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Karl Marx's immediate philosophical forebear, Hegel, was a determinist. Hegel believed that history unfolded according to an inviolable form of order that manifested itself dialectically. A concept, a mode of thought, a way of existing forms a Thesis. This thesis represents and embodies the Absolute Truth.
But, because the Universe has not yet reached the stage where Absolute Spirit has fully realized itself, the truth that a given thesis represents is only a partial, one-sided truth. The thesis brings about its own opposite as a natural by-product of its own existence. For example, in the very act of thinking about Hegel's first, most fundamental thesis, Being, one cannot help but stumble across the concept of its opposite: Nothing. Once a thesis and its opposite its Antithesis both exist, a new Synthesis of the two comes into existence (Being and Nothing coalesce into the notion of Becoming) which becomes, itself, a new thesis and starts the process anew. At each stage, the actualization of Absolute Spirit increases. In this fashion, the history of the Earth plays out the self-realization, in and for itself, of Absolute Spirit, Hegel's conception of God.
Borrowing the notion of an historical dialectic from Hegel, Marx applied the concept to history from this point of view. Marx based his entire philosophy on the equally deterministic notion that the substructure precedes the superstructure. In short, this means that the economic system (substructure) which a society employs is the primary factor in determining all other aspects of the character of that society. Thought, for instance, does not precede economics (as one might expect since economics as a discipline is a product of thought). Rather, as part of the superstructure, it is an outgrowth of the economic relations prevalent in society.
So, for Marx, everything reduces to economic interchange. This is a subtle point, this determination that thought, action and interpersonal relations, along with all other aspects of society, originate from society's predominant form of economic interchange. Marx views the history of mankind through a lens tinged with economic oppression, condensing all of history into a succession of new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Where Hegel saw the actualization of Absolute Spirit as the driving force of all historical development, Marx asserts that the entire history of human society as a history of class struggles.
Marx substitutes the constant opposition of oppressor and oppressed for the Hegel's theses and antitheses as the motivating factor of historical change. In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. This opposition, not interaction of opposing ideas, forms the basis for development. In a way, Marx's job is simpler than Hegel's. Hegel had to sift through history with a fine comb to sort the various philosophers into a meaningful order that supported his contention. Marx has the luxury of taking a broad brush to history.
Ancient Romes hierarchy of patricians, knights, plebeians, [and] slaves gave way inevitably to the feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, [and] serfs of the Middle ages. And feudal society, in its turn, could not do otherwise than give way to the simpler class antagonisms of modern industrial bourgeois society. Marx offers this simplest of class divisions, two great classes directly facing each other, bourgeoisie and proletariat, as evidence that the great historical dialectic of class division is nearing its apogee. Marx sketches the development of the capitalist bourgeoisie society from feudal society, driven by colonialism. Serfs gave rise to burghers who formed the advance guard of the new bourgeois class. The European discovery and subsequent establishment of trade with America and the Far East contributed to the rapid development of the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society.
New markets, unable to be served by the inefficient processes of feudal production by closed guilds, caused that system to be replaced by the manufacturing system. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in a single workshop. And, so, by an inevitable historical process, a dialectic, the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange. And each of these has been accompanied by a corresponding political advance in class. At each turn, whichever class represented and controlled the apex of production also held political sway, organizing the affairs of the state to suit its ends. So it follows that the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.
The factory process is but one mode of production. The guild system as a whole was another, as was Roman (and feudal) slave labor. The distinctive feature of bourgeois capitalism, though, is the aforementioned simplification of classes people who produce, who do the work (the proletariat) and those who own the means of production and pay them to work (the bourgeoisie). Wage labour, the selling of ones productive effort for money, will be the driving force of the next inevitable historical change. [T]he work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman. Workers divorced from the products they make, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital, cannot but become alienated.
The law of dialectical history makes another revolution in the progression of the class struggle inevitable. In fact, Marx notes an increasing tempo of dissatisfaction in the decades immediately preceding the publication of the Communist Manifesto. [T]he history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they might overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. And so, the weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself, the very means by which the bourgeois secured themselves and their attendant privileged position have again in an inevitable dialectical process created the men who represent their opposite: The proletariat, the modern working class. That the working class is becoming pauperized indicates the unfitness of the bourgeoisie to continue as a ruling class. This sets the stage for the next, and final stage of this dialectical process: A revolution of the working class.
Once they develop a political consciousness and a sense of class solidarity, the working class will overthrow the bourgeois owners who are in fact their masters. Having done so, they will seize the means of production and institute a society in which there will be no class divisions. No one will be forced to sell their labor for the ends of capital accumulation. Property relations being the means by which they are bound to their condition, must be destroyed. Once bourgeois property no longer undergirds the substructure, association among workers, not competition between them, will form the basis for a classless, Communist social order.
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