Marx's Oversight of Thomas Paine's Moral Virtue and the Impossibility of a Stateless, Classless Society.

What Marx Overlooked

Karl Marx's vision of a stateless, classless society, as articulated in his works on communism, stands as a revolutionary blueprint for an idealized form of human organization. Marx’s theories advocate for the eventual dissolution of the state and the class structure, based on his critique of capitalism and his belief in historical materialism.

However, a critical examination of Thomas Paine’s arguments in "Common Sense" reveals a significant aspect that Marx overlooked: Paine's identification of a fundamental defect in moral virtue that necessitates the establishment of government in the first place.

This oversight reveals a potential flaw in Marx’s ideal of a stateless society, suggesting that such a society might be inherently unachievable due to the nature of human morality and social organization.

For some reason there's this great outcry among "intellectuals" about "Marxism." Jordan Peterson doesn't like "cultural Marxism," people think Black Lives Matter is Marxist, and so on. Since I don't read their stuff, I pick it up through articles in Jacobin which show up on my Facebook feed.

Happy Birthday Karl!

Karl Marx has been proven accurate with his predictions on capitalism...
Marx believed the coming crisis would result from contradictions within the capitalist system itself, and predicted that these contradictions would become more and more acute as the capitalist system evolved. Over time, Marx writes, capital takes control over the handcraft production processes and later manufacture where the workers were in control of the work process, centralizing the workers into workshops and factories. Through the process of competing for markets, some firms win and others lose, capital becomes enlarged and centralized; science and technology are consciously used to improve the productivity of the workplace, thus throwing many out of work while creating new jobs in service to the machines. In the process of competing for markets, unsuccessful capitalists fall into the proletariat and all productive labor, worldwide, come ultimately within the capitalist system
...
In addition to the booms and busts of capitalism that swing wider as capitalism evolves there is a constant churning of employment as machines replace men in one industry after another, throwing thousands out of work, thus swamping the labor market and lowering the cost of labor. In all of this the labourers suffer. Mass production, machine technology, and economies of scale will increasingly be applied to all economic activities; unemployment and misery for many men and women results . As capitalism develops the system must necessarily create enormous differences in wealth and power. The social problems it creates in its wake of boom and bust—of unemployment and under employment, of poverty amidst affluence will continue to mount. The vast majority of people will fall into the lower classes; the wealthy will become richer but ever fewer in number.
http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/users/f/felwell/www/Theorists/Essays/Marx5.htm

Omigod we can't be communists -- that would be, like, working together for a better future instead of working for the bosses (or something like that). So we must all instead succumb to the allure of instant expertise, and proclaim ourselves knowledgeable about history, the world, and human nature, all on a foundation of very little.

Or not?

Philosophical innovation from, say, the Enlightenment (i.e. from the mid-18th century) to the Seventies has focused upon a set of concepts which I've been calling, for the sake of brevity, utopia. Sure, calling it "utopia" means that, when I suggest that the historic period cited above was the Age of Utopia, I need to clarify what I mean by utopia if I am to have an audience at all. Utopia, as discussed here, is the intersection of human desire and human world-picture.

(Educated Marxists will recognize the title of this "new essay" as riffing off of Marx's eleven Theses on Feuerbach. For Marx, writing in 1845, this text represents a final break from Feuerbach's contemplative materialism and an embrace of historical materialism, a doctrine familiar in name but not in spirit to those for whom this "new essay" is written.)