O historical materialism is political, sociological and economic theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century. The thinkers had understood that the nineteenth century, experiencing the high social change brought about by the Industrial Revolution, had a new configuration, based on the power of production of the bourgeoisie and on the exploitation of the labor of the working class by the bourgeois class (owners of the factories).
Sociologists also understood that there was always a historical class struggle movement in society and that this movement was the essence of humanity. The theory of Marx and Engels diverged from German idealism, especially Hegel, who understood that there was an intellectual movement of each era that influences people. For Marx and Engels, it was the people who made their time.
See too: Social inequality – an evil fought by Karl Marx
Historical and dialectical materialism
Historical and dialectical materialism is the name of the theory developed by Marx and Engels. Marx performed
economic studies published in the book series The capital, in partnership with Friedrich Engels, as well as wrote and had the posthumous publication of his Political Economic Manuscripts, where he studied the organization politics of Europe after the Industrial Revolution.
Marx went deeply influenced by philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who had formulated a dialectical theory based on the idea of the formation of a epochal spirit, which, according to its author, was a kind of metaphysical and collective idea that made people live in a certain way.
In the beginning, Marx was a supporter of this theory, however, as time went by, he noticed internal contradictions in her. One of them was the idea of immobility of social classes. While the Hegelian theory admits a metaphysical immobility of classes, Marx admitted that the opposite is possible: the subversion of classes. Such subversion would only be possible through a revolution.
Do not stop now... There's more after the advertising ;)
For Marx and Engels, there is an internal contradiction in the system capitalist which makes workers (proletariat) see themselves as producers of everything through their workforce, but excluded from the education, health and safety system. Workers produce, but cannot access what is rightfully theirs.
The bourgeoisie, in turn, does not work (from a Marxist perspective, the bourgeois only manage what the proletariat produces), but enjoys what proletarian work yields and still has access to health, education and safety. This contradiction made Marx and Engels think about a practical application of the ideas resulting from dialectical historical materialism.
For German theorists, workers should become class conscious and realize that they are being deceived in this system. From there, they should unite and seize power from factories from the hands of the bourgeoisie and the power of the state, which, according to Marx and Engels, serves the bourgeoisie.
THE revolution of the proletariat, as Marx called it, it would be the first phase of a government that would tend to reach its perfect state: the communism, a utopia in which there would be no social classes (such as the bourgeoisie and the proletariat). However, for this, a dictator government based on proletarian strength would be necessary, the dictatorship of the proletariat. During that time, social classes would be suppressed by the total nationalization of private property.
Read too: The material conditions of existence in Marxist dialectics
Characteristics of historical materialism
Historical materialism intends, initially, break with any idealistic tradition. For Marx, idealism is only on the ideal plane and cannot achieve anything that actually changes society. The intention of this author was to promote a social revolution that would subvert the current order of power of the ruling class over the ruled class. In this sense, the fundamental characteristic of understanding historical materialism is change. so that the proletariat can access power and establish a government of uniformity. Social.
Marxist theory understands that humanity is defined by its material production, hence the word “materialism” in its name. O Marxism also understands that the history of humanity is the history of class struggle, thus putting the social classes as opposites. In this sense, there is a dialectical relationship between classes, which gives the term “dialectic” to the name of Marxist theory, moving away from any sense of it previously proposed by Hegel or by Plato.
Dialectical materialism is, then, the understanding that there is a dispute of Social classes history since the dawn of humanity and that it is conditioned to the material production (work and result of work) of society. The problem is that, from a Marxist perspective, the proletariat works and the bourgeoisie enjoys the profit provided by the working class through the appropriation of labor and what Marx called surplus value.
THE added value it is, for the author, the difference in price between a final product and its raw material. This difference is added by the work printed on the product, and, according to Marx, all work is done by the workers, while the bourgeoisie only enjoys profit. The profit received by the bourgeoisie is a kind of appropriation of the worker's work, which has its workforce usurped and falsely rewarded by a salary.
Read too: Neoliberalism - conservative economic vision that preaches the minimum state
Critiques of historical materialism and historical materialism after the 20th century
The context in which Marx and Engels formulated dialectical historical materialism was quite specific: 19th century industrial england. There was, in that space and time, a detailed relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, with their differences in social class.
In fact, the adoption of the method proposed by dialectical historical materialism for the analysis and production of philosophical, historical and sociological knowledge remains current. However, social analyzes underwent severe changes in the 20th century and continue to change in the 21st century due to the changes brought about by the achievement of rights, of urbanization, technology and, above all, globalization and the expansion of capitalism.
There is still a clash of social classes, but it does not express itself directly through the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat any more, as other categories and a new configuration of capitalism entered the scene: the financial capitalism. What remains today is the exploitation of the poorest strata by the richest strata of society.
