This chapter aims to situate the present volume's relationship to historical materialism. These contributions argue that factional competition plays a crucial role in the social transformation of precolumbian America. Factions are hierarchical units, which include elites and masses engaged in a struggle over resources. This factionalism approach is a complement to two prevailing approaches to understanding social change in prehistory, Marxism and ecological functionalism. I will not deal here with the latter. But the claim that the factions approach contributes to Marxian theory raises an important problem. Many Marxisms exist. To which Marxism does this approach contribute? Much confusion and debate still exists about the nature of historical materialism, about the relationship between “base” and “superstructure,” and particularly about the role of active human intervention in Marx's theory of history. Determinist and idealist interpretations of Marx's historical materialism do not allow much space for the sophisticated nuances of the factionalism approach. This essay argues that the factional conflict approach is consonant with an interpretation of historical materialism which centers on the cumulative development of the productive forces without neglecting political struggles. In other words, the factional conflict approach suggests that historical materialism need not conceive of analyses based upon economic structure and human agency as mutually exclusive modes of explanation.

This essay is divided into three parts. The first examines determinist and idealist versions of historical materialism. The second identifies an alternative, what could be called an “activist materialism,” an historical materialism which accepts the centrality of the cumulative development of the productive forces without neglecting the role of superstructural elements, active political intervention by real individual and collective social actors.