Question

Explain Marx’s historical materialism in details. What question(s) does it try to answer? How does it answer these question(s)? How does it relate to “dialectics”? What implications does it have for creating significant social change?

Answer 1

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Marx’s historical materialism

Historical materialism, also known as the materialist conception of history, is a methodology used by some communist and Marxist historiographers that focuses on human societies and their development through history, arguing that history is the result of material conditions rather than ideals. This was first articulated by Karl Marx (1818–1883) as the "materialist conception of history".It is principally a theory of history which asserts that the material conditions of a society's mode of production or in Marxist terms, the union of a society's productive forces and relations of production, fundamentally determine society's organization and development. Historical materialism is an example of Marx and Engel's scientific socialism, attempting to show that socialism and communism are scientific necessities rather than philosophical idealsd

Following Quetion it tried to answer through the experiment and critical analysis

1. Social progress is driven by progress in the material, productive forces a society has at its disposal (technology, labour, capital goods and so on)
2. Humans are inevitably involved in productive relations (roughly speaking, economic relationships or institutions), which constitute our most decisive social relations. These relations progress with the development of the productive forces. They are largely determined by the division of labor, which in turn tends to determine social class.
3. Relations of production are both determined by the means and forces of production and set the conditions of their development. For example, capitalism tends to increase the rate at which the forces develop and stresses the accumulation of capital.
4. The relations of production define the mode of production, e.g. the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the polarization of society into capitalists and workers.
5. The superstructure—the cultural and institutional features of a society, its ideological materials—is ultimately an expression of the mode of production on which the society is founded.
6. Every type of state is a powerful institution of the ruling class; the state is an instrument which one class uses to secure its rule and enforce its preferred relations of production and its exploitation onto society.
7. State power is usually only transferred from one class to another by social and political upheaval.
8. When a given relation of production no longer supports further progress in the productive forces, either further progress is strangled, or 'revolution' must occur.
9. The actual historical process is not predetermined but depends on class struggle, especially the elevation of class consciousness and organization of the working class

implications that it have for creating significant social change

Historical materialism represented a revolution in human thought, and a break from previous ways of understanding the underlying basis of change within various human societies. As Marx puts it, "a coherence arises in human history" because each generation inherits the productive forces developed previously and in turn further develops them before passing them on to the next generation. Further, this coherence increasingly involves more of humanity the more the productive forces develop and expand to bind people together in production and exchange.

Overall primacy of the productive forces can be understood in terms of two key theses:

(a) The productive forces tend to develop throughout history

(b) The nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces

c) Human beings have a rational interest in developing their capacities to control their interactions with external nature in order to satisfy their wants, the historical tendency is strongly toward further development of these capacities.

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