In Marx's time the most popular explanations of what was wrong with society were still of a religious kind. The misery of society, it was said, was because of the failure of people to do what God wanted them to. If only we were all to `renounce sin' everything would turn out all right.
A similar view is often heard today, although it usually purports to be non-religious. This is the claim that `to change society, you must first change yourself'. If only individual men and women would cure themselves of `selfishness' or `materialism' (or occasionally `hangups') then society would automatically get better.
A related view spoke not of changing all individuals, but a few key ones - those who exercise power in society. The idea was to try to make the rich and powerful `see reason'.
One of the first British socialists, Robert Owen, began by trying to convince industrialists that they should be kinder to their workers. The same idea is still dominant today among the leaders of the Labour Party, including its left wing. Note how they always call the crimes of the employers `mistakes', as if a bit of argument will persuade big business to relax its grip on society.
Marx referred to all such views as `idealist'. Not because he was against people having `ideas', but because such views see ideas as existing in isolation from the conditions in which people live.
People's ideas are intimately linked to the sort of lives they are able to live. Take, for instance, `selfishness'. Present day capitalist society breeds selfishness - even in people who continually try to put other people first. A worker who wants to do their best for their children, or to give their parents something on top of their pension, finds the only way is to struggle continually against other people - to get a better job, more overtime, to be first in the queue for redundancy. In such a society you cannot get rid of `selfishness' or `greediness' merely by changing the minds of individuals.
It's even more ridiculous to talk of changing society by changing the ideas of `top people'. Suppose you were successful in winning a big employer over to socialist ideas and he then stopped exploiting workers. He would just lose in competition with rival employers and be driven out of business.
Even for those who rule society what matters is not ideas but the structure of the society in which they hold those ideas.
The point can be put another way. If ideas are what change society, where do the ideas come from? We live in a certain sort of society. The ideas put across by the press, the TV, the educational system and so on defend that sort of society. How has anyone ever been able to develop completely different ideas? Because their daily experiences contradict the official ideas of our society.
For example, you cannot explain why far fewer people are religious today than 100 years ago simply in terms of the success of atheistic propaganda. You have to explain why people listen to atheistic ideas in a way they did not 100 years ago.
Similarly, if you want to explain the impact of `great men', you have to explain why other people agree to follow them. It is no good saying that, for example. Napoleon or Lenin changed history, without explaining why millions of people were willing to do what they suggested. After all, they were not mass hypnotists. Something in the life of society at a certain point led people to feel that what they suggested seemed correct.
You can only understand how ideas change history if you understand where those ideas come from and why people accept them. That means looking beyond the ideas to the material conditions of the society in which they occur. That is why Marx insisted, `It is not consciousness that determines being, but social being that determines consciousness.'
2. Understanding history
Ideas by themselves cannot change society. This was one of Marx's first conclusions. Like a number of thinkers before him, he insisted that to understand society you had to see human beings as part of the material world.
Human behaviour was determined by material forces, just like the behaviour of any other natural object. The study of humanity was part of the scientific study of the natural world. Thinkers with such views were called materialists.
Marx regarded materialism as a great step forward over the various religious and idealist notions of history. It meant that you could argue scientifically about changing social conditions, you no longer depended on praying to God or on `spiritual change' in people.
The replacement of idealism by materialism was the replacement of mysticism by science. But not all materialist explanations of human behaviour are correct. Just as there have been mistaken scientific theories in biology, chemistry or physics, so there have been mistaken attempts to develop scientific theories of society. Here are a few examples:
One very widespread, non-Marxist, materialist view holds that human beings are animals, who behave `naturally' in certain ways. Just as it is in the nature of wolves to kill or in the nature of sheep to be placid, so it is in the nature of men to be aggressive, domineering, competitive and greedy (and, it is implied, of women to be meek, submissive, deferential and passive).
