It can even be seriously argued that Marx was not ultimately a materialist, in that his theories celebrated individual effort and creativity in giving form to matter.⁶ There is nothing in his writings to suggest he thought it a good idea that the state own the means of production, as to him the state itself was the problem. To Marx, "communism" merely meant community ownership of property, to prevent the landed gentry from accumulating capital amidst the pauperization of the workers and peasantry. As policy, he advocated confiscatory inheritance taxes to keep property and society fluid. Clearly he would have been more amazed by the widescale worker ownership of land and commercial equity that he would see today in the West. His theoretical advocacy of common property was built on an assumption that a small class of capitalists would eventually accumulate all property, that capitalism could not find a way to disperse property to the masses. Revolution would occur when disequilibrium became intolerable. It was V.I. Lenin who fostered the idea of a bureaucracy that would manage the community's property.

To Marx, the flaw of capitalism was political, in that successful entrepreneurs -- the true economic revolutionaries who spring from the work force -- would allow themselves to be co-opted by the ruling elite. This bourgeoisie would be a positive force up to a point, wresting freedoms away from the entrenched oligarchical interests of feudal society, but would eventually become entrenched itself. In combination, they would choke off the upward paths from the lower classes and thwart those magical forces of production by which civilization reaches toward its utopian destiny: "Capitalist production develops the technique and the combination of the process of social production only by exhausting at the same time the two sources from which all wealth springs: the earth and the worker."

Just as animals who devour their young become extinct, "The bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers. The fall of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable," he wrote in the Manifesto. "In the place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and its class antagonisms, there will be an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." What we surmise Marx is talking about is a fluid society, one in which anyone can rise or fall without encountering artificial social impediments created by government in either direction. If this is what he means, and I think he does, it represents what I believe to be the realistic ideal of political economy. The flavor is represented in the purely American expression, "Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations," which was in usage in the early decades of this century -- when the United States came close to being a fluid society at least for men. African Americans were, of course, the notable exception, a legacy that persists to this day -- a point we will develop in discussing the underclass later in this essay.

In critiquing the writings of the 19th century American economist Henry Carey, Marx in 1857 clearly approves of the productive forces at work in America at the time, as the bourgeoisie was still unfettered by the state. Carey, in his Principles of Political Economy written in 1837, had set forth his observations of a harmonious capitalism, in which capitalist and worker shared willingly in the fruits of expanding productivity. This challenged the classical economists of Europe, including Ricardo, who presented a more adversarial capitalism, of the kind that Marx built into his central thesis of class struggle. Marx bridged the gap between the two in this manner:

Carey is the only original North American economist. He belongs to a country in which bourgeois society has not developed from a background of feudalism, but began of its own accord; a country where this society was not the surviving result of centuries of development, but the starting point of a new movement; where the state, unlike all other national structures, was from the start subordinated to the bourgeois society and to bourgeois production, and could never attend to a purpose of its own; where, finally, bourgeois society itself, linking the productive forces of the old world with the gigantic natural terrain of the new, has developed to hitherto unknown dimensions and freedom of movement, and has far exceeded previous efforts to overcome the forces of nature, and where the contradictions of bourgeois society themselves appear only as transitory phenomena. It is not surprising that the production relationships in which this immense new world has developed so surprisingly quickly and fortunately are considered by Carey as the normal, eternal conditions of social production and distribution, contrary to what has taken place in Europe, especially in England -- which for Carey is the real Europe -- where the production relationships have been hindered and disturbed by the inherited obstacles of the feudal period.⁷

Just wait, Marx seemed to be saying. In due time, the contradictions inherent in bourgeois society will appear in this new world, and as in Europe disharmony will appear, with bourgeois society in the U.S. becoming subordinate to the bourgeois state. Again contrary to popular belief, Marx was not an advocate of violent revolution, but argued that violent revolution would inevitably occur when the bourgeois state could no longer cope with the demands of the historic forces of production. Where the previous classical economists had assumed that consumption would naturally follow production, that "supply would create its own demand," Marx questions that hypothesis, even as he celebrates capitalism as a mighty engine of productive growth. Distribution of productive wealth is a problem each phase of history must solve for itself, a problem he believed capitalism in its mature stage would fail to solve -- at that point giving way to revolution and a socialist, communist epoch. His collaborator, Frederick Engels, summarized the concept in a lengthy essay written after Marx's death:

Distribution...is not a merely passive result of production and exchange; it has an equally important reaction on both of these. Each new mode of production or form of exchange is at first retarded not only by the old forms and the political institutions which correspond to these, but also by the old mode of distribution; it can only secure the distribution which is essential to it in the course of a long struggle. But the more mobile a given mode of production and exchange, the more capable it is of expansion and development, the more rapidly does distribution also reach the stage in which it gets beyond its mother's control and comes into conflict with the prevailing mode of production and exchange.⁸