He and Engels regarded industry and commerce as 'material' by contrast with religion and morals, and even by contrast with politics and law. He admired those English and French writers who, by writing 'histories of civil society, of commerce and industry,' gave the writing of history 'a materialist basis' ( The German Ideology, p. He believed that a general science of human society could be worked out only by describing and explaining society in empirical terms. Marx wrote in the preface to the first edition of Capital that he conceived 'the development of the economic structure of society to be a natural process.' This is the main force of the adjective materialist in the phrase 'materialist conception of history.' Marx used the word materialist to make a contrast with what is obviously or implicitly supernatural, metaphysical, or speculative. Marx's chief work, Capital (the first volume of which was published by Marx in 1867 and the other two by Engels after Marx's death) is an application of the historical-materialist view to the capitalist form of society. A vigorous sketch is given in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. Marx himself gave a brief account in his Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and more concisely perhaps in a letter to Paul Annenkov, written in December 1846, while Marx was working on the Poverty of Philosophy. Marx and Engels had formulated it, however, in their The German Ideology, written in 1845 –1846 but not published until 1932. According to ' historical materialism,' the structure of society and its historical development are determined by 'the material conditions of life' or 'the mode of production of the material means of existence.' These last two phrases are quoted from Marx's preface to his Critique of Political Economy (1859), in which he gave a brief presentation of the view.

The materialist conception of history was put forward by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and subsequently adopted by their followers and incorporated in the doctrine of Marxism-Leninism.

Means of production marx definition