The Historical Method

A Historiography of Historical Materialism

Joshua J. Morris

3/31/2014

Word Count: 7798

Preface: A Note on Form

“There can be no impartial social science in a society based on class struggle.”[1]
-V.I. Lenin

This is a historiography of a philosophical method for history. Rather than simply a topic of history, it unveils the history of a method through the works of its key influences. It should go without saying that any analysis of historical method from a materialist, let alone dialectical, standpoint is inevitably going to cross philosophical paths with those of others. In acceptance of this very valid truth, it is necessary to explain the purpose of form for this historiography. To explain the history of dialectical theory, it is necessary that one experience it; as such, this historiography will present history as an unfolding sequence of material relationships and their idealistic, or metaphysical, components. There is no hiding the fact that this presentation of history is invariably divided against an opposing view.

We will proceed from antiquity to so-called ‘modernity’; tracing the development of the idea of social progress simultaneously with the development of historical method. This we will do rather quickly. We will see how the latter proceeds slower than the former and yet, by the 20^th century, the former proceeds to express the latter. We will observe the inversion of the Hegelian dialectic, the transformation of theory into Marx’s magnum opus Das Kapital, the synthesis of action and philosophy into a social science by Lenin, and finally the evolution of theory separated from practice throughout the 20^th century.[2]

In following the tradition of “a ruthless criticism of everything,”[3] this analysis seeks to show the materialist conception of history as an idea and its ongoing relevance as a contemporary historical method of world history. As such, no consideration will be given to alternative theories and their various charges against concepts like Marxism, materialism, and world-systems analysis. The central argument, or thesis, of this historiography is that historical materialism was the first genuine world history. As such, this essay argues that historical materialism is the foundation of a scientific approach to history, and the means to incorporating the social sciences into a more uniform discipline. It is from the position that historical materialism is world history that we begin our analysis.

Part 1: The origin of the Idea and Materialism

In his famous depiction of a utopian society, Plato outlined what some have described as a primitive form of intellectual communism mid-way through his magnum opus, The Republic.[4] Plato depicted “guardians of the state” as servants to philosopher-kings whose rule was done in the name of justice and wisdom. A central feature of all these guardians, according to Plato, was that “none of them have property of their own beyond what is absolutely necessary; neither should they have a private house or store closed against anyone who has the mind to enter.”[5] These servants of the Republic guarded the sacred trust between the philosopher-kings and their ruled subjects. Plato described what was, in his mind, the ideal expression of governance; that is, governance of the wise, for the ignorant. In doing so, Plato also outlined one of the earliest depictions of what one might call a political ideal. Because of this, among many other idealist components to The Republic,[6] Plato is usually credited with being the father of idealist (or Platonic) philosophy.

Plato also played a central part in the development of the concept of a dialectic. A dialectic, strictly, refers to the ‘Socratic Dialog’ in which two participants are able to resolve the conflict of a debate through reasoned discourse. The goal of a constructive dialectic, in the mind of Plato, is to arrive at a synthesis of ideas; where the positive components of two alternative ideas manage to outweigh their negative differences. Of course, Plato points out, this process is rare. Plato criticized his fellow students for abandoning dialectic and instead simply listening to lectures, for in doing so they merely passively accepted the instruction of someone else, as opposed to actively engaging with knowledge.[7]

Plato’s role in the development of Greek philosophy typically outshines the development of materialist philosophy, which occurred around the same time, between 480-425 bce. Known as both “the father of history” and “the father of lies,” Greek historian Herodotus typically merits the honor of writing one of the first history texts: The Histories. It is here where Herodotus made one of his most famous statements on the relationship of people to their society: “Circumstances rule men, men do not rule circumstances.”[8] Herodotus’ depiction of society asserted that individuals are slaves to a larger system around them, a system that both defines and confines the mental and physical expressions of society as a whole. Along with Aristotle, who questioned Plato’s idealistic portrayal of form over content, Herodotus’ works are considered to be among the foundations of materialist (sometimes called realist, Aristotelian, or physicalist) philosophy. Whereas for Plato history was merely a categorization of ideas, for Herodotus, history was a systemization and categorization of material.

The idealist and materialist camps of philosophy created divergent views on all forms of social development, from politics to agriculture to religion. The summation of their debates and conclusions is best exemplified by what is called the mind-body problem. The mind-body problem is a specific debate between idealist and materialist philosophy, but in many ways it contains the totality of the worldview that separates each camp. In its most simplified form, the debate is merely over mind versus matter. It became a central issue to philosophical debates under the criticism of Descartes in his text Meditations on First Philosophy. There, Descartes depicted a uniform dualism that asserted the primacy of neither materialist nor idealist views but rather the dual functioning of mental activity with physical action. It was Descartes’ dualism that revitalized the mind-body debate by offering a third alternative. Afterward, all forms of mind-body debates became split into two new categories: a dual reality and a mono reality.[9]

By the time of the Enlightenment, the so-called rationalists brought back an extreme appreciation for idealist philosophy (as did Descartes’ writings), with the cornerstone of reason being the reification of liberty; that is, freedom in its most ideal sense. But the philosophical Enlightenment also gave way, as many Eurocentric historians have argued, to the development of a European hegemonic power in economic trade. More accurately, the Enlightenment coincided with transformations occurring in agriculture, specifically textile industries in various regions such as China, India, Mongolia, the Middle East, Egypt, and Italy. Nevertheless, the resurgence of idealism coincided with an increasing attempt by secular (by that I mean, non-religious) groups to attempt to rationally explain the world. Immanuel Wallerstein describes this process in his introductory text, An Introduction to World-Systems Analysis:

