ARTICLES

Defending Historical Materialism against G. A. Cohen: critical engagement with "Karl Marx's Theory of History"

Within the Marxist scholarship there is no shortage of differing explanations of why capitalism still continues its historical course. This paper enters this debate and proposes an alternative explanation of historical social development within the framework of historical materialism. While Cohen’s development thesis is accepted, the generally dominant Marxist notion of class consciousness is dismissed. Instead, the historical social development is explained as the result of the ever changing collective social consciousness, which itself is completely subordinated to the social relations and their evolution alongside the material development of social productive forces. It is argued that the mistreatment of the relation between the material world and the human mind leads to unsatisfactory social explanations within Marxist scholarship.

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Rethinking the Revolutionary Agent

This text intervenes in the debate over the historical social change. A revamped conception of dialectical materialism is proposed as the tool through which this historical development should be understood. The central argument here is that our societies are shaped by the general social consciousness which always reflects the social relations that stem from the means of material reproduction. As a consequence, this work dismisses the notion of class consciousness and argues that revolutionary social upheavals are the result of general ideological changes that gradually permeate the entire society. The approach proposed in this text has wider implications regarding the potential revolutionary transition to Communism. Above all, it renders superfluous all search for revolutionary classes and agents. Rather, it is suggested that one should focus upon the way the development of material social productivity shifts the society’s ideological superstructure.

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Addressing Marxism's greatest failure: towards the world without nations

The unsatisfactory treatment of the national question by Marx and Engels has been well documented. This study intervenes with the defence of dialectical materialism by claiming that behind this failure stands their inability to grasp the fictional essence of nations. With the recognition that nations are not natural, but rather imagined, and that nationalism is a false consciousness, it becomes possible to search for the material foundations of this contemporary idea, namely that the world consists of sovereign nations. The central proposition of this study is that the upgrade of the means of production which began in Europe in the second half of the 18th century unleashed radical changes upon the social relations, with nationalist consciousness being merely the ideological reflection of these novel circumstances.

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