2. Marx’ and Engels’ Historical Materialism.

In section ix of his essay “The Poverty of History”, Thompson called attention to the distinction between structural and historical analysis with their different heuristics as a problem in historical materialism left unresolved by Marx and Engels. And to their “historicist notions of lawed and pre-determined development”18 which are part of this problematic. A problematic also involving the problem of how to understand the meaning and significance of the interconnected concepts of “relative autonomy” and “determination in the last instance”.19

Marx’ and Engels’ historical materialism is a theory or hypothesis about the nature of the process of historical development and transformations (that is, the transitions from one type of society (defined by a specific dominant mode of production) to another), with the conception of the dialectic of forces and relations of production as the motive power of this process as its core element. This conception is the major problem with their historical materialism, while some unsuccessful attempts to reconcile it and its implications with the conception of human beings as the makers of their own history, which are dealt with below, are less crucial, but symptomatic of the tension in their historical materialism between these two conceptions and their respective implications. The conception of the dialectic of forces and relations as the motive power of historical development and transformations is found in their texts from the mid-1840s and on, with its classical formulation in Marx’ 1859 Preface toA Contribution 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 within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure. In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is