Whatever you may think of their political conclusions, there can be little doubt that Marx and Engels saw what was coming. They were present at the birth of the modern world – and declared the newborn to be a monster. Nascent “bourgeois” society, they said, threatened to dissolve not just the old social and economic order, with its roots in class and tradition, but also religion, and all moral and social codes too, “in the icy water of egotistical calculation”, as they put it in their 1848 Communist Manifesto. The freedoms humans had hitherto cultivated through active engagement in the institutions of civic life would be replaced by that “single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade”, stripping man of all connections bar those forged through “callous cash payment”. Every occupation “hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe” would be “stripped of its halo”, and “the physician, lawyer, priest, poet and man of science” alike converted into capitalism’s “paid wage labourers”.
The family, too, would be uprooted and pulled apart by the growth of the world market and the individualist ideology it would inevitably give rise to. The forces