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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.4: Historical Materialism

One of my hobbies is studying historiography and the philosophy of history. I don’t like just studying history, I like studying the history of history. It’s why, for example, the first appendices in the History of Rome was about the ancient Greek and Latin historians. I enjoyed the history of history in all of its meta glory. And you can’t really do the history of history without devoting a lot of space to the Marxist historiographic revolution, which opened up a whole new theoretical approach that tied the course of history, not to great ideas or great men, or divine Providence, but rather to economics. That how a group of humans produces the material means of their biological survival, those base elements at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, food, drink, clothing, shelter, that is the base structure upon which the rest of the cultural superstructure is built. Religion arts, literature, politics, science, all of it is rooted in how we produce the means of our survival. And it is changes and conflicts in that base that determines the course of human history. That is the basic premise of historical materialism, and it is the subject of today’s episode.

Starting in the 1840s, certainly no later than his arrival in Paris, Karl Marx started considering the course of human history and what causal mechanisms might be at work. He did this because he was beginning to conceive of a new kind of scientific socialism, and he wanted to put it on a solid foundation. But because he had this fundamentally materialist philosophical outlook, when Marx went looking for these causal mechanisms, he did not plumb the depths of human reason like the utopian socialists did. Instead he studied economics and politics and the actual events of actual history going back to the dawn of time.

Marx begins with the idea that the thing that makes humans different from animals is that we come together to produce the means of our survival. We don’t just passively depend on what nature provides, we actively produce the necessities of life. We grow food, make shelter, weave cloth; that’s what makes humans human. With this idea in mind, Marx comes to believe that society is defined by the manner in which it does this production. This is the stuff we talked about last week, we’re talking about the forces of production and the relations of production, and more specifically the combination of those two concepts into the grand concept mode of production: how a society produces its material needs.

This base mode of production is what defines all the other parts of the society’s cultural superstructure. As I just said, art, religion, philosophy, politics, science forms of media, everything, and we can lump all of that stuff together and call it the ideology of the mode of production.

Now though Marx believes that the material base defines the cultural ideology, he recognizes that it’s a feedback loop between the base and the superstructure and that each maintain and reinforce the other. Just as the prevailing mode of production shapes legal, artistic, and religious institutions,  the resulting law and art and religion serves to justify and maintain the prevailing mode of production.

Now for Marx, the really frustrating part of this is that the organizing ideology of a mode of production is always synonymous with the ideology of the ruling class in that mode of production. So right and wrong, good and bad, who gets what and why, essentially all the prevailing morality is the morality of the ruling class imposed on everyone else, instilling in the exploited, a set of beliefs designed to do little more than rationalize the fact that they are being exploited and why that’s fine, actually.

The ruling ideology of a given era imprints itself and makes it seem like this is the way it’s always been and will always be. Marx further believes that humans are fundamentally conservative creatures who prefer routine habit and continuity to novelty and change, and that this social imprinting is very difficult to undo.

But for Marx history is progressive. It moves in an evolutionary way from the simple to the complex, it does change and grow and evolve. So how then do we move from one mode of production to the next, from small hunter gatherer groups walking around to these huge industrial cities linked by railroads? Well, for Marx it clearly comes down to changes in the means of production, right, those are the tools and the subjects of labor. So we invent a better bow for hunting, maybe discover a technique for preserving food in the winter, learn how to domesticate some wild plant. And this is fundamentally a concept that we would call the development of the productive forces. Which can partly be understood as a measure of human power over nature. And if you survey human history, you can trace the development of our productive forces: new tools, new techniques, new technologies, lead to new ways of social organization, all with the aim of producing more of the necessities of life more efficiently. This can happen both slowly with refinement of technique, or it can happen all at once with some breakthrough discovery or invention. But the tendency to develop the productive forces is clearly present.

Now, because he’s working in a dialectical tradition, Marx sees things evolving through a process of action and reaction, and he has this theory that changes in the forces of production developments in the forces of production will ultimately seek to create new relations of production to continue that development. This is one of the underlying tensions in history. What if the developing productive forces start slipping out from under the prevailing ideological superstructure? Put in another way, if the existing ideological and cultural superstructure starts to become a hindrance to the further development of the forces of production, then we have a major problem on our hands, and society is either headed for revolution or complete social collapse. When this happens, the inhibited forces of production will of necessity burst asunder, as Marx likes to put it, and reorganize as a new mode of production, better suited to continue the development of the productive forces. Marx thinks that these moments of revolution or social collapse occur when a society is ready to transition from one overarching mode of production to its successor. And as Marx says in The German Ideology, and I’m quoting here, at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters, then begins an era of social revolution. End quote. To use metaphors invoking industrial imagery, then, revolution is thus the motor force of history.

