This post is the third part of a biweekly series posting chapters of Frank Cunningham’s Understanding Marxism: A Canadian Introduction (Toronto: Progress Books, 1981). Through these excerpts, readers will come to understand the basics of Marxist theory through a Canadian lens in a digestible, accessible, and easy-to-understand way. As 2021 marks 100 years of the communist movement in Canada, and as more young workers and students become interested in Marxism, we hope that this educational series will benefit our readers.
The following chapter (Ch. 4 of Understanding Marxism) explains how the basic nature of human labour influenced the development of a Marxist theory of history — that of “historical materialism”.
The original text is available to borrow through Archive.org. It has been amended minimally to include links to relevant texts, to update vital information, and to remove notes relevant only to the physical book.
With the exception of the idle rich, people must work to stay alive. In this way humans are like other animals. However, humans differ from other animals in the way they work and in the effects they have on nature and on themselves in the process. Lacking the sharp claws, tough hides or other natural equipment that make the survival of other species possible, humans use their hands and their brains to make tools and they work socially, by dividing up the jobs that need to be done. Some other animals use simple tools (for instance, some birds use sticks to dig bugs out of tree bark), and there are animals that have a simple division of labour as when male lions drive prey into areas where female lions are lying in wait for them. But no animal other than humans can produce even such a simple tool as a bow and arrow, let alone a steamship or modern factory. Even early human societies contained a greater division of labour than is found among other animals — some hunted while others planted, wove, made pots, and so on. Of course there is nothing at all in the world of other animals to compare with the highly complex division of labour of modern societies.
The effect of this division of labour and use of tools has been that humans not only survived but produced more than was necessary for one generation to stay alive. Hence, each generation of humans has left behind it more than it started with. Using this surplus, people could be freed to do different kinds of labour, to acquire different skills and to develop new tools, so the division of labour and technological development became more and more complex. The production of a surplus has had another effect as well. It has made it possible for some people not to work at all, but to live off the labour of those who do work.
These facts about the nature of human work are central to the Marxist theory of history — “historical materialism”. It is a general scientific theory that guides Marxists in their efforts to understand the past and to change the present. Among other things, this theory explains why it is no accident that capitalism has bred the problems discussed in chapter three. It explains how capitalism came into existence in the first place, and why it is now being replaced by socialism.
To study anything scientifically it is necessary to classify the subject matter and to explain what goes on in that subject matter by discovering the laws of its behaviour. Neither classifications nor laws are easy to find. They do not “jump out” of a subject matter, so to speak, and reveal themselves to a scientist, but have to be discovered by much careful investigation. For instance, it took the science of chemistry well over a century to discover the classification of chemical elements and the laws of chemical combination that we learn in high-school chemistry classes today. In a similar way Marx and Engels had to study the process of human history carefully and learn from both the correct insights and the mistakes of previous thinkers — as well as examining the practical struggles of their own times — before they could formulate the basic tenets of historical materialism. They took as their starting place the social use of tools by humans.
Mode of Production
The basic Marxist category within human societies is the “mode of production”. This category is made up of two things: the “forces of production” and the “relations of production”. The forces of production include such things as tools and machines, systems of transport, factory buildings and warehouses, land, sources of energy and raw materials — in short, the “means of production”. Of course the forces of production also include the working people themselves who use these means of production to transform nature into products suitable for human use. In early society the means of production were simple — hammers, crude plows and so on. In more complex societies they include sophisticated things like modern factories or power plants.
The “relations of production” refer most importantly to the division in a society between those who own its means of production and those who do not own any means of production and are therefore obliged to work for those who do, to stay alive. This is the class division between owners and workers.
Economic classes. An “economic class” is a group of people who share a common relation to the means of production. The “ruling class” owns the key means of production in a society. Owning these means, they are able to compel others to work for them and to take the fruits of this work for themselves. In the last chapter we discussed two classes — the capitalists and the working class. The capitalist class, also called the “bourgeoisie”, includes those who privately own and control the major means of production in an economy based on mass producing commodities. Private owners of large means of distribution and of the banks and other major financial institutions are also considered parts of the capitalist class by most Marxists. These three sectors of the capitalist class closely interact and there is much overlap in their membership. An earlier ruling class was made up of feudal lords, who owned farmland (either directly or as agents of a king) that was worked by “serfs”. Still earlier there were “slaveholders” who, among other things, owned other people.
