“First, capitalism must destroy itself. The planless nature of production must lead to crises and slumps and the social chaos of depression. The system was simply too complex; it was constantly getting out of joint, losing step, and overproducing one good while underproducing another. Secondly, capitalism would unknowingly breed its own successor. Within its great factories it would not only create the technical base for socialism – mass production – but it would create as well a trained and disciplined ‘class’ who would be the agents of socialism – the embittered proletariat. By its own inner dynamic, capitalism would produce its own downfall, and in the process, it would nourish its own enemy. It was a profoundly revolutionary insight into history, not only what it betokened for the future, but for the whole new perspective it opened upon the past. We have come to be familiar with the “economic interpretation” of history, and we can accept with equanimity a re-evaluation of the past with respect to the struggle, say, of the nascent seventeenth-century commercial classes and the aristocratic world of land and lineage. But Marx and Engels, this was no mere exercise of historical reinterpretation. The dialectic led to the future and that future, as revealed by the ‘Communist Manifesto’, pointed to an ‘inevitable’ communist revolution which this same dialectic would produce. In somber words the ‘Manifesto’ proclaimed: “The development of modern industry… cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”” [Robert L. Heibroner, The Worldly Philosophers. The Lives, Times, and Ideas of the Great Economic Thinkers, 1953]
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- Articolo pubblicato:30 Aprile 2013