On the Historical Materialist View of Society

	Workers Vanguard No. 882	8 December 2006

TROTSKY

LENIN

On the Historical Materialist View of Society

(Quote of the Week)

The works of Georgi Plekhanov, founder of Russian Marxism, were crucial in educating Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin and others of his generation. In polemicizing against both philosophical idealism and revisionist conceptions of Marxism, Plekhanov expounded the materialist view of class society, which is the core of the Marxist worldview.

Man makes history in striving to satisfy his needs. These needs, of course, are originally imposed by nature; but they are later considerably modified quantitatively and qualitatively by the character of the artificial environment. The productive forces at man’s disposal determine all his social relations. First of all, the state of the productive forces determines the relations in which men stand towards each other in the social process of production, that is, their economic relations. These relations naturally give rise to definite interests, which are expressed in law.... The development of productive forces divides society into classes, whose interests are not only different, but in many—and, moreover, essential—aspects are diametrically antagonistic. This antagonism of interests gives rise to conflicts, to a struggle among the social classes. The struggle results in the replacement of the tribal organization by the state organization, the purpose of which is to protect the dominant interests. Lastly, social relations, determined by the given state of productive forces, give rise to common morality, the morality, that is, that guides people in their common, everyday life.

Thus the law, the state system and the morality of any given people are determined directly and immediately by its characteristic economic relations. These economic relations also determine—but indirectly and mediately—all the creations of the mind and imagination: art, science, etc.

—Georgi Plekhanov, The Materialist Conception of History (1897)