Historical materialism is an organic part of Marxist philosophy and the only scientific historical view. Historical materialism holds that social existence determines social consciousness, and social consciousness actively reacts to social existence; It is pointed out that social history is an objective and regular dialectical development process, social basic contradiction is the driving force of all social development, and productivity is the initial source of social development. In class society, class struggle is the direct driving force of social development; People are the main force to promote historical development. The establishment of historical materialism has broken the situation that idealism dominates the world in the field of social history, which is a great change in the historical view.
Historical idealism holds that social consciousness determines social existence, denies the decisive role of material production in social development, regards personal concept, rationality or "absolute spirit" and "God" as the driving force of historical development, and holds that a few heroes are the creators and decisive forces of historical development.
Extended data
Before the development of capitalist socialized mass production, the scale of manual labor production was small, and people were basically in a self-sufficient closed and isolated state; The underdevelopment of transportation and communication limits the communication between ethnic groups, regions and countries to a small extent.
This level of social development, on the one hand, makes the society itself develop slowly, and the inner and deep things can not be fully displayed and exposed, on the other hand, it also limits people's horizons, so that people can't see the commonality and repetitiveness of the social and historical process, so that they can't find the general law of social and historical development, and they can only replace the objective connection of social and historical itself with imaginary connection.
In class society, the broad masses of working people are deprived of the right to enjoy spiritual and cultural activities, and can only engage in heavy manual labor, and it is impossible to produce their own systematic view of history, let alone a materialistic view of history.
In class society, the ruling class has the privilege of mastering and monopolizing spiritual production, but it only accounts for a very small number of the exploiting class. In order to safeguard the vested interests of this class, it is inevitable to belittle the role of the creator of material wealth and exaggerate the role of a few heroes, belittle the material power created by workers and exaggerate the spiritual power controlled by rulers. It is impossible to correctly face the objective laws of historical development and establish historical materialism.
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