The Primacy of What? The Revolution of Networks and the shaping of real utopias for the twenty-first century

As Susan Marks (2008) has pointed out, the intellectual legacy of Karl Marx has been appreciated in the last years, both by the public and the scholarship. This essay is part of this re-valorization of Marx’s work. It asserts that a radical social change is still possible, and that the best way to understand how

that could be possible is through the theoretical framework of historical materialism firstly developed by Marx.

This essay has to parts. The first one is an assessment of three central aspects of Marx’ historical materialism: (1) social change is a product of the development of forces of production; (2) capitalism will eventually disappear; and (3) the possibility of the rise of new (and higher) relations of production depends on the development of certain conditions in the womb of the older social formation. The outcome of this evaluation is that the possibility of a progressive social change relies not only in reaching a certain level of development of forces of production, but also in the conscious political

effort of fostering new modes of production which are in formation in nowadays capitalism.

The second part of this work presents some productive practices as a possible embryo of new modes of production, that could give rise to a new historical bloc capable of overcoming capitalism. Following Euclides Mance’s idea of a network that links all this practices in an autopoyetic whole, this essay will

show the strengths that makes these proposal to deserve special attention. Then it will address some of the criticisms and uncertainties that can be posed to it and tries to draft some answers for them. The essay concludes with a reflection on the necessity of shifting the emphasis of revolutionary practice from (state) politics to economics, albeit without abandoning the former.