Karl Marx was disproven back in the 19th Century. Attempts to correct all those errors while saving the sacrosanct conclusion quickly divided into a “Western” way and an “Eastern” way, as James Lindsay explains, which is quoted in full below due to the limitations of Twitter/X embeds:
Here’s a complicated explanation of some big currents that are happening in the world according to Marxist theory put into practice.
Understanding what’s happening in the People’s Republic of China and BRICS as well as throughout the Western democratic republics requires understanding how Marxists view the dialectical progression of history from one stage to another and what they’ve learned about that progression through the 20th century’s experiments with Marxism.
Marx believed he had a comprehensive and systematic science of history, which he called “dialectical materialism.” There are a number of places and ways he characterized it, but for our purposes, it’s enough to start with his famous first chapter of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Communist Manifesto) where he and Engels wrote this:
“The history of all hitherto existing society† is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
The idea is that all of human history is in fact defined by the conflict of classes, and the nature of that conflict changes over time through a series of revolutions in how (mostly material/economic) structures manifest. A simplistic rendering of Marx’s and Engel’s view goes like this:
- (Estranged, local) tribal communal (communist, lowercase c) societies give way through conquest to
- Slaveholding societies, which through eventual slave revolts become
- Feudal/aristocratic (and mercantilist) societies, which through liberal revolutions in private property rights and industrial revolution become
- Capitalistic/bourgeois societies, which “socialize” production and therefore eventually face a high-drama, violent revolution where the “expropriators are expropriated” to be forced into a
- Socialist economy/society, which eventually withers away of its own accord because it has no ambition to maintain the class distinctions and conflict that maintain class society and that necessitate a state, thus eventually arriving (back) at
- Communism: a transcendent, stateless, classless society of ultimate plenty.
Marx described this final state (a full sublation of the original tribal communism) elsewhere (in his 1844 Manuscripts) this way:
“Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to him self as a social (i.e., human) being—a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development.”
Marx believed this model is a true science of history (in the Hegelian sense of a “system of science”) that must play out. The only question was how to awaken the workers to bring about the necessary violent revolution that would push capitalism into socialism, which literally no one ever figured out.
In the 1910s, everything in the world changed with regard to this model. Marx was technically already falsified, but Marxists don’t care about that and don’t stop. Two schools of thought emerged: Eastern Marxism (Soviet Communism) and Western Marxism (Cultural Marxism). Neither matched Marx’s predictions or the “immortal science of Marxism,” which is not only not science, but is also evil, wrong, and a twisted, Luciferian faith system.
