Introduction to Marxist theory on history Historical Materialism: the marxist
view of history The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in
constant opposition to each other, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large or in the mutual ruin of the contending
classes. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: The Communist Manifesto Section A: How
society works 1. Making sense of history: looking behind the 'story' The ruling
class portrays history as the doings of "great men", the role of
governors and explorers, lists of wars and invasions and other "important
events". History in school books is like a story - a succession of events
without any general pattern. Marxists say that in order to make sense of the
story of history - what people, famous or not, actually did - we have to
understand the overall economic and social context to show why they acted in the
way they did. Take for example the American Civil War of 1861-65. What do most
people know about this war? Northern Americans, the Union, fought against the
Southern Confederates; Bluecoats fought Greycoats. Why? Most people would say,
well, it was about slavery. The Union president, Abraham Lincoln, was against
slavery, while the southerners were in favour of it. That's the myth; the
northerners fighting slavery out of the goodness of their hearts. But Marxists
would say there was a lot more to it than that. In fact the northern
industrialists behind the Union were in bitter conflict with the big southern
farmers who owned the slaves; most of these industrialists were racists and not
very sympathetic to black slaves. The basic causes of the war were in this
economic conflict between the to different sections of the US ruling class.
Let's take the example of the English civil war of 1641-49. Most people know it
was cavaliers against roundheads, parliament versus the crown, Oliver Cromwell
versus Charles 1. But why? Who did parliament represent - whose interests? And
who backed the king, and why? When we investigate this, we find that different
class forces were involved. So, a Marxist analysis of the English civil war
would try to explain the story of the war in terms of the class interests
involved. This method of looking at things to discover the real class and social
interests involved in events, of course is relevant to more contemporary events.
Why did the US president George Bush start the Gulf war? To defend plucky little
Kuwait against the monster Saddam? Marxists say no, this was just the
propaganda; Bush started the war to defend the economic and political interests
of the US, including the oil supplies from the area. Another example of how we
try to look behind the surface events at the real story. So this is the first
idea: Historical materialism is about discovering the class interests which
determine how people act in history. Now read the following quote about the
English civil war from someone who fought in it, and think how it relates to
what we have discussed so far: "A very great part of the knights and
gentlemen of England ... adhered to the King. And most of the tenants of these
gentlemen, and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the others call the
rabble, did follow the gentry and ere for the king. On the Parliament's side
were (besides themselves) the smaller part of the gentry in most of the
counties, and the greatest part of the tradesmen and freeholders and the middle
sort of men, especially in those corporations and counties which depend on such
manufactures". (Colonel Baxter: Autobiography) What Baxter is saying here
is that the conflict was between the king and the aristocracy (supported by
those most dependent on them) on the one hand: and the rising middle classes on
the other. This of course is exactly the Marxist explanation of the Civil War.
(See Christopher Hill: 'The English Revolution 1640'). 2. Different types of
society The type of society we have now - capitalism - only started to come into
existence about 350 years ago, first in Holland and England. But human society
existed for hundreds of thousands of years before that. In societies before
capitalism, the way people lived was different to what we know now. Before
capitalism, in Western Europe and in China and Japan before the arrival of the
Europeans, the system which existed was feudalism. Instead of today's
capitalists who own firms and employ workers for a wage, under feudalism the
ruling class was the aristocratic nobility - the lords - based on large estates
in the countryside. The oppressed class, instead of workers earning a wage, were
the peasants (serfs) doing agricultural work on the lord's estate. They had
their own plots of land, but they had to work for the lord for part of the week
or give part of their own produce to the lord. In Europe, before feudalism the
predominant form of society was slavery - the type of society of classical Rome
and Greece. The majority of people were literally owned by the ruling nobles,
doing manual labour on the land (although some slaves worked in the towns),
having no rights of their own. From these few examples we can see that as
society evolves, as it gets richer, the way it is organised changes. The
examples we gave here are all examples of class society, where there were rulers
and ruled. However, before slavery there were other forms of society where there
was no ruling class - something which the capitalists today don't like to think
about. Marxism tries to analyse each society in terms of how it began, how it
worked and how it was replaced by another type of society. The basic form of
organising any society, the way its economy works, Marxists call the mode of
production. Below we will try to explain this a bit more. Marx tried to explain
these two things (class interests and mode of production) in the following
passage - one of the most famous in all his writings. Read it a couple of times
and try to get the gist (NB. Marx and Engels, in common with their
contemporaries, always talk about "men" rather than "people"
- we should make the translation). "In the social production of their life,
men enter into definite relations which are indispensable and independent of
their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of
their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations constitute
the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal
and political superstructure and to which corresponds definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social and
intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men which
determines their being but on the contrary, their social being which determines
their consciousness." (From the Preface to 'A Critique of Political
Economy' of 1859) 3. The mode of production of hunter-gatherer society So far we
have seen that Marxists say the following things: 1.History has to be analysed
according to the different social and class interests at work, 2.There are
different types of society, and that society changes over time, 3.The basic way
that society is organised is called the mode of production. Let's think about
point 3) in a bit more detail and try to relate it to the quote from Marx. If
you understand this bit, you'll have Marx's key to understanding human history
in your hands. Marx says that in order to produce their livelihood, people enter
into "definite relations" and these are "indispensable" and
"independent of their will". All peoples through history have lived in
societies and co-operated with one another to produce the food, clothes and
shelter they need to survive. As far as the politicians and social engineers of
today are concerned, society is just made up of individuals and their families.
