ABSTRACT
Marxism has become indelibly associated with materialism. Many Marxists have believed, and have thought that Marx himself believed, that ideas are mechanistically determined by the material environment. In this, Marxists recalled earlier ‘metaphysical’ materialists such as Condillac and Destutt de Tracy. They allied this materialism, however, to an emphasis on the historical process, originally inspired by Hegel. This led them to assert that both our objective circumstances and our subjective ideas inevitably change and develop through history, and that this process is driven by the material engine of the economy. The kind of economic system under which a person lived, and the position that person occupied within that system, were thus held to determine his or her consciousness.
