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Polar Vision:
The Limitations of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”
Joe Student
Polar Vision:
The Limitations of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto”
Karl Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” was a fascinating call for change. The document had a huge effect on the political climate of the time and continues to have an effect on modern politics and nations. Marx saw the world as a social conflict between two groups. Indeed, he had a very polaristic view of social class relationships. When describing the history of the relationship between the social classes, Marx (1848) stated, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another” (p. 223). In addition, Marx described the social condition of the modern world as the result of an evolution of all prior social classes into a final and simplified clash between the remaining two classes. When writing about the historical evolution of the social classes, Marx notes, “society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (p. 223). Marx’s call for revolution was predicated on his perception that there is only a two-class society and inevitably, the unfair distribution of wealth between these two classes will lead to unrest and revolution. In addition to this simplistic binary, Marx had an overly simplistic view that all laborers (proletarians) were in some way the capital of the bourgeois industrialists and beholden to them. One can question whether or not proletarians all fell under this all-encompassing description and if they did not, is it possible that some groups fell under an emerging class that Marx could not see. It can be argued that there was there an emerging class that fit somewhere in between his...