Marxist or historical materialist historiography is a school of historiography influenced by Marxism. The chief tenets of Marxist historiography are the centrality of social class and economic constraints in determining historical outcomes.

Marxist historiography has made contributions to the history of the working class, oppressed nationalities, and the methodology of history from below. The chief problematic aspect of Marxist historiography has been an argument on the nature of history as determined or dialectical; this can also be stated as the relative importance of subjective and objective factors in creating outcomes.

Marxist history is generally deterministic, in that it posits a direction of history, towards an end state of history as classless human society Marxist historiography, that is, the writing of Marxist history in line with the given historiographical principles, is generally seen as a tool. Its aim is to bring those oppressed by history to self-consciousness, and to arm them with tactics and strategies from history: it is both a historical and a liberator project.

Historians who use Marxist methodology, but disagree with the mainstream of Marxism, often describe themselves as Marxist historians. Methods from Marxist historiography, such as class analysis, can be divorced from the liberator intent of Marxist historiography; such practitioners often refer to their work as Marxian or Marxi. Born in 1818 in Trier, a prominent town in the Rhine province of Prussia, Karl Marx grew up amidst practically the last phase of capitalist transition in Europe.

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Along with the triumph and consolidation of capital’s wealth and power in any country, its laboring people were inevitably ousted from any holding of their own means of production and had to seek their subsistence as wage-labour of capitalist entrepreneurs / employers. Marx’s view of history helps to see the relevance of Marx’s emphasis on scientific knowledge in his argument with Witling.

He places a large premium on the general character, universality, necessity, and objective truth – all this considered to be attributes of scientific knowledge – in the pursuit of historical reality.

Before entering into further details of the Marxian theory, we may note the major influences of Europe’s intellectual tradition which had their roles in the development of Marx’s thought. Indeed, many of the components of Marx’s theory can be best understood in the light of his acceptance/rejection of the ideas articulated by his forerunners/ contemporaries about Europe’s capitalist transition and the subsequent agenda of moving towards socialism.

During his student days at the Bonn and Berlin universities, particularly at the latter, Marx was largely influenced by the method and range of Hegelian philosophy. He joined the ‘Young Hegelians’ whose interpretation of Hegelian philosophy and criticism of Christian thought presented a kind of bourgeois democratic thought and political interest.

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Friedrich Engels (1820-95) met Marx in 1844 and they became life-long friends and collaborators. Both of them were critical of the idealist philosophical position of Young Hegelians’ and emphasized the need for investigating material social relations at the roots of the spiritual life of society. Earlier, Ludwig Feuerbach (1807-72) had pointed to the idealist weakness of the ‘Young Hegelian’ position.

In his important book The Essence of Christianity. The formulation of human beings creating god in their own image was a significant step forward in materialist prevalence over idealist thought. The Holy Family or the Critique of Critical Critique (1845), jointly written by Marx and Engels, launched a piercing attack on philosophical idealism. The ‘Young Hegelians’ were facetiously named the ‘Holy Family’. The book upheld the position of the Enlightenment philosophers for their emphasis on empirical test of truth.

At the same time, the dialectical method was rigorously applied to arrive at an adequate idea of changing social relations and also that of recognizing the proletariat as the gravedigger of capitalism.

Capitalist private property necessarily creates its own antagonist in the proletariat. And as private property grows, the proletariat develops as its negation, a dehumanized force becoming the precondition of a synthesis to do away with both. The German Ideology was the next joint work of Marx and Engels.

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Though written in 1845, the book could not be published in their lifetime. It appeared for the first time in the Soviet Union in 1932. In his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Marx referred to The German Ideology as an effort to settle accounts with their previous philosophical conscience. In addition to their critique of idealism, Marx and Engels exposed the contemplative nature of Feuerbach’s materialism which failed to consider really existing active men as they live and work in the midst of any particular socio-economic formation. The German Ideology provided for the first time the ideas of historical stages in relation to class struggle and social consciousness to help our comprehension of movements in history.

The earlier materialism could regard human beings only as creatures of their circumstances, failing to recognise the role of human sensuous activity in the making of circumstances. Marx’s position was memorably expressed in his eleventh thesis, which was as well the last aphorism of the series, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’. In his articulation of historical materialism, Marx’s immediate concern was to interpret the contradiction of the capitalist social formation.

No doubt, the veracity of a new theory of social change is closely linked to the evidence of the present as history. The economics of the capitalist mode of production is the subject matter of Marx’s Capital, which Marx considered to be his lifework. Its first volume was published in 1867; the second and the third volumes were posthumously published in 1885 and 1894 respectively, under the editorial supervision of Engels.

The first volume gives us a logical elaboration of capital-labour relationship at a level of abstraction and in analytical forms that can best crystallize the most significant structural characteristic with the realities of capitalism on a much lesser level of abstraction and in terms of concrete things and happenings. Their areas are circulation of capital and then the process of capitalist production as a whole.

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The Theories of Surplus Value (1862-63) (often mentioned as the fourth volume of Capital) turned upon the historical substantiation of Marx’s theory in the light of other earlier and contemporary writings on Political Economy. Marx points to the source of profits in a competitive capitalist economy. The value of a commodity is determined by socially necessary labour time necessary to produce it.

Labour power is a commodity as well as exchanged for wages. The value of labour power (i.e. wages) is equal to the value of what is needed for the subsistence and maintenance of a worker and his family. The peculiarity of labour power as a commodity is that it can create more value than what is paid in wages as its value. This difference between the values produced by labour power and its wages is surplus value. Surplus value accrues to the capitalist employer and here lies the source of profits.

Larger and larger accumulation out of these profits is the main aim of capitalist production. More and more accumulation results in the advance of productive forces and increased productivity. It also leads to centralization of capital. In Marx’s words, ‘one capitalist always kills many’. Many capitalists are knocked out by the working of competition; all this is associated with cumulative increase of misery, oppression, slavery and degradation. The conditions become rife for the revolt of the working class.

The advance of productive forces can no longer be compatible with the insatiable urge of capital to maximize profits at the expense of the proletariat. The tendencies towards a falling rate of profit and also that of over production i.e., inadequate market demand for what is produced) appear as symptoms of capitalist crisis. The issues relating to profit rate and overproduction are analyzed in some details in the third volume of Capital.