Materialistic understanding of the history of K. Marx

The core of Marx's sociological theory is the concept of a materialistic understanding of history. In its presentation, one should rely primarily on the classical formulation given by Marx in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859, since it is here that he formulates the “general result” that he arrived at and from which he proceeded in his subsequent works. In using other texts of Marx, it is necessary to adhere to the interpretive model proposed by M. Buravy: to consider the materialistic understanding of history, first of all, as a developing research program of empirical sociology. This will avoid both artificial unification and excessive attention to "breaks" in the corpus of Marx's texts.

So, a comparison of the three classics showed that for Weber, the starting point was epistemological problems related to the question of how knowledge of social reality is possible, while for Durkheim the very subject of sociology - social facts - is decisive. At the same time, it is assumed that social reality exists as an object subject to cognition: having fixed the existence of a multitude of social facts or social actions, one can begin to study them. Unlike both classics, Marx puts the question more radically: before asking the question of whether What is a social reality and How to investigate it, it is necessary to raise the question of conditions of its possibility. As has been shown, Marx did not seek to limit the scope of his research to some area of ​​the "social" and, moreover, did not distinguish between sociological and historical research. Social relations cannot be understood outside their history. Therefore, the question of the conditions for the possibility of social reality - society - turns with him into the question of the possibility of human stories. Arguing with the "idealistic" philosophy of history, which explains historical development by such factors as the evolution of ideas, the development of the human spirit, the actions of "historical figures" or the activities of "historical peoples", Marx points to "the first premise of any human history" - the existence of living people, human individuals in a given natural environment. In order to maintain their existence, these individuals must provide the means of subsistence they need by transforming and modifying the environment, or material production. Its basis is the expedient human activity aimed at transforming the material environment into a means of life - work. According to Marx, labor is the generic essence of man, since in labor he is realized as a conscious active being; consequently, it is the material production of the conditions of life that distinguishes man from animals. In addition to labor, a key element of this process are means of production- the totality of available natural resources, technologies, tools, etc. The totality of the means of production and the working people employed in production forms social productive forces.

However, material production in the Marxian sense is not limited to maintaining and reproducing the physical existence of individuals - production in the narrow economic sense of the word, a set of certain technological and organizational processes, the use of "factors of production". Having fixed the conditions for the possibility of human history (social reality), he proceeds to consider the very "life process" of individuals. In the course of producing the conditions of their own life, people enter into communion (German: Verkehr) with each other, into relations of cooperation and division of labour. As Marx and Engels write in The German Ideology, the production of life arises as a twofold process: natural (in the sense of the transformation of the material environment by people) and social, since it involves the “cooperation of many individuals” [Marx, Engels, 1955, p. 28]. By producing their livelihood, people indirectly produce their own material life, and their mode of production is that How people jointly create the conditions of their own life - this is not just a certain way of organizing labor, using technologies and resources, but a way of life, a certain Lifestyle producing individuals. Therefore, as Marx writes, "individuals producing in society - and, consequently, the social production of individuals - such, naturally, is the starting point" [Marx, 1958, p. 709]. In other words, material production is social production, since certain social relations are established and maintained in the course of this process - relations of production. At each historical stage, the productive forces and production relations form a certain mode of production.

Returning to the comparison with Weber and Durkheim, one could put the category of production relations on a par with social facts and social actions. However, what is this relationship? What are their properties and characteristics? Marx gives the classical formulation of the materialist understanding of history in the preface to the Critique of Political Economy: “In the social production of their lives, people enter into certain, necessary, relations independent of their will - relations of production that correspond to a certain stage in the development of their material productive forces” [ Marx, 1959, p. 6-7]. So, relations of production, firstly, in each historical epoch are determined by the achieved level of development of the productive forces, technology, and organization of labor; secondly, they are necessary - in the logical sense of the word, that is, they are not accidental and not arbitrary, but are systematically connected with the productive forces and are stable; at the same time, relations of production arise as a result of the need for material production to maintain human existence, i.e., they have a “coercive force” in relation to individuals, and therefore, thirdly, they exist independently of the consciousness of the individuals involved in them. In other words, Marx derives here the autonomy of social reality in relation to the individual and this is precisely what makes the materialistic conception of history a sociological conception proper.

Wrong mixing materialism Marx to economic determinism: material production is a condition for the possibility of social reality, but the meaning of historical materialism is not at all that “the economy is destiny”, but that social relations have supra-individual causality, structure the process of human life. In other words, we are not talking about economic determinism, but about social determinism: the empirical diversity of social phenomena cannot be understood either from individual ideas of people, or from abstract historio-philosophical concepts (“general development of the human spirit”), or from these phenomena themselves. , because, as Marx writes, “they are rooted in material life relations, the totality of which Hegel, following the example of English and French writers of the 17th and 18th centuries, calls “civil society”” [Marx, 1959, p. 6]. Materialism is not about "things" - technological processes or natural resources; material relations in the sense that they exist independently of the will and consciousness of people, and one can abstract from them only in the imagination. It is impossible to understand human history, state and law, religion and art, economic life “out of themselves”, abstracting from the context of social relations. It is easy to see that this thesis coincides with the initial premises of the classics of sociology.

At the same time, "the anatomy of civil society should be sought in political economy" [Marx, 1959, p. 6]. It must be understood that the "political economy" of Marx's time was a social science in the full sense of the word, investigating the course of economic processes in society - it was this discipline that Marx began to study already in the 1840s, since it made it possible to approach the study of social reality, going further philosophical speculations and normativism of jurisprudence.

Society is not a closed system, it exists only thanks to the "metabolism" with the environment, material production. Acting as its "anatomy", production relations set the principles by which society is structured, and their central element is relations over the means and results of production, the legal expression of which is property relations.

Individuals involved in the production process perform different functions, and control over the means of production and rights to appropriate its results are unequally distributed among them. Property relations - the axis around which is built class structure society. Class- this is a certain position of an individual or group in the system of social relations, allocated on the basis of the position of this individual or group in social production, attitude to the means of production and participation in the distribution of production results. In accordance with this principle, society is divided into two large classes - the owners of the means of production, who control the means and the process of production itself, as well as the distribution of its products, and the workers, deprived of property and control rights and forced to sell their labor. At the same time, distribution relations, as Marx emphasizes in Economic Manuscripts, are a subordinate moment, a consequence of property relations. The source of social inequality is not the mere fact of possession of certain material resources, but conflict in the sphere of production, unequal access to and control over the means of production, and the resulting relations of domination and subordination. For the same reason, the establishment of legal equality and freedom to conclude economic contracts does not eliminate, but only hides the real inequality arising from the structure of production relations.

The totality of production relations is the basis of society, the real basis, determining the limits of variation superstructures- political and legal institutions and forms of public consciousness - literature, art, science, etc. It must be understood that we are not talking about the one-sided and only influence of the base on the superstructure - the phenomena of political and spiritual life have their own logic, not reducible to logic economic, however "in the end(our italics. - A. R.) the defining moment is the production and reproduction of real life” [Engels, 1965, p. 370]. Empirical analysis always comes down to analysis multiple causation, and that is why he cannot ignore the influence of the base on the superstructure, of the relations of production on the forms of law, politics and ideology.

The mode of production determines the processes of social, political and spiritual life. However, the mode of production is not a static system, but a historical formation that has its own dynamics of development. It develops in the process of interaction of productive forces and production relations, which change at different speeds, unevenly and at a certain moment come into conflict - a contradiction with each other. The development of the productive forces necessarily entails a change in production relations and, accordingly, the phenomena of the superstructure, but this does not happen all at once, but in the process. social revolution, period, which Marx refers to as an "epoch", spanning several centuries.

The restructuring of production relations means a break in the old system of relations of power and domination, a change in the social structure and is therefore accompanied by class conflicts and class struggle. Society is a stable system, but it is subject to historical development and, having reached the limits of its development, enters a period of transformation. A change in the material productive forces requires a corresponding restructuring of production relations - social institutions; however, as noted, we are not talking about "spontaneous order", but about stable, objective, material relations connected with the vital interests of certain groups subject to historical inertia. Marx emphasizes that, firstly, any social change implies social conflict(which may take the form of political conflict) does not occur "automatically" and attempts to present it as a neutral process of "economic growth" or "technological progress" only obscure the essence of the matter. Secondly, precisely because social relations exist independently of the will of individuals, they do not arise and disappear at the same time, but have a historical duration, long-term consequences and effects.

