historical materialism research in critical marxist theory

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Historical Materialism is a Marxist journal, appearing four times a year, based in London. Founded in 1997 it asserts that, not withstanding the variety of its practical and theoretical articulations, Marxism constitutes the most fertile conceptual framework for analysing social phenomena, with an eye to their overhaul. In our selection of material we do not favour any one tendency, tradition or variant. Marx demanded the ‘Merciless criticism of everything that exists’: for us that includes Marxism itself.

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Historical Materialism Research in Critical Marxist Theory (volume 17 issue 3)

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Historical Materialism - Research in Critical Marxist Theory

Special issue about the Symposium: Ernest Mandel and the Historical Theory of Global Capitalism. Ernest Mandel theorised the capitalist world economy as an articulated system of capitalist, semi-capitalist and precapitalist relations of production, linked to each other by capitalist relations of exchange and domination by the capitalist world market. This seems to be an interesting starting point for an historically well-founded theory, building on and going beyond Marx's work, of the worldwide expansion of the capitalist mode of production from its origins to the present. In his attempt to formulate his theory, Mandel did not succeed in resolving all difficulties, however. His main works - Marxist Economic Theory and Late Capitalism - show a number of dangling loose ends. The central question is whether these loose ends are merely technical difficulties or whether they reveal fatal flaws in the theory as a whole. In order to come a step closer to answering this question, a conference was organised in Amsterdam, November 2003.

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Historical Materialism Book Series

The Historical Materialism Book Series is a major publishing initiative of the radical left. The capitalist crisis of the twenty-first century has been met by a resurgence of interest in critical Marxist theory. At the same time, the publishing institutions committed to Marxism have contracted markedly since the high point of the 1970s. The Historical Materialism Book Series is dedicated to addressing this situation by making available important works of Marxist theory. The aim of the series is to publish important theoretical contributions as the basis for vigorous intellectual debate and exchange on the left. We are convinced that a project of this kind can make an important contribution to the revitalisation of critical politics and intellectual culture.

The peer-reviewed series publishes original monographs, translated texts and reprints of “classics” across the bounds of academic disciplinary agendas, and across the divisions of the left. The series is particularly concerned to encourage the internationalisation of Marxist debate, and aims to translate significant studies from beyond the English speaking world. We have previously published important studies of Marxist thinkers, key collections of sources from the socialist movement, works of philosophy, history and literary criticism, as well as political and economic studies. Future publication plans include texts in the fields of cultural and aesthetic theory, sociology, and geography.

The Historical Materialism Book Series  expands significantly over the coming years with substantial and important books in all areas of Marxist theory. We are undertaking a project of publishing previously untranslated texts by Marx, long unavailable debates from the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, and English editions of important studies from the post war period. Equally significantly, we also aim to publish the work of the emerging generation of Marxist scholars and theorists. The Historical Materialism Book Series intends to be at the forefront of radical publishing for the coming period with a commitment to rigorous intellectual work produced within the many Marxist traditions.

Contact Information Jason Prevost, Acquisitions Editor Rosanna Woensdregt, Assistant Editor Brill 2 Liberty Square Eleventh Floor Boston, MA Netherlands http://www.brill.com/publications/historical-materialism-book-series [email protected] (617) 263-2323 ext. 143

Region Europe Western Europe

Year Established 2002

Supported by grants to the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern University from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Produced in collaboration with the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI). University of California, Berkeley | copyright © 2016-2024 | All rights reserved | Homepage artwork: Joyce Kozloff, Targets, 2000, detail. For more information, contact [email protected]

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2 Historical Materialism

Paul Blackledge, London South Bank University

• Published: 10 September 2018
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Marx’s theory of history is often misrepresented as a mechanically deterministic and fatalistic theory of change in which the complexity of the real world is reduced to simple, unconvincing abstractions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Though Stalin attempted to transform Marxism into something akin to this caricature to justify Russia’s state-capitalist industrialization after 1928, neither Marx nor his most perceptive followers understood historical materialism in this way. This chapter shows that Marx’s theory of history, once unpicked from its misrepresentations, allows us to comprehend social reality as a non-reductive, synthetic, and historical totality. This approach is alive to the complexity of the social world without succumbing to the descriptive eclecticism characteristic of non-Marxist historiography. And by escaping the limits of merely descriptive history, Marxism offers the possibility of a scientific approach to revolutionary practice as the flipside to comprehending the present, as Georg Lukács put it, as a historical problem.

The term “historical materialism” has a peculiar place within the Marxist tradition. While it has come to function as a synonym for Marxism, the phrase itself was never used by Marx. In fact, it was first coined by Engels after Marx’s death as a synonym for an earlier notion, “the materialist conception of history,” which he had first used in his 1859 review of Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Engels 2001a : 8; 2001b : 36).

Engels aimed, both in his 1859 review and in a series of later essays and letters, to unpack Marx’s dense methodological comments to make them palatable to the general reader. Many critics have argued that in so doing Engels reduced Marx’s method to a mechanically determinist and fatalist caricature of the real thing. And just as Marx once famously joked that he was not a Marxist ( Engels 1992 : 356), Engels’s critics have suggested that neither was Marx an (Engelsian) historical materialist ( Thomas 2008 : 39). Others have gone further to suggest that Marx shared Engels’s mechanically determinist and reductive conception of history. So, despite the illuminating insights contained within his historical writings, the method outlined in the 1859 preface is incompatible with the tenets of modern historiography ( Rigby 1998 :94).

As we shall see, neither Marx, nor Engels (Blackledge 2017 ; 2019 ), embraced a reductive or mechanical method. In fact, Marx’s method, properly understood, facilitates the integration of evidence into a non-reductive, synthetic whole that offers the possibility of simultaneously explaining the historical process with a view to informing revolutionary practice. This approach stands in stark contrast to the tendency toward eclectic description characteristic of even the best of non-Marxist historiography.

Georg Lukács articulated the most sophisticated philosophical critique of the limitations of non-Marxist thought generally and non-Marxist historiography in particular. He argued that it was impossible to comprehend capitalism as a historical totality from the (bourgeois) standpoint of the individual within civil society because “when the individual confronts objective reality he is faced by a complex of ready-made and unalterable objects which allow him only the subjective responses of recognition or rejection” ( Lukács 1971 :48, 50, 63, 69). To argue that this standpoint is bourgeois should not be interpreted mechanically as assuming that those who hold it are individual members of the bourgeoisie. Rather, it is best understood as a claim that this general worldview emerged with the rise of capitalism, whose parameters it cannot escape. In relation to historiography, this failing explained the “total inability of every bourgeois thinker and historian to see the world-historical events of the present [1914–23—PB] as universal history.” More generally, Lukács claimed, “We see the unhistorical and antihistorical character of bourgeois thought most strikingly when we consider the problem of the present as a historical problem .” Because the standpoint of the individual within civil society tends to naturalize capitalist social relations, intellectuals viewing the world from this perspective are incapable adequately of conceiving “the present as history” ( Lukács 1971 :157–158).

