In Defense of Historical Materialism

A brief essay on philosophical materialism and idealism in the study of history

Several Substackers have asked me lately what I mean by “idealist” or “materialist” when it comes to history, current events, and human ethics in general. Whether my answer is a useful one or an example of “Be careful what you wish for” is really up to you, but for what it’s worth here it is.

To understand where the two different approaches diverge, one must go to where they both start. Let’s look at idealist philosophy first.

Genesis 1:1-3: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

IOW, creation ex nihilo, or out of nothing. Some one, some being, some god, had an idea, and that idea caused the universe, the world, reality.

People living before the scientific method was invented and applied did try to understand why their world was what it was, and why it changed.

They knew that before anyone did anything, someone had to have an idea of how to do the thing, and then either do it or instruct others how. It seems very natural. Before people do anything, somebody has to create the idea of how to do it first, therefore ideas and thoughts cause human beings to change how they think and do things, therefore ideas are what drive historical change.

Taken to its logical conclusion, philosophical idealism says that since ideas cause reality, the stronger the idea, the more people(especially powerful people) who promote the idea the more likely that idea will become reality.

Plato took philosophical idealism to incredible heights in The Republic, with his perfect Ideas existing in some perfect, divine plane being graspable to us imperfect humans by the rigors of philosophy and logical thought, but opens the door to a devastating materialist, and democratic, critique by concluding that the ideal state is governance by philosopher-kings, ie people like him who know best.

Materialist philosophy, OTOH, starts in a different place, and that place is, “The world is. It’s here. I perceive it, and I can try to figure out why it operates the way it does so me and mine can live and prosper.” The world just is, it exists, independent of human perception and ideas, and it doesn’t seem to care much what people think what it should be.

IOW, there is an objective, material reality(meaning it’s made of materials that we can understand) and we are a part of it. Using reason and experiment, we can learn to understand how it works the way it does and manipulate it into things we want and need—my favorite two examples are electricity and indoor plumbing—so we can live better than our ancestors did.

Materialists know that people have ideas all the time, but ask, What causes radically different ideas to be accepted and to become dominant when they do? What causes the old ideas and systems to lose credibility and to collapse when they collapse?

When it comes to understanding history, much less what is going on now so that maybe we can anticipate the future, the two approaches can reach radically different conclusions and call for radically different actions to be taken, and both can blind people into doing everything they can to cause mass tragedy which could have been avoided.

In the 19th Century, Karl Marx did a materialist analysis of the economic and political system in which he lived, which he called capitalism. Capitalism consists of a tiny number of people, employers, having the authority and power to tell a much larger number of people, employees, what to make, how to make it, and how much or little they will be paid by the employer in exchange for their labor.

Marx, after analyzing how changing material conditions had given this capitalist system the chance to become a dominant system in the first place, then sets about predicting how capitalism’s own goals will ultimately lead to its destruction when enough employees become desperate enough, and powerful enough, to overthrow it.

It’s important to note here that Marx’s concept of the dialectic, which means basically the same thing as a paradigm, came from an idealistic philosopher named Hegel. Marx concluded that when the objective material conditions were ripe for revolution, then a revolution would happen.

It wasn’t as if Marx didn’t have examples of this. There were the English, American and French Revolutions, the American Civil War, and the Paris Commune to study, of which the latter two happened in Marx’s lifetime. Marx’s conclusion was that without the right material preconditions, no idea, no matter how morally good or bad it might be, would ever become material reality. The idea may hang around, disappear and reappear again, but would never really do much until objective material conditions were right for it.

Let’s look at two historical examples of this, the Reformation and the Russian Civil War.

The Reformation was based on Martin Luther’s idea that each person can have a personal relationship with God, with no priests or Church necessary to facilitate said relationship. All one had to do was to study the Scripture, pray, and one could find the joy of living in harmony with God’s Will.

There was nothing new about this idea in 1519. It had been around for well over a thousand years. The Arian Christians, notably the Visigoths and Vandals, believed that the Deity was one thing, Jesus was another, and the idea of the Trinity was bullshit. Jesus was an inspired man, and his rules of conduct towards other human beings, or at least other Christians, were to be emulated, but he could be understood by study and prayer by anyone.

The Roman Catholic Church of the time believed and acted quite differently. Only the Church and its appointed priests were qualified to interpret Scripture, and anyone else who did it was a heretic. This was convenient for the late Roman Emperors, who saw the Church as a way of boosting their own threatened authority, which is why they became Catholic instead of Arian, or what we might now call Unitarian.

Well after the fall of the Roman Empire, there were heresies galore in Western Europe, some of which taught almost the same thing Martin Luther did, and none of which succeeded. Why?

The printing press or lack thereof, that’s why. The economy in Europe was rapidly changing in the 1500s, as the European economy changed from feudalism, which had been crippled by the Black Death-induced labor shortage of two centuries before, to primitive capitalism.

New things were not only being invented, they were being embraced and adopted, and one of them was the printing press. Just like the censors of authority today, running around canceling people and taking down heretical websites, the Roman Catholic Church tried to smash the printing press. It failed, of course, but it had always succeeded before.