The A.L.P. don't believe in the existence of the working class - only this or
that kind of voter; the sociologists divide people into income brackets, but
have no idea about social organisation. But, even when the first humans were
tribes roaming the African plains in search of food, they had a definite form of
social organisation and collaborated with one another to gather and hunt. But
the fact remains that hunting and gathering is a hard way to earn a living - the
whole tribe had to work every day to eke out a living. There was no room for
slackers. The only division of labour was based on gender and age, and indeed,
the early tribes were extended families. If Kerry Packer dropped out of the sky
and landed in a hunter-gatherer society, he'd have to go out and hunt with the
rest of the tribe or he'd go hungry; and if he tried to set up a firm and make a
profit from other people's hunting he'd be sorely disappointed, because after
the hunters and their families had been fed, there'd be nothing left over by way
of profit and he'd still go hungry. Let's suppose that the land in a particular
country is particularly bountiful or the hunters particularly skillful and the
hunters and gathers produce enough to keep themselves and their children and old
folk and have a little over to spare. We know that under these conditions
special roles developed in tribal society - there were priests and chiefs that
had the time to study the stars and the seasons, have fine clothes made for
them, carry out social and cultural affairs etc., and these people all enjoyed a
privileged position by being free from labour and became "mini-rulers"
of one kind or another. If a sociologist from a university were to come across
such a society, they might write learned papers about the customs and religion
etc., or any number of things, but the key to understanding what is going on in
such a society is not these kind of things, but the way they organised
themselves to produce their livelihood - and that little bit extra. Imagine if a
group of Militant members were to find themselves living in such a society; no
doubt they would share everything equally, work cooperatively, making all
decisions with discussion and voting, etc., and form what we could call a
"primitive communist" society. But their choice would be very limited.
One thing they couldn't do, even if they wanted to, is set up a capitalist
society. The fundamental wealth of society, the productive technique and
division of labour are not sufficiently developed. With a small number of people
simply hunting and gathering, you can't have firms, banks, shareholders, capital
or capitalism. The productive forces are just not sufficiently developed. This
hints at another important point we shall come back to: the social relations,
the type of society, has to "fit" the level of development of the
productive resources. 4. Classes and exploitation: the Neolithic Revolution In
Section 1 we talked about three different types of society which have existed in
western Europe during the past 5000 years: slave society, feudalism and
capitalism. In other words, very different types of class societies have existed
during this period. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are all characterised by
having a ruling class which owns or controls the land, materials, equipment etc.
used for production, what Marxists calls the means the means of production.
Through their ownership or control of the means of production, the ruling class
is able to exploit the labour of the oppressed class, whether these are slaves,
serfs or proletarians under capitalism. But before slave society, for hundreds
of thousands of years, people had organised themselves into clans and tribes
which had no ruling class exploiting the others. Of course, many of these clans
and tribes had chiefs and elders with authority: but they were not an
economically privileged social layer, not a class. Stable social classes, which
involves exploiters and exploited, are a product of the great change which took
place in human society about 6,000 years ago. This was the most fundamental
change in human history, called the Neolithic Revolution. What happened? To cut
a long story short, in the area which is now Iraq (Mesopotamia), people
developed a settled form of agriculture. Instead of roaming around killing
animals and picking berries, they learned how to domesticate animals and grow
crops. They became farmers. Of course, at first this was a hard struggle. But
over time, they learned that this was much more economically productive. Instead
of always having to struggle just to produce what they needed to live on, they
began to produce a surplus. They started to live in settlements, which gradually
became bigger, leading to the first cities. The surplus they produced was not of
course big enough for everyone to double or treble the amount they consumed.