Conversely, the collective struggles of the proletariat against alienation provide a standpoint from which intellectuals can begin to understand capitalism as a historical totality. It is because the proletariat exists at the center of the constant reproduction of bourgeois society that its struggles against this system are able to point beyond it. Historical materialism, from this perspective, is best understood as “the theory of the proletarian revolution . . . because its essence is an intellectual synthesis of the social existence which produces and fundamentally determines the proletariat; and because the proletariat struggling for liberation finds its clear self-consciousness in it” ( Lukács 1970 :9).

Conceived in this way, it is understandable that the influence of Marxism has tended to ebb and flow with changing fortunes in the class struggle. Within the academy, Marxism became more popular as the generation radicalized in the 1960s came to maturity, while the subsequent downturn in class struggle informed what Ellen Meiksins Wood called a “retreat from class” amongst intellectuals from the late 1970s onward ( Wood 1986 ). Subsequently, many radical intellectuals tended to justify their embrace of culturally defined New Social Movements at the expense of socially structured class politics through criticisms of Marxism’s supposed inability to comprehend non-economic forms of oppression and domination ( Blackledge 2013 ; Palmer 1990 ).

This article challenges this caricature of Marxism: the false claim that Marx’s method is reductive involves a one-dimensional interpretation of his attempt to conceptualize the complexity of the real world as a synthetic whole. As we shall see, although Marx’s dialectical approach is not reductive, it does fundamentally challenge the dominant tendency merely to describe reality superficially as the evolving interaction of a multiplicity of factors. As Georg Plekhanov argued more than a century ago, the problem with the factoral approach to social analysis lies not in the attempt to distinguish different aspects of the mediated whole but rather in the tendency to reify these factors such that history is made to stand still. Marxism transcends the theory of factors not by reducing everything to class but through a “synthetic view of social life” that facilitates our cognition of the whole as a complex totality centred on humanity’s productive engagement with nature ( Plekhanov 1944 :13). Because this approach allowed Marx to comprehend the social whole as a historically evolving totality it underpinned his organic conception of revolutionary politics ( Engels 1987 : 27).

1. The Materialist Conception of History

In 1859 Marx and Engels published outlines of their basic methodology. The first of these essays was Marx’s preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , followed by Engels’s review of this book. Both these works are somewhat opaque: Marx’s preface was written with an eye to the censor ( Prinz 1969 ); while only the first two of three projected instalments of Engels’s review were written because the journal in which it was serialized, Das Volk (effectively edited by Marx), went bankrupt before Engels had time to complete the final part of the review ( MECW 16 , 673–674).

The central paragraph of Marx’s preface is an infamously dense summary of themes from the German Ideology (for a comparison of these texts see Carver 1983 :72–77).

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure” ( Marx 1987 : 263).

According to Richard Miller, the widespread claim that this passage proffers a mechanically determinist and fatalist theory of history is predicated upon the assumption that Marx was a positivist. And while it is certainly possible to interpret Marx’s 1859 preface through a positivist lens as making hard technologically deterministic predictions which are not only falsifiable but have in fact been falsified, Miller points out that neither Marx nor “most of his insightful followers” understood historical materialism in this way ( Miller 1984 :7, 271). In fact, Marx’s method is best understood, contra positivism, as a precursor to the critical realist philosophy of social science. This approach includes a stratified conception of reality through which agency is explained as an emergent property rooted in but irreducible to underlying social relations. Further, this approach points to the existence of tendencies rather than superficial Humean constant conjunctions. Interpreted in this way, Marx is best understood as positing that though modes of production shape the contours of social struggles, definite historically and socially constituted men and women are the active, conscious, and (historically relative) free agents of change. In this model there is nothing preordained about the outcome of the struggles in which these agents engage ( Blackledge 2006a :14–16; Meikle 1985 :57; Collier 1994 ; Blackledge 2002 ). This is why, as Geoffrey de Ste. Croix has powerfully argued (and as many Marxist historians have demonstrated in practice), there is no necessary contradiction between Marx’s conception of social structure on the one hand and the demand that historians attempt to richly reconstruct historical processes on the other ( Ste. Croix 1983 :90; Blackledge 2008b ).

More concretely, Marx’s analytical distinction between forces and relations of production on the one hand, and base and superstructure on the other, is intended not as a schema of automatic historical progress but rather as a map of the broad coordinates of revolutionary politics. If the development of the forces of production—the means of production and the labor power required to utilize instruments and raw materials—sets the parameters of what is politically possible at any particular historical juncture, the relations of production—class relations of effective control—frame the contradictory material interests that underpin the evolving lines of conflict in developing struggles. This latter concept is the foundation of the Communist Manifesto ’s claim that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another” ( Marx and Engels 1984 :482).

If crises born of the contradiction between forces and relations of production evidence the historical necessity of revolution, the potential for hope emerges because structural crises create the conditions in which revolutionary movements tend to develop as groups rooted in the relations of production coalesce around competing responses to structural crises. But victory for these revolutionary forces is never guaranteed: though structural crises will tend to generate challenges to the existing relations of production, the legal, political, and ideological superstructure acts to ensure the reproduction of these relations. Which side will triumph in the ensuing conflicts is an open question. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto : the class struggle is “carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” ( Marx and Engels 1984 :482; Harman 1998 :7–54).

Engels’s own gloss on Marx’s method points in a similar direction. In his introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific he defined historical materialism as “that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another” ( Engels 1990b : 289). He was, however, adamant that this was not a reductionist model:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. ( Engels 2001b : 34–35)

Engels emphasized, for instance, that this approach allowed “political power” to enjoy a degree of “relative independence” from the economic base ( Engels 2001c :60). Moreover, he insisted that the sophistication of his and Marx’s method was apparent in their works of historical analysis. While in polemics with their opponents they often one-sidedly “emphasise[d] the main principle . . . when it came to presenting a section of history . . . it was a different matter and there no error was permissible” ( Engels 2001b :36).

Some have charged that Engels mischaracterized Marx’s method in his 1859 review ( Carver 1983 :116). But this claim is difficult to square with what we know of the piece’s publication history. Marx was editing the journal in which Engels’s essay was published, he had asked Engels for the review, and Engels had offered it with a cover note suggesting that “if you don’t like it in toto , tear it up and let me have your opinion” ( Engels 1983 : 478). Moreover, while the phrase “materialist conception of history” may have been new in 1859, it certainly is not an eccentric description of either Marx’s 1859 preface, the approach outlined in The German Ideology , or (though Engels had not had sight of this) Marx’s method as detailed in his 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse ( Hunley 1991 :92).

