Historical Materialism

What explains history here?

Before people can do politics or philosophy they must first eat, be clothed and housed. Historical materialism takes this plain fact as the starting point of a theory of history. To know the character of a society, look at what it produces, with what instruments, and in what relations of person to person. The sentence from the 1859 preface sums up the standpoint: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness." The deeds of kings, generals and thinkers are the surface of history; underneath, changes in the way production is carried on make the great currents of an epoch.

What are base and superstructure?

Production has two sides: the 'productive forces' (instruments, technique, the skill of working people) and the 'relations of production' between people (who owns the means of production, how the product is divided). Together they form a 'mode of production', and the totality of an epoch's production relations makes up the economic 'base' of society. Institutions and ideas such as the state and law, religion, philosophy and art are the 'superstructure' erected on this base, reflecting it and also defending it. Productive forces keep developing; if the relations of production stand still, the contradiction between the two grows, shows itself as class struggle, and finally breaks the old relations. That is the basic schema of transformation.

Where did the five-stage schema come from?

Stalin's 1938 essay arranged history as a sequence of five types of production relations: primitive communal, slave-holding, feudal, capitalist, socialist. Marx's own texts were more open. The 1859 preface listed 'Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois' modes of production side by side, and the late Marx even examined whether the Russian village commune might skip the capitalist stage. When the Soviet academic controversy over the 'Asiatic mode of production' was settled politically around 1930, five stages remained, and the schema was taught as a universal law applying to the history of every people. Whether non-European history can be fitted to a stage theory drawn from Europe has remained a running dispute inside and outside Marxist historiography.

Is it a theory that the economy decides everything?

That is the commonest misreading, and one Engels himself worked to correct in his last years. In his 1890 letter to Bloch he wrote that the economic element determines only 'ultimately', that the various elements of the superstructure also exercise real influence on the course of historical struggles and in many cases decide their form, and that if Marx and he bore some blame, it was because polemics against opponents had forced them to stress the economic side. The logic of interaction, base begetting superstructure but superstructure acting back on base, is present in Stalin's codification too. Even so, actual Soviet historical writing often showed the vulgarized pattern of schema first, sources after, leaving open the question of whether the fault lay in historical materialism itself or in its administration.

What role did it play in Soviet state ideology?

Historical materialism was the official methodology of history and of the social sciences in the USSR, and at the same time the theory underpinning the system's understanding of itself. Since the last box of the five-stage schema was socialism, the 1936 Constitution's declaration that socialism had been basically built was presented as the fulfilment of a law of history. That the revolution had come not in the advanced capitalist country the theory expected but in backward agrarian Russia was the most argued question inside this tradition; from Trotsky's theory of uneven and combined development to the dispute over socialism in one country, the debates all turned on it.