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What is Historical Materialism?

• Historical materialism is how Marxists view the world

• Marx started out from the most basic parts of human life: humans need food, housing, and clothing to survive

• He then built his logic and realized that labor was the one common human unifier to man’s interactions with the world around him, other human beings, and societies.

• From this idea Marx and Engels built their worldview

How Does This Work?

• To Marx and Engels human society is made up of two parts:

• Productive Forces– capability for humans to engage in labor activity (technology, organization of labor, skills, scientific knowledge)

• Relations of Production– social economic relation, who owns what, how people relate to one another, how things are distributed (slave vs master, lord vs peasant, capitalist vs wage laborer)

• When productive forces advanced beyond relations of production revolutions occur

• Marx said relations of production during times of technological upheaval become “ fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution”

• From our base of productive forces, relations of production, and the struggle between both, we see the source of class struggle and why it’s the engine of human history

• Human history moved through this contradiction of class struggle that was set in the sandbox of productive forces and relations of production

• Under capitalism we already have a post scarcity world in regards to housing,medicine, and food — these all go to waste because of the capital worker relationship

• ‘Bull shit’ jobs to generate capital

The Creation of State & Class

• According to Marx and Engels, both the state and class came out of agricultural surpluses

• Once humanity had enough surpluses for one section of the population to hoard, they created ruling classes

• This allowed for the division of labor

• In order to secure their power, the ruling classes created a state

• Through the usage of armies, governments, police, laws,prisons etc.– the ruling classes were able to appropriate labor from ruled classes

• “The increase of production in all branches – cattle-raising, agriculture, domestic handicrafts – gave human labour-power the capacity to produce a larger product than was necessary for its maintenance… It was now no longer necessary to kill or enslave captured enemy warriors; they could be used for productive labour instead” -Engels

History of Human Economy

• Marx was one of the first few political economists to apply historical materialism and reveal humanity had gone through several different modes of production

• Primitive communism (egalitarian society,common ownership eg. paleolithic)

• Slave Mode of production (class hierarchy based on enslavement eg. Greece, Rome)

• Feudal mode of production (class hierarchy based on peasants farming lands for lords)

• Capitalism (bourgeoisie and wage laborer relationship)

How Was Capitalism Created?

• Capitalism was created through primitive accumulation

• Peasants were purposely deprived of their common lands and ownership of all things so that all they had left was their labor power

• They would then be left with nothing and forced to sell their labor power to capitalists

• Labor power then became a commodity

• The main circuit of this system was Capital

• Money->Commodity-> Money(x)

• Capitalism therefore sees “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole” -Marx

Surplus Value

• Marx realized that to find the value of a commodity if you stripped them of all other factors (electricity, raw materials cost, rent) the one common factor left was labor

• Therefore Marx realized that under capitalism value within commodities was the socially validated quantity of homogenous human labor determined temporally

Why is the Working Class Special?

• The productive forces under capitalism have essentially created a post scarcity world in key aspects (food, housing,and medicine) the working class is in a unique position to be able to overthrow class and the state itself

• Likewise, the proletariat has all the tools to overthrow their ruling classes and class society itself as it:

• Has the technology for post scarcity

• Has no ownership of anything but its own labor power

• Is globally connected

• Is concentrated in social labor on a scale peasants and slaves never were

• Capitalism has created the infrastructure for socialism (productive forces) now all that needs to happen is a negation of the relations of production

• And when our technology is freed from our capital wage laborer relationship we can make even greater advancements in post scarcity which would allow for the dismantling the current reality

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

• To Marx and Engels, the state was a tool of class rule a dictatorships of classes over another

• These can take many forms (monarchy, liberal democracy,corportism)

• Under capitalism we are under a dictatorship of the capitalist classes

• The proletariat upon smashing the old state would constitute their own in order to stop enemies of their class before abolishing states all together creating a never before seen system of human governance

• The Paris commune was the first dictatorship of the proletariat

• It was made up of several workers councils that acted as legislature and executive bodies being able to pass and execute laws

• All administrators were subject to recall and given standard works pay

• From systems like and similar to this once class antagonism is eliminated the state can ‘wither’ away