Philosophers lent themselves to this task, insisting that human beings could obtain knowledge by using their minds in some way, as opposed to receiving revealed truth through some religious authority or script. Such philosophers as Descartes and Spinoza….were both seeking to relegate theological knowledge to a private corner, separated from the main structures of knowledge.[10]

In this way, academia, emerging out of the medieval period, opened up a rational challenge against irrational claims. But this did not occur in just one fashion, as no development in history is singular, absolute, and self-defined.

A second group of scholars similarly rejected the irrational claims of theological philosophy, but insisted on an approach of empirical study as opposed to simply rational thinking. This group, which eventually became known as scientists, emerged within academic and political circles to derive at conclusions based on observational study. To be sure, elements of reason and theory were still present; throughout the 17^th and 18^th centuries, science and the humanities were not sharply at odds with one another. But, as many historians have noted, including Wallerstein, there came to be a “divorce” between humanities’ emphasis on rational thinking and science’s emphasis on empirical study.[11] It is here where we move into the first major text in the historiography of historical materialism as a modern form of historical study[12], Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.

Part II: The Early Historiography, Hegel to Marx

Part of Georg W. Hegel’s main purpose in writing Phenomenology of Spirit was to respond to this ongoing debate and division among academics between rationalist and scientific camps. While the totality of Hegel’s work is usually considered his magnum opus, his preface typically obtains considerable attention by scholars both during his time and afterward. It is here where a unique correlation between Descartes’ dualist rationalism and the theological pre-supposition of “the spirit” manifest a new way of understanding social relationships and the diverse development of thought. According to Hegel, “the systematic development of truth in scientific form can alone be the true shape in which truth exists.” Philosophical truths, including historical ones, can inherently benefit from a systematic development in a form that can only be described as “scientific.”[13] Hegel acknowledges the legitimacy of science simply by its actualization and reification among scholars. As such, Hegel tells us that the duty of philosophy is to explain this necessity that drives knowledge toward empirical study. Hegel’s challenge was for philosophers to take up the reins of commanding a more active, practical form of philosophy. And of course, Hegel gives plenty of reasons for why this failed to occur up to that point.

Hegel attributed “argumentative thinking” to the negative discourse that developed between philosophy and science, particularly the kind that resulted in what he described as a “Bacchanalian revel.” The problem with argumentative debates, for Hegel, was their characteristic feature of refutation. Argument “adopts a negative attitude towards the content apprehended; knows how to refute it and reduce it to nothingness.”[14] The obviously problems is that “to see what the content is not is merely a negative process; it is a dead halt, which does not of itself go beyond itself.”[15] This reductionist logic is essentially as vain and meaningless as the content it tries to refute. On the other hand, a dialectical discourse contains a constructive form of negation: the negation of the negative qualities of ideas in preference for their positives. Whereas the argument seeks to negate ideas while not positing an alternative, dialectic seeks to arrive at a synthesis through negation. All this discussion of argument versus dialectic causes Hegel to explain the “nature of philosophical truth and its method” up to the early 19^th century:

The truth is thus a Bacchanalian revel, where not a member is sober; and because every member no sooner becomes detached that they collapse straightaway, the revel is just as much a state of transparent, unbroken calm.[16]

The problem of truth, for Hegel, was that different groups of individuals arrived at different paths to obtaining the truth and as such asserted the primacy of their path over others. Regardless of the differences in path however, Hegel believed that they all led to the same ultimate end, the absolute idea, which leads to social change.

Visual Depiction of the Hegelian Dialectic[17]

Overall, Hegel’s contribution to the historiography should be considered the bedrock, or the foundation upon which historical materialism then begins its own process of development. Marx himself, in his younger years from 1825-1850 is typically considered a young Hegelian, resulting from his emphasis in philosophy as a student and his subsequent Hegelian influences. From Hegel’s influences, we draw two main conclusions. For one, we get the notion of “alienation” that results from the aforementioned “revel.” Secondly, we get the importance of dialectical discourse and thought, as opposed to reductionist argument. This creates the basis for understanding the importance of a unifying method for understanding history and ideas.

Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right serves as a good bridge between Hegelian alienation and dialectics to the more materialist take on such concepts. Written in 1843, Marx responded to his Hegelian teachings by presupposing the radical viewpoint of a revolution based on class. Following this piece, historical materialism holds agency as a theory to be ‘actualized’ by the masses, which turns it into a driving force of causality in Marx’s next text. The influences of Hegel are present throughout the text, particularly Marx’s insistence on the notion of heaven being the abstracted (or alienated) utopia present in the mind (something that everyone relates to in one way or another). The materialist critique on the abstraction appears in the first few paragraphs:

The basis of all irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is indeed man’s self-consciousness and self-awareness so long as he has not found himself or has lost himself again.[18]

Marx’s criticism, put very simply, was that the very concept Hegel used to depict a component of his ‘absolute idea’ existed historically only because of man’s existence. The notion that absolute truth could exist separated from mankind and social history met a challenge in Marx’s reasoning.