 One of the most important tensions and contradictions that exist in a society is how the development of these forces of production produce different classes that are defined by who is doing the labor and who is reaping the rewards, who is the laboring class, and who is the ruling class, who is the oppressor and who is the oppressed. Now the development of the ruling class, freed from the drudgery of manual labor to produce the necessities of life, is not just how we come to have lords and priests, who were the first two groups to say, no, actually you work, I’ll just be over here. chillin’, it also brings us all the things we associate with that cultural superstructure: art music, philosophy, science, sports, all of it.

But for nearly all of human history, the production of culture, as we understand it, has been the province of a small minority inside or adjacent to the ruling class who do not have to labor to survive. And this tension between the laborers and the non laborers, between the oppressed and the oppressors, will naturally create tension, class conflict, and class struggle. And that class conflict is central to the course of history. Marx opened the Communist Manifesto by stating boldly, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. And then he goes on to say, freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeymen, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

Now I am leaving a lot of nuance out of this, but before we move on, I want to say that Marx does not think human beings are mere passengers in history. They are not carried along by some mystical force of history outside of free will. And this makes sense for a guy like Marx, who is at heart, a passionate, energetic, revolutionary activist who doesn’t want to just interpret the world, he wants to change it. And so though sometimes he gets carried away and uses phrases like inevitable to describe the triumph of the working class, he doesn’t actually think this. But he does believe that the conditions within which humans live at any given moment limit the scope of available action. Individual humans are rooted in history. Early hunter gatherers could not invent capitalism because the technological level of their means of production simply did not allow it. It was impossible for the levelers and the diggers to usher in communism during the English Revolution, because the mode of production and level of technology did not allow it. And Marx summed this up and I heartily endorse this sentiment, by the way, he says this in The 18th Brumiere of Louis Bonaparte, men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please. They do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living. And that is a million percent true.

So we will now move on to the stages of historical materialism. Marx divided the eras of human history up by their prevailing mode of production. And he was here working in the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment tradition. The Scottish Enlightenment guys, like Adam Smith, had come up with their own progressive stages of economic development and defined them as hunting, pasturage, agriculture, and commerce, and so Marx has his own version of this. To keep things simple, I will keep it restricted to what is now the accepted canon: first, tribal or primitive communism, then ancient or slave mode of production, then the feudal mode of production, then the capitalist mode of production, and finally, the socialist mode of production. There are slightly modified versions of this that involve an asiatic mode and a barbarian mode that exists in the area between the tribal and the ancient mode of productions, but I will set those aside for now. The basic questions we are going to be asking ourselves are: what are the means of production, who owns or controls the means of production, what are the relations of production that surround and enable those means? Where’s the surplus production going? What is the class conflict? How are the forces of production being developed? Those are the fundamental questions. And I should stress though, before we get into this, that Marx never really grappled with East Asian or South Asian history, and he gets pretty fuzzy about everything the further you get from say the Rhine River. And so what follows amounts to mostly in accounting of European history from pre-history.

Okay. So we begin with primitive communism or the tribal mode of production, or as it is commonly known, hunter-gatherer society. Now, the first thing we should say is that for the materialist historian, the big thing that advances proto-humans beyond their initial animal state is not that they had big brains, but instead that they decided to adopt bipedal locomotion, which freed up their hands to use tools, and that is what allowed their brains to grow big and smart. Remember: always material development first, ideas second. You can disagree with that, but this is what the materialists say.

The other big things humans have going for them is cooperative labor. We always find humans working in groups together. So those early modern and Enlightenment era depictions of man as a solitary creature in the state of nature that you find in like Rousseau and Locke and Hobbes, that is all wrong. Humans were never solitary creatures. We were always in groups. Sharing and cooperative dependence are the essential survival skills of the human species, not self-reliance and independence.

So the means of production in this first mode are just rudimentary tools and available natural resources, so axes and spears, baskets, knives, they tame fire, wear simple animal skin, clothing, they live in rudimentary shelter, and both the means of production and the production itself is shared in common by the group.