History matters because here and now people rely on the results of the activities of past generations, embodied not only in material culture, but also in public institutions, the creation of which is much more distant in time from the immediate present. “People make their own history, but they do not make it as they please, under circumstances that they did not choose themselves, but which are directly available, given to them and passed on from the past” [Marx, 1957, p. 119]. The problem of the role of human action in historical change formulated in this quotation, presented in sociological theory in the form of the well-known agency-structure dichotomy, admits different interpretations. Of course, these questions were discussed in the philosophy of history before Marx, but his research program allows us to consider them as empirical questions which can be answered by comparative historical research.

Having formulated the concept of a materialistic understanding of history, Marx outlines a model for such a study, considering the historical process as a sequence of historical systems - modes of production corresponding to different stages of socio-economic development: Asian, ancient, feudal and modern, bourgeois (Marx did not use the word "capitalism"). In his sociological concept, Marx builds a program of empirical sociology as historical and comparative discipline. The materialistic understanding of history provides the key to understanding both the relationships within the system and its changes, since they are governed by the same logic.

The principles of this concept open up the possibility of raising many empirical questions. How are economic crises and political revolutions related? How does changing technological processes affect the structure of employment and income distribution? What role do mass mobilizations play in institutional change and economic development? Why did England switch to wage labor earlier than France? How to explain the economic backwardness of the countries of Eastern Europe in the early modern period? Why did the revolutions in Ancien Régime France and in Russia take place there and then, and not earlier or later or elsewhere? As can be seen, these questions are compatible with both qualitative, case-oriented (why England?) and quantitative, systematic relationship-oriented (how are property relations and political structure?) comparative research strategies. However, this is where a number of problems arise.

Karl Marx, who created the true science of society, is 190 years old. Marx left a huge spiritual legacy. He is one of the greatest thinkers of all time. J. P. Sartre had reason when he wrote: “... It is quite clear that epochs of philosophical creation are rare. In my opinion, between the XVII and XX centuries. there are only three eras: the era of Descartes and Locke, the era of Kant and Hegel, and finally the era of Marx. These three philosophical epochs are in turn the ground of every extraordinary thought and the horizon of every culture. And they will be insurmountable until the moment in history, of which they are an expression, is overcome.

Before Marx, there were many great thinkers who studied the driving forces of social development, the immanent logic of the historical process. Suffice it to mention the names of Montesquieu, Condorcet, Herder, Kant, Hegel and other outstanding philosophers. But despite the different, sometimes even opposing views and approaches, they basically worked on the same historical field and used, in essence, the same categories. In their works we find deep and sometimes brilliant thoughts about society and the mechanisms of its functioning, but there is no coherent and systematized doctrine of society as an integral entity. Even the great Hegel, whom Marx held in high esteem and declared himself his disciple, in his philosophy of history (with the possible exception of Introductions to "lectures on the philosophy of history") puts forward few interesting and meaningful ideas. The main defect of all philosophical and historical teachings was their speculative and idealistic character.

Marx, of course, deeply studied everything that was created before him about society, and this is already felt in his first theoretical works. Take, for example, articles written in 1842. Here we already meet the names of Luther, Strauss, Feuerbach, Kant, G. Hugo, Voltaire, Herder, Augustine of the Blessed, Montaigne and many other thinkers. And in 1843, Marx wrote the work "On the Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law", in which he gives a critical analysis of the views of his teacher and at the same time lays the foundations of his own teaching. He cooks epistemological gap with all the old philosophy of history. The essence of this gap lies in the fact that in order to analyze society as an integral social organism, Marx is not satisfied with the categorical apparatus of the previous philosophical theories. In "German Ideology", written in 1845-1846. and published only in 1932, one can observe this epistemological gap. Here already there are categories of philosophy that were absent in the previous philosophical and historical teachings: "mode of production", "thoughts of the ruling class", "material force", "spiritual force", "social system". However, instead of the category "relations of production" the term is used "form of communication". No and category "socio-economic formation", the term is used instead "type of ownership".

Categories appear in The Poverty of Philosophy "public relations", "social production", "production relations, means of production. The classic presentation of all the categories that make up the framework of the materialist understanding of history, Marx gives in Preface"toward a critique of political economy". Added to the above categories "economic basis", "superstructure", "social being", "public consciousness", "socio-economic formation", "economic structure of society", "prehistory of human society". In "Capital" and other works of Marx, new categories also appear, carrying, like all other categories, an enormous theoretical and semantic load.

Why does Marx develop new categories? After all, he subjected to severe criticism not only of his predecessors, but also of his contemporaries for logical schemes and speculative reasoning. Let us recall, for example, Proudhon's criticism of the artificial categories and principles he put forward. “Like a true philosopher, M. Proudhon understands things upside down and sees in actual relations only the embodiment of those principles, those categories that, as the same M. Proudhon the philosopher informs us, were dormant in the bowels of the “impersonal reason of mankind”.”

Marx creates a new materialistic the doctrine of society, and it needs such categories that adequately reflect the realities of the historical process and at the same time serve as a tool for understanding this process. It can be put differently: Marx not only develops new categories, but also “creates” new the field of analysis of society as an integral entity. This new field is social reality itself. “The premises with which we begin are not arbitrary, they are not dogmas; they are real presuppositions, from which one can abstract only in the imagination. These are the actual individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find ready-made and those created by their own activity. Thus, these premises can be established in a purely empirical way. Not abstract reasoning about society, but the study of the real life of people, the material conditions of their existence. People in the process of joint activity produce the means of life they need, but by doing so they produce their material life, which is the foundation of society. Therefore, the production of material life itself must be considered the first historical act. Material production, that is, the production of material values ​​- housing, food, clothing, etc. - is the basic condition of any history, any society, and it must be carried out continuously. Material life, material social relations that are formed in the process of production of material goods, determine all other forms of people's activity - political, spiritual, social, etc. Ideas, even foggy formations in people's brains, are the evaporation of their material life. Morality, religion, philosophy and other forms of social consciousness reflect the material life of society.

The production of material goods is necessary to meet the needs of people, but satisfied needs lead to new needs, since new production gives rise to new needs. And the satisfaction of new needs requires a new production of needs. Such is the dialectic of production and consumption. This is how Marx formulates the law of increasing needs.

People, producing daily their own life, produce other people, that is, they begin to multiply. In this regard, Marx singles out three aspects of social reality: the production of means of subsistence, the generation of new needs, and the production of people by people.

Essence materialistic understanding of history Marx expressed in Preface“On the Critique of Political Economy” as follows: “In the social production of their lives, people enter into certain, necessary, relations independent of their will - relations of production that correspond to a certain stage in the development of their material productive forces. The totality of these production relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which the legal and political superstructure rises and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual processes of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.

The materialistic understanding of history discovered by Marx requires not just its statement, otherwise it would not differ in any way from the speculative, idealistic explanation of social processes, but the study of the actual life of people. Therefore, Marx turns to an analysis of the practical activities of people who, first of all, must live, and for this they need food, housing, clothing, etc. That is why the production of material life itself should be considered the first historical act. Material production is the basic condition of all history, and it must be carried out continuously.

The materialistic understanding of history can be summarized thus:

1. This understanding of history proceeds from the decisive, determining role of the material production of immediate life. It is necessary to study the real process of production and the form of communication generated by it, that is, production relations.

2. It shows how various forms of social consciousness arise - religion, philosophy, morality, law, etc. - and how they are determined by material production.

3. It always remains on the basis of actual history, it explains not practice from ideas, but ideological formations from material life.

4. It considers that each stage of the development of society encounters a certain material result, a certain level of productive forces, certain production relations. New generations use the productive forces, the capital acquired by the previous generation, and thus simultaneously create new values ​​and change the productive forces.

The discovery of a materialistic understanding of history meant scientific revolution in the philosophy of history. Marx discovered a new continent-field - this economic field, on which material values ​​are created, acting as the foundation of any social life.

The materialist understanding of history has been criticized since its discovery. His opponents argue that Marx allegedly ignores the role of non-economic factors - politics, philosophy, religion, etc. - in social development. One of the first critics of Marx was Professor P. Barth of the University of Leipzig, whose work Engels was familiar with. Barth writes that Marx was brought up on Hegelian philosophy, and therefore everything that did not follow from a single principle, he considered unscientific. Marx himself chose economics as such a principle, from which he derives all other spheres of social life. He, continues Barth, deprives these spheres of independence and completely subordinates them to the economic factor. In fact, law, ideology, politics, etc. are independent of the economy and develop independently. But “Marx and Engels do not say a word about the reaction of ideology to the national economy, a reaction that is self-evident and cannot but be revealed, because an active worker in the field of the national economy, a person, is at the same time a bearer of ideas, and ideas guide his actions.

But it is not corresponds historical reality, for Marx never belittled the role of non-economic factors. He viewed society as complex structured whole, which can be conditionally divided into four large spheres: economic, social, political and spiritual. Each of these spheres is a whole system of various elements that are in constant interaction.

