I was just reading this interview with Thomas Barnett, who makes an interesting point:
Say Marx and possibly also Engels tour the U.S. before writing some of their most well-known works. How does this change their writings, and how socialism develops in the decades and centuries ahead?
Marx was right. Back in the 1840s, he said that capitalism is going to sweep the planet, just crush everything in its way. It’s just that it took a certain type of capitalism to do it—not the European version, not colonialism. It took an American-style, truly liberal, free-trade version. It took political adaptations that Marx considered impossible to achieve. Marx was diagnosing capitalism on the basis of Europe in the nineteenth century. He saw castes, he saw elites, he saw viscounts and dukes and duchesses. He said this is never going to work. But if he’d come to America, he would have seen that this is the place where anybody comes, anybody joins. The synthetic identity is crucial to us. We are a version of globalization before globalization.
Say Marx and possibly also Engels tour the U.S. before writing some of their most well-known works. How does this change their writings, and how socialism develops in the decades and centuries ahead?