The change was the printing press, and the motivation of new merchants to make money without interference or taxation by the Church, which is why so many of them became Protestant, and then changed Protestant theology itself to justify their own positions and actions.

IOW, the economy had slowly changed, material circumstances had changed, and then and only then did ideas that advocate for these changes become the dominant ones. The material conditions changed first, then the ideas consistent with those changes became prevalent, not the other way around.

The Russian Civil War, and the policies the Bolsheviks imposed in response, show how even historical materialists can be blinded or seduced by ideals. Early on, it was the soviets, or workers’ committees in the factories and the military, who had authority in the new Soviet Russia.

The exigencies of the Civil War, however, showed a need for a centralized hierarchy and a structure to feed, clothe, and equip not only the Red Army, but civilian workers and their families as well. The Bolsheviks did this, and always said they were acting in the only way that circumstances allowed, but even at the time plenty of people knew they were full of shit.

The Bolsheviks had access to all the old Tsarist government records, and they knew how much food each farm had produced in 1913, before the Great War started. They took this information, this scientific and material information, and starting in 1918 demanded that all farmers give so much food over to the government so it could feed the hungry workers in the city and soldiers in the Red Army.

The fact that five years had passed, four of which were in a time of war, with different amounts of rainfall and numbers of animals and such, was not considered. Why? For one thing, the old Tsarist information was all the Bolsheviks had. For another, the Bolshevik leaders were either academics or career criminals and agitators who knew nothing about farming, and they really did desperately need food for the cities.

So they fixed this idea of how much farmers could produce in their heads, decided that any who didn’t turn over enough was either a lying, greedy capitalist kulak or an active counterrevolutionary who was a threat to the Revolution and therefore must be eliminated.

Nothing in what Lenin and Trotsky, and later Stalin, did to the millions of Russian and Ukrainian farmers who eventually perished was historically materialist at all; it was based on a false premise, a false idea in which they had great circumstantial motive to believe at the time. They did believe and act upon that idea, and of course never admitted they had succumbed to a preconceived notion.

What it all boils down to is that historical materialists such as myself assume that there is an objective, material reality that exists no matter what we humans think of it, think about it, or do to it, and that humans are primarily motivated to behave in the ways we do because of objective, material conditions around us that we are capable of understanding and changing through our actions over time.

Historical idealists, very generally speaking, think that human, or maybe godly, ideas are somehow real in and of themselves(they can feel real, can’t they?), and that if an idea is powerful enough or spiritual enough or true enough, it—the idea—will change reality. Many also believe that if just enough people believe in a thing, then that thing will become real.

The converse to that is that if too many other people don’t believe in an idea that you believe in, then the thing to do is to eliminate the unbelievers so that only the believers are left and voila! The new perfect paradise can be achieved right here on Earth!

This is not so different from the transgender ideological idea that one’s feelings or ideas determine one’s gender, or the postmodernist idea that people with low melanin levels inherently believe in white supremacy because some idiot with an agenda decided that America was founded because of racism, when nobody even knew what racism was until European planters invented the thing to prevent slave revolts that threatened their livelihood a generation after Jamestown and Plymouth.

Notice how the adherents of both of these ideas tend to scream at you if you dare to differ with them. That’s because they are not based on anything, well, real. So screaming’s all they’ve got.

All of that idealistic thinking begs the question of whether these ideas exist at all without human beings to think them. The true idealist, or many people of faith, will say yes, they do have their own existence. A materialist says “Show me,” which is perhaps a little unfair because how can any human demonstrate something can exist without having a human being there to do, or to understand, the demonstration?

IOW, I really don’t know, and I don’t think you really know, either, but I will try to be polite about it.

I am convinced that history demonstrates changes in a human society come about because of how its economy and politics work, how authority manifests(or not) and is exercised(or not), and how outside factors such as climate and other human societies interact with it. All of these things can be understood without any idealistic justifications for why they are better or worse; in fact, such justifications are often just propaganda and act to prevent such understanding.

This is why I’m a historical materialist. This is how I analyze and try to understand both the past and the present. This does not mean that I believe idealism is worthless; far from it. I happen to think that “Slavery is Bad” and “women should have equal political and economic rights” are both excellent ideas. I just think I understand why those two great ideas took so long to manifest, and that idealists can never do the same. Not accurately, anyway.

History is replete with great ideas and people who appeared “before their time.” There are good, solid, and always material reasons why they did not, and why “their time” was in fact the right time for them to shine.

I hope this helps people understand me when I say things like “idealist” and “materialist.” Ideas are the things human beings think of to understand or change how we live. Material reality is the objective truth about how our systems work and how power is distributed, not the ideas those in power teach us so that we consent to them keeping that power.

It’s also the objective truth about how things like the universe were created or how our planet’s ecosystem works, truths which no human being who ever lived has ever known.

We have our theories, but like string theory, the divine right of kings or the clockwork model of the universe, none of them ever turn out to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and that’s OK. Knowing when one does not know is the beginning of wisdom.

I’ll close with one bit of advice. Whenever anybody says they understand everything, have a direct conduit to the god or the gods, or presents an idea that seems too good to be true, keep your wallet, weapons, and family close, for odds are a charlatan is at hand.

Thank you for reading, good day, and good luck.

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