Gradually, a layer of priests emerged who began to take the leading role in
organising the new settlements and taking control of and using the new economic
surplus. The priests were the core of the first ruling class, organising society
so they could snaffle the economic surplus that had been produced. Another thing
we should note about the Neolithic revolution: as society gets richer, as the
first towns and cities are built, then production gets more complicated. As
farming gets more efficient, less people have to do farming. Others are freed up
to become artisans, producing goods like pottery and jewellery, in the towns. In
other words, different types of jobs appear, things get more specialised: Marx
said that the social division of labour got more complex. Now another quote:
it's from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, a brilliant man who wrote Class Struggles in
the Ancient Greek World: "Class (essentially a relationship) is the
collective social expression of the fact of exploitation, the way in which
exploitation is embodied in the social structure. By exploitation, I mean the
appropriation of part of the product of the labour of others... . A class is a
group of persons in the community identified by their position in the whole
system of social production, defined above all according to their relationship
(primarily in terms of their degree of ownership or control) to the conditions
of production (that is to say to the means of production) and to other social
classes... . The individuals constituting a given class may or may not be partly
or wholly conscious of their own identity and common interests as a class, and
they may or may not feel antagonism to members of other social classes."
What Ste Croix is getting at is that you can't separate classes from
exploitation: if you have an upper and a lower class, one is exploited by the
other. And that takes place through the control or ownership of the means of
production. 5. Summary to Section A: the rulers and the ruled At this point, you
should look back at the quote from Marx. He is saying that the basis of every
society is how people organise to produce their livelihood, and in every society
this is done in a definite and specific way, giving rise to certain relations of
production. In class societies, these relationships are about control and
ownership of the productive process, about exploitation. Exploitation in turn is
about controlling the product of the labour of others, to appropriate the
economic surplus created. Here is another quote in which Marx says the same
thing in a slightly different way: "The specific economic form in which
unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the producers determines the relationship
between the rulers and the ruled . . . It is always the direct relationship of
the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers - a
relationship naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of
the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity - which reveals the
innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it
the political form of sovereignty and dependence, in short the corresponding
specific form of the state." Note that in the first quote above, Matx says
the economic basis of society is the "sum total" of the social
relations of productin, and that this determines the "legal and political
superstructure" and the "social and intellectual" life of society
in general. This is among the most controversial propositions of historical
materialism, which is the topic of section B. Section B: Base and superstructure
6. How the different "bits" of society fit together Marxists are
generally accused of srtressing too much the role of economic factors. In order
the probe this point it is worth considering some concrete examples. A goof
place to start is the present legal system in Australia. If you sign a mortgage
agreement and don't keep up the payments, either your house will be taken back
by the bank or you will be taken to court (or both). If you are taken to court,
the judge will find against you and your would be on the street. But why? Why
doesn't the judge say you have the right to keep your house and not pay for it?
The answer of course is that the whole of Australian law is founded on
protecting private property, and that "corresponds" with the basic
type of society we have - capitalism. If we had a legal system based on
hostility to private property, then the whole thing would begin to break down.
