/lit/ - Literature

>>12265113
>i-if you interpret marxists the way they meant it will surely work this time

With full disclosure: I am not a Marxist, and I am highly critical of Marxism, communism, and socialism in general, but I’ll try to be as fair and objective as possible before offering my personal opinions (read: vitriol) later on. The ideas advocated by Marx and Engels are hardly comparable to Marxism today beyond a few broad concepts, so I’ll try to address those concepts only as they are currently accepted by modern Marxian thinkers.
Marx’s thinking largely followed from Hegel’s dialectical idealism and Feuerbach’s materialism (which had its earliest roots in Atomism and Epicureanism, but was largely informed by John Dalton’s discoveries). Hegel’s dialectic, highly simplified, following Kant and Fichte, was a conception of the history of ideas: that ideas (theses) have a competing ideas (antitheses), which are combined or reconsidered in each other’s lights to create a new idea (syntheses). Marx applied this model to Feuerbach’s physicalist conception of an Atomic, material world to create dialectical materialism and historical materialism (not to be confused with Stalin’s essay of a similar name). Dialectical materialism turns the focus of that dialectical model away from thoughts and ideas toward economics and revolutions (which were quite common in the 1840s while Marx and Engels were creating the greatest body of their work).
Historical materialism is a concept that applies this thinking toward a history/historiography similar to Rousseau’s which was highly similar to the historiography of positivism, which was in its infancy at the time. According to Marx, societies went through three stages: a period of Feudalism, where the primary authority was God and the king; a period of limited democracies and republics, where the bourgeois used their overwhelming capital to control the proletariat; and a period of communism, a classless, stateless society where the means and products of industry were owned and distributed on a collective basis. Brief periods of violent revolution would border these stages of civilization. Of course, those who’ve read Plato will hear notes of Republic in the harmony.
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