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for continual economic growth sustainable? But next comes another deadly

contradiction: capitalism creates the “proletariat”:

“The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now
turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the
weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are
to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians. At this stage,
the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and
broken up by their mutual competition. But with the development of industry, the

proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses,
its strength grows, and it feels that strength more.”

How inexorable and threatening Mark makes it all sound!

“Machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces
wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the

resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating,
their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen
and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two
classes. Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the
proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.”

But Marx now makes another dubious claim, that nations will fade away:

“National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more
vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to
the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life
corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish
still faster. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation
vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.”

This was one of several predictions made by Marx that didn’t pan out. Nationalism
th
grew stronger, not weaker, as 19 century capitalism progressed. When the First
World War broke out in 1914, workers of all nations ignored the calls of their socialist
leaders to oppose the war in the name of class solidarity. Instead, they rallied behind
their nation-states, then spent four bloody years killing one another in the trenches*.
th
In the 20 century, both Communist Russia and Communist China became
extraordinarily nationalistic (not that either was communist in a recognisably Marxist
sense). Nationalism seems to go from strength to strength almost everywhere.

*A grim socialist wartime joke was that “a bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends”.