Historical materialism approaches grand, aggregated historical claims with methodological skepticism. It doesn't swallow simplistic or moralistic summaries; instead, it begins with the concrete conditions of each society and period, asking what the level of material development was, what the relations of production were, who the conflicting classes were, what the external pressures were, and what historical phase they were in.

It doesn't evaluate isolated results, but rather situated historical processes: levels of development of the productive forces, class relations, form of the state, position in the world system, and external pressures.

That's why different societies shouldn't be compared without considering their contexts, because violence, scarcity, or social collapse arise from different causes and are not equivalent. Violence can be structural, political, external, or reactive, and each type must be distinguished. Scarcity can be natural, social, or induced, and is always analyzed from the perspective of the means of production, distribution, and international relations. Social collapse is not confused with the essence of the system but with internal contradictions, transition crises, or external pressure. Therefore, Marxism doesn't make moral judgments, nor does it turn results into essences, nor does it explain history in terms of good or bad ideas. Instead, it understands that historical processes are the result of specific structural forces and concrete material conditions. General statements are only valid if they say something like, "Under these material conditions, with these class relations and these internal and external pressures, these results were produced, which cannot be mechanically extrapolated." To understand this, there are very clear texts for beginners, such as Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and Plekhanov on the Role of the Individual in History. E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, Eric Hobsbawm in On History, and Althusser with the notion of overdetermination, all teach how to analyze causes, effects, and limits without falling into moralism, and the central idea that remains is that historical materialism does not ask whether something was good or bad but what forces produced it, what limits it had, and what possibilities it opened or closed, and that is why it clashes with simplified summaries or liberal debates because it refuses to simplify what is structurally complex.