When reading Marx’s theories of historical materialism, it is easy to identify his theories as part of a larger trend of materialistic analysis of human societies. The prominent cultural anthropologist Marvin Harris wrote in the early aughts about the concept of ‘cultural materialism,’ in which all human society was structured around the physical needs of people, whether that be hunger, thirst, the need for shelter, or the need for production to feed those aforementioned basic needs. The general thesis of these ideas is that humans, no matter how complex the systems they devise are, will be ultimately driven by base instincts; in Harris’s case, hunger drives traditions as widespread and diverse as the Eucharist or the worship of cows in Hinduism, while Marx’s theory of historical materialism firmly places every society and economic system into a mold of a shifting economic base and superstructure that will both ultimately aim towards a communist system, as production increases and private property is first established and then abolished. However, both Marx and Harris’s approaches betray a utility-minded focus toward history that concerningly does away with human concepts of meaningfulness that very much influence day-to-day decision-making. When one considers everything in terms of profit and production, then every ritual makes sense under those simplistic considerations; this was the exact criticism leveled at Harris by Marshall Sahlins, the pre-eminent cultural anthropologist and contemporary opponent of cultural materialism. In a response to Harris’s book, Sahlins uses the example of Aztec sacrifice to identify that the religion’s ritual practices far outweighed the potential bodily gain that Harris justified it with. Marx’s theory of history, unfortunately, is much the same in its logical extremism. Marx casts the entire shadow of history as aiming toward the changing of the superstructure to a world without exploitation, but he ignores the backsliding, improvements, and changes in the superstructure that have few to no sources in the economic base itself. The scale of the superstructure works on the level of the state, but local communities often make decisions based on group identity and ideology that often have little to do with the economic base. Even under Marxist morality theory, in which the economic base is the center of people’s values in society, practices such as religion are difficult to explain in a non-productive capacity. While it might make sense to give workers a Sabbath to ensure their future productivity and obedience, it makes little sense to give them dietary restrictions that would make them less likely to be well-fed and strong; despite this, many of the world’s major religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism spread a vegetarian diet. In this sense, historical materialism commits the central flaw of generalizing all of history into a theoretical framework that might not match reality in individual communities, even if it does on larger scales.