How Did Marx And Engels Not Call For Moral Virtue

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t was for this reason that Marx and Engels did not call for moral renovation or virtue as the cure for embourgeoisment. The gap between material self-interest and collective good was the result of capitalist prosperity, not a lack of virtue; thus the only way to reverse embourgeoisment was to wait for time and the dynamics of capitalism to close the gap. Capitalism would not be able to sustain the workers in luxury, Marx and Engels believed, so the end of prosperity would drive the class again towards the collective interest. Thus when Engels said in
1858 that ‘the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois’ because of British imperialism, he added that ‘only a couple of thoroughly bad years might help here’. In 1852 he