Marxism does not possess a monopoly of the economic interpretation of history. Other theories of this kind can be formulated – for instance that which can be found in the very distinguished work of Karl Polanyi, dividing the history of mankind into three stages, each defined by a different type of economy. If Polanyi is right in suggesting that reciprocity, redistribution and the market each defined a different kind of society, this is, in a way, tantamount to saying that the economy is primary, and thus his work constitutes a species of the economic interpretation of history. Nevertheless, despite the importance of Polanyi’s work and the possibility of other rival economic interpretations, Marxism remains the most influential, the most important, and perhaps the best elaborated of all theories, and we shall concentrate on it.

One often approaches a theory by seeing what it denies and what it repudiates. This approach is quite frequently adopted in the case of Marxism, where it is both fitting and misleading. We shall begin by adopting this approach, and turn to its dangers subsequently.

Marxism began as the reaction to the romantic idealism of Hegel, in the ambience of whose thought the young Karl Marx reached maturity. This no doubt is the best advertised fact about the origin of Marxism. The central point about Hegelianism was that it was acutely concerned with history and social change, placing these at the centre of philosophical attention (instead of treating them as mere distractions from the contemplation of timeless objects, which had been a more frequent philosophical attitude); and secondly, it taught that history was basically determined by intellectual, spiritual, conceptual or religious forces. As Marx and Engels put it in The German Ideology, ‘The Young Hegelians are in agreement with the Old Hegelians in their belief in the rule of religion, of concepts, of an abstract general principle in the existing world’ (Marx and Engels 1845–1846, p. 5).

Now the question is – why did Hegel and followers believe this? If it is interpreted in a concrete sense, as a doctrine claiming that the ideas of men determined their other activities, it does not have a great deal of plausibility, especially when put forward as an unrestricted generalization. If it is formulated – as it was by Hegel – as the view that some kind of abstract principle or entity dominates history, the question may well be asked: what evidence do we have for the very existence of this mysterious poltergeist allegedly manipulating historical events? Given the fact that the doctrine is either implausible or obscure, or indeed both, why were intelligent men so strongly drawn to it?

The answer to this may be complex, but the main elements in it can perhaps be formulated simply and briefly. Hegelianism enters the scene when the notion of what we now call culture enters public debate. The point is this: men are not machines. When they act, they do not simply respond to some kind of push. When they do something, they generally have an idea, a concept, of the action which they are performing. The idea or conception in turn is part of a whole system. A man who goes through the ceremony of marriage has an idea of what the institution means in the society of which he is part, and his understanding of the institution is an integral part of his action. A man who commits an act of violence as part of a family feud has an idea of what family and honour mean, and is committed to those ideas. And each of these ideas is not something which the individual had excogitated for himself. He took it over from a corpus of ideas which differ from community to community, and which change over time, and which are now known as culture.

Put in this way, the ‘conceptual’ determination of human conduct no longer seems fanciful, but on the contrary is liable to seem obvious and trite. In various terminologies (‘hermeneutics’, ‘structuralism’, and others) it is rather fashionable nowadays. The idea that conduct is concept-saturated and that concepts come not singly but as systems, and are carried not by individuals but by on-going historic communities, has great plausibility and force. Admittedly, those who propose it, in Hegel’s day and in ours, do not always define their position with precision. They do not always make clear whether they are merely saying that culture in this sense is important (which is hardly disputable), or claiming that it is the prime determinant of other things and the ultimate source of change, which is a much stronger and much more contentious claim. Nonetheless, the idea that culture is important and pervasive is very plausible and suggestive, and Hegelianism can be credited with being one of the philosophies which, in its own peculiar language, had introduced this idea. It is important to add that Hegelianism often speaks of ‘Spirit’ in the singular; our suggestion is that this can be interpreted as culture, as the spirit of the age. This made it easy for Hegelianism to operate as a kind of surrogate Christianity: those no longer able to believe in a personal god could tell themselves that this had been a parable on a kind of guiding historical spirit. For those who wanted to use it in that way, Hegelianism was the continuation of religion by other means.

