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Karl Marx: History
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For Karl Marx, the basic determining factor of human history is economics. According to him, humans — even from their earliest beginnings — are not motivated by grand ideas but instead by material concerns, like the need to eat and survive. This is the basic premise of a materialist view of history. At the beginning, people worked together in unity and it wasn’t so bad.
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Karl Marx inherits that Hegelian dialectic, and with it, a disdain for the notion of an underlying invariant human nature. Sometimes Marxists express their views by contrasting �nature� with �history.� Sometimes they use the phrase �existence precedes consciousness.� The point, in either case, is that who a person is, is determined by where and when he is � social context takes precedence over innate behavior; or, in other words, the main feature of human nature is adaptability.
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By 1845, Marx had completed the first stage of his work. He had acquainted himself with the nature, history and laws of the society in which he found himself. He concluded that the history of human society was the history of man seeking to attain mastery of himself and nature by means of his creative and productive labor. This labor is manifest in the struggles of opposing social classes, one of which must emerge triumphant. Progress is constituted by the succession of victories of one class over another, a theme propounded in The German Ideology (1846) and elsewhere. Having identified the rising class in the struggle of his own time with the proletariat, Marx devoted the remainder of his life -- nearly forty years -- to planning victory for those at whose head he had placed himself.
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According to Karl Marx, religion is one of those social institutions which are dependent upon the material and economic realities in a given society. It has no independent history but is instead the creature of productive forces. As Marx wrote, "The religious world is but the reflex of the real world."
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How did Marx arrive at such a conclusion? What was the "guiding thread" of which Marx makes so much in the previous quotation? Marx's ideas are an amalgam of conceptions current in mid-19th century Europe. For instance, the notion of the communal ownership of property and with it, the abolition of private property has a long history. Plato talked about it in the Republic. The Apostles of the Early Church certainly seemed to live a life in common without personal possessions.
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The driving force of history, in Cohen's reconstruction of Marx, is the development of the productive forces, the most important of which is technology. But what is it that drives such development? Ultimately, in Cohen's account, it is human rationality. Human beings have the ingenuity to apply themselves to develop means to address the scarcity they find. This on the face of it seems very reasonable. Yet there are difficulties.
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