ReMarx: How Marxists Understand Society
In the previous ReMarx, we explained that Marxism is a science for understanding society and changing it. But how does this science investigate society?
Its method is called dialectical materialism. When this method is used to study the development of human society through time, it is called historical materialism.
Materialism: Start From Real Life
Materialism does not mean greed, consumerism or believing that money is the only important thing. It means beginning with the real world and the conditions under which human beings live.
Before people can practise religion, make laws, form political parties or debate morality, they must be able to eat, find shelter and reproduce their daily lives. These necessities do not fall from heaven. They must be produced through human labour.
So, to understand Nigeria, Marxists do not begin with what politicians say about the country. We begin with how Nigerians actually live. How is food produced? Who owns the land? Who controls the banks, oil, cement and telecommunications? Who works, and under what conditions? Where does the wealth created by that work go?
Millions of Nigerians work from morning until night and still live in poverty. The materialist does not accept that they are poor because they lack discipline, prayers or an entrepreneurial mindset. The materialist asks why those who perform the labour own so little, while those who own companies, land and financial assets accumulate enormous wealth from the labour of others.
Materialism begins from life as it exists, not from the stories society tells about itself.
Ideas Grow From Society
Materialism does not mean that ideas, religion, culture or morality are powerless. Ideas can inspire obedience, resistance, sacrifice and revolution. But ideas do not appear from nowhere. They develop within definite social conditions.
A landlord and a tenant may speak the same language, worship in the same church and belong to the same ethnic group. But they experience rent very differently. To the landlord, rising rent is income. To the tenant, it may mean hunger or eviction.
Their ideas about whether the rent is “fair” are influenced by their different positions. This is why Marxists do not explain Nigeria by saying that Nigerians simply have the wrong mindset. We ask what kind of society continually produces these ideas and whose interests they serve.
When poverty is everywhere, motivational speakers tell the poor to improve their attitude. When wages lose value, economists tell workers to make sacrifices. When public services collapse, private investors tell us that the solution is to sell them. These ideas appear reasonable because the interests of capital are presented as the interests of everybody.
Marx and Engels therefore argued that the material production of life helps shape law, politics, religion and social consciousness. They did not say that ideas merely copy economic life, but that ideas must be understood in relation to the society that produces them.
To change the ideas dominating society, we must also change the material relations that make those ideas powerful.
Dialectics: Nothing Stands Alone
Dialectics means that nothing in society can be properly understood in isolation. Everything exists through relationships and is always moving and changing.
Consider the price of fuel. It cannot be understood as a number standing by itself.
Fuel prices affect transport. Transport affects the cost of moving food. Food prices affect wages and household spending. Higher costs affect small businesses. Government policy affects all of them, while the government itself faces pressure from local capitalists, foreign lenders and the world oil market.
A change in one part of society moves through the others.
This is why Marxists reject explanations that separate Nigeria’s crises into different boxes. Inflation is discussed without wages. Unemployment is discussed without ownership and investment. Insecurity is discussed without poverty and land. Government policy is discussed without asking which class influences the state.
Dialectics examines the relationships connecting these things. It asks how each part affects the others and how they form a whole.
But this whole is not peaceful. It contains opposing interests. Workers and capitalists participate in the same economy, but they do not want the same thing from it. Landlords and tenants exist through the same rental relationship, but what benefits one may injure the other.
Society is not a collection of separate problems. It is a system of connected relationships, and those relationships contain conflict.
Contradiction Drives Change
A contradiction is not simply hypocrisy or saying two opposite things. In Marxism, a contradiction is a conflict built into the way something exists.
Capitalism needs workers because workers produce goods, services and profit. But every capitalist is also pushed to reduce labour costs, hold down wages and extract more work from fewer people. Capital therefore depends upon labour while constantly attacking it.
Capitalism also needs people to buy what companies produce. But when wages are held down, jobs are casualised and prices rise, the purchasing power of the majority is weakened. The system attacks the very consumers it needs.