Economic the sphere is the unity of production, consumption, exchange and distribution. All production is at the same time consumption. But all consumption is at the same time production. In turn, production and consumption do not exist without exchange and distribution. These four elements of the economic sphere can be divided into sub-elements. So the economic sphere itself is complex and multifaceted. The same applies to other areas.

social the sphere is represented by ethnic communities of people (clan, tribe, ethnos, people, nation, etc.), as well as various classes - slaves, slave owners, peasants, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and other social groups.

Political the scope covers power structures (the state, political parties, political relations, political institutions, etc.). The state and political structures are very differentiated.

Spiritual the sphere also has a complex structure. It includes philosophical, religious, artistic, legal, political, ethnic and other views of people, as well as their moods, emotions, ideas about the world around them, traditions, customs, etc. All these elements are interconnected and interact.

Four large spheres of social life are dialectically, and not mechanically, in contact with each other. They are not only interconnected, but also mutually condition each other. Does the economic sphere exist without people, the bearers of class, group and other relations? But aren't these same people carriers of forms of social consciousness? Or is society not a product of human interaction? Obviously, all these questions should be answered in the affirmative.

Society, as noted above, is a structured whole. This means that all its elements, both at the macro and micro levels, dialectically and continuously interact. They are structurally changing, improving, developing. In other words, they (elements) are variant. Spiritual spheres (for example, the era of slavery and our time) differ sharply from each other: they have undergone fundamental qualitative and quantitative changes. But at the same time, elements of the spiritual sphere of society invariant in the sense that the functions entrusted to them are constant throughout the history of the world. So, no matter what changes the political sphere undergoes, its main function remains the regulation of relations between society and the state, between different classes, states, etc. No matter how the economy improves, no matter how production relations and productive forces change, The main function of the economy has always been and will be the production of material values.

In a structured whole, different spheres perform different functions that differ in significance for the subjects of history, that is, for people. For society to function as a social system, it is necessary first of all to produce and reproduce immediate life. In other words, it is necessary to constantly and continuously produce material values, build housing, plants, factories, produce food, clothing, etc. This is a natural process of the historical development of society. Therefore, Marx had every reason to say that the mode of production of material life determines all other life processes. In other words, the economic factor in the final analysis always acts as a determinant, as the driving force of the historical process.

The words "ultimately" were first used in Engels' letters in the 1990s. XIX century L. Althusser was the first to pay attention to their theoretical meaning. He believes that the expression "ultimately" is "a topic, that is, a spatial arrangement that determines places in space for given realities." These realities are the four large spheres of social life mentioned above. Topeka represents society as a building, the floors of which rest on its foundation. There may be many floors, but the foundation is one. A foundation without floors is not a building, but floors without a foundation cannot hang in the air. Ultimately, they need some kind of support. Therefore, in the determination of a topic, the final count is really the final count. This means that there are other accounts or instances that figure in the legal-political and ideological superstructure. Thus, the reference to the final account in determination has a double function. It separates Marx from all mechanism and reveals in determination the action of various instances, the action of real difference, into which dialectics fits. Therefore, the topic means that determination, in the final analysis, by the economic basis is conceived only in differentiation and, consequently, in a complex and dissected whole, where determination in the final instance fixes the real difference of other instances, their relative independence and their own way of influencing the basis itself.

The economy ultimately determines the entire historical process, but at each stage of its development, other spheres can act as dominants, that is, they can play a dominant role. Thus, the wars of Julius Caesar played a decisive role in the Romanization of Europe. As Weber showed, the Protestant religion played a dominant role in the formation of capitalist relations in Germany.

In addition, being in constant interaction, all spheres of social life influence each other and thus the entire historical development. Public consciousness, the state, the social sphere and other non-economic factors are relatively independent, have their own patterns of development and logic. Thus, the development of philosophy does not necessarily coincide with the economic basis of a particular country. In an economically backward country, philosophy can develop very successfully as a specific area of ​​the spiritual sphere. In feudal Germany, classical German philosophy arose, which made an invaluable contribution to world philosophical culture. In landlord Russia, we see the rise of the philosophical thought of A. I. Herzen, B. S. Solovyov and many others.

If we take art, we see the same picture. Art as a spiritual phenomenon is complex and diverse, and its explanation cannot be limited to references to the material conditions of life. “Regarding art,” wrote Marx, “it is known that certain periods of its heyday are by no means in accordance with the general development of society, and therefore also with the development of the material basis of the latter.” No material factors can explain the phenomenon of Pushkin, the brilliant work of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Balzac and Tolstoy. And yet, these greatest figures of world culture appeared when a certain level of material civilization had already been reached.

Thus, speaking figuratively, we can say that society is a multi-storey building with one foundation. The foundation is the economy. Floors are non-economic factors. They are variant, and one or another of them dominates in specific historical conditions. The foundation is the determinant in all cases. He immanently variant, but for history is invariant. Dominants and determinants are in dialectical unity and constantly interact.

Engels wrote that the opponents of the materialist conception of history lack knowledge of dialectics. “They constantly see only the cause here, the effect there. They do not see that this is an empty abstraction, that in the real world such metaphysical polar opposites exist only during crises, that the whole great course of development takes place in the form of interaction (although the interacting forces are very unequal: the economic movement among them is the strongest, initial, decisive ), that there is nothing absolute here, but everything is relative. To these words of Engels one can add: they lack the ability to think, analyze, and penetrate into the essence of social phenomena and processes. In short, they lack a scientific understanding of the historical process.

Based on the materialistic understanding of history that he discovered, Marx created the theory of socio-economic formation. He believed that the historical process has its own immanent logic of development, like natural processes. And this logic cannot be ignored not only in theory, but also in practice. Marx wrote: “Society, even if it has attacked the trail of the natural law of its development - and the ultimate goal of my work is the discovery of the economic law of the movement of modern society - can neither skip over the natural phases of development, nor cancel the latter by decrees. But it can shorten and alleviate the pangs of childbirth.

The category of socio-economic formation is a category of social philosophy, and the specificity of philosophical categories lies in the fact that, being abstractions of the highest level, they reflect the most general, essential features of objective reality.

The formation deals with the general logic of the development of human society, abstracting from private phenomena and accidents. Its philosophical understanding should not be confused with interpretation in historical science. Such confusion often leads to misunderstandings when historians take the concept of formation in its pure form and impose it on the real historical process, and when they do not find the complete identity of formation and reality, the former is declared a fiction. Of course, the real process is immeasurably richer and more meaningful than any philosophical category. Feudalism, for example, in the words of Engels, never corresponded to its concept. The same can be said about capitalism, and about slavery, etc. To this it should be added that there are no pure formations at all. Each formation has elements of the previous formation, and even formations. Bourgeois socio-economic, for example, manifests itself in different ways in different regions and countries. In Europe it looks different than in Asia, and in Asia it looks different than in Latin America, etc.

Of course, it does not follow from this that the category of formation is an ideal construction and does not reflect reality. It adequately reflects this reality, but adequacy should be understood as a reflection of the essence, not the phenomenon. The historical process is a set of various facts, phenomena and events. Some of them are more important for the subjects of history, others are less important, some are directly related to the logic of history, others are not. Formation deals with the logic of history, shows its unity and diversity.

The socio-economic formation includes all the phenomena that exist in society (material, spiritual, political, social, family and household, etc.). The core of the formation is the method of production of material life in the unity of the productive forces and production relations. And the basis of production relations is the form of ownership of the means of production. A socio-economic formation is a historically specific society at a given stage of its development. Each formation is a special social organism that develops on the basis of its own immanent laws. At the same time, the socio-economic formation is a certain stage in the development of the historical process along an ascending line.

Marx divided the whole history into five formations: primitive communal, slaveholding, feudal, bourgeois and communist. True, Marx also has another division of history: the primary formation (primitive society), the secondary formation (slavery, feudalism, capitalism) and the tertiary formation (communism). Moreover, according to Marx, each subsequent formation is more progressive than the previous one.

Often critics of Marx's theory of socio-economic formation accuse Marx of allegedly presenting the entire complex historical process in the form of a railway, the stations of which are socio-economic formations. All countries are allegedly required to stop at every station. In fact, Marx never claimed anything of the sort. The more developed country shows the less developed its own future, but this does not mean at all that the less developed country must necessarily follow all the paths of the more developed. In this regard, one cannot fail to recall the appeal of the Russian revolutionary V. Zasulich to Marx with a request to express her position on the Russian community and the future development of Russia. Before answering V. Zasulich, Marx prepared four drafts, which differ little in content from each other. To give a fuller picture of Marx's point of view, here is a long quotation from the first draft: “Turning back to the distant past, we find everywhere in Western Europe communal property of a more or less archaic type; with the progress of society it has disappeared everywhere. Why will she avoid this fate in Russia alone?

