The First Stage: is usually called primitive communism.

It has the following

characteristics.
Shared property: there is no concept of ownership. All is shared by the tribe
to ensure its survival.
Hunting and gathering: tribal societies have yet to develop large scale
agriculture and so their survival is a daily struggle.
Proto-democracy: there is usually no concept of "leadership" yet. So tribes
are led by the best warrior if there is war.
Primitive communist societies tend to be very small, consisting of a maximum of a few
hundred members. This stage ends with the development of private property, especially
with the development of large scale agriculture.
The Second Stage (antiquity): may be called slave society, considered to be the
beginning of "class society" where private property appears.

Class: here the idea of class appears. There is always a slave-owning ruling class and the
slaves themselves.

Statism: the state develops during this stage as a tool for the slave-owners to use and
control the slaves.

Agriculture: people learn to cultivate plants and animals on a large enough scale to
support large populations.

Private property: citizens now own more than personal property. Land ownership is
especially important during a time of agricultural development.

The slave-owning class "own" the land and slaves, which are the main means of producing
wealth, whilst the vast majority have very little or nothing. The propertyless included the
slave class, slaves who work for no money. From a Marxist perspective, slave society
collapsed when it exhausted itself. The need to keep conquering more slaves
created huge problems, such as maintaining the vast empire that resulted.
The Third Stage: may be called feudalism; it appears after slave society collapses. This
was most obvious during the European Middle Ages when society went from slavery to
feudalism.

Aristocracy: the state is ruled by monarchs who inherit their positions, or at times marry
or conquer their ways into leadership.

Theocracy: this is a time of largely religious rule. When there is only one religion in the
land and its organizations affect all parts of daily life.
During feudalism there are many classes such as kings, lords, and serfs, some little more
than slaves. Most of these inherit their titles for good or ill. At the same time that societies
must create all these new classes, trade with other nation-states increases rapidly. This
catalyzes the creation of the merchant class. Out of the merchants' riches, a capitalist
class emerges within this feudal society. These proto-capitalist and capitalist classes are
driven by the profit motive but are prevented from developing further profits by the
nature of feudal society where, for instance, the serfs are tied to the land and cannot
become industrial workers and wage earners. Marx says, Then begins an epoch of social
revolution (the French Revolution of 1789, the English Civil War and the Glorious

Revolution of 1688, etc.) since the social and political organization of feudal society (or
the property relations of feudalism) is preventing the development of the capitalists'
productive forces.
Capitalism
Capitalism may be considered the Fourth Stage in the sequence. It appears after the
bourgeois revolution when the capitalists (or their merchant predecessors) overthrow the
feudal system. Capitalism is categorized by the following:

Market economy: In capitalism, the entire economy is guided by market forces.

Private property: The means of production are no longer in the hands of the monarchy
and its nobles, but rather they are controlled by the capitalists. The capitalists control the
means of production through commercial enterprises (such as corporations) which aim to
maximize profit.
In capitalism, the profit motive rules and people, freed from serfdom, work for the
capitalists for wages. The capitalist class are free to spread their laissez faire practices
around the world. In the capitalist-controlled parliament, laws are made to protect wealth.
But according to Marx, capitalism, like slave society and feudalism, also has critical failings
inner contradictions which will lead to its downfall. The worker is not paid the full
value of what he or she produces. The rest is surplus value the capitalist's profit,
which Marx calls the "unpaid labour of the working class." The capitalists are forced by
competition to attempt to drive down the wages of the working class to increase
their profits, and this creates conflict between the classes, and gives rise to the
development of class consciousness in the working class. The working class, through trade
union and other struggles, becomes conscious of itself as an exploited class. Marx believed
that capitalism always leads to monopolies and leads the people to poverty.
After the working class gains class consciousness and mounts a revolution against the
capitalists, socialism, which may be considered the Fifth Stage, will be attained, if the
workers are successful. Lenin divided communism, the period following the overthrow of
capitalism, into two stages: first socialism, and then later, stateless communism or pure
communism - Marx uses the terms the "first phase" of communism and the "higher phase"
of communism.
Communism - Classes are thus abolished, and class society ended. Communism will
have spread across the world and be worldwide. Eventually the state will "wither away"
and become obsolete, as people administer their own lives without the need for
governments or laws. Thus, stateless communism or pure communism, which may be
considered the Sixth Stage, is established, which has the following features:

Statelessness: there are no governments, laws, or nations any more.

