Scientific inquiry and Historical materialism

Many argue Marxism as an ideology is primarily of a theoretical development. But on the contrary Marx developed the theory of communism from elaborate scientific inquiry and adopting scientific methodologies. As a first step towards scientific inquiry, Marx provides a comparative analysis of various societies in different time epochs. His scale of comparative analysis is cross-temporal. He studies the earliest of human society—the primitive communism, the slave society (ancient society), the feudal society and the capitalist society of today. A question may arise, how could a man study the history of human society scientifically? Marx used documentary research to the maximum, when he collects the data from various sources to understand the existing conditions in different time periods. Like a true scientific research he also predicts the future course of action of human progression—the progression of human society towards communism.

Like a true science, he tends to understand why society changes from one stage to other and devises a general rule which will be applicable to all the societies at all time levels. Marxism is basically a uni-variate analysis i.e. one factor leads to other developments. We will be returning to this topic again at the later part of the article to understand how uni-variate analysis is applicable to Marxism.

Then coming to Historical materialism, the first question is what does it mean? Materialism, in Marxian terminology, means material forces can explain everything in the society. Here the material forces refer to the economy of the society, the economic relations that people have in the society, the production and technology level etc. in a nutshell the prosperity of a society. It is strictly contrasting to spiritual prosperity which puts more emphasis on the values. But materialism puts more emphasis on factors which we can see and analyze and quantify. It is historical because Marx studies the materialism as a historical process i.e. he studies the earlier societies thorough this principle and then tries to understand how the societies of earlier time give rise to modern complex society. His analysis is basically historical and materialistic. Hence the process is called as historical materialism. But one caution needs to be put here. Marxism should not be confused with economic determinism. For Marx economic factors play a very important role in the progression of human society but they alone cannot cause nay change because economic is a dead thing. Economic relations bring about changes in human ideas and it is this change that is one of the foundations of communism.

So far we have studied the various facets of Marxian communism like, it is a scientific inquiry, it is historical materialism etc. without properly defining what is communism and what Marxian stand on it is. From now on we will discuss hardcore Marxism albeit in a simplistic manner. Before this, a small paragraph on communism needs to be placed over here.

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