In Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence, G.A. Cohen quotes Marx from 1859 in one of the most useful epigraphs I’ve ever encountered. (An epigraph is a quote that is put before the beginning of a book or chapter.) I will briefly describe the epigraph here, and then reproduce the passage in full.

I read the epigraph a while ago as I was starting to get into Cohen’s book, and a few things stuck with me about Marx’s language of productive forces and productive relations eventually coming into conflict over time. Then this morning, after a shower, I was thinking about how leftist organizations have to socially reproduce themselves over time, how our organizing groups undergo changes, and how this can often lead to internal tensions within groups—that is, tensions between the motivations of its members and the established institutional rules, norms, and empowered decision makers. At that moment, I was struck that this was extremely similar to what Marx had described about the internal tensions of economic systems, as quoted in the epigraph.

It's such a damn good passage. It concisely summarizes the basic motivations for the Marxist (economic) theory of history. But as my experience this morning showed me, it doesn’t take much abstraction to apply his analysis more broadly, as an extremely common pattern that we find within the institutions that matter to us—and relating to those things that matter to us within those institutions. This abstraction describes a materialist dialectic within institutions broadly, as those institutions undergo a historical process of maintaining and reinventing themselves.

I felt compelled to look up the source of this quote. Cohen only tells us, “—Marx, 1859”, but it was easy enough with that to hop on DuckDuckGo and see that a major publication from Marx in that year was A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Particularly its Preface, which I learned that this epigraph pulls from, seems to have been very important to past Marxists who were studying his economic theory of history, and has been the subject of some contention. Nevertheless, I think this passage is a good, accessible inroad into understanding Marxism at a deep level.

I will reproduce the passage in full here, after one more note.

When I looked at the entire Preface on Marxists.org, I saw that immediately before the place that Cohen starts the epigraph, Marx writes this: “The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows." Marx himself is writing this as a concise summary of his epistemic motivations! No wonder this passage is so powerful.

Here is the passage:

[The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows.]

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis, on which rises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made 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, aesthetic, or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social formation ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production—antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of human society to a close.

— Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), including the sentence immediately preceding the epigraph (from Marxists.org), but otherwise as translated/presented in G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (which I think is a neater, better translation than what is found on Marxists.org)

As a self-studied Marxist—and in the Global North, aren’t most Marxists self-studied?—I had seen other people talk about the Manifesto, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Capital, the Grundrisse, and the 1844 Manuscripts, but I didn’t really recognize this piece by name. Perhaps it fell out of the common Marxist reading program after the 80s, when the fall of the USSR and the disillusionment felt by Western Leftists of the authoritarian overreaches of Socialist states left many feeling as though the Marxist theory of history had been disproven.

While my experience in the left has led me to believe that the Preface is now less popular to read / discuss among Marxists, it is nevertheless important enough to appear in my copy of Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Hackett Publishing, 1994). Lawrence H. Simon, the editor of Selected Writings, introduces the Preface, and describes controversy around Marx’s essay. I reproduce his introduction in full here:

Marx spent the 1850’s in London working on his critique of political economy and analysis of capitalism. He emerged from this period of intense theoretical work in 1859 with the publication of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. This work was an anticipation of the first part of volume one of Capital, which would appear eight years later, and is little read today except by scholars of Marx. What is read and widely controverted is the Preface to the 1859 essay. In the Preface, Marx first provides a thumbnail sketch of the development of his thinking on political economy, beginning with his early days with the Rheinische Zeitung. This can be taken as evidence that Marx saw a great deal of continuity in his work from his Young Hegelian days. He then presents a summary of “the guiding principles of my studies.” This statement of the basic claims of historical materialism has become duly famous for pronouncements such as “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” and “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.” The Preface seems to outline a fairly straightforward version of technological determinism. Controversy has concerned whether the Preface accurately represents Marx’s actual theoretical views or is distorted by the attempt to be overly concise, and whether the presented here is consistent with other of his theoretical and political writings.

I think there are a lot of deep and practical insights in the Marxist description of a materialist dialectic of change and progress, which we shouldn’t be so quick to give up on. While the theory needs more detail, nuances, and caveats, the major force of the argument remains compelling, and can serve as a guide for what areas of society deserve deeper, more precise study; and which areas are potentially ripe for effective organizing and agitation.

Relatedly, the focus on the interaction of material forces, rather than ideological development, is important for understanding where we should put our organizing focus. However, simply because we are materialists does not mean that we should ignore ideological influence entirely. Developing the productive forces to the point of progressive conflict relies on designing more institutions that help people socially reproduce in ways that prove to people in practice that a better society is achievable, and that we deserve it. We can help people develop a revolutionary consciousness, sometimes through purely ideological discussion, as was the case with my Marxism; and most of the time through the material, institutional developments of things such as tenants unions, labor unions, systems of mutual aid, deliberative democracy, and worker and consumer cooperatives.