>>2580513I already explained it here
>>2577979Let's talk more about historical materialism though and analyze in Marxism terms.
In Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx says:
"In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces."
Marx is saying that the structure of society emerges in accordance with the level of development of its productive forces, particularly its tools and technology.
In the earliest human societies, people lived in small groups where everything was shared and there was no private property. These communities were mostly egalitarian because their tools and technology were very basic. They hunted, gathered, and later farmed in simple ways. Since they couldn't produce much extra beyond what they needed to survive, there wasn’t room for wealth or class differences to develop. Studies today show that contemporary indigenous hunter gather tribes, who use very basic tools are quite egalitarian.
Marx also talks about how as the forces of production advances, it drives changes to the relations of production:
“At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.” – Marx
"No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. " – Marx
Once the material productive forces advances or outgrow beyond what the existing relations of production can accommodate, a contradiction arises. The relations of production, which once facilitated the development of the productive forces, begin to act as constraint (what Marx calls "fetters") on further progress. This contradiction gives rise to a transitional period marked by social revolution. In this period, class conflict intensifies and ultimately leads to the overthrow of the existing social order. A new set of relations of production then emerge, ones that are better suited to the level of development of the productive forces.
For instance, the Agricultural Revolution marks a critical turning point in human history. It represented a leap in the the productive forces where agriculture, domestication of animals, irrigation systems, and improved tool led to a significant increase in food surplus. Settlements grew, and with them, social hierarchies and more complex economies developed, including allowing some individuals to specialize in activities other than food production, initiating a division of labor.
With the emergence of surplus came the concept of private property and systems of inheritance, which laid the foundation for the first class divisions. Those who controlled land, tools, or surplus resources began to hold power over others. Over time, these material inequalities became institutionalized in social structures. The need to protect property and manage growing, more complex societies gave rise to centralized authority which manifests in the formation of city-states, organized religion, standing armies, and hierarchical rule by kings and priests. But once again, the development of the productive forces eventually necessitates a transformation of the social and economic relations meaning the relations of production. This in turns create a new superstructure.
Feudalism eventually took over as the dominant system where most most people were peasants (or serfs) who worked the land for a landlord in exchange for protection and a place to live. The economy was based on tradition, agriculture, and rigid class hierarchy. You were basically born into your role and stuck there.
But over time, things started to change again. New tools, better farming methods, growing trade routes, and the rise of towns made the old feudal structure less efficient. A new class, the bourgeoisie, emerged: merchants, artisans, and early capitalists who weren’t tied to land but made their wealth through trade and production. As their economic power grew, they started challenging the feudal lords for political and social control. Eventually, feudalism couldn’t contain the new economic realities. Social revolutions took place and capitalism started to take over.
In the era of the capitalist mode of production, Marx talks about how
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society." (The Communist Manifesto)
In this new relations of production, the bourgeoisie, in their drive for profit and competition, rapidly innovates the productive forces and breaks up old stagnating systems, like feudalism, and pushes humanity forward technologically and economically. Marx then surmise that socialism will emerge from western countries with advance productive forces:
"The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism."' The bourgeoisie becomes their own gravedigger.
Now, here's the thing. Marx was just saying he was uncovering the scientific laws of historical materialism. Even if Marx didn't exist, the the laws of historical materialism and stages of society should still exist. Historical materialism is not dependent on Marx’s existence, just like evolution didn’t need Darwin to happen. However, because Marx wrote in depth about the theory of historical materialism, he gave socialism and political groups a coherent language, strategic clarity and and self-awareness of historical positioning. Without him, instead of "scientific socialism," you’d have moralistic socialism ("let’s be fair"), religious socialism (Christian egalitarianism), and so on. But by writing it down, he also made it possible for political groups to act ahead of their maturity, sometimes at great cost, but with the aim of catching up over time.
This is how the PRC and the USSR had inverted Marx's sequence to find themselves on the other side of the dialectical coin. The major contradiction in 1949 for China was that the base was weak and the superstructure was revolutionary. Thus the logic became: once the productive forces are mature, the already-established Marxist-Leninist state can guide society peacefully toward mature socialism, and eventually communism. As a result, the USSR and China had to catch up technologically and industrially to the capitalist West before they could even begin to approximate the conditions that Marx saw as necessary for socialism. Neither Mao or Lenin believed their countries had achieved communism in their life time, but they were still in the transitional stage of socialism.
Since Western capitalist countries still have not had their socialist revolution, it's clear that the productive forces still aren't advance enough. It is not driving a strong enough contradiction to necessitate a social revolutionary to transform the relations of production. However, you can probably get that with mass joblessness driven by the rise of AI. Goldman Sachs predicts that up to 50% of jobs could be fully automated by 2045, driven by generative AI and robotics. So why is this different from the tools of the first to third industrial revolutions? AI+advance automation+abundant renewable and fission energy to power the whole system, represents a qualitative leap in the forces of production to qualitatively transform the relations of production. That's because it's not merely just the efficient tools of the 1st to 3rd industrial revolution that enhanced human labor, it's an entire new way of producing value because it replaces human labor. Trying to fit this level of productive power into capitalism is like pouring molten metal into a wooden mold, it breaks the form. As I said previously, it severs the constitutive link between labor and value by disrupting the circuit of capital: M — C — P — C' — M' (Money — Commodity — Production — Commodity — Money). If labor is no longer central to production, then profit becomes harder to extract, and capitalism’s internal engine begins to sputter. The lack of need for wage labor destroys the foundation of surplus value extraction. The lack of meaningful scarcity undermine markets, prices, and profit motive. Central planning and coordination can be done intelligently, flexibly, through predictive logistics and self-optimizing supply chains that erode the rationale for market allocation. This is why in China's five year plans, the development of new quality productive forces has high priority. Xi Jinping has also said, "To develop new quality productive forces, it is imperative to deepen reform across the board as to create a new type of relations of production that is compatible with the development of new quality productive forces." When the new quality productive forces are fully "ripe", China’s ML state structure, built on the foundations of the original revolution, gives China a unique position to transition peacefully and strategically to a mature socialism and the horizon of communism. Meanwhile, mass unemployment in the USA will likely be far more destabilizing, contested, and even violent. It will likely take a much longer time, compared to China, to synthesize the forces of production and relations of production. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezo will fortify their compounds, militarize the police, and desperately cling on to maintain the decaying neoliberal order, in the midst of intensifying culture wars and social unrest.