The Inevitable Revolution: Exploring Marx and Engel’s Promise Usman Mohammad Ali College

As the authors of The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are known as the initiators of communist and Marxist theories; many of their ideas are still at the heart of contemporary critiques of capitalism’s excesses. In their Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously predicted that the proletariat of the world would one day rise up in an inevitable revolution against their bourgeois “masters,” so to speak, and that then these proletarians would take control of the means of production for themselves, abolish property, and initiate communist societies. The problem with this prediction is that almost two centuries have passed since it was offered in the Manifesto and nothing even remotely close to an international proletarian revolution has occurred. Even on a smaller scale, no true communist nation has arisen in this time span either. In light of these facts, some have wondered whether or not Marx and Engels were too bold in their estimation that a proletarian revolution was inevitable. Has the capitalists’ control on the means of production become so entrenched that a revolution cannot be mounted? Has not enough time elapsed for the inevitable revolution to yet take place? Or is economic injustice so currently rampant...