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Exoduses of nations and crusades. 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.”

These passages read almost as a “hymn to capitalism”, yet they are written by the
founder of modern communism. But Marx’s admiration for the way the bourgeoisie
has used science and technology to conquer and subdue nature reflects a basic
Enlightenment belief in the power of reason. But he then turns the tables on the
bourgeoisie in a brilliant phrase:

“Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a
corresponding political advance of that class. The executive of the modern state is but
a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

In these words, Marx dismisses reforms passed by parliamentary, constitutional
governments, such as in Britain, as merely a mask for selfish bourgeois interests.

Reforms such as the Factory Acts to help the working classes are a sham. He then
expresses a crucial feature of modern capitalism, its insatiable appetite and energy
which literally carries it to world domination:

“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. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the
production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the

products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion
and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-
dependence of nations.”

This idea that capitalism creates “new wants” is a powerful one, as the money spent
on modern advertising illustrates. The following paragraph is another powerful

statement of how modern capitalism reproduces itself and reshapes the world in its
own image:

“The bourgeoisie, compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois
mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their
midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its
own image. The bourgeoisie has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the
urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable
part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country

dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries