A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF KARL MARX’S MATERIALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF HISTORY

This paper is a critical appraisal of Karl Marx’s theory of historical materialism and a deployment of its emphasis on economic factor in addressing Nigeria’s socio-economic situation. As we applaud Marx’s materialistic approach to history as an account that is rich enough to promote contextual understanding of past events in various part of the world, we identify its limitation in providing a scientific framework that could serve as the sole interpretation of world history. In this paper, we exposed Marx’s explanation which holds that it is simply the human- productive forces that drives history. Since there are many interpretations of historical materialism among Marxist’s scholars , we limit our reference to ‘historical materialism’ in this essay strictly to the theory developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels . Therefore, we ensure that our discourses are extrapolated from their primary writings and direct our comment towards their ideology by recent studies. Meanwhile, we consider the influence of Hegelian dialectics and Feuerbach’s materialism on the formation of Marx’s theory of historical materialism. This paper, based on our awareness of the recent works of historians and philosophers like Richard Tarnas, Lyotard, and Foucault, argues that even though there might not be an objective or a singular interpretation of history, and that some unconscious forces and tendencies might be playing their own powerful role in shaping human history, the economic superstructure cannot be ignored