It was Descartes who was accused of splitting the world in two, between the material and the spiritual. In accord with a trend that began in the Renaissance, Descartes had inadvertently and finally delegated the indigenous knowledge of the artisan to the wood shops of history.

As industrialization and farm mechanization drove rural to urban migration in the nascent modern economies of the Industrial Age, traditional farm families and guildsmen abandoned their lands and workshops, their fate sealed in the pull of a lever, the motion of a sewing machine, the hum of industrial factories; the factory succeeded in removing the human element from the final, mass-produced deliverable.

Even in the earliest days of industrialization, incisive writers like Karl Marx realized the undemocratic nature of a world where the owners of capital (in this case the heavy machinery) were able to economically wed the urban masses to their industrial machines.

In the United States the tension has always existed between a society on the one hand rabidly individualistic and unwavering in its commitment to democracy (rhetorically at least), and on the other an economy that enslaved the creative mind within the mass production facilities of America’s mega-corp.

And with the masses enslaved to the rote motion of factory levers and the incessant clicking of sewing machines, they were more easily manipulated, more easily convinced into accepting the undemocratic injustices of a poorly structured society. Sure they were restless from time to time. They created things like unions, pensions, and minimum wage, but throughout the history of the modern, industrial age the fundamental relationship between capital and labor remained the same.

Sundering the link between the common man and woman (and their communities) from the means of production had far-reaching consequences for the liberal movement. For liberalism, in its classic, Enlightenment form, had very little to do with the welfare state or a woman’s right to choose. Liberalism (the philosophy of Locke, Jefferson, and Adam Smith) had more to do with the liberation of the individual through reason and the study of Nature.

Once the means of production were concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie, a critical element to individual and communal liberation was removed from the equation. To protect profit-making processes and equipment, closed and proprietary systems became the rule of the industrial economy, putting the human aspiration of autonomy well beyond the reach of the average citizen or community.

This is not to suggest that Marx had it right. What most people don’t realize is that Marx’s writings (as enshrined in his voluminous work Das Kapital) are an exhaustive analysis of capitalist markets and their relation to issues of class, democracy, equality and social economics. Marx’s analysis of capitalism is much more instructive than his belief in Hegelian polemics and historical imperatives; the nebulous nature of his writings on the actual practice and implementation of communist economies gave people like Lenin, Stalin, Castro and Mao a free hand to model communism based on state-centered, totalitarian personality cults.

Nevertheless, Marx’s critique of the industrial economy remains relevant to this day. For capitalism itself wasn’t responsible for the source of Marx’s class war. It was the ability of the bourgeoisie to concentrate the means of production (and later the channels of information) into their own hands that caused Marx such great anxiety. Thus the source of class conflict was, in many ways, technological.

At his core, Marx, like Jefferson and Locke, was a liberal in classic fashion; he too believed that rational human-beings would foment democratic revolution and individual liberation. For Marx, however, this would be achieved in a radical way: through state-imposed economic equality, thus giving the proletarian masses equal access to capital and technology.

Paradoxically, Marx believed that top-down, state-centric reform would liberate humanity from the oppressive burden of government, arguing that socialism was the final step before true anarchy. According to Marx, pure social and economic equality would eliminate the need for a state destined to “wither away” in the inexorable winds of historical imperative.