Nobody would be able to enforce a contract or collect any debts. Shoplifting
would be legalised, Banks and companies would collapse. A moment's thought shows
this is obvious: the legal system has to "fit" the property system,
the existing class system. Capitalist law is designed to keep the rich rich and
the poor poor. This is recognised in the common sense saying that "there's
one law for the rich, another for the poor": of course there is, that's
what it's there for! Now, let's think about the political system. Look at any
major capitalist country the US, France or Germany. All the government parties
in these countries are pro-capitalist parties. The newspaper and TV channels are
all owned by big business and churn out capitalist ideas. An idea that doesn't
make a profit for somebody, doesn't get a look-in. The whole political culture,
with the exception of socialist parties trying to fight the system, is
pro-capitalist: the political system "fits" together with the economic
system. This is what Marx means by the "political and legal
superstructure" which rises on the economic base. The legal and political
system of course are very direct products of the economic system, in which it's
easy to trace the infterests of the ruling class. We can go back and look at the
legal system under feudalism and the prevailing form of politics, and see how it
defended the landed aristocracy and the king. But there are many more
complicated things in society in which the domination of the ruling class is
more complicated. Marx said: "The ruling ideas of any society are the ideas
of the ruling class". Is this true - and what ideas? Let's start with
Australia in 1996. Open up a copy of any major newspaper. They have lots of
debates among themselves, but you will not finmd a single daily paper in favour
of maintaining workers' Awards, let alone the abolition of capitalism! Ruling
class ideas are propagated by ruling class control of the means of mass
commmunication. But direct propaganda is not the sole way that ruling class
ideas are purveyed, even in the newspapers. Ruling class ideas - what we call
ideology - is spontaneously reproduced in every section of society, including
the working class. Often it goes in the form of what is known as "common
sense". Think of a few common sense ideas - let's list a few: "Men are
stonger than women" "You should get a fair day's pay for a fair day's
work" "Inequality between people is only human nature"
"There'll always be rich and poor" "Trade unions are bad for the
economy" "Gay sex is unnatural" These ideas fit together with the
common assumptions of capitalist law and politics: they are part of the ideology
which has grown up around capitalist society. Of course, under capitalism these
kind of ideas are fought against by socialists and sometimes by other radical
groups like the Greens. Over time, the ruling class ideas change to meet
changing circumstances, and also because of struggle against them. For example,
100 years ago the following statements would have been widely accepted in
Australia: "It's only natural that white people should rule the world"
"Britons are superior to other races" "Black people are
inferior" "Men are superior to women both physically and
intellectually" Now these are not commonly accepted, althuogh there are
many people who do believe in them - but you will rarely find these ideas
publicly advocated in newspapers and by leading politicians. Why? First, of
course because there has been a struggle against these ideas. But, vitally,
material conditions have changed. The British Empire has gone. Britain no longer
rules 30% of the world. The ruling class has had to come to terms with being a
third rate power: ideas about the white man's role and Britain's superiority
have changed with the changing conditions. Women have entered the workforce on a
massive scale: ideas about the complete inferiority of women no longer
"fit" the changing circumstances - although of course women's
oppression and sexism still exist. In all the ideas we have discussed here, we
can see a direct link between the social relations of production (capitalist),
the ruliong class (the capitalist class or bourgeoisie), the legal and political
superstructure (pro-capitalist), and the ruling ideas, ideology (pro-capitalist,
anti-working class, racist and sexist). They all "fit" together. Once
they no longer fit together in a more or less harmonious way, society begins to
go into crisis. There is another aspect of ruling class ideology which we should
take into account. There are of course disagreements among the capitalist class
itself - although not on fundamentals. There are different interest groups among
the capitalists: for example those based on finance and banking do not always
have the same interests as those based no manufacturing industry. Beyond the
different interests, there are different assessments of how best to advance the
needs of the capitalist system, how many concessions to make to the working
class and so on. These sorts of differences are reflected in different
ideological trends in capitalist thinking - liberalism and conservatism for
example - and in immediate practical political differences. Sometimes these
differences can become very sharp, without ever going beyond the bounds of
capitalist ideology. Of course, there are many ideas and fields of intellectual
activity in society which are not so easy to analyse. For example, what about
cinema, music, painting, TV dramas, pop music, the arts in general? Do they all
have pro-capitalist ideology embedded in them? This is a complicated question
and very controversial among Marxists. The answer is "yes and no" - it
depends. Let's take an easy example - James Bond movies. These are permeated
with pro-capitalist ideology which is absolutely transparent. On the other hand,
it would be difficult to argue that the American school of painters called the
Abstract Impressionists, or a particular piece of jazz music is a piece of
"bourgeois ideology". Nonetheless, it is possible to explain how these
forms of artistic expression grew up at this particular point in time, and what
developments in society gave rise to them. For example, the "youth
culture" of the 1960s grew up on the basis of a generation of young people
who had a lot of money to spend - "flower power" wouldn't have got
very far in the 1930s! Marx's ideas about how the law, politics and ideas in
general fit together with the economic basis of society are not just applicable
to capitalism. For example, Marxists have analysed the role of the Catholic
Church under feudalism as a key factor in the ideological "cement" of
feudal society, justifying the rule of the landed nobility and the role of the
crown, None of this should lead us to conclude that it is possible to predict
exactly every aspect of law, politics and art just on the basis of knowing that
a society is feudal or capitalist: it can only tell us the general parameters.
