Marxist Humanism

I want to make a concluding remark about [Marx's] theory of communism, concerning one of the most often misinterpreted features of his theory: when Marx speaks about the "historical necessity" of communism he does not understand this in the sense of communism's inevitability. What he means by this perhaps can be expressed as follows: a further long-run and uninterrupted (in a radical sense) development of human productivity and human culture will be possible only if the social conditions of contemporary industrial societies are radically changed in the direction of the abolishment [sic] of private property, organization of material production in a socially controlled and planned way, and on the basis of all this, modification of the entire character of the division of labor. Whether this would happen or not was for him a question of social practice and struggle, and not speculation. In the field of social sciences, according to him, prediction always has the character of pointing out alternatives, and the very predictions, the recognitions of possibilities, can become factors in their realization. Speaking generally about the development of higher social formations, Marx pointed out that the inner crisis of a social system can give birth to a higher social system, but can also pass into a long-run stagnation and decay, and can end up with the deeply regressive destruction of the entire civilization. What the "other" alternatives are for our culture and civilization Marx never tried to specify. He was not an unbiased viewer of history, but a revolutionist interested in the possibility of its humanistic transformation. --Gyorgy Markus, 1966.