Karl Marx may have been right after all.
As readers revisit "The Communist Manifesto" on its 150th anniversary, those on the left and the right have been struck by the eerie way in which its 1848 description of capitalism resembles the restless, anxious and competitive world of today's global economy.
Economists and political scientists note how the manifesto, written by Marx and Friedrich Engels, recognized the unstoppable wealth-creating power of capitalism, predicted it would conquer the world, and warned that this inevitable globalization of national economies and cultures would have divisive and painful consequences.
"The manifesto speaks to our time," says Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard University. "Marx saw capitalism as the driving force of history. But he also warns of the divisions that capitalism's spread would bring, of the social orders destroyed."
The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm describes the manifesto's portrait of capitalism as "recognizably the world we live in 150 years later" in his introduction to the elegant little edition brought out by the British-based publisher Verso to mark the anniversary.
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