But Hegelianism is not exhausted by its sense of culture, expressed in somewhat strange language. It is also pervaded by another idea, fused with the first one, and one which it shares with many thinkers of its period: a sense of historical plan. The turn of the 18th and 19th centuries was a time when men became imbued with the sense of cumulative historical change, pointing in an upward direction – in other words, the idea of Progress.

The basic fact about Marxism is that it retains this second idea, the ‘plan’ of history, but aims at inverting the first idea, the romantic idealism, the attribution of agency to culture. As the two founders of Marxism put it themselves in The German Ideology (pp. 14–15),

In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven … We set out from real active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process … Morality, regligion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Later on in the same work, the two founders of Marxism specify the recipe which, according to them, was followed by those who produced the idealistic mystification. First of all, ideas were separated from empirical context and the interests of the rulers who put them forward. Secondly, a set of logical connections was found linking successive ruling ideas, and their logic is then meant to explain the pattern of history. (This links the concept-saturation of history to the notion of historic design. Historic pattern is the reflection of the internal logical connection of successive ideas.) Thirdly, to diminish the mystical appearance of all this, the free-floating, self-transforming concept was once again credited to a person or group of persons.

If this kind of theory is false, what then is true? In the same work a little later, the authors tell us:

This sum of productive forces, forms of capital and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of … the … ‘essence of man’.… These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, decide also whether or not the periodically recurring revolutionary convulsion will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of all existing forms. And if these material elements of a complete revolution are not present… then, as far as practical developments are concerned, it is absolutely immaterial whether the ‘idea’ of this revolution has been expressed a hundred times already … (p. 30).

The passage seems unambiguous: what is retained is the idea of a plan, and also the idea of primarily internal, endogenous propulsion. What has changed is the identification of the propulsion, of the driving force of the transformation. Change continues to be the law of all things, and it is governed by a plan, it is not random; but the mechanism which controls it is now identified in a new manner.

From then on, the criticisms of the position can really be divided into two major species: some challenge the identification of the ruling mechanism, and others the idea of historic plan. As the most dramatic presentation of Marxist development, Robert Tucker’s Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (1961, p. 123) puts it:

Marx founded Marxism in an outburst of Hegelizing. He considered himself to be engaged in … [an]… act of translation of the already discovered truth … from the language of idealism into that of materialism…. Hegelianism itself was latently or esoterically an economic interpretation of history. It treated history as ‘a history of production’ … in which spirit externalizes itself in thought-objects. But this was simply a mystified presentation of man externalizing himself in material objects.

This highlights both the origin and the validity or otherwise of the economic interpretation of history. Some obvious but important points can be made at this stage. The Hegel/Marx confrontation owes much of its drama and appeal to the extreme and unqualified manner in which the opposition is presented. This unqualified, unrestricted interpretation can certainly be found in the basic texts of Marxism. Whether it is the ‘correct’ interpretation is an inherently undecidable question: it simply depends on which texts one treats as final – those which affirm the position without restriction and without qualification, or those which contain modifications, qualifications and restrictions.

The same dilemma no doubt arises on the Hegelian side, where it is further accompanied by the question as to whether the motive force, the spirit of history, is to be seen as some kind of abstract principle (in which case the idea seems absurd to most of us), or whether this is merely to be treated as a way of referring to what we now term culture (in which case it is interesting and contentious).

One must point out that these two positions, the Hegelian and the Marxist, are contraries, but not contradictories. They cannot both be true, but they can perfectly well both be false. A world is easily conceivable where neither of them is true: a world in which social changes sometimes occur as a consequence of changes in economic activities, and sometimes as a consequence of strains and stresses in the culture. Not only is such a world conceivable, but it does really rather look as if that is the kind of world we do actually live in. (Part of the appeal of Marxism in its early days always hinged on presenting Hegel-type idealism and Marxism as two contradictories, and ‘demonstrating’ the validity of Marxism as a simple corollary of the manifest absurdity of strong versions of Hegelianism.) In this connection, it is worth noticing that by far the most influential (and not unsympathetic) sociological critic of Marx is Max Weber, who upholds precisely this kind of position. Strangely enough, despite explicit and categorical denials on his own part, he is often misrepresented as offering a return to some kind of idealism (without perhaps the mystical idea of the agency of abstract concepts which was present in Hegel). For instance, Michio Morishima, in Why has Japan ‘Succeeded’? (1982, p. 1), observes: ‘Whereas Karl Marx contended that ideology and ethics were no more than reflections … Max Weber … made the case for the existence of quite the reverse relationship.’ Weber was sensitive to both kinds of constraint; he merely insisted that on occasion, a ‘cultural’ or ‘religious’ element might make a crucial difference.

