Had Karl Marx been born after Karl Popper, his greatness would be incomparable. Successfully, Marx identified the bourgeois, the proletariat, and 'the material dialectic', but he failed to identify the artifex, meaning 'creator class', which is made up of entrepreneurs, inventors, and artists. An artifexian, which is a term first introduced in this paper, is anyone who creates or recreates a means of production and/or a thing to be produced. If anything, Marx conflated creators with the bourgeois or lost sight of them amongst the general proletariat. Consequently, his material dialectic only halfway addresses the nature of socioeconomic change through history. The full dialectic by which society 'marches' can be expressed as follows: 'The Creative Concord' 'The material dialectic' | creativity or (owner(s) | worker(s)) | creator(s) or (Bourgeois | Proletariat) | Artifex Marx argued, through the material dialectic, that Capitalism was inherently contradictory, for it inevitably undergoes, of one kind or another, 'creative destruction' (Schumpeter): the businesses it creates destroys others, the resources it consumes leaves many lacking, etc... In other words, at the center of Capitalism is self-destructive paradox. Though the material dialectic properly delineates how socioeconomic orders change within a given creative epoch, it does not describe how such orders change through them. To allude to Popper, history changes not in line with any kind of dialectic, but in concordance with unpredictable inventions, 'eurekas', and 'creative acts' (see Nikolai Berdyaev). Marx, coming before Popper, missed this, and so created a theory and system that works in a given epoch, but not through them.... continue reading