For example, the French legal system is very different from the British. In
France you are (more or less) guilty until proven innocent. In Britain you are
(in theory) innocent until proven guilty. In order to explain this difference,
we have to study the history of these legal systems in detail. Thefact that
Britain and France are both capitalist won't help us much in explaining these
differences: but one thing is noticeable. Both British and French system are
ounded on defence of private property. They both "fit" the basic
relations of production. 7. The state One thing we have left out so far, in
discussing the evolution of class society and the legal-political
superstructure, is of course the state - the entire bureaucratic apparatus which
guards the domination of the ruling class. The role of the state is explained in
a separate paper in this pack. For the moment it is enough to note the following
propositions of Marxist theory: 1.The state is an apparatus to defend the
continued rule of the ruling class. 2.The state is ultimately a body of armed
people - in other words, the core of the state when it comes to the crunch are
the police and the armed forces. 3.The state did not exist before class society,
but only came into existence with the division of society into classes. Section
C: The ruling class and revolution 8. The ruling class and revolution How does
one type of society get transformed into a completely new type How is it that
feudalism came to an end and was replaced by capitalism - why aren't we still
living under feudalism? Marx approaches the problem this way in the next passage
from one of his writings quoted above (the 1859 Preface to the Critique of
Political Economy): "At a certain stage of development, the material
productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of
production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the
property relations ...From the forms of development of the productive forces,
these relations turn into their fetters". What does this mean? Here we have
to remind ourselves of the way that society fits together. A certain level of
production technique gives rise to definite social relations of production.
Let's think about this point. Remember the hunter-gatherer society we talked
about above. We noted that there were different ways the people there could
organise themselves on the basis of thier production, which consists of hunting,
fishing, picking fruit and a few handicrafts (the exact details don't matter for
our purposes). However, we also said that capitalism couldn't exist there,
because to get capitalism you need a money economy, capital, industry, banks, a
developed division of labour, etc. This is impossible in our very
under-developed desert island (so long as it remains isolated from the rest of
the world). The level of productive tecnique, or to put it another way, the
level of development of the productive forces, sets definite limits to the type
of society you can have. In a book he wrote in 1845, 'The Holy Family', Marx
presented this in a very sharp manner when he said: "The hand mill (for
grinding flour - Ed.) gives you the feudal lord; the steam mill gives you the
industrial capitalist". There is a large element of truth in this, but
painted so boldly it is an overstatement. The development of the productive
forces places definite limits on the type of social relations you cna have, but
does not absolutely determine them in detail. We know that the level of
productive technique associated with feudalism - mainy based on the agriculture
of rural peasants - in other parts of the world gave rise to a different type of
society based not on the rule of lords based in the countryside as in Britain,
France and Germany, but to the rule of a centralised state bureaucracy under a
king (or in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey and North Africa, a Sultan). But
overall, the level of productive technique and the type off social relations
have to fit together more or less harmoniously, and this in turn has to fit
together with the legal, political and ideological "superstructure".