Classlessness: all social classes disappear, everyone works for everyone else.

Propertylessness: there is no money or private property, all goods are free to be

consumed by anyone who needs them.

Nihilism is often associated with the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who provided
a detailed diagnosis of nihilism as a widespread phenomenon of Western culture.
Nietzsche saw nihilism as the outcome of repeated frustrations in the search for
meaning. Nietzsche conceptualizes this with the famous statement "God is dead" - crisis
that Western culture must face - irreparable dissolution of its traditional foundations,
moored largely in classical Greek philosophy and Christianity.
Karen Carr describes Nietzsche's characterization of nihilism "as a condition of tension,
as a disproportion between what we want to value (or need) and how the world
appears to operate." When we find out that the world does not possess the objective
value or meaning that we want it to have or have long since believed it to have, we find
ourselves in a crisis. Nietzsche characterized nihilism as emptying the world and
especially human existence of meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or
essential value. "knowledge" is always by someone of some thing: it is always bound by
perspective, and it is never mere fact. Rather, there are interpretations through which we
understand the world and give it meaning. Interpreting is something we can not go
without; in fact, it is something we need.
One way of interpreting the world is through morality, as one of the fundamental
ways that people make sense of the world. Christian moral doctrine provides people
with intrinsic value, belief in God (which justifies the evil in the world) and a basis
for objective knowledge. In this sense, in constructing a world where objective knowledge is
possible, it is exactly the element of truthfulness in Christian doctrine that is its undoing: in
its drive towards truth, Christianity eventually finds itself to be a construct,
which leads to its own dissolution.
all human ideas are therefore valueless. The death of God, in particular the statement that
"we killed him", is similar to the self-dissolution of Christian doctrine: due to the
advances of the sciences, which for Nietzsche show that man is the product of evolution,
that Earth has nospecial place among the stars and that history is not progressive, the
Christian notion of God can no longer serve as a basis for a morality. A nihilist is a man who
judges of the world as it is that it ought not to be, and of the world as it ought to be that it
does not exist. According to this view, our existence (action, suffering, willing,
feeling) has no meaning: the pathos of 'in vain' is the nihilists' pathos at the same
time, as pathos, an inconsistency on the part of the nihilists.
He believed that there was no longer any real substance to traditional social,
political, moral, and religious values. He denied that those values had any
objective validity or that they imposed any binding obligations upon us. Indeed, he
even argued that they could at times have negative consequence for us. Nietzsche saw that
the old values and old morality simply didn't have the same power that they once did. It is
here that he announced the "death of God," arguing that the traditional source of
ultimate and transcendental value, God, no longer mattered in modern culture
and was effectively dead to us. Nietzsche believed that traditional moral values, and in
particular those stemming from traditional Christianity, were ultimately harmful to
humanity.
For Nietzsche, there is no objective order or structure in the world except what we
give it. the nihilist discovers that all values are baseless and that reason is impotent.
"Every belief, every considering something-true," Nietzsche writes, "is necessarily false
because there is simply no true world". For him, nihilism requires a radical

