Marxism posits multiple distinct historical breaks, not a single linear transition

Evidence

In fact, the stages aspect of historical materialism can be refrained in an unconventional way that transforms the absolute break most often (and rightly) felt to be present in Marxism between capitalism (and socialism) and the so-called precapitalist modes of production. Indeed; in the tradition, a number of diversely accented breaks wander along the historical continuum, like a line of verse about which one hesitates as to its meter or relative freedom. Marxism indeed posits one kind of break between tribal societies (hunters and gatherers, primitive communism) and those later modes of production (including capitalism) which know state power (along with the surplus, writing, the division between mental and manual labor, and so forth). It posits another kind of break between precapitalist power societies and that very special dynamic of capitalism, with its infinite expansion (“both positing a limit specific to itself and on the other hand driving beyond any limit”) that may be said to reinvent history in a new way, and also to constitute an incomparable and hitherto novel form of social imperialism; this is, of course, the break Latour has in mind. Meanwhile, one must also presumably posit a fundamental break between capitalism and socialism, in the sense in which this last reinvents, on a new and higher level, collective forms and experiences which make it rather more comparable to precapitalist social formations, and in that respect dissimilar from the atomic fragmentation and individualism of capitalism per se (even though, in a Hegelian move, socialism will also claim to retain the new richness of individual subjectivity developed under the market system). But this sequence, as thus traditionally presented and now that we are no longer quite so worried about its Darwinian overtones (unilinear evolution or multilinear evolution), still raises embarrassing questions which are not altogether dispelled by the dialectical notion that capitalism now inaugurates a new kind of global history, whose very logic is “totalizing” in the strict sense: with the result that, even if before there were histories — many of them, and unrelated — now there is tendentially only one, on an ever more homogeneous horizon, as far as the eye can see. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 806

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes three distinct breaks in historical materialism: tribe-vs-state society, precapitalist-vs-capitalist, and capitalist-vs-socialist, each with different criteria.
• XREF: The ‘totalizing’ global history claim connects to the reader’s core interest in whether the postmodern cultural dominant thesis is falsifiable — the homogeneous horizon premise underlies it. — connects to: Marx saw historical development as contradictory rather than unilinear