This is not to say that nothing new was added to the Marxist method in the late 1850s. There was a shift in Marx’s understanding of method at this juncture, but this development constituted, as Henri Lefebvre has argued, a deepening of Marx’s conception of the historical method ( Lefebvre 2009 :69–74). To this end, he famously wrote to Engels in January 1858 stating: “What was of great use to me as regards method of treatment was Hegel’s Logic ” ( Marx 1983 :249). Though Marx’s reengagement with Hegel is of the first importance to his method, before this aspect of his work is discussed it is instructive to outline the theory of history he articulated alongside Engels in The German Ideology .

The German Ideology is not an easy read. The text that eventually saw the light of day after its authors’ deaths was cobbled together from various unfinished texts penned between November 1845 and August 1846 and intended for publication as separate journal articles ( Carver and Blank 2014 ). Though this provenance gives The German Ideology a somewhat opaque quality, it nonetheless remains an invaluable resource for anyone wanting to understand and extend Marx and Engels’s method of analysis. For it was through these manuscripts that they achieved a degree of what they both described as “self-clarification” ( Marx 1987 :264; Engels 1990a :519), while the manuscript itself offers “page after page [of] astonishing insights” ( Arthur 2015 ).

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels argue that humans make and remake themselves through labor to meet their needs. It is through social, conscious productive interaction with nature that our ancestors became human: they transformed themselves by working together to transform nature. So, while Marx and Engels argue that we do have a nature made up of needs and capacities, by contrast with crude materialists who posit this essence as a simple transhistorical fact, they insist that our nature is not fixed because these needs and capacities are not fixed. They claim that our essence evolves because these needs and capacities develop through our active interaction with nature ( Marx and Engels 1976 :41–43). This argument marks the point of synthesis between the concepts of practice and material need that constitutes a core feature of Marxism. Moreover, because need is a social concept that nonetheless has natural roots, this argument highlights the unity (but not identity) of natural and social history ( Marx and Engels 1976 :28–29).

This unity between natural and social history informs their famous claim that definite individuals at a specific moment in time differentiated themselves from nature by consciously transforming their environment in order to meet their (initially natural) needs:

Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their material life ( Marx and Engels 1976 :31).

Consequently, rather than follow modern political theory from Hobbes and Locke onward in positing abstract “man” as the starting point for the analysis of the social world, Marx and Engels wrote that their study proceeds from the standpoint of definite individuals in definite social relations:

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity ( Marx and Engels 1976 :31).

The human essence is on their account a historical rather than ideal abstraction: at any particular juncture it is the “sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :54). Though too often dismissed as the background noise to history, the mere “reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals,” human productive interaction with nature is rather “a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :31). More specifically, by contrast with traditional elitist ideologies that tend to denigrate practice as the poor cousin to theory’s pure universality, Marx and Engels insist that our consciousness is profoundly shaped by the way we produce to meet our needs.

Morality, religion, metaphysics, and all the rest of ideology as well as the forms of consciousness corresponding to these, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their actual world, also their thinking and the products of their thinking. It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness. For the first manner of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; for the second manner of approach, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness ( Marx and Engels 1976 :36–37; also see Marx 1987 :263).

Marx and Engels argue that production includes both natural and social aspects. It comprises not only our work on nature to meet our needs but also the social relations that spring from working together to that end. Indeed, “a certain mode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with a certain mode of co-operation, or social stage” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :43). They labeled the totality of these relations a “mode of production,” and periodized history according to changes in the mode of production ( Marx and Engels 1976 :43). Their conception of a mode of production as a totality is in the first instance a “scientific hypothesis” about how the world works ( Vygodski 1973 :16). The essence of capitalism is different from the essence of feudalism and both of these differ again from other modes of production. The goal of science is, in the first instance, to grasp the essence of each particular mode so as to understand its distinct dynamic. It can only then move on to make sense of more complex characteristics of the system as a whole.

It was through the concept of mode of production that Marx and Engels began to overcome the limitations of earlier attempts to understand modernity ( Marx and Engels 1976 :32–37). By contrast both with liberalism’s attempt to naturalize egoistic individualism and private property and earlier socialist criticisms of the consequences of private property, they outlined a dialectical and historical approach according to which private property had a history—having evolved through “tribal,” “ancient communal,” “feudal,” and on to its present capitalist form—and through its history these specific forms had played positive and negative parts at specific junctures. Most recently, capitalist private property had fostered the social development necessary for the transition to socialism before itself becoming a fetter on further development ( Marx and Engels 1976 : 33, 48).

While this approach marked a step beyond both liberal and early socialist conceptions of private property, when compared with Marx’s later conception of social determination it remains analytically weak. For whereas Marx would subsequently insist that production determines exchange and distribution, in this earlier text he and Engels conceive production and exchange as co-determining distribution, which in turn determines them ( Marx and Engels 1976 :40). Nonetheless, the analysis of private property in The German Ideology did constitute a profound theoretical breakthrough. It allowed Marx and Engels to grasp capitalism as a historical mode of production with dominant progressive and regressive characteristics at different moments in its history. Furthermore, they understood this dialectical account of capitalism to be a specific example of a more general historical law: one whereby social change through revolutions occurs when social relations that had previously fostered social development subsequently come to fetter that development ( Marx and Engels 1976 :74; see, e.g., Marx 1987 :263). Marx subsequently worked an important improvement on the account of social change given in The German Ideology . Whereas in The German Ideology he used the term “forms of intercourse” to describe the social relations that initially fostered and latterly fettered the development of the forces of production and through which he periodized history, he subsequently refined this concept as relations of production to rid it of any remnants of technological determinism ( Therborn 1976 :366; Callinicos 2004 :48).

More specifically, Marx and Engels argued that though private property had previously played a progressive historical role, the crises and social conflicts that it now engendered meant that this was no longer the case. This claim was a double-edged sword: although socialism was now moving onto the historical and political agenda, this movement was possible only because economic growth had previously been fostered by private property relations. Consequently, any attempt to bypass this earlier stage of history would be disastrous for the socialist project, the

development of productive forces . . . is an absolutely necessary practical premise, because without it privation, want is merely made general, and with want the struggle for necessities would begin again, and all the old filthy business would necessarily be restored. ( Marx and Engels 1976 :49)

Concretely, it is “only with large-scale industry [that] the abolition of private property becomes possible” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :64). As a fundamental precept of Marx’s theory of history this argument also undermines the claims that Stalin and Mao were able to introduce socialism in relatively backward countries ( Cliff 1974 ).