I answer: because in Russia, thanks to an exceptional combination of circumstances, the rural community, which still exists on a national scale, can gradually free itself from its primitive features and develop directly as an element of collective production on a national scale. Precisely because she is a contemporary of capitalist production, she can assimilate its positive achievements without going through all its terrible vicissitudes. Russia does not live in isolation from the modern world; at the same time, it is not, like the East Indies, the prey of a foreign conqueror.

If Russian admirers of the capitalist system began to deny theoretical the possibility of such an evolution, I would ask them: did Russia, like the West, have to go through a long incubation period of development of machine production in order to introduce machines, steamships, railways, etc.? Let them at the same time explain to me how they managed to immediately introduce the entire mechanism of exchange (banks, credit societies, etc.), the development of which took centuries in the West?

This shows that Marx, as a dialectician, perfectly understood the complex and difficult nature of the development of the historical process. And he did not at all consider that each country must go through all the formations without fail. For Marx, it is important (and this is confirmed by the course of development of world history) that all of humanity goes through these formations.

Marx also used the concept of the Asiatic mode of production (ASP). In Marxist literature since the 1920s. this concept has caused heated discussions, which, in fact, have led nowhere. The concept of ASP denoted such a socio-economic system in which there is no private ownership of the means of production, primarily land, there is no class of exploiters, there are communities that own land, but are exploited by the state. Power is despotic. The monarch concentrates in his hands all the levers of power - economic, political, legal, etc. The reasons for the emergence of ASP in the East are harsh climatic conditions, the need for irrigation work, which only the state can do.

Some participants in the discussion argued that the ASP took place only in the East, that its history differs from the history of the West, in particular, from their point of view, there was no slavery in the East, and feudalism did not replace the slave-owning socio-economic formation. Others rejected the ASP, arguing that the West and the East had a common path of development, that slavery was everywhere and that it was everywhere replaced by the feudal mode of production.

Historian B.V. Porshnev, also an opponent of the ASP, went in an original way. He stated that in the time of Marx in historical science, instead of the concept "primitive" used the concept "Asiatic":“... The epithet “Asiatic”, under the impression of the discovery of Sanskrit and the recognition of Asia, especially India, as the ancestral home of mankind, was used in the then scientific literature in the meaning of “original”, “archaic”. Descriptions of the Indian community, or rather, its fragments, Marx considered important evidence in favor of the conclusion that at the very beginning of human history there was a classless communal system. Later, when the development of science confirmed this idea not only with Asian, but also with European and American data, Marx no longer used the expression "Asiatic mode of production" ... ".

The question of the absence or presence of ASP in the history of the East cannot be resolved within the framework of social philosophy. This is the task of specific, primarily historical sciences.

From the point of view of social philosophy, it does not matter at all whether the ASP existed or not, it also does not matter how many formations there were - five, six, ten or twenty; but it is important that certain stages, stages, formations take place in the whole world history, indicating that the historical process does not stand still and that each of its stages, stages or formations is qualitatively different from the previous one.

At present, in connection with the collapse of socialism, the majority of social scientists in unison began to assert that the theory of socio-economic formation has shown its inconsistency and therefore it should be consigned to oblivion. But in fact, it is precisely the collapse of socialism that confirms its scientific nature. Marx wrote in the same Capital: "A country that is more industrially developed shows to a less developed country only a picture of its own future." From Marx's point of view, one cannot skip the natural phases of one's development, and socialism wins not in a backward country, but in a developed one. We all know what tsarist Russia was like in which the revolution won.

The formation theory is also criticized because it is associated with progress, which is rejected by many modern philosophers. But let us remind these philosophers that since society arose at a certain stage in the evolution of nature and is a qualitatively new formation, then it must develop in an ascending line, because society is a product of the interaction of people interested in the continuous improvement of their living conditions, that is, in progress. . Progress is the comfort of life. And it would be absurd to deny that as society advances along the path of social progress, life becomes more comfortable.

The materialistic understanding of history discovered by Marx is one of the fundamental discoveries in social philosophy. This is a kind of Copernican revolution in philosophy. Even during Marx's lifetime, one of his enthusiastic admirers, Belfort Bax, called Marx's Capital "a book that developed a doctrine in economics comparable in its revolutionary character and all-encompassing significance to the Copernican system in astronomy or to the law of gravity in general mechanics" . But in "Capital" the scientific substantiation of the materialistic understanding of history is just given.

In our era, due to the rapid growth of productive forces and the reduction of people in material production, some social scientists began to argue that we live in a post-economic space, and therefore the economic factor has ceased to play a determining role in social production. But this is a naive view of society. Material production plays a determining role not because many people work in it, but because people must first of all satisfy their material needs, since their biological existence depends on their satisfaction. Therefore, as long as humanity lives, the determining role will be played by material production.

Marx's teaching is relevant and irresistible, because the historical moment, of which it is an expression, has not been overcome and is topical. The social reality that Marx explored has changed structurally, but its essence has remained. Therefore, in the words of the same Sartre, one can say: “The so-called “overcoming” of Marxism is, at worst, a return to pre-Marxism, and at best, to a rediscovery of the thought contained in the philosophy that one wanted to overcome.”

We live in the era of globalization, which is a very complex and contradictory process in the historical development of society. This process requires rigorous scientific analysis. It must be said that a huge number of monographs, articles, brochures, etc. are devoted to the study of globalization. It cannot be denied that many of these works contain interesting thoughts and ideas. Many authors are rightly concerned about the negative consequences of globalization, without overcoming which humanity will face an abyss. And yet, there is no rigorously scientific analysis in the numerous writings on globalization. Each author chooses as a starting point that aspect or sphere of public life that he likes best. But science is guided by general principles, not by subjective preferences. Let us remind the reader of some of these principles. First the principle is the recognition of the objectivity of the natural and social environment. Science proceeds from the fact that nature (more broadly - the Universe) and society are not created by anyone. Science believes that the objective world is cognizable, that the discovery of its laws enables man to use them to improve his living conditions. Therefore, science calls a person to vigorous activity. Let us recall Marx when he wrote about the difference between his method and Hegel's: “My dialectical method is fundamentally not only different from Hegel's, but is its direct opposite. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he transforms even under the name of an idea into an independent subject, is the demiurge of the real, which constitutes only its external manifestation. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing but the material, transplanted into the human head and transformed in it. Second principle is the principle of doubt. Science questions everything, because without a doubt there is no scientific progress. Marx's favorite motto is "question everything." Marx did not take anything for granted. He was critical not only of social reality, but also of social theories. But he perfectly understood that criticism is different from criticism. You can't criticize for the sake of criticism. Any scientific criticism presupposes the preservation of everything positive that was in the criticized theories. And Marx in his criticism was guided by this immutable thesis. He not only criticized Hegel, but declared him his teacher. Marx did not just criticize the representatives of classical political economy, but used everything valuable that was available in their work. Third principle is the principle of evidence. In the objective world, one must take for original a point is something that is completely obvious and irrefutable. Material production serves as such a starting point in the materialist understanding of history: people must first of all have food, clothes and a roof over their heads before they engage in politics, philosophy, science, art, etc. Marx begins his analysis of capitalism with a commodity, because that "the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production predominates appears as a 'vast accumulation of commodities', and an individual commodity as an elementary form of this wealth." Fourth principle is the search for truth. Science is looking for truth. There are many ways to find the truth. From this it is clear that a pluralism of opinions is absolutely necessary in science. But there is only one truth. Therefore, one of the opinions may turn out to be true, and all other opinions may be false. The truth of scientific results is confirmed by practice in the broadest sense of the word. It was Marx who first introduced the concept of practice into scientific circulation. Already in the “Theses on Feuerbach” he wrote: “The question of whether human thinking has objective truth is not at all a question of theory, but a practical question. In practice, a person must prove the truth, that is, the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking. Fifth principle - the principle of evidence and reasoning. Theology doesn't prove anything. It is based on faith, so it does not need evidence.

All these principles are included in the methodology of the materialistic understanding of history, guided by which, one can give a real analysis of contemporary social reality. Thus, the materialistic understanding has been and remains a very relevant and vital teaching, on the basis of which it is possible to consider modern realities from a scientific point of view, to analyze the situation in which today's humanity finds itself.

According to the materialistic understanding of history, people make their own history. But they do it under the circumstances that they find ready and which therefore do not depend on them. This is a historical necessity that people have to reckon with. Such a necessity, although given to each individual generation of people, is by no means predetermined by history, but belongs to history. It is an internal or, as it is customary to express it in philosophy, an immanent moment of history itself.