The element of historic agency arrives in later paragraphs, deriving from differences between nations and their social relations:

In France and England the problem is put in the form; political economy or the rule of society over wealth. in Germany it is put in the form; national economy or the rule of private property over nationality. Material force can only be overthrown by material force; but theory itself becomes a material force when it has seized the masses.[19]

Thus, for Marx, a world historical theory is one that retains the capacity to become a material, driving force in society once it has been acquiesced, or actualized by the masses. This ‘actualization’ occurs through the struggled dialectic held between history’s “passive element[s]”(class relationships) and its “material basis.”[20]

Marx’s criticism was part of a broader effort first emphasized by Ludwig Feuerbach, another young Hegelian from Germany. Feuerbach, who was a direct student of Hegel, wrote his most influential work The Essence of Christianity in 1841. Feuerbach and his materialist writings on Hegelian philosophy illustrate the connection between Hegel and Marx because of the inversion of Hegel’s emphasis on historical ideals into Marx’s emphasis on historical social and material relations.[21] As the cliché phrase goes, Marx ‘stood Hegel on his head’: ideas became material relationships, theses and antitheses became the struggle of these relationships, and syntheses became social progress leading to communism, the absolute material. By revealing the materialist narrative of history, Marx made a considerable contribution to the concept we now call world history; a history that incorporates vast systems of relationships across temporal stages beyond the decade, the century, and the lifetime of a nation.

By 1845, Marx’s disagreements with other young Hegelians culminated into his work The German Ideology, a major component of which was the preface Theses on Feuerbach. Marx’s purpose in writing both the preface and the main text itself was to critically respond to “hithero existing materialism” by designating attempts to understand reality without observation of human activity and practice as “purely a scholastic question.”[22] For Feuerbach and his contemporaries, best depicted in Essence of Christianity, theoretical thinking is regarded “as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judacial manifestation [sic].”[23] The German Ideology became the culmination, or synthesis, of Marx’s previous conclusions on Hegelian dialectics and his criticism of Feuerbach’s crude materialism. The text’s main feature is the separation of mankind from the animal kingdom by definition of a few specific traits, such as utility of tools, reproduction of daily life, and social structures. Some might consider the separation of humanity from nature to be an act of idealism, but Marx merely isolated the fundamental difference between human and animal activity, which is work or labor versus survival. In studying this process of survival, we obtain a perspective of history with a simple materialist root. Engels later described the text as the propositional start of the “materialist conception of history” in which “the production of the means to support human life…..is the basis of all social structures.”[24] Humans work in order to survive, as opposed to seeing work as just a general activity of human beings. Thus Marx’s materialism isolated itself from the other young Hegelians in that it was historical, and it envisioned a history of society on a grand scale and defined by its various material components; specifically the relationships between social components. By 1846, historical, or dialectical, materialism had a theoretical framework with theory as the agent within historical development.

But what about causality? For Marx, coinciding with this trait of survival within human civilization was the division of society into two distinct social camps based on how (and ultimately if) individuals work to reproduce themselves on a daily basis. Marx calls this social division the “division of labor” between those who produce and those who exploit. Marx points to the concept of property ownership as the material manifestation of this social division, with its roots in the end of feudalism around the 16^th century.[25] Throughout The German Ideology, Hegelian influences present themselves as the duality of Marx’s unique materialism. The division of labor, a material phenomenon, provided Marx with the central component to causality in history, class. Althusser commented on Marx’s assessment of causality:

Whereas classical theories of causality have only two models, linear (transitive, mechanical) causality, which only describes the effects of one element on another, and expressive (teleological) causality, which can describe the effect of the whole on the parts, but only by making the latter an ‘expression’ of the former, a phenomenon of its essence, Marxist theory introduces a new concept of the effect of the whole on the parts, structural, complex causality, where the complex totality of the structure in dominance is a structure of effects with present-absent causes. The cause of the effects is the complex organization of the whole, present-absent in its economic, political, ideological and knowledge effects.[26]

Ruling classes, those groups who manage to retain control over labor forces through property ownership, also present themselves as the intellectual rulers of society. As such, in order to support itself and the arrangement of classes as they were, the state mystifies the relationships of society between the individual and the collective and places the laboring class (which Marx here first refers to as the proletariat) into a false consciousness of alienation.[27] The conclusion to get out of Marx’s German Ideology is the interconnected relationships that form what we call society, and how class is prime causality in a materialist history. Just like Hegel’s dialectic of thought, with Marx’s social dialectic we obtain a visual breakdown of society.

[28]
Marx’s Sociological Model in The German Ideology

The last major work to examine for the early historiography of historical materialism is the text that Marx left us as the archetype, the blueprint: Das Kapital. To be sure, there is a multitude of texts and writings between The German Ideology, published in 1845, and Das Kapital, published in 1867. Those familiar with Marx will know that we skipped arguably his most famous text, The Communist Manfiesto (1848). The purpose for going directly to Das Kapital is to more concisely address product of his observations.

