This essay analyzes Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels's Communist Manifesto, focusing on its central arguments about class conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat and its prediction that capitalism would inevitably collapse under its own contradictions. The paper examines the foundational principles of Marxist thought — including the labor theory of value, alienation, and the necessity of proletarian revolution — before evaluating why Marx's major prophecies went unfulfilled. Drawing on Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center and broader postwar intellectual critiques, the essay argues that Marx erred both politically and sociologically, underestimating capitalism's capacity for reform and the emergence of a worker-entrepreneur class in free societies.
The paper demonstrates claim-then-refutation structure: it presents Marx's arguments on their own terms before systematically identifying where the predictions diverged from historical outcomes. This approach is especially effective in evaluative essays because it shows the writer has engaged seriously with the original theory rather than constructing a straw man.
The essay opens with a framing observation about Marx's prophetic reputation, moves into a summary of Marxist class theory and the Manifesto's central claims, then devotes the bulk of its argument to explaining why those claims failed — politically, sociologically, and historically. A dedicated concluding section uses the Great Depression as a capstone counterexample. The structure is linear and thesis-driven, appropriate for an undergraduate-level argumentative essay.
Marx has been called the last of the great Jewish prophets, and it is easy to see why. His epic depictions of the feats of the bourgeoisie in the first section of the Manifesto seem to describe the workings of today's global economy far more accurately than they describe the Europe of his own day (Brooke, 1998).
It is true that a century and a half later the social order has come to resemble a few of his predictions — though others not at all — but this hardly marks him as a co-discoverer of social science, unless we admit that all social science is little more than guesswork.
Karl Marx taught that the world was divided into two powerful classes: the "proletariat" (the working class) and the "bourgeoisie" (the wealthy ruling class). Marxism sees the proletariat and bourgeoisie as engaged in a direct and ongoing struggle, in which capitalists exploit workers and workers in turn resist that exploitation — the foundational principle behind modern organized labor. Marx's scientific socialism combined his economics and philosophy — including his theory of value and the concept of alienation — to demonstrate that throughout human history a profound struggle has developed between the "haves" and the "have-nots" (omegaletter.com, 2005).
Marx claimed he had discovered the laws of history — laws that expose the contradictions of capitalism and the necessity of class struggle. The more advanced the capitalist economy becomes, Marx argued, the greater these contradictions and conflicts. The more capitalism creates wealth, the more it sows the seeds of its own destruction.
Ultimately, Marx believed, the proletariat would realize that it possessed the collective power to overthrow the few remaining capitalists and, with them, the entire system (omegaletter.com, 2005).
Marx and Engels described modern industrial society as one defined by class conflict between the wealthy and the working class. They argued that capitalism's productive capacity would cease to be compatible with the exploitative relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The working class would revolt — but it would be a different kind of revolution. Previous revolutions had simply transferred property to a new ruling class. Members of the proletariat, however, could not appropriate property in the same way. When they gained control through revolt, they would abolish all private ownership of property, and class distinctions would disappear.
Marx and Engels went on to argue that capitalism is inherently unstable and that this outcome was unavoidable. In all of this, one can only conclude they were wrong.
In the 150 years since the Communist Manifesto was published, many of its prophecies have been disproven by actual history. There are many reasons this may be the case. It is possible that some of the beliefs central to communist thought — including the labor theory of value — were simply mistaken.
The difficulty with Marx and Engels's ideas embedded in the Manifesto may be that they were wrong about which class would ultimately absorb all the others. They assumed that the proletariat would, in the end, seize the means of production and thereby destroy capitalism. What they did not foresee was that production would become less costly over time due to efficiencies of scale. Workers would become entrepreneurs in free, rather than communist, societies. The invention of computers and the accessibility of tools in the service industry would make small business a driving force in the economy (Mattson, 2005).
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