THE MARXIAN CONCEPTION OF THE WORKING CLASS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF PHYSICS

Marx extrapolated the relations of production of the factories of his time into his predictions about the development of the working class. These predictions are among the most important theses of Marxism-Leninism relative to the socialist world revolution which the working class was to carry out. The physics of Marx' era was not very developed. Marx could have no inkling of the future development of physics and of its application to technology. This is why his predictions had to be in simple and direct proportion to the development of the relations of production of the time. Industry developed thanks in part to the development of physics in ways other than Marx had suspected. The use of modern physics, leading to cybernetics and automa tion, gradually changed the workers from forces of production to supervisory engineers. Were one to undertake today an extrapolation like that which Marx carried out, one would have to see as highly probable the disappearance of the very working class that Marx saw as carrying out the world-revolution. THE WORLD-REVOLUTION IN HISTORICAL MATERIALISM One of the characteristic traits of historical materialism is to be found in its prediction about the political and economic future of mankind. According to this prediction, the working class ? under the leadership of its best people in the Communist Party ? will eliminate capitalism and construct the classless society in the final phase of the development of society, Communism.1 The precondition for attaining this goal is the accomplishment of the Communist world-revolution, which has to be carried out successively in all countries of the world. The world-revolution eliminates once and for all the antagonistic contradictions in society and replaces them with harmless non antagonistic contradictions which can lead to no further revolution since they are solved in classless society without social tensions. World-revolution thus becomes the last qualitative leap in the development of society ? the leap that will eliminate all social, political and economic difficulties of class society, because the world-revolution will introduce a new and previously unknown era of classless society. Carrying out the world-revolution is Marxism-Leninism's path to the estab lishment of world-Communism and all activities of the Communist Party Studies in Soviet Thought 26 (1983) 143-150. 0039-3797/83/0262-0143 $00.80. ? 1983 by D. Reidel Publishing Co. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.55 on Sun, 12 Jun 2016 05:43:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms