All our lives, we are told that greed and selfishness are simply human nature — that history has always been a fight for survival in a hostile world, and only the rulers and the weapons ever change. We are told, too, that society cannot be changed, and that the only way to get ahead is aggression and acquisition.
Marxism starts somewhere else. People have lived in many kinds of societies, and their behavior has changed with the conditions under which they lived and worked. Capitalism rewards competition and the chase after profit — then holds up the conduct it produces as eternal human nature. People can compete, but they can also cooperate and stand together. Which side succeeds depends on how society is organized. These are social interactions, not predestined behavior. People made them, and people can change them.
Materialism and dialectics give us a scientific way to understand how nature and society develop and change. They help us understand the conditions in which people live and how, through collective action, people can change society.
What does materialism mean?
Materialism starts from a simple recognition: the world exists outside us, however we perceive 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. Mind and society grow up out of nature, but they are something new. You cannot explain a strike or a song by chemistry alone. 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 through observation, thought and practice, testing our ideas by acting on the world and learning from the results. As Marx wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Materialism is sometimes mixed up with the chase after money and possessions. That is not materialism. It is the conduct people learn in a society structured around private profit.
What does dialectics mean?
Everything is always changing. Nothing stays the same forever. Things come into being, develop and pass away.
Change often develops through contradictions within things and processes themselves — through opposed tendencies that exist together and affect one another.
Take capitalism. The capitalist and the worker depend on each other within the system: the capitalist cannot make profit without workers’ labor, while workers who do not own the means of production must sell their labor power to live. Yet their class interests pull in opposite directions. Workers produce more value than they receive back in wages, and the surplus is appropriated by the capitalist class. That contradiction is built into capitalist production and drives class struggle.
Change does not always come little by little. Small changes can accumulate until they produce a sudden break. Heat water and its temperature rises; for a while it remains liquid. At the boiling point, it changes into steam. The same can happen 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.
The new develops out of conditions created by the old, but history does not move forward automatically. There can be advances and defeats, revolutions and restorations. Capitalism transformed earlier forms of production and developed large-scale industry and an increasingly social division of labor. In doing so, it created a working class whose collective labor makes modern society possible. Socialism does not mean returning to the small-scale production of the past. It means taking the productive capacities created under capitalism and placing them on a new social basis.
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 and reproduce the means of life — food, clothing, shelter and everything else society requires — and in doing so they enter into definite relations with one another. They divide up the work, develop tools and technologies, and establish different forms of property and social organization.
These arrangements do not stay fixed. As productive powers develop, they can come into conflict with existing property relations and social institutions. These contradictions give rise to struggles between classes and other social forces.
For the greater part of human existence, people lived in societies without exploiting classes or a state standing above society. These societies took many different forms. As human productive capacity developed, some societies became able to produce a regular surplus beyond immediate needs. This created new possibilities: wealth could be stored and redistributed, but it could also be seized and controlled.
Under different historical conditions, class societies arose in different forms. Some were based heavily on slavery, others on tribute, landlordism or forms of dependent labor. Capitalism developed later by concentrating the means of production in the hands of one class while separating growing numbers of people from the land, tools and other means by which they could support themselves.
Class society did not develop everywhere along one identical path. But wherever exploiting classes arose, control over the surplus produced by others became a basis of social power, and states developed to defend the existing relations of property and class rule.
Under capitalism, the land, factories, machinery and other major means of production are owned or controlled by a small class. The great majority own none of them and must sell their labor power in order to live. Production is carried on for profit, not human need. Driven to accumulate, capitalism continually expands production, drawing on and looting the labor and natural resources of the whole world. It has developed the power to produce on an enormous scale — and at the same time produces exploitation, recurring crises, imperialist war and a deepening contradiction between production that is increasingly social and ownership that remains private.
None of this means that money and machines explain everything. Politics, law, religion, culture and ideas all shape the course of history, and they can in turn affect economic and social development. But the production and reproduction of material life remain fundamental: every society must organize the labor, resources and social relations through which people live.
Where this leads
No social system lasts forever. Capitalism had a beginning, and it can have an end. Its central contradiction remains: production is increasingly the collective labor of millions, while the wealth and means of production remain under the control of a small capitalist class.
But capitalism will not fall on its own. The capitalist class holds enormous wealth and controls a state apparatus — the government, courts, police, prisons and armed forces — built to maintain its rule. Ending capitalism takes an organized working class and a struggle for political power.
People are not helpless products of history. They are born into conditions they did not choose, but through their own activity and collective struggle they can change those conditions and create new ones.
Society can be changed because the people who make it can remake it.
Additional reading
- Materialism – by Frederick Engels, Part 2 of Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy
- 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.
- The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology – by John Bellamy Foster. Carries Engels’s Dialectics of Nature forward, tracing how socialists and materialist scientists — from William Morris and Engels to Rachel Carson and Stephen Jay Gould — worked out a dialectical, ecological materialism against capitalism. Foster’s earlier Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (2000) is the more Marx-focused companion.
- Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History – by Helena Sheehan. A readable history of dialectical materialism as a living argument — from Marx and Engels through the Second International and the Soviet debates to the British Marxist scientists of the 1930s.
- Materialism — by Roy Bhaskar, in “A Dictionary of Marxist Thought,” ed. Tom Bottomore (1983). Advanced — a full philosophical treatment of materialism.
- Return to What is Marxism?