A Globalized Civilization: Ascendancy, Contradictions and Interdependence

Abstract

In their Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels detected a profound change in the human condition. Central to this transformation, they proclaimed, was a new social class, the proletariat, a class that would grow in importance even as “other classes decay and finally disappear”. As time progressed, however, it was the proletariat who withered away. Ascendant was a class of salaried professionals, many of whom were employed in the public sector. Rather than withering away as the “neo-liberalism” literature would indicate, the bureaucratic state and its agencies were also increasingly ascendant in the twenty-first century. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, government spending typically amounted to 40–50% of GDP. The modern bureaucratic state is thus just as much a feature of the new iteration of western civilization as capitalism. Contradictions also long characterized the relationship between the historic West and those drawn into its orbit after 1850. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, trade with African and Asian societies made inconsequential additions to European totals. If, however, Britain’s trade was India was of modest significance to Britain, it was of great significance to India. Like ripples in a pond, wrenching changes radiated along trade routes.