After Capitalism—What?

Abstract

The traditional Marxist answer of course is socialism. And the essence of socialism, running like a red thread through all of Marx and Engels' writings, is the replacement of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class by the proletariat, the exploiters by the exploited. As Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto, "the first step in the revolution by the working class" is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class, and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

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