repudiation (refusal) of all imposed values and meaning: "Nihilism is . . . not only the
belief that everything deserves to perish; but one actually puts one's shoulder to the
plough; one destroys" (Will to Power).
Nietzsche saw his age facing a fundamental crisis in values. With the rise of science,
the Christian worldview no longer held a prominent explanatory role in peoples lives, a
view Nietzsche captures in the phrase God is dead. However, science does not introduce
a new set of values to replace the Christian values it displaces. Nietzsche rightly foresaw
that people need to identify some source of meaning and value in their lives.
Instead, he sought to find a way out of nihilism through the creative and willful
affirmation of life.
According to Nietzsche, everything is in flux, and there is no such thing as fixed being.
Matter is always moving and changing, as are ideas, knowledge, truth, and everything else.
Nietzsche, the universe is primarily made up not of facts or things but rather of
wills. Because change is a fundamental aspect of life, Nietzsche considers any point of
view that takes reality to be fixed and objective, be it religious, scientific, or philosophical,
as life denying. A truly life-affirming philosophy embraces change and recognizes in
the will to power that change is the only constant in the world.
Nietzsche is critical of the very idea of objective truth. A healthy mind is flexible and
recognizes that there are many different ways of considering a matter. There is no single
truth but rather many.
Nietzsche writes scathingly about Christianity, arguing that it is fundamentally opposed to
life. The concept of sin makes us ashamed of our instincts and our sexuality, the
concept of faith discourages our curiosity and natural skepticism, and the
concept of pity encourages us to value and cherish weakness. Furthermore,
Christian morality is based on the promise of an afterlife, leading Christians to
devalue this life in favor of the beyond.
Nietzsche seeks to find a place beyond good and evil. He shows that our values are not
themselves fixed and objective but rather express a certain attitude toward life.
By exposing morality as a fiction, Nietzsche wants to encourage us to be more honest about
our drives and our motives and more realistic in the attitude we take toward life. Such
honesty and realism, he contends, would cause a fundamental revaluation of all
values.
Philosophy is interested in giving us insight not into truth but into the minds of
the different philosophers. Everything is governed by a will to power, and in
philosophy, we see great minds trying to impose their will on the world by persuading
others to see the world as they see it. What we call truth, for instance, is just the expression
of our will to power, where we declare our particular perspective on reality to be objectively
and universally true. Ultimately, all reality is best understood in terms of competing wills.
Nietzsche praises free spirits who struggle to free themselves from the
prejudices of others and to question their own assumptions.
While Europe is still nominally Christian, Nietzsche suggests that its faith in God has been
replaced by a faith in science. He warns that this faith in science leads to nihilism and that
we must find something more spiritually affirming.

Nietzsches new philosophers will rebel against the values and assumptions of their day
and will have the strength of will and creativity to affirm something new. For
Nietzsche, change is the predominant feature of reality. Everything is always
changing: not just matter and energy, but ideas, wills, and hence truth. Philosophy and
science tend to see the world as primarily made up of facts and things that we
can observe and regulate, providing the illusion of stable, objective truths.
Nietzsche rejects this metaphysics of facts and things, suggesting instead that the world is
primarily made up of willssome conscious and some unconsciouswhich are
constantly competing for dominance.
Whatever we see as true at a given moment is not objectively so but rather represents
the victory of a particular will against the others working within us. Nietzsches main
targets, from Christianity to science to democracy to traditional philosophy, are
all guilty in one way or another of denying or avoiding the fact that reality is
composed of a constantly shifting competition between wills. They wish to see the
universe as fixedwhether by divine law or the laws of natureand wish to slacken
the struggle and competition that characterize existence. Nietzsche sees any effort to resist
struggle and change as contrary to life. The greatest power that we can have is power over
ourselves, and we gain power over ourselves in the same way we gain power over external
enemies: by attacking them and submitting them to our will. Strong-willed people,
whom Nietzsche often refers to as free spirits, are always ready to attack their
fundamental beliefs and assumptions, to question their very identity. Nietzsche
advocates for a strong and healthy will, which acts cheerfully, independently, and
free from resentment.

Mills defense of utilitarianism and liberalism. Utilitarianism assesses actions and

institutions in terms of their effects on human happiness and enjoins us to
perform actions and design institutions so that they promotein one
formulation, maximizehuman happiness. its insistence that everyone's
happiness matters equally.
Bentham and James Mill understand happiness hedonistically, as consisting in pleasure, and
they believe that the ultimate aim of each person is predominantly, if not
exclusively, the promotion of the agent's own happiness (pleasure). Bentham
endorses a version of psychological egoism, which claims that the agent's own
happiness is and can be the only ultimate object of his desires. he faces a problem,
for he combines the ethical claim that each of us ought to aim at the general happiness
(pleasure) with the psychological claim that each of us can only aim (ultimately) at his
own happiness (pleasure). Bentham claims that utility not only describes human
motivation but also sets the standard of right and wrong.
In the political context, the problem is how we can get self-interested rulers to rule in
the interest of the governed, as utilitarianism implies that they should. Bentham's
answer invokes his commitment to representative democracy. We can reconcile selfinterested motivation and promotion of the common good if we make rulers
democratically accountable to (all) those whom they govern, for this tends to make
the interest of the governed and the interest of the governors coincide.
Bentham's argument, elaborated by James Mill in his Essay on Government, is something
like this.

