All our lives, we are told that greed and selfishness are simply human nature — that history has always been each against all, and only the rulers and the weapons ever change. We are told, too, that society cannot be changed, and that the only way out is a private one: get rich at the expense of others, or make peace with poverty through religion.
Marxism starts somewhere else. People have lived under many kinds of society, and their behavior has changed with the conditions they lived and worked under. Capitalism rewards competition and the chase after profit — then holds up the conduct it produces as eternal human nature. But people can compete, and they can also cooperate and stand together. Which side comes forward depends on how society is organized. These habits are social, not eternal. People made them, and people can change them.
Materialism and dialectics give us a scientific way to understand how nature and society develop, and how people can organize to change them.
What does materialism mean?
Materialism starts from a simple recognition: the world exists outside us, whatever we think about it. Nature was here before human beings. A flower does not bloom because someone looks at it; we can see it because it is already there, and because we are living, material creatures able to think.
Thought is part of the material world, not something floating above it. Our ideas grow out of the lives we lead — out of work, out of dealing with other people, out of struggle. We come to know the world by acting on it and testing our ideas against it. The real world does not change to fit our beliefs; our understanding has to change to fit the real world.
Materialism is sometimes mixed up with the chase after money and possessions. That is not materialism. It is the conduct a society built on private profit trains into people.
What does dialectics mean?
Everything changes. Nothing stays the same forever. Things come into being, develop and pass away.
What drives that change? The deepest changes in anything come from the struggle going on inside it — between opposing forces bound together and pulling against each other. Take capitalism. The capitalist and the worker are locked together: one cannot profit without the other’s labor, the other cannot eat without selling it. Yet their interests pull in opposite directions, because every dollar taken as profit comes out of the wealth the worker produces. That opposition is built into the system, and it drives the system to change. Marxists call it a contradiction.
Change does not always come little by little. Small changes pile up until they produce a sudden break. Heat water and its temperature climbs; for a while it is still water. Then, at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it boils and turns to steam. The same happens in the class struggle. A wage cut here, a speedup there, a firing, a grievance ignored — the pressure builds while the surface stays calm. Then it breaks, and the workers walk out.
And change moves forward, not in a circle. The new grows out of the old by overcoming it. Capitalism swept away the small farms and workshops of an earlier age and built large-scale production in their place — and in doing so created the working class that can carry society forward again, to common ownership, but now on everything capitalism built. That is no return to the poverty of the past. It is a step up to something higher.
Dialectics is not a formula stamped onto reality. It is a way of understanding real movement, connection and change, and each process has to be studied as it really is.
What is historical materialism?
Historical materialism applies this outlook to society. People have to produce the means of life — food, clothing, shelter — and in producing them they enter into definite relations with one another. They divide up the work, develop tools, settle questions of property. These arrangements do not stay fixed. As people’s power to produce grows, it collides with the old forms of property, and class struggles arise.
For most of human history there were no classes at all. The earliest peoples produced barely enough to live on and shared what they had — no rich and poor, no masters, no state. That changed once people could produce more than they needed. The surplus could be stored, seized, fought over. A small group took control of it, and classes were born: masters and slaves, later lords and serfs, finally capitalists and workers. Property, and a state to guard it, grew up to defend those on top. Each system rose, developed and gave way to the next. Capitalism is the newest. It is not the last.
Under capitalism, the land, the factories and the machines are owned by a small class. The great majority own none of it and must sell their ability to work in order to live. Production is carried on for profit, not human need. Capitalism builds up the power to produce on an enormous scale — and at the same time produces exploitation, one crisis after another, imperialist war, and a deepening clash between production that is more and more social and ownership that stays private.
None of this means money and machines explain everything. Politics, law, religion and ideas all shape the course of history. But in the last analysis, the foundation under all of it is the way people produce and reproduce the means of life.
Where this leads
No system lasts forever. Capitalism had a beginning, and it will have an end. Its contradictions only sharpen as production becomes the joined labor of millions while the wealth that labor creates stays in the hands of a few.
But capitalism will not fall on its own. The capitalist class holds the wealth, the weapons, the courts and the government, all built to defend its rule. Ending it takes an organized working class and a fight for political power. People are not helpless products of history: they are born into conditions they did not choose, but through their own struggle they can change those conditions and build something new.
Society can be changed, because the people who make it can remake it.
Additional reading
- Materialism – by Frederick Engels, Part of Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
- Idealism and Materialism — by Karl Marx
- The Science of Dialectics – by Frederick Engels, Part 2 of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
- Historical Materialism – by Frederick Engels, Part 3 of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
- Dialectics of Nature – by Frederick Engels
J.B.S. Haldane’s introduction: “Dialectical materialism, the philosophy which, along with Marx, [Engels] founded, is not merely a philosophy of history, but a philosophy which illuminates all events whatever, from the falling of a stone to a poet’s imaginings. And it lays particular emphasis on the inter-connection of all processes, and the artificial character of the distinctions which men have drawn, not merely between vertebrates and invertebrates or liquids and gases, but between the different fields of human knowledge such as economics, history, and natural science.” - Karl Marx – by V.I. Lenin, A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism, including Materialism and Dialectics
- Encyclopedia of Marxism on dialectics
- Engels’ 1890 letter to J. Bloch — on why the way people produce and reproduce real life is decisive in the last analysis, though it is not the only force at work.
- Engels’ four letters on Historical Materialism
- The Class Struggles in France — by Karl Marx, with Frederick Engels’ 1895 introduction, which traces the political events of the day back to their economic causes.
- On Historical Materialism – by Franz Mehring (1893). Mehring was a founding member of the German Communist Party along with Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin.
- Return to What is Marxism?