in order to unite and overthrow their oppressors. Those who deny this class character stand in the way of the development of this consciousness and so perpetuate the enslavement of the masses. Again, Marx does not provide any justification for his belief that reform must come from below beyond his theory of historical progress. Indeed, such reforms seem to have been fairly successful in improving the condition of workers. While there is still considerable suffering in the world, one would be hard-pressed to attribute this entirely to economic development. Indeed, most of the third world's problems stem from economic underdevelopment. Even in the developed world, the proletariat, insofar as one can claim its exists, is very limited. The middle-class has continued to grow while the lower class has remained relatively small. It is certainly not the social juggernaut, which Marx thought it would be. In any case, it is difficult to maintain that proletariat revolution is inevitable 150 years after an immediate revolution was predicted. There is a notable absence in Marx's list of contemporary rivals, the anarchists. These followers of the Russian social thinker Mikhail Bakunin were very active in the revolutionary movements of the mid 19th century. Marx does not include them because they are neither socialist nor communist. I bring them up to draw attention to a potentially problematic aspect of Marx's view, the role of government in effecting social change. As the name might suggest, anarchists desire the destruction of government altogether; a dictatorship of the proletariat is no better than the executive committee of the bourgeoisie. All government shackles humans unnaturally and creates the conditions for all kinds of inequities. If people were left to his or her own devices, the natural goodness of the human nature would reign and government would become irrelevant. The important question this challenge raises for Marx is why governmen...
