Vejas Liulevicius
speaker
414 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Vejas Liulevicius’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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claims that Marx is essentially the Darwin of history, the Darwin of history, that he had done for the world of politics and of human history what Darwin had done with his theory of evolution, understanding the hidden mechanism, understanding the laws that are at work and that make that whole process meaningful rather than just one damn thing after another.
Well, so this was the motive force that Karl Marx and Engels saw driving the historical process forward. And it's important to keep in mind that class conflict doesn't just mean revolutions, revolts, peasant uprisings. It's sort of the totality of frictions and of clashes, conflicts of interest that appear in any society. And so Marx was able, in this spirit that he avowed was very scientific—
to demarcate stages of historical transformation. Primitive communism in the prehistoric period, then moving towards what was called state slavery. That's to say the early civilizations deploying human resources and ordering them by all powerful monarchs. Then private slavery in the ancient period.
and then moving to feudalism in the Middle Ages, and then here's where Marx is able to deliver a pronouncement about his own times, seeing that the present day is the penultimate, the next to last stage of this historical development.
Because the feudal system of the Middle Ages and the dominance of the aristocracy has been overcome, has been displaced by the often heroic achievements, astonishing achievements in commerce and in world building of the middle class, the bourgeoisie.
who have taken the world into their own hands and are engaged in class conflict with the class below them, which is the working class or the proletariat. And so this sort of conflict... also, by the way, obtains within classes. So the bourgeoisie are going to be gravediggers, Marx announces, of their own supremacy because they're also competing against one another.
And members who don't survive that competition get pressed down into the subordinate working class, which grows and grows and grows to the point where at some future moment, we're
the inevitable explosion will come and a swift revolution will overturn this penultimate stage of human history and usher in instead the dictatorship of the working class and then the abolition of all classes because with only one class remaining, everyone is finally unified and without those internal contradictions that had marked class conflict before.
So this in particular for Marx, I think, is a really key moment, which is what makes that such a good question. In his vision, the epic narrative that he's presenting to us, revolution... is key. It's not enough to have evolutionary change. It's not a question of compromises. It's not a case of bargaining or balancing interests.
Revolution is necessary as part of the process of a subjugated class coming to awareness of its own historical role. And when we get to the proletariat, this
working class in its entirety, to whom Marx assigns this epic Promethean role of being the ones who are going to liberate all of humanity, a class that is universal in its interests and in the sort of role in salvation history that they'll be playing in this secular framework, they need revolution and the experience of revolution in order to come into their own.
Because without it, you'll only have half-hearted compromise and something less than the consciousness that they then need in order to rule, to administer, and to play the historical role that they're fated to have.
That's where things become a good deal less detailed in his and Engel's accounts. The answer that they proposed in part was, this is for the future to determine. So all of the details will be settled later. I think what was allied to this was a tremendous confidence in... some very 19th century ideas about how society could be administered and what made for orderly society.
in a way where if the right infrastructure was in place, you might expect society to kind of run itself without the need for micromanagement from above. And hence, we arrive at Marx's tantalizing promise that there will be a period where it'll be necessary to have centralized control.
And there might have to be, as he puts it, despotic inroads against property in order to bring this revolution to pass. But then afterwards, the state, because it represents everybody, rather than representing particular class interests that are in conflict with other classes, the state will eventually wither away. So there won't be need for it.
Now, that's not to say that pure stasis arrives, right? Or that the stabilization equals being frozen in time. It's not as if That is what things will look like. But instead, the big issues will be settled. And henceforth, people will be able to enjoy lives of, as he would consider it, inauthentic freedom without necessity, without poverty, as a result of this blessed state that's been arrived at.
Dispossession. Dispossession of the middle classes and of the bourgeoisie. In his model, humanity is never standing still, right? So he'd probably argue in this dynamic vision of how history unfolds that there's always conflict and it's always moving, propelling history forward towards its predestined ending. In the way he saw this climax was that
As things did not stay the same, the condition of the working class was constantly getting worse, and hence their revolutionary potential was growing.
And at the same time, the expropriators, the bourgeoisie, were also facing diminishing returns as they competed against one another with more and more wealth concentrated in fewer and fewer hands and more and more elements of what had been the middle class detached from the ruling class and being pressed down into the working class. For Marx, this is really a key part.
I mean, it's a key part of this whole ratchet effect that's going to produce this final historical explosion. And in German, the word given to that process was «Ferehlendung». which is very evocative. Elend means misery. So it's the growing misery. When this gets translated into English, the results are never quite as evocative or satisfactory.
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