Things are only understood after the fact.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owl_of_Athena In affirmative contrast, the 19th-century German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously noted that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk"; philosophy comes to understand a historical condition just as it passes away.[18] Philosophy appears only in the "maturity of reality", because it understands in hindsight.
Philosophy, as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering.
This is why Marx waited for the events of the Paris Commune before revising the Communist Manifesto about the manner in which the workers would wield state power. He could not predict and needed as case study to attempt generalizations. Similarly we may make generalizations of what may be possible based in the current state of human struggles, to see what is embryonic and could be broadened.
Capitalism is no more internal or natural to humans than any other mode of production and communism should it ever arise. It is in fact in the stories about the development of capitalism that capitalist logic is presented as inherent to persons independent of capitalist production as they barter and trade and then haphazardly introduce money but consider exchange independent relations of production that are historically specific.
https://kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/law-of-value-8-subjectobject/[url]college.holycross.edu/eej/Volume14/V14N4P299_318.pdf[/url]
There are all sorts of ideological thought experiments which abstract essential qualities to only emphasize things seen as common to past production to naturalize capitalism as universal, natural, just a more complex form of technical production of goods. But then we’re back to the point of losing sight of specific social relations and how they are different based on a mode of production and its not just a case of technological development but a restructuring of human ways of life. And so natural is such a process that one needs to force people of alternative means of subsistence so that they have only labor power to sell.
I could of course universalize the conditions of animals in a specific environment and say how they react is natural as this is how they act and develop within that environment. But the environment of humans has been radically different because we made it so. And there was much that had to be destroyed about different ways of life that don’t automatically reduce everything to a single qualitative value.
The utilitarianism of Bentham only arises exactly within the conditions of capitalist production developing and the expansion of such production into regular life.
Humans develop within a material culture and this is why we are so versatile because we change the world and thus change ourselves. What is natural is that we must reproduce our existence materially, but as we have done so we have changed our social relations and developed new needs, new ways of living. It is through the preexisting institutions and cultural artefacts that are already up and running prior to our individual existence what we learn how to live and are automatically accustom to our own culture because we experience little us but it.
The difficulty is in changing anything as its a macroscale of human habits and requires many to adapt.
Though there is a fervor in revolutions and the such that animates such a desire to find the new.
But if there is any oath to communism which is a regulative ideal and very abstract in the same way an end to sexism may be, it is to be found in the present conditions of how people develop solidarity and do not subjugate one another to their own ideas yet collaborate towards a shared end. A modern movement against capitalism will not be lead by fronts backed by parties.
Rather it be found in a solution to the problem of how to work together as strangers within modernity. At least this is what I draw from one of my favorite Marxists Andy Blunden. Communism is not to be a mere dream forced upon reality but found through struggles against present day problems. Just as many who created the conditions for the rise of the bourgeoisie were not animated by the vision of capitalism but the desire to overcome restrictions in feudalism thought to be corrected by liberal ideals, which in some sense are to be more concretely realized through socialism as they remain to abstract.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics