Karl Marx never visited America, and as a young man at a moment of political fervor in quasi-feudal Europe, he could not foresee the resilience of new, industrializing political economies like ours to adapt and thrive for another century or two. But in 1848 he absolutely nailed the new condition of perpetual, contagious reinvention that America most purely exemplified. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish [this] epoch from all earlier ones,” twenty-nine-year-old Marx and his
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