ABSTRACT
“Modernization” has come to signify a complex of social, economic, and political processes: sustained economic development, industrial expansion, urban growth, bureaucratic regulation and rationality, mass media, mass participation in politics—including at least the pretense of democracy—large-scale social planning, shattering of traditional cultures and forms of life, continuous pressure to raise productivity and make progress. The members of the bourgeoisie have alienated themselves from their own creativity because they cannot bear to look into the moral, social, and psychic abyss that their creativity opens up. Some of Marx’s most vivid and striking images are meant to force readers all to confront that abyss. Take, for instance, Marx’s vision of the revolutionary community. Its foundations will be laid, ironically, by the bourgeoisie itself: “The progress of industry, whose inadvertent promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the workers through competition with their union through association.”.
