Some Notes on Historical Materialism
By Michael Coleman
In this article, I want to describe and stake out my opposition to a reading of Marx’s theory of history which I have, perhaps unfairly, given the label ‘Historical Materialism 101’. This is because I think that the errors which stem from it come as a result of the kinds of oversimplified summaries of Marx’s approach which tend to appear in introductory university courses, errors which then go on to be repeated by Marxists and non-Marxists alike. What I am describing is a tendency quite similar to what Marxists would have once disparagingly called ‘mechanical materialism’, yet it is something that has periodically reappeared in new guises throughout the history of the international socialist movement.
It can be characterised by a view of history as advancing down an inevitable pre-determined path, a belief that economic growth and development of the productive forces will eventually lead to socialism by a kind of logical necessity. At the very least, this development is often seen as a necessary precursor to socialism. Going hand and hand with this productivism is a tendency to ignore the actual agency of workers (as well as other classes). In a textbook example of this, Vivek Chibber[1] recently argued in Jacobin that Marx’s materialism can be reduced to the concept of ‘actors behaving in rational self-interest’. This is a further side of a flattened and impoverished historical materialism over-focussed on the ‘fettering’ of technology. It is a phenomenon traceable in the analytical Marxism of G.A. Cohen[2] and his successors in that school[3], including Chibber himself. And it persists also in the productivism of certain eco-modernist tendencies, which places faith in technological development.[4]
Most importantly, as John Molyneux has observed, it is also a tendency which has been prominent outside academia, within real socialist movements from the Second International to the present day[5], and the theoretical errors many of these movements made, as a result, had real material stakes. Moreover, it’s based on a not-entirely-unreasonable reading of some of Marx’s most concise statements on the subject of historical materialism, making it something which is necessary to continually challenge.
What is Historical Materialism
To get technical for a moment, historical materialism can be understood as the application of the methodology of dialectical materialism to the concept of historical development.[6] It is worth spelling out what is meant by both components of this term before we move on. First, the Marxist approach is dialectical in that it starts from the observation that ‘everything is subject to change, and thereby that everything is part of a restless process of development’.[7] The driving force of this change and development are the components of the whole that stand in contradiction to one another. It therefore stands to reason that the best way to understand something is not to take its component parts in isolation, but to analyse the relations between them.
““Going hand and hand with this productivism is a tendency to ignore the actual agency of workers (as well as other classes)”.”
Second, it is also given the label materialist in order to distinguish it from the idealist approach of the German philosopher GWF Hegel, who believed that history was a process of reason dialectically making itself actual in the world. Marx’s move was to observe that it was actually contradictions and processes in the material world which drive ideas and the production of knowledge, as well as the process of history. Following on from this, as the Greek-French Marxist Nicos Poulantzas explains, the task of historical materialism is to take concrete social formations as a whole, to examine the relations between their component parts, and to look to the contradictions between these component parts to understand how one social formation transforms into another.[8] The main argument I want to advance in this article is that the ‘Historical Materialism 101’ tendency I describe attempts to flatten and simplify the relations between the component parts of a social formation in such a way that loses track of their complexity and dynamism, leading to significant political errors.
Against Historical Materialism 101
There is a kind of technological determinism which characterises Historical Materialism 101, which, in fairness to its advocates, can be rather easily reconstructed from Marx's quotes. In The Poverty of Philosophy, for example, he suggests that ‘the handmill gives you society with the feudal lord, the steam-mill gives you society with the industrial capitalist’ [9], a quote which taken in isolation could be seen to claim that socialism will spring forth once we have the right technological development. Meanwhile, the broad historical strokes that Marx and Engels paint in The Communist Manifesto tend to tell a story of history as an inevitable march of progress driven by the development of productive forces.[10] Perhaps the crucial text in this line of thinking, however, is the 1859 Preface to a Contribution of a Critique of Political Economy, [11] from which it is worth quoting a key passage in full:
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.”
