Marxist and neo-marxist theories of development
Marxisrm is far more than radical politics: it is a materialist philos-mophy of social existence and a dialectical theory of human devel-mopment. Writing in the inid-nineteenth century, the founders of this school of thought, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were enlightenment modernists who belive in social progress and the perfectability of humankind, in the transformative potential of science, and in the material plentitude made possible by technological advance in Western societies. Yet they thought differently than most most modenists. They saw modern processes of prodution as emancipation but also as aiienation from nature; as a process of human self-creation, but one directed by a few powerful people; and as progress in material life, but driven by a mainspring motivated by socially and environmentally irrational drives. Marxian analytics thus became not the scholastic pursuit of truth for its own sake, and certainly not legitimation thory for the rich and famous, but a guide to radical political practice aimed at changing society so that it met the needs of the working class. Marx and Engels came to liberate modernism, not to praise it.