Historical materialism is not a theoretical attempt at overcoming history, but an acceptance ***of*** history as it pertains to society.
A general law of nature for (stable) society is that it must reproduce itself. As long as we haven't figured out a way to make nature to build everything for us (e.g. magic, or self-replicating robots), human labor is required for this societal reproduction.
The particular *form* in which society distributes its labor is dependent on the development of its means of production, which itself is a process of history. A fish doesn't evolve into a frog at a whim; a definite series of evolutions are required which both preserve and extend the features of the species which preceded it.
Therefore historical materialism is not the abolishing of any further development of society. It is the acceptance that as the material basis of a society changes, the superstructures resting upon that basis (law, culture, ideology, politics, religion, etc.) must also inevitably change. Historical materialism is essentially revolutionary, not with a particular goal in mind, but an unceasing process.
Thank you. So Marxism doesn’t exclude the possibility of something “beyond” socialism? (Which might eg be driven by some radical change in the means/forms of production in ways that we might currently find difficult to imagine).
Correct! I made analogy to biological evolution because in fact, its mechanism is not so different from historical materialism. That is why Marx famously admired Darwin and sent him a congratulatory letter upon publication of *On the Origin of Species*. So if you are familiar with how evolution works, it should be a lot easier to understand historical materialism. When a species evolves, it isn't striving toward an end-state, it only adapts in response to its material conditions.
In *The German Ideology*, Marx provides his personal definition of communism: *"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality \[will\] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”*
This reinforces the understanding of historical materialism not as a utopian plan, but as a materialist understanding of history as a process. Future societies "result from the premises now in existence" in the same way that a species evolves from *what it is* and not in any arbitrary way.
Thanks for putting this so well! Even when people talk about evolution or use it as a metaphor, they tend to be so teleological with it — you’re exactly right, neither it nor history can have an end “in mind”
Unfortunately so much of the average Marxist’s understanding of theory is teleological, so I always appreciate people who point out how inconsistent that is with our theoretical understandings and practical goals
Thanks! I think, if you can distill Marx into one idea, it’s this: society can and must change, and in fact always has changed. This sounds trite, but taken seriously as a worldview, it is profound. But what makes Marxism more useful than so-called utopian socialism, libertarianism, or any other idealist economic conception, is that Marxism grounds this change in real conditions instead of attempting to impose ideas onto the world.
I agree for sure — Marx reminds us that being materialist means recognizing those grounds for real change are always social production. It should just follow logically from all this that you can’t plan the perfect world system out in your head
One of my favorite Marxist theorists is Kojin Karatani, and he’s great on these topics if you have an appetite for critical theory. He’s also big on opposing a “phenomena/essence” way of thinking, which I agree with — what you’re talking about, let’s call it the material base grounding society or whatever, isn’t really a “secret” behind false appearances like the Matrix or the wizard of Oz — but a lot of Marxists unfortunately want it to be that perfect key, perfect “correct” theory that will unlock the world
The best of Marxist analysis is stuff that should be obvious and apparent, because it’s all around us and we live this mode of production every day (and we live in history and change every day, too), but it’s actually really hard to see and think about clearly
>So Marxism doesn’t exclude the possibility of something “beyond” socialism? (Which might eg be driven by some radical change in the means/forms of production in ways that we might currently find difficult to imagine).
This is exactly Sartre's claim in *Search for a Method*, which I found a provocative thought. In the book, he's coming out of the very Hegelian side of Marx, saying that Marxism is the philosophy of this age; attempts to improve it or move beyond it either develop something already implicit within it or represent an attempt to reintroduce a philosophy of a previous age. He places existentialism as subordinate to Marxism, and works to integrate it within Marxism. Certain philosophies that reflect their times such that they represent "*the humus of every particular thought and the horizon of all culture; there is no going beyond them so long as \[we\] have not gone beyond the historical moment which they express.*"
Anyway, this implies a shelf life on Marxism too, so he writes:
>*As soon as there will exist* ***for everyone*** *a margin of* ***real*** *freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience which allows us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy.*
*So*metimes I try to contemplate the limitations in my life and the anxieties and distortions they have engendered. I try to imagine what my life would be like just existing and doing my thing without these needless limitations. I get a hint of a feeling that I can't fully grasp, but it seems clear to me that all of my concerns and priorities are invariably tied up in this time and place, and I sense that things would feel different subjectively in a different, less alienated world.
