What Is Historical Materialism? (ABC #7)

The companion primer to the volume on dialectical materialism, and the seventh in the same introductory series: historical materialism set out for the beginner across eleven chapters.

Its subject is the materialist account of society - production and the productive forces, the relations of production and the socio-economic formations, classes and class struggle, the state, revolution, the role of the masses and of the individual in history, social consciousness, and the transition to communism.

Three authors are named - Zoya Berbeshkina, Lyudmila Yakovleva and Dmitry Zerkin - and the book supplies nothing about them beyond the names, though it prints its series editorial board in full.

It can be dated from the inside with unusual precision. The latest event cited is a Central Committee plenum of December 1983, on the environment; the freshest statistic is from 1982; the most recent Party landmark is the Twenty-Sixth Congress of 1981; and the phrase developed socialism, the organising formula of Soviet self-description under Brezhnev, appears eighteen times. The Twenty-Seventh Congress quietly retired that formula in February 1986.

So this is a manuscript closed in 1984. What that establishes is not a set of silences but the reverse: this is the last full statement of the doctrine before it was opened up - the position from which Soviet social theory was about to have to move.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.