Yet Marx and Engels themselves provided ample reason to doubt that what they called the “pre-history” of the species would end in a Götterdämmerung of disenchantment. It was never clear that the reduction of the workers to industrial servitude would result in revolution, as money, that “god among commodities,” exercised a potent and increasingly untrammeled authority in capitalist society. If all traditional sources of moral and ontological truth were pulverized in the course of capitalist development—if indeed, as they proclaimed in the Manifesto, “all that is solid melts into air, all that
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