Your assessment of evolutionary development is sound. The only thing I take issue with is your assumption that socialist believe in social evolution in the Darwinian sense. Ideas such as this are, as you have rightly stated, incorrect. Rather, Marxists look the historical progression of society in a dialectical sense. Observing the historical transitions from one socio-economic order to the next show us that human history is one of class antagonisms, within which the oppressed class eventually overtake and become the new ruling class in society. In roman times there were on the one hand, patricians and nights, and on the other plebeian and slaves. Feudalism had the lords and the serfs. Capitalism has bourgeois and working class.
In each of these historical epochs, the subordinate class eventually overcame the dominant class, resulting in a new set of social relationships from which the next social order could develop. Primitive communistic food foraging society's gave way to the Asiatic mode of production, which in turn led to the Greek and Roman slave based economies. The decline of the Roman empire after the Germanic invasions synthesized Roman civilization with Germanic tribal society, eventually leading to the development of feudalism. Within Feudal society sprang up medieval towns and a rising class of merchants. These merchants eventually overtook the feudal lords, ushering in the era of capitalism. In each of these stages, there was the resolution of antagonism between a subordinate class and a dominant class, leading to the establishment of a new social order in which new class antagonisms develop. Capitalism has as its antagonism the struggle between capitalist and worker. Eventually, materialists argue, the workers will overtake the dominant bourgeois class and establish as system of society based on common ownership.
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