So as Marxists, as I understand it, we’re supposed to consider systems like feudalism, capitalism and socialism as fundamentally transitory. I also understand that communism is different, being classless and therefore containing no contradictions that would drive any “autodynamic” or organic social change. Maybe I have a skewed understanding of our ideology, but this feels like a bold assertion. If history can be summarized as class struggle, and communism has no class struggle, is communism the end of history?
Hopefully this makes sense.
the history of all things, not just humanity, is the creation, development, and resolution of contradictions. this happens on the small scale and the large scale, the general and the specific scale, etc.
the recorded history of society is the history of various types of class divisions because that’s primarily what has been the greatest catalyst for human development for all of recorded history. and, by class i’m referring not only to class divisions created by different economic models (feudalism, capitalism, etc) but also divisions like race and gender too.
but, there is a long history of contradictions before recorded history during “primitive communism,” and there will be a long history of contradictions once all class contradictions have been resolved as well. what about contradictions between humans and nature? these can range from ecological things like building infrastructure that becomes part of the surrounding ecology, to bioengineering that resolves contradictions with how our bodies have evolved for very different conditions that they no longer, by and large, inhabit. what about the contradictions between technology and biology? or of earth and space? what about inherent contradictions within human interactions? what about contradictions between species?
there will always be contradictions to resolve, and the resolution of contradictions always creates more contradictions to resolve, in an infinite cycle or until the human species no longer exists. this is really what “development” means in marxist theory. the difference between now and then would be that, for the first time in human history, we as a global society would be able to consciously, actively and efficiently resolve these contradictions with real intent. in this sense, this would better be understood as the beginning of human history rather than its end because it would be the beginning of self-directed human history.
just imagine a world without the need for violence and all the death and wasted production it entails, a world where you can reliably expect your life to improve rather than society being on the brink of extinction and enduring constant crisis all the time. there will still be things to do, and people will probably be better equipped to do them too.
A great and thorough explanation. There is no “end of history” and there never will be. The dialectical logic of class society however dictates that there must eventually be an end to class struggle and that can only be the victory of the proletariat and the abolition of classes. New struggles will then emerge.