Connected with this, there is another important theoretical difference to be found in Weber and many contemporary sociologists. The idea of the inherent historical plan, which had united Hegel and Marx, is abandoned. If the crucial moving power of history comes from one source only, though this does not strictly speaking entail that there should be a plan, an unfolding of design, it nevertheless does make it at least very plausible. If that crucial moving power had been consciousness, and its aim the arrival at self-consciousness, then it was natural to conclude that with the passage of time, there would indeed be more and more of such consciousness. So the historical plan could be seen as the manifestation of the striving of the Absolute Spirit or humanity, towards ever greater awareness. Alternatively, if the motive force was the growth of the forces of production, then, once again, it was not unreasonable to suppose that history might be a series of organizational adjustments to expanding productive powers, culminating in a full adjustment to the final great flowering of our productive capacity. (Something like that is the essence of the Marxist vision of history.)

If on the other hand the motive forces and the triggers come from a number of sources, which moreover are inherently diverse, there is no clear reason why history should have a pattern in the sense of coming ever closer to satisfying some single criterion (consciousness, productivity, congruence between productivity and social ethos, or whatever). So in the Weberian and more modern vision, the dramatic and unique developments of the modern industrial world are no longer seen as the inevitable fulfilment and culmination of a potential that had always been there, but rather as a development which only occurred because a certain set of factors happened to operate at a given time simultaneously, and which would otherwise not have occurred, and which was in no way bound to occur. Contingency replaces fatality.

So much for the central problem connected with the economic interpretation of history. The question concerning the relative importance of conceptual (cultural) and productive factors is the best known, most conspicuous and best advertised issue in this problem area. But in fact, it is very far from obvious that it is really the most important issue, the most critical testing ground for the economic theory of history. There is another problem, less immediately obvious, less well known, but probably of greater importance, theoretically and practically. That is the relative importance of productive and coercive activities.

The normal associations which are likely to be evoked by the phrase ‘historical materialism’ do indeed imply the downgrading of purely conceptual, intellectual and cultural elements as explanatory factors in history. But it does not naturally suggest the downgrading of force, violence, coercion. On the contrary, for most people the idea of coercion by threat or violence, or death and pain, seems just as ‘realistic’, just as ‘materialistic’ as the imperatives imposed by material need for sustenance and shelter. Normally one assumes that the difference between coercion by violence or the threat of violence, and coercion by fear of destitution, is simply that the former is more immediate and works more quickly. One might even argue that all coercion is ultimately coercion by violence: a man or a group in society which coerces other members by controlling the food supply, for instance, can only do it if they control and defend the store of food or some other vital necessity by force, even if that force is kept in reserve. Economic constraint, it could be argued (as Marxists themselves argue in other contexts), only operates because a certain set of rules is enforced by the state, which may well remain in the background. But economic constraint is in this way parasitic on the ultimate presence of enforcement, based on the monopoly of control of the tools of violence.

The logic of this argument may seem persuasive, but it is contradicted by a very central tenet of the Marxist variant of the economic theory of history. Violence, according to the theory, is not fundamental or primary, it does not initiate fundamental social change, nor is it a fundamental basis of any social order. This is the central contention of Marxism, and at this point, real Marxism diverges from what might be called the vulgar image possessed of it by non-specialists. Marxism stresses economic factors, and downgrades not merely the importance of conceptual, ‘superstructural’ ones, but equally, and very significantly, the role of coercive factors.

