modern capitalist economy, and they put forward an ambitious pol-
itical strategy to bring about a revolution, based on the international
organization of the working class.^64
InCapital(1867), Marx argued, like Smith and Ricardo before him,
that labor was the source of all value. For him, though, this reality
implied that the capitalist appropriation of labor was inherently
exploitative since wage earners necessarily lost the surplus they pro-
duced. “Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by
sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”^65
This exploitation was bound to expand, because it was driven by
competition and the laws of accumulation. Capitalism transformed
the world in an apparently unstoppable process: “The bourgeoisie
cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them
the whole relations of society....The need of a constantly expanding
market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface
of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connexions everywhere.”^66 In the end, however, capitalist accumu-
lation would prove self-defeating. First, the laws of capital would
engender increasingly severe economic crises, because competition
and the use of capital-intensive technologies would tend to lower the
rate of profit, concentrate property, and depress the demand for
goods. Second, an increasingly united working class would revolt and
bring about socialism and, later, communism. A confrontation between
the bourgeoisie and the working class was indeed bound to come.^67
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class
struggles,” wrote Marx and Engels in theCommunist Manifesto. This
vision of class conflicts clearly demarcated them from earlier social-
ists. Equality would not be achieved through education and reform, or
through conspiracies, but rather through the organization of a broad
and international working-class movement.
(^64) Ibid., pp. 222–24; Eley,Forging Democracy, pp. 38–40.
(^65) Karl Marx,Capital, Volume I (1867), Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1887,
Chapter 10, Section 1 (www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.
66 htm).
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,Manifesto of the Communist Party(1848),
Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1969, Section 1 (www.marxists.org/archive/
marx/works/1848/communist- manifesto/index.htm).
(^67) Ibid.
The rise of the modern state system (1776–1945) 99