Socialism, in Marx and Engels’s model, far from being an abstract, transhistorical moral ideal is best understood as a historically concrete form offered as a solution by definite historically constituted individuals to historically specific problems ( Blackledge 2012 ). Ludwig Feuerbach, the most important antagonist in their critique could understand none of this because he assumed two related myths: a transhistorical human essence alongside a transhistorical natural world ( Marx and Engels 1976 :40–41). This mistake meant that insofar as he “is a materialist he does not deal with history, and as far as he considers history he is not a materialist. With him materialism and history diverge completely” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :41).

Marx and Engels’s new approach to human history amounted to a real transcendence (sublation) of materialism and idealism. As Lukács argued, they aimed to overcome the opposition between materialism and idealism by synthesizing causal, materialist models of behavior with purposeful, idealist accounts of agency to provide a framework through which our actions could be understood as human actions ( Lukács 1975 :345). Marx famously contrasted his approach with these earlier systems in the first of his Theses on Feuerbach :

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism—that of Feuerbach included—is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation , but not as sensuous human activity, practice , not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such ( Marx and Engels 1976 :4).

So, Marx differentiated his materialism from older forms of materialism which were in one way or another reductive in their effects. His sublation of materialism and idealism into a new approach to history nonetheless remained a form of materialism because it recognized that priority should be assigned to satisfying our needs: as Chris Arthur writes, “ in the first instance material circumstances condition us, however much we revolutionise those conditions later” ( Arthur 1970 :23).

By contrast with the fatalism of earlier mechanical forms of materialism, because Marx and Engels aimed to grasp real historical change, theirs was a form of “practical materialism” focused on “revolutionising the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence” ( Marx and Engels 1976 , 38). Indeed, they claimed that in the modern world practical materialism was a synonym for communism because only those intent on the revolutionary reconstruction of existing social relations are able to transcend the sterile opposition between the old mechanical materialism, which accepted reality as a pre-given and immutable fact, and its idealist (moralist) other that responded to the evils of the world with “impotence in action” ( Marx and Engels 1975 :201). Conversely, practical materialism assumes the existence of agents already challenging the status quo: “The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class” ( Marx and Engels 1976 :60). In the modern world, or so Marx and Engels claimed, this was the working class, and they framed their political activity in relation to its real struggles against capitalism.

2. Coquetting with Hegel

What Marx added to this model when he reread Hegel in the 1850s was a more nuanced understanding of how the social world might be conceived as a totality of interdependent processes. In his 1857 Introduction he wrote:

The economists of the seventeenth century, e.g., always begin with the living whole, with population, nation, state, several states, etc.; but they always conclude by discovering through analysis a small number of determinant, abstract, general relations such as division of labour, money, value, etc. As soon as these individual moments had been more or less firmly established and abstracted, there began the economic systems, which ascended from the simple relations, such as labour, division of labour, need, exchange value, to the level of the state, exchange between nations and the world market. The latter is obviously the scientifically correct method. The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete, reproduces it as the concrete in the mind” ( Marx 1973 :101).

Though the approach set out here is clearly dialectical, it is also not Hegelian. Marx suggested that he “openly avowed [himself] the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even . . . coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him” ( Marx 1976 :103). However, whereas the Hegelian concept develops deductively, for Marx conceptual deepening emerged through the successive introduction of more complex determinations as he sought to move from the abstract to the concrete ( Ilyenkov 2013 :149–167). Commenting on this method, Bertell Ollman writes that Marx and Engels considered the whole to be constituted through its internal relations, and their work focused on the painstaking reconstitution of the whole as such a concrete totality ( Ollman 1976 :34; Marx 1973 :101). As Engels wrote:

Our view of history, however, is first and foremost a guide to study, not a tool for constructing objects after the Hegelian model. The whole of history must be studied anew, and the existential conditions of the various social formations individually investigated before an attempt is made to deduce therefrom the political, legal, aesthetic, philosophical, religious, etc., standpoints that correspond to them ( Enggels 2001a :8).

So, while Marx and Engels may well have agreed with Hegel that the truth is the whole, they nonetheless insisted that the process of reproducing the whole in thought as a concrete totality of many determinations was an arduous and ongoing scientific process. Marx’s goal was not to reduce non-economic processes of oppression and domination to class relations. Rather, he aimed to integrate these processes into a complex totality where explanation “means something like being placed correctly in the system of concepts that together form the theory of the capitalist mode of production” ( Callinicos 2014 :131; Gimenez 2001 ). According to Sue Clegg this method entails, for instance, not that forms of oppression are reduced to epiphenomena of class relations but that they are conceived as part of a greater whole: “The argument for historical materialism is not, as some of its critics have claimed, to reduce women’s oppression to class but that women’s position only makes sense in the explanatory context of the dynamics of particular modes of production” ( Clegg 1997 :210; cf Blackledge 2018 ).

Clegg is right, for though Marx insisted that relations of production constitute the inner essence of a mode of production, he also stressed that other aspects of the social whole cannot be reduced to these underlying social relations; they must be understood through an active engagement with empirical evidence:

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers—a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity—which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis—the same from the standpoint of its main conditions—due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations in appearance, which can be ascertained only by analysis of the empirically given conditions ( Marx 1981 :927).

Consequently, in his theory of history Marx posited a method of analysis that opens with an attempt to grasp the essence of a system understood as the dominant form in which surplus is extracted from the direct producers. However, essence is not appearance, and science must also be able to comprehend totalities as complex wholes not as simple abstractions, and this entails careful theoretically informed and detailed engagement with evidence.

In modern capitalist societies Marx’s method involves starting from an analysis of wage labor, because this is the historically novel and dominant form through which surplus is extracted from the direct producers. Wage labor is not, of course, the only way that surplus is thus extracted, and it certainly is not the only form of work in the modern world. Nevertheless, it is the dominant form through which the system is reproduced and the specific character of wage labor differentiates capitalism from earlier modes of production. In particular, wage labor underpins capitalism’s most salient characteristics: its dynamism and its tendency to crisis.

