Marx, stages of society, and why development matters: industrial revolutions, urbanization, and the role of technology in social change.

Marx, stages of society, and why development matters

When Karl Marx wrote about history, he wasn’t trying to predict election results or design a single blueprint for every country. He was doing something stranger and more ambitious. He wanted to understand how human societies grow, how technology reshapes daily life, and why certain economic systems give way to others. He imagined history as a kind of unfolding drama, where each era carries the seeds of the next.

In his view, human communities move through broad stages. First come ancient slave-based civilizations, where a small elite controls labor directly. Then come the feudal centuries, with lords and serfs tied to land and tradition. Then capitalism rises... a world defined by factories, markets, machines, and the restless drive to innovate. And only after capitalism’s enormous productive capacity matures, Marx argued, would societies be prepared for socialism and eventually communism, systems where productive power is so great that inequality becomes unnecessary.

One part often forgotten in casual talk is that Marx never believed you could leapfrog these stages by force of will. He was explicit about Russia: a largely rural, agrarian society without industrial development was not ready for communism. He assumed that the engine driving all social change was technology... specifically, the way new tools rearrange how we work and live. In his mind, machines had to do a huge share of labor before society would have enough abundance for any post-capitalist arrangement to function.

This is why he wrote that Russia needed more time to industrialize. He didn’t think peasant communities, no matter how eager, could conjure the conditions of a later stage before the technological foundation existed.

You can see echoes of this idea today. Every leap in human society has followed a change in how we produce things: the plow, the windmill, the steam engine, the assembly line, the microchip. Each one reshaped how people live, what they expect, and what new forms of society become possible.

Whether or not you agree with Marx’s conclusions, his central insight was that technology isn’t just machinery. It’s the quiet architect of social change. And we’re living through one of those technological earthquakes right now... which makes revisiting these older frameworks not just historical study but a way of watching our own world in motion.

If you’re interested, think about how Marx’s stage model might map onto today’s transitions. What happens when machines begin to take over not just physical labor, but mental labor... writing, planning, problem-solving? And what kinds of societies might be possible when that shift really accelerates?

The road from past to future is rarely a straight line, but it is rarely random either. It bends in response to the tools we make... and the tools we make bend us in return.

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