What is the main message of Marxism as expressed in the Communist Manifesto?
The essential contention of Marxism is that anyone who says the economy, is stupid. To redo a well-known recent saying it’s the economy, stupid. If you say the economy, you show you’re stupid. There’s no such thing as the economy. There is not a unity between the forces of production and the relations of production. So, you could condense the whole of the manifesto and three volumes of Das Kapital into that – the forces and relations of production are not the same. The ability to mine coal and to use that to make iron ore into steel is something that is socially in common. It’s collectively done. And the mobilization for it is social but the profit goes to a small group of people, so the product of it is not shared. Thus to speak of this as an industrial revolution or a new economy is false. It’s just a refinement of old patterns of exploitation for modern purposes. You could do without this class and the same amount of production could be done. Or indeed, more could be done because th