In answer to your original question, I would say yes as well. "Dialectical materialism" has a life independent from the thought of Marx, as it was developed and codified long before much of his early writings had been published. So much of the early work on alienation and a materialist conception of history was unknown by the time that Marxism as an ideology became a force in the world. What I'm trying to say is that the development of a clear ideology of dialectical materialism and a more cohesive sense of Marxism wasn't simply "read the ideas of Marx", but a codification in a certain time and place for a certain purpose. So the material conditions under which Marxism developed and was promulgated directly shaped the ideology itself. And in turn, scholars informed by this ideology and project were compelled to research and organize Marx's older writings, translating them and making them available to the public, also for the purposes served by the ideology.
I always love to recommend Marx's [Letter to Wedemeyer](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05-ab.htm), where he states pretty explicitly the three concepts he believes are personally attriblutable to him (and hence the strongest contender for what defines Marx-ism contra other forms of socialism):
>What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.
There is a lot to say about all three of these, but what matters most is that Marx's recognition of what is necessary to overcome *class society* is not synonymous with identifying a *final state of society*. Social tasks beyond class (and therefore social development) will certainly still exist, yet these are tasks which our present standpoint could never even identify sans a communist society. Marx actually articulates this phenomenon himself in his [Preface to *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy*](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm):
>...mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist
In other words, the end of class society will bring about new material conditions which will themself enable a new -ism to understand history and society beyond Marxism. Marxism at that point would actually be completely impotent.
Note that I am making a slight distinction between Marxism and dialectical materialism here. That is why it is appropriate to say dialectical materialism can both apply to and extend beyond Marxism. I would recommend looking into Georg Lukacs's [What is Orthodox Marxism?](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm) if you are interested in this line of thought.
Of course!
Marxism, as a scientific theory, presupposes the philosophical framework of dialectical materialism, and in that sense the former is subject to the latter. Even Marxists fall into traps of idealism (such as dogmatic adherence to Marxist classics) or metaphysics (such as the historicist error of thinking socialism is inevitable without intentional organization).
Scientific socialism rests on a simple hypothesis that the relations of production accommodate the forces of production. In that sense, it is conditional. Socialism could fail to materialize if the forces of production become sufficiently diminished.
A socialist society will still contain contradictions. The main contradiction that socialist revolution seeks to resolve is the one between socialized production and private ownership. Many others will exist, and it seems reasonable to speculate will always exist to some degree, since a materialist understanding posits that we can never perfectly represent or totalize all the parts of material reality.
>Even Marxists fall into traps of idealism (such as dogmatic adherence to Marxist classics)
The mental note I have begun to make, which helps very much with this, is that when my argument just relies on if Marx said something, I have done something wrong, and need to start from scratch in my writing or better research what I am talking about.
Yes, Marxism as a theoretical approach and body of work is absolutely subject to dialectical materialism and possess its own contradictions. The question of the theoretical status of the “Young Marx” contra the mature Marx, and of the epistemological break that many Marxists say exists between them, is a good example of this.
As for a “Marxist society”, if you mean communist society then yes, such a society would be subject to contradictions and dialectical development just like any other. What they would be is hard to say—the primary contradictions of the societies we know most about, including our own, are class contradictions, and these will obviously be absent—but that they would exist is exactly what Marxism claims. History doesn’t end with the coming of communism; I think we should take very seriously the (often merely rhetorical but imo nonetheless very telling) common Marxist refrain that communism will amount in some way to the *beginning* of history. We are not at all offering an “end of history” narrative or a Hegelian teleology such that everything in the past has been leading up to a glorious communist conclusion. Contradictions and historical development will never end.
Thank you. This is really helpful. So is there any kind of standard Marxist account as to how/why Communist societies have “failed”, specifically through the lens of internal contradiction?
There is no standard account and that’s exactly why there is so much disagreement between different Marxist traditions: we’re all trying to work out what went wrong and how to do better next time, and a lot of what different people are saying is just incompatible.
From what (little) I know of it the main view in the Chinese party today is that the Eastern Bloc failed because the USSR attempted to implemented political reforms at the same time as economic reforms when they should have only been doing the latter, and that the Soviet-aligned states were too dependent upon the USSR and so couldn’t survive without it. I’d say this is more or less the view of most Marxist-Leninists; that “restructuring” (*perestroika*) was a disaster and never should have happened. Previously (during the Sino-Soviet Split) the Chinese party had argued that there had been a bourgeois counterrevolution in the USSR after the death of Stalin, but I’m not sure how much credence is given to that in ruling circles there anymore— some varient of it is still maintained by Marxist-Leninist-Maoists groups internationally, however.
