Marx's prescient predictions for the 21st century

As others have noted, the few quotes from Marx/Engels that are given in the article are apparently about the past/present, not predictions of the future. He/they were describing what was happening at the time (in fact in a few cases they were stating commonplace observations already made by other writers).

I find the third “prediction” particularly strange:

Marx wrote those words in 1848, when globalization was over a century away

Ah yes, that golden age before globalisation. America was building itself into an economic powerhouse by trading voraciously with every inhabited continent on Earth, just as Europe and Asia had been doing for centuries. China was already trading with the Mediterranean as far back as the 1st century AD, and Britain was enthusiastically drinking imported Italian wine hundreds of years before the Romans invaded.

The cultural exchange aspects of globalisation were also commonplace in Marx’s day. It was a big deal among the Victorians to study Eastern “wisdom”, turn vegetarian, smoke exotic herbs, translate the Koran or Mahabharata, go looking for parallels between world religions, identify Krishna with Jesus, etc. Such things were long thought classy and progressive. The 1960s take on this was practically a revival (swinging London in the '60s inherited both Victorian garb and Victorian-style championing of Indian culture and mysticism).

Marx himself almost certainly sipped his tea from a China cup, and a vast army of African slaves had only recently been declared free by the British, a question the US would not finally confront for a few decades yet.

But no, there was none of that nasty globalisation, no sirree.

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