HOW ACCURATE WERE ITS PREDICTIONS BY 1890?
The ôManifesto of the Communist Partyö by Karl Marx and Friederich Engels has proved to be an enduring and widely read call to arms for revolutionary movements around the world. However, few of its predictions came true û or even seemed to be coming true, especially in the first forty-two years after its original publication in 1848.
The document outlined a scenario for how the world, in general, and the ôclass struggle,ö in particular, would unfold over the coming decades. In general, the manifesto clearly and accurately noted the periodic occurrence of economic disruptions that Marx and Engels called epidemics of overproduction. They observed them happening about once every ten years, and assumed they were an inevitable byproduct of the so-called ôbourgeois epoch,ö or capitalist system, that would continue indefinitely and keep getting worse (Tyler, 1998, p. 12). Though later on, governments would belatedly take corrective measures, by 1890 û after a series of devastating economic depressions or ôpanicsö in both Europe and the United States, this was one idea that seemed entirely plausible.
In particular, perhaps the manifestoÆs most inaccurate call of all was the notion that individual nations would disappear before the powerful drive for dignity and equality by international workers. ôNational differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing,ö Marx and Engels wrote in the manifesto (Marx, 1978, p. 488). However, nationalism proved to be arguably the strongest ôismö of the nineteenth century. Indeed, the unification after lengthy struggles of Italy in 1864 and Germany in 1871 turned out to be two defining moments that would reshape the world as much or more than communism over the century that followed the manifestoÆs first appearance (Harding, 1998, p. 29).
Likewise, the manifesto demanded the abolition of private property, an...