The “working class” or “proletariat” is made up of those people who do not own any means of production but must work for people who do. Sometimes Marxists use “proletariat” to mean only the industrial working class, or those whose work is most directly related to the production of surplus value, as that term was defined in the last chapter. Factory workers, miners, transport and construction workers and others engaged in large-scale production and distribution fall into this category. Their work makes them the most highly disciplined segment of the working class with the most experience in organizing against the effects of capitalism. Members of the industrial working class tend to form the core of the revolutionary political parties in industrialized societies.
In addition to the industrial working class, there are service workers, clerical workers and many others. Their labour is less directly related to the creation of surplus value; however, as capitalism develops they are increasingly forced into regimented work similar to that of the industrial working class. Changes in technology have also affected industrial work by demanding more skills of industrial workers and by requiring closer coordination between work in factories and work outside them. Because of these changes the industrial working class has grown and diversified its modes of work, and it has been able to find more and more allies among other segments of the working class.
Under capitalism not everyone is either a member of the capitalist class or of the proletariat. Marx and Engels noted several other groups and classes. There are those people who privately own a small means of production or distribution which they must work themselves or with the help of their families or a few employees in order to make a profit. These members of the “petty-bourgeoisie” include people who own small businesses, shopkeepers and family farmers who own their own farms. There are also people sometimes called members of the “middle class”, like lawyers, doctors, professional engineers and people who work in corporations as middle management. Some of these people are self-employed, but even when they work for salaries, their work is not as highly organized as that of the working class and they usually make more money. Also, they are often hired to supervise other employees and increase productivity.
Some people in the petty-bourgeoisie and from the middle class realize that it is in their interests to line up with the working class against capitalists. In fact some have no choice, since the economic squeeze created by the domination of a few large monopoly capitalist interests hurts them as well as the working class and forces some of them into the working class. Others from these groups throw in their lot with the capitalists, as do some of the chronically unemployed and down and out (the “lumpenproletariat”). In Canada, farmers often, but not always, line up with city workers against capitalism (RY-JM note: This text was written in the 1980s, and this alignment has changed over the past few decades.)
Historical materialists do not present their categories as a complete classification of absolutely everything that can be found in human society. They do present their classifications as representing groups and relationships which actually exist in society and which are the most important for understanding and changing things. As with the classifications of any scientific theory, there are borderline cases where it is not clear which class a person fits into, but the general meanings of Marxist classifications are clear enough. These meanings must be kept in mind to avoid confusion. Owning a house or a car does not make someone a capitalist. For this you need to own something like a factory and employ people to create surplus value for you. A capitalist who chooses to work in his own factory or bank, as some do in a management capacity, does not therefore become a worker. He does not have to work unless he wants to, and his economically central role is as an owner and employer.
The Superstructure
Those, then, are the components of a society’s mode of production: its forces of production and its relations of production. The mode of production is often called the “economic base” of society by historical materialists. Societies also include political institutions — the government and the courts, with systems of law and agencies like the army and the police to enforce them. And, in every society there are ideas: philosophical ideas, morality, religion, cultural and scientific views. Historical materialists call all these institutions and ideas the “superstructure” of society. Political institutions are the “political” or “legal-political” part of the superstructure, while the main systems of ideas are referred to as its “ideological superstructure”. (Sometimes the word “ideology” is used more narrowly by Marxists to describe just some of the leading ideas of a society, namely those unscientific ideas which only serve to rationalize oppressive rule.)
Laws of Historical Materialism
Marxist social scientists have discovered many laws of social development, some more general than others. Here I will summarize two of the most general laws of historical materialism. First, by and large, a society’s superstructure is determined by its economic base. Specifically, in a class-divided society the type of existing political system is determined by the needs of that society’s ruling class, and the dominant ideas of the society are for the most part the ideas of its ruling class.
