Historical Materialism is the concept that social structures derive from economic structures, and these structures are changed through class struggles, each ruling class producing another class that will eventually supersede it.
A Marxist doctrine, which supposes that human history develops as the result of contradictions, mainly among social classes. The material element of the theory consists in the assertion, first, that human history is a form of more general natural development and, second, that the principal determinant of social organization is the manner in which people reproduce their lives. Thus, at the stage of ‘primitive communism’ humans found it necessary to work in common to survive, and class formation was absent. However, slave society emerged with the accumulation of surplus products and weaponry in the possession of a military caste. Feudal relations were characterized by the military protection of serfs in return for a proportion of their surplus agricultural product. Capitalism, in turn, was characterized by the emergence of a bourgeois class, using free labourers (proletarians) to operate machine technology to produce an even greater surplus product. Within each of these ‘modes of production’, at a certain point the existing class relations begin to act as a constraint on the further development of the material forces of production and revolutions occur. On this basis, socialism was expected to succeed capitalism under which private control of the material forces was increasingly at odds with their real potential.
Originally written by Stephen Whitefield