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Unit 11: Karl Marx: His Life and Works, Materialism and Dialectical Materialism

11.5 Materialism and History Notes

Marx’s theory, which he called “historical materialism” or the “materialist conception of history”
is based on Hegel’s claim that history occurs through a dialectic, or clash, of opposing forces.
Hegel was a philosophical idealist who believed that we live in a world of appearances, and true
reality is an ideal. Marx accepted this notion of the dialectic, but rejected Hegel’s idealism because
he did not accept that the material world hides from us the “real” world of the ideal; on the
contrary, he thought that historically and socially specific ideologies prevented people from seeing
the material conditions of their lives clearly.
Marx applied his dialectical method to the material or social world that consisted of economic
production and exchange. A study of the productive process explained all other historical
phenomena. Marx noted that each generation inherited a mass of productive forces, an accumulation
of capital, and a set of social relations which reflected these productive forces. The new generation
modified these forces, but at the same time these forces prescribed certain forms of life, and
shaped human character and thought in distinct ways. The mode of production and exchange was
the final cause of all social changes and political revolutions, which meant that for minds or
thoughts to change, society would have to change. Marx considered matter as being active, capable
of changing from within. It was not passive, needing an external stimulus for change, a conception
found in Hobbes.
Our conception of history depends on our ability to expound the real processes of
production, starting out from the simple material production of life, and to comprehend
the form of intercourse connected with this and created by this (i.e. civil society in its
various stages), as the basis of all history; further, to show it in its action as state, and
so, from this starting point, to explain the whole mass of different theoretical products
and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, ethics, etc., and trace their origins
and growth.
While Hegel viewed national cultures as the driving force of history, for Marx it was the social
classes whose antagonism supplied the motive power for change. Both regarded the historical
course as a rational necessity consisting of a pattern of stages, with each stage representing a step
towards the predetermined goal. Both appealed to an emotion above self-interest : in the case of
Hegel it was national pride; for Marx the loyalty among workers for a better future. Marx was
initially enthused by Darwin’s Origin of Species, but subsequently dismissed it as strictly an empirical
generalization offering a causal theory of change with no implied idea of progress. Hegelian
dialectics, on the contrary, offered a law with a definite beginning and an end, “a condition
towards which society is progressing, a condition of complete harmony and integration in which
man will discover his time fulfilled nature”.
Marx attacked the formidable Hegelian philosophy from within with the help of the writings of
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach.
Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity (1843), rejected the theory that subject and object condition
influenced each other, declaring that comprehension of things was primarily sensual and passive,
and only secondarily active and conceptual. As a result, he saw religion as the basis of all social
evils. The more an individual enriched the concept of God, the more he impoverished the self. In
his later works, Feuerbach went beyond the criticism of religion, subjecting Hegelian philosophy
to a critical analysis. Hegel viewed the mind as the moving force of history, and humans as its
manifestations. This, according to Feuerbach, located the essence of humanity outside human
beings, and thus, like religion, served to alienate humanity from itself. He emphatically insisted
that philosophy had to begin with the finite and the material world; thought did not precede
existence, it was existence that preceded thought. In Feuerbach’s philosophy, it was neither God
nor thought, but the individual who was the focus.

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