By contrast with this essentialist model, descriptive accounts of history tend to reduce it to the successive iteration of mere chance—“one damn thing after another” as Toynbee wrote. By contrast with Marxism, the descriptive approach fails to recognize that to understand a thing we must grasp not merely what it is but also what it has the potential to become—and indeed what its essence necessitates that it tends toward (Meikle 1983 , 1985 ). For Marx, properly understood the scientific method aims to reveal the dynamic social essence beneath the appearance of things: “All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence” ( Marx 1981 :956). To this end, social science is a theoretical exercise aimed at cognizing the world we inhabit: “In the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both” ( Marx 1976 :90). Marx’s own contribution to this project revealed that capitalist society necessarily tends to both dynamism and crisis, which in turn impose an aging process on the system—and these are all essential characteristics of capitalism. Of course, the ways in which these tendencies are realized in practice is highly mediated and complex. If this truth means that mechanical applications of Marx’s model to reality will tend to a crude caricature of existing reality, the alternative approach of dismissing essence as a metaphysical concept lends itself to the tendency to lose sight of the capitalist wood for the trees.

Critics of essentialism generally argue that it fails as a model of history because it is fundamentally reductive. But as Scott Meikle argues in relation to Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World this criticism of Marxism misses its mark. In his magnificent book, Ste. Croix aimed to reveal the essence of the ancient world as a system of surplus extraction from unfree labor. Far from being a reductive exercise, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World married the highest level of theoretical sophistication with an incredibly detailed knowledge both of the primary and the secondary sources for his period of study. By marrying these two aspects of knowledge, Ste. Croix was able to explain the historical evolution of the ancient Greek world in relation to slowly changing forms of unfree labor—whereas even the best of mainstream historians were only able to describe this process ( Ste. Croix 1983 ; Meikle 1983 ; Blackledge 2006a ).

Ste. Croix illuminated the changing form of surplus extraction over more than a millennium, and through his analysis he revealed the evolution from the ancient mode of production dominated by slavery to the feudal system dominated by serfdom. This changing essence underpinned changes across society more broadly, as new social relations gave rise to new forms of rationality, politics, and culture. In so doing, Ste. Croix’s book acts as a concrete application of Marx’s method. He shows how the “real individuals” noted as the starting point of analysis by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology are in fact, as Marx wrote in the 1857 Introduction , concrete not because they are the unmediated starting point of analysis imagined by naive positivists but because they are constituted through the synthetic “concentration of many determinations.” They are, therefore “a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation and conception” ( Marx 1973 :101).

3. England’s Bourgeois Revolution?

The limitations of descriptive history are evident in mainstream interpretations of the English Revolution. Within the mainstream, the “Civil War” tends to be framed as a struggle between two sections of the English ruling class that had little or nothing to do with the rise of capitalism. Marxists, by contrast, have tended to label the events of 1640 to 1660 as a bourgeois revolution, though they disagree markedly over the meaning and even applicability of this term.

In his fundamental contribution to this literature, Brian Manning evidenced the power of Marx’s essentialist method as compared to the superficiality of mainstream historiography ( Blackledge 2005 ). He agreed that the mainstream account of the Civil War captured a superficial truth, but insisted that this account was inadequate as an explanation for the revolution. In a series of studies of turning points in the revolution he highlighted the decisive part played within it by the “intervention of people from outside the class that normally dominated politics” ( Manning 1992 :16–17).

In his discussion of the growing divisions with the ruling class in the period 1640 to 1642, Manning looked beneath the superficial story of the growing distrust felt for Charles by large sections of the aristocracy to examine the role of popular struggles in shaping the opposing sections of the ruling class. He explained the emergence of a strong royalist party in this period as a response to the fear caused by the independent actions of the London crowd. Conversely, he points out that parliamentarians came to believe that the only force that stood between them and the King’s wrath was the London crowd ( Manning 1991 :71, 101).

According to Manning, the independence of the core group of the crowd was rooted in the growing economic independence of the “middle sort of people” in the century preceding the conflict ( Manning 1991 :230). This analysis of the role of the middling sort in the revolution followed Maurice Dobb’s argument that English capitalism emerged from within the ranks of the direct producers, and that roughly speaking the nation divided in the 1640s along socioeconomic lines ( Dobb 1963 :170; Manning 1994 :86). Manning suggested that the growing importance of this group should be related to the prior development of industry, and through his stress on this development Dobb was able to explain why “industrial districts—not all of them—provided a main base for the parliamentarian and revolutionary parties” ( Manning, 1994 : 84–86). Following Dobb, Manning argued that the English Revolution could best be understood as a bourgeois revolution located within a framework dominated by “the rise of capitalism” ( Manning 1999 :45–51).

This concept of an English bourgeois revolution is contentious even amongst Marxists. Perhaps the most important critic of this sort of interpretation of the Civil War is Robert Brenner ( Blackledge 2008a ). Though Brenner has written a detailed analysis of the social roots of the conflict between the English monarchy and parliament in the 1640s ( Brenner 1993 ), he rejects the idea of a bourgeois revolution because, or so he argues, the break between feudalism and capitalism long preceded the Civil War. In his alternate account of this transition he argues that capitalism originated not as a result of a victory of the peasantry over the feudal nobility in the class struggle, and still less was it the product of a rising bourgeoisie. Rather the transition occurred as an unintended consequence of the class struggle under feudalism. According to Brenner:

The breakthrough from ‘traditional economy’ to relative self-sustaining economic development was predicated upon the emergence of a specific set of class or social-property relations in the countryside—that is, capitalist class relations. This outcome depended, in turn, upon the previous success of a two-sided process of class development and class conflict: on the one hand, the destruction of serfdom; on the other, the short-circuiting of the emerging predominance of small peasant property. ( Brenner 1985 :30)

In France, serfdom was destroyed by the class struggle between peasants and lords, but the process went beyond that needed for the development of capitalism, leading instead to the establishment of widespread small peasant property. In Eastern Europe, the peasants were defeated, which led to the reintroduction of serfdom. Only in England did optimal conditions come about for the evolution of agrarian capitalism.

Commenting on this thesis, Guy Bois has argued that Brenner’s thesis “amounts to a voluntarist vision of history in which the class struggle is divorced from all other objective contingencies and, in the first place, from such laws of development as may be peculiar to a specific mode of production” ( Bois 1985 :115). Conversely, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that Brenner’s interpretation of the transition to capitalism in England is of the first importance to the crique of capitlalism because, contra the orthodox Marxist case that ascribes explanatory primacy in history to the development of the productive forces, Brenner does not assume that a peculiar rationality (characteristic only of the capitalist mode of production) is a constituent element of human nature. His approach is therefore better able than its alternatives to grasp the specificity of capitalist rationality, and consequently the possibility of transcending capitalism ( Wood 1999 :7).