This finding is disputed by practically all anti-Marxist social scientists, and Marxism is denounced as crude and simplistic for advancing it, but some reflection should convince anyone that it is correct. People must work to stay alive, and it would be most strange if the tools used and the social relations guiding this work did not shape the rest of society. Surely it is no accident that complex governmental forms and scientific theories like those of modern physics did not appear in ancient times. As each and every seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European society began to change its methods of production to ones with capitalist relations of production, similar changes followed in the country’s type of government. Parliamentary governments were formed (which, as we will see, are best suited to capitalist interests) and the dominant philosophical ideas changed from medieval religious views to ones favouring scientific invention and economic competition.
The other main law of historical materialism is that major changes within a society’s mode of production are caused by conflicts between its forces and relations of production. In very early societies, where hunters and gatherers used simple tools, there were no class divisions. This was not because people in these societies, called “primitive communism” by Marx and Engels, were believers in socialist theory, but simply because there was very little division of labour and the economy was not sophisticated enough for anyone to privately hoard a surplus. The forces of production in early societies were mainly human hands and brains aided by very simple tools. The relations of production were equally simple — little division of labour and no ruling class.
There are ongoing debates among Marxist anthropologists over the nature of these hunting and gathering classless societies and how they changed into class-divided ones. Following the most advanced anthropological thinking of their time, Marx and Engels seemed to have held that there were no ruling classes because life was too hard, so there was no surplus above what was needed to keep the members of a tribe alive for anyone to exploit. However, hunting and gathering work, primitive as it was, eventually led to several changes in society that undermined the early communistic nature of this mode of work itself. Contact between tribes created trade. It led to war and the taking of captives as slaves. Standing armies came into existence. Agriculture replaced hunting and gathering. With the production of a surplus for the first time, some people found themselves not hunting, farming or doing any physical labour. They found themselves also in a position to personally control new means of production and to take as their own the surplus created by the rest of their tribe. New relations of production appeared and humanity entered the period of history in which societies are torn by class division between rulers and ruled.
More recent work, by both Marxist and non-Marxist anthropologists, suggests that in most, if not all places, early hunters and gatherers did not experience want. Compared to the peasants who succeeded them, they worked fewer hours and consumed a more adequate and varied diet. What these people did lack was a technology of food preservation, that is, the ability to accumulate a surplus which would free some from the daily necessity to hunt and gather. This possibility emerged with agriculture, when some people, freed from productive labour, took personal control of agricultural land.
Whatever the various origins of class-divided society might have been, Marx and Engels noted that from the point where classes emerged history progressed differently in different parts of the world. Areas of Asia developed one way, of Europe in another, depending on raw materials available, geography, and the specific means of production that took hold. In the history of Europe egalitarian communities gave way to large land-and-slave-holding empires. These in turn were replaced by feudalism, which was replaced by capitalism.
In each transformation the pattern was the same. Forces of production that at one time worked in relative harmony with certain relations of production outgrew them and these relations of production became fetters on developing forces. At the same time, new relations of production came into being and encouraged new productive forces. For instance, under feudalism the means of production included farm implements, crude mining and irrigational tools, and relatively simple devices to aid manufacture and navigation. Ruling class feudal lords took a major portion of what was produced by farming serfs. However, with increased trade and manufacture, new classes of manufacturers and merchants emerged to develop new and profitable means of production. Geared to agriculture and simple trade, the old relations of production began to retard the development of trade and large-scale manufacture. Feudal relations gave way to new relations in which capitalists became the ruling class. They employed city workers who had left the farms (forming an industrial proletariat) and developed the tremendous potential of new technology. These changes in the relations of production were accompanied by political developments in which bourgeois revolutions (all of them involving violence) replaced feudal states with capitalist-dominated ones.