The real basis of the historical process is the productive forces of society. They bind together not only representatives of one generation, but also people of different generations. “That sum of productive forces,” wrote Marx and Engels, “of capital and social forms of communication, which every individual and every generation finds as something given, is the real basis of what philosophers imagined in the form of “substance” and in the form of “the essence of man.” "what they deified and what they fought...".

But in order to simply live, people are forced to put into action those productive forces that they received from previous generations. This is the practical expression of historical necessity. Thanks to their activity, and this is its specificity, people can change and change circumstances, both given by nature and created by the activity of people themselves - their social circumstances. And in this sense they are free. But they are free not because they do what they want to do, but because they want to do and do what can be done under the given conditions. And in this respect, freedom must be distinguished from arbitrariness, with which it is often confused. "Circumstances create people just as much as people create circumstances."

The materialistic understanding of history does not replace actual history, as does the philosophy of history, but only provides a method for understanding the latter. “The depiction of reality,” write Marx and Engels, “deprives independent philosophy of its living environment. At best, it can be replaced by bringing together the most general results abstracted from consideration of the historical development of people. These abstractions in themselves, apart from real history, do not have absolutely no value. They can only be useful in order to facilitate the ordering of historical material, to outline the sequence of its individual layers. "

In other words, the materialist understanding of history can manifest itself only in historical science. Therefore, it is impossible to express it in the form of a complete philosophical system, because otherwise history must end.

According to Marx and Engels, freedom and necessity are interconnected moments of the historical process, the very activity of people. And, according to this understanding, a person is by no means a passive product of circumstances, as the French materialists believed. After all, circumstances change with people themselves. “The materialist doctrine,” wrote Marx, “that people are the products of circumstances and education, that, consequently, changed people are products of other circumstances and changed education, this doctrine forgets that circumstances are changed precisely by people and that the educator himself must be educated. ...".

But the materialistic understanding of Marx's history must also be distinguished from what later came to be called technological determinism. The fact is that, according to Marx, the level of human freedom and, accordingly, necessity is determined not only by the level of development of production technology. It is also determined by the level of development of society, namely by the form of social relations, primarily production relations, into which people are forced to enter in order to put the corresponding productive forces into action. But there is no direct correspondence here, but the opposite relationship can be observed: a higher level of productive forces can become a condition for human lack of freedom. In other words, a person can become a hostage of technological progress and feel more free with a shovel in his own garden, and not with the most modern computer, if he has to work on it for the sake of alien and incomprehensible goals.

35. The meaning of Marx's concepts of "social being", "social consciousness", "basis", "superstructure", "formation", "revolution".

Formation - The mode of production underlying the socio-economic formation is the unity of the interaction of productive forces and production relations (relations of ownership of the means of production). On the basis of the mode of production, superstructural relations (political, legal and ideological institutions of society) are formed, which, as it were, consolidate the existing relations of production. The unity of the interaction of the superstructure and the mode of production constitutes the socio-economic formation. According to Marx, humanity has gone through several socio-economic formations - primitive, ancient Eastern, slave-owning, feudal and capitalist, and the last - communist - must come in the future and is final.

Public consciousness - in Marxism: a reflection of social life; a set of collective ideas inherent in a particular era. Social consciousness is often opposed to individual consciousness as that common that is contained in the consciousness of each person as a member of society. Social consciousness is an integral part of the superstructure and expresses its spiritual side.

The basis is material production, which is a combination of productive forces (the working mass of people and the means of production that they use) and production relations (social relations that inevitably arise in connection with production). Basis - the basis and root cause of all processes occurring in society. According to their role in production, in almost all formations, 2 "main", antagonistic classes are distinguished - working producers and owners of the means of production.

Superstructure - a set of political, legal, religious institutions of society, as well as moral, aesthetic, philosophical views in it. For class societies, the presence of classes is reflected in the superstructure in the form of the existence of social structures associated with the relationship of classes to the means of production and expressing the interests of these classes. The superstructure is secondary, dependent on the basis, but has a relative independence and can both correspond to the basis in its development, and ahead of it or lag behind it, thus stimulating or hindering the development of society.

Revolution (from late Latin revolutio - turn, upheaval, transformation, conversion) - a radical, fundamental, “revolutionary”, deep qualitative change, a leap in the development of nature, society or knowledge, associated with an open break with the previous state. Revolution as a qualitative leap in development, a gap in gradualness, is distinguished both from evolution (where development occurs gradually) and from reform (during which any part of the system is changed without affecting the existing foundations). Revolution according to the max is divided into bourgeois and socialist. The bourgeois revolution leads to the replacement of feudalism by capitalism in the economy, not completely or does not completely eliminate the feudal political regime, this usually entails the emergence of bourgeois-democratic revolutions, the meaning of which is to bring the political superstructure in line with the economic basis. The socialist revolution leads to the transition from capitalism to socialism.

Philosophical materialism Marx considered the basis of his scientific worldview. This materialism was above all a reaction to the idealism of Hegel and the Young Hegelians, a striving to oppose to it an explanation of the world by "real", "practical", "material" grounds.

Marx never used the term "historical materialism", which after his death came to denote his metatheory of society. This term was introduced by Engels, using it first in his letters of 1890 to K. Schmidt and J. Bloch, and then in the introduction to the English edition of his work The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science. Marx himself preferred to use the more cautious expression "materialistic understanding of history", thereby implying, as it were, that this is not a philosophical system, but a certain theoretical and methodological position or attitude. This did not prevent historical materialism from becoming one of the theoretical systems, the most dogmatic, closed and claiming universal explanations.

What is the materialistic understanding of history in Marx's interpretation? The essence of this understanding is expressed in the well-known preface of Marx to the work “On the Critique of Political Economy”: “In the social production of their life, people enter into certain, necessary, relations independent of their will - relations of production that correspond to a certain stage in the development of their material productive forces. The totality of these production relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which the legal and political superstructure rises and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual processes of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.

In The German Ideology we find similar theses, in particular: “Consciousness (das Bewusstsein) can never be anything other than conscious being (das bewusste Sein), and the being of people is the real process of their life.”

The principle of reduction, the reduction of the spiritual to the material, the explanation of all social life from its material aspects, is supplemented in historical materialism by an indication of the need to take into account the reverse impact of consciousness on being. At the end of his life, Engels was forced to emphasize that economic factors only "in the long run" determine social life.

The main postulates of the materialist understanding of history, despite the outward clarity and apparent obviousness of a number of formulations, are largely metaphorical, ambiguous and tautological. Even such basic concepts as “material” and “being” are extremely ambiguous and vague. Consider, for example, some of the meanings of the word "material" in Marx.

• 1) Material as economic. This usage refers mainly to the production of life support. Sometimes Marx puts two words next to each other: “material economic”, so that the second one serves as if clarifying in relation to the first. Out of this interpretation of the “material,” “economic determinism,” which Marxists often reproached for the vulgarization of historical materialism, grew quite naturally.
• 2) Material as natural. In this case, this concept includes natural factors: biological, geological, orohydrographic, climatic, etc. Here the materialistic explanation merges with the naturalistic; the latter was defended by many sociologists of naturalistic trends, very far from historical materialism.
• 3) Material as real. In this sense, the word is close to Comte's term "positive" as real as opposed to chimerical. In this usage, materialist explanations do not differ from the positivist explanations of Comte or Spencer.

The latter meaning, in particular, is also inherent in the Marxian term "being", which is considered as the "real process" of people's lives. With this word usage, the fundamental postulate “social being determines social consciousness” means: “the real process of people's social life determines their social consciousness”. But what is to be attributed in this case to being, and what to consciousness? It is more than doubtful to believe that the “real process” is the economy, and law, politics, morality, etc. are “consciousness” in which this “real” process is reflected. Firstly, the economy does not exist without economic consciousness, and secondly, law, politics, morality, science, etc. - this is no less "real" practical process of people's lives than the economy.

As a result, the thesis “being determines consciousness” in Marx’s social philosophy can be understood in three ways:

• 1) Some real processes of people's lives determine other real processes; the thesis is as indisputable as it is banal.
• 2) The real processes of people's lives determine the chimerical ones; the thesis is as indisputable as it is meaningless.
• 3) The basis, relations of production (“real”) determine the “superstructure”, i.e. politics, morality, law, etc.; the thesis is provable to the same extent as the opposite.

