There is a much better way to approach the question of history than Marx’s overly ambitious perspective on ‘stages of production’ theory, and its ‘epochs’ in the style of the useless historical materialism: Kant’s challenge in his classic essay on history with its core theme of the progression toward a perfect Civil Constitution. Kant’s essay is not a ‘theory’ but a set of questions and that could set up a very useful analysis of the way to a new form of society, one that could study the blend of democracy and communism, liberalism and socialism. There is no new epoch of history to represent communism but there could be a derivation of a communist/democratic values based on axioms of fairness and equality with the master chord the social evolution of freedom. We can see that democracy has been hijacked by capitalism, and that some form of (neo-) communism is directly relevant to that consideration and the question of free agents experimenting with new forms of civil constitutionalism work far more effectively than the sterile historical materialism. The complete nonsense, perhaps not so evident in the early nineteenth century, of marx’s value free theory as scientism is simply a distraction.