Das Kapital is a contribution to the historiography in two ways: For one, it presents a materialistic outlook on social activity and defines its development by its dialectical history. History is the key component that separates Marx’s economic conclusions from that of other economists of his and present day. Secondly, Das Kapital presented its argument in a dialectical format. This is the key feature of Das Kapital: its use of historical study and economic discourse in conjunction to form an overall assessment of social relations within a capitalist society. Usually the text is cited as the best resource for understanding values and exploitation within capitalism, but this overshadows the theoretical importance of the text. Though Marx never wrote his magnum opus on the philosophy of historical materialism, we see its method laid out in Das Kapital. The single element in society, the commodity, is shown to have a direct connection with the survival and ongoing existence to the individual, which is then shown to have a direct connection with the survival and ongoing existence of human society in general. This dialectic is no longer Hegelian, in the sense that it is no longer concerned exclusively with the realm of thought. Rather, Marx now used the dialectic to explain material transformations in society which are themselves the defining elements of society. The production of surplus-values, class structures, and property ownership became isolated as the features which determine the degree to which a society is ‘modern’ in the 19^th century sense.

Das Kapital’s form resulted from Marx’s experience in observing the American Civil War through newspaper accounts and public speeches.[29] In a now-famous letter to Arnold Ruge, Marx explained his need to “demolish everything” in order to properly explain his economic conclusions. Central to this was the organization of the text into its dialectical shape, as well as the inclusion of a new chapter that became a defining feature of Marx’s outlook on social change. Chapter 10, The Working Day, illustrated the breakdown of the workday into a period value production, and surplus-value production. For Marx, surplus-values are “the amount [of money] by which the value of the product exceeds the value of its constituent elements.”[30] Money, a commodity whose value is determined solely by its exchangeability, is given to the individual in exchange for his labor, a commodity whose value is determined solely by its usefulness. Ultimately, as Marx depicts in Chapter 10, by attempting to shorten the workday while keeping wages relative or increased, the individual laborer is actually “robbing the capitalist.”[31] Volumes II and III of the text, published after Marx’s death, also do a good service to extending the materialist analysis to deeper levels of production. The text has come into criticism since the 1950s with respect to the Labor Theory of Value, and Marx’s reliance on it. This creates some limitations in using Das Kapital as a primary text, and necessitates the expansion of research into other works.[32] Most essential to Marx’s work is the positing of a social dialectic and its internal contradictions, which unveil the un-static nature of capitalist economies, shown below:

[33]

A good companion read to Das Kapital that helps to explain its argument on the method for resisting and depicting such a society is Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. At the time of Das Kapital’s publication, Marx’s historical materialism had received both praise and criticism, particularly within the growing camp of political activists who identified themselves as socialists. Engels’ document helps to explain the connection between Marx’s assertions about society, and the Hegelian insistence on a scientific, or logical approach to philosophy. The problem with a non-materialist, non-scientific approach to socialism, in Marx and Engels’ view, was that it merely created “utopian pictures of ideal social conditions” where “all humanity at once” became emancipated as opposed to a shift from one class’ rule to another. In its most abstracted metaphor, the utopian approach to socialism attempts to create “Heaven from the Earth.”[34] Thus Das Kapital presents an argument in direct contrast with the utopian approach by utilizing a systematic and scientifically historical breakdown of capitalist society into its various components, and expose the hidden secrets of exchange and production in a logical manner. World history, in a sense, is presented as the history of capitalism. The integration of historical analysis, materialist criticism, and Hegelian concepts of alienation create the foundation of the text, and ultimately isolate it as the magnum opus of historical materialist methodology.

Marx’s work ends the early historiography of historical materialism. In the post-Marx period, from Lenin onward, historical materialism took on new shapes and adapted new interpretations. Without Marx to guide the development of the idea, historical materialism was bequeathed to the next generation for implementation. Thus the early historiography is separated from the latter by the simple fact that the early historiography is for the most part a craft of German thought, moving from Hegel to Feuerbach to Marx. The latter historiography extends into larger realms of world history as historical materialism grew in acceptance as a methodology and a practice following the success of the Russian revolution. Another difference between these areas of the historiography is the various divisions of thought that began to influence the philosophy. As such, it should be understood that there is much sourcework left out here. It would simply be too large of an undertaking to attempt to assess all contributions to Marxist materialism, so key works have been chosen based on the assertions they make and the parallelism between their analysis and historical materialism’s methodology. Finally, many of these theories developed in tandem with one another, and as such they did not necessarily benefit from being well versed in each others’ particular fields of study and approach. Rather, they should each be seen as a shade of grey to make up the totality of what we might now call the materialist conception of history.

The Latter Historiography: Leninism and post-Marxism

V.I. Lenin’s seminal work on historical materialism was Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Central to Lenin’s argument was that the “Machians”, or Lenin’s Russian contemporary critics of Marx and Engels, failed to assess history accurately because they lacked an understanding of dialectics and materialism. Much of Lenin’s conclusions derive from the influences of a German tanner and contemporary of Marx, Joseph Dietzgen. As opposed to rejecting their situation, individuals “learn by experience,” which “in the words of Kant, passes beyond the bounds of all experience.”[35] Absolute truth is, thus, beyond the immediate experience, while the immediate experience produces a relative truth. The problem with the Machians, for Lenin, was that their “unhealthy mysticism [of experiences] unscientifically separates the absolute truth from the relative truth.” The experience of the individual cannot be negated, and all individuals retain the capacity to accurately reflect the actual, absolute and objective world around them in a relative manner. In the latter part of the text, Lenin spends a hefty amount of time responding to various arguments and charges made against Marx for being a “metaphysicst.”[36] What we ultimately get out of Lenin’s work is the notion that historical materialism is a social science, one that is both scientific in its methodology and rational in its theoretical form. Most importantly, the subject by which the social scientist can understand society through this method, is the individual and their experiences relative to others. Overall, Lenin’s contribution to the historiography gives us the understanding that in a society divided by class, historical materialism is the most effective form of social science.

