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The Classless Society

March 5, 2016 by Admin Leave a Comment

The Classless Society

It is absolutely essential that those who struggle to influence the development of the next social formation understand the subject of class relations. We dare not allow this structure to survive and form the basis of the new society. The new social formation, necessitated by the revolution of the means of production, must be classless. This […]

Filed Under: Historical Materialism

Universal Basic Income: Insight From Historical Materialism

February 18, 2016 by Admin Leave a Comment

Universal Basic Income: Insight From Historical Materialism

The idea that government should provide every citizen with a basic income sufficient to sustain a decent standard of living, and that this provision should be given without constraint to work, is spreading like wildfire around the world, and is being taken very seriously by some very serious people.1 It is arguably the best solution to hand for addressing the […]

Filed Under: Historical Materialism

Gøsta Esping-Anderson: Social Foundations of Post-Industrial Economies

September 6, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

Gøsta Esping-Anderson’s book, Social Foundations of Post-Industrial Economies provides an excellent introduction to the way we should be thinking about what a successful society looks like and how we should go about achieving it. Published in 1999 some of the detailed statistical evidence may be outdated but his general observations and conclusions remain vital. His book […]

Filed Under: Historical Materialism

On the Question of the Alternative to Work

August 25, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

On the Question of the Alternative to Work

If we can successfully navigate our way to a society of universal ownership and subsidiary control, a society where individuals are no longer compelled by financial necessity to sell time from their all-too-brief lives in order to survive, what will we do with ourselves? How will we find a sense of collective or individual purpose? […]

Filed Under: Historical Materialism

The Historical Materialist Approach

March 14, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

The Historical Materialist Approach

The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into […]

Filed Under: Historical Materialism

Scientific Socialism

March 14, 2015 by Admin Leave a Comment

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Filed Under: Historical Materialism Tagged With: engels, socialism

The contradiction between the general social power into which capital develops, on the one hand, and the private power of the individual capitalists over these social conditions of production, on the other, becomes ever more irreconcilable and yet contains the solution of the problem, because it implies at the same time the transformation of the conditions of production into general, common, social conditions. This transformation stems from the development of the productive forces under capitalist production, and from the ways and means by which this development takes place.

Marx, Capital vol.III

Understanding the Zeitgeist

In considering such [societal] transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production... and the legal, political, religious, esthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become consciousness of this conflict and fight it out.
Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we cannot judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.

- Karl Marx

Revolution in the Fullness of Time:

Since the historical appearance of the capitalist mode of production, the appropriation by society of all the means of production has often been dreamed of, more or less vaguely, by individuals, as well as by sects, as the ideal of the future.
But it could become possible, could become a historical necessity, only when the actual conditions for its realization were there. Like every other social advance, it becomes practicable, not by men understanding that the existence of classes is in contradiction to justice, equality, etc., not by the mere willingness to abolish these classes, but by virtue of certain new economic conditions.

-Friedrich Engels, Socialism; Utopian and Scientific (1880)

We are free to imagine an ideal society in which all other tasks are almost totally automated and each individual has as much freedom as possible to pursue to goods of education, culture, and health for the benefit of herself and others.

Thomas Piketty, Capital In The Twenty-First Century

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