The Great Debate

Abstract

Decades before the invention of the light bulb, Marx and Engels had envisaged communism as arising in the most developed capitalist countries. Those societies would already have a huge accumulation of wealth and technology that the working class would appropriate to liberate itself from exploitation. In reality, the only countries that had attempted to construct socialism were underdeveloped, lacking large accumulations of capital for investment, advanced technology, and dominant industrial proletariats.