1. Each person acts only (or predominantly) to promote his own interests.
2. The proper object of government is the interest of the governed.
3. Hence, rulers will pursue the proper object of government if and only if their
interests coincide with those of the governed.
4. A ruler's interest will coincide with those of the governed if and only if he is
politically accountable to the governed.
5. Hence, rulers must be democratically accountable.
Bentham - For every distinct pleasure and pain, we must calculate its intensity and
its duration. That would give us the total amount of (net) pleasure (or pain)
associated with each option. Then we must do that option with greatest total. Bentham
does not assume that our estimates of what will maximize utility will always be reliable. Nor
does he assume that we should always try to maximize utility. Nonetheless, utility, he
thinks, is the standard of right conduct.
Though Mill accepts the utilitarian legacy of the Radicals, he transforms that
legacy in important ways. Mill aims to show that happiness is the one and only thing
desirable in itself. everyone desires his own happiness. But the proof does not reveal
Mill to be a psychological egoist. While Mill does say that each person has an ultimate
desire for her own happiness, he does not say that this is each person's only ultimate
desire. Indeed, in the second half of the proof he allows that some agents have a
disinterested concern for virtue. So Mill rejects the substantive doctrines of psychological
egoism and hedonism that Bentham and his father sometimes defended or suggested. an
agent's ultimate desire is not always and necessarily to promote his own
interests or pleasure.
The old threat to liberty is found in traditional societies in which there is rule by one
(a monarchy) or a few (an aristocracy). Though one could be worried about restrictions
on liberty by benevolent monarchs or aristocrats, the traditional worry is that when rulers
are politically unaccountable to the governed they will rule in their own
interests, rather than the interests of the governed. In particular, they will restrict
the liberties of their subjects in ways that benefit themselves, rather than the ruled. But
Mill thinks that these traditional threats to liberty are not the only ones to worry about. He
makes clear that democracies contain their own threats to libertythis is the
tyranny, not of the one or the few, but of the majority.
Mill thinks that there are two ways in which democracy is, under the right circumstances,
best suited to promote the common good.
First, he thinks that democracy plays an important epistemic role in identifying the
common good. Proper deliberation about issues affecting the common good requires
identifying how different policies would bear on the interests of affected parties and so
requires the proper representation and articulation of the interests of citizens.
Universal suffrage and political participation provide the best assurance that the
interests of the governed will be properly appreciated by political decisionmakers.
Second, Mill thinks that democracy is also the best form of government because of
the constitutive effects of political participation on the improvement of the moral
capacities of citizens. To the extent that the governed can and do participate in public
debate and elections they exercise those very deliberative capacities that it is the aim of
government to develop. They learn to gather information about their options,