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism laid the foundation for Lenin’s approach to dialectical theory, and thus its eventual application during the Russian revolution. His final published piece, his Last Testament, contained Lenin’s final thoughts on the application of theory following revolution. Written as a series of formal statements to the Soviet Central Committee, Lenin criticized his fellow comrades for failing to recognize that “the apparatus [they] call [their own] is, in fact, still quiet alien; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years.” Directly criticizing Stalin’s “nationalist-socialism,”[37] Lenin disagreed with the concept of uniform totality and the growing acceptance of socialism’s very meaning reduced to Communist Party leadership. His criticism made a powerful resurgence in the early 1940s by humanist philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya, at the time a Trotskist, in her article The Union of Soviet Socialists Republics is a Capitalist Society. Moreso than the content of her text was the implication it made in terms of the materialist conception of history; namely that specific forms of movements in practice resulted in an alienation from theory. For the Soviet form, according to Dunayevskaya, the problem lay in their abstraction of private versus state property:

The determining factor in analyzing the class nature of a society is not whether the means of production are the private property of the capitalist class or are state-owned, but whether the means of production are capital, that is, whether they are monopolized and alienated from the direct producers.[38]

Dunayevskaya laid out the theoretical framework of state-capitalism, a form of capitalism whereby the state has assumed control and power over the production of surplus-values. The “class nature of the Soviet Union” explained the existence of surplus-values, and thus negated the practical application of historical materialism. She asks: “How does the mode of production differ under bureaucratic state socialist rule from that under capitalist rule?”[39] It is not the political group in power that determines the social relations of society, Dunayevskaya asserts, but rather the “economic law of motion.”[40] Dunaevskaya essentially charged the Soviet Union with a false revolution, in a similar manner that was done by Marx in his criticisms of the French Republic published as The Civil War in France in 1871. In doing so she also confined the material limitations of what a social revolution actually entails.

The last major work from Dunayevskaya to consider as a contribution to the historiography is Philosophy and Revolution, published in a second edition in 1989 shortly before her death. Dunayevskaya’s text was a collection of her unpublished essays on the concept of “returning to Hegel.” Part of the purpose for attempting to re-emphasize Hegel rested on Dunayevskaya’s life-long struggle to ‘rescue Marxism’ from the stain of Stalinism. Dunayevskaya isolated three essays, Alienated Labor, Private Property and Communism and Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right that “marked the birth of a philosophy of human activity, an integrality of philosophy and economics destined to be known as Marxism.”[41] The limitations of Soviet ‘Diamat’, in her view, was its submission to the reduction of “the very concept of socialism…to the concept of state property, state plan.”[42] Both the Stalinist and Trotskist camps that extended their ideological frameworks from Russia, despite their differences on “the question of leadership” after the revolution, accepted the political success of the Bolshevik Party as the origin of the existence of socialism in Russia. Additionally, she responds to growing concerns about historical materialism’s inability to account for the conflict and social struggle of gender. Dunayevskaya’s work remains one of the most radical criticisms of Soviet Marxism in general, namely that both of its hyper-polarized ideological camps contain the same root origin. As a contribution to the historiography, she reminds us that determinist politics and economics has no place in the materialist conception of history.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, philosopher and historian Herbert Marcuse attempted to consolidate Martin Heidegger’s existentialism and the materialist conception of history with three essays, published together as Heideggerian Marxism. At the time, the growing existentialist movement in Western philosophy threatened to uproot the Marxist agency of class. During the writing, Marcuse switched from Heidegger to Hegel as his master thinker of philosophy.[43] The problem with Heidegger, and thus existentialism in a broader sense, was how he portrayed social life as “relegated to inauthenticity” which thus “cuts off the possibility of a critique of actual social relations.”[44] For Marcuse, this false abstraction failed “to capture and carry within [itself] the concreteness of human life.”[45] Some have called Marcuse’s interest in Heidegger as an attempt to unveil the “subjective dimension” of Marxist analysis[46], but others have suggested that Marcuse discovered in the young-Marx a conception of labor that was “an ontological category of dialectical historicity.”[47] The real value in Marcuse’s contribution was his emphasis on the importance of the younger, more Hegelian Marx whose “conception of human-sensuous activity”[48] was more dominant than in his later works. This notion of a return to Hegel, we will see, is not unique to ongoing development of world historical materialism in the post-WWII era.

Fernand Braudel’s Capitalism and Material Life and his essays on historical theory examine the economic structures of capitalism in Europe from 1400-1800. Braudel expanded on Marx’s more narrow view of society by questioning the differences between material and economic life. Braudel emphasizes how “material life, consisting of very old routines, inheritances and successes, is there at the root of everything.”[49] Braudel describes material life as “a series of replications,” the central most one being the replication of society itself. “Economic life,” on the other hand, exists in a “wider radius,” particularly because we start dealing with multiple “material lives” within the framework of a single “economic life.”[50] Braudel thus sets forth the task of trying to explain this term of capitalism utilizing a method of world historical analysis made famous in his larger work The Mediterranean. For Braudel we must move beyond the scope of the 18^th and 19^th centuries if we are to understand the economic life of capitalism.

