Do Marxists unironically believe in linear progression of history?

>there will ALWAYS be someone at the top
Well, different communists deal with this issue in different ways.

Mainline Marxists think that the current ruling system is a "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie," in that you can be ruled over by anyone of the bourgeoisie class, not just, say, kings or archbishops or nobility as in the past. Therefore, what is needed is a "dictatorship of the proletariat" where different proles take turns dismantling the system of wealth accumulation until the system is fully dismantled. Marxist-Leninists think that a somewhat select "vanguard party" needs to be permanently in charge of the dictatorship of the proletariat until the dismantling is done to ensure that no spies or revisionists slip in and reverse the progress. Anarcho-communists like Peter Kropotkin break from tradition and insist that the system must be dismantled and all people made equal immediately, or else the dictatorship of the proletariat will become a truly permanent institution (like what happened in the Soviet Union). All decisions are then made locally by the interested parties. Syndicalists like in Revolutionary Catalonia think much like anarcho-communists, except they allow a single greater-than-local body to exist, that being a confederation of trade unions. Its purpose is explicitly to organize production, and the leaders of those trade unions exercise no political power outside of that production organization.

Sure, in syndicalism, the trade union leaders may have SOME more power than the average citizen. But the point of communism is not really to eliminate some people from being more powerful than others. That's impossible. The purpose of communism is to eliminate class. That means that even if there are some people in charge, their interests do not differ from the interests of everyone else (the wealth of the bourgeoisie depends on the exploitation of the proletariat, for example).

>That means that even if there are some people in charge, their interests do not differ from the interests of everyone else

And that's how Johnny, the good hearted, improvised leader of the pack because reasons in order to do stuff by agreement of the lot became Johnny I, Great Pharaoh and Son of Isis.

I don't believe that's a relevant commentary. The reason that the bourgeoisie are incentivized to act against the proletariat is because of the financial incentive. The proletariat have money that the bourgeoisie want, so the bourgeoisie invents a system that extracts this money from them gradually, over years and even generations. This has even been the basis of the class divisions of the past. Though they exploited the lower class in different ways, the end result of the upper class's exploitation was always wealth accumulation. The kings used the law, the lords used the sword, the clergy used the book, and now the bourgeoisie uses the wage, but whatever their different tools, they always had one motivation: wealth accumulation.

In communism, personal property is made public and wealth accumulation is thus impossible. What, then, is the motivation to exploit? A simple lust for power, merely to have it? There will always be some few who hold that desire under any system. One could say Napoleon just had that desire. But what then would be their means to hold this power? If there is no government, no taxes, no military, and no personal stores of money, how could they accumulate and hold this power? By the tongue alone? We see the rise and fall of charismatic celebrities every day, for public opinion is quick to change. So then even if Johnny were to convince his comrades that he is superior and deserving of immense power, what tools could he possibly use to exploit the masses, if all such tools have been abolished?

Religion.

I thought it meant a linear route to your destination.

Like if your ideal society has free healthcare, then a free healthcare is unconditionally a step in the right direction even if your country is infested with niggers.

Like wanting to travel to a town 200km south, but the train station is 2km North of your home. Marxists believe that walking South is more progress than walking North.

What the fuck am I reading.

There is no objective value to "classes" or "materialism" what has onjective value are guns.

The two second part is self fulfilling phropercy
Communists in a way are very similar to doomsday evangelics

>truly free and equal society

Do people actually think we are all equal?

Personally, I go with the historical dialectic.

According to Hegel, the dialectic is the belief that while history does gradually trend towards more egalitarian social arrangements it is not, in fact, a linear path, but is instead a messy, uneven lurching of society from one extreme to the next, learning by trial-and-error. Progress is not necessarily spurred by "human progress", that some generations are better or worse than the others, but by the material conditions affecting that society, and how new technology allows for both the more expedient transfer of information, and the gradual alleviation of humans from rote physical tasks, allowing humans to devote less energy to survival and more energy towards enrichment and self-reflection.

I'm not a Marxist in the classical sense, as when I understand the dialectic the way that Hegel meant it, I understand that "Marxism" is just one more swing in the direction of an extreme, and today we know that outright nationalization of the entire economy overcentralizes it, which makes it brittle and resistant to beneficial change, and the way to actually bring socialism forward is not with guns and government bureaucrats, but by heavy investments in education and research institutions.

ayy

Marxists aren't the only ones guilty of this. One of the biggest memes that underpin our liberal democratic capitalist system is that history is a march of freedom, democracy and technological progress.

>what tools could he possibly use to exploit the masses, if all such tools have been abolished?
Delusional idealism. People are very much capable of corrupting even the most impeccable of institutions.

Is this what communists actually believe?

But would this truly be exploitation in the class-based way we are discussing? The proletariat-bourgeoisie divide is all-encompassing. You either live by virtue of your labor, or you live by virtue of your capital earning interest. But in this scenario, there is no reason to believe that each individual person will be bound to a new system of theocratic exploitation. Not everyone in society will be sorted into the shepherd-sheep divide. Escaping the clutches of the foul bishops actually seems more likely than being caught in them.

There will always exist power structures to which some will abide. Communism has no answer for a handful of people becoming religious zealots who abuse their followers. It's an ideology about eliminating systemic exploitation of one class by another, not small conflicts in which one person may convince some others to follow him.

Yes.