A place where this is vigorously expressed is Engels’s ‘Anti-Dühring’ (1878):

… historically, private property by no means makes its appearance as the result of robbery or violence. … Everywhere where private property developed, this took place as the result of altered relations of production and exchange, in the interests of increased production and in furtherance of intercourse – that is to say, as a result of economic causes. Force plays no part in this at all. Indeed, it is clear that the institution of private property must be already in existence before the robber can appropriate another person’s property… Nor can we use either force or property founded on force to explain the ‘enslavement of man for menial labour’ in its most modern form – wage labour…. The whole process is explained by purely economic causes; robbery, force, and the state of political interference of any kind are unnecessary at any point whatever (Burns 1935, pp. 267–9).

Engels goes on to argue the same specifically in connection with the institution of slavery:

Thus force, instead of controlling the economic order, was on the contrary pressed into the service of the economic order. Slavery was invented. It soon became the predominant form of production among all peoples who were developing beyond the primitive community, but in the end was also one of the chief causes of the decay of that system (ibid., p. 274).

Engels a little earlier in the same work was on slightly more favourable ground when he discussed the replacement of the nobility by the bourgeoisie as the most powerful estate in the land. If physical force were crucial, how should the peaceful merchants and producers have prevailed over the professional warriors? As Engels puts it: ‘During the whole of this struggle, political forces were on the side of the nobility…’ (ibid., p. 270).

One can of course think of explanations for this paradox: the nobility might have slaughtered each other, or there might be an alliance between the monarchy and the middle class (Engels himself mentioned this possibility, but does not think it constitutes a real explanation) and so forth. In any case, valid or not, this particular victory of producers over warriors would seem to constitute a prima facie example of the non-dominance of force in history. The difficulty for the theory arises when the point is generalized to cover all social orders and all major transitions, which is precisely what Marxism does.

Engels tries to argue this point in connection with a social formation which one might normally consider to be the very paradigm of the domination by force: ‘oriental despotism’. (In fact, it is for this very reason that some later Marxists have maintained that this social formation is incompatible with Marxist theory, and hence may not exist.) Engels does it, interestingly enough, by means of a kind of functionalist theory of society and government: the essential function, the essential role and duty, of despotic governments in hydraulic societies is to keep production going by looking after the irrigation system. As he puts it:

However great the number of despotic governments which rose and fell in India and Persia, each was fully aware that its first duty was the general maintenance of irrigation throughout the valleys, without which no agriculture was possible (Burns 1935, p. 273).

It is a curious argument. He cannot seriously maintain that these oriental despots were always motivated by a sense of duty towards the people they governed. What he must mean is something like this: unless they did their ‘duty’, the society in question could not survive, and they themselves, as its political parasites, would not survive either. So the real foundation of ‘oriental despotism’ was not the force of the despot, but the functional imperatives of despotically imposed irrigation systems. Economic need, as in the case of slavery, makes use of violence for its own ends, but violence itself initiates or maintains nothing. This interpretation is related to what Engels says a little further on. Those who use force can either aid economic development or accelerate it, or go against it, which they do rarely (though he admits that it occasionally occurs), and then they themselves usually go under: ‘Where… the internal public force of the country stands in opposition to economic development… the contest has always ended with the downfall of the political power’ (Burns 1935, p. 277).

We have seen that Engels’s materialism is curiously functional, indeed teleological: the economic potential of a society or of its productive base somehow seeks out available force, and enlists it on its own behalf. Coercion is and ought to be the slave of production, he might well have said. This teleological element is found again in what is perhaps the most famous and most concise formulation of Marxist theory, namely certain passages in Marx’s preface to A Contribution to ‘The Critique of Political Economy’ (1859):

A social system never perishes before all the productive forces have developed for which it is wide enough; and new, higher productive relationships never come into being before the material conditions for their existence have been brought to maturity within the womb of the old society itself. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such problems as it can solve; for when we look closer we will always find that the problem itself only arises when the material conditions for its solution are already present, or at least in the process of coming into being. In broad outline, the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois mode of production can be indicated as progressive epochs in the economic system of society (Burns 1935, p. 372).

