/lit/ - Literature

>>8052233
Marx believed that the way that a classless society would come about was through revolution. This revolution would be spurred by an angry and oppressed working class. As industrialization would lead to diminishing wages and increasing labour for the workers, they would one day rise up and overthrow the bourgeois, seizing control of the means of production and establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which would either wipe out the bourgeois and other classes (Marx and Engels envisioned nine classes in total) or educate them and induct them into the proletariat. After finishing the process of industrialization, destroying or educating the land-owning classes and those who support them (such as the church and the aristocracy), and destroying all vestiges of bourgeois society such as the nuclear family and religion, the dictatorship of the proletariat (of which Engels used the Paris commune as a small-scale model) would finally introduce a communist society, without classes, without a state, without religion, without scarcity.
This revolution was not only class-based, but racial as well, and also geographic. Marx mainly wanted to apply his theories to Germany, England, France, and the United States, and one Marxist criticism of the USSR was that Soviet society had barely begun the process of industrialization when the October revolution began. Marx also considered that certain social and racial groups, such as American blacks and Jews were incapable of revolutionary thought, at least without great exception or herculean effort, and when asked specifically about the concept as it applied to the German Confederation and the territories of its states, argued that only Germans, Magyars, and Croats were revolutionary, and that Poles, Slavs, Serbs, Jews, and other people-groups would either have to be exiled or exterminated. This point of Marx’s was abandoned as early as Leninism.
Another idea which modern Marxists’ often refuse to consider is accelerationism: that a classless society can be hastened through free trade, the idea being that nothing drives industrialization and class-tensions more than capitalism. While few post-Lenin Marxist thinkers accept this and even few advocate it (exception: Antonio Gramsci), the concept has been latched onto by many radical thinkers on both the left and the right, from Nick Land to Ted Kaczynski.
Marx also believed that the working class were too moral to revolt effectively and too uneducated to revolt intelligently, and he and Engels called on intellectuals to lead the revolution and manage the dictatorship of the proletariat: a group called the “vanguard”.
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