Nigeria’s celebrated economic growth contains this kind of contradiction. A company can increase its profits by raising prices while restraining wages. Its shares may then become more valuable. The worker, however, can afford less food, rent and transport.
What appears as success to the company appears as hardship to the worker. These are not two unrelated stories. The company may be succeeding because the worker is being squeezed. This is what dialectics reveals. Poverty does not merely exist beside wealth. Under capitalism, enormous private wealth is created and sustained through social relations that also reproduce poverty.
The contradiction between labour and capital cannot be solved by asking both sides to cooperate. It arises because one class owns the means of production while another must work for that class to survive.
Small Changes Can Become a Crisis
Dialectics also teaches that gradual changes can accumulate until they produce a larger transformation.
One rise in transport fares may force a family to reduce another expense. One increase in food prices may remove meat from the table. One school-fee increase may push a child out of school. One job loss may force someone into debt.
Taken separately, each event can appear manageable. But as they accumulate across millions of households, they produce a different social condition: mass hunger, school exclusion, homelessness, anger and political instability.
The same applies to resistance. One worker complaining alone may be ignored. Ten workers can present a demand. Thousands organised across workplaces can stop production. What begins as scattered dissatisfaction can become organised class struggle.
This does not mean every hardship automatically produces revolution. Suffering can produce despair, migration, crime, religious withdrawal or ethnic conflict. The decisive question is whether people understand the source of their suffering and develop the organisation required to fight it collectively.
Conditions may create the possibility of change, but conscious organisation turns that possibility into power.
Historical Materialism: Society Was Made
Historical materialism applies dialectical materialism to human history. It does not treat today’s society as natural or permanent. It asks how existing property relations, classes and institutions developed.
Nigeria did not simply wake up one morning with an economy dependent on exporting oil and importing essential goods. Colonial rule reorganised production, taxation, transport and trade to serve imperial interests. The state and infrastructure were developed primarily to extract resources and move them outward, not to meet the democratic needs of the people.
Independence changed who formally governed the country, but it did not automatically abolish the economic structure inherited from colonialism. Nigerian ruling-class factions entered and developed relationships with foreign capital, accumulated wealth through control of the state and preserved an economy centred on extraction, importation and private profit.
This history shapes the choices available today. But it does not remove human agency.
Marx wrote that people make their own history, but they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves. They act under conditions transmitted from the past.
Historical materialism therefore rejects both fatalism and hero worship. History is neither controlled by destiny nor made by presidents acting alone. People inherit definite conditions, but through class struggle they can preserve or transform them.
Nigeria’s present was historically produced. What was produced by human relations can also be changed by human action.
From Appearance to Reality
This is why dialectical and historical materialism is the foundation of Marxism. It teaches us not to stop at appearances.
When the government says the economy is growing, Marxists ask who owns the growth and how it was produced. When unemployment supposedly falls, Marxists examine whether people have secure and useful work or have merely been renamed “self-employed” because they struggle to survive.
When the stock market rises while hunger spreads, Marxists ask whether the same policies impoverishing workers are increasing the revenues and assets of the capitalist class. When another president promises national renewal, Marxists ask whether ownership and class power will change or whether a new government will administer the same system.
Other methods can count inflation, describe poverty or expose individual corruption. But dialectical and historical materialism connects these facts to the social relations producing them. It shows how labour, ownership, the state, imperialism and class struggle operate together.
That is why it provides the most complete method for understanding Nigeria’s crises. It does not treat poverty, corruption, unemployment and insecurity as separate accidents. It reveals them as connected expressions of a dependent capitalist society organised for accumulation by a minority.
Marxism therefore does not ask only: what is wrong with Nigeria?
It asks: what system keeps reproducing these conditions, which class benefits from it, and which class has the power to end it?
The answer cannot be another change of personalities at the top. The people who produce Nigeria’s wealth must understand their shared position, organise as an independent political force and take democratic control of production and the state.
Dialectical and historical materialism does not only help working people understand the world beneath its appearances. It helps them discover their power to change it.