The claim that a new order does not come into being before the conditions for it are available, is virtually a tautology: nothing comes into being unless the conditions for it exist. That is what ‘conditions’ mean. But the idea that a social system never perishes before it has used up all its potential is both strangely teleological and disputable. Why should it not be replaced even before it plays itself out to the full? Why should not some of its potential be wasted?

It is obvious from this passage that the purposive, upward surge of successive modes of production cannot be hindered by force, nor even aided by it. Engels, in ‘Anti-Dühring’, sneers at rulers such as Friedrich Wilhelm IV, or the then Tsar of Russia, who despite the power and size of their armies are unable to defy the economic logic of the situation. Engels also treats ironically Herr Dühring’s fear of force as the ‘absolute evil’, the belief that the ‘first act of force is the original sin’, and so forth. In his view, on the contrary, force simply does not have the capacity to initiate evil. It does however have another ‘role in history, a revolutionary role’; this role, in Marxist words, is midwifery:

… it is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with the new,… the instrument by the aid of which social movement forces its way through and shatters the dead, fossilized, political forms … (Burns 1935, p. 278).

The midwifery simile is excellent and conveys the basic idea extremely well. A midwife cannot create babies, she can only aid and slightly speed up their birth, and once the infant is born the midwife cannot do much harm either. The most one can say for her capacity is that she may be necessary for a successful birth. Engels seems to have no fear that this sinister midwife might linger after the birth and refuse to go away. He makes this plain by his comment on the possibility of a ‘violent collision’ in Germany which ‘would at least have the advantage of wiping out the servility which has permeated the national consciousness as a result of the humiliation of the Thirty Years War’.

There is perhaps an element of truth in the theory that coercion is and ought to be the slave of production. The element of truth is this: in pre-agrarian hunting and gathering societies, surrounded by a relative abundance of sustenance but lacking means of storing it, there is no persistent, social, economic motive for coercion, no sustained employment for a slave. By contrast, once wealth is systematically produced and stored, coercion and violence or the threat thereof acquire an inescapable function and become endemic. The surplus needs to be guarded, its socially ‘legitimate’ distribution enforced. There is some evidence to support the view that hunting and gathering societies were more peaceful than the agrarian societies which succeeded them.

One may put it like this: in societies devoid of a stored surplus, no surplus needs to be guarded and the principles governing its distribution do not need to be enforced. By contrast, societies endowed with a surplus face the problem of protecting it against internal and external aggression, and enforcing the principles of its distribution. Hence they are doomed to the deployment, overt or indirect, of violence of the threat thereof. But all of this, true though it is, does not mean that surplus-less societies are necessarily free of violence: it only means that they are not positively obliged to experience it. Still less does it mean that within the class of societies endowed with a surplus, violence on its own may not occasionally or frequently engender changes, or inhibit them. The argument does not preclude coercion either from initiating social change, or from thwarting change which would otherwise have occurred. The founding fathers of Marxism directed their invective at those who raised this possibility, but they never succeeded in establishing that this possibility is not genuine. All historic evidence would seem to suggest that this possibility does indeed often correspond to reality.

Why is the totally unsubstantiated and indeed incorrect doctrine of the social unimportance of violence so central to Marxism?

The essence of Marxism lies in the retention of the notion of an historical plan, but a re-specification of its driving force. But the idea of a purposive historical plan is not upheld merely out of an intellectual desire for an elegant conceptual unification of historical events. There is also a deeper motive. Marxism is a salvation religion, guaranteeing not indeed individual salvation, but the collective salvation of all mankind. Ironically, its conception of the blessed condition is profoundly bourgeois. Indeed, it constitutes the ultimate apotheosis of the bourgeois vision of life. The bourgeois preference for peaceful production over violent predation is elevated into the universal principle of historical change. The wish is father of the faith. The work ethic is transformed into the essence, the very species-definition of man. Work is our fulfilment, but work patterns are also the crucial determinants of historical change. Spontaneous, unconstrained work, creativity, is our purpose and our destiny. Work patterns also determine the course of history and engender patterns of coercion, and not vice versa. Domination and the mastery of techniques of the violence is neither a valid ideal, nor ever decisive in history. All this is no doubt gratifying to those imbued with the producer ethic and hostile to the ethic of domination and violence: but is it true?

