Historical materialism

Historical materialism understands thought as part of the social reality it can help transform, not as a mirror held up to an independently complete world. The book presents it in a parallax relation to dialectical materialism: the two are substantially the same, but each makes visible a different dimension of social being. Historical materialism emphasizes collective praxis and historical transformation; dialectical materialism supplements it by asking how negativity and distance arise within life and human existence themselves.

Praxis and the Transformation of Social Being

For historical materialism, consciousness is an active moment in social being. Becoming conscious of a concrete social position and its revolutionary potential can alter that position: a working class understood merely as a stratum in the social structure can become a proletariat acting as a revolutionary subject. Georg Lukács’s account of this transition illustrates the point. Consciousness does not simply describe an already finished social world; through collective praxis, it participates in changing that world.

This approach also displaces the image of an observing mind standing outside reality and manipulating it from a distance. In the Lukácsian account, that apparently external position is itself an effect of social alienation and reification. Historical materialism thus explains the separation of thought from being through the historical organization of social life. The book nevertheless argues that praxis cannot be its own final horizon: an account of how thought acts within society does not, by itself, explain how praxis emerges in the first place.

The Social Order Within the Individual

The social is not simply a larger level of experience added to individual psychology. It is an externalized, impersonal order of practices and beliefs to which individuals must relate. Even a private cynic who dismisses public moral norms depends on those norms remaining publicly recognized by others. The individual’s relation to the social order therefore carries within it the gap between private disbelief and collective belief; the apparently external system exists through the ways people treat it as an objective order.

This example clarifies why the book rejects the simple question of whether ideas developed for individuals can be applied to society. The issue is instead how institutionalized practices and beliefs must be structured for subjects to function within them. The social order is neither merely outside the individual nor reducible to private experience. Its external, impersonal character is sustained through individual relations to it, making the division between individual and social an internal division as well.

The Parallax with Dialectical Materialism

The relation between historical and dialectical materialism is one of perspective rather than two separate levels of reality. Historical materialism approaches the thought–being problem through collective praxis: thought becomes active within social reality. Dialectical materialism approaches the same knot from the other direction, asking how the gap between thought and being—and the negativity of thought—can emerge within positive being. Its concern includes the possibility that a living being can interrupt the reproduction of life through a non-act or a withdrawal into reflexive distance.

This supplement matters because an account confined to social praxis risks making society into an absolute subject, or else leaving room for a more encompassing general ontology. The book instead locates a constitutive gap within humanity itself: the human is not fully coincident with its collective practice, but bears an inhuman excess that exceeds it. The two materialisms therefore do not stand as universal theory and its particular social application. Their difference is a parallax within the particular, a shift of perspective that brings out a tension already internal to the subject and society.

Revolution, Rupture, and Historical Necessity

The book applies this framework to the history of the October Revolution and Stalinism. It presents the collectivization and rapid industrialization launched from 1928 as a transformation of the social body, not simply as a change of policy. The years from 1917 to 1921 had been a period of emergency; the New Economic Policy consolidated Soviet state power while leaving much of social life substantially intact. The later drive, by contrast, aimed to liquidate peasants as individual owners and replace the old intelligentsia of teachers, doctors, scientists, engineers, and technicians with a new one. The scale of this change was such that, in Sheila Fitzpatrick’s comparison, someone who had left Moscow in 1914 could still recognize the city in 1924, but would not recognize its social texture on returning in 1934.

The interpretation also complicates the idea that Stalinism was merely an accidental deviation from the revolution. Drawing on Isaac Deutscher, the book argues that, when the revolutionary dynamic was compressed within the Soviet Union instead of spreading abroad, it turned inward: forced collectivization and industrialization became substitutes for the expansion of revolution, while the liquidation of the kulaks stood in for the overthrow of bourgeois rule abroad. The argument is not that the revolutionary project was inherently totalitarian. It insists instead on holding together the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential and what the author calls the historical necessity of its Stalinist outcome, opposing both a purely contingent-deviation account and the claim that totalitarianism lay at the Communist project’s core.

Value, Commodity Form, and Political Struggle

The same parallax method shapes the book’s account of Marx and political economy. In its reading of Marx, value cannot be assigned exclusively to production or circulation. Marx’s engagement with Ricardo’s labor theory of value and Bailey’s relational account of value opens a way beyond the assumption that value is an inherent substance of a commodity. A commodity’s status depends on its structural relation to other commodities; money, for example, occupies the formal place of the general equivalent rather than being money by virtue of a natural property of gold.

The ordinary wooden table makes this distinction concrete. As a useful object, it remains wood; as a commodity, it enters a social relation that gives it a different, seemingly transcendent character. The form is not a decorative cover over an essence that can simply be exposed and discarded. The book stresses that Marx’s critical move is to return to the secret of the form itself: the form is essential to how value takes shape. This also distinguishes Marx from readings that move from the appearance of exchange to production as the sole site of truth, treating exchange as an illusion.

Finally, the book describes an irreducible parallax between the critique of political economy and political struggle. Class antagonism is inscribed in economic relations, yet is not directly thematized by the economic account; political struggle concerns economic power, yet cannot be reduced to a mere reflection of economic interests. The two logics implicate one another without becoming interchangeable. Historical materialism’s force, in this account, lies not in collapsing these differences into a single explanation, but in tracing how social forms and collective action shape one another through their unresolved tension.