Karl Marx: Dead For Humankind
Marx is definitely dead for humankind."
Quotations like this come up all the time when questions of radical political and social change are discussed. They can be found in the corporate media, especially the blowhard punditocracy. They can be found in textbooks and academic journals. And they can be found--actually, more often and with greater acrimony--in discussions on the left, among people who agree on many points. A variety of arguments are put forward as evidence--that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels predicted that capitalism would collapse, and it hasn't; that the fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the failure of Marxism; that class struggle can't survive in a world of cable television, the Internet and SUVs. What connects them is the …show more content…
Only a small fraction of the world's population living in parts of Europe and North America were in the early stages of a different way of life, based on capitalist factory production. The number of industrial workers everywhere in the world at the time was smaller than the number of industrial workers in South Korea today. And the technology that we take for granted today--and which Marxists believe can, if democratically controlled, be the basis for constructing a new society of abundance, instead of poverty and competition--was unimaginable 150 years ago.
Now bear these facts in mind while reading a few random passages from the Communist Manifesto:
"The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country...In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands."
"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage …show more content…
One of the most constant criticisms of Marxism is that the working class has been shrinking in importance and in numbers as capitalism has aged. What people who say this actually mean is that, in advanced countries, the blue-collar industrial working class has been decreasing as a proportion of the workforce as a whole. On the other hand, the size of the industrial working class internationally is bigger than ever, and even in advanced countries like the U.S., it remains an important part of the economy. More importantly, though, the idea that Marxists only care about blue-collar workers is a stereotype--one that goes along with a picture of the proletariat as all-male, working only in factories, engaged in manual labor,
Quotations like this come up all the time when questions of radical political and social change are discussed. They can be found in the corporate media, especially the blowhard punditocracy. They can be found in textbooks and academic journals. And they can be found--actually, more often and with greater acrimony--in discussions on the left, among people who agree on many points. A variety of arguments are put forward as evidence--that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels predicted that capitalism would collapse, and it hasn't; that the fall of the Berlin Wall exposed the failure of Marxism; that class struggle can't survive in a world of cable television, the Internet and SUVs. What connects them is the …show more content…
Only a small fraction of the world's population living in parts of Europe and North America were in the early stages of a different way of life, based on capitalist factory production. The number of industrial workers everywhere in the world at the time was smaller than the number of industrial workers in South Korea today. And the technology that we take for granted today--and which Marxists believe can, if democratically controlled, be the basis for constructing a new society of abundance, instead of poverty and competition--was unimaginable 150 years ago.
Now bear these facts in mind while reading a few random passages from the Communist Manifesto:
"The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country...In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands."
"The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage …show more content…
One of the most constant criticisms of Marxism is that the working class has been shrinking in importance and in numbers as capitalism has aged. What people who say this actually mean is that, in advanced countries, the blue-collar industrial working class has been decreasing as a proportion of the workforce as a whole. On the other hand, the size of the industrial working class internationally is bigger than ever, and even in advanced countries like the U.S., it remains an important part of the economy. More importantly, though, the idea that Marxists only care about blue-collar workers is a stereotype--one that goes along with a picture of the proletariat as all-male, working only in factories, engaged in manual labor,