Though nominally aimed at Marx’s 1859 preface, Wood’s critique of orthodoxy is best understood as a challenge to GA Cohen’s understanding of historical materialism as detailed in his classic study Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence . Cohen’s interpretation of Marxism is characterized by its analytically rigorous defense of two key propositions. First, “the forces of production tend to develop throughout history (the development thesis),” and, second, “the nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces (the primacy thesis)” ( Cohen 2000 :134). Cohen explained the relationship between these propositions, and thus the course of history, in functionalist terms ( Cohen 2000 :260, 272). He also pointed to an explanation for the salience of the development thesis: he assumed that in a situation of scarcity human agents find it rational to develop the forces of production over time. This is because “men are . . . somewhat rational,” they live in a “historical situation of . . . scarcity,” and they “possess intelligence of a kind and degree which enables them to improve their situation” ( Cohen 2000 :152). Cohen’s interpretation of historical materialism consequently included an idiosyncratic defence of a type of political fatalism that was rooted in what Erik Olin Wright et al. call a “transhistorical” model of human rationality ( Wright et al. 1992 :24). He claimed that “in so far as the course of history, and more particularly, the future socialist revolution are, for Marx, inevitable, they are inevitable not despite what men may do, but because of what men, being rational, are bound, predictably, to do” ( Cohen 2000 :147, Cohen 1988 :55). Commenting on this argument, Alex Callinicos observes that the inevitabilist structure of Cohen’s reinterpretation of historical materialism “is almost a reductio ” of historical materialism, while Terry Eagleton writes that “rarely has a wrongheaded idea been so magnificently championed” ( Callinicos 2004 :69; Eagleton 2011 :242–243; Blackledge 2015 ).

If some theorists have responded to Cohen’s work by dismissing the utility of the developmental thesis and productive force determinism, others have attempted to salvage the rational core of these ideas. The problem with Cohen’s account is that by interpreting Marx as a positivist he reconstructed a caricatured version of historical materialism as a fatalist theory of change. By contrast, when he was still a Marxist, Alasdair MacIntyre argued that if the ethical core of Marxist political theory was to be retrieved from the corpse of Stalinism, historical materialism must be rescued from such crude account of historical progress ( MacIntyre 2008a :32). Stalin’s claim that history’s general course was predictable rested, or so MacIntyre maintained, on a misconceived view of the role of the base-superstructure metaphor in Marxist theory. Marx understood this metaphor as denoting neither a mechanical nor a causal relationship. Rather, he utilized Hegelian language to denote the process through which the economic base of a society provides “a framework within which superstructures arise, a set of relations around which the human relations can entwine themselves, a kernel of human relationships from which all else grows.” It was a mistake to imply that according to this model political developments followed automatically from economic causes. This is because in Marx’s view “the crucial character of the transition to socialism is not that it is a change in the economic base but that it is a revolutionary change in the relation of base to superstructure” ( MacIntyre 2008a :39).

Through this argument MacIntyre began the process of reconnecting Marx’s conception of history to his revolutionary politics after they had been torn asunder by the Stalinist counter-revolution. MacIntyre showed that once extricated from positivistic caricatures of his writings, Marx’s theory of history could be conceived as an essential resource for anyone wanting to understand capitalism as a historically transient mode of production, so as to overcome it. From a similar perspective, Manning’s work on the English Revolution detailed how the development of the forces of production in the century prior to 1640 had cumulatively restructured society. One consequence of these changes was the emergence of new forms of agency that were able to challenge the status quo in a way that would have been inconceivable a century earlier (see, e.g., Harman 1998 :96).

If it is difficult to imagine Cromwell’s victory, the Restoration, and subsequently the Glorious Revolution apart from these changes, it is equally true that the precise outcome of these revolutionary struggles was not inescapable. As Chris Harman argues, nothing was inevitable about the triumph of capitalism. For instance, the area around Prague was the most economically developed part of Europe in the early seventeenth century, but social forces similar to those that won a revolution in England were defeated by feudal reaction in Bohemia ( Harman 1998 :103–105). In an illuminating debate, Brenner and Harman agreed that the outcome of the class struggle could not be predicted, while disagreeing markedly in their assessment of the role of the development of the forces of production in history. Following Bois and others, Harman argued that a focus on the development of the forces of production allows historians to better explain why the revolutionary challenge to feudalism happened generally across Europe when it did, and not at any earlier point over the previous millennium ( Harman and Brenner 2006 ).

Whether one finds Harman or Brenner more persuasive on this point, they shared a desire to comprehend the transition from feudalism to capitalism in terms of forces inherent to the feudal system and without recourse to claims of inevitability. Gramsci embraced a similar conception of Marxism. Against attempts to downplay the role of individuals in the Marxist theory of history, Gramsci insisted that “organic crises” could develop and continue indefinitely if the agency required to overcome them did not appear.

A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them. These . . . efforts . . . form the terrain of the conjunctural. ( Gramsci 1971 :178)

Similarly, though from the opposite angle, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution examined Lenin’s role in overcoming an organic crisis. Trotsky maintained that individual socialists could play pivotal roles in history. But whereas in the past the process of revolutionary change had been less consciously determined, the transition from capitalism to socialism could only be won if the agents had a clear understanding of their position within a historical process. Lenin not only had a profound understanding of the historical process but also had built a party able to act on this understanding. Consequently, he was able to intervene decisively into a “chain of objective historic forces” in October 1917. Specifically, Lenin accelerated the process through which the Bolsheviks were able to grasp the new reality at a moment when time was at a premium, such that without him the revolutionary opportunity would probably have been missed ( Trotsky 1977 :343). Commenting on these arguments, MacIntyre points out that by contrast with caricatured criticisms of Marxism, because Trotsky recognized that “from time to time history presents us with real alternatives” his History illuminated the dialectical unity that can exist between great social forces and individual political initiatives ( MacIntyre 2008b :275; Blackledge 2006b ).

4. Conclusion

Commenting on Trotsky’s History , C. L. R. James wrote that “it is the greatest history book ever written . . . the climax of two thousand years of European writing and study of history” ( James 1994 :118). James was no fool, and he did not give praise lightly. He believed that Trotsky deserved this accolade because his History creatively applied Marx’s synthesis of the great strands of European culture to reconstruct the historical totality without either reducing the role of individuals to epiphenomena of broader social forces or reifying them as “great men” separate from these forces. Trotsky’s History was therefore a powerful example, perhaps the most powerful example, of what Hobsbawm calls “total history,” understood not as a “history of everything but history as an indivisible web in which all human activities are interconnected” ( Hobsbawm 2007 :186).

