Kingston Philosophy Café

Barrie Selwyn will be giving a talk on the subject of Historical Materialism.  It will be not be about why we should be Marxists so much as  what lessons are to be learned. Perhaps Marx's clearest formulation of historical materialism resides in the preface to his 1859 book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”:

     In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of productionappropriate 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 ofconsciousness. 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. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

     In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short,ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge anindividual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production.