Braudel’s method focuses on what he calls the longue durée, which portrays history “as a long duration” of events connected by networks of exchange[51]. Braudel’s language of history, and his emphasis on economic materialism, portrays a materialist conception of history without an emphasis on class. The problem with historians, including Marxists, according to Braudel is “their preference [to go] instinctively toward the short term.” Braudel gives credit for the longue durée to Marx himself:

Marxism is peopled with models. Sartre would rebel against the rigidity and the schematic nature…[and] I would rebel with him, though not against the model, but rather against the use which has been made of it, the use which it has been felt proper to make. Marx’s genius, the secret of his long sway, lies in the fact that he was the first to construct true social models, on the basis of the historical longue durée.[52]

Braudel’s acceptance of Marxist social models as the basis for the longue durée illustrates his desire to unify these models into a general theory of world history. The key contribution to get out of Braudel’s work is the depiction of capitalist social relations on a world scale, with all of its material components extrapolated beyond the nation-state and into the framework of world history. When one considers, as some have pointed out[53], that Marx’s thought was limited to that of the 19^th century where the nation-state remained a dominant and coercive element to social thought, Braudel’s work brings the materialist conception of history to a more worldly level in the post-WWII era.

Almost directly resulting from Braudelian influences, the works of Immanuel Wallerstein form an essential contribution to historical materialism by reorienting the materialist analysis of history and social relations into a structural model. His major works, The Modern World System Vol. I-III and Historical Capitalism is what we will consider here. Central to all of Wallerstein’s works is the model of the “world-system,” a social hierarchy of geopolitical regions defined by their relationship to production and framed over the Braudelian longue durée of the 16^th century to the present. To Wallerstein, capitalism is a “world system” because “it is larger than any juridically-defined political unit” and “because the basic linkage between the parts of the system is economic.”[54] Because of its material history, capitalism is also a hegemonic world-system that historically uprooted previous forms of social relations, such as those in India, China, and the Middle East. The concept of dependency is thus also central to Wallerstein’s portrayal of capitalism, and extends from Latin American dependencia or ‘dependency theory’ studies. Overall, we get a portrayal of capitalism on the world stage broken up into three zones of dependency and the inter-relations of exchange between them: Core, peripheral, and semi-peripheral zones.

For Wallerstein, the most critical aspect of capitalist society is its nature as a historical system, one that requires us to step into the larger stage of world history. To examine it in short periods, or eras defined by geographic localities, fails to explain the overall totality of relations within a historical system, which can typically exist beyond the geographic and temporal boundaries of nation-states. Utilizing the system’s history we can avoid “a set of abstract statements…to judge and classify reality.” A historical, materialist approach however “describes what capitalism has actually been like in practice, how it has functioned as a system, why it has developed in the ways it has, and where it is presently heading.”[55] The series The Modern World-System Vol. I-III is similar in respects to Das Kapital in that it does not attempt to explain its theoretical model; rather it crudely asserts it. Though he does not ignore empires, city-states, or nations, for Wallerstein the ‘world-system’ “encompasses within its bounds empires, city-states, and the emerging ‘nation-states’.”[56] Another example comes from Wallerstein’s depiction of a “crisis within the Core” as the central component to understanding the rise in production and prices in Europe between 1730 and 1820. By simply asserting his core-peripheral-semi peripheral model, Wallerstein effectively argues how “the rapid response of market prices” in external zones to the Core (Western Europe) resulted in a general “crises d’Ancien Regime” whereby the core regions “reacted by attempting to concentrate all the major sources of capitalist profit within their frontiers.”[57] Wallerstein expands on Marx’s 19^th-century version of the longue durée by integrating a model to explain the dependency of geographic regions within the totality of the system that we call capitalism.

Ron Aronson’s text After Marxism is a necessary contribution to the historiography because of its criticism of specific uses of historical materialism, namely by postmodernists and so-called “analytical Marxists.” He sets himself the task of answering just what happened to Marxism in the post-Soviet era. Aronson describes himself as among the first to admit a post-Marxist stage of theory,[58] but this phrasing coincides with his unique portrayal of historical materialism in theory versus in practice. For Aronson, his experiences growing up in the trend of New-Leftism and postmodernism created an understanding of a unique idealistic Marxism that lacked a practical foundation. In essence, Aronson described the Marxist movement of the post-1970s era as “idealist.”[59] The analytical Marxists, whom Aronson states includes “Allen Wood, Richard Miller, John Roemer, Jon Elster, Andrew Levine, Adam Przeworski, and Eric Olin Wright,” utilize historical materialism for analysis and discourse to generate what they call “no-bullshit Marxism.”[60] Their discourse and analysis, however, separated itself from the activism and popular movements at the time (particularly culture shifts following 1968 and economic shifts following 1972). Aronson’s essential point highlighted the disconnect that occurred in mainstream academia that took historical materialism in as a method and model without relating it to practice. The result, Aronson suggests, is a “Marxism without Marxism,” one that is “influenced by analytical philosophy and mainstream ‘bourgeois’ social science.”[61] Like both Marx and Dunayevskaya in their criticisms, Aronson’s main contribution to the historiography is the assertion of theory in action and theory as a process as opposed to simply a model.

