ABSTRACT
Against the impulse of contemporary social theory and social science this chapter presents a materialist view of history as indispensable to radical critique. It will show why, and in what ways, (1) assertions that historical materialism is determinist, teleological and reductionist are to be taken as false and (2) social theories that do not position class as an essential and deep-real feature of capitalist societies lack sufficient explanatory power for radical action. To these ends, the chapter draws on assistance from outside Marxism in the form of a movement in philosophy known as critical realism. As a philosophy of science, critical realism offers a general meta-theory of the stratification of nature of which the Marxian base/superstructure arrangement – the source of much of the contention with which this chapter deals – can be seen as an example. In bringing critical realism to work for Marxism, a “strong historical materialism” is advanced where class relations within capitalism are understood as being rooted, essentially but non-reductively, in material bases consisting in both human and non-human mechanisms. The concluding sections draw on Marx’s dialectical method to show how “strong historical materialism” can be used as a practical frame for socialist pedagogy: the development of class consciousness through the deliberate teaching of Marxist critique.
