[-] GenosseMarx3 MLM 18 points 16 days ago I’m gonna give a bit of a schematic answer for simplicity’s sake. The briefest answer would be to say: read Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Why? Because it is there that he explains that historical materialism is dialectical materialism as applied to history, to human societies in their development. And he gives you a short introduction into the basic analytical categories of historical materialism: class, mode of production, relation and means of production. There are your conceptual tools with which you can approach the concrete analysis of specific societies, and the tools themselves are concretized and developed through your empirical research and its theoretical
universalization. If you want some examples I can recommend for both excellent and clear examples three texts in particular: first would be Marx’ Class Struggles in France; second is Engels’ Peasants War in Germany; third is Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In each case you see them analyze the concrete relations of production, the class forces and their tendencies, the level of the productive forces relative to other societies. Then they will analyze the class struggle and the superstructural phenomena arising from the social basis in the relations of production, that is the bourgeois state or feudal church, the politicians and their actions, the leaders of given class forces, etc. The key is that once you have a clear and adequate analysis of the relations of production, the class forces, their relative strength and tendencies as well as the social milieu (other societies and their influence upon the one under investigation - this is where Lenin’s book is particularly insightful) you can understand the struggles at hand, you can derive specific forms of political organization adequate to the concrete situation, you can locate the class you want to organize and help to liberate
itself, you can derive a political program to overcome this given social contradictions, etc. When reading these books it is also important to keep in mind what Marx liked to stress: the method of investigation and the method of presentation are not the same thing. Your research might be more chaotic, and indeed logically it will be the case that you will have to go through ideology in order to get to the real social basis of society since ideology is itself produced by this basis and mediates it, it thus forms a link in the analytical chain, as you say. To make this less abstract: you will have to engage with bourgeois literature on political economy to extract the facts from it and if you are not aware that it represents a specific class view, that of the bourgeoisie, you can unwittingly take up its distortions
and class position. Demystification is an absolute necessity.
This is as good as I can do with a biref and hopefully somewhat concise explanation.
[-] GenosseMarx3 MLM 18 points 16 days ago I’m gonna give a bit of a schematic answer for simplicity’s sake. The briefest answer would be to say: read Stalin’s Dialectical and Historical Materialism. Why? Because it is there that he explains that historical materialism is dialectical materialism as applied to history, to human societies in their development. And he gives you a short introduction into the basic analytical categories of historical materialism: class, mode of production, relation and means of production. There are your conceptual tools with which you can approach the concrete analysis of specific societies, and the tools themselves are concretized and developed through your empirical research and its theoretical universalization. If you want some examples I can recommend for both excellent and clear examples three texts in particular: first would be Marx’ Class Struggles in France; second is Engels’ Peasants War in Germany; third is Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In each case you see them analyze the concrete relations of production, the class forces and their tendencies, the level of the productive forces relative to other societies. Then they will analyze the class struggle and the superstructural phenomena arising from the social basis in the relations of production, that is the bourgeois state or feudal church, the politicians and their actions, the leaders of given class forces, etc. The key is that once you have a clear and adequate analysis of the relations of production, the class forces, their relative strength and tendencies as well as the social milieu (other societies and their influence upon the one under investigation - this is where Lenin’s book is particularly insightful) you can understand the struggles at hand, you can derive specific forms of political organization adequate to the concrete situation, you can locate the class you want to organize and help to liberate itself, you can derive a political program to overcome this given social contradictions, etc. When reading these books it is also important to keep in mind what Marx liked to stress: the method of investigation and the method of presentation are not the same thing. Your research might be more chaotic, and indeed logically it will be the case that you will have to go through ideology in order to get to the real social basis of society since ideology is itself produced by this basis and mediates it, it thus forms a link in the analytical chain, as you say. To make this less abstract: you will have to engage with bourgeois literature on political economy to extract the facts from it and if you are not aware that it represents a specific class view, that of the bourgeoisie, you can unwittingly take up its distortions and class position. Demystification is an absolute necessity. This is as good as I can do with a biref and hopefully somewhat concise explanation.