To reconstruct the social totality in the mind was, of course, Marx’s aim, and it continues to be the aim of contemporary Marxists. This project is an intrinsic aspect of revolutionary politics because the social revolution demands the present be understood as a historically constituted whole. Such a scientific account of the present as a historically evolving whole is an essential prerequisite for coherent revolutionary practice. If radical theory too often shares with mainstream social science a tendency to mere description—one thinks of intersectionality theory, for instance—pseudo-radical criticisms of the ideas of essentialism, necessity, and totality actually undermine the attempt to move beyond abstract moral condemnation to the politics of liberation. This article argues, contra the caricatures of Marx’s theory of history as a mechanically deterministic and fatalist conception of reality, that by providing the resources necessary to understand the present as a historical problem, historical materialism is the necessary theoretical complement to socialist activity without which the latter is blind.

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Materialism in Critical Theory: Marx and the Early Horkheimer

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• David A. Borman 3  

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This chapter explains and defends the sort of materialism that was a core theoretical commitment of Marx and of the early Frankfurt School—in particular, Max Horkheimer—and which has been the subject of aggressive internecine criticisms on the part of later critical theorists, like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth. The author offers grounds for thinking Marx’s and Horkheimer’s materialism both attractive and plausible. Section 10.1 establishes some necessary distinctions between substantive and explanatory materialism, Sect. 10.2 offers an account of Marx’s materialism, intended to hew closely to Horkheimer’s reading of Marx, Sect. 10.3 discusses Horkheimer’s understanding of materialism as a practical–theoretical commitment, and Sect. 10.4 concludes the chapter by offering some defense of materialism, chiefly centered around the normative importance of social labor, which both Marx and Horkheimer affirm.

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On this, see Alfred Schmidt’s excellent work; in the case of Marx, see Schmidt (1981) and Schmidt ( 2014 ); in the case of Horkheimer, see Schmidt ( 1984 , 1993 ).

For agreement that Horkheimer’s early materialism represents a form of what is now called “nonideal theory”, see Berendzen ( 2008 : 713).

It is unclear to me how Schmidt would define the substantive basis of Marx’s materialism in the sense I intend: in Chap. 1 of Schmidt 2014 , the emphasis is on material conditions and labor, as I have suggested; in Chap. 2 , however, Schmidt seems to suggest that it is Marx’s insistence on the independence of matter, of nature and its laws, from human consciousness and will that is basic ( 2014 : 69–70). At the same time, the significance of the claim about the independence of nature is, for Schmidt, the permanence of labor in human life, understood as the metabolic interaction between humans and nature ( 2014 : 83, 86). For what it is worth, I take the argument regarding matter and nature to be a secondary, “negative ontological” (as Schmidt calls it) consequence of the anti-idealist nature of Marx’s materialism, understood with reference to the basic conditions of human life.

The reflexive form is not the product of translation: “Sie selbst fangen an, sich von den Tieren zu unterscheiden, sobald sie anfangen, ihre Lebensmittel zu produzieren , ein Schritt, der durch ihre körperliche Organisation bedingt ist” (Marx and Engels 1962 : 21).

As Schmidt writes, quoting The German Ideology : “An ‘opposition between nature and history’ is created by the ideologists in that they exclude from history the productive relation of men to nature. Nature and history, said Marx in criticizing Bruno Bauer, are ‘not two separate “things” ’. Men always have before them a ‘historical nature and a natural history’ ” (Schmidt 2014 : 49).

Eclipse of Reason is back in print in English and a number of Horkheimer’s early essays have been republished, some translated for the first time, in Horkheimer 1993 (a, b, c, d, e), which appeared with a companion volume of newer commentary (although much of this is actually translation of some of the major contributions to German reception of Horkheimer in the 1970s–1980s). On the other hand, as others have also noted, several of the authors included in this companion volume demonstrate a marked lack of charity in their treatment of Horkheimer, a somewhat puzzling feature in an anthology the declared intent of which is to stimulate renewed interest in Horkheimer’s work: see Regier ( 1995 ) and Abromeit ( 2011 : 9, n. 26).

See McCole et al. ( 1993 ) for agreement that the secondary literature displays a distorting focus on methodological works, see Abromeit ( 2011 : 3). Important exceptions to that tendency include: Schmidt ( 1984 , 1993 ), Berendzen ( 2010 ), Berendzen ( 2008 ), and Schnädelbach ( 1993 ).

As Habermas himself observes, “Only twice did Marx express himself connectedly and fundamentally on the materialist conception of history [in The German Ideology , and in the “Preface to The Critique of Political Economy”]; otherwise he used this theoretical framework, in the role of historian, to interpret particular historical situations or developments… Engels characterizes historical materialism as a guide and a method. This could create the impression that Marx and Engels saw this doctrine as no more than a heuristic that helped to structure a (now-as-before) narrative presentation of history with systematic intent” (Habermas 1979 : 131). As we will see, this is in keeping with Horkheimer’s account of materialism, as centered on the response to contingent, historical conditions, relative to which the more abstract and universal commitments are the less essential and binding. And, as Habermas has just reported, this would also more or less fit Marx’s practice. Yet Habermas does not accept this account, insisting to the contrary that “historical materialism was not understood in this way … I shall not, therefore, treat it as a heuristic but as a theory, indeed as a theory of social evolution that, owing to its reflective status, is also informative for purposes of political action and can under certain circumstances be connected with the theory and strategy of revolution. The theory of capitalist development that Marx worked out in the Gründrisse and in Capital fits into historical materialism as a subtheory” (Habermas 1979 : 131). With respect to the full theory of social evolution, Habermas insists: “Marx conceives of history as a discrete series of modes of production, which, in its developmental-logical order, reveals the direction of social evolution” (Habermas 1979 : 132).

But one finds scarcely any argument in Habermas to support this sweeping interpretation which, as he admits, does not conform to Marx’s priorities as a theorist: we are to make nothing of the fact that, despite his central theoretical commitment purportedly being located in a highly abstract and universal theory of social evolution, Marx almost exclusively directed his attention elsewhere and to the development of forms of argument which indeed fit somewhat awkwardly with his rare metatheoretical pronouncements. To the contrary, as Schmidt observes: “In the 1850s, as [Marx] turned his attention to an almost overwhelming amount of social-historical material (and thus began preliminary work on Capital ), he became aware of the uselessness of a rigid linear schema of successive historical stages. Marx is concerned not only with ‘the uneven development of material production relative to, for example, artistic production’ but also with the considerable disproportions and cleavages that he confronts ‘within practical-social relations themselves’… These passages should make it clear that the philosophy of history constitutes only one—albeit indispensable—aspect of Marx’s thinking about history. It consists more of a radical humanistic impulse which gladly embraces and grows out of substantive investigations than of a doctrinaire developmental schema” (1981: 15–19). As Schmidt also notes, when Marx perceived a Russian commentator to have interpreted him as offering an “historical-philosophical theory of a general developmental path which is prescribed as a fate for all peoples regardless of their historical situation”, he protested that “such a ‘universal key’ to history is mistaken” (Schmidt 1981: 19).