In the context of changes, theorists emerged who gave a new interpretation of socialist thinking and to historical materialism or even criticized the Marxist form of social interpretation and analysis. The most interesting thing is that the criticisms and attempts to overcome the Marxist method, profoundly widespread among left-wing intellectuals, emerged doubly between left-wing and left-wing theorists. right. We will deal, below, with some of these authors:
Antonio Gramsci
We can quote the Italian philosopher and linguist Antonio Gramsci as one of the first Marxists to postulate Marxist ideas that surpassed Marx. Gramsci was openly communist, he was even one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party. The intellectual, imprisoned for opposition to the far-right regime imposed by the totalitarian dictator Benito Mussolini, fascism, had as one of its main pillars of political formation the writings of Karl Marx.
Highly influenced by Marx, the Italian philosopher occupied himself with the proposition of socialist theories, reaching the point of going beyond the analysis of the influencer himself. Gramsci's understanding of the state, for example, goes far beyond the understanding of a simple mechanism for the perpetuation of power (the bourgeois state and the post-revolution socialist state).
Despite an apparent intention by Gramsci to found a Soviet-type state in Italy in opposition to the fascist state, the philosopher was also not in full agreement with the proposal of Lenin's government, and, much less, understood the State as a mere total application of force on individuals, as was the totalitarian State imposed by Joseph Stalin. Gramsci seemed to find himself in the middle, in a search for balance between strength and administrative control, when thinking about his conception of the State.
The criticism and attempt to overcome Marx was perpetuated in the field of philosophy with the political philosophers of the 20th century, among them the poststructuralists. However, it is worth noting that, in almost all the cases presented here, theorists departed from Marxist conceptions and adopted political positions aligned with the thinking of the left. What they sought to overcome was the dichotomy proposed by historical materialism.
Hannah Arendt
The Philosopher and Political Theorist Hannah Arendtwove harsh criticism to Marx's political and philosophical thought. First, we can highlight the strong intellectual presence of his doctoral advisor in his work, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Second, Arendt's political conceptions started from a dialectical notion much more aligned with Hegel's idealist dialectic, a tradition opposed to dialectical historical materialism.
for suffering persecution Nazi during Hitler's government to the point of being arrested and having to flee to the United States, Arendt turned her studies to the phenomenon of totalitarianism. Having understood the totalitarian power through the studies of the governments of hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, Arendt related parts of the revolutionary lectures pointed out by Marx and the indication of the need, in a first moment after the revolution, from a strong and dictatorial State (the dictatorship of the proletariat), to the totalitarian phenomenon in the Union Soviet. In part, totalitarianism is born from the project of power centered on an idea of a strong and undemocratic state.
The post-structuralist philosophers (theorists who appeared in the second half of the 20th century with the intention of elevating the proposal of analysis to the maximum) philosophical, sociological, linguistic and anthropological structuralists) also had intellectual alignment with the ideals of the left, but weaved criticism what we can call a orthodox Marxism. For these intellectuals, we will quote here the French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, one must think that the 20th century faced other demands and other paradigms than those found by Marx in the 19th century.
Michael Foucault
For Foucault, the center of capitalist power is given by bourgeois state, since Industrial Revolution, not by mere centered force and by a simple state apparatus, but by the surveillance and disciplining of people's bodies, creating what the thinker called docile bodies. Foucault understood that a surveillance mechanism was created that, instead of concentrating the power in a single axis (as it was with the Ancien Regime, in which the monarch took all the decisions and held power), it spreads power in several institutions that exercise the function of watch over people and discipline their bodies.
These institutions are those of confinement (which confine the individual in a certain space to make his body a product of the discipline): school, barracks, factory, prison, hospital and hospice. Their intent is keep capitalism up and running with high production. Therefore, the overthrow of capitalism is not a mere question of class struggle, but of the revision of this mode of production of power.
In this understanding, we see Marx as a kind of important theorist, but one who has not explained himself satisfactorily. We find in Foucault a much stronger presence of the thoughts of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche regarding the forms of perception of power. As Foucault himself said, he had a kind of intellectual “toolbox”, in which he kept the ideas of Nietzsche (and, in a way, Marx's historical materialism as well) and used them as apparatus for the construction of his own theory.
Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze he pointed out even more problems, as his vision went beyond confinement: for the philosopher, the end of the 20th century was beginning to experience a age of control. Control is an evolution of Foucault's discipline that no longer needs confinement, but is exercised in a dispersed way by virtual mechanisms and work flexibility. People are controlled all the time, as the control mechanisms (media and, later, internet, social networks, etc.) express a form of domination by the individual full-time.
Work goes beyond the workspace. The individual works incessantly, he receives and responds to emails from the service in his “free time”, he is charged to be an entrepreneur of himself all the time. This new configuration takes the notion of the proletariat from the factory space and shows that, in the 20th century, the proletariat is much more exploited, because, in addition to exploitation in the workplace, there is that which takes place outside it, reinforcing the gears of capitalism.
Dialectical historical materialism does not allow these perceptions of new mechanisms, as it is based on a material dialectic simplistic that only sees the clash of forces between the bourgeois and the proletariat and does not perceive the mechanisms of capital that exist for other than that. Therefore, we can state that in Gilles Deleuze's post-structuralist political philosophy we find a synthesis of some of Marx's ideas combined with a strong presence of Nietzsche's thoughts.
by Francisco Porfirio
Sociology Professor
