This portion of a larger 1914 article, an Encyclopedia entry, was reproduced here for the 40th anniversary of Marx’s death in March, 1923.

‘Marx’s Materialist Conception of History’ (1914) by N. Lenin from International Press Correspondence. Vol. 3 No. 25. March 13, 1923.

The realization of the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the old materialism convinced Marx of the necessity of bringing social science into accord with the materialist foundation of society. If materialism lays down the general rule that consciousness is to be explained by being, then the application of materialism to the examination of society demands that social consciousness be explained by social being. “Technology”, says, Marx (chap. 1), “reveals the active attitude of Man towards Nature, the immediate productive process of his life, and at the same time, the social relations of his life and the mental conceptions arising therefrom”. Marx gives a consistent formulation of the fundamentals of materialism in its application to human Society and its history,–in the preface to his book, Critique of Political Economy, in the following words:

“In the life of social production, human beings enter into definite and necessary relations which are independent of their will and which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these productive relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis, upon which a legal and political super-structure arises, and which corresponds to definite forms of social consciousness. The methods of production of man’s material existence, determine the whole process of social, political, and mental life. It is not the consciousness of human beings which determines their existence; the reverse is the case; their social existence determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or, in juridical language, with the relations of property within which they have hitherto functioned. These relations are transformed from forms of development of the productive forces into fetters of production.

“Then comes the period of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation, the entire immense super-structure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of  natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic–in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.

“Just as little as one can judge an individual by what he thinks himself to be, just as little can such a revolutionary epoch be judged by its consciousness, but must rather be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflicts between social productive forces and relations of production. No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society. Therefore mankind always takes up only such problems as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the problem arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. Broadly conceived, Asiatic, antique, feudal, and modern bourgeois methods of production may be designated as progressive epochs of the economic social development. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production”.

The materialist conception of history, or, strictly speaking, the application of materialism to the sphere of social phenomena, has removed two of the main defects of the theory of history as hitherto understood. History has, at best, up to now, considered the ideal motives of the historical activity of human beings, without examining into the cause of these motives, without discovering the objective law behind the development of the system of social relations, without seeking for the root of these relations in the degree of development of material production. Secondly, the theories applied up to now, have overlooked precisely the activity of the great masses of the population, while historical materialism has given us for the first time the possibility of examining, with the precision of natural science, into the social conditions influencing the life of the masses, and into the changes taking place in these conditions. Pre-Marxian “sociology” and history writing achieved, at best, an accumulation of bare facts, and have provided us with nothing more than a representation of some separate phases of the historical process. Marx showed the way to a comprehensive and thorough examination into the process of origination, evolution, and decay of social-economic formations, in that he regarded all contradictory tendencies in their totality, and traced them back to accurately definable conditions of life and production in the various classes of society; he thus eliminated subjectivism, as well as arbitrariness in the choice and interpretation of some “leading ideas”, and laid bare the roots of all ideas, without exception, and of all the different tendencies in the state of social productive forces. Human beings make their own history, but Marx was the first to show what determines the motives of human beings, and particularly of the masses of human beings; he was the first to show what the totality of all these conflicts is to human society, what are the objective conditions of the production of material life, forming the basis for every historical activity among human beings, what is the evolutionary law of these conditions. In this way Marx pointed out the way to the scientific study of history as a consistent process, following definite laws through all its multifarious immensity and in all its contradictions.

That in every society the strivings of some members of this society are opposed to the strivings of others, that social life is full of contradictions, that history shows us a struggle between and within peoples and societies, that history is composed of alternating periods of peace and war, revolution and reaction, standstill and rapid advance or decay–all these facts are well known. Marx gave us the clue which enables us to discover the law underlying this apparent labyrinth and chaos. This cue is the theory of class war. It is only the study of the sum total of the strivings of all the members of a society, or of a group of societies, that can lead to a scientific determination of the results of these strivings. The source of conflicting interests lies, however, in the difference of position and living conditions, of the classes into which every society is divided. “The history of all societies up to now has been the history of class war”, wrote Mars in 1848 in the Communist Manifest (and Engels added later: “except the history of primeval society”). Free men and slaves, patricians and plebians, barons and serfs, guild citizens and journeymen, in short, oppressors and oppressed have always stood in opposition to one another, have carried on an uninterrupted struggle, at times open, at times concealed; a fight which invariably ended with a revolutionary reformation of the whole society, or with the common decay of both fighting classes. In earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complete stratification of society into various classes, a multitudinous graduation of social positions. In ancient Rome we see patricians, plebians, knights, slaves; in the middle ages–feudal lords, vassals, guild citizens, journeymen, serfs; and within almost all of these classes a still further special graduation. The modern bourgeois society which has arisen out of the decay of feudal society has not annulled class antagonisms. It has only replaced the old classes by new ones, created new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle. Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, however is, distinguished by having simplified class antagonisms. The whole of society splits up more and more into two large hostile camps, into two large classes directly antagonistic to one another: bourgeoisie and proletariat…

Since the great French revolution, European history has revealed in a number of countries, with special clearness, the real fundamental of events, the Class War. Even during the epoch of restoration there were a number of French historians (Thierry, Guizot, Mignet, Thiers), who could not but designate when forming a generalization on events–Class War as the key to French history as a whole. And the latest epoch, the epoch of complete victory of the bourgeoisie, of the parliaments, of extended if not general suffrage, of cheap daily newspapers real by the masses, the epoch of mighty and ever growing labor organizations and employers, unions etc., has shown even more graphically, though often in a very peaceful constitutional form, class war as the motive force underlying events. In a number of historical works, Marx has given us many brilliant and profound examples of materialist historical writing, analyzing the position of each separate class and even of the various groups and strata within the class, and thus demonstrating why and how every struggle of class against class is a political struggle.

International Press Correspondence, widely known as”Inprecorr” was published by the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) regularly in German and English, occasionally in many other languages, beginning in 1921 and lasting in English until 1938. Inprecorr’s role was to supply translated articles to the English-speaking press of the International from the Comintern’s different sections, as well as news and statements from the ECCI. Many ‘Daily Worker’ and ‘Communist’ articles originated in Inprecorr, and it also published articles by American comrades for use in other countries. It was published at least weekly, and often thrice weekly.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/inprecor/1923/v03n25-mar-13-1923-Inprecor-loc.pdf