The so-called ‘development thesis’ Marx puts forward in this quote forms the basis of the argument put forward by G.A. Cohen in Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence [12]. This itself became a foundational text within the academic school of ‘Analytical Marxism’, and is the main form in which university students will first come into contact with Marxist thought (at least in the Anglophone world).[13]
The argument of Historical Materialism 101 is simple. It says that human history is the story of developing human productive power. We act on nature in order to produce what we need, so the defining question of any social formation will concern how we produce what we need. It derives from this the idea that social formations and modes of production will rise or fall based on whether they facilitate or impede human productive power. Feudalism transformed into capitalism because feudal social formations were ‘fettering’ the development of the productive forces until a nascent bourgeoisie gradually seized power and unleashed these forces once more, something which this view sees as historically progressive and a necessary step on the road to socialism. The final step in the argument is then to say that socialism will emerge when capitalism itself is fettering the development of the productive forces. Then, we will enter a period of social revolution where the proletariat will step into the spotlight of history and release these fetters once more.[14] The clear conclusion from this is that technological development is 1) inevitable, 2) historically progressive and 3) necessary to set the scene for socialism.
An over-focus on the productive forces
It is worth noting as an aside here that many of Marx’s later writings point to a position developed beyond the productivism outlined in the previous paragraph.[15] In any case, I don’t think we should be getting into the habit of treating ‘what Marx really said’ as catechism; the issue is that this view is problematic at a fundamental, theoretical level. It is not that it is ‘wrong’ as such; rather it is static and linear, leaving out important aspects of historical development. According to Historical Materialism 101, the development of the productive forces occurs in a linear direction, until this is fettered by the mode of production.
Properly put, however, history is not so much a linear narrative unfolding in a predetermined direction, rather it is dialectical. Remember that everything is in a constant state of flux and change; a restless process of development driven by the components of the social whole that stand in contradiction to one another. As Paul Murphy pointed out in these pages in our most recent issue [16], if Cohen’s view of history has a lot to say about one of these components, the forces of production, it has very little to say about one of the primary points of contradiction between different components; that is in the relations of production, between capitalists and workers. It elides that the primary work of socialists is to intervene directly in this political struggle, rather than to wait for the forces of production to ripen sufficiently in such a way that will automatically resolve this struggle in favourable terms.
““The primary work of socialists is to intervene directly in this political struggle, rather than the forces of production to ripen sufficiently in such a way that will automatically resolve the struggle in favourable terms.””
We can see this motif of waiting occurring and recurring when we look at socialist history, and perhaps most prominently and tragically to the history of the Second International. At the time, many cleaved toward the view that the role of the socialist movement was to ‘move with the tide’ and not rock the boat too much. Especially in Germany, social democratic parties seemed to be steadily advancing based on a predicted path of economic development. In this view, working-class consciousness was considered something of a fait accompli. It was thought by many that the iron laws of capitalist development would ensure its emergence without much need for active intervention. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into detail about this history, but the upshot was a workers' movement that sleepwalked into the disaster of World War I.
One of the fiercest critics of social democracy at this time was Rosa Luxemburg, whose famous dictum put forward a choice: ‘Socialism or barbarism’.[17] This slogan implies that there is more than one possible path that society can go down when capitalism as a system begins to come under strain. Transparently, this means it can never be enough to simply wait for socialism to establish itself; it is not an inevitable fact of history-produced iron economic laws. Rather, it is an objective possibility brought about by the material conditions of capitalism. Actualising this possibility depends entirely on the decisions made under those material conditions and cannot be reduced to a mechanical process. As Walter Benjamin observed, ‘nothing has so corrupted the German working class as the notion that it was moving with the current’.[18. The conformity of Social Democracy to the ideology of progress, and not least technological progress, meant that it was unable to grasp the dynamic of fascism and unable to critique capitalism effectively.[19]
““To excessively focus on the productive forces, as Historical Materialism 101 does, is to miss the forest from the trees.””