One formulation of this view is to be found in the best selling book The Naked Ape. The conclusions that are drawn from such arguments are almost invariably reactionary. If men are naturally aggressive, it is said, then there is no point in trying to improve society. Things will always turn out the same. Revolutions will `always fail'.
But `human nature' does in fact vary from society to society. For instance, competitiveness, which is taken for granted in our society, hardly existed in many previous societies. When scientists first tried to give Sioux Indians IQ tests, they found that the Indians could not understand why they should not help each other do the answers. The society they lived in stressed cooperation, not competition.
The same with aggressiveness. When Eskimos first met Europeans, they could not make any sense whatsoever of the notion of `war'. The idea of one group of people trying to wipe out another group of people seemed crazy to them.
In our society it is regarded as `natural' that parents should love and protect their children. Yet in the Ancient Greek city of Sparta it was regarded as `natural' to leave infants out in the mountains to see if they could survive the cold.
`Unchanging human nature' theories provide no explanation for the great events of history. The pyramids of Egypt, the splendours of Ancient Greece, the empires of Rome or the Incas, the modern industrial city, are put on the same level as the illiterate peasants who lived in the mud hovels of the Dark Ages. All that matters is the `naked ape' - not the magnificent civilisations the ape has built. It is irrelevant that some forms of society succeed in feeding the `apes', while others leave millions to starve to death.
Many people accept a different materialist theory, which stresses the way it is possible to change human behaviour. Just as animals can be trained to behave differently in a circus to a jungle, so, say the supporters of this view, human behaviour can similarly be changed. If only the right people got control of society, it is said, then `human nature' could be transformed.
This view is certainly a great step forward from the `naked ape'. But as an explanation of how society as a whole can be changed it fails. If everyone is completely conditioned in present-day society, how can anyone ever rise above society and see how to change the conditioning mechanisms? Is there some God-ordained minority that is magically immune to the pressures that dominate everyone else? If we are all animals in the circus, who can be the lion tamer?
Those who hold this theory either end up saying society cannot change (like the naked apers) or they believe change is produced by something outside society - by God, or a `great man', or the power of individual ideas. Their `materialism' lets a new version of idealism in through the back door.
As Marx pointed out, this doctrine necessarily ends up by dividing society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. This `materialist' view is often reactionary. One of the best known adherents of the view today is a right wing American psychologist called Skinner. He wants to condition people to behave in certain ways. But since he himself is a product of American capitalist society, his `conditioning' merely means trying to make people conform to that society.
Another materialist view blames all the misery in the world on `population pressure'. (This is usually called Malthusian after Malthus, the English economist of the late 18th century who first developed it.) But it cannot explain why the United States, for instance, burns corn while people in India starve. Nor can it explain why 150 years ago there was not enough food produced in the US to feed 10 million people, while today enough is produced to feed 200 million.
It forgets that every extra mouth to feed is also an extra person capable of working and creating wealth.
Marx called all these mistaken explanations forms of `mechanical' or `crude' materialism. They all forget that as well as being part of the material world, human beings are also acting, living creatures whose actions change it.
The materialist interpretation of history
Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence - their food, shelter and clothing.
With these words, Karl Marx first stressed what was distinct about his explanation of how society developed. Human beings are animals descended from ape-like creatures. Like other animals, their first concern is feeding themselves and protecting themselves from the climate.
The way other animals do this depends on their inherited biological make up. A wolf stays alive by chasing and killing its prey, in ways determined by its biologically inherited instincts. It keeps warm on cold nights because of its fur. It brings up its cubs according to inherited patterns of behaviour.
But human life is not fixed in this way. The humans who roamed the Earth 100,000 years ago or 30,000 years ago lived quite different lives from ourselves. They lived in caves and holes in the ground. They did not have any containers to keep food or water in, they depended for their food on collecting berries or throwing stones at wild animals. They could not write, or count beyond the fingers on their hands. They had no real knowledge of what went on beyond their immediate neighbourhood or what their forefathers had done.
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