Marx’s Historical Materialism and the Notion of Praxis

The present paper examines Karl Marx's famous conception of “historical materialism,” in his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Marx, 1970, p. 19-23), and focusses on the criticism that it has deterministic, both economically and technologically, and therefore it omits the role of human agency and free will. This paper aims at evaluating this criticism in closer detail, and showing that it is not founded. By considering two types of determinism, and the issue of human intentional behavior and its relation to history, it is shown that the allegation that historical materialism ignores the importance of conscious human conduct or praxis is untenable.