numbers were shrinking, while the size of the proletariat was constantly increasing. At the right historical moment, the working class would be able to seize power, and no capitalist would exist to appropriate surplus value for himself. When the new society was a reality, the slogan would be "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Marx insisted that the Manifesto was not just another theory. He saw the eventual overthrow of the bourgeoisie as inevitable; at the same time, workers could have a hand in the forging of history by helping to overthrow the class which sought to exploit and debase them. As Lerner points out in his History of Civilizations, "Marx and Engels, more than any other political thinkers of the 1830s and 1840s, provided workers with a potential sense of their worth as human beings and of their vital role in the historical process" (1988, p. 826).
Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939, was born midway through Marx's life, and died sixteen years before Einstein. Freud, like Marx, attempted to relate the whole development of society to a single theory of historical development--in Freud's case, the historical development of the individuals personality from childhood to adulthood. Unlike Marx, however, Freud would argue against the rationality of man, unless, of course, Freudian therapy could intervene to bring the person into acknowledgement of long suppressed unconscious urges. Prior to Freud's theories, novelists had sapped faith in bourgeois society by exposing its hypocrites and the shallowness of its pretensions. As Willis (1986) tells us, "the new science of psychology, with its new emphasis on the unconscious motives of the mind, undermined even more the belief that reason can control the environment (P. 458).
Freud believed that it was essential to get beyond the physiological and rational factors in human behavior. By combining scientific genius, literary skill, and stubborn a...