One of the most recent contributions to historical materialism, and the last we will examine, comes from Michael A. Lebowitz, in his text Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis. As a method for world history, Lebowitz depicts historical materialism as an “ideological extension of 19^th-century Hegelianism.”[62] An essential follow up to post-Marxist views like Aronson, Lebowitz describes analytical Marxism as “anti-Marxism” and argues for the same “return to Hegel” called for by Dunayevskaya. Only by understanding Marx’s early flirtations with Hegel can someone understand how “Marx’s search for truth in political economy led him to dialectics.”[63] The important aspect of Lebowitz’s analysis, which was identified by others as well, is its “careful examination of Marxism as a methodological project”[64] in response to the rise of what Aronson described as “Marxism without Marxism.” It is, in essence, an attempt to rectify and justify historical materialism as a practical theory regardless of a disconnect between theory and practice. In many ways it creates the starting point from which to view historical materialism in the present day; as a method and a theory that has yet to reconnect with its material implications.

Conclusion: Historical Materialism as World History

This historiography has examined a multitude of texts by connecting their implications to theory as they developed chronologically (for the most part) over the 19^th, 20^th, and into the 21^st centuries. The unifying theme of all these texts has not been their arguments, nor has it been the structure and organization of their discourse. Rather, the unifying element is the method for depicting world history. World history is best depicted over a longue durée, with the agency of class and the causality of theory in practice. The ability to interpret world history in this manner, as we have seen, can change over time as society changes, which makes it the most scientific approach to world historical studies.

Starting with Hegel and moving into Marx, we obtain a depiction of world history on a scale and scope that begins to defy the very premise of a history of nations or a history of great leaders. We instead get a history of social relations, with the ultimate component being that relations carry their history with them in a constant struggle. The agency of class holds a central feature to this method, as it is the most relative social relation by which all others find their root. Then moving into Lenin, we saw the development of practical materialism as the most effective form of social science within a world divided by class. Marcuse and Dunayevskaya’s contributions reiterate the complexity of historical materialism in practice, and question the negation of Hegelian influences as they were becoming increasingly rejected by Soviet philosophers. Braudel’s and Wallerstein’s works represent in many ways the culmination of Marx’s view on history into a historical model from which to depict world history. Finally, Aronson and Lebowitz illustrate the limitations of historical materialism when it loses its touch with social movements.

This concept of world history as both a theory and a practice runs into some limitations, particularly in terms of the means of conveying it as such. Arguably, one can only fully understand the actualization of theory by doing the grunt work of meticulous study. Even Wallerstein’s model, which is arguably one of the best for visually depicting a historical system, takes Wallerstein over four texts to adequately explain. As such, there remains the necessary work of finding a simple and concise means to convey the history that thus answers the problem of separating theory from practice. Hopefully continued emphasis and scholarship on the development of the materialist conception of history can help to explain these minor shortcomings.

Make no mistake: it would be false to assert the absolute primacy of historical materialism as ‘true’ reality. Rather, this essay has sought to show how the materialist conception of history is the most effective means for understanding world history, regardless of Marxism’s political identity. By incorporating a perspective of the longue durée, in conjunction with a focus on social relations and the material conditions that define them, historical materialism gives the historian the tools for unveiling the progression of society from one set of relations (and all of its material/ideal components) to the next. As Marcuse and Dunayevskaya made clear, historical materialism is not a rigid framework; instead it bends and develops in the same manner that society does. As such, it remains the most powerful approach for the modern social historian.

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[1] Lenin, V.I. “Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism,” in Collected Works, vol. 19 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 23

[2] This refers to the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union; which, following negation theory, refers to the inability to revert to previous systems (monarchy, socialism), and rather a progressive continuity.

[3] Title to one of Marx’s famous letters prior to writing The Communist Manifesto, 1843

[4] By this, I mean that certain editions of Plato’s text (including the generic Barnes and Noble edition published in 2004) list in their index “communism” and cite it to the section pertaining to the “guardians of the state.”

[5] Plato, The Republic. (NY: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2004), 114

[6] Plato’s Cave is probably the most famous depiction to come out of The Republic

[7] Plato, 206-207

[8] Herodotus, The Histories, (NY: Barnes and Noble Publishing, 2001), Book 7, Chapter 49

[9] Robinson, Howard (Nov 3, 2011). "Dualism" In Edward N. Zalta, ed. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2011 Edition), p. 313

[10] Wallerstein, Immanuel. An Introduction to World Systems Analysis, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2

[11] Wallerstein, Immanuel. An Introduction to World Systems Analysis, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2

[12] I refer to historical materialism as a modern form of study because it would be fruitless to pretend that theory can’t or doesn’t change over time. Marx’s historical materialism was the product of the 19^th century; here I am suggesting that there exists a ‘modern’ form.

