Historical materialism as a kind of materialistic comprehension of the world

Identifying the basic forms of being, philosophers always reflected on what place in ontology bodily and material takes, whether it has a single root cause, and whether it is the very basis of all that exists. Teaching about the eternity of the physical world gives us even ancient India and China. Therefore, we can say that the historical forms of materialism arose in the development of philosophy. The earliest of them, antique, identified matter with a particular substance or its symbol, from which various bodies and objects arise, and into what they perish, turn (water, "apeiron", air, fire, atoms and emptiness ...). That is, as Aristotle correctly noted, the philosophers of this direction believed that the essence of such a primordial principle does not change, it simply appears before us in different manifestations.

Although such ideas were popular among the Renaissance figures, it is generally accepted that it was the seventeenth century that became the birthplace of yet another form of materialism - the mechanistic one. Descartes defines matter as a kind of independent being, and its attribute is called extension. Newton adds to the properties of this substance still impenetrability, inertia and weight (the last two he unites the notion of mass). The thinkers of the Enlightenment defined matter as everything that is conceivable by feelings and sensations, and even everything that exists outside the consciousness of a person. However, the connection between different things and phenomena at that time was seen according to the prevailing then scientific picture of the world as purely mechanical, like a huge complex clock, where each wheel or cog is playing a role.

One of the few attempts to explain the history of mankind and social relations on the basis of material principles has become Marxism. A huge role in this was played by Feuerbach's doctrine of the objectivity of matter, as well as the rationalism of the classics of German philosophy. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of this trend in the history of ideas, put forward the practice of the relationship between man and the world. They stated that the primary issue of philosophy as such is the problem of primacy, and recognized the priority of matter as the primary basis of being, including social. Thus, dialectical and historical materialism was born.

Within the framework of the Marxist concept, its creators used Hegel's dialectical principles not only for the analysis of nature, but for politics, economics and other social processes and phenomena. Therefore, they came to a new approach to a complex of issues related to the life of society. If the previous philosophy regarded ideas and theories as the driving forces of social development, then historical materialism focuses attention on economic life, and, above all, on the sphere of activity that gives the products of production. Relations in this area, from the point of view of this theory, determine all other types of connections between collectives of people, and represent the economic basis of social life. And this very being forms public consciousness (that is, the prevailing moral, law, ideas, and so on).

Marx and Engels succeeded in discovering elements of a certain repeatability in the process of development and of different epochs. From this they concluded that not only nature, but society also moves forward according to certain laws. Historical materialism deals not only with the identification of these laws, but also with the isolation of individual stages in the process of their action. Scientists have called these stages socio-economic formations, in the emergence of which play a role not only and not so much individuals, as huge masses of people. They also outlined their vision of the reasons for the emergence and functioning of the state, social groups (classes), how they struggle and interact with each other, showed the evolution of the family, and so on.

Historical materialism, in its own way, poses the problem of man. Marxist philosophy reduces the essence of people to social traits, to the totality of social relations. Therefore, a special role here is played by theoretical comprehension of such a social phenomenon as alienation. The ancestors of Marxism described this term as a very complex phenomenon, when, as a result of different types of human activity, the process itself, like results, turns into some kind of external force. She begins to rule over people, to put pressure on them, to replace them with all other feelings and attitudes. The reason for this is exploitation, and the latter is based on private ownership of the means by which production is carried out. Therefore, they proposed the only possible possible way out of this situation - the change in the type of ownership of these funds - from private to public.