: : Again, why would anyone care about what Marx has to say about history given his biased interpretation? : But that wasn't his interpretation, what he was saying was that socialism was imminant inn history, that humanity was repeadedly striving to achieve a classless society, but that only Capitalism made the conditions for its full realisation. he was specifically looking to history, to previous societies, and had swathes upon swathesn of anthropological notes, he saw those societies as in fact showing teh tendancy of human history, of the species form, towards socialism. Don't you read responces or something?
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"And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society, nor yet the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with particular, historic phases in the development of production; 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society." Marx - letter to Weydemeyer, 1852
*Marx was well aware of the works of historians and others who preceeded him. As for the poster who sputtered this nonsense about Egypt et al as forerunners of socialism and communism as Marx defined it, unless you can show me where the Egyptian slaves formed their own state in order to create a classless, stateless society, this is nothing more than intellectual dishonesty... of course, as Marcus Aurelius said, "Nothing is ever useless; it can always serve as a bad example."* --K
None.
