1 What is the ‘Material’ of Marx’s Materialism? I would like to thank the Young Communist League and the organisers of the Harry Pollitt School for putting this event together and for inviting me to speak. I’m the co-secretary of the Merseyside Branch of the Communist Party and the incoming editor of an international academic journal called Rethinking Marxism. The research that I have published so far has largely been dedicated to explaining how dominant sociological understandings of class struggle have undermined the practice of historical materialism within the social sciences, due to the way that sociology relies on idealist ideological notions as opposed to materialist scientific concepts. The foremost of these idealist notions, following the work of Marx, Lenin and one of their more contemporary disciples, the communist philosopher Louis Althusser, I argue is the notion of man, or the human subject. The reason to mention this is that it provides some important foregrounding to the talk I will give this morning on the question that I have posed in my title: what is the ‘material’ of Marx’s materialism? There are two main avenues of thought that I would like to explore in this talk to generate an answer to this question. The first is the definition of these terms ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’ as two currents within philosophy. More than a definition, it will be important for us to think about the struggle between these two currents, identified by Engels and Lenin, and the role that this struggle plays in the founding of scientific concepts. The second thing to think about will be the role played by this struggle and its appearance in the establishment, by Marx and Engels, of the science of historical materialism. Using evidence from their texts, I will demonstrate how this can be observed in an ongoing and persistent struggle by Marx and Engels against the concept of ‘man’ and the human subject, in order to complete the movement from an idealistic history of man towards a historical materialism, a materialist understanding of the content of history itself, as something that transcends the immediate consciousness or will of individual human subjects. The aim for this talk is to emphasise the historical part of historical materialism, in order to argue that as communists, history is the object of both our theory and our politics. My argument is that if we are to seriously argue that historical materialism is a science, then we have to acknowledge the particularity and finitude of all science. In his introduction to a seminar in 1963, Louis Althusser offers this important insight into the characteristics of a science: