I’ve heard it said before, though I can’t remember where, that Marx regarded capitalism as a necessary stage in social development. Does this imply that capitalism is inevitable, along with all its exploitation? Maybe I’m misinterpreting something, but I don’t really like the idea. I understand that communism refers to a post-capitalist society rather than a non-capitalist society, making capitalism “necessary” for the creation of socialism, but I don’t think it follows to argue that capitalism is something every society must move through. Thoughts?
Capitalism was not inevitable. Feudalism could have just stagnated or died out. Capitalism is what ultimately resolved the contradictions of Feudalism and this happened over the course of centuries. Likewise, Socialism will resolve the contradictions of Capitalism (hopefully before life on Earth is doomed).
In Marx’s time, it was presumed that the most advanced centers of Capitalism would be the first to progress to Socialism, but historically this didn’t bear out. The Socialist revolution didn’t take place in England or Germany, but in Russia, which was a backwater by contemporary standards, barely letting go of serfdom. As a functionally feudal monarchy on Europe’s periphery, the bourgeois class of Russia was stunted, and this certainly played a role in their defeat. The vast majority of places we see revolutionary class struggle endure, from China to Korea to Cuba to Vietnam tend not to be the centers of industrial production (at least, at the times of their revolutions).
So you could say that countries like the USSR and China skipped past Capitalism, but only in a regional sense. It still remains as a world-hegemonic system which they have always been forced to contend with.
So you could say that countries like the USSR and China skipped past Capitalism
They didn’t though. They tried but ultimately did had to resort to state capitalism. And while in USSR it could be explained being destroyed by war and in horrible internal and external emergency, China only did it 30 years after revolution after trying to specifically avoid it at first.
Yes i do think capitalism is inevitable, Marx might been wrong about socialism coming first in most developed nations, but note how everywhere the revolution did happened, even in most backward countries it did happened as the reaction for the capitalism, specifically imperialism. So still capitalism, but not necessarily their own capitalism.