[13] Hegel, G.W. Phenomenology of Spirit, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1976), Preface, #5

[14] Hegel, G.W. Phenomenology of Spirit, (NY: Oxford University Press, 1976), Preface, #59

[15] Ibid, emphasis is Hegel’s

[16] Ibid, #47

[17] Raapana, Niki and Nordica Fredrich. What is the Hegelian Dialectic? (AK: ACL Books, 2002)

[18] Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Tucker, Robert. The Tucker Marx-Engels Reader, 53

[19] Ibid, 60

[20] Marx, Karl. A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Tucker, Robert. The Tucker Marx-Engels Reader, 61

[21] Harvey, Van A., “Ludwig Feuerbach” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/Ludwig-feuerbach/, accessed 4/18/14, 12:45pm

[22] Marx, Theses on Feuerbach. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), I and II

[23] Ibid

[24] Engels, Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ (accessed 4/16/14, 7:13am)

[25] Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1932), Section B, Part 1: Civil Society
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01b.htm#b1 (accessed 4/9/14, 9:45pm)

[26] Althusser, “Causality, Linear, Expressive and Structural” in Althusser Glossery, Marxists.org
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/althusser/ (accessed 4/23/14, 9:14am)

[27] Marx, Karl. The German Ideology. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1932), Section B, Part 1: Civil Society
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ (accessed 4/9/14, 9:45pm)

[28] Hamlin, J. Karl Marx Sociological Theory
http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/MarxReadings/KarlMarx.html (accessed 4/22/14, 6:07pm)

[29] See: Marx, Letters Between Marx and Engels, 1860-1864 in Collected Works. Marx wrote as a news correspondent for a Vienna paper during the Civil War, in which he criticized the idealistic portrayals of the event by British newspapers. As well, during the Civil War, Marx was exposed to an actual example of class warfare…but a kind that confirmed Marx’s argument about social relations. To the general masses, the Civil War was a political battle between two Parties over territory. To Marx, the Civil War was a class struggle in which the more progressive capitalist production system was attempting to uproot and destroy the slave-labor component that remained antithetical to wage-labor.

[30] Marx, Das Kapital, p. 320

[31] Ibid, 342

[32] I, however, would merely call this a continuation of the theory in practical form; hence the need to divide the theory up into its Marx and post-Marx phases in the historiographical narrative.

[33] Image from New Left Review
http://newleftreview.org/II/43/goran-therborn-after-dialectics (accessed 4/22/14, 5:26pm)

[34] Engels, Frederick. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ (accessed 4/17/14, 9:15am)

[35] Lenin, V.I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. (Moscow: Zveno Publishers, 1909), Chapter 2, Section 3
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/two3.htm#v14pp72h-117 (accessed 4/14/14, 2:32pm)

[36] Lenin, V.I. Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. (Moscow: Zveno Publishers, 1909), Chapter 2, Section 4

[37] Lenin, V.I. “The Question of Nationalities or ‘Autonomisation’” in Last Testament Letters to Congress (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1956)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/autonomy.htm (accessed 4/19/14, 12:21pm)

[38] Dunayevskaya, Raya. “The Union Of Soviet Socialists Republics is a Capitalist Society” in Internal Discussion Bulletin of the Workers’ Party (March, 1941)

[39] Dunayevskaya, Raya. “The Union Of Soviet Socialists Republics is a Capitalist Society, Section II: State Capitalism” in Internal Discussion Bulletin of the Workers’ Party (March, 1941)

[40] Ibid

[41] Dunayevskaya. Philosophy and Religion (NY: Lexington Books, 1989), p. 52

[42] Ibid, p. 144

[43] Schmidt, Alfred. “Existential Ontology and Historical Materialism in the Works of Herbert Marcuse” in Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968)

[44] Marcuse, Herbert. Heideggerian Marxism. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 169

[45] Ibid, 170

[46] Schmidt, Alfred. “Existential Ontology and Historical Materialism in the Works of Herbert Marcuse” in Antworten auf Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968)

[47] Angus, Ian. “Review of Marcuse” in Herbert Marcuse’s Heideggerian Marxism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 224
www.academia.edu/720779/A_Review-Essay_on_Herbert_Marcuses_Heideggerian_Marxism (accessed 4/13/14, 1:50pm)

[48] Marcuse, 140

[49] Braudel, Fernand. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800. (London: Cox & Wyman Ltd, 1967), xii

[50] Ibid

[51] Braudel, On History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. viii

[52] Braudel, “History and the Social Sciences” in On History, p. 50-51

[53] In his preface to Historical Capitalism, I. Wallerstein described Marx as a man whose thoughts and works were limited to the material realities of the 19^th century, uninfluenced by experiences we know of in hindsight.

[54] Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System Vol. I (NY: Academic Press, 1974), p. 15

[55] Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism. (NY: Verso, 1983), 13

[56] Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World System Vol. I (NY: Academic Press, 1974), 15

[57] Wallerstein, The Modern World System, Vol. III, (NY: Academic Press, 1989), 58

[58] Aronson, Ron. After Marxism (NY: Guilford Press, 1995), p. 4

[59] Ibid, 66

[60] Ibid, 141

[61] Ibid

[62] Lebowitz, Michael A. Following Marx: Method, Critique and Crisis (Boston: Brill Publishing, 2009), 9

[63] Ibid, 113

[64] Mathoor, Vineeth. “A Review of Michael Lebowitz’s Following Marx” in Capital & Class (Oct. 2011): 509

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