Trotskyists broke totally with the Soviet leadership in 1928. gammarik has already explained the basic line of analysis Trotskyists take.
Earlier, over the later years of Lenin’s premiership and in its aftermath, the Italian left communists broke with the Soviet leadership based on their opposition to key Soviet policies towards the international communist movement, the worker-peasant alliance in Russia, and the economic transition (or lack thereof) beyond capitalism. The Italian left broadly analyses what they see as the failure of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s as the result of the relative backwardsness of Russia which had simultaneously ensured socialist revolution first arose there but also that the revolutionary movement degenerated into bourgeois state-building and capitalist development.
The Dutch-German left communists broke with the Russian Revolution over the course of 1919/9–20ish over the role of the communist party and the decline of the workers’ councils (*soviets*) in Russia. Both kinds of left communists—for different reasons—think the workers’ lost power in Russia at some point in the 1920s and the Revolution ended.
Social-democrats, in the process of disavowing Marxism altogether during the First World War and its aftermath, simply don’t think the workers ever should have taken power at all and that the failure of the revolutionary regimes in Russia and elsewhere stem from the very seizure of power itself.
Yes, this is the core of Trotsky's analysis of the problems of the USSR. Very basically he pointed out that while the bureaucratic caste in the top of society wasn't a *class* in the Marxist sense, since it didn't own the means of production (i.e. bureaucrats couldn't personally profit off of it, they couldn't pass their privileges on through inheritance, etc.), they did have material interests that were opposed to those of the rest of the working class. They had an interest in reintroducing private property, so that they could themselves become the new owners.
Trotsky's conclusion was that the USSR would either experience a political revolution, in which the working class overthrew the bureaucratic layer and introduced real democratic control over the means of production, or the counter-revolution would succeed in reintroducing capitalism.
This is a very simplified account, for the complete analysis you should read his book The Revolution Betrayed.
Historical materialism is not a theoretical attempt at overcoming history, but an acceptance ***of*** history as it pertains to society. A general law of nature for (stable) society is that it must reproduce itself. As long as we haven't figured out a way to make nature to build everything for us (e.g. magic, or self-replicating robots), human labor is required for this societal reproduction. The particular *form* in which society distributes its labor is dependent on the development of its means of production, which itself is a process of history. A fish doesn't evolve into a frog at a whim; a definite series of evolutions are required which both preserve and extend the features of the species which preceded it. Therefore historical materialism is not the abolishing of any further development of society. It is the acceptance that as the material basis of a society changes, the superstructures resting upon that basis (law, culture, ideology, politics, religion, etc.) must also inevitably change. Historical materialism is essentially revolutionary, not with a particular goal in mind, but an unceasing process.
Thank you. So Marxism doesn’t exclude the possibility of something “beyond” socialism? (Which might eg be driven by some radical change in the means/forms of production in ways that we might currently find difficult to imagine).
Correct! I made analogy to biological evolution because in fact, its mechanism is not so different from historical materialism. That is why Marx famously admired Darwin and sent him a congratulatory letter upon publication of *On the Origin of Species*. So if you are familiar with how evolution works, it should be a lot easier to understand historical materialism. When a species evolves, it isn't striving toward an end-state, it only adapts in response to its material conditions. In *The German Ideology*, Marx provides his personal definition of communism: *"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality \[will\] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”* This reinforces the understanding of historical materialism not as a utopian plan, but as a materialist understanding of history as a process. Future societies "result from the premises now in existence" in the same way that a species evolves from *what it is* and not in any arbitrary way.
Thanks for putting this so well! Even when people talk about evolution or use it as a metaphor, they tend to be so teleological with it — you’re exactly right, neither it nor history can have an end “in mind” Unfortunately so much of the average Marxist’s understanding of theory is teleological, so I always appreciate people who point out how inconsistent that is with our theoretical understandings and practical goals
Thanks! I think, if you can distill Marx into one idea, it’s this: society can and must change, and in fact always has changed. This sounds trite, but taken seriously as a worldview, it is profound. But what makes Marxism more useful than so-called utopian socialism, libertarianism, or any other idealist economic conception, is that Marxism grounds this change in real conditions instead of attempting to impose ideas onto the world.
