How did Marx arrive at communism?

[Taboo Tongue]

(:unsure: N00bish question?)

We all know that Marx concluded that one day there will be a communist society, but what facts and reasons supported this claim and his theory, or are we all beleiving this on faith?

[Zingu]

Faith?! WTF! Faith is for the superstitous.



The answer lies in Marxist economic theory, here is a thread that will help you start thinking in the right direction:
http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=44841


Historical Materialism would also help....

Theres no really easy way on answering this...because uh, Marx took a large amount of his life writing the answer to this question...

[commiecrusader]

The easiest way to summarize his thinking is this:

1. At the moment, the working class majority is exploited by the ruling class minority, who own the means of production.

2. At some stage in time, the working class will gain class consciousness and become aware of this fact.

3. Because the working class vastly outnumbers the ruling class, it will be impossible for the ruling class to stop the working class taking over the means of production when they become roused.

4. This will result in socialism - the workers control the means of production

5. As this occurs, the ruling class will cease to exist, because it will be everyone. There will no longer be classes of any kind. Equality will prevail, and Communism will be born.

I know before some intellectual comes along and says blah blah that this isn't exactly right, but it's the basic gyst, and can provide a starting point. However, I would recomend reading, such as the thread referred to above.

[Ian]

August 1844

[Storming Heaven]

I'm not a scholar on Marx or Marxism, but I think the root of Marx's belief (and prophecy) was his dialetic.

Originally, dialetic was a theory attempting to explain the development of human thought. It proceeds in stages: first is the original theory, a thesis. This produces opposition, the antithesis. Neither the thesis or antithesis can be expected to be perfect, so the best points are taken from both and the 'final' stage, or synthesis is born. The synthesis in turn may be taken as a new thesis, which produces a corresponding anthesis and so on.

Marx inherited a theory of dialetic from his teacher Hegel. Hegel, was an idealist, that is, he belived the world that we encounter was really just ideas in some mind, or that 'the mind is the world' (Popper, K. Conjectures and Refutations). Believing that ideas developed along dialetical lines, and that the world was nothing but ideas, Hegel concluded that the world developed as a dialetic.

Marx, however, was a materialist. He turned his teacher's idealism on it's head, by holding that the (material) world produced the mind, and that this world developed along a dialetic. From there it was a relativly simple matter of finding appropriate 'theses' and 'antithesis' in material history. Once he had found a particular movement or interest of certian people, he only needed to find an appropriate counter-movement to predict an outcome...