The relations of production are: kinship groups, with a loose and fluid division of hunter-gatherer labor without a great deal of specialization. And since this is a very hand to mouth existence, there is no surplus to cream off that would allow a non-laboring life, so everyone is working. This means there is no class, there’s no state property, money, kings, aristocrats, any of that stuff. There was no class, and so there was no class conflict, and the forces of production basically stayed the same, that is, they were not developing, for hundreds of thousands of years. For the majority of human existence, I mean, just by sheer number of years, this primitive communist mode of production has been the prevailing mode of production.

Then about 10 or 12,000 years ago, give or take, human society underwent what has been dubbed the Neolithic Revolution. This is when the ancient aliens came down from the heavens, messed with our DNA and taught us how to be farmers. The forces of production developed from hunting and gathering to settled agriculture and animal husbandry. Our new found ability to domesticate plants and animals to produce the necessities of life changed how and where humans lived. This material change altered our social relations. Some societies stopped being nomadic and started to live in permanent settlements. Harnessing the productive power of farming also introduced a truly transformative element: surpluses. These societies could produce so much food that some people didn’t have to devote themselves to productive labor. So we have the origins of class between a laboring majority and a non laboring minority. This non-laboring minority becomes the ruling class, who initially through sheer physical intimidation are able to command and control the surplus production.

The free time of this non-laboring ruling class allowed for even greater developments in the productive forces, but also everything else we think of as culture. All the elements of what we now call civilization become present as a result of surpluses. So this neolithic revolution is arguably the single most important event in human history.

This revolution takes us from the tribal or primitive communist mode of production to the ancient or slave mode of production, which at its highest state is basically synonymous with Greco Roman civilization. The means of production now include large scale settled agriculture, the extensive use of animals for power, the beginnings of industry, mining, and craft work in cities and advanced large scale trade networks.

We also have the arrival of legal private property: this field is mine, not yours, and because we now have a surplus that can be allotted to a non-laboring ruling class, we also have advancements in the cultural superstructure. The development of the intellectual means of production: writing, cataloging, archiving, math, calendars, science, weights, and measures, all of which will be handled by a new professional class: engineers, lawyers, architects, traders, artisans, musicians, actors, and teachers. Real permanent specialization of labor starts to set in.

But the defining feature of the ancient mode of production is the arrival of the slave. With warfare now a much larger scale proposition, captured prisoners can be brought home and put to work: get them, not us, to do the productive labor. For Marx, the defining class division then in the ancient mode of production is not necessarily between ruler and ruled, but between free individual and slave. And it’s these free individuals who are gobbling up the surplus created by the laboring class of slaves who were the private property of another human being no less than the hammer or the scythe. Now, this is a very general depiction of like a thousand years or more of Mediterranean history with the ancient mode of production again just sort of being a picture in the mind’s eye of a timeless Roman empire.

Now from the materialist perspective, the big thing that wrecked the ancient mode of production was the decrease in supply of cheap slaves. From about the end of the Punic Wars up through the disaster in the Teutoburg Forest, the Roman legions steadily expanded Rome’s borders and its population of slaves. But after this, the Roman empire stopped expanding, aside from a few side projects and the ambitions of Trajan. This meant that slaves became dearer and more expensive, and eventually it’s going to make sense to stop using slaves and start using again some version of non-owned people. When this happens, the transition from slave society to feudal society oh so imperceptibly began. Now, we actually mapped a lot of this transition out during the history of Rome, right, starting with the Crisis of the Third Century, the large, broad and safe empire started to become internally isolated. Big walls along the frontiers were replaced by walls around cities. The inability of the central government to guarantee safety raised the power of local nobles. Labor was willing to send its surplus, not to some central state bureaucracy, but to the local lord, who promised to actually defend them.

And this is the origins of lord and serf. State taxes levied on commerce by the later emperors tended to make those rising feudal lords say, well, screw it, I’ll just make it myself rather than buying it on the open market. And this developed internal self-sufficiency. All of this makes late antiquity a great transition phase from the ancient mode of production to the feudal mode of production, but this is not accompanied by a revolutionary reconstruction of society at large. But rather this other thing: the common ruin of the contending classes. In this case, the ancient mode of production was tottering and decrepit. And when the great migrations came through, they swept aside the Roman Empire, and what was left was those proto-feudal relations.

