Marx’s Materialist Conception of History and Critique of Capitalism

Posted on Dec 14, 2024 in Social sciences

Marx’s Revolutionary Philosophy

Marx sought to transform philosophy into a science capable of explaining all of reality. His theory served to criticize the historical reality he lived in and, consequently, to help transform it. It is a practical philosophy with two interrelated revolutionary pretensions:

• Theoretical: To scientifically explain reality, society, and human history to obtain a theory clarifying the ideological consciousness of alienated existence.
• Practical: To develop a program of political action for the revolutionary proletariat to guide the transformation of the bourgeois mode of production and forms of consciousness. This revolutionary action aims to bring about the intelligent and effective equality and unity of all people.

Historical Materialism

The appropriate science to explain history is, in fact, history itself. Historical materialism does not make an object of human achievement derived from ethical-moral, emotional, or metaphysical considerations, but rather from objective, real, and material conditions. It opposes all forms of idealism and starts from the material needs of humans, who act on nature and transform it through work. When activity is focused on human’s material needs, it is materialistic. When examining historical activity, it is material. When analyzing the dialectical relations between humans and nature, and between humans, it is a materialist dialectic.

The Problem of Reality

Marx prioritizes concrete reality over thought or consciousness. Reality is considered a dialectical process of production, a material process (dialectical materialism). Marx considered nature and humans together, as nature is always mediated and transformed by human productive activity. Therefore, dialectical materialism is a system that states that matter is the essence of reality, governed by dialectical laws that are external to humans.

The Problem of the Human Being: Alienation

**The human-nature relationship:**

• A Natural Being: Humans come from nature and are nothing without it, just as the human being is nothing without nature. Humans have material needs and turn to nature to meet them.
• An Active-Practical Being: There is no predetermined nature, but rather one that has made itself into a human achievement through a progressive relationship with nature. This work, through which humans develop and refresh their potential skills, projects their essential strength, and the object is humans as they produce and are produced.
• A Social Being: Humans need to engage with others to produce and perform.
• A Historical Being: Humans always work and are productive, but not always in the same way (mode of material production). The natural mode of production coincides with the human being at a given moment in history.

Productive activity is a specifically human activity and should fulfill humans. However, it has now generated exploitation, confrontations, inequality, and alienation, which has reached its climax in capitalism. Alienation is an alien and hostile power that stands against humans instead of being the one they dominate. The worker, in the execution of the product, goes out of themselves, is externalized, and loses contact with nature and with other humans. They make an effort through which they are expressed in the object, and therefore, they are somehow dispossessed of something of themselves, as the product is not their product or their property.

**The basic and fundamental alienation, the economic one, contains negative aspects:**

• The object produced does not belong to the worker; it is owned by another, making the product foreign and strange to its producer. Not only the product but also the worker is alienated, and this puts their life into the product. By becoming a commodity, the producer is also subject to the same treatment and use as a thing.
• There is also the alienation of the worker’s activity. They do not live their work as something of their own, something voluntary and free, but as something foreign and forced. This causes the worker to be unhappy in their work, shunning it like the plague.
• Being socially divided, workers (facing class division) break the individual-society relationship. Collaboration between individuals is not free and voluntary but forced, like an alien and hostile power. Each individual is forced not to be able to produce and consume according to their individual and collective interests.

From economic and social alienation derive other forms of alienation: political and ideological.

The Problem of Society

Society is composed of two structures:

Socio-Economic Infrastructure or Real Base of Civil Society

This is the basis of society and the conditions of the production process. It has two levels:

• Income Level: Where productive forces are, representing the mode of development of production capacity that a society has reached at a particular historical moment to address its needs. When purchasing new instruments, new needs are created.
• Social Level: The social relations of production are established between people according to their given position, depending on the type of productive forces. The relations of production shape society. The modes of production in history have changed and are different at different times.

Cultural Superstructure of Society

This is the set of ideas, offices, and institutions derived from the infrastructure and responsible for maintaining and justifying it.

• Political-Legal Level: The system that organizes society and all the laws within it.
• Cultural Level: Constituted by the set of ideas, values, and beliefs that a society has.

The relationship between real life and the superstructure is dialectical.