I am less certain that Habermas’ judgment is fair to Marcuse. As Abromeit reports, in 1936, Horkheimer and Marcuse each sent letters to Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and others, announcing their joint intention to produce “a source book that contains the materialist theories of Western philosophy from classical antiquity to the end of the 19th century”, a project for which Marcuse had lead responsibility (Abromeit 2011 : 243; quoting Horkheimer 1985 –1996: V. 15, 517). The project was never completed, but Marcuse and Horkheimer appear to have been in substantive agreement about what it would involve. Nevertheless, there are pronounced differences between the materialist theory of the early Horkheimer and that of Marcuse, but that is a topic which I cannot pursue here.

Of course, as Horkheimer himself sarcastically notes, “metaphysics” has been used to describe a great variety of things as well: “It is difficult to come up with a formulation which will appeal to all learned gentleman and their views about ultimate things. If you are reasonably successful in your attacks on some such pompous ‘metaphysics,’ you may expect all the rest to say that they always had something altogether different in mind. And yet it seems to me that there is some sense in which metaphysics means insight into the true nature of things” ( 1978 : 45). As Berendzen puts it, “metaphysics”, in Horkheimer’s usage, refers to “a kind of intellectualized, theoretically elaborated attempt at coming up with a synoptic view of nature and human experience” ( 2008 : 698). While Hegel makes for an obvious example, Stirk ( 1992 ) suggests that Horkheimer, in the 1930s, principally had in mind the work of neo-Kantians like Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert, as well as “life philosophers” like Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann.

For a discussion of Horkheimer’s view of materialism in contrast to the “metaphysical materialism” of the Soviet type, for instance, see Schmidt ( 1984 : 71–72); for specific criticisms of Lenin and Engels, see Horkheimer ( 1985 –1996: V. 11) and Abromeit’s discussion ( 2011 : 150–56).

In his discussion of the relationship between Horkheimer and Rawls, Berendzen neglects this important difference: that the form of constructivism recommended by Horkheimer’s combination of ethical theory and social theory is importantly more like Habermas’ in this sense than like Rawls’ (see Berendzen 2010 : 1031–32). I am also not convinced that Horkheimer’s materialism is best understood as resting on a minimal, realist foundation—in the metaethical sense—as Berendzen suggests, as opposed to being constructivist “all the way down”. Such a position is both difficult to reconcile with Berendzen’s own compelling reading of Horkheimer’s materialism as a pragmatic “stance” and, in any case, metaethical realism in the standard sense adopts what Horkheimer would likely see as an undialectical attitude toward the objectivity of moral facts. In a letter to Friedrich Pollock, Horkheimer once wrote “The most unpleasant discovery to which materialism leads is that reason exists only as long as it is supported by a natural subject” (Dubiel 1985 : 1), and I suspect he would similarly tie the normativity of the facts of suffering to the existence of subjects capable of solidarity (see, e.g., Horkheimer 1993c : 158, where he asserts that the “materialist fighter”, as Dubiel puts it, prefers to struggle against the existing social order rather than to accommodate himself to it, not because of an external command or an inner voice; the reason lies “only in his wishes and desires, which will one day disappear”).

Of course, I enthusiastically concede that an account of discourse that is compatible with Horkheimer’s materialism will also differ from Habermas’ in important ways: in particular, it will deal in a direct way, as Habermas does not, with the material conditions which make discourse and the individual competence for discourse possible. For a more detailed critique of Habermas’ puzzling position on this, see Borman ( 2011 : Chap. 4).

As Berendzen also notes ( 2008 : 700), Horkheimer sees metaphysics both as a “symptom of the social arrangements that cause suffering” and as a distraction from and thus a cover for those very social arrangements, protecting them from critique and change.

For agreement on the centrality of the refusal of theodicy to Horkheimer’s thinking, early and late, see Schmidt ( 1993 : 28). Of course, this commitment is not unique to Horkheimer but is clearly found in Adorno as well. On the other hand, as Abromeit discusses, it was a significant point of disagreement between Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin (see Abromeit 2011 : 231–32).

“Materialist theory certainly does not afford to the political actor the solace that he will necessarily achieve his objective; it is not a metaphysics of history but rather a changing image of the world, evolving in relation to the practical efforts toward its improvement. The knowledge of tendencies that is contained in this image offers no clear prognosis of historical development. Even if those who maintain that the theory could be misleading ‘only’ in regard the pace of development, and not its direction, were correct (a frightful ‘only,’ since it concerns the agonies of generations), merely formally understood time could, after all, turn around and affect the quality of the content, i.e., humanity could be thrown back to earlier stages of development simply because the struggle had lasted too long” (Horkheimer 1993b : 44). See also Horkheimer ( 1978 : 35–37), where he insists that socialism in no way follows mechanically from the economic “laws” discovered by Marx, that “[o]ne has to fight for socialism, in other words” because “it will not be realized by a logic that is immanent in history but by men trained in theory and determined to make things better. Otherwise, it will not be realized at all”.

In this light, Honneth’s repeated complaint that Horkheimer subscribes to a problematic “philosophy of history” must indeed seem surprising and implausible (see Honneth 1993 : passim). Surveying the various arguments he directs at Horkheimer and Marx, it seems Honneth regards the philosophy of history as having two principal and unacceptable characteristics: the postulation of “a unified species-subject” in history ( 1993 : 190) and/or the postulation of a single, unitary process as the basis of history—to wit, the development of the forces of production, the technical mastery of nature—which unfolds behind and explains all of the myriad phenomena of historical change (200-01). Honneth offers very little textual evidence for his belief that Horkheimer endorses either of these positions. For a detailed discussion of Horkheimer’s texts which convincingly argues against his endorsement of either a metasubject of history or an inexorable historical process, see Schmidt ( 1993 ) (also, Dubiel 1985 : 33), and for more of Horkheimer’s own clear statements on these issues, see (1993d: 374, 388).

That is, rather than independently analyzing the dialectical relationship between labor—understood by Habermas as a reflection of accumulated instrumental knowledge of nature—and interaction—understood as actions coordinated on the basis of agreement or shared norms—Marx and Horkheimer reduce the latter to the former.

There is also something seriously disingenuous about Habermas’ position here given that he has disqualified as a reasonable desire for the members of any society, as a consequence of his theory of social evolution, the desire for the democratization of their economic life (see Habermas 1987b ; Borman 2011 : 101–2).

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Borman, D.A. (2017). Materialism in Critical Theory: Marx and the Early Horkheimer. In: Thompson, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Theory. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55801-5_10

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