But what happens if the "fit" begins to break down? In the transition
from feudalism to capitalism, the growth of the productivity of agriculture
created the basis for sections of the peasants to move off the land into the
towns. The growth of trade and commerce began to create merchants in the towns
with huge amounts of money capital to invest: the conquest or pillage of
colonial lands like South America concentrated new ealth, including huge amounts
of precious metal like gold and silver, which could be used as coins. The scene
was set for the development of a manufacturing, capitalist class - the
bourgeoisie - developing within feudalism. As production developed, the
development of the productive forces came into conflict with the existing
relations of production - those of the domination of the feudal lords, the
landed aristocracy. As Marx notes: "A period of revolution then
ensued". This period of revolution was of course the period of the
bourgeois, capitalist, revolutions against feudalism - most notably the French
Revolution of 1789, the English Revolution of 1641 - 9, which destroyed the
monarchy and brought Oliver Cromwell to power, the unification of Italy (the
Risorgiamento) led by Garibaldi in the 1840s. The United States has had TWO
bourgeois revolutions - first George Washington's revolt against the British
Crown, leading to the Declaration of Independence in 1778, and second, the Civil
War of 1861 - 5, in which the northern industrial capitalists united the
country, by destroying the slave mode of production in the south, and creating a
unified country based on capitalist production relations. By clearing away
feudal and pre-capitalist social relations and state structures, the bourgeois
revolution creates the basis for extending and ensuring the domination of
capitalism. The feudal aristocracy was either destroyed, or integrated into a
reconstiuted capitaist class (as happened in Britain). Huge sections of the
serfs, the rural peasantry, are driven off the land and forced into the towns to
become wage labourers, proletarians, the core of the new working class. The
transformation from feudalism to capitalism takes place via revolution. As Marx
says: the bourgeois emerges on to the historical stage as a most revolutionary
class. Section D: Freedom and determinism 9. Freedom and determination According
to Marx: "Men make their own history, but not in conditions of their own
making". This has to be put together with two other statements by Marx:
that production relations are "indispensable and independent of their
(human beings') will", and the notion that what distinguishes human beings
from animals is consciousness. Imagine a peasant serf in feudal England who
believes in the socialist Commonwealth and hates the system - a very advanced
and far-seeing serf! That doesn't stop the serf being trapped in a set of feudal
social relations, dominated by his feudal lord. However, being a conscious
being, het serf could have taken conscious action: for example, by organising a
peasant uprising. But not in conditions of his own choosing - an individual
peasant could not wish away feudalism by an act of will. Human beings have
choices, they have free will: but their field of action is strictly limited by
the economic, social and political circumstances in which they find themselves.
However, despite the limitations of circumstances, history works throughh active
human agencies who have free will. People have choices. The idea of a sociaist
serf however is highly improbable, because the ideology of socialism hadn't been
thought of. We are all products of the time in which we live. Today, we can't
think in terms of a new ideology or theory which won't be developed until a
thousand years from now. So we have free will, but only within definite limits.
The problem from the point of view of Marxist theory is that, as Marx and Engels
put it, the political-ideological "superstructure" reacts upon the
economic base of society. People can try to change the existing social relations
and sometimes succeed. For example, the British deliberately kept the price of
land high in Australia to promote the development of capitalist agriculture:
"extreme facility of acquiring land, by which every man has been encouraged
to become a Proprietor, producing what he can by his own unassisted efforts . .
. [but] what is now required is to check this extreme facility and to encourage
the formation of a class of labourers for hire ..." (Colonial Secretary
Lord Goderick, quoted in "No Paradise for Workers" by Ken Buckley and
Ted Wheelwright). This is just one example of how the development of ideas
reacts with the economic base of society. Ideas, inventions, are crucial to the
development of new productive techniques, which in turn help to transform
production relations. New ideas about equality and social justice create
movements which fight against the prevailing system. As Marx put it, ideas, when
mobilising millions, themselves become a material force. This is especially true
of the struggle for socialism. The capitalist revolution was fought out with the
feudal lords on the basis of a religious ideology. Socialist revolution is the
first revolution in human history based on a totally conscious attempt to
transform the social relations of production and bring them under the control of
the producers themselves. The way in which production relations, the state,
politics and ideology fit together will be completely transformed. The
literature on this topic is vast, so the choice of further reading is arbitrary.
To erally get into the topic it is worth reading 'What Happened in History?' And
at least the first 50 pages of 'The German Ideology'. In addition to the works
listed below, 'The Communist Manifesto' by Marx and Engels, also now available
as a Penguin Classic, is important to read. 
Bibliography
1.'What happened in History?' C. Gordon Childe, Penguin Books 2.'The German
Ideology', Marx and Engels, Lawrence and Wishart 3.'Origin of the Family,
Private Property and the State', Engels, Penguin 4.'Preface to the Critique of
Political Economy, 1859' Marx (This is in most one-volume selections of Marx-Engels).
More difficult work 1.'Freedom and Determination in History according to Marx
and Engels' Joseph Ferraro, Monthly Review Press 2.'Karl Marx's Theory of
History: A Defence' G A Cohen 3.'Making History' Alex Callinicos, Polity Press
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