Marx's theory of history is called historical materialism. Its central claim is simple to state: to understand any society, start with how its people produce the things they need to live. Ideas, laws and politics matter, but they grow out of that material base and are shaped by it.
Forces and relations of production
Marx divides economic life into two parts:
- Forces of production: the means people use to produce, such as tools, machines, land, raw materials, technical knowledge and human labor itself.
- Relations of production: the social relationships people enter into when they produce, above all who owns and controls the means of production and who does the work. Slave and master, serf and lord, wage worker and employer are all relations of production.
Together, a particular combination of forces and relations makes up a mode of production.
Base and superstructure
Marx described society with an architectural image. The economic base (the mode of production) supports a superstructure: law, the state, religion, philosophy, art and the dominant ideas of the age. In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx wrote that “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”
An example: in a feudal society, where wealth comes from land worked by serfs bound to it, it makes sense that the dominant ideas stress fixed social rank, loyalty and duty to one's lord. In a market society, where people buy and sell labor freely, ideas of individual rights, contracts and personal freedom come to the fore.
Later Marxists stressed that the relationship runs both ways. Engels wrote that the economic base is “ultimately” determining, but that law, politics and ideas also act back on the economy. Few serious Marxists hold that every idea is a direct reflection of economics.
How history changes
Forces of production tend to develop over time: new tools, new techniques, new knowledge. For a while, the existing relations of production help that growth. Eventually, Marx argued, they become “fetters”: they hold back further development. Feudal restrictions on trade and labor, for example, blocked the growth of markets and manufacturing. At that point a period of social revolution begins, and new relations replace the old ones.
Stages of history
Marx and Engels sketched a broad sequence of modes of production, mainly from European history:
- Primitive communism: small hunting and gathering societies with little surplus and no class division.
- Ancient slave society: Greece and Rome, where production rested on slave labor.
- Feudalism: lords controlled land worked by serfs.
- Capitalism: owners of capital employ free wage workers.
- Socialism and communism: the stage Marx predicted would follow, with common ownership of the means of production.
Marx did not insist every society must pass through each stage in order. Late in life he wrote that his account of capitalism's origins described Western Europe and should not be turned into a universal law for every people.
Materialism in this sense
“Materialism” here does not mean caring about possessions. It means explaining society by starting from material conditions of life, rather than from ideas, great individuals or divine plans. Historians who never call themselves Marxists now routinely ask the questions Marx made central: who produced the wealth, who controlled it, and how did that shape politics and belief?
Worked example: the end of feudalism
Historical materialism is easiest to see in a real transition. In medieval England, most people were peasants tied to a lord's estate. They owed labor or a share of their harvest, could not freely leave, and lived under the lord's courts. The dominant ideas stressed a fixed, God-given order of ranks.
Over several centuries, trade grew, towns expanded, and wool became valuable for export. Landowners found it more profitable to fence off common land for sheep (the enclosures) than to keep peasants on it. Displaced people drifted to towns, where they had nothing to sell but their ability to work. Merchants and manufacturers gained wealth and pressed against feudal restrictions on trade and labor. Political conflicts, including the English Civil War of the 1640s, shifted power toward Parliament and property owners.
A Marxist reading: the forces of production (trade, wool, manufacturing) outgrew feudal relations of production; new relations (wage labor and private capital) replaced them; and the superstructure changed with them, toward ideas of contract, property rights and individual liberty. A historian who disagrees might stress religion, ideas, accidents of war or the choices of individuals. Notice that both sides now argue partly on the ground Marx laid out: what changed in production, and how did it connect to politics?