What would Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels write today? Perhaps something like this:
“A spectre is haunting the world — the spectre of activism. All the powers of the old world order have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre . . . It is high time that Activists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views.”
These sentences faithfully echo the opening words of The Communist Manifesto. The original famously declared: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” For Marx and Engels, in a capitalist system a sequence of widening splits between the classes was inevitable. The bourgeoisie would become more powerful as markets expanded, until the disenfranchised labourers in the proletarian class booted them out. Ultimately a revolution would end capitalism’s reign.