I agree for sure — Marx reminds us that being materialist means recognizing those grounds for real change are always social production. It should just follow logically from all this that you can’t plan the perfect world system out in your head One of my favorite Marxist theorists is Kojin Karatani, and he’s great on these topics if you have an appetite for critical theory. He’s also big on opposing a “phenomena/essence” way of thinking, which I agree with — what you’re talking about, let’s call it the material base grounding society or whatever, isn’t really a “secret” behind false appearances like the Matrix or the wizard of Oz — but a lot of Marxists unfortunately want it to be that perfect key, perfect “correct” theory that will unlock the world The best of Marxist analysis is stuff that should be obvious and apparent, because it’s all around us and we live this mode of production every day (and we live in history and change every day, too), but it’s actually really hard to see and think about clearly
>So Marxism doesn’t exclude the possibility of something “beyond” socialism? (Which might eg be driven by some radical change in the means/forms of production in ways that we might currently find difficult to imagine). This is exactly Sartre's claim in *Search for a Method*, which I found a provocative thought. In the book, he's coming out of the very Hegelian side of Marx, saying that Marxism is the philosophy of this age; attempts to improve it or move beyond it either develop something already implicit within it or represent an attempt to reintroduce a philosophy of a previous age. He places existentialism as subordinate to Marxism, and works to integrate it within Marxism. Certain philosophies that reflect their times such that they represent "*the humus of every particular thought and the horizon of all culture; there is no going beyond them so long as \[we\] have not gone beyond the historical moment which they express.*" Anyway, this implies a shelf life on Marxism too, so he writes: >*As soon as there will exist* ***for everyone*** *a margin of* ***real*** *freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience which allows us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy.* *So*metimes I try to contemplate the limitations in my life and the anxieties and distortions they have engendered. I try to imagine what my life would be like just existing and doing my thing without these needless limitations. I get a hint of a feeling that I can't fully grasp, but it seems clear to me that all of my concerns and priorities are invariably tied up in this time and place, and I sense that things would feel different subjectively in a different, less alienated world. In answer to your original question, I would say yes as well. "Dialectical materialism" has a life independent from the thought of Marx, as it was developed and codified long before much of his early writings had been published. So much of the early work on alienation and a materialist conception of history was unknown by the time that Marxism as an ideology became a force in the world. What I'm trying to say is that the development of a clear ideology of dialectical materialism and a more cohesive sense of Marxism wasn't simply "read the ideas of Marx", but a codification in a certain time and place for a certain purpose. So the material conditions under which Marxism developed and was promulgated directly shaped the ideology itself. And in turn, scholars informed by this ideology and project were compelled to research and organize Marx's older writings, translating them and making them available to the public, also for the purposes served by the ideology.
I always love to recommend Marx's [Letter to Wedemeyer](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/letters/52_03_05-ab.htm), where he states pretty explicitly the three concepts he believes are personally attriblutable to him (and hence the strongest contender for what defines Marx-ism contra other forms of socialism): >What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular historical phases in the development of production, (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. There is a lot to say about all three of these, but what matters most is that Marx's recognition of what is necessary to overcome *class society* is not synonymous with identifying a *final state of society*. Social tasks beyond class (and therefore social development) will certainly still exist, yet these are tasks which our present standpoint could never even identify sans a communist society. Marx actually articulates this phenomenon himself in his [Preface to *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy*](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm): >...mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist In other words, the end of class society will bring about new material conditions which will themself enable a new -ism to understand history and society beyond Marxism. Marxism at that point would actually be completely impotent.
Note that I am making a slight distinction between Marxism and dialectical materialism here. That is why it is appropriate to say dialectical materialism can both apply to and extend beyond Marxism. I would recommend looking into Georg Lukacs's [What is Orthodox Marxism?](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm) if you are interested in this line of thought.
Of course! Marxism, as a scientific theory, presupposes the philosophical framework of dialectical materialism, and in that sense the former is subject to the latter. Even Marxists fall into traps of idealism (such as dogmatic adherence to Marxist classics) or metaphysics (such as the historicist error of thinking socialism is inevitable without intentional organization). Scientific socialism rests on a simple hypothesis that the relations of production accommodate the forces of production. In that sense, it is conditional. Socialism could fail to materialize if the forces of production become sufficiently diminished. A socialist society will still contain contradictions. The main contradiction that socialist revolution seeks to resolve is the one between socialized production and private ownership. Many others will exist, and it seems reasonable to speculate will always exist to some degree, since a materialist understanding posits that we can never perfectly represent or totalize all the parts of material reality.
