Capital and Historical Materialism

Abstract

Many argue that Marx’s political project of working class revolution to realize socialism has proved a dead end. His critique of capitalism’s inherent economic dysfunctionality and profound inequalities, however, has been acknowledged even by the mainstream during the current global crisis. This disconnect reflects the belief that proletarian socialist revolution might reasonably have been expected in 1848, when Marx and Engels called for it in The Manifesto. Extending Marx’s method of historical materialist analysis to the history of class society−historical analysis that Marx did not himself pursue, relying instead on liberal historical accounts of classes−reveals that even in Western Europe capitalism was far from sufficiently developed for proletarian revolution even at the turn of the 20th century. Using the analysis provided in Capital, however, it can be seen that the society Marx understood to be the foundation for a profound revolutionary transformation does finally exist today.