Historical Totality

[Rafiq]

Does the materialist conception of history pre-suppose the Hegelian concept of Totality, i.e. In the sense of how history is defined by Marx and Engels (Drastic changes in social relations to the mode of production, in the sense that there was no history in Asia for more than a thousand years, just "moments" or "phases). I know there is a great anti-Hegelian following among modern Marxists but I'm just curious as to how this is approached by them: Is this concept of historical totality scrapped all together or is it, like other remnants of Hegel in Marx's thinking, accepted?

EDIT: I do recognize the traditional utilization of Hegel's notion of Totality, that historical changes themselves are merely the "phases" of a single, total historical development. My problem with this is simply it's teleological nature. Perhaps, this holds some ground, but instead the "totality" is the objective laws of social motion, the process of historical change itself (Not something determined from the begging of time), instead of some kind of whole teleological conception of history?

[Luís Henrique]

Does the materialist conception of history pre-suppose the Hegelian concept of Totality, i.e. In the sense of how history is defined by Marx and Engels (Drastic changes in social relations to the mode of production, in the sense that there was no history in Asia for more than a thousand years, just "moments" or "phases). I know there is a great anti-Hegelian following among modern Marxists but I'm just curious as to how this is approached by them: Is this concept of historical totality scrapped all together or is it, like other remnants of Hegel in Marx's thinking, accepted?

EDIT: I do recognize the traditional utilization of Hegel's notion of Totality, that historical changes themselves are merely the "phases" of a single, total historical development. My problem with this is simply it's teleological nature. Perhaps, this holds some ground, but instead the "totality" is the objective laws of social motion, the process of historical change itself (Not something determined from the begging of time), instead of some kind of whole teleological conception of history?

To Hegel, history is a totality, ie, a system, which makes his thinking teleological. But to Marx history isn't a totality at all. Which in the other hand doesn't mean that Marx doesn't use the idea of totality. But for Marx "totalities" are intellectual reconstructions of the concrete, after the dialectic that goes from concrete to abstraction and then back to concrete. He can't therefore construct a "totality" that includes the future, for this isn't yet part of the concrete. What he does is to try and understand the present concrete order of the world, dominated by capitalism as it is, as a system, ie, a totality. The same can, of course, be made to any past social formation, feudal, slaverist, primitive communist, etc. But there aren't transhistoric "objective laws of social motion" that may apply to human history as a whole: the "objective laws of social motion", if we must call them so, can only be found through the concrete analysis of each concrete system - and so they refer and pertain to the particular concrete modes of production in human history. They are different in capitalist societies than in feudal societies, and still different in slave-based societies: there aren't any "objective laws of social motion" that apply to those different objects; each of them has its own set of "objective laws of social motion", irreducible to each others.

Luís Henrique