Historical materialism

Historical materialism is a theory of history and sociology in Marxist thought that posits that material and economic conditions are the primary drivers of societal structure and historical change. First articulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century, the theory proposes that the mode of production of material life—the way a society produces and reproduces the means of human existence—determines or conditions its political, legal, and ideological "superstructure". Historical development is understood as a succession of modes of production, with transitions between them driven by contradictions that arise between the developing forces of production (technology, labour power) and the static relations of production (class structure, property ownership). The materialist conception of history was developed by Marx as a critical response to German idealist philosophy, the ahistorical materialism of the Enlightenment, and the classical political economy of thinkers like Adam Smith and David Ricardo. In what is considered its definitive formulation, from his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx summarized the theory's guiding principle: "It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." Marx and Engels first sketched the theory in The German Ideology (1846), conceptualizing history as a series of "progressive epochs"—the Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois (capitalist) modes of production. Rather than a complete and established scientific theory, Marx and Engels presented these ideas as a set of methodological principles and hypotheses to serve as a "guiding thread" for historical and social research. Following Marx's death, Engels expanded on these ideas in works such as Anti-Dühring (1878) and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). According to some scholars, Engels's later formulations shifted the theory's emphasis from a critical-philosophical method to a positivist and deterministic...