Historical materialism in the context of "Walter Benjamin"

Social history, often called history from below, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. Historians who write social history are called social historians.

Social history came to prominence in the 1960s, spreading from schools of thought in the United Kingdom and France which posited that the Great Man view of history was inaccurate because it did not adequately explain how societies changed. Instead, social historians wanted to show that change arose from within society, complicating the popular belief that powerful leaders were the source of dynamism. While social history came from the Marxist view of history (historical materialism), the cultural turn and linguistic turn saw the number of sub-fields expand as well as the emergence of other approaches to social history, including a social liberal approach and a more ambiguous critical theory approach.

Karl Marx (German: [ˈkaʁl ˈmaʁks]; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (written with Friedrich Engels), and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894), a critique of classical political economy which employs his theory of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his life's work. Marx's ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence.

Born in Trier in the Kingdom of Prussia, Marx studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, and received a doctoral degree in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1841. A Young Hegelian, he was influenced by the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and both critiqued and developed Hegel's ideas in works such as The German Ideology (written 1846) and the Grundrisse (written 1857–1858). While in Paris, Marx wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and met Engels, who became his closest friend and collaborator. After moving to Brussels in 1845, they were active in the Communist League, and in 1848 they wrote The Communist Manifesto, which expresses Marx's ideas and lays out a programme for revolution. Marx was expelled from Belgium and Germany, and in 1849 moved to London, where he wrote The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and Das Kapital. From 1864, Marx was involved in the International Workingmen's Association (First International), in which he fought the influence of anarchists led by Mikhail Bakunin. In his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), Marx wrote on revolution, the state and the transition to communism. He died stateless in 1883 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a dialectical materialist interpretation of historical development, known as historical materialism, to understand class relations and social conflict. Originating in the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the Marxist approach views class struggle as the central driving force of historical change.

Marxist analysis views a society's economic mode of production as the foundation of its social, political, and intellectual life, a concept known as the base and superstructure model. In its critique of capitalism, Marxism posits that the ruling class (the bourgeoisie), who own the means of production, systematically exploit the working class (the proletariat), who must sell their labour power to survive. This relationship, according to Marx, leads to alienation, periodic economic crises, and escalating class conflict. Marx theorised that these internal contradictions would fuel a proletarian revolution, leading to the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of a socialist mode of production. For Marxists, this transition represents a necessary step towards a classless, stateless communist society.

The great man theory is an approach to the study of history popularised in the 19th century according to which history can be largely explained by the impact of great men, or heroes: highly influential and unique individuals who, due to their natural attributes, such as superior intellect, heroic courage, extraordinary leadership abilities, or divine inspiration, have a decisive historical effect. The theory is primarily attributed to the Scottish essayist, historian, and philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who gave a series of lectures on heroism in 1840, later published as On Heroes, Hero-Worship, & the Heroic in History, in which he states:

This theory is usually contrasted with people's history, which emphasizes the life of the masses creating overwhelming waves of smaller events which carry leaders along with them. Another contrasting school is historical materialism.

Marxist historiography, or historical materialist historiography, is an influential school of historiography. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography include the centrality of social class, social relations of production in class-divided societies that struggle against each other, and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes (historical materialism). Marxist historians follow the tenets of the development of class-divided societies, especially modern capitalist ones.

Marxist historiography has developed in varied ways across different regional and political contexts. It has had unique trajectories of development in the West, the Soviet Union, and in India, as well as in the pan-Africanist and African-American traditions, adapting to these specific regional and political conditions in different ways. Marxist historiography has made contributions to the history of the working class, and the methodology of a history from below.

The Communist Manifesto (German: Das Kommunistische Manifest), originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is a political pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It was commissioned by the Communist League and published in London in 1848. The text represents the first and most systematic attempt by the two founders of scientific socialism to codify for wide consumption the historical materialist idea, namely, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", in which social classes are defined by the relationship of people to the means of production. Published amid the Revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the manifesto has become one of the world's most influential political documents.

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels combine philosophical materialism with the Hegelian dialectical method in order to analyze the development of European society through its modes of production, including primitive communism, antiquity, feudalism, and capitalism, noting the emergence of a new, dominant class at each stage. The text outlines the relationship between the means of production, relations of production, forces of production, and mode of production, and posits that changes in society's economic "base" affect changes in its "superstructure". The authors assert that capitalism is marked by the exploitation of the proletariat (working class of wage labourers) by the ruling bourgeoisie, which is "constantly revolutionising the instruments [and] relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society". They argue that capital's need for a flexible labour force dissolves the old relations, and that its global expansion in search of new markets creates "a world after its own image".

The German Ideology (German: Die deutsche Ideologie), also known as A Critique of the German Ideology, is a set of manuscripts written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher, but the work was retrieved and first published in 1932 by the Soviet Union's Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute. The book uses satirical polemics to critique modern German philosophy, particularly that of young Hegelians such as Marx's former mentor Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own. It criticizes "ideology" as a form of "historical idealism", as opposed to Marx's historical materialism (the "materialist conception of history"). The first part of Volume I also examines the division of labor and Marx's theory of human nature, on which he states that humans "distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence".