Karl Marx, Polylogism, and Utopian Socialism – How Fundamental Philosophy Drives History

I’m currently listening to: “The Long 19th Century:European History From 1789 to 1917”  Professor Robert I.Weiner (Disk 4, Lecture 7), from  ‘The Great Courses’ series.

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/long-19th-century-european-history-from-1789-to-1917.html

It is a pretty ‘middle of the road’ series with no obvious ideological skew other than, maybe, ‘slightly left of center’, since it’s a mainstream college professor.

In it, he says Karl Marx called the other socialists ‘utopians’ because they believed that socialism could be achieved through peaceful means, maybe even with the assistance of other classes. That is where the term ‘utopian socialist’ comes from.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_socialism

Marx, on the other hand, believed that only violent class struggle could achieve socialism.

I realized when listening to this that Marx’s metaphysics and epistemology was driving his politics. He thought that your class determines your consciousness -that what class you are born into determines your logic. He was a ‘polylogist’ who believed in ‘many logics’. The proletarians have their method of thinking, the bourgeoise have theirs, the aristocracy have theirs, etc.

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/polylogism.html

Thus, for Marx, there could be no reasoning with those who control the factors of production, because they fundamentally don’t think like proletarians. Only violence could bring about socialism. Any socialist who thought you could reason with the bourgeoise was a ‘utopian’ -not recognizing reality. Marxism was therefore self-described as ‘scientific socialism’.

This explains the inevitable Marxist penchant for mass killing when they took over in a country. Anyone who wanted a peaceful transition to socialism was seen as naive at best.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

Later, what I think happened is others picked up this same idea of polylogism and applied it to things besides class -such as your race or ethnicity. (Specifically, a certain political group in 1930’s Germany.) Once again, without a common frame of thinking and logic, any such proponent of ‘racially unique logic’ would be led to believe that no reason or discourse is possible between the races, and that only violence or separation is the solution.

I vaguely knew about polylogism from reading Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff. http://www.peikoff.com/lr/home.htm But,  I never really saw how one’s views on logic and the nature of the mind could have political ramifications like they clearly did on Marx when he referred to his fellow, non-violent, socialists as ‘utopians’. Furthermore, any time a Marxist committed murder, he had the perfect rationalization handy: He is serving the forces of historical necessity, and no reasoning is possible with the forces of counter-revolution because they don’t think like him.

Fundamental philosophy really does have political and social consequences for history.