According to historical materialism, this switch from the ancient to the feudal mode of production was a regression for society, it was a step back. The forces of production were still defined by agriculture manual and animal labor with some technological help from things like water mills. But the technological level went backwards, or at the very least did not advance. And this is also not happening in a huge linked together empire of trade and distribution, but rather local self-sufficiency. And more importantly, most importantly perhaps, the slaves were now gone. They were replaced by serfs out in the field, ostensibly non-owned individuals who were nonetheless legally bound to the land.

And this is the fundamental class antagonism during the feudal mode of production between the productive serfs and the non laboring nobility. In the cities, crafts were made by free artisans who eventually organize themselves into guilds. The surplus went to the new class of feudal nobles, the cast of warrior families who entered into complex reciprocal contracts with each other and claim most of the land for themselves. But it is important to note that in the feudal mode of production, the artisan owned all his own tools, the means of production, and thus the products of his labor. And the peasant, while they had to give some designated portion of the produce of their land to the local lord, the rest was theirs to live on. There was a direct relationship between the labor invested and the produce consumed.

For a long time, the forces of production were not really developing at all. In fact, they were producing less than the Roman Empire had at its height. And this went on for a thousand years. Around these feudal forces of production came a monotheistic Catholic Church and a hierarchical monarchy with divinely ordained kings that preached a timeless chain of being.

But around about 1300, something started to happen, most probably rocketed forward by the Black Death, which swept through Europe and killed a third of the population. Suddenly, the oppressed peasants could demand better pay and conditions and terms of service. Land that had previously been owned by people who were dead were claimed by people who were living, growing their landholdings and creating something like a wealthy peasant class or an emerging gentry. In the cities, the merchants and traders were able to assert more autonomy and weight against the land-based feudal aristocracy. And these guys were the burghers, basically the urban oligarchs. And it is from that title burgher that Marx dubs them, the bourgeoisie, a class that was destined to develop the forces of production more than any other group since at least the ancient aliens who taught us how to farm.

By the 1400s, you start getting real developments in modern banking techniques of pooling and investing in lending capital, the printing press is invented then the Americas were discovered — the whole world was discovered — Constantinople fell and Islamic civilization was pushed out of Spain, leading to European rediscovery of ancient philosophy and knowledge on a wide scale.

So inside late feudalism, the forces of production began to change. Industry started to become larger, more cooperative and more centralized. The old guild system came under pressure from larger scale investments based off of pooled capital, and the historical role of capitalism was to concentrate all the scattered means of production spread out across a bunch of mostly self-sufficient local regions and start producing goods on a massive scale. This goes hand in hand with a change in mentality: production now is not just for use, but for sale in a consumer economy. And that sale was meant to create a monetary profit for the capitalist investor.

Now, of course, people had always produced things that people need, but this was taken to a whole different level, and a consumer economy organized around profitable commodities produced on a heretofore unimaginable scale was born. The old feudal culture was replaced by new concepts: rationalization of processes, training efficiency, and discipline. The division of industrial labor, that is, the production of goods, rather than just food had mostly been between guilds — as in you make shoes, I do hats — this was replaced by a division of labor inside the shop itself. You cut leather. I pound nails, we can make way more stuff.

So this is clearly a major development for the forces of production. But it was running up against a feudal system that was not fit for this next stage of development. And just to take one example, serfdom was tying people to the land, and so they weren’t allowed to move to the cities to become workers, or you have archaic tax and tariff systems that inhibited the free movement of mass produced goods. So this brings us basically to the beginning of the Revolutions podcast because in the historical materialist conception, the English Revolution and the French Revolution are both major bourgeois revolutions, the forces unleashed by the bourgeoisie bursting asunder against the old funeral aristocracy. Or, if you like, the new capitalist base trying to shake off a now thoroughly ill-fitting feudal superstructure to build a capitalist society on top of the capitalist forces of production.

Now in France, things were set back a bit by the fall of Napoleon, but the July Revolution 15 years later was explicitly and nakedly a bourgeois revolution. There’s a quote from Jacques Laffitte where he says, now the bankers will rule.