World capitalism now faces a situation where the productive forces that it developed have outgrown capitalist relations of production. Industrialized production has become too massive and interdependent to be run by individual competitive capitalists who are driven by the profit motive. The effects of technological changes are too long-term and too important to be guided by such short-term individual desires. In the last chapter, the contradiction between social labour and private ownership was discussed. One effect of this contradiction is the mess all capitalist economies are in. Food in one part of the world is destroyed, while in other parts of the world (or even in the same country) people starve. There is chronic unemployment. Inflation continues. The gap between rich and poor widens. And social revolution occurs as working people organize to take political power and institute social ownership of the means of production.
The pattern of changing relations of production is as before, but with an important difference. For the first time it is working people themselves who are taking control of the means of production, not a small group of people who do not themselves work. A socialist transformation is one in which the majority of the people, those who do the actual work, become the ruling class. In this respect socialism marks a major turning point in history. It begins an era in which the mighty tools that humans have created can finally be used in a planned and rational way for the benefit of humanity as a whole.
In the application of the general theory of historical materialism, Marxists have discovered other historical laws — despite the claim of anti-Marxist historians that there are no laws in history. Including laws we have already discussed, some of the most important laws Marxists have discovered are:
- Changes in a society’s mode of production ultimately cause changes in its superstructure.
- Social revolutions result from a conflict between a society’s forces of production and its relations of production.
- Capitalist mass production is a source of working-class organization and militancy.
- Advanced capitalist need for expansion leads to imperialism.
- Threatened capitalism tends toward fascism.
- Rivalry between and within economic classes causes war.
These laws are stated in a general and simplified form. To apply them, the historical materialist, like a scientist in any other field, must examine the specific features of the concrete situation. Marxists claim that their study of history has proven these and other laws correct, and they challenge anti-Marxists to provide explanations for such things as imperialism, social revolution and war that match the facts of history better than do the explanations of historical materialism.
Do Marxists reduce everything to economics?
Those who charge that Marxists reduce everything to economics sometimes object to the fact that Marxists view production as central for understanding what goes on in a society. Well, Marxist view it as central because it is central. This is not a case of simplistic “reduction” but of recognizing the fact that, as Engels put it: “Human beings must first of all eat, drink, shelter and clothe themselves before they can turn their attention to politics, science, art and religion.” Hence, it is the organization of work — the forces of production and the class relations of production — that has been the most important factor in determining the overall movement of history.
Usually the belief that Marxists reduce everything to economics comes from a misunderstanding of Marxism. Sometimes people have in mind a concept of “economics” that is much narrower than the Marxist one. They think that Marxists hold a crude theory of “technological determinism”, which maintains that machines cause everything; or they think of “economics” in the same way as the bourgeois economists who typically limit it to considerations of how capitalists market goods. For Marxists, the economic base of society is much broader. However, even in the broad sense of “economic base”, where this includes all of a society’s forces and relations of productions, Marxists do not “reduce” everything to economics.
Marx and Engels never held that absolutely everything that happens in history is caused by economic factors. On the contrary, Marxists maintain that non-economic factors have important effects on a society’s economy. To put this in historical-materialist terms, Marxists maintain that while what happens in the superstructure is caused by what happens in the economic base, there are also causes that work the other way. One example is the scientific discoveries that lead to the invention of new tools, or means of production.
Also, certain religious attitudes or right-wing political systems, both part of the superstructure of society, may hold back changes in the forces or relations of production. In the early days of capitalism pro-feudal religious leaders successfully prevented the use of new technology in some places, and under fascism trade unions and other working class-organizational activity is made extremely difficult.
IN saying that the economic base is central for social change, Marxists mean that the overall pattern of historical change can only be understood and predicted by looking at the changing way people work, not by looking just at the governmental forms or theories people have. Major changes in the superstructure can be made if there is a major change in the economic base, but not the other way around. Therefore, Marxists maintain that political revolutions require certain economic bases and cannot be artificially imposed. Although the superstructure can affect the base, it cannot do so unless the base is itself developed sufficiently to be affected. For instance, while scientific discoveries revolutionized industry in the eighteenth century, those same discoveries would not have had the same effect in earlier societies. In fact, the steam engine was discovered in ancient Greece, but since the forces and relations of production were too underdeveloped to convert to industrialization, it was just used as a toy by the rich.
