Works on (Historical) Materialism

[Widerstand]

For all I know, Marx sketches the concept of Historical Materialism in the Communist Manifesto (in his description of history being based on class struggle and how social change came about) and uses it throughout Kapital (as a method). To my knowledge, only The German Ideology (and the Theses of Feuerbach) are works fully devoted to Materialism, or at least to debunking Idealism (which appears opposed to Materialism).

What other works (by whomever) deal with Materialism / anti-Idealism? Wittgenstein would come to mind (following the notions of The German Ideology), though I'm not sure he could really be called a Materialist, maybe more of an "Empiricist" (?) - he certainly seems not to utilize what I would call Historical Materialism. Could Darwin's evolutionary theory be considered Materialist (or even said to apply a Historical Materialist method)? To be frank I'm very much clueless.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Well, Wittgenstein is certainly not an empiricist, in fact he is a nothing-at-all-ist (don't confuse this with nihilism), since he rejected all philosophical theories as just so much hot air.

I explain why here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1995528&postcount=1

What he has to say is in many ways compatible with Historical Materialism [HM], but he had in fact nothing to say about it since it's not a philosophical theory.

Sadly, there is very little (if nothing) worth reading on materialism in the Marxist tradition, since what comrades have had to say has been completely ruined by their infatuation with Hegel and with traditional thought.

However, the situation is much much better when we come to HM, where comrades have at least made an attempt to think about what they write and to do so with some originality.

The best book by far on this is Gerry Cohen's Karl Marx's Theory of History. A Defence -- but ignore his technological determinism and his functionalism.

Follow that with Alex Callinicos's Making History (2nd edition) and then Paul Blackledge's Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History.

Darwin's theory has in fact very little to do with HM, and in many ways is not compatible with it.


To be frank I'm very much clueless.

Remember we were all like this once! And ask your future questions in Learning, which is there for just this.

[ChrisK]

What other works (by whomever) deal with Materialism / anti-Idealism? Wittgenstein would come to mind (following the notions of The German Ideology), though I'm not sure he could really be called a Materialist, maybe more of an "Empiricist" (?) - he certainly seems not to utilize what I would call Historical Materialism. Could Darwin's evolutionary theory be considered Materialist (or even said to apply a Historical Materialist method)? To be frank I'm very much clueless.

Darwin's theory could be characterized as materialist. Kropotkin and Engels both wrote on evolution in a way much more applicable to HM. I don't remember Engels work, but Kropotkin's is here (http://marxists.org/reference/archive/kropotkin-peter/1902/mutual-aid/index.htm)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

In fact, Engels wrote this about Darwinism:


"1) Of the Darwinian doctrine I accept the theory of evolution, but Darwin's method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) I consider only a first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until Darwin's time the very people who now see everywhere only struggle for existence (Vogt, Büchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasized precisely cooperation in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrow-minded as the other. The interaction of bodies in nature -- inanimate as well as animate -- includes both harmony and collision, struggle and cooperation. When therefore a self-styled natural scientist takes the liberty of reducing the whole of historical development with all its wealth and variety to the one-sided and meagre phrase 'struggle for existence,' a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can be accepted only cum grano salis ['with a grain of salt' -- RL], such a procedure really contains its own condemnation.

"...I should therefore attack -- and perhaps will when the time comes -- these bourgeois Darwinists in about the following manner:

"The whole Darwinists teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes's doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes ['a war of all against all' --RL; from Hobbes's De Cive and Leviathan, chapter 13-14] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus's theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed (and I questioned its absolute permissibility, as I have indicated in point 1, particularly as far as the Malthusian theory is concerned), the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it. But if I wanted to go into the matter more thoroughly I should do so by depicting them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad naturalists and philosophers.

"4) The essential difference between human and animal society consists in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. This sole but cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of animal societies to human societies....

"At a certain stage the production of man attains such a high-level that not only necessaries but also luxuries, at first, true enough, only for a minority, are produced. The struggle for existence -- if we permit this category for the moment to be valid -- is thus transformed into a struggle for pleasures, no longer for mere means of subsistence but for means of development, socially produced means of development, and to this stage the categories derived from the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now happened, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater quantity of means of subsistence and development than capitalist society can consume because it keeps the great mass of real producers artificially away from these means of subsistence and development; if this society is forced by its own law of life constantly to increase this output which is already too big for it and therefore periodically, every 10 years, reaches the point where it destroys not only a mass of products but even productive forces -- what sense is their left in all this talk of 'struggle for existence'? The struggle for existence can then consist only in this: that the producing class takes over the management of production and distribution from the class that was hitherto entrusted with it but has now become incompetent to handle it, and there you have the socialist revolution.

"...Even the mere contemplation of previous history as a series of class struggles suffices to make clear the utter shallowness of the conception of this history as a feeble variety of the 'struggle for existence.' I would therefore never do this favour to these false naturalists....

"6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the 'bellum omnium contra omnes' was the first phase of human development. In my opinion, the social instinct was one of the most essential levers of the evolution of man from the ape. The first man must have lived in bands and as far as we can peer into the past we find that this was the case...." [Engels to Lavrov, 17/11/1875.]