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Historical Materialism Quotes

Browse 40 quotes about Historical Materialism.

Historical Materialism Quotes

“It is a development of history that has transformed the political classes into social classes such that, just as the Christians are equal in heaven yet unequal on earth, so the individual members of a people are equal in the heaven of their political world yet unequal in the earthly existence of society.”

ChristianityDemocracyLogicIdealismCritiqueHistorical MaterialismDialectical MaterialismMystification
Book:Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right
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“We know today that there is no such thing as absolute truth, that everything is relative, that everything is dependent on the conditions of time and place; but precisely for that reason, we should be very cautious in judging the “ignorance” of various historical periods. Their ignorance, to the extent that it is manifested in their characteristic social movements, aspirations and ideals, is also relative.”

JudgmentAbsolute TruthHistorical MaterialismRelative Truth1891
Book:The Materialist Conception of History
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“Passing to historical nations, we must first point out that in relation to them the word race cannot and should not be used at all. We do not know of any historical nation that can be regarded as racially pure; each of them is the product of an extremely lengthy and intense process of interbreeding and intermingling of different ethnic elements. Now try, after this, to determine the influence of “race” on the history of the ideologies of any nation! At a first glance it seems that nothing could be simpler and more correct than the idea that natural environment influences national temperament and, through temperament, the history of the nation’s intellectual and aesthetic development. But if Labriola had only recalled the history of his own country, he would have been convinced of the erroneousness of this idea. The modern Italians are surrounded by the same natural environment as that in which the ancient Romans lived, yet how unlike is the “temperament” of our modern tributaries of Menelik to the temperament of the stern conquerors of Carthage! If we were to undertake to explain the history of Italian art, for example, by the Italian temperament, we should very soon be confronted by the baffling question why this temperament, for its part, varied so profoundly at different times and in different parts of the Apennine Peninsula.”

RaceNationalismTemperamentHistorical MaterialismNational Character1897
Book:The Materialist Conception of History
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“The Marxist critique of the postulates of bourgeois democracy is in fact based on the definition of the class character of modern society. It demonstrates the theoretical inconsistency and the practical deception of a system which pretends to reconcile political equality with the division of society into social classes determined by the nature of the mode of production.”

DemocracyCapitalismLiberalismMarxismProletariatBourgeoisieClass StruggleHistorical Materialism
Book:The Democratic Principle
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“The real contradiction between Marx's scientific socialism and all bourgeois philosophy and sciences consists entirely in the fact that scientific socialism is the theoretical expression of a revolutionary process, which will end with the total abolition of these bourgeois philosophies and sciences, together with the abolition of the material relations that find their ideological expression in them.”

PhilosophyCapitalismMarxismBourgeoisieClass StruggleSocial RevolutionHistorical MaterialismClass WarDialectical MaterialismScientific Socialism
Book:Marxism and Philosophy
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“The form of family corresponding to civilization and coming to definite supremacy with it is monogamy, the domination of the man over the woman, and the single family as the economic unit of society. The central link in civilized society is the state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class.”

CapitalismExploitationMarxismPrivate PropertyClass StruggleMonogamyHistorical Materialism
Author:Frederick Engels
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“Those who substitute "people" for class, by prioritising the proletarian class above the party, believe they are rendering it a supreme homage whilst in fact they are declassing it, drowning it in "popular" confusion, and sacrificing it on the altar of counter-revolution.”

PoliticsRevolutionCommunismMarxismProletariatPopulismHistorical MaterialismCounter Revolution
Book:The Fundamentals, of Revolutionary Communism
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“Bakunin, on the other hand, considered himself a revolutionist of the deed, "not a philosopher and not an inventor of systems, like Marx." He adamantly refused to recognize the existence of any "a priori ideas or preordained, preconceived laws." Bakunin rejected the view that social change depended on the gradual maturation of "objective" historical conditions. On the contrary, he believed that men shaped their own destinies, that their lives could not be squeezed into a Procrustean bed of abstract sociological formulas. "No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world," Bakunin declared. "I cleave to no system, I am a true seeker." Mankind was not compelled to wait patiently as the fabric of history unfolded in the fullness of time. By teaching the working masses theories, Marx would only succeed in stifling the revolutionary ardor every man already possessed—"the impulse to liberty, the passion for equality, the holy instinct of revolt.”

MarxismAnarchismHistorical Materialism1967BakuninRevolutionary Theory
Book:The Russian Anarchists
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“...in pure mathematics the mind deal only with its own creations and imaginations. The concepts of number and form have not been derived from any source other than the world of reality. The ten fingers on which men learned to count, that is, to carry out the first arithmetical operation, may be anything else, but they are certainly not only objects that can be counted, but also the ability to exclude all properties of the objects considered other than their number-and this ability is the product of a long historical evolution based on experience. Like the idea of number, so the idea of form is derived exclusively from the external world, and does not arise in the mind as a product of pure thought.”

