a question we might have asked Marx, if we had had the opportunity: ‘Since you believe that the productive forces will finally assert themselves, why did you bother to spend so many evenings going to meetings of the International Workingmen’s Association, rather than relaxing at home with your family?’ Marx might have answered that he enjoyed being the tool of history. More reasonably, he might have believed that although the productive forces would finally assert themselves anyway, the transition to the new communist era would come sooner if he helped the workers to get organized—and since
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