The development of social relation through history goes hand-in-hand with the technical means for producing the ability to live and reproduce the human species.
In The Poverty of Philosophy Marx gave a rough outline of his theory of history:
“…the social relations are intimately attached to the productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production, and in changing their mode of production, their manner of gaining a living, they change all their social relations. The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist” (‘The Poverty of Philosophy’ .pbl 1847).
Marx’s sketch is not an appeal to technological determinism since the steam-mill factories made feudal relations incompatible with large areas of production. Consequently, a class struggle developed between the aristocracy and the industrialists, resulting through revolution the industrialists and their politicians gaining control of the State in a political way while also marrying into the aristocracy.
In fact, Marx said:
“History does nothing, It possesses no immense wealth, it “wages no battles” is man, real, living man who does all that, who possesses and fights; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims” (Marx and Engels, ‘The Holy Family’, 1845) .
Although later he wrote in his ‘18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’ from 1852: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”
Marx’s rejection of idealism and his view of labour and production demonstrated that his conception of history was materialist. Ideas, politics and the state were not written out of history but judged to be a superstructure and rested on materialist foundations. This superstructure does not develop independently but is constrained in any given social system. Marx outlined his theory of history in the preface to “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859):
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
The materialist conception of history clarified esoteric and idealistic statements; usually theological and philosophical, made within the superstructure, down to basic statements about class, class interest and class struggle. These statements reflected and favoured property relations, the types of production and social relations to the means of production.
However, base and superstructure in society do not always represent reality and appearance. For example, consciousness and social being are reciprocal and interactive with each other and have to be for socialism to be possible. Although freedom may be reduced to the freedom of capitalists to exploit yet liberal ideas of freedom have influenced social policies of western capitalism. Therefore, the superstructure can react back upon the base.
Marx’s Materialist conception of history informs socialist politics. The development of the forces of production have meant that socialism – the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all of society. Socialism will be a global system of production and distribution solely and directly meeting human need.
