Growth vs Constriction
In seeking to represent the effects of class domination, and the possibilities inherent in its abolition, Marx makes frequent use of the imagery of expansion, growth, and “flourishing” vs the restrictive, circumscribing, limiting forces of the capitalist mode of production which only “sustains their [the workers’] life by stunting it.” Even as he studiously avoids suggesting that communism represents the “natural” state of human beings, or even the notion of any fixed human “nature,” Marx uses this imagery to invoke the rhetorical power of the kind of free, unimpeded development that the earliest critics of capitalism, the Romantic movement, saw exemplified in the natural world.