So we talked about some of the hallmarks of the capitalist mode of production last week: labor has now been collected and socialized, but the means of production: the tools, the natural resources, and eventually the factories, are owned by a single individual or a small collection of investors who claim all the profit from the commodities produced. And everything is now organized around the principle of producing commodities for profit, and more specifically exploiting labor to extract profit from the produce of that exploited labor. And as Marx sees it, this upends the intuitive old style of market economics, where you sell a commodity to get some money so that you can go buy a different commodity that you need, but do not have. So you make a table, sell it for money so you can go buy some clothes.

Under capitalism, there’s a new version where you take your money, use it to make a product, so you can sell that product to get more money. And this whole new conception of reality starts to attach itself to everything, and everything becomes abstracted into a commodity that can be bought and sold inside the market. And the market used to be just this ancillary piece of society, and now it’s the whole obsessive focus. No one, certainly not the historical materialist, denies the results: once unleashed the capitalist mode of production advanced the productive forces further than all of human history put together. It is practically as significant as the Neolithic revolution.

This new mode of production created a fundamentally new class struggle. No longer between the noble and the serf, but between the capitalist and the worker, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, a new class of laborers who own nothing and can only sell their labor for wages. And the etymology of proletariat, just so you know, comes from an old Roman census designation for a landless citizen who fell well short of all property qualifications for real citizenship and participation in civil society.

Now as we discussed two episodes, back Marx the young revolutionary identified a restrained bourgeois class that was both suffering under the fetters of feudalism and who had unique power, thanks to their position inside the developing forces production to stage a revolution. They were the revolutionary class. And when he went looking for a group that fit these parameters inside the new capitalist mode of production, he landed on this previously unidentified, and unknown working class: the proletariat. Their misery and exploitation was such that they would desire revolutionary emancipation, and their proximity to and position within the new capitalist means of production placed them in a unique position to have a real revolutionary impact on the economic base of society.

And Marx further believed that these proletarian forces, the forces that would destroy the bourgeoisie, had been summoned by the bourgeoisie themselves. That like the sorcerer’s apprentice, they had conjured forces they could not control. And that in the end, the bourgeoisie ultimately produced, above all, their own grave-diggers.

Now, when the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoisie, it would usher in a new socialist mode of production. Now I will say though, that both Marx and Engels are very vague and cagey about what this new socialist mode of production will look like. And partly this is because they don’t want to be dreamy, utopians building castles in the sky, but they do think that something is going to happen and that it will be socialism.

They hint that it will probably unfold in two stages, a lower transitionary phase and a higher stage. And this is sometimes divided between socialism and then full communism, but Marx often just uses the terms lower and higher socialism. In this new mode of production, the means of production will be owned by the workers themselves. They will be the beneficiaries of their own labor, rather than seeing it creamed off and hoarded by a small minority of exploitive rulers. He also thinks that this will bring about the end of all class distinctions, which dated back to the dawn of agriculture. Since the Neolithic revolution, every mode of production has been dominated by a minority ruling class, living off the produce of a majority laboring class.

Now that this has been upended with the majority laboring class, now the new ruling class, all class distinctions will evaporate because there will be no more oppressor and no more oppressed. All of the surplus will be shared in common. In fact, there will be such an abundance thanks to the productive powers consolidated during the capitalist mode of production, a post-scarcity society will not require oppressor or oppressed, it all becomes irrelevant. Who’s fighting for control of the necessities of life, they are in abundance. Everyone can share. From each according to their abilities, and to each according to their needs.

So that is the materialist conception of history. And that is the trajectory that Karl Marx believed human civilization is on. And this is going to be picked up by his successors, because Marx has sketched out an idea that by necessity the working class proletariat and only the working class proletariat is the revolutionary class. And that in the transition phase between capitalism and socialism, they are going to have to seize revolutionary power and impose what Marx problematically dubbed, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

And so next week we are going to set Marx aside, and we are going to turn to the philosophy of people who rejected all of that, who thought that this was not the stuff of emancipation, but the stuff of further tyranny. And just as we did with Marx and Engels, next week, we will cover the life and times of Mikhail Bakunin, their ideological opponent in the battle for control of the First International, and for the revolutionary future of all of Europe.

 I will end though, by reminding everybody that I will be at the Intelligent Speech conference in New York on June the 29th, a bunch of us podcasters will be there. You can meet us. We can hang out all day. I will be doing a presentation called What is the Point of All This? And then later in the day, I’ll sit for a round table discussion about whatever we decide to round table discuss. It is going to be great, and I very much hope to see you there.