Fragment on nonlinear Marxism

What I have written below is a fragment of a larger abandoned project which I have edited and cauterized to work as a distinct writing. 

The idyllic far future and the imagined ancient past are kindred in their fictionality, the production of reality at any great temporal distance is fiction. 

It is no coincidence that Marx defined communism as a janus epoch bookending history: first as primitive communism–later as developed communism. Communism was for Marx something that existed at the furthest reach of any distance, at the final frontier of all historical direction. 

At the back end of Marxian teleology, primitive communism was recognized as a disorganized communal ownership which stems from the absolute absence of economic development. The term primitive communism was adopted by Marx and Engels from the concept of “communism in living”, a term coined by the anthropologist Lewis H. Morgan, who defined it in Ancient Societies as: “[having] its origin in the necessities of the family, which, prior to the Later Period of barbarism, was too weak an organization to face alone the struggle of life. In savagery and in the Older and the Middle Period of barbarism the family was in the syndyasmian or pairing form into which it had passed from a previous lower form.” (1)

As with much of early anthropology, the exact accuracy of Morgan's prognosis has recently fallen under great scrutiny.

According to Marxist eschatology, while primitive communism is abolished by the development of surplus, economy and technology, a fully developed communism will ultimately emerge from it. The actualized/“actual” communism demands the dialectical struggles of human history to be realized. In this classical Marxist sense history is a process by which communism reinvents itself. Communist society begins in naive harmony, then disunifies itself into the particularities of class and power, which through their painful contradictions reunify in a new communism now aware of its component parts. 

We can see in this model the elements of Marxism that are directly lifted from Hegel. The geist of hegelian teleology is in the process of becoming aware of itself, the endpoint of history being its full realization, a society aware of its own being. Marx, as he himself put it, found Hegel on his head and turned him right side up. The subtle difference being that Marx privileges the economical over the social, as opposed to the social over the economical.  

A fundamental flaw in Marx’s philosophy was his inherited faith in the historical process. Marx determined wrongly that history was in the process of redeeming itself, a speudo-christian inference that the contentions and sufferings of the present are component to a divine machinery which “...will wipe away every tear from their eyes” where “[t]here will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” (2)

This belief belies: 

First: on the old imperialist notion of civilization (the advanced form of communism which rests at the end of history being privileged over its communal and tribal alternative specifically because it has been processed/“civilized” by the process of primitive accumulation and eventual socialist redistribution.

And,

Second: an outmoded element of modernist (grand) narrativization which understands the movement of history as impractically linear. This mode of reasoning is a direct reinstallation of the overtly christian elements of Hegel's philosophy of history (and carries with it all the reactionary elements of christian historicism.) Furthermore this linear assessment of history generates a predeterministic apathy that has caused more harm than good in the translation of Marxist history into practice. 

Taking a flat ontological view, and operating without the unilineal evolutionary perspective of classical Marxist teleology, we should demand that the margins of communism at all ends of the historiographical spectrum be united against a catatonic and calcified contemporary. We must build a world that is at once the far future, and the ancient past, the dynamism of the tribal nomad and the bliss of the post scarcity utopian subject, this should be our promise. 

What we have learned in the two centuries since Marx’s revelation is that history is not a singular mechanism, but a budding hydratic assemblage of mechanisms, each vying to monopolize mutually exclusive directions and momentums. The reality is that the direction of history will always be commandeered by the organizing social authority. The great shifts in social-economy were not seamless evolutionary movements, but radical divergences along the historical network. To follow a single linear movement of history is only ever to deepen the canals of the existing superstructure, in our present capitalist reality the future promises only further capitalism; to escape capitalism is to chart a new history. The new history, both past and future, is diagonal to the one in which we live. 

The new history demands not only new futures but also new pasts. 

(1) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/morgan-lewis/ancient-society/index.htm 

(2) Revelation 21:4 (cited as Marxist theory for comparison)