Marx's theory of history

The Marxist theory of historical materialism sees human society as fundamentally determined at any given time by the material conditions—in other words, the relationships which people have with each other in order to fulfill basic needs such as feeding, clothing, and housing themselves and their families. Overall, Marx and Engels claimed to have identified six successive stages of the development of these material conditions in Western Europe. In contrast to many of his followers, Marx made no claim to have produced a master key to history, but rather considered his work a concrete study of the actual conditions that pertained in Europe. As he put it, historical materialism is not "an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself."

The Marxist concept of private property gives the basis for Marx's theory. "Private property" in the terminology of Marx's time, for Marx himself, and for Marxists sometimes today, does not mean the simple possessions of a person, but the ownership of productive property or property which produces a profit for the owner, such as corporate ownership, share ownership, land ownership, and—in the case of slave society—slave ownership (since slaves work the land, mines and other means of producing the material means of existence).

Marx saw that each stage or epoch created a new class or invention that would lead to its downfall. However the downfall would not be an automatically negative event, since with each step humanity at large would benefit. Each passing stage would therefore raise the standard of living of the masses while at the same time be doomed to its own downfall because of internal contradictions and class conflicts.

Only the last two epochs are spared from this fate. With socialism the final oppressive class is overthrown and society is put under the dictatorship of the proletariat and thus advances into communism.

The first three stages are not given particular attention, since by Marx's time they had long come to pass. As such, he does not provide the principles of these stages as he does for capitalism and the stages that follow. Nonetheless, these epochs have common characteristics.

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