Cosmonaut recently published an article by a comrade Valentine Seebart, in which the comrade attempts to critique the framework of historical materialism as “a form of disenfranchised idealism.”1 I regret to inform comrade Seebart that their understanding of historical materialism is deeply flawed, and that the foundation of their argument for an “ideo-materialist” alternative for Marxism is fatally undermined by the resulting confusion.2
Subjecting the reader to an immense block of text from The German Ideology as proof, Seebart argues that Marx reconstructs the terms of Hegelianism by simply placing the power of the geist “into the hands of an equally undefinable entity, the historical process.”3 Of course, if this was Marx’s formulation, then Seebart would be correct, since the tautology ‘history creates history’ is a deeply idealistic statement of the most vulgar kind. Yet, the evidence provided does not support Seebart’s claim. Let us take, for example, Seebart’s evidence for historical materialism’s quasi-idealism. In the material quoted, Marx and Engels simply claim and elaborate on the idea that “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”4 However, nowhere do they state that the origin of the phenomenon of historical change is “the unconscious entity of economic development.”5 Rather, this is something that Seebart reads in to the text.
Contrary to what Seebart would have Cosmonaut’s readers believe, historical materialism is not built on such weak foundations. The actual historical materialist explanation for the phenomenon of historical change is far more profound than the simple tautology Seebart provides. In the mature work of Marx and Engels, the origin of historical change is to be found in the agency of opposed collective subjects in struggle. In other words, class struggle over production, including the production of history itself, produces historical reality as a changing terrain of material conditions, within and over which the struggle continues. The motor of historical change in historical materialism, then, is not the processual nature of a platonic history, as Seebart claims, but the agency of collective subjects.6
Without the foil of this misrepresented aspect of historical materialism, Seebart’s case for an “ideo-materialism” collapses. For it is only by ignoring the centrality of class struggle that Seebart can claim to be reconciling a contradiction they believe lies at the heart of historical materialism: that Marx and Engels make a distinction between base and superstructure as ontologically opposed categories roughly approximating ‘the material’ and ‘the ideal,’ and that historical materialism asserts the primacy of ‘the material’ base as the motor of historical change and development.
However, for Marx and Engels, base and superstructure are neither ontologically distinct nor opposed, and neither is assigned the power to enact historical change of their own accord. Base and superstructure are simply different aspects of production. The superstructure, rather than being an ontologically distinct aspect of reality from the base, is made up of those aspects of production contingent upon others. Instead of asserting the primacy of ‘the material world’ over ‘the world of ideas,’ Marx and Engels collapse these categories into production and assign the bulk of what has come to be called mental, intellectual, and cultural production to a general, but not absolute, status of contingency. Base and superstructure make up the totality of the terrain of material conditions, i.e. historical reality. Class struggle, the actual motor of historical change and development, occurs within this totality.7
It is all too common for the plethora of post-Marxist theorists that orbit the political Left to misconstrue the foundational principles of historical materialist analysis so as to better present themselves as the level-headed alternative to so-called Marxist orthodoxy. Unfortunately, Seebart has joined this increasingly large club. However, despite accusations of ‘mechanical’ materialism peddled by comrade Seebart and many others, historical materialism has always placed the origin of historical change firmly within the class struggle and the collective human agency involved therein.
Solidarity,
Christopher Carp
- Valentine Seebart, “From Marx, and Back to Hegel,” Cosmonaut Magazine, Sept. 1, 2022, https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/09/from-marx-and-back-to-hegel/.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Easily accessible evidence to this effect can be found in The Communist Manifesto, where the terrain of the then-consolidating capitalist world-system, rather than being posited as the origin of the bourgeois, is described as the product of the struggles of the bourgeois’ as an already existing political subject. Whether or not one agrees that capitalist society has its roots in the specific struggle between bourgeoisie and nobility, it is clear that Marx and Engels understood the origin of the phenomena of historical change and development to be the struggles between collective subjects over production, rather than the mode of production itself or ‘history’ as an ideal force. See: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2011), 64-71.
- The material which Seebart quotes from The German Ideology can itself serve as evidence to this effect. In this quote, Marx and Engels eloquently describe “mental production” not as an ontologically distinct realm subordinated to ‘material reality’ as the real motor of historical change, but as a contingent aspect of general human production that is tightly interwoven with the base.