Analysis Of Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto, A Prophecy Of Globalization

When Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto, he outlined ‘the revolutionary utopia of a society marked by equalitarianism and mutual solidarity’ that he saw as an inevitability for the twentieth and twenty-first century world. Although Marx’s ideal communist environment never came into fruition his analysis of the modern bourgeois society is prophetic of globalization. Marx identifies several problems that he sees in his current social and economic climate, the likes of which are extremely prevalent today. Thus, it can be said that The Communist Manifesto was a prophecy of globalization, a claim that is supported by splitting Marx’s foresight into two key aspects; that the bourgeois desire to progress is like that of the current middle and upper class, and that there is

Whilst in comparison the middle class, who were the indirect architects of the problem, continue to widen the gap between the two classes, a theme which is encapsulated by Marx as he writes ‘[the proletariat] are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.’ A final striking similarity is seen in Marx’s perception of how tradespeople and shopkeepers of the lower middle class ‘all these sink gradually into the proletariat’ due to lack of capital compared to large capitalist. The similarity in globalization is about how small-to-medium businesses find it difficult to stay afloat and compete with multi-nationals as they are not price competitive enough due to a lack of division of labour and more importantly economies of scale. Both the tradespeople of the nineteenth century and the business owner of the twenty-first century have little hope when faced with the challenge of competing with larger and more powerful companies that can use resources from around the world as well as more advanced machinery to lower prices. As a result the size of the lower class