ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the thought and practice of the “historical materialist” method and its continued relevance to social justice oriented research. Marxism, or “historical materialism”, is a powerful and enduring perspective in social research because of its focus on the actually existing, or material, circumstances which produce social and historical events. This focus makes this approach applicable and complimentary to a wide range of research subjects, political struggles, and theoretical perspectives. This chapter illustrates this by connecting a class analysis to critiques of U.S. militarism through the example of workers organizing at U.S. tech companies to oppose contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security. In so doing, it also demonstrates that historical materialism is not merely a dispassionate mode of analyzing the world, but carries with it a political injunction to “change it.”