If we add to this the extreme ambiguity of the term “determines” in the indicated postulate (“conditions”, “influences”, “generates”, “affects”, “causes dependence”, “forms”, etc.), then the scientific value of the original the postulate of a materialistic understanding of history will be even more dubious. It is no coincidence that Marx and Engels were forced, firstly, to emphasize the need to study the interaction between various spheres of social reality, and secondly, to point out that materialistic understanding is an explanation “in the final analysis”. Both were essentially useless, since this could not help the vulgarizers of historical materialism, and serious scientists are always busy studying the interaction of various factors, and “ultimately” do not need explanations.

At the same time, the materialist understanding of history contained the most important proposition for social science that societies and groups cannot be explained by the ideas that they create about themselves, that behind various ideologies it is necessary to strive to discover the deep foundations of social reality. The reduction of this reality to the economic subsystem was certainly erroneous. But the inclusion of this subsystem in the social system, the analysis of its interrelationships with other subsystems of society were undoubtedly fruitful. In a number of his works, Marx studied not the unilateral influence of the base on the superstructure, but the interaction of economic and non-economic institutions and the interaction of the latter with each other. Nevertheless, the economy, as well as politics, always seemed to him to be more “real” (“material”) entities than, for example, morality, law or religion.

After Marx wrote the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844", in the course of criticizing his former associates - the Young Hegelians and his last idol - Feuerbach, he laid the foundations of a doctrine that later became known as historical materialism.

The essence of the criticism of Young Hegelianism, which runs through both joint works of Marx and Engels, is that it is impossible to change the world through a change in consciousness, through the ideas put forward by Young Hegelian "critical thinkers", since people's interests are generated by the real conditions of their life, their being. According to Marx, if we want to understand a person, explain his behavior, we must start not from a person as such, but from the society in which he lives, and above all to find out how relations between people develop in this society. All social relations are based on the production relations of people (the economic basis of society), which are formed through their practical activities.

Marx introduces into philosophy the sphere of the practical-transformative activity of people, in which philosophers had not previously been interested. This practical activity - first of all, the processing of natural objects for the production of material goods necessary for people's lives, and then the revolutionary struggle for the sake of changing society itself - is, according to Marx, the most important type of activity on which all the others depend in one way or another.

In history, different types of production relations are observed, and each time the relations of people among themselves are determined by their relationship to the means of production. If some people own the means of production, while others do not, then the latter have no choice but to work for the former, for the owners. Hence comes the division of people into classes that form a social hierarchy of domination in society: slave owners rule over slaves, feudal lords over peasants, capitalists over workers. From here follows the possibility of periodizing history, classifying the types of society - "social formations" - in accordance with various forms of ownership of the means of production, with different methods of production.

In the "German Ideology" this periodization is as follows: tribal, ancient, feudal, capitalist and future communist forms of ownership and, accordingly, types of society. All this, Marx and Engels emphasize, is not deduced by speculative philosophical reasoning, but is revealed empirically, as “positive science” does. Their goal, they declare, is to construct a doctrine of society and its history as a science, which they directly oppose to all previous philosophy and even philosophy in general. And this science is designed not only to state the division of the history of society into formations, and each formation into its constituent elements and classes, but also to explain why this or that social formation is arranged in this way, and most importantly, why society develops, moving from formation to formation. .

Society is a kind of integrity capable of self-development. Its various parts must somehow correspond to each other. Such a correspondence exists in principle between the forces of production and the relations of production. Marx explains the change of formations in society by the fact that productive forces are developing, violating the correspondence between themselves and production relations, from which follows the need to change these relations, and after them other, “superstructural” relations, that is, the whole society. And since changes affect the interests of different classes, they take place in the course of the class struggle, in the course of the revolution, where some classes appear as progressive, while others as conservative or reactionary. "The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles." According to Marx, a new society is derived from the contradictions of society itself at a given stage of its development, and above all from the contradiction between the productive forces and production relations.

The term "historical materialism" was used by Engels to "designate that view of the course of world history, which finds the ultimate cause and decisive driving force of all important historical events in the economic development of society, in the change in the mode of production and exchange, in the resulting division of society into various classes and in the struggle of these classes among themselves. In the future, the materialist understanding of history began to be regarded as the fundamental principle of historical materialism as a science of society.

Having discovered the materialist understanding of history, Marx and Engels made a significant contribution to the scientific understanding of society and created examples of a dialectical materialist explanation of social life. Their first scientific vision of human society was scientific in the classical Newtonian understanding of the world, where law is identical with necessity, repetition. On this basis, Marx's idea was formed about the conscious, systematic reorganization of the world on the basis of knowledge of its laws.

The creation of a materialistic understanding of history, the disclosure of the role of material production as a decisive condition for historical development meant a fundamentally new solution to the problem of the emergence of man and society. Thus, Engels, in contrast to the biological approach to solving the problem of man, developed the social aspect of anthropogenesis. He showed that the formation of man and society is a single process, later called anthroposociogenesis. The connecting link between anthropogenesis and sociogenesis was labor in the dialectical unity of its material and spiritual aspects. Thus, the leap from the animal world to the social world was explained, it was proved that, along with the natural, there is a social reality.

According to the historical-materialistic teaching of Marx, the development of society should be regarded as an objective, natural-historical process. Thanks to the materialistic understanding of history, it became possible to move on to a concrete study of socio-economic formations. The creation of a formational doctrine made it possible to consider history as a progressive process, which is based on objectively existing laws. The doctrine of socio-economic formations showed the historical inevitability of the transition from capitalism to communism, that "the prehistory of human society ends with the bourgeois social formation."

In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels laid the methodological foundations for the scientific periodization of world history. The basis of this periodization was the doctrine of the progressive change of social formations.

The stages of historical progress were:

1. The primitive stage of development of society, characterized by common (“tribal”) property and the absence of class division.

2. Slave stage.

3. Feudalism.

4. Capitalism.

5. They considered communism to be the highest stage in the development of human society.

Each stage corresponded to a certain level of development of the division of labor and a certain form of ownership, which determines the dominant type of social relations. Later, the place of such a material factor as the form of ownership was taken by the mode of production.

However, this periodization was not for Marx and Engels some kind of rigid scheme, a template that is taken into account by all peoples. The evolution of many peoples, according to Engels, does not occur in strict accordance with the general periods of world history.

Formations are considered as self-developing social organisms. An analysis of capitalist society by K. Marx shows that the capitalist formation, like any other, should be understood not only as a qualitatively defined, but at the same time as an idealized type of society. Moreover, the abstract-theoretical model of capitalism can never absolutely coincide with its concrete historical embodiment. As historical practice shows, in no country, even in England, where the capitalist order was most developed, ideally completed forms of bourgeois relations, characteristic of the pre-monopoly phase of the development of capitalism, were achieved. Ideally completed imperialism also remains an abstract theoretical model, and the concrete historical embodiment of this model is nothing more than a limiting possibility.

The doctrine of a progressive change in the socio-economic form is the cornerstone of Marxism. The idea of ​​communism, which was seen as the future classless society, is most directly based on it.

This society, according to Marx, should replace capitalism in the course of a social upheaval, which will remove the existing antagonism between the productive forces and production relations, and open the way for the development of the productive forces. The proletariat will be placed in power, that is, the class capable of mastering the development of the productive forces.

According to Marx, communism should replace capitalism, since it will present much greater opportunities for the all-round development of man.

Historical materialism (materialistic understanding of history), the Marxist theory of the development of society and the methodology of its knowledge. The subject matter of historical materialism is society as an integral and developing social system, the general laws and driving forces of the historical process. Historical materialism is an integral part of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and, at the same time, a specific component of the system of social sciences.

Historical materialism is organically connected with dialectical materialism. The unity of dialectical and historical materialism does not negate the relatively independent nature of historical materialism as a science of society that has its own conceptual apparatus and has developed a philosophical and sociological methodology for social cognition. The need for such a philosophical science of society is determined primarily by the fact that any social theory that analyzes the activities of people faces the problem of the relationship of their consciousness to being. Historical materialism provides a solution to this basic philosophical question as applied to society, i.e., the question of the relationship between the social existence of people and their consciousness, guided by the general philosophical principles of dialectical materialism and based on the material of history itself. Having discovered the laws and driving forces of social development, the founders of historical materialism raised sociology to the level of a true science of society. Historical materialism also acts as a Marxist general sociological theory, which reveals the specifics of the structural elements of the social system, the nature of their interaction, the laws of social development and the mechanisms of their manifestation.

Before the advent of Marxism, idealism reigned supreme in the views on society. Even the materialists before K. Marx, as well as such prominent representatives of the social sciences as A. Smith and D. Ricardo, A. Saint-Simon and C. Fourier, O. Thierry and F. Mignet, N. G. Chernyshevsky and N. A. Dobrolyubov and others were not materialists in their understanding of social life.

