Theories of Social Evolution and Development: The Marxist Tradition

Abstract

It has long been a point of controversy amongst Marxists whether Marx formulated, or even meant to formulate, a stage-like theory of human social evolution, as was the fashion amongst the liberal thinkers, and as indeed it became official Soviet ideology from Stalin’s time. According to this Soviet interpretation, Marx was supposed to have delineated five progressive stages of human socio-economic formations: the ‘classless’ primitive community, the slave-based society of classical times, the feudal society based on serfdom, the modern bourgeois society based on capitalism, and lastly the advanced ‘classless’ society of the future, i.e. communist society. This unilinear schema was thought to be not only a logical but also a chronological progression of human social life. When applied to the now underdeveloped world, it permitted the Soviets to adopt an ‘interventionist’ view of social change in these societies, uncannily similar to that of the bourgeois modernisation theorists. Both Soviet and bourgeois theorists believed that the laws and generalisations derived from the past experience of the nations now affluent could serve as a lesson for the present and the future of those who were still poor.