Marx famously “turned Hegel on his head” when he came up with the concept of dialectical materialism. Both believed in what is frequently called “the arc of history,” but while Hegel saw that in terms of ideas, Marx saw it as a product of changing means of production. In the penultimate stage, that of bourgeois capitalism, the means of production would be owned by a small and shrinking group of capitalists who would be overwhelmed by the instability of their own system and the numerical predominance of the working class. Revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and a peaceful, classless society would be the happy result.
Marx claimed to be a “scientific” socialist, but dialectical materialism isn’t science, and it isn’t based on history; it is more accurately described as philosophy, and maybe even religion. The theory can’t be tested in the real world, and the events of the last 150 years don’t support it. What has happened, in reality, is that the capitalist system has been buttressed by the welfare state, and that advanced economies are primarily based on services, not manufacturing. Marx did not foresee those developments. The classless society is nowhere in sight.