deliberate about their merits, and choose a representative that will give
expression to their ideals and preferences. But they deliberate and choose with others
about a public agenda, and in so doing they cultivate abilities to form a conception of
a common good, to take principled stands, to exchange reasons with others, and to learn
from others.
Mill defends the extension of the franchise to women too. Democracy presumably
involves rule by the will of the people. Mill defends representative, rather than direct,
democracy. Mill advocates a federal system in which a central representative body has
more limited functions and local or municipal representative bodies govern in matters
involving local affairs or local detail, such as the creation and maintenance of local
infrastructure, including roads, courts, jails, and schools. Mill also insists that a
representative democracy, either local or federal, should employ proportional, rather
than winner-take-all, representation.
The one that maximizes utility, usually defined as maximizing total benefit and
reducing suffering or the negatives. In utilitarianism, the moral worth of an action is
determined only by its resulting consequences. Bentham says that the value of a
pleasure or pain, considered by itself, can be measured according to its intensity,
duration, certainty/uncertainty and propinquity/remoteness.
Mill rejects a purely quantitative measurement of utility and says:It is quite compatible with
the principle of utility to recognise the fact, that some kinds of pleasure are more
desirable and more valuable than others. It would be absurd that while, in estimating
all other things, quality is considered as well as quantity, the estimation of pleasures should
be supposed to depend on quantity alone. Mill's approach is to argue that the pleasures of
the intellect are intrinsically superior to physical pleasures.
Invoking the doctrine of utilitarianismthe belief that something has value when it is useful
or promotes happinessthey argued that the object of all legislation should be the
greatest happiness of the greatest number. political system that would guarantee its
citizens the maximum degree of individual freedom of choice and action
consistent with efficient government and the preservation of social harmony.
They advocated expanded education, enlarged suffrage, and periodic elections to
ensure governments accountability to the governed. Although they had no use for
the idea of natural rights, their defense of individual libertiesincluding the rights to
freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of
assemblylies at the heart of modern democracy. These liberties received their
classic advocacy in John Stuart Mills On Liberty (1859), which argues on utilitarian grounds
that the state may regulate individual behaviour only in cases where the interests
of others would be perceptibly harmed.

Kantian ethics is based on what Immanuel Kant claimed is the supreme principle of
morality, the Categorical Imperative. The first, the Universal Law Formula, says that we
should act only on principles that we can will to be a universal law that applies to everyone.
The idea here seems to be that when people act immorally, they want everyone else to
obey the rules but want to make an exception for themselves. Principle of Humanity. It
says that whenever we act we must be sure always to treat all persons (both ourselves
and others) as ends and never as mere means. Persons in Kantian ethics refers to any

being with the capacity to make moral judgments and conform to them (where that often
requires that one resist various urges, inclinations, and temptations to act against them).
Persons have free will and reason. Kants Principle of Humanity implies that it is only
persons who possess dignity and must be treated as ends. Animals only have a use
value and may be treated as mere means or resources.
objection that Kantians have to AU, especially the hedonistic version, is that it is a
degrading to humanity to think and act as though pleasure were the point of life. Kantians
think that the point of life is the exercise of ones personhood capacities in moral
deliberation and choice. This does not mean that Kantians must oppose all suicide and
euthanasia. They support it in cases where people have permanently lost the capacities for
free will and reason.
The underlying idea behind Kantian ethics is that each human being has inherent worth.
Simply because you are a human, you have worth in and of yourself. without human
beings, there would be nothing valued so, since the value must come from someplace,
it must be from human beings.
Further, Kant argues that human reason facilitates human autonomy. So, we can reason to
what we want to accomplish in the world i.e. we can make decisions about how to act
and the overall course of our lives. Thus, we can also reason to right behavior. Kants idea
is that the Categorical Imperative should function as a decision rule for right action. The
general idea behind the CI is that you shouldnt act on motives you wouldnt want to be
universal law so, in essence, you shouldnt do what you wouldnt want others to do. One
of the major variations on the categorical imperative is the means / ends formulation
which makes an important point about Kants view of humanity namely, that you ought
not treat humans as a means to an end. In other words, you shouldnt use people to get
what you want. For utilitarianism, you may use whatever means (act on whatever motives)
are necessary to achieve an end that increases happiness. It doesnt matter why you did
the action, only that the end result is an increase in happiness.
establish this foundational moral principle as a demand of each person's own rational will.
He rests this second project on the position that we or at least creatures with rational
wills possess autonomy.
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the
"Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the
demands of the moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are
principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be
obeyed by all, in all situations and circumstances, if our behavior is to observe the moral
law. It is from the Categorical Imperative that all other moral obligations are generated, and
by which all moral obligations can be tested. Kant also stated that the moral means and
ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain
"ends" using the appropriate "means". He believed that the moral law is a principle
of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would
make us happy, but to act upon the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness
of being happy". Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational
agents. Kant believed that if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without
moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise it
was meaningless. He did not necessarily believe that the final result was the most

important aspect of an action, but that how the person felt while carrying out the action
was the time at which value was set to the result.
Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences
and values, and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate
utility". Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it".
With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside
the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A
good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the
autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity
understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others as
an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This
necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons.