Historical Materialism

Historical Materialism: Understanding How Societies Change

Historical materialism, first developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is a framework for understanding how societies evolve, persist, and eventually break down. At its core, it looks at how economic activity shapes social structures and how struggles over resources drive historical change.

What Are Social Structures?

Social structures are the organised patterns of relationships and institutions — governments, schools, corporations, families — that come together to form society. For historical materialists, these structures aren’t random or purely cultural. They are built around how societies meet basic needs: food, shelter, care, and reproduction. But it’s not just about markets and money. It’s about how human beings collectively work with nature to survive and thrive. The way societies produce, consume, and distribute resources forms the backbone of every social institution.

Crucially, hierarchies aren’t inevitable — they only emerge in class societies, where a division arises between an appropriating class (those who control the extra resources) and an exploited class of producers (those who produce them). In more egalitarian societies, resources are shared more equally, and social structures exist without entrenched domination. This leads to one of historical materialism’s central ideas: class struggle. This struggle arises when some people control the surplus — the extra goods and resources produced beyond what’s needed for survival — while others are left with only the bare minimum. For example, if a farmer produces more food than their family needs, that extra food is surplus. In class societies, that surplus often ends up in the hands of a ruling class, rather than the person who produced it. Disputes over who gets access to this surplus create tensions that can lead to social change — or even revolution.

Stability, Change, and Revolutions

Societies tend to remain stable when they can adapt to external pressures (like wars or natural disasters) and when their institutions are seen as legitimate. Part of that stability comes from what Marx called superstructures — the ideas, beliefs, laws, religions, and cultural narratives that justify the existing social order. Superstructures help maintain power dynamics by making themselves seem “natural” or inevitable. For example, the idea of the “divine right of kings” made feudalism seem natural and inescapable. Today, the fact that, to quote Mark Fisher, its easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism helps entrench the system by making it appear that its version of class society has to be the final horizon for human existence.

People are born into social structures that have been passed down through generations, often without questioning them. As Marx famously put it, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please… they do so under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

But stability isn’t permanent. Marx and Engels argued that when a society’s forces of production — the tools, technology, land, and labour used to produce goods — come into conflict with its relations of production — the social arrangements that control how those resources are used and who benefits — crises emerge. This has been the most controversial idea within historical materialism as it seems determinist and mechanical. Yet its not necessary for the broader theory to work. 

Here’s a breakdown:

• Forces of production include everything needed to produce goods and services — from natural resources (like land or minerals) to tools, machines, and human labour.
• Relations of production describe who owns these productive forces and how they’re organised. It’s about power: who controls production, who does the labour, and who benefits from the results. Put in another way, in class societies, when it comes to the means of production – who is it that is the appropriating class, and who is it that is the exploited one.  

In every class society, these relations determine who benefits from the labour of others. For example:

• In slave societies, enslaved people worked the land, but the masters owned both the land and the people, keeping any surplus for themselves.
• In feudal societies, peasants farmed land owned by landlords, handing over a share of their crops as rent.
• In capitalist societies, workers sell their labour for wages, but the surplus value they create (the difference between what they produce and what they’re paid) goes to business owners as profit.

When the forces of production evolve — through new technologies or methods — but the relations of production stay the same, tensions build. Eventually, the old system can no longer function, leading to instability and, potentially, revolution.

Marx captured this dynamic in a famous passage:
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… Then begins an epoch of social revolution.”

In simple terms: when the way society works can’t keep up with how people produce and innovate, something has to give. But, as we explored before, history is also about class struggle. It doesn’t just have to be about technological progress. 

Class, Production, and Power

One of the key contributions of historical materialism is its focus on modes of production — the combination of forces of production (tools, land, technology) and relations of production (social roles and power dynamics around production). By analysing these, Marx and Engels could distinguish between different types of societies, from feudalism to capitalism, across different periods of time.

For Marx and Engels, communism wasn’t just a utopian dream — it was a logical outcome of history, a classless society where the means of production would be collectively owned, eliminating the division between producers and appropriators. That’s because the material wealth that capitalism brings, and the way in which it makes workers understand themselves as a class, would mean that one day workers would rise up against the capitalists and usher in communism.

Agency, Struggle, and Change

A common critique of historical materialism is that it can sound overly deterministic — as if history is driven purely by impersonal economic forces. But Marx and Engels also emphasised human agency — the capacity of people to act independently and make choices that shape the world.

While people are born into existing social structures, they’re not trapped by them. Class struggle is the clearest expression of this agency. Workers, peasants, enslaved people, and other oppressed groups have always resisted exploitation — sometimes through small, everyday acts of defiance and sometimes through large-scale revolutions.

However, this struggle is not waged on equal footing. The ruling class controls not just the economy but also the superstructures — legal systems, media, education — that shape how people understand their world. This is why resistance often involves challenging dominant ideologies, exposing exploitation, and building solidarity among the oppressed.

Agency in historical materialism is therefore both constrained and enabled by existing social relations. People “make history,” but they do so under conditions they didn’t choose. Still, through collective action, they can transform those conditions.

This is why Marx famously declared:
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

For Marxists, the point isn’t just to study these struggles but to actively participate in them. Historical materialism isn’t a passive theory — it’s a call to action. It invites us to understand how power operates in society, and more importantly, how people can organise to challenge exploitation and build more just, equitable systems.

As Marx put it:
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.