All of this fundamentally amounted to a denial of working-class agency. Vivek Chibber’s conception of materialism being about rational actors pursuing their material well-being, referred to in the opening paragraph, is essentially a contemporary manifestation of the same kind of tendency. In some ways, there is not much to distinguish his approach here from bourgeois rational choice theory. Just like that framework, he seems to be suffering from a painfully narrow conception of what an ‘interest’ is. At some basic level, people need to work in order to survive, fair enough, but as William Clare Roberts has pointed out, clearly workers are motivated by a far wider range of things than mere survival when they get up in the morning [20].
All of this is to say that ‘interests’ are mediated by the distinct ways that different individuals see the world and their place in it; things which are informed by the cultural, the social and the political as well as the economic. And crucially no one ‘interest’ can be objectively described as more rational than another. Working-class supporters of Trump and the wider far-right have interests other than economic and material advancements that they perceive those actors as satisfying. As Richard Seymour has recently pointed out, these interests are often related to the fulfilment of deep and dark psychological needs, and any left response to this which amounts to trusting in these people to follow their ‘objective’ material interests simply will not cut it.[21] To Chibber’s credit, and unlike the Second International tendency described in the previous paragraph, he does still argue in favour of the need for political intervention[22], but his formulation still suggests that the path to socialism lies in constructing and illuminating the right economic incentives for the working class, rather than the multi-faceted political and cultural action that will be required.
Conclusion
The reality is that concrete social formations are far more complex than those described by Historical Materialism 101. For a more whole picture, I would point to the excellent summary of historical materialism found in the introduction to Nicos Poulantzas’ State Power and Social Class. For him, many Marxists make the mistake of subsuming all history under the same abstract law, a universal model regulating all historical concretisation as if the path followed by Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries is inevitable and applicable in all times and places.[23] A social formation may be dominated ‘in the final instance’ by the economic, but that does not mean that we can draw a clear line of causality which can be replicated elsewhere. The reality of contemporary capitalism is that it is constructed by the interaction between a variety of different structures and practices; the economic, the political and the ideological, amongst others. To excessively focus on the productive forces, as Historical Materialism 101 does, is to miss the forest for the trees.
Notes
1. Vivek Chibber, ‘Materialism is Essential for Socialist Politics, Jacobin (2025).
2. G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978).
3. See for example Jon Elster, Making Sense of Marx (1985).
4. See for example Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts: A Defence of Growth, Progress, Industry and Stuff (2014); John Asafu-Adjaye et al., An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015); Aaron Bastani, Full Luxury Automated Communism (2019).
5. John Molyneux, “The Case for Ecosocialism”, Irish Marxist Review Vol. 9 (2020).
6. Nicos Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (1968).
7. Sven-Eric Liedman, A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx (2019).
8. Poulantzas (1968).
9. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1847).
10. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848).
11. Karl Marx, Contribution Toward a Critique of Political Economy (1859).
12. G.A. Cohen (1978)
13. See for example Jonathan Wolff, Why Read Marx Today (2003), a very commonly recommended introductory text in university classes.
14. This is a summary of the account of historical materialism presented in Jonathan Wolff (2003).
15. For example, in the preface to the 1882 Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels comment on the distinct historical trajectory of Russia as compared to Western Europe, pointing to a far less mechanical and teleological understanding of historical materialism. Available at: https://www.marxists.org
16. Paul Murphy, ‘The Case For Luddism’, Rupture Issue 15 (2025).
17. Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet (1915).
18. Walter Benjamin, On The Concept of History (2005).
19. Benjamin Noys, ‘Emergency Brake’, No Useless Leniency, 3 March 2013.
20. William Clare Roberts. ‘The Red Pill: Breaking Out of the Class Matrix’, Radical Philosophy 213 (2022).
21. Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism (2024).
22. Chibber thinks the need for political intervention is based around morale and fighting disillusionment; that workers would begin the process of ushering in socialism if only they understood the power they had. See Vivek Chibber, The Class Matrix (2022).
23. Poulantzas (1968).