Revolutions
Marx and Engels issued the Communist Manifesto in 1848, just as John Stuart Mill published his Principles of Political Economy and women's rights advocates in Seneca Falls, New York issued their own manifesto.
In that same year a revolution in the streets of Paris extended the right to vote to all French men and also proclaimed their right to work, establishing workshops for the unemployed. Though short-lived, these gains became a model for collective protest elsewhere. ‘‘There is a spectre haunting Europe,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had proclaimed, with perfect timing. Though they called for proletarian ownership of the means of production, their demands were mild by current standards, featuring a progressive income tax and free education for all children in public schools.2The aura of de Saint-Simon colored their confidence in science and industry, the development of the ‘‘forces of production”. A hint of Fourier appeared in their vision of a future in which men would be able to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, herd cattle in the evening, and criticize philosophy after dinner.3 But the early writings of Marx and Engels distanced them from the “critical-utopian” socialism that they believed was premature, lacking the support and guidance of a proletariat. The Communist Manifesto did not endorse cooperative experiments. It called for revolutionary change.
The first volume of Capital, published in 1867, provided a compelling account of the role of force and violence in the early stage of primitive accumulation in Britain. It went on to develop a critique of capitalism that drew heavily from the doctrines of classical political economy even as it emphasized their ideological character. Locke had originally offered the labor theory of value as a justification for private property. Ricardo had applied it to a very different end, the demonstration of a difference between the costs of production and a surplus that was appropriated by landowners who provided absolutely no labor or services in return.
Extending Ricardo's analysis to argue that capitalists extracted a different kind of surplus from workers, Marx turned the labor theory of value into a theory of capitalist exploitation. One need not accept his specific formulation to support the claim that the relative bargaining power of capitalists and workers affects the distribution of income. In the late twentieth century, a new generation of Marxist economists would develop more analytical versions of a general theory of exploitation.4Marx's analysis of class conflict was joined to a prophecy of a future in which the vicious conflicts of capitalism would be transcended. The falling rate of profit would force an economic crisis and a transition, first, to a socialist system based on de Saint-Simonian principles—from each according to their ability, to each according to their work. The next stage would be communism—from each according to his ability, to each according to his need. The teleology drew heavily from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's abstract formulation of the laws of history. The stage theory neatly transcended earlier debates about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcomes by suggesting that they should come in sequence.