![]() ![]() Here Marx offers, if not comfort, at least inspiration. The Communist Manifesto was written in Friedrich Engels’s clear, striking prose and declared the earth-shaking ideas of Karl Marx. But the survival of humanity, Marx realised, clearly indicates that other strategies must be adopted if we are to avoid the worst form of dystopian future. The rationale of capitalism lies in the maximisation of profit: no other ends can modify this aim. The manifesto, written in the months prior to the revolutionary wave of 1848 and distributed. However, what Marx did shrewdly observe was that those who profit from the existing system would resist any fundamental change to it – even if it jeopardised the lives of future generations to come. His theory did not account for the issues of scarcity of resources and overpopulation indeed they were not relevant to his epoch. Marx and his coauthor, Friedrich Engels, begin The Communist Manifesto with the famous and provocative statement that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle. Marx envisioned a communist system in which high levels of industrial production would ensure a good standard of living for the entire population. Here, curiously, Marx has perhaps failed to see that a proletarian revolution might give rise to a bourgeois one, where the workers come to define themselves as consumers. The greatest problem facing humanity this century is arguably environmental collapse. ![]()
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