The Problem of Consciousness: Critique of Ideology

It is not consciousness that determines life, but real life that determines consciousness. Consciousness expresses the relation of humans or a class with their mind and their social and historical existence. Ideas expressing this relationship can do so scientifically (historical materialism) or improperly (ideology). False consciousness or ideology imagines that consciousness is independent, which makes humans move away from the material base and dedicate themselves to creating pure theories. This illusion is conditioned by the material base, the division of labor, and inequality. This leads to the separation of physical and intellectual work, especially when the level of production makes it possible.

To eliminate the ideas of false consciousness, criticism is not enough. It is necessary to abolish, through revolution, the existing socioeconomic relations from which such ideas are derived.

Marx’s Claims About Consciousness

• The way humans think (consciousness) is a product of the society they live in.
• Ideologies, in a negative sense, describe humans and their situation with the world and society in a deformed way.
• That strain is the result of the interest of the ruling class to remain in its position of dominance. The dominant class, possessing the means of material production, has control of the production of culture. The ideas that succeed in a society are those that the ruling class wants to dominate. They assume that all class power controls the thinking of the exploited class. Ideology is a form of alienation.
• In capitalist society, the entire superstructure is ideological. The political ideology of the bourgeoisie is to declare the people sovereign and all citizens free and equal. But that does not reach the people, the real humans. The state is not impartial but an instrument of oppression in the service of the ruling class. The same is true of philosophical ideas, moral values, and religion. Moral values are relative to a mode of production, and there is no transhistorical morality. Religious ideas are also conservative and justify the existing socioeconomic order, considering that all the suffering on earth will be compensated for in heaven. All these ideas are reassuring illusions.
• As a social product, the consciousness of the proletariat, due to its extreme contradiction, can be scientific and non-ideological. In the proletariat, the particular interest and the universal interest merge. The consciousness that arises only from their point of view is theoretical and practical. Historical materialism represents this consciousness-transforming practice.

The Problem of the Sense of History

Marx sees history from a Hegelian, dialectical perspective but changes its idealistic interpretation to a materialistic one. History is governed by necessary and universal dialectical laws, which can predict the future. History is a product of human action; it is the succession of different modes of production that has resulted in different societies. What makes history progress are the dialectical contradictions between productive forces and production relations. What changes are the productive forces. When the form given by the relations of production appears as an obstacle to the advancement of productive forces, it is abolished and replaced by a revolution with another that is better suited to its development. These, in turn, will also become a nuisance and be replaced again. This is how the different modes of production progress up to capitalism, in which the contradictions of the proletariat are extreme, and the situation is one of total dehumanization.

Stages of History

• Primitive Society: A society of hunters because the instruments were rudimentary.
• Agricultural Societies: As these instruments were replaced by mechanical utensils, other relations of production originated, leading to sedentary agricultural societies.
• Feudal Society: With the discovery of iron, feudal society developed, divided into lords and serfs.
• Capitalist Society: When feudalism became an impediment to production due to new working tools (machines), the bourgeois revolution destroyed it, and capitalist society appeared.

Critique of Capitalist Society

The bourgeoisie and the proletariat are facing each other. The bourgeoisie emerged as a revolutionary class against feudalism. However, it has created productive forces that cannot develop within the relations of production created by the bourgeois regime of private property and the specialized division of labor. In the capitalist mode of production, the worker produces a value that they do not perceive, called surplus value, which is unpaid work. This exploits and alienates humans, producing the constant pauperization of the proletariat.

How Communist Society Will Be

The working class will become aware of its class and rise against the bourgeoisie. This will begin after the dictatorship of the proletariat, in which the proletariat will take over the power of the state. At this stage, private property and the division of labor will be abolished, and the means of production will be socialized, passing to the state, now controlled by the proletariat. This phase of dictatorship will be temporary but necessary. The next step will be to dissolve the state, class differences, and everything else. The allocation formula will be”from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” Production will be collective. Instead of the hierarchical division of tasks, there will be voluntary collaboration and unification of physical and intellectual work, overcoming all forms of alienation. Then, the prehistory of humanity will end, and history will begin. Prehistory is the period before the revolution, a stage governed by necessity, alienation, and exploitation, with the goal of freedom. However, the realm of freedom only begins where work stops being determined by necessity, beyond the sphere of material production.