A non-mechanical, non-voluntarist version of historical materialism is absolutely vital today. It can easily be found in the works of Marx himself, if you supplement his classic account in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy with what he says at various points in The German Ideology, The Poverty of Philosophy, The Communist Manifesto, and elsewhere.

Production and society

Marx first sets out his account of historical materialism in The German Ideology of 1846.

He starts from a materialist recognition that human beings are biologically part of nature:

`The premises from which we start are not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are real individuals, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both those which they find existing and those which they produce by their own activity.

The first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relationship to the rest of nature… The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the actions of men.

We must begin by stating the first real premise of human existence, and therefore of all human history, the premise that men must be able to live in order to `make history'. But life involves before everything else eating and drinking, a habitation, clothing and many other things. .

[This is] a fundamental condition of all human history which today as thousands of years ago must be daily and hourly fulfilled merely in order to sustain human life.' Thе Gеrmаn Іdеоlоgy іn Mаrx аnd Еngеls, Cоllеctеd Wоrks, vоl 5, pp. 31, 41-42. Thіs аrtіclе wаs wrіttеn usіng аn оldеr trаnslаtіоn whіch іs mаrgіnаlly dіffеrеnt іn plаcеs frоm thаt іn thе Cоllеctеd Wоrks.

So there is a core activity at any point in history which is a precondition for everything else which happens. This is the activity of work on the material world in order to get food, shelter and clothing.

The character of this activity depends upon the concrete material situation in which human beings find themselves.

This determines the content of the most basic forms of human action. And so it also determines what individuals themselves are like.

`The mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.

As individuals express their life so they are. What they are therefore coincides with their production, both of what they produce and how they produce.

The nature of individuals thus depends on the material circumstances determining their production …' іbіd., p. 31.

These passages cannot be properly understood unless Marx's central point about human activity - best expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach (written at the same time as The German Ideology) - is understood. For Marx humanity is part of nature. It arises as a product of biological evolution, and one must never forget its physical dependence on the material world around it. All of its institutions, ideas, dreams and ideals can only be understood as arising from this material reality - even if the route through which they so arise is often long and circuitous. As Labriola put it, `Ideas do not fall from heaven and nothing comes to us in a dream'. Lаbrіоlа оp. cіt., p. 55.

But that does not mean humans are not qualitatively distinct from the rest of nature. Like any other species, humanity has its own defining features. For Marx the key such defining features are that human beings have to react back upon the material circumstances in which they find themselves in order to survive:

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life. Thе Gеrmаn Іdеоlоgy, оp. cіt., p. 31.

Humans cannot act independently of their circumstances. But this does not mean they can be reduced to them. They are continually involved in `negating' the material objective world around them, in reacting upon it in such a way as to transform both it and themselves.

At each point in history, human beings have to find some way to cope with the needs of material survival. How they cope is not something independent from the objective physical world; rather it is a product of that world. Yet it can never be grasped simply as a mechanical consequence of the physical constitution of nature. It is not mechanical causality, but human action which mediates between the world in which human beings find themselves and the lives they lead.

Social production

Production is never individual production. It is only the collective effort of human beings that enables them to get a livelihood from the world around them.

So the central core activity - work - has to be organised socially. Every particular stage in the development of human labour demands certain sorts of social relationships to sustain it.

In The German Ideology Marx refers to the social relations between people at any particular point in history as the `form of intercourse'. And he insists that, `The form of intercourse is again determined by production'. іbіd., p. 32.

The various institutions that embody human relationships can only be understood as developing out of this core productive interaction:

`The fact is that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations … The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life processes of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they appear in their own or other people's imaginations, but as they really are; i.e. as they operate, produce materially and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.' іbіd., p. 35.

In order to maintain their material lives, human beings are forced to act on the world in certain ways - to engage in material production. But that requires certain forms of cooperation between them.

These core relationships provide a framework which everything else humans do has to fit on to. Everything else is, in this sense, based on them. They provide the limits to what is possible in any society.

So, for instance, a hunter-gatherer society does not have the means to store food for more than a few days, and can only survive if its members are continually on the move looking for more foodstuffs. It is therefore restricted in a number of ways: it cannot be made up of bands of more than 20 or so people; the women in it cannot bear more than one child every four or five years, since the children have to be carried when the band looks for food; there is no means by which one section of society could be freed from labour in order to engage in writing, reading, higher arithmetic, etc.

This is the narrowest way in which you can grasp Marx's argument. But he sees it as having even wider implications than this. The relations of material production not only limit the rest of relations in society, they are also the source of the content of these wider relations as well.

The history of society is the history of changes in the ways in which production takes place, each associated with changes in the relations between human beings immediately around the productive process. And these changes in turn then exert a pressure on all the other social relations.

If, for instance, a band of hunter-gatherers adopts a me of radically increasing the food available to them (by, say planting root vegetables for themselves instead of having search for them) and of storing food for long periods of time (for instance, in earthenware pots), this necessarily changes their social relations with each other. Instead of continually moving, they have to stay in one spot until the crop can be harvested; if they are staying in one spot, there is no longer any necessity for restriction on the number of children per woman the crop becomes something which other bands of people can seize, so providing, for the first time, an incentive for warfare, between rival bands.

