Marxism

Materialist Understanding of History

The philosophy of history within Marxism, or historical materialism, can be conceptually and methodologically distilled into eleven theses concerning the materialist understanding of history, as articulated in the preface to "A Critique of Political Economy" by Karl Marx:

1. In social production, individuals enter into specific, necessary relationships that are independent of their will—productive relations that correspond to a certain level of development of the material productive forces.
2. The totality of these productive relations forms the economic structure of society, a real foundation upon which legal and political superstructures rise, corresponding to specific forms of social consciousness.
3. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political, and spiritual processes of life in general.
4. It is not the consciousness of individuals that determines their existence; rather, their social existence determines their consciousness.
5. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society enter into contradiction with the existing productive relations—or, which is merely a legal expression of the latter—with the relations of property within which they have hitherto developed.
6. From the forms of development of productive forces, these relations transform into their shackles. Thus begins the epoch of social revolution.
7. With the change of the economic foundation, a transformation occurs in the entire vast superstructure, more or less rapidly. When examining such transformations, it is essential to distinguish the material revolution—that is, in the economic conditions of production—from legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophical revolutions, that is, from the ideological forms through which people perceive this conflict and strive to resolve it.
8. Just as one cannot judge an individual solely based on their self-perception, one cannot assess a similar epoch of upheaval based on its own consciousness. On the contrary, this consciousness must be explained through the contradictions of material life, stemming from the existing conflict between social productive forces and productive relations.
9. No social formation perishes before all the productive forces that it can adequately accommodate have developed, and new, higher productive relations never emerge until the material conditions for their existence have matured within the old society.
10. In broad strokes, the Asian, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs of economic social formations.
11. Bourgeois productive relations represent the final antagonistic form of the social production process—antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but in the sense of antagonism arising from the social conditions of individual lives; yet the productive forces developing within bourgeois society simultaneously create the material conditions for resolving this antagonism. Thus, the bourgeois social formation concludes the prehistory of society.

Consequently, we have every reason to interpret Marxist doctrine as a coherent system of sociological determinism. The anthropology of Marxism is grounded in sociological determinism: the economy determines all human life; it influences not only the entire structure of society but also the entirety of ideology, spiritual culture, religion, philosophy, morality, art, and more. The economy serves as the base, while ideology is the superstructure. There exists a single objective socio-economic process that dictates everything.

But where, then, is the individual? Marxism responds that it is not the individual who creates; rather, it is the social class to which one belongs that shapes one's thoughts and actions—be it as a noble, a wealthy bourgeois, a petty proprietor, or a proletarian. The significant role of the economy in human life is not a discovery of Marx; this was already known prior to him. What did Karl Marx do? Upon elucidating this premise, he granted it a universal character. The observations Marx made regarding capitalism at a certain stage of its development were mistakenly extrapolated to serve as a foundation for society as a whole. Much that Marx articulated about his contemporary phase of capitalism holds truth, but his error lies precisely in the universalization of the particular. Such an absolutization of the economic dimension of life can only be likened to the absolutization of sexual desire in Sigmund Freud's teachings.