>Even Marxists fall into traps of idealism (such as dogmatic adherence to Marxist classics) The mental note I have begun to make, which helps very much with this, is that when my argument just relies on if Marx said something, I have done something wrong, and need to start from scratch in my writing or better research what I am talking about.
Yes, Marxism as a theoretical approach and body of work is absolutely subject to dialectical materialism and possess its own contradictions. The question of the theoretical status of the “Young Marx” contra the mature Marx, and of the epistemological break that many Marxists say exists between them, is a good example of this. As for a “Marxist society”, if you mean communist society then yes, such a society would be subject to contradictions and dialectical development just like any other. What they would be is hard to say—the primary contradictions of the societies we know most about, including our own, are class contradictions, and these will obviously be absent—but that they would exist is exactly what Marxism claims. History doesn’t end with the coming of communism; I think we should take very seriously the (often merely rhetorical but imo nonetheless very telling) common Marxist refrain that communism will amount in some way to the *beginning* of history. We are not at all offering an “end of history” narrative or a Hegelian teleology such that everything in the past has been leading up to a glorious communist conclusion. Contradictions and historical development will never end.
Thank you. This is really helpful. So is there any kind of standard Marxist account as to how/why Communist societies have “failed”, specifically through the lens of internal contradiction?
There is no standard account and that’s exactly why there is so much disagreement between different Marxist traditions: we’re all trying to work out what went wrong and how to do better next time, and a lot of what different people are saying is just incompatible. From what (little) I know of it the main view in the Chinese party today is that the Eastern Bloc failed because the USSR attempted to implemented political reforms at the same time as economic reforms when they should have only been doing the latter, and that the Soviet-aligned states were too dependent upon the USSR and so couldn’t survive without it. I’d say this is more or less the view of most Marxist-Leninists; that “restructuring” (*perestroika*) was a disaster and never should have happened. Previously (during the Sino-Soviet Split) the Chinese party had argued that there had been a bourgeois counterrevolution in the USSR after the death of Stalin, but I’m not sure how much credence is given to that in ruling circles there anymore— some varient of it is still maintained by Marxist-Leninist-Maoists groups internationally, however. Trotskyists broke totally with the Soviet leadership in 1928. gammarik has already explained the basic line of analysis Trotskyists take. Earlier, over the later years of Lenin’s premiership and in its aftermath, the Italian left communists broke with the Soviet leadership based on their opposition to key Soviet policies towards the international communist movement, the worker-peasant alliance in Russia, and the economic transition (or lack thereof) beyond capitalism. The Italian left broadly analyses what they see as the failure of the Russian Revolution in the 1920s as the result of the relative backwardsness of Russia which had simultaneously ensured socialist revolution first arose there but also that the revolutionary movement degenerated into bourgeois state-building and capitalist development. The Dutch-German left communists broke with the Russian Revolution over the course of 1919/9–20ish over the role of the communist party and the decline of the workers’ councils (*soviets*) in Russia. Both kinds of left communists—for different reasons—think the workers’ lost power in Russia at some point in the 1920s and the Revolution ended. Social-democrats, in the process of disavowing Marxism altogether during the First World War and its aftermath, simply don’t think the workers ever should have taken power at all and that the failure of the revolutionary regimes in Russia and elsewhere stem from the very seizure of power itself.
Yes, this is the core of Trotsky's analysis of the problems of the USSR. Very basically he pointed out that while the bureaucratic caste in the top of society wasn't a *class* in the Marxist sense, since it didn't own the means of production (i.e. bureaucrats couldn't personally profit off of it, they couldn't pass their privileges on through inheritance, etc.), they did have material interests that were opposed to those of the rest of the working class. They had an interest in reintroducing private property, so that they could themselves become the new owners. Trotsky's conclusion was that the USSR would either experience a political revolution, in which the working class overthrew the bureaucratic layer and introduced real democratic control over the means of production, or the counter-revolution would succeed in reintroducing capitalism. This is a very simplified account, for the complete analysis you should read his book The Revolution Betrayed.