It was left for Engels to undertake a detailed application of the Marxist scheme to history at large.
Marx and Engels were so exclusively historians, so exclusively dialecticians in Hegel's sense, that they were not concerned to undertake an exposition of social organisation (to deal with what Comte termed social statics in contrast with social dynamics). The concept of this organisation can, however, be abstracted from history, and we have moreover for this purpose the Marxist formula known as the doctrine of historical materialism.
Marx contends that the totality of the relationships of production, the economic structure of society, constitutes the real basis upon which the legal and political superstructure is built and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond. These relationships of production are, in fact, independent of the human will; they have originated historically, in correspondence with a definite stage of the evolution of the material forces of production. In a certain phase of development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the preexistent relationships of production (i.e. conditions of ownership) within which they have hitherto had their being. These earlier relationships, which were at first evolutionary forms of the productive energies, now manifest themselves as shackles to those energies, and an epoch of social revolution ensues. With the transformation of the economic basis, the whole colossal superstructure is more or less rapidly overthrown. When we are contemplating such transformations we must ever be careful to distinguish between the material transformation in the economic conditions of production, which is effected in strict conformity with the reign of natural law, and the legal, political, religious, artistic, or philosophical (in a word, ideological) forms wherein human beings become aware of this conflict and carry on the struggle. In broad outline Marx depicts the Asiatic, classical, feudal, and modern capitalist modes of production, respectively, as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The capitalist method of production has created the antagonism between the productive forces of society and the relationships of ownerships, an antagonism which will be solved by the material conditions which this same capitalist structure of society has already prepared; for humanity never sets itself problems which it is incompetent to solve, and indeed