ScienceMathematicsHistorical MaterialismMaths
Book:Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science
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“In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.”

IndividualHistoryPowerEconomicsUnconsciousWillCollectivismVolitionHistorical MaterialismAggregate
Book:On Historical Materialism
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“The separation between the Man of Labour and the Instruments of Labout once established, such a state of things will maintain itself and reproduce itself upon a constantly increasing scale, until a new and fundamental revolution in the mode of production should again overturn it, and restore the original union in a new historical form.”

TheoryMarxismMarxKarl MarxHistorical MaterialismModes Of Production
Book:Wage-Labour and Capital & Value, Price and Profit
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“In nineteenth century Europe (and later in other parts of the world) the transition from a subsistence to a market economy based on the use of wage labor caused a net loss of autonomy for kin-based groups and households. Individuals became more dependent on external political, economic, and ideological forces. A profound contradiction resulted from the increasing individuation of the labor force and the need to maintain collective mechanisms for the reproduction of the working class through preexisting but constantly evolving patterns of family, household, and kinship organization. In other words, the advance of capitalism created a dynamic opposition between productive and reproductive spheres.”

FeminismReproductionHistorical MaterialismDialectical MaterialismDialecticFamily SystemsPolitcal Economy
Book:Women's Work: Development and the Division of Labor by Gender
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“But having developed productive forces to a tremendous extent, capitalism has become enmeshed in contradictions which it is unable to solve. By producing larger and larger quantities of commodities, and reducing their prices, capitalism intensifies competition, ruins the mass of small and medium private owners, converts them into proletarians and reduces their purchasing power, with the result that it becomes impossible to dispose of the commodities produced. On the other hand, by expanding production and concentrating millions of workers in huge mills and factories, capitalism lends the process of production a social character and thus undermines its own foundation, inasmuch as the social character of the process of production demands the social ownership of the means of production; yet the means of production remain private capitalist property, which is incompatible with the social character of the process of production. These irreconcilable contradictions between the character of the productive forces and the relations of production make themselves felt in periodical crises of overproduction, when the capitalists, finding no effective demand for their goods owing to the ruin of the mass of the population which they themselves have brought about, are compelled to burn products, destroy manufactured goods, suspend production, and destroy productive forces at a time when millions of people are forced to suffer unemployment and starvation, not because there are not enough goods, but because there is an overproduction of goods.”

CommunismSoviet UnionDialecticsUssrStalinHistorical MaterialismMarxism LeninismHistorical Science
Book:Dialectical and Historical Materialism
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“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 circumstances.”

HistoryCapitalismCommunismMarxismPolitical EconomyHistorical Materialism
Book:Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3
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“The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”

HistoryMarxismClass StruggleHistorical Materialism
Book:On the Concept of History
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“In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish 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, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”

ConsciousnessHistoryIdeologyHistorical Materialism
Author:Karl Marx
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“The uninterrupted victory of democracy, which to our revisionism as well as to bourgeois liberalism, appears as a great fundamental law of human history and, especially, modern history has shown upon closer examination to be a phantom. No absolute and general relation can be constructed between capitalist development and democracy. The political form of a given country is always the result of the composite of all the existing political factors, domestic as well as foreign. It admits within its limits all variations of the scale from absolute monarchy to the democratic republic.”

HistoryCommunismLiberalismHistorical Materialism
Book:Reform or Revolution
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“At the present time, it is of course still impossible to foresee to any precise degree just what sections of the field of history will be illuminated and just how much light will be cast by a materialist investigation which would proceed from a more concrete study of the capitalist curve and the interrelationship between the latter and all the aspects of social life. Conquests that may be attained on this road can be determined only as the result of such an investigation itself, which must be more systematic, more orderly than those historical materialist excursions hitherto undertaken. In any case, such an approach to modern history promises to enrich the theory of historical materialism with conquests far more precious than the extremely dubious speculative juggling with the concepts and terms of the materialist method that has, under the pens of some of our Marxists, transplanted the methods of formalism into the domain of the materialist dialectic, and has led to reducing the task to rendering definitions and classifications more precise and to splitting empty abstractions into four equally empty parts; it has, in short, adulterated Marxism by means of the indecently elegant mannerisms of Kantian epigones. It is a silly thing indeed endlessly to sharpen and resharpen an instrument to chip away Marxist steel, when the task is to apply the instrument in working over the raw material!”

Historical Materialism
Author:Leon Trotsky
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“Politics always lags behind economics, far behind. The state apparatus is far more resistant than is possible to believe; and it succeeds, at moments of crisis, in organizing greater forces loyal to the regime than the depth of the crisis might lead one to suppose. This is especially true of the more important capitalist states.”

