Historical Materialism: Does the Concept Have a Future?

Abstract

The article examines academic and intellectual merits of the central part of Marxism – historical materialism. The authors argue that historical materialism has many valuable findings and conclusions and analyze some of them, showing that they together with its methodology can be helpful for social scientist and for a historian theorizing and aspiring for wide analogues. There are given new explanations to this phenomenon as the restrictions are revealed of the existing model of historical materialism. A peculiar attention is paid to Marx's conclusion that the changing developmental level of productive forces inevitably leads to changes in all other spheres of societal life; moreover, these changes proceed far from automatically and immediately but through the resolution of structural and systemic crisis in a society. The article presents a survey on the history of the Western studies within historical material-ism framework starting from the end of the nineteenth century at the general background of the ups and downs of the Western Marxism and its crisis after the collapse of socialism. The authors show the waves of the Western Marxists' attenuating and increasing interest in historical materialism. The latter to a certain extent should be considered as a program for scientific research which is far from its realization. The authors make a conclusion that today one can hardly work within the framework of historical materialism conception since many of its postulates should be revised. It is very important, that historical materi-alism can affect social science mainly in an indirect way through a creative acquiring and interpretation of its method, approaches, and par-Social