Historical Materialism Critique

Definition

The critique of historical materialism is the explicit target of The Mirror of Production: the argument that Marx's theory does not transcend political economy but completes it, and that "the critique of political economy is basically completed." The formula is stated twice in the book. In its strongest form: "Marx made a radical critique of political economy, but still in the form of political economy" (ch. I, "The Critique of Political Economy Is Basically Completed"). In its programmatic form: "Today we are exactly at the same point with respect to Marx. For us, the critique of political economy is basically completed. The materialist dialectic has exhausted its content in reproducing its form" (same section, p. 50). Marx's own move — from the critique of religion to the critique of political economy — is thus repeated one more time, "to a radically different level."

The charge is not that Marx is an economic determinist or that he under-values culture. It concerns the concepts: production, mode of production, productive forces, labor power are said to have been left unanalyzed as forms. "Historical materialism, dialectics, modes of production, labor power—through these concepts Marxist theory has sought to shatter the abstract universality of the concepts of bourgeois thought… Yet Marxism in turn universalizes them with a 'critical' imperialism as ferocious as the other's" (ch. I, "Epistemology I: In the Shadow of Marxist Concepts"). The epistemological sections supply the mechanism: "in Marxism history is transhistoricized: it redoubles on itself and thus is universalized"; and once universalized, concepts "become canonical and enter the general system's mode of theoretical representation. Not accidentally, at this moment they also take on their scientific cast (as in the scientific canonization of concepts from Engels to Althusser)" (same section).

Applied to earlier societies, the universalization becomes an inbuilt blindness: "Marxism is the projection of the class struggle and the mode of production onto all previous history; it is the vision of a future 'freedom' based on the conscious domination of nature. These are extrapolations of the economic" (ch. II, "Epistemology II: Structural Limits of the Marxist Critique", pp. 65–68). And: "Historical materialism does not know how to grasp earlier societies in their symbolic articulation. It only finds in them what it could find under its own light, that is, its artificial mode of production" (ch. IV, "Epistemology IV: Marxism and Miscomprehension", p. 107) — a miscomprehension that "is not a peripheral or secondary weakness," since "a culture that is mistaken about another must also be mistaken about itself" (same section).

The book's image for the completed system is geometric. If our history is the space in which the concepts hold, "historical materialism could only be the Euclidean geometry of this history" (ch. V, "A Euclidean Geometry of History?", pp. 111–118) — a geometry true of one space and illegitimately universal. Its "scientificity" is criticized in Althusser's terms precisely as circularity: "One can admit that the epistemological break which, made possible by a certain historical process and in its own turn making possible the scientific analysis of this process, marks not a 'critical' rupture but a vicious circularity"; and, of the alternative "break" hypothesis, "the critique of political economy is not extendable to a generalized theory" (both ch. V, "A Euclidean Geometry of History?").

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the critique's author: the critique of political economy "basically completed"; concepts universalize themselves and "take on their scientific cast"; the "Euclidean geometry of this history" (1973/1975).
• Karl Marx — the target, credited with the one genuinely radical break ("the concept of production" dispossesses political economy of its imaginary universality) and charged with having let the form re-form around it.
• Louis Althusser (not yet paged) — named for the "scientific canonization" of Marxist concepts and for the epistemological break that is said to be a "vicious circularity" rather than a rupture (see structuralism).
• Maurice Godelier (not yet paged) — the anthropological adjuster whose rescue of "the economy as determinant in the last instance" is read as preserving materialist orthodoxy rather than testing it (see mode-of-production, determinant-instance).
• Mark Poster — the translator, who summarises the charge ("Marx's theory of historical materialism… is too conservative, too rooted in the assumptions of political economy") and presses the standing objection that a critique which denies all standpoints "courts the danger of pure relativism" (see universalism-vs-relativism).

Related Concepts

• mirror-of-production — the figure that names what the critique describes: the form in which the critique of political economy reflects itself.
• mode-of-production — the central concept said to be projected onto all history and defended by adjustment.
• political-economy-of-the-sign — the level to which the critique is supposed to pass once political economy's critique is exhausted.
• ideology — the outcome of universalization: canonical concepts "enter the general system's mode of theoretical representation."
• structuralism — the intellectual formation (Althusser, Godelier) whose scientificity the book attacks.
• enlightenment — the moral philosophy of Nature, Law and Necessity that Marxism is said not to have disencumbered itself of.
• praxis — the Marxist term in which production as form and revolutionary practice are fused.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the critique's canonical statement: "the critique of political economy is basically completed" and "the materialist dialectic has exhausted its content in reproducing its form" (ch. I, p. 50); Marxism's "critical imperialism" in universalizing its own concepts (ch. I, "Epistemology I"); historical materialism as "the projection of the class struggle and the mode of production onto all previous history" (ch. II, pp. 65–68); and the verdict that it "could only be the Euclidean geometry of this history" (ch. V, pp. 111–118).
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• Interpreting the book: does it claim historical materialism is false or that it is true only of our society — and can it consistently claim both, as Poster's objection suggests it does?
• If the concept of production is itself "produced," what status does the critique's own discourse have? Baudrillard calls it symbolic exchange, which is not offered as a better science of history.
• Was "basically completed" a periodisation Baudrillard could defend? Poster notes the book's own history of social systems rests on an untheorised discontinuity.
• The Althusser verdict is voiced in Althusser's own vocabulary (break, science, circularity): is the critique internal to structuralist Marxism or external to it? See structuralism-vs-poststructuralism.