Chapter #1: - HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

According to Karl Marx, the history of Humanity is the history of class struggle. The materialist conception of history is the instrument to analyze social formations, its changes and laws. Historical Materialism promotes the idea that the material world is modified by human work, which depends on the mode of production and the relations it establishes in the world. So, the changes of human societies are produced by the eternal class struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, but the modification of these relations results in evolutionary steps. Marxism based the history of humanity on 5 stages: primitive communism, oriental despotism, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism. The next revolutionary step was Socialism, whose goal is to overthrow capitalism through the Proletarian Revolution and that, for Marx, is “historically unavoidable.”

Through all the phases of history, Marx saw antagonism between the major social classes: the dominant class and the oppressed class. During the Old Ages of slavery, the opposition was between the free citizen and the slaves; in the Middle Ages, the distinction was marked between the feudal lords and the Vassals. Subsequently, at the end of Feudalism, the antagonism was between the nobles and the merchants. However, historical events, such as the Discovery of America in 1492, which was fundamental to encourage transatlantic trade and mercantilism, determined the new productive relations that resulted in a new social order where the merchants became the embryonic bourgeoisie and the dominant social class. We can say, thus, that antagonism among social classes existed between those who owned and those who did not own the means of production.

The Enlightenment was one of the most splendid periods of our history. During that time, the French Encyclopedia, Humanism and Renascence accomplished great changes in art, culture, knowledge and politics. The bourgeois revolutions, as the French Revolution in 1789, brought important advances to Humanity such as the principles of liberal democracy, freedom of citizens, and the first ideas of human rights. But at the same time, it was the historic moment in which the bourgeoisie assumed the political power in addition to the economic power. This new dominant social class became the owner of the means of production to the detriment of their workers, a practice that came to be known as ‘exploitation’ because of the endless work shifts, the meager food and exiguous wages the latter received in exchange. This exploitation created a new antagonist social class: the proletariat.

The Industrial Revolution created the material conditions for the exploitation of proletarians. During the first half of the 19th Century the worker usually had a work day of 12 hours in totally unhealthy factories. The remuneration was extremely low and it did not even cover the basic needs of the workers and their families, while the owners of the means of production lived in luxury and extravagance. The bourgeoisie obtained enormous benefits from their capital with a less than minimum investment in the direct producers, the workers. The capitalist bourgeoisie decided what was wrong or right; they imposed their moral values, beliefs, and their interpretation of life, besides determining, of course, social relations.

Marx and Engels wanted to demonstrate that spiritual human conditions do not create material changes, as promoted by Hegel. They thought that material changes create the spiritual conditions of societies. Marx called these material, economic, and social conditions the bases of society, referring to the way of thinking, the political institutions, and other human facets, such as religion, moral, art, philosophy and science, as the superstructure of society. In Marx´s days, the work of the proletarians was an alienating work because they gave away their workforce to capitalist production for an unfair salary. Alienation was granting the rights of property to people who, through oppressive methods, controlled society. As Marx thought that the reason for all this was the private property of the means of production, he wrote that the solution was the general workers’ emancipation to eliminate private property and create common, human and social means.

According to Marx, there were entities that helped the survival of this contradiction in favor of the dominant class, and that generated the prevailing political and economical ideologies; religion was one of the leading institutions. In fact, the State and the Church were in charge of justifying the economic structure. The State used all the instruments to conceal the workers’ exploitation in the capitalist system and the Church was its accomplice.

In view of these concrete historical conditions which produced the appropriation and accumulation of capital in the hands of the bourgeoisie, Marxism proposed to transform that reality and overcome the contradictions. To make it possible, Marx saw that the only way out was through a violent revolution of the proletarians because the dominant class never was going to give up their privileges. According to Marxism, capitalism is an auto-destructive economic system because it does not have a rational direction. Its destruction is inherent and it is to be executed by those who are against the injustice and inequality; so it is a phase in the road to communism that has to be led by the Proletarian Dictatorship, a transitional period in which proletarians must defeat the bourgeoisie. Ultimately, this stage would be substituted by a classless society.