Hana asked:

Why does Marx think communism will ultimately supplant capitalism?

It is my question. Please answer me, Philosopher.

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Marx thought that capitalism bore the seeds of its own destruction within it. This was the inequality
within it that would lead the oppressed to rise up and revolutionize it and replace it for an economic
system in which each would receive their due according to a system of equity and justice for all.
Marx's communism was the vision of an anti-class society in which people would be valued for who
they were not how much they earned or consumed or inherited.

Marx had a dialectical theory of history, as it is called. That means an economic interpretation of
history which saw economics in political terms of relationships between people, commodities, labour
and exchange. What marks a period of history is its economy. When the economy changes, Marx
thought, (e.g. the change from feudal society to mercantile or bourgeois society), culture, religion,
philosophy and everything else necessarily follows suit.

Economy for Marx had to do with power. New economies come in when new powers rise up. The
Feudal society of Medieval Europe was overthrown and the power of the Church with it, by the new
merchants from the new worlds (the Americas, Australia, the colonies) based on the new technology.
History is not conservative, Marx thought, it advances. But he was less of a determinist than an
idealist or utopian, because he thought the injustices of the Europe of his day could not be borne for
long. Working men, women and children, whose labour was commodified, who had been turned into
'things' by their economic relationships, would (given the encouragement and education by
intellectuals) rise up and take charge of the means of production and change things for the good of
the many, not the preservation and gratification of the few.

Matthew Del Nevo

www.sicetnon.com