Historical Materialism: Marx’s Core Concepts
Marx’s Historical Materialism
This theory is based on the achievements of man in nature and conditions in running the existence of individuals.
A. Levels of Social Structure
The social structure is divided into three levels:
- Economic activities take place for the production of material goods necessary to live. Marx considers this level as the infrastructure of the social structure.
- Legal and political power establishes the mechanisms and rules of a community (represented in the state and law).
- The ideological ideas that are present in every society. Its function is to give cohesion to the social structure and perpetuate the system of domination of one class over another. It is what sustains the domination, according to Marx.
The last two levels are considered the superstructure. They have a relative autonomy and are governed by their own laws, but are based on the infrastructure (the economy, which is the explanation of everything that happens in the other two levels).
B. Economic Level: Modes of Production
According to Marx, work is the element that defines humanity, as it allows the maintenance and conservation of the species through action on nature. It takes place in the economic structure and explains the political and ideological structures. Work has a number of elements in the production of goods:
- Productive Forces: These are fundamental and necessary for the development of work. Their development indicates the degree of development reached by human beings and the conditions under which it works (relations between individuals that produce).
- Furthermore, producing the goods on which nature is transformed into objects of consumption establishes production relationships between media owners and the staff directly.
There are also, in this process, different modes of production (set of productive forces and relations of production at a given time and historically conditioned). Here, Marx introduces the concept of history and materialist dialectics, through which he developed an understanding of his historical moment: the capitalist mode of production (the main objective).
C. The Capitalist Mode of Production
Based on the law of supply and demand of A. Smith and D. Ricardo, a form of capitalism is established, based on equality and freedom that the market “prints” in social relations. Under this ideal equality, Marx says that there is an inequality between the worker (forced to sell their labor to survive in the market) and the capitalist (who is enriched). Here, the worker is called a proletarian (and receives a salary for their work), and the more he produces, the poorer he becomes due to surplus value (which is the profit that the capitalist makes at the expense of the proletariat, in which lies the key to capitalist exploitation and the origin of the proletariat under capitalism).
It follows that the progress of civilization enriches capital. Marx changes the concept of alienation (making it a bit more materialistic) and affirms the alienation of the worker in two respects:
- 1: The worker is alienated from the fruits of their labor, which are not theirs but are the fruit of their efforts.
- 2: The proletariat is alienated from the productive activity, which itself is a commodity with market value and is beside himself (it belongs to someone else).
Marx notes that this alienation is exacerbated if the worker takes as “natural” that the capitalist appropriates the surplus value by owning the means of production. To avoid this, Marx proposes communism, which involves the removal of private property and, consequently, the removal of surplus value (because the capitalist would own neither the means of production nor the final product). Here, Marx’s theory and practice are reattached: the transition to a communist society requires the conscious organization of the proletariat.