Historical Materialism and the Mode of Production

Historical materialism (a term coined not by Marx himself but by Engels, though it accurately describes the theory both men developed jointly) holds that the fundamental motor of human history is not the unfolding of ideas, religion, or the state, as Hegel had argued, but the way human beings collectively organize the production of their material means of subsistence. In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx offers his most compressed formulation of the theory: in the social production of their existence, human beings enter into definite relations of production (Produktionsverhältnisse) — property relations, essentially, concerning who owns and controls the means of production — that correspond to a given stage of development of the material productive forces (Produktivkräfte), meaning tools, technology, labor power, and applied scientific knowledge. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the "real foundation" or base (Basis), on which rises a legal and political superstructure (Überbau), and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness — law, politics, religion, art, philosophy — so that, in Marx's often-quoted phrase, "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."