Note that, were it true, Marxism is free to commend spontaneously cooperative production, devoid of ownership and without any agency of enforcement, as against production by competition, with centrally enforced ground rules. It is free to do it, without needing to consider the argument that only competition keeps away centralized coercion, and that the attempt to bring about propertyless and total cooperation only engenders a new form of centralized tyranny. If tyranny only emerges as a protector of basically pathological forms or organization of work, then a sound work-pattern will on its own free us for ever from the need for either authority or checks on authority. Man is held to be alienated from his true essence as long as he works for extraneous ends: he finds his true being only when he indulges in work for the sake of creativity, and choses his own form of creativity. This is of course precisely the way in which the middle class likes to see its own life. It takes pride in productive activity, and chooses its own form of creativity, and it understands what it does. Work is not an unintelligible extraneous imposition for it, but the deepest fulfilment.

On the Marxist economic interpretation of history, mankind as a whole is being propelled towards this very goal, this bourgeois-style fulfilment in work without coercion. But the guarantee that this fulfilment will be reached is only possible if the driving force of history is such as to ensure this happy outcome. If a whole multitude of factors, economic, cultural, coercive, could all interact unpredictably, there could hardly be any historic plan. But if on the other hand only one factor is fundamental, and that factor is something which has a kind of vectorial quality, something which increases over time and inevitably points in one direction only (namely the augmentation of the productive force of man), then the necessary historical plan does after all have a firm, unprecarious base. This is what the theory requires, and this is what is indeed asserted.

The general problem of the requirement, ultimately, of a single-factor theory, with its well-directed and persistent factor, is of course related to the problems which arise from the plan that Marxists discern in history. According to the above quotation from Marx, subsequent to primitive communism, four class-endowed stages arise, namely the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois, which is said to be the last ‘antagonistic’ stage (peaceful fulfilment follows thereafter). Marxism has notoriously had trouble with the ‘Asiatic’ stage because, notwithstanding what Engels claimed, it does seem to exemplify and highlight the autonomy of coercion in history, and the suspension of progress by a stagnant, self-maintaining social system.

But leaving that aside, in order to be loyal to its basic underlying intuition of a guaranteed progression and a final happy outcome, Marxism is not committed to any particular number or even any particular sequence of stages. The factual difficulties which Marxist historiography has had in finding all the stages and all the historical sequences, and in the right order, are not by themselves necessarily disastrous. A rigid unilinealism is not absolutely essential to the system. What it does require (apart from the exclusiveness, in the last analysis, of that single driving force) is the denial of the possibility of stagnation, whether in the form of absolute stagnation and immobility, or in the form of circular, repetitive developments. If this possibility is to be excluded, a number of things need to be true: all exploitative social forms must be inherently unstable; the number of such forms must be finite; and circular social developments must not be possible. If all this is so, then the alienation of man from his true essence – free fulfilment in unconstrained work – must eventually be attained. But if the system can get stuck, or move in circles, the promise of salvation goes by the board. This would be so even if the system came to be stuck for purely economic reasons. It would be doubly disastrous for it if other factors, such as coercion, were capable of freezing it. The denial of any autonomous role for violence in history is the most important, and most contentious, element in the Marxian economic theory of history.

So what the Marxist economic interpretation of history really requires is that no non-economic factor can ever freeze the development of society, that the development of society itself be pushed forward by the continuous (even if on occasion slow) growth of productive forces, that the social forms accompanying various stages of the development of productive forces should be finite in number, and that the last one be wholly compatible with the fullest possible development of productive forces and of human potentialities.

The profound irony is that a social system marked by the prominence and pervasiveness of centralized coercion, should be justified and brought about by a system of ideas which denies autonomous historical agency both to coercion and to ideas. The independent effectiveness both of coercion and of ideas can best be shown by considering a society built on a theory, and one which denies the effectiveness of either.