The March of the Classes Toward the Dawn: Capitalism, 19th Century

The March of the Classes Toward the Dawn: Capitalism, 19th Century

Marx believed that capitalism contained within its development the opportunity for its collapse. The concentration and accumulation of capital widens the gap between the rich and the poor and intensifies the conflict between the ruling and the ruled classes. The structure of capitalism, which pursues surplus value, eventually runs up against its own limits, creating a historical process in which the working class rises up to seek its own emancipation. Marx saw this not as an accident but as an inevitable change brought about by the contradiction between the material productive forces and the relations of production. In nineteenth-century Europe, while the Industrial Revolution brought about rapid industrialization, workers' lives were impoverished, and class struggles swept over society; the February Revolution of 1848, the uprising of the Paris Commune, and the formation of the International Workingmen's Association are symbolic events of this. Marx saw beyond these developm
ents a transition to socialism, where the proletariat would share the means of production and where class discrimination and state domination would disappear. For him, this was not an idea, but the law of historical motion itself.