Changes in the way material production takes place lead changes in the relations of society in general.

And even relations between people which do not arise out production - the games people play with each other, the forms sex takes, the relations of adults and young babies - will affected.

Marx does not at all deny the reality of relations other than directly productive ones. Nor does he deny that they can influence the way production itself takes place. As he puts it in Theories of Surplus Value:

`All circumstances which… affect man, the subject of production, have greater or lesser effect upon his functions and activities, including his functions and activities as creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this sense it can be truly asserted that all human relations and functions, however and wherever they manifest themselves, influence material production and have a more or less determining effect upon it.' Thеоrіеs оf Surplus Vаluе, Pаrt І, Mоscоw, nd, p. 280.

This is even true in pre-class societies. There is a tendency for old patterns of working and living to crystallise into relatively inflexible structures. They become `sanctified' with the development of systems of religion, magic, taboos, rituals and so or At first these systems are carried on even in `bad times', when the short term needs or desires of the individual might lead ti actions which ruin the long term interests of the social collectivity. But, by this very fact, they discourage innovation and move to new forms of production, which would be of long-term as well as short-term benefit.

Exploitation and the superstructure

Something more is needed than simple cooperation between people for the forces of production to develop beyond a certain point. Exploitation is also needed.

While the surplus left after the satisfaction of everyone's minimal needs is small, resources can only be gathered together for further development of the forces of production if the surplus is controlled by a small, privileged minority of society. Hence it is that wherever there is the development of agriculture proper out of horticulture, the growth of trade, the use of dams and canals for flood prevention and irrigation, the building of towns, there are also the beginnings of a polarisation within society between those who exploit and those who are exploited.

The new exploiting group has its origins in its role in production: it is constituted out of those who were most efficient in introducing new methods of agricultural production, or those who pioneered new sorts of trade between one society and its neighbours, or those who could justify themselves not engaging in backbreaking manual labour because of their ability to foresee flood patterns or design waterworks. But from the beginning the new exploiting group secures its control by means other than its role in production. It uses its new wealth to wage war, so further enhancing its wealth through booty and the taking of slaves. It establishes `special bodies of armed men' to safeguard its old and its new wealth against internal and external enemies. It gains control of religious rites, ascribing the advance of the social productive force to its own `supernatural powers'. It rewrites old codes of behaviour into new sets of legal rules that sanctify its position.

The new exploiting group, in short, creates a whole network of non-productive relations to safeguard the privileged position it has gained for itself. It seeks through these political, judicial and religious means to secure its own position. It creates a non-economic `superstructure' to safeguard the source of its own privileges in the economic `base'.

The very function of these `non-economic' institutions means that they have enormous economic impact. They are concerned with controlling the base, with fixing existing relations of exploitation, and therefore in putting a limit on changes in the relations of production, even if this also involves stopping further development of the productive forces.

In ancient China, for example, a ruling class emerged on the basis of certain sorts of material production (agriculture involving the use of hydraulic installations) and exploitation. Its members then sought to preserve their position by creating political and ideological institutions. But in doing so they created instruments that could be used to crush any new social force that emerged out of changes in production (eg out of the growth of handicrafts or trade). On occasions that meant physically destroying the new productive means.

So great is the reciprocal impact of the `superstructure' on the base, that many of the categories we commonly think of as `economic' are in fact constituted by both. So, for instance, `property rights' are judicial (part of the superstructure) but regulate the way exploitation takes place (part of the base).

The way the political and judicial feed back into the economic is absolutely central to Marx's whole approach. It is this alone which enables him to talk of successive, distinct `modes of production' - stages in history in which the organisation of production and exploitation is frozen in certain ways, each with its distinctive ruling class seeking to mould the whole of society to fit in with its requirements.

Far from ignoring the impact of the `superstructure' on the `base', as many ignorant critics have claimed for more than a century, Marx builds his whole account of human history around it.

Old relations of production act as fetters, impeding the growth of new productive forces. How? Because of the activity of the `superstructure' in trying to stop new forms of production and exploitation that challenge the monopoly of wealth and power of the old ruling class. Its laws declare the new ways to be illegal. Its religious institutions denounce them as immoral. Its police use torture against them. Its armies sack towns where they are practised.

The massive political and ideological struggles that arise as a result, decide, for Marx, whether a rising class, based on new forces of production, displaces an old ruling class. And so it is an absolute travesty of his views to claim that he `neglects' the political or ideological element.

But the growth of superstructural institutions not only freezes existing production relations, it can also have profound effects on the relations between the members of the ruling class themselves, and therefore on the way they react to the other classes in society.

Those who command the armies, the police and the priesthoods live off the surplus obtained by exploitation just as much as do the direct exploiters. But they also develop particular interests of their own: they want their share of the surplus to be as great as possible; they want certain sorts of material production to take place to suit the particular needs of their institutions; they want their sort of lifestyle to be valued more highly than that of those involved in direct production.

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