"My (shaky) understanding of Marxism is that it is an evolutionary theory of human society. Said societies go through/will go through various stages, and the ultimate stage is socialism. The various stages include: hunter gathering, primitive agrarianism, feudalism and industrial capitalism. To reach the ultimate socialistic stage a society must go through the industrial capitalist stage and possess a fully fledged working class. This working class will be in the vanguard of the progression to socialism.

Me too Shimrod. This model clearly argues that the way wealth is produced, (gathering and hunting, farming, industrial production) is powerfully predictive of the type of society ( primitive communism, agrraian fuedalism and eventualy industrial capitalism) that is created. So far so historical.

The big quaetion is whatever socialism is, will it in one form or another use industrialisation to create wealth? If so how different will it be from benificial, or otherwise, capitalism?