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Comment by yanowitz | Hacker News Reader

As were Marx and Engels, 175 years ago in the Communist Manifesto: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.”

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This was written in the context of European society moving from a relatively settled period to one of rapid change. Had they been writing during the Wars of Religion they would have made similar observations about "uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation", and "All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify".

You can point to a lot of periods in history where everything changes rapidly for at some points a couple of centuries before settling down again. It's hard to say if the modern period is unique or just another period of tumult between long stretches of calm. I'd caution against the notion that history is a science.

> It's hard to say if the modern period is unique or just another period of tumult between long stretches of calm.

Nobody can know the future, but some things are clear:

1. We are a lot more interconnected than in the past (every human civilization that wants to interact with others can do so... or was even forced do it, not very long ago).

2. We are a lot more self-aware than in the past, en masse.

3. We are a lot more structured in our large scale scientific approaches, and we have a lot more science centers working in parallel, widely distributed around the world.

Assuming peaceful conditions and no Venus-style global warming, things will stay hectic for the foreseeable future.

I'm not sure how you would measure something like self-awareness.

I don't think interconnectedness presages rapid social change. We could just as easily settle into a sort of long quiet period where people are more or less accustomed to the way society is organized and institutions have been reformed to adapt to present day issues. After the industrialization of the 1early 9th century there was a fairly stable social arrangement until WWI swept everything off the map. It isn't impossible to imagine a situation where WWI didn't happen and the Belle Époque stretched for a long period of time.

> After the industrialization of the 1early 9th century there was a fairly stable social arrangement until WWI swept everything off the map.

That's one way to look at that period with rose tinted glasses :-)

There's a reason Marx & co wrote things during that time.

WW1 was just a more violent outburst of many frustrations, national, social, etc.

I’m not looking at it with any judgment positive or negative. I’m just saying it is imaginable that the institutions of the period could have persisted had WWI not happened.

Marx wasn’t writing during the late 19th century. The Revolutions of 1848 were the backdrop of their work.

> You can point to a lot of periods in history where everything changes rapidly for at some points a couple of centuries before settling down again. It's hard to say if the modern period is unique or just another period of tumult between long stretches of calm. I'd caution against the notion that history is a science.

Whether history is or isn't a science is completely orthogonal to how unique a period is.

The modern period is unique due to the amount of resources being exploited per capita being unprecedented compared to any other time in human history. Although in the future it's possible that that number will trend down, for the time being our current prosperity is only enabled by copious amounts of energy spent on modern conveniences, particularly infrastructure, appliances and utilities.

The ability to turn raw materials into resources and to generate energy is certainly unique so far, but it may turn out to be basically the norm going forward.

Were they, though?

If we need progress, and we do, because nobody wants to die (of disease, old age, whatever) and everyone wants a good life (not one doing backbreaking work or even doing dishes), then that means trying to progress is an inevitable aspect of being human, not a an aspect of the "bourgeois epoch".

It's not the bourgeoisie doing stuff, it's just us, humans.

So if we are progressing and we build upon progress, then progress accelerates, it's only natural, since we have more stuff to build on top of.

That's what's actually melting social conventions and perceived stability.

And I don't think anyone has a solution to this problem, yet.

"It's not the bourgeoisie doing stuff, it's just us, humans."

I think this is misunderstanding what Marx was trying to say here. Marx saw the bourgeoisie (fancy word for "owners", that's all) as a product of forces, not a cause.

The cause is the specific form of economic management / ownership in the current era -- capitalism. The structure of private property, or ownership of production by private entities; which unleashes the profit motive. Which rewrites and restructures everything in its path. Workers and owners are just doing what's required of them to keep feeding this furnace -- and their tummies.

Yes it's humans doing it. But they're doing it in the context of filling their stomachs. The point is that the way that they filled their stomachs changed. With consequences, good and bad.

Disagree strongly with this phrase "we are progressing"; this is value laden, and hand waving. There is definitely a motive force driving things -- profit extraction -- but the word "progress" implies inevitability and a singular direction as well as a positive aspect. I think we can be more scientific than that.

And yes, agreed, nobody has a solution. But I think Marx is among many who have a line of useful analysis about what this is.

I think about this quote -- especially the "melts into air" part -- often.

I do feel like Marx "slips up" a bit there with the "senses his real conditions of life"; this feels like "Younger Marx" of Manifesto/German-Ideology era and not older, mature, cynical Marx of "Grundrisse" and "Capital". I think the latter recognized that at no point are the "real conditions" visible or confronted, and that all is 'obscured' by ideology and the pursuit of market domination and exploitation.

The words of "Younger Marx" there were easily twisted and exploited by people with awful motives and means and brutal simple minds. Later Marx ... they didn't understand.

Their diagnosis was okay, it's the proposed cure people have a problem with.

There's actually very little written by Marx or Engels on any kind of proposed "cure". Marx himself reacted very negatively to the idea of "writing recipes for cook-shops of the future." He didn't think it possible, nor desirable, to draw up plans.

The "cures" in the 20th century were on the whole written by people with far simpler minds and uglier motives. Their actions don't take away from the value of Marx as an analyst and critic of capitalism.

What little they did write in the Manifesto did plenty of damage all on its own, and it served as a step-by-step guide for most of history's failed communist states. (Particularly the bits of making "despotic inroads" on the existing systems)

I don't disagree, but I also think much has been lost in translation between 19th century phrases and language and conventions vs now. Context of the time was revolutions in the context of a mix of brutal 19th century monarchies/dictatorships, proto-capitalist/mostly agrarian economies, and brutal badly regulated industrial capitalisms.

The phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" in particular has a very unfortunate history and ... interpretation.

It is certainly a novel way to look at what Marx wrote.

I assume you are overlooking the little things like the abolition of private property, or central planning of the economy on purpose?

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