PhilosophyHistorySocialismMarxismPolitical PhilosophyPolitical EconomyPolitical HistoryHistorical MaterialismCultural Hegemony
Author:Antonio Gramsci
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“The law of combined development of backward countries – in the sense of a peculiar mixture of backward elements with the most modern factors – here rises before us in its most finished form, and offers a key to the fundamental riddle of the Russian revolution. If the agrarian problem, as a heritage from the barbarism of the old Russian history, had been solved by the bourgeoisie, if it could have been solved by them, the Russian proletariat could not possibly have come to power in 1917. In order to realise the Soviet state, there was required a drawing together and mutual penetration of two factors belonging to completely different historic species: a peasant war – that is, a movement characteristic of the dawn of bourgeois development – and a proletarian insurrection, the movement signalising its decline. That is the essence of 1917.”

Russian RevolutionHistorical MaterialismPermanent Revolution
Book:History of the Russian Revolution
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“A radical social revolution depends on certain definite historical conditions of economic development as its precondition. It is also only possible where with capitalist production the industrial proletariat occupies at least an important position among the mass of the people. And if it is to have any chance of victory, it must be able to do immediately as much for the peasants as the French bourgeoisie, mutatis mutandis, did in its revolution for the French peasants of that time. A fine idea, that the rule of labour involves the subjugation of land labour! But here Mr Bakunin's innermost thoughts emerge. He understands absolutely nothing about the social revolution, only its political phrases. Its economic conditions do not exist for him. As all hitherto existing economic forms, developed or undeveloped, involve the enslavement of the worker (whether in the form of wage-labourer, peasant etc.), he believes that a radical revolution is possible in all such forms alike. Still more! He wants the European social revolution, premised on the economic basis of capitalist production, to take place at the level of the Russian or Slavic agricultural and pastoral peoples, not to surpass this level [...] The will, and not the economic conditions, is the foundation of his social revolution.”

RevolutionMarxismAnarchismCritiqueSocial RevolutionHistorical MaterialismDialectical MaterialismMikhail Bakunin
Book:Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy
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“Like right, so crime, i.e. the struggle of the isolated individual against the prevailing conditions, is not the result of pure arbitrariness. On the contrary, it depends on the same conditions as that rule. The same visionaries who see in right and law the domination of some independently existing, general will can see in crime the mere violation of right and law.”

PhilosophyLawCrimeTheoryPolitical RightsHistorical MaterialismConflict TheoryCritical Criminology
Book:The German Ideology / Theses on Feuerbach / Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy
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“Every ideology dies together with the social relations which produced it. This final disappearance is, however, preceded by a moment when the ideology, suffering the blows of the critique directed at it, loses its ability to veil and conceal the social relations from which it emanated. The exposure of the roots of an ideology is a sure sign of its imminent end. For, as Lassalle said: "The dawning of a new age always consists only in the knowledge attained about the true nature of the preceding reality.”

RevolutionIdeologySociologyMarxismCritiqueSocial RelationsHistorical Materialism
Book:Law and Marxism
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“The contradiction between the individual and the social, between the private and the universal, which bourgeois philosophy is unable to do away with, despite all its efforts, is the very basis of life in bourgeois society as a society of commodity-producers. This contradiction is embodied in the actual interrelations of people who cannot regard their private endeavors as social aspirations except in the absurd and mystified form of the value of commodities.”

IndividualismMarxismCritiqueDialecticsHistorical MaterialismDialectical MaterialismCommodity FetishismCommodity ProductionBourgeois Philosophy
Book:The General Theory of Law and Marxism
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“The modern proletariat was not led by the social-democracy into class struggle. On the contrary, the international social-democratic movement was called into being by the class struggle to bring a conscious aim and unity into the various local and scattered fragments of the class struggle.”

SocialismCommunismMaterialismMarxismClass StruggleSocial DemocracyHistorical Materialism
Book:The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy
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“Have private property, capitalist exploitation and class rule ceased to exist? Or, have the propertied classes in a spell of patriotic fervour declared: in view of the needs of the war we hereby turn over the means of production, the earth, the factories and the mills thereon, into the possession of the people? Have they relinquished the right to make profits out of these possessions? Have they set aside all political privileges, will they sacrifice them upon the altar of the fatherland, now that it is in danger? It is, to say the least, a rather naive hypothesis, and sounds almost like a story from a kindergarten primer. And yet the declaration of our official leaders, that the class struggle has been suspended, permits no other interpretation.”

CommunismMarxismCritiqueClass StruggleHistorical MaterialismSocial Democratic Party
Book:The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy
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“Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole, that is recognizable only in all its relations, and from which no nation can hold aloof at will.”

WarCapitalismImperialismMarxismDialecticsHistorical Materialism
Book:The Crisis in the German Social-Democracy
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