ABSTRACT
The desire to understand both how modern societies arrived at their present condition and the likely direction of their future development is probably universal. One answer to this question was given in the nineteenth century in Marx’s analysis (summarized in the Communist Manifesto) of the growth of the capitalist mode of production and his predictions for the future. He identified ‘classes’ as major forces in historical development, arguing that the bourgeoisie had assumed a ‘revolutionary’ role in the transition from feudalism to capitalism and that the proletariat was the emerging revolutionary class of capitalist society (Marx and Engels, 1962).
