ABSTRACT
IT WOULD be hard to find among the writings of the mid-nineteenth century a more generous tribute to the capitalist system than is paid to it in The Communist Manifesto. In a short space of years it had wrought unparalleled wonders. It had established “the universal interdependence of nations.” It had “drawn all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.” By creating great cities it “had rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” It had, in a word, “subjected nature’s forces to man.” “What earlier century,” Marx asked, “had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?” He did not indeed pause to inquire whether this was altogether an advantage. Yet he can scarcely be blamed, as few Victorians would have denied that production was the chief duty of man; and we may surely admit Marx to their company after the many years he lived among them.
