The next stage


Contents
Future history
Spiral development
Historical patterns
Slave economy
Land-duty economy
Capitalist economy
Economic trends
State trends
Society trends
Summary history
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Appendices
Capitalist globalization
Historical Materialism
Disproving Marxism
Proof of the theory
Biological lifecycles
Lifecycle examples

Feedback 		Historical Materialism and spiral development

Historical Materialism is a philosophy of history. It explains how and why human societies develop. It's an application of the philosophy Dialectical Materialism.

Dialectical Materialism is the philosophy of change and it explains how all things change. Dialectical and Historical Materialism were developed by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels based on the Dialectic philosophy of Georg Hegel.

The main parts of Historical Materialism are:
  • Change is driven by a conflict between opposites
  • Quantitative changes leads to qualitative changes
  • Qualitative changes enable further quantitative changes
  • Qualitative changes in environment create the conditions for new ideas to emerge
  • Qualitative changes thru time lead to a series of stages
  • The character of each stage is the opposite of the previous stage's character

    (These last two parts are known as the "stages theory".)

    The spiral theory of development, which is the basis of the book The Next Stage, is an extension of Historical Materialism. It models the change thru opposite stages as a spiral. The spiral moves upwards thru time. The alternation between opposite stages is modeled as movement from front to back and side to side along the spiral.

    The book gives a more detailed explanation of Dialectical and Historical Materialism.

    Content copyright: Nathan Davis  2003-2010

    If you've questions or comments, please contact me:  nathan_k_davis@after-capitalism.com