Highlighting the basic forms of being, philosophers have always thought about what place in the ontology is occupied by the physical and material, whether it has a single root cause, and whether the very foundation of everything exists. The teachings on the eternity of the physical world are given to us by ancient India and China. Therefore, we can say that in the development of philosophy, historical forms of materialism arose. The earliest of them, ancient, identified matter with a specific substance or its symbol, from which various bodies and objects arise, and what they perish, they turn into (water, “apeiron”, air, fire, atoms and void ...). That is, as Aristotle correctly noted, philosophers of this direction believed that the essence of such a principle does not change, it simply appears before us in different manifestations.
Although similar ideas were popular among Renaissance figures, it is generally accepted that it was the 17th century that became the birthplace of yet another form of materialism - the mechanistic one. Descartes defines matter as a type of independent being, and calls it extension by its attribute. Newton adds impenetrability, inertness and weight to the properties of this substance (he combines the latter two with the concept of mass). The thinkers of the Enlightenment defined matter as everything that is understandable by feelings and sensations, and even everything that exists outside of human consciousness. However, the connection between different things and phenomena at that time was seen according to the then prevailing scientific picture of the world as purely mechanical, as if in a huge complex watch, where each wheel or cog plays a certain role.
One of the few attempts to explain the history of mankind and social relations based on material principles has become Marxism. A huge role in this was played by Feuerbach's doctrine of the objectivity of matter, as well as the rationalism of the classics of German philosophy. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of this movement in the history of ideas, put forward in the first place the practice of the relationship between man and the world. They stated that the main issue of philosophy as such is the problem of primacy, and recognized the priority of matter as the primary basis of being, including social. Thus was born the dialectical and historical materialism.
Within the framework of the Marxist concept, its creators used Hegel’s dialectical principles not only to analyze nature, but politics, economics, and other social processes and phenomena. Therefore, they again approached a set of issues related to the life of society. If the previous philosophy considered ideas and theories as the driving forces of social development, then historical materialism focuses on economic life, and, above all, on the sphere of activity that produces products of production. Relations in this area, from the point of view of this theory, determine all other types of relations between groups of people, and represent the economic basis of social being. And this very being forms public consciousness (that is, the prevailing morality, law, ideas, and so on).
Marx and Engels managed to discover the elements of a certain repeatability in the process of development and various eras. From this, they concluded that not only nature, but also society is moving forward according to certain laws. Historical materialism is engaged not only in the identification of these laws, but also in the allocation of individual stages in the process of their operation. Scientists called these stages socio-economic formations, in the appearance of which not only and not so much individuals play a role, but huge masses of people. They also set out their vision of the reasons for how the state emerges and functions, social groups (classes), how they fight and interact with each other, showed the evolution of the family, and so on.
Historical materialism in its own way poses the problem of man. Marxist philosophy reduces the essence of people to social traits, to the totality of social relations. Therefore, the theoretical understanding of such a social phenomenon as alienation plays a special role here. The founders of Marxism described this term as a very complex phenomenon, when, due to different types of human activity, its very process, as well as its results, turn into a kind of external force. She begins to rule over people, put pressure on them, replace them with all other feelings and relationships. The reason for this is exploitation, and the latter is based on private ownership of the means by which production is carried out. Therefore, they proposed the only possible way out of this situation that seemed to them - a change in the type of ownership of these funds from private to public.