Is Marxism deterministic?
PHIL GASPER argues that Marx’s theory of history is vital for understanding social change, but it doesn’t claim that socialism is inevitable KARL MARX’S key idea, in the words of his collaborator Frederick Engels, was that “the production of the immediate material means of subsistence and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved.” Moreover, all class-based societies are characterized by conflict between exploiters and exploited that can only be ended by their revolutionary transformation. One of the most common misconceptions about Marxism is that it is a deterministic theory that sees the course of history as preordained by economic and social forces. According to one recent commentator, for example, “In Marx’s theory, the oppressed class does not need to hope for social ju