Subjectivism
Another common criticism of historical materialism is that it does not take into account how people think of themselves. Anti-Marxist sociologists regularly do opinion surveys to show that while Marxists might consider all the factory workers in a country members of the proletariat, some of these workers think of themselves as middle class or maybe some even as upper class. This approach of bourgeois theorists, called “subjectivism”, suggests that people are just what they think they are.
Subjectivism has never cut much ice with Marxists, who are more interested in what people really are than what they may think themselves to be. If you were to put all the people who consider themselves “middle class” in the same scientific classification, you would have to group together people who may have nothing else in common except this belief.
The subjectivist criticism of Marxism would have some weight if people never came to see themselves as being accurately described by the Marxist classifications. But despite what the subjectivists say, there is no wide gap between Marxist class analysis and how people think of themselves. In the first place, the sociologists’ opinion surveys seldom define terms when asking people to classify themselves. If a factory worker was asked to say whether he was a member of the middle class, and “middle class” was explicitly described as being part of management or a professional class such as a doctor or a lawyer, I very much doubt that he would think himself middle class by this definition.
In the second place, while some people can maintain illusions about their place in society, very few can maintain them for long. I imagine that in a small plant a factory worker might help to make some minor management decisions and even feel chummy with the boss, thus gaining the illusion of being part of management. But this attitude is hard to maintain when he is fired by his “chum” or when the boss sells the business and retires to Florida leaving his fellow “manager” to join the ranks of the unemployed.
Subjectivists also criticize Marxists for not being “humanistic”. They claim that by classifying people in economic terms, Marxists cease to be concerned with people’s personal, human qualities — their hopes and fears, their values and beliefs. If Marxists weren’t concerned about these things, they would not work so hard to create a world where people’s hopes can be realized and inhuman values like racism are not bred. But to build such a world we must figure out how the present one works, and for this we need the scientific categories that best explain it.
Thinking of people in terms of their mode of work is completely compatible with thinking of them in truly human terms. Work is the transformation of nature into humanly useful things. Human work shapes and in turn is shaped by human values and beliefs. If work becomes debasing, cold and inhuman, it is not because there is something wrong with the human transformation of nature. The problem lies with capitalist rule, where people do not work for themselves but for the private profit of those who care little about the quality of work or its effects on humans, other species and nature. Wanting to understand how this takes place in order to change it is a deeply humanistic goal.
Because anti-Marxist theorists believe it is impossible to give any general explanation of what happens in history, they have devoted much energy to trying to show that historical materialism cannot be correct. Despite the cleverness of many of their arguments, I do not believe that purely abstract arguments can settle this question. It is necessary to look at actual historical facts to decide whether they are best explained by historical materialism, or by some other theory, or whether they are explained by no theory at all. In the next chapter I will contrast historical materialism with some of the popular, non-Marxist ideas that people have about history.
Readings for Chapter Four
Dynamics of Social Change, edited by H. Selsam, D. Goldway, & H. Marten (New York, New World Paperbacks, 1970). This book of selections from works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, both explaining historical materialism and applying it, is useful as a guide to help one find works of these authors for further study.
K. Marx, “Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy“. A classic short statement of the basic outline of Marx’s theory.
K. Marx and F. Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party.
F. Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Parts I and III of this work contain a useful summary of some main parts of the theory of historical materialism.
F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Engels’ account of the transition from early tribal communism to class society. It also contains his account of the state and of the origin of the subjugation of women.
V.I. Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (also in Vol. 22 of the Collected Works).
V.I. Lenin, What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats (also in Vol. 1 of the Collected Works). An early pamphlet of Lenin’s, the first part of which contains a useful presentation of the principles of Marxist explanation and classification.
The quote from Engels is in his Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx available here.
Chapter Five of Understanding Marxism, “Marxism and Other Theories”, will be posted on Monday, June 14th. Please visit our “Marxism” section for previous chapters.