The social prerequisites for the emergence of historical materialism are connected with the development of capitalism, which expanded the possibilities of social knowledge, and the class struggle of the proletariat, which gave rise to a social need for an objective knowledge of social reality. Historical materialism is linked to previous social philosophy and social science. Before K. Marx and F. Engels, the ideas of historical necessity and social development were formulated (J. Vico, G. Hegel), the labor theory of value was created (Smith, Ricardo), the class struggle was discovered (Thierry, Mignet, F. Guizot), , albeit in a utopian form, some features of socialism (T. More, Fourier, Saint-Simon, R. Owen and others).

The starting points of the theory of historical materialism were developed by K. Marx and F. Engels in the 1940's. 19th century They first formulated the basic principles of historical materialism in the work The German Ideology (1845-46, published in the USSR in 1933). An important place in the development of the Marxist concept of history belongs to such works as The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), The Communist Manifesto (1847), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) and others.

A brief and at the same time integral characterization of the essence of historical materialism was first given in the preface to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).

Initially put forward as a hypothesis, historical materialism had to prove its truth and fruitfulness. This was done by the founders of Marxism by applying it to the study of various social processes and historical events and, first of all, to the analysis of the functioning and development of the capitalist system. Since the publication of K. Marx's Capital (1867), the scientific authenticity of historical materialism can be considered fully proven (see V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 1, pp. 139-40) .

Historical materialism made a real revolution in the development of philosophy and social science. The emergence of historical materialism made it possible to complete the building of materialism "to the top", to create an integral scientific and philosophical view of the world, including both nature and society, to concretize the general principles of the philosophical worldview in relation to society as a special, social form of the movement of matter, to scientifically analyze the features of social knowledge , explore the nature of social concepts and the dialectics of their relationships.

Main Categories Historical Materialism are social being, social consciousness, socio-economic formation, mode of production, productive forces, production relations, basis, superstructure, social revolution, forms of social consciousness.

Essential Principles Historical materialism: recognition of the primacy of the material life of society - social being in relation to public consciousness and the active role of the latter in public life; separation from the totality of social relations - production relations as the economic structure of society, which ultimately determines all other relations between people, providing an objective basis for their analysis; a historical approach to society, i.e., recognition of development in history and understanding it as a natural historical process of movement and change in socio-economic formations, the idea that history is made by people, the working masses, and the basis and source of motives for their activity should be sought in the material conditions of the social production of their lives. The development and application of these principles led to overcoming the main shortcomings of previous historical and sociological theories: idealism in understanding history and ignoring the creative role of the masses in history, made it possible to put the scientific theory of social development in place of abstract philosophical and historical schemes. “People make their own history, but what determines the motives of people and precisely the masses of people, what causes clashes of conflicting ideas and aspirations, what is the totality of all these clashes of the entire mass of human societies, what are the objective conditions for the production of material life that create the basis for all the historical activity of people, what the law of development of these conditions - Marx drew attention to all this and showed the way to the scientific study of history, as a single, regular process in all its enormous versatility and inconsistency" (Lenin V.I., ibid., vol. 26, p. 58). Historical materialism constitutes the theoretical and methodological basis of scientific social science - historical science, political economy, jurisprudence, art theory, etc.

Historical materialism rejects both the idealistic separation of society from nature and their naturalistic identification. The specificity of society is expressed primarily in the social relations that form a given social system, and in the culture created by man. The nature of this system is ultimately determined by the degree of domination over nature, materially fixed in the means of labor, in the productive forces. Production, that is, the functioning and development of productive forces, is the fundamental basis for the existence of human society. “In the social production of their lives, people enter into certain, necessary, relations independent of their will - relations of production, which correspond to a certain stage in the development of their material productive forces. The totality of these production relations constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which the legal and political superstructure rises and to which certain forms of social consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and spiritual processes of life in general. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness. . At the same time, historical materialism is fundamentally different from vulgar economic materialism, which views the economy as the only active force in history. Historical materialism requires taking into account the relative independence and specificity of various social phenomena. The dependence of spiritual life on material life, the superstructure on the basis, the entire social system on the mode of production is by no means one-sided. I. m. substantiates the enormous role of ideas, the subjective factor in the development of society, in the solution of urgent social problems. History is the result of a complex interaction of various social phenomena, social forces. But the method of material production is always the basis for the interaction of all aspects of social life, and ultimately determines the nature of society and the general direction of the historical process.

The most important category historical materialism is the concept of a socio-economic formation as a qualitatively defined society at a given stage of its development. This concept allows us to single out what is common in the orders of different countries that are at the same stage of historical development, and thereby apply the general scientific criterion of repetition in historical research, approach the knowledge of the objective laws of the development of society. Each socio-economic formation is a kind of "social organism", the specificity of which is determined, first of all, by the material production relations that form the basis of the formation. The basis forms, as it were, the "economic skeleton" of the social organism, and its "flesh and blood" is the superstructure that arises on the basis of this basis (see Basis and superstructure). The superstructure is a set of ideological, political, moral, legal, i.e. secondary, relations; related organizations and institutions (state, court, church, etc.); various feelings, moods, views, ideas, theories, which together constitute the social psychology and ideology of a given society. The basis and superstructure with sufficient certainty and completeness characterize the peculiarity of each formation, its qualitative difference from other formations. But, in addition to the basis and superstructure, the category of socio-economic formation also covers a number of other social phenomena necessary for the functioning of this formation, for the life of a “social organism”. Each formation is associated with certain productive forces; no society can exist without such a means of communication as language; in modern societies, science plays an increasingly important role, etc. In addition, each formation is associated with certain types of differentiation into social groups (classes, social strata) and communities (family, nationality, nation, etc.). These formations are in different relations to the base and superstructure, intersect with them, but cannot be attributed to either the base or the superstructure. I. m., thus, considers each socio-economic formation as a complex social system, all the elements of which are organically interconnected, and the mode of production of material goods is the constitutive element of this system in the final analysis.

With the help of the category of socio-economic formation, historical materialism inextricably links the analysis of the structure of society with the study of the process of its development. The interpretation of the historical process as a dialectic of development and change in socio-economic formations puts the study of history on concrete ground. Analysis and comparison of various formational structures make it possible to single out some general dependencies and patterns of social life, to understand the historical process in its entirety. The general sociological law that determines the historical necessity of the transition from one socio-economic formation to another, higher one, and makes it possible to understand the essence of historical progress, is the law of correspondence of production relations with productive forces discovered by K. Marx. The productive forces determine the relations of production. Correspondence of production relations with the productive forces is necessary for the normal functioning and development of the productive forces. However, developing within the framework of given production relations, the productive forces at a certain stage of their development come into conflict with them. “From the forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then comes the era of social revolution. With a change in the economic basis, a revolution takes place more or less quickly in the entire vast superstructure ”(Marx K., ibid., p. 7). Before the onset of the socialist era, social revolution is a natural form of transition from one socio-economic formation to another in the process of the progressive development of society. The stages of this development are the primitive communal, slaveholding, feudal, capitalist and communist socio-economic formations. Except for the primitive communal one, all social formations preceding the communist one are based on exploitation and class antagonism. Among the numerous differences (gender, age, ethnic, professional, etc.) between people in antagonistic formations, class differences are of paramount social importance, because production relations here are relations of domination and subordination, exploitation of one class by another, and all social problems are solved in the struggle of classes . The class struggle is the driving force behind the development of an antagonistic society. In this struggle, each class upholds and defends its material interests, which are determined by the place of the class in the given system of production relations and its relation to other classes. In order to become the guiding principle of activity, interest must be realized to one degree or another. The reflection of fundamental general class interests in a theoretically systematized form is carried out in the ideology of the class. According to their social role, ideologies are divided into progressive and reactionary, revolutionary and conservative, according to the nature of the reflection of reality - into scientific and non-scientific, illusory. Historical materialism demands that every ideology be considered from party positions, i.e., linked to the interests of one class or another. Marxism-Leninism is a revolutionary and consistently scientific ideology, expressing the interests of the proletariat, the interests of socialist development. The Marxist principle of party membership makes it possible to carry out a scientific analysis of social class and ideological phenomena and processes. Marxist party spirit and objectivity, consistent scientific character are identical. This is determined by the fact that the working class and its revolutionary party are building a program of struggle for their emancipation on the basis of the objective laws of social development. Therefore, a correct knowledge of these patterns is a condition for the successful liberation struggle of the working people.

