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Historical materialism is a methodological and explanatory framework for understanding social, political, and environmental conditions and change, based in the thought of Karl Marx. It suggests that the various forms of human institutions and social organization are dependent upon the “production of material life” in communities, and is described most famously in the preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859. There, Marx calls the ensemble of the material “productive forces” and their corresponding relations of production, as they exist at any one place and point in time, a “mode of production,” and offers as examples “Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois [capitalist].” Historical materialism is thus an explicitly materialist theory of history, for each of the social formations that make up the diversity of human history, “the social, political and intellectual life process in general” will be conditioned or derived from the “mode of production of material life.”

The approaches to these relations we know today as political ecology, environmental sociology, and political economy of the environment would be unthinkable without historical materialism. The fundamental object of analysis in the environment – society relation is change: How does human life affect its environment (nature), and how does the environment affect human life? The way in which the mutual shaping of environment and society is critically approached today was largely rejected, even unthinkable, in the intellectual climate from which Marx emerged.

Early Beginnings

Marx developed his theory of history as a critique of the idealism dominant in Germany when he began his career. Idealism asserts that human consciousness is independent of the world in which it exists. Within environmental constraints, human life is seen to be a product of human ideas, not of the material ways in which that life is lived. However, historical materialism shares G.F.W. Hegel’s idea of historical “development.” Hegel argued that society developed through the progressive overcoming of contradictions in human consciousness. Marx agreed with that assumption, but felt that “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.” For Marx, what people are even capable of comprehending is a product of their material-historical life. An approach like political ecology, which attends to the myriad ways in which the environment is both a site of politics and highly politicized, is unimaginable without this central tenet.

Although Marx did not use the term historical materialism himself, there are several key ideas upon which historical materialism depends. The most contentious of these is the so-called base–superstructure model. Marx claimed that the “sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” Also at issue is the process of social change. Marx argues that “at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production.” This dynamic has massive repercussions for individual and collective life, since during “the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.” Further, Marx states the “epoch of social revolution” is driven by the “conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production,” which transforms “the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”

This is the only place in Marx’s huge corpus that he uses the terms basis and superstructure, but the idea has over time become the most widely known formulation of historical materialism, and is the main support for the many who claim Marx was an economic or technological “determinist.” Many scholars of historical materialism reject these simplistic accusations. Marx makes it clear that the economic structure or base is not technology, but the social relations of the production of human life. For Marx, human life is produced at many sites like the home, the school, and what he called “nature.”

Historical materialism has been crucial in informing a wide range of work on social and environmental change: Fernand Braudel is concerned with the slow, massive changes in human and biophysical landscapes; Piers Blaikie or Michael Watts with the vicious spiral of exploitation, environmental decay and social immiseration; and O’Connor with the inevitable crises precipitated by capitalism’s destruction of nature. But in each instance, the conceptual framework is an environmentally sensitive historical materialism.

Marx sometimes described these dynamics as a struggle to subdue or control nature, and sometimes historical materialists do present human history in this manner. More often, however, what is at stake in historical materialism is the way in which it presents analytical categories for rigorous, engaged, socioenvironmental research. In other words, base-superstructure or environment-society can seem an overly simplistic relational model. But if we think of it as the name of a problem, as Fredric Jameson suggests, then we open up enormously productive avenues for thinking about how and why societies and their environments interact the ways they do.

Bibliography:

Piers Blaikie, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (Longman, 1986);
Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries, 3 (University of California, 1992);
Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism (Verso, 1990);
Jake Kosek, Understories: The Political Life of Forests in Northern New Mexico (Duke, 2006);
Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (International Publishers, 1979);
James O’Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in Ecological Marxism (Guilford, 1997);
W. Scott Prudham, Knock on Wood (Routledge, 2004);
Paul Robbins, Political Ecology (Blackwell, 2004);
Michael Watts, Silent Violence: Food, Famine and Peasantry in Northern Nigeria (University of California, 1983).