The germ of the idea that society should be organized around the downtrodden was developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-nineteenth century. In The Communist Manifesto they argued that it was possible and desirable to build a radically egalitarian society. We would do so from a place of cooperation, not competition. Socialism would take us from our current system of capitalist meritocracy to communist utopia. While Marx and Engels described the worker overthrow of the government in economic and social terms, revolution had a spiritual meaning, too: “the total redemption of
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