The class approach allowed historical materialism to scientifically define the nature of the state. The state arose with the advent of classes and was the product and manifestation of the irreconcilability of class contradictions. With the help of the state, the economically dominant class exercises its political domination and suppresses the resistance of the oppressed classes. The state in an antagonistic society is essentially an instrument of violence of one class over another. Types of state and forms of government change with the development of an antagonistic society, but its essence as a dictatorship of the exploiting class remains unchanged. Under capitalism, the development of the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie leads to a socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat - a qualitatively new type of state that serves as an instrument for the suppression and final destruction of the exploiting classes, rallying the working people around the proletariat and creating socialist relations of comradely cooperation and mutual assistance based on public property to the means of production. Socialism is the first phase of a new formation in which exploitation has been abolished, but differences between the working classes and social groups still remain, and within which conditions are being prepared for the transition to a classless socially homogeneous society, to the highest phase of communism. This transition is carried out gradually on the basis of the conscious and planned use of the laws of social development, on the basis of the solidarity and cooperation of all classes and social groups, while maintaining the leading role of the working class. In this case, the socialist state becomes a state of the whole people. With socialism, a new era in the history of mankind begins, when conditions are gradually created for people to consciously regulate their social relations, to submit them to the control of society, for the harmonious development of man, for drawing the entire mass of working people into the process of conscious creation of history. A scientific understanding of the historical development in historical materialism serves as the basis for the development of social ideals and spiritual values ​​of the new society, the beginning of which was laid by the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia, marking the onset of the revolutionary era of transition from capitalism to socialism on a world scale.

The general concept of historical development developed by Historical Materialism is of great ideological and methodological significance. But this is not a scheme that can be imposed on the historical process or interpreted in a teleological spirit - as the desire of history from the very beginning to achieve a certain goal. The possibility and necessity of transition to each new formation arises only within the framework of the previous one, to the extent that the material conditions for its implementation mature. “... Humanity,” wrote K. Marx, “always sets itself only such tasks that it can solve, since upon closer examination it always turns out that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already available, or are at least in the process of becoming” (ibid.).

The theory of historical materialism makes it possible to overcome the extremes of both fatalism and voluntarism in understanding the historical process. History is a natural process. People cannot create it according to their own arbitrariness, because each new generation acts in certain objective conditions created before it. These objective material conditions and laws open up diverse but definite possibilities for social activity. The realization of possibilities and, consequently, the real course of history depend on the activity and initiative of people, on the unity and organization of revolutionary and progressive forces. Therefore, the specific course of history is never predetermined, it is formed in activity, in struggle, in the interaction of various forces, factors, and events. The application of historical materialism makes it possible to reveal both the internal unity of the historical process and the sources of its diversity.

Historical materialism is organically connected with the practice of the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat, with the needs of the development of socialist society. The determination of concrete goals and the choice of means, the elaboration of policy, the development of the strategy and tactics of the class struggle are carried out by the communist parties on the basis of the application of the principles of historical materialism to the analysis of social reality. The basis for the development of historical materialism is the accumulation of new historical experience and new gains in social knowledge.

An enormous contribution to the development of historical materialism was made by V. I. Lenin, who enriched it with a generalization of the experience of the class struggle of the proletariat in the era of imperialism, proletarian revolutions, and the beginning of building socialism in the USSR. Noting that any social activity should be built in accordance with objective conditions, V. I. Lenin, proceeding from the tasks of the class struggle of the proletariat, paid special attention to methods of analyzing the objective conditions of the revolutionary movement, including here not only the level of material development, the nature of social relations, the specifics of the class structure of society, but also the state of consciousness of the masses, their psychology, mood, etc. V. I. Lenin developed the question of the role of the subjective factor in the historical process, comprehensively substantiated the enormous role of scientific theory in the revolutionary movement, the importance of the creative initiative of the masses, classes, parties and individuals. In polemics with bourgeois theoreticians and reformists, dogmatists and revisionists, V. I. Lenin developed the Marxist theory of the class struggle, the theory of nations and national liberation movements in their connection with the general tasks of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat and the construction of a socialist society; the theory of the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the theory of culture and the cultural revolution. Lenin formulated a number of the most important methodological principles for approaching the communist formation, connected with the conscious purposeful nature of its development, the liquidation of antagonistic classes, and developed a program for socialist construction in the USSR.

Based on the principles of Marxism-Leninism, communist and workers' parties, Marxist scholars develop historical materialism, taking into account the experience of the world revolutionary movement, the development of the socialist system, in the fight against theories and trends hostile to Marxism-Leninism. There are three main directions for the development of problems Historical materialism

The first is connected with the analysis of social processes in the countries of socialism and developed capitalist countries, as well as in the countries of the "third world" that adhere to both socialist and non-socialist orientations. The application of historical materialism to these new social conditions required both the further development of the "traditional" problems of historical materialism and the raising of new questions. We are talking about concretization and further development of the theory of social formation; principles and methods for analyzing the social class structure of society, as well as the structure and features of the development of social consciousness, in particular ideology; general patterns and specific conditions for the transition from capitalism to socialism; about understanding the social consequences of the modern scientific and technological revolution in the conditions of capitalism and socialism and the struggle of two opposing social systems; about methodological problems of planning, forecasting and managing the processes of formation and development of a socialist society; about the problem of the relationship between the individual and society.

The second direction is connected with the development of methodological problems in the special social sciences, and above all in history, the political economy of modern capitalism and socialism, and the legal and other sciences. A number of problems also arise in connection with the need to develop general philosophical worldview issues. The significance of these problems is explained, first of all, by the growing role of the social sciences in the life of modern society and, above all, in the development of socialism, as well as by the development of these sciences themselves, by the accumulation of new material requiring theoretical generalization. In its most general form, the methodological problems that arise at the intersection of the concrete social sciences and historical materialism are connected either with the difficulties of applying general principles in concrete social cognition (for example, the relationship between the objective and the subjective in a socialist economy, the problem of the mechanism of social determination in various historical conditions, etc.). or with the revealed insufficiency of the categorical apparatus and the need to assimilate and develop new concepts that make it possible to more adequately reflect and comprehensively cover the studied social phenomena. The elaboration of the methodological problems of the concrete social sciences contributes to the development of historical materialism and raises the theoretical level of these sciences.

As a general sociological theory, historical materialism is the theoretical and methodological basis of concrete social research. In connection with the development of these studies, a point of view was formulated and developed, according to which, along with historical materialism, particular sociological theories, generalizing and reflecting various areas of sociological research, are included in the structure of Marxist sociology. Particular sociological theories of varying degrees of generality (for example, the sociology of labor, the family, science, law, etc.) serve as an intermediate link between general sociological theory and the empirical basis of sociology.

Finally, the third direction is connected with the development and use for the purposes of social cognition of some general scientific research methods (system approach, mathematical methods, structural-functional approach, etc.). The development of methodological problems that have arisen in connection with the mutual influence and interpenetration of sciences, the emergence of new methods of social research, is included in the range of tasks of historical materialism

Research in the field of historical materialism and the enrichment and development of this science are of great ideological, theoretical, and methodological significance.

In the ideological struggle, historical materialism opposes bourgeois socio-philosophical and sociological concepts and views on fundamental questions of the theory of social development and knowledge. Most bourgeois sociologists reject or question the basic principles of historical materialism. For them, the thesis of historical materialism that capitalism is the last antagonistic formation in history and that it will necessarily be replaced by a communist social formation, that the transition from capitalism to socialism is possible only through the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. They argue that historical materialism is a purely ideological construction, a doctrine divorced from life, designed to justify the actions of communist parties, that the development of rational historical, sociological knowledge about society is supposedly gradually leading to the elimination of historical materialism. In reality, the opposite process takes place: along with the development of various spheres social science increases the importance of historical materialism as a general theory and methodology of social cognition. Historical materialism determines the ideological and theoretical positions of all Marxist social science.

Historical materialism has had a profound influence on all modern sociological thought. Rejecting historical materialism as a whole, many bourgeois sociologists use its separate principles and provisions, as a rule, distorting them. Sociologists and Marxist philosophers, in criticizing bourgeois sociology, also take into account those of its specific achievements that are of scientific interest (in particular, the work of progressive sociologists, which provide rich factual material for the criticism of capitalism).

An important direction in the theoretical and ideological struggle is the criticism of various distortions of historical materialism. This, firstly, exposes all kinds of attempts to push through idealistic, voluntaristic views on the historical process; secondly, it is a struggle against the vulgarization of historical materialism, against replacing it with economic materialism, which complex dialectic of the interaction of diverse, relatively independent social forces and phenomena and tries to look for the causes of all events in social life only in the economy. The substitution of the dialectic of social interaction by a narrowly understood economic determinism, the vulgar sociological schematization of the historical process are deeply alien to the very spirit of Historical materialism Criticism of idealistic distortions and vulgarization Historical materialism is of great importance in the conditions of the modern acute ideological struggle against right and "left" revisionism and dogmatism.