For Marx, however, these new industrial feats were just the tip of the iceberg. He believed that such changes in technology, production and social life, would come to form the basis of an entirely new society. This reflected his view of history as unfolding through an ensemble of fields encompassing not only technology, but also politics and our ideas and assumptions about both the world and each other. Technology – just as it had done twelve thousand years earlier with the First Disruption – had ushered humanity into a new paradigm, yet we remained unable to create the institutions and ideas appropriate for this new age. Achieving that was the project to which Marx would commit his life.
In contrast to his portrayal by critics, Marx was often lyrical about capitalism. His belief was that despite its capacity for exploitation, its compulsion to innovate – along with the creation of a world market – forged the conditions for social transformation:
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 … constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.
As a result, his conclusion was that capitalism inevitably ‘created its own gravediggers’:
The condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association.
The Three Disruptions
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