historical materialism

American  

noun

1. (in Marxist theory) the doctrine that all forms of social thought, as art or philosophy, and institutions, as the family or the state, develop as a superstructure founded on an economic base; that they reflect the character of economic relations and are altered or modified as a result of class struggles; that each ruling economic class produces the class that will destroy or replace it; and that dialectical necessity requires the eventual withering away of the state and the establishment of a classless society: the body of theory, in dialectical materialism, dealing with historical process and social causation.

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historical materialism British  

noun

1. the part of Marxist theory maintaining that social structures derive from economic structures and that these are transformed as a result of class struggles, each ruling class producing another, which will overcome and destroy it, the final phase being the emergence of a communist society

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Etymology

Origin of historical materialism

First recorded in 1920–25

Example Sentences

On the one hand, he was a poetic soul, whose first book had been a study of the poet Horace and who loved Shelley; on the other, he was a philosopher sharpening his applications of historical materialism.

From The Guardian

Firestone’s objective in The Dialectic of Sex was an attempt to follow the methodology of Marx and Engels in order to “enlarge historical materialism” – that is, to widen the scope of a class analysis using the “scientific approach to history” that characterised the duo’s works on capitalism.

From The Guardian

I acquired the complete works of Marx and Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-tung, and others and probed into the philosophy of dialectical and historical materialism.

From Literature

His contextualised critique extends to Marx's early attempts at communist ideology in The Paris Manuscripts, as well as the historical materialism of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

From The Guardian

It reminds me of the Marxist theory of historical materialism and the Marx-Engels ideology that if we only tolerate the bourgeois state during the transitional advancement to a higher phase, we will see the complete “withering away of the state.”

From Forbes