of modern economies...when it comes to solutions he makes a few bad predictions and then his followers took the theory straight off the rails. For instance the notion that social classes are clearly defined like opposing armies in the field, rather than fluid, evolving alignments of interest & habits. The idea that a modern nation-state could coexist without conflict with the aims of a workers' paradise. There's also the weird notion gleaned from Hegel that historical dialectic processes "resolve" themselves and that history has some kind of a natural end state. Hegel should've read more Chuang Tzu. Ditto Fukuyama.

Still, the notion that a general workers'/tenants' uprising is inevitable given the accumulation of wealth still seems possible to me; a conflict that has been deferred in our time by "outsourcing" labor to cultures undergoing their own versions of the industrial revolution. The crushing, subsistence-level manufacturing in our time is carried out by simple villagers recently driven from their customary rural ways of life by massive land enclosures, just as was the case in Marx's London. And just as in the 1840s, today's sweatshop laborers haven't been urbanized enough to be capable of organizing, unionizing, legislating in order to negotiate better conditions. But eventually, presumably, there will be no untapped pre-industrial populations left to exploit, workers of the world will be more or less acculturated and "united," and then the conflict will indeed have to be resolved.

Needless to say, organizing an armed and bloody revolution is not a good way to resolve it. And also needless to say, any resolution will not be the "end of history," but only another in the endless series of accomodations people make with each other and a changing world.

Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. -JH