Historical materialism

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Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods.^[1]

Karl Marx stated that technological development plays an important role in influencing social transformation and therefore the mode of production over time.^[2] This change in the mode of production encourages changes to a society's economic system.^[3]

Marx's lifetime collaborator, Friedrich Engels, coined the term "historical materialism" and described it as "that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another."^[4][5][6]

Although Marx never brought together a formal or comprehensive description of historical materialism in one published work, his key ideas are woven into a variety of works from the 1840s onward.^[7] Since Marx's time, the theory has been modified and expanded. It now has many Marxist and non-Marxist variants.