Forecasts of K. Marx and F. Engels on the Post-Capitalist Future: The Test of Time

Abstract

The modern world has entered a complex controversial era of changing economic systems, clearly visible in a variety of new phenomena. These include the completion of industrialization in developed countries with the development of the third industrial revolution and the entry into the era of technology development of the Fourth industrial revolution. Such a change resolves the fundamental contradiction of capitalism that has reached a critical level, in the author's interpretation, on the side of the productive forces acting as an environmental crisis, on the side of industrial relations – inequality in income and property. In the era of changing economic systems, it is appropriate to ask a question about the relevance of classical forecasts regarding the future of capitalism, and there are two such in their scientific heritage. The first of them is the well–known socialist one, set out in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, published in 1848, and, on the contrary, the forecast about the «transformation of the capitalist mode of production into an associated one,» which Marx outlined very succinctly, but clearly and unambiguously in the third volume of Capital. The followers of the classics picked up the first forecast, contrary to their expectations, which never took place in the history of capitalism in developed countries, addressed directly to them by the classics, but implemented in semi-feudal Russia. However, the age of socialism turned out to be short-lived in it, but the reasons for its fleeting death are not fully realized to this day. And on the contrary, the second forecast took place: capitalism underwent such a transformation at the stage of mastering the second industrial revolution and even more – the third. Let's try to figure out how popular a socialist forecast can be in modern conditions. This is also relevant in view of the steady increase in state ownership, which abolishes the monopoly of private ownership forms inherent in capitalism and contributes to the increasing role of the state as a macroeconomic entity.