Marx and Historical Materialism
Karl Marx rejected the philosophical Idealism of Hegel and the utopianism of the early socialists in favor of a theory of history thoroughly grounded in materialism. For Marx, ideas, cultures, political systems were all part of the superstructure of society while economics and the social relations of classes represented the base that truly drove history forward. Economic forces were the motor of history, not ideas, philosophies or ideologies, much less spiritual or supernatural forces. Capitalism had already broken up the old feudal order in Western Europe, and the Protestant Reformation, the great peasant rebellions, the English, French and American Revolutions were all signs indicating that a new capitalist political economy was coming into being, and that the bourgeoisie was seizing political power from the landed aristocracy. Capitalism was destroying the old culture of honor, chivalry and paternalism, replacing it with bourgeois values of free trade, the cash nexus and "egotistical calculation" (Marx and Engels 9). Even the American Civil War and the defeat of the planter class of the South was part of this bourgeois-capitalist revolution that was sweeping the world. As the entire planet became a single marketplace, the capitalists created large-scale industries to meet the demand, battering down all "Chinese Walls" of protectionism and isolationism as it did so (Marx and Engels 11). In fact, all of history was based on class struggle, but the socialist revolution would be the final one since for the first time the overwhelming majority of people would be in control of society.
Under capitalism, Marx predicted (incorrectly) that only two classes would exist in the end, the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. As the old feudal system decayed, peasants, small farmers and artisans were transformed into wage laborers for the capitalists, and work once done by hand was now done by machinery. Proletarian wage laborers were part of this machinery, no longer having any control over the product of their labor or working conditions and therefore highly alienated...
Capitalists expropriated the social product of their labor, paying them subsistence level wages, which Marx called exploitation. Workers "must sell themselves piecemeal," and labor became just another commodity like any other (Marx and Engels 14). A proletarian was simply "an appendage of the machine," a private in "the industrial army…under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants" (Marx and Engels 15). When they had finally sunk into absolute misery, they would rise up against the capitalists and seize the means of production from them. Thus the expropriators would be expropriated and labor would control all production and distribution in the new socialist society. Marx was somewhat vague about what this new socialist society would look like, although he asserted that industry, banking, transportation and communications would be nationalized, private property abolished, and public education made free for everyone in the country (Marx and Engels 35). He also imagined a time in the distant future when all production would be automated, money would no longer exist and the state and social classes would fade away. This was the utopian future that he called 'communism', although of course none of the countries that were once called 'communist' had a political-economy that even remotely resembled this.
Marx fully expected that the working class would sink into misery, while the old middle class of small farmers, artisans and shopkeepers would disappear and become proletarians as well. At some point, as capitalism sputtered along in its familiar boom and bust cycles, the proletarians would rebel, seize the means of production and run the machines in their own interests. Under Marx's version of socialism, the workers would run the factories and mines themselves, producing for human needs rather than the profits of the capitalist elite. There would no longer be any need for banks, money or rents and there would no longer be any classes. Class conflict was therefore essential to early Marxism, as was the insistence that social harmony could never exist but…
