Historical materialism
Editorial · base & superstructure / class struggle / stages of history / the withering state
Marx's claim that the mode of production shapes a society's law, politics and ideas, and that history moves through stages toward communism. This is the engine underneath every communist political program.
The claim
Historical materialism is Marx's theory of what drives history. Its core: the way a society produces its material life — its mode of production — shapes its law, politics, religion and ideas, and the tensions inside that economic base are what move history from one epoch to the next. It is the engine beneath every communist political program, because it is what lets a movement believe it is acting with history rather than merely arguing for a preference.
- Base and superstructure. "The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life" (Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, 1859). The economic base conditions the legal and political "superstructure" — though how tightly is exactly what's contested.
- Class struggle is the motor. History advances through conflict between classes defined by their relation to the means of production: "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (The Communist Manifesto, 1848).
- Capitalism breeds its own gravedigger. By concentrating workers and socialising production, capitalism is said to create the class that will overthrow it — so revolution is offered as a prediction, not merely a hope.
- A transitional state, then withering away. A "dictatorship of the proletariat" holds power during the transition, after which class antagonism — and with it the state — is expected to dissolve.
- Why it matters: this is what gives communist movements their confidence. If history has a direction, acting against capitalism is siding with the inevitable.
G. A. Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978) gave the most rigorous modern reconstruction, reading Marx as explaining institutions by their function in developing society's productive powers.
The scholarly debate
Two disputes run deep. First, is historical materialism falsifiable social science or an unfalsifiable philosophy of history? Karl Popper's The Poverty of Historicism (1957) argued that theories of historical inevitability cannot be tested and should not be trusted. Second, how deterministic was Marx himself — the long-running "late Marx" question, where his letters show far more contingency than the confident Manifesto.
Strongest counterargument
◆ Against this entry’s own thesis
Defenders argue that crude economic determinism is a caricature Marx never held. Engels himself insisted the economy is decisive only "in the last instance," and that law, politics and ideas react back on the base with real autonomy. On this reading, the durable insight — that material interests shape *which* ideas become dominant, and that institutions persist partly because of whom they serve — has been quietly absorbed into mainstream social science. The hard version (history has a necessary direction, ending in communism) is what the evidence strains; the soft version (follow the material interests) is now almost common sense.