14. There will be, Marx says, (1) ‘a progressive diminution in the number of the capitalist magnates’; (2) ‘a corresponding increase in the mass of poverty, oppression, enslavement, degeneration and exploitation’; (3) ‘a steady intensification of the wrath of the working class’. These three forces, working together, produce the Hegelian crisis, or the politico-economic version of the poetic catastrophe he had imagined as a teenager: ‘The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point where they prove incompatible with their capitalist husk. This bursts asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.’ This is very exciting and has delighted
generations of socialist zealots. But it has no more claim to be a scientific projection than an astrologer’s almanac.” Johnson, Op. Cit.
“Marxism rested on the assumption that the condition of the working classes would grow ever worse under capitalism, that there would be but two classes: one small and rich, the other vast and increasingly impoverished, and revolution would be the anodyne that would result in the “common good.” But by the early 20th century, it was clear that this assumption was completely wrong! Under capitalism, the standard of living of all was improving: prices falling, incomes rising, health and sanitation improving, lengthening of life spans, diets becoming more varied, the new jobs created in industry paid more than most could make in agriculture, housing improved, and middle class industrialists and business owners displaced nobility and gentry as heroes.”
From a speech by Rev. Robert A. Sirico, President, Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty.
Delivered at Hillsdale College, October 27, 2006
