Inevitabilism

Gramsci identified such inevitabilism and mechanical determinism as a form of consolation during a time of defeat: ‘I have been defeated for the moment but the tide of history is working for me in the long term’.

Another unscientific characterization of historical processes is inevitabilism, or the idea that history is the result of an unfolding process in which stages follow one from another in a necessary order, like the pages of a book.

Inevitabilism enshrines the apparatus of ubiquity as progress but conceals the realpolitik of surveillance capitalism at work behind the scenes. We know that there can be alternative paths to a robust information capitalism that produces genuine solutions for a third modernity.

‘It is’, A. J. P. Taylor writes in his lauded introduction to the Manifesto, ‘a grave upset to the Marxist system that the proletariat has not become the ruling class in the community and shows no sign of doing so.’ And it's true that the Manifesto repeatedly expresses certainty about particular outcomes. Such ‘inevitabilism’ is misplaced. As we've seen, the Manifesto’s argument for the ineluctable impoverishment of the working class under capitalism, for example, has not been borne out.