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Marxism, Materialism and Historical Progress*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
The theory of historical materialism is the core commitment of Marx’s social theory. More than his views on markets, philosophical methods, the state and social institutions, it is this theory which sets Marx’s views apart from alternative traditions in political philosophy. Marx believes that there is a tendency for societies to make moral and material progress. The point of Marx’s theory of historical materialism is to offer a theory of the mechanisms which produce this tendency. However, in Marx’s own formulation, the precise nature of these mechanisms remains obscure. In The German Ideology, Marx emphasizes the growth of human productive powers as the fundamental cause of historical change and progress: social forms (e.g., feudalism, capitalism) change in order to adapt to the requirements of further productive development. By contrast, in The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse, Marx emphasizes the desires and interests of classes as fundamental to explaining social change. Here, it is class struggles (aimed at ending specific conditions of oppression) which determine not only when an old social form will be replaced by a new one, but also the nature of the new social form itself. Marx never specifies the connection between these two explanations of historical change, between the development of human productive powers and class struggles. In particular, Marx is not explicit as to whether there are two distinct mechanisms at work in the production of historical progress, or only one.
- Type
- IV Historical Materialism and Ideology
- Information
- Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 15: Analyzing Marxism , 1989 , pp. 391 - 424
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Authors 1992
Footnotes
*
I would like to thank Joshua Cohen, John Dupré, Andrew Levine, Jean Roberts and Christopher Waters for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
References
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4 The identification of what is good with what is in human interests is controversial. In particular, someone might argue that there are things which are in human interests and are not good. I am not assuming that all interests are good, only the interests the agent would have if she formed her interests under certain ‘ideal conditions.’ For a discussion of different ways of defining interests see R. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982).
5 Marx’s explicit lack of clarity about the relationship between material and moral progress is a point emphasized by J. Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press 1971), esp. ch. 2 and 3.
6 We need not reject, however, Marx’s incisive observation that material progress is a necessary condition for moral progress.
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30 I owe this point to Paul Horwich.
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32 Marx defines classes by their relationship to the means of production, their objective position in the network of ownership relations. For example, workers do not own the means of production and must sell their ability to labor (their labor-power’) to survive.
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