The Materialist Conception of History

In the late 19th-century controversy with the populists, Lenin was confronted with this objection: “In which work did Marx expound his materialist conception of history?”. The German Ideology, written jointly by Marx and Engels in 1845-46, was then unpublished – it would not be published until 1932 – but the controversy had reasons that went beyond this incidental circumstance. The populist, not by chance a university professor, lamented the lack of a Marxist work that expounded the new conception of the historical process with the same meticulous and systematic coherence that Marx employed in Capital for economics. Lenin replied that the materialist conception of history was already fully contained in Capital.The scholar’s point of view and that of the communist cannot be aligned: all Marxist literature is nothing but a weapon in the revolutionary struggle. Theory is no exception: Marxism assigns it a prominent place only insofar as it is indispensable for firmly grounding revolutionary strategy.The “catalogue” of Marxist works is not dictated by the encyclopaedia, but rather by the succession of political battles that “commissioned” their writing. Formally speaking, the Russian academic was right: there is no Marxist treatise on the philosophy of history. However, there is the radically new conception of the “development of the socio-economic formation as a process of natural history” – together with the extensions, clarifications, and applications of this idea that the demands of the revolutionary political struggle have gradually made necessary.This anthology presents certain moments of such reflection and is guided by the same revolutionary logic. It does not aim at a general, though meritorious, popularisation of one of the highest peaks of human theoretical thought, nor does it, of course, include all Marxist elaboration on the subject. As is the aim of all the volumes in the Publications for young people series, this anthology seeks to provide a study tool for all those engaged in the struggle for communism, particularly for young people.