He envisioned a progression from a stateless society marked by chaos to the emergence of organized communities as nomadic groups settled due to agricultural developments.
With settlement came the division of labor, gender roles, and territorial boundaries, sparking disputes that birthed slave societies where vanquished people were subjugated.
Two years later, that idea was expounded in The Communist Manifesto:[2] The executive of the modern state is nothing but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
The modern French, English and American writers all express the opinion that the State exists only for the sake of private property, so that this fact has penetrated into the consciousness of the normal man.
This phenomenon was evident already in the first Italian commercial republics; later, since the last century, it showed itself to a marked degree in Holland, where the stock exchange speculator Pinto drew attention to it as early as 1750,[9] and now it is again occurring in England.
[10]By the early 1850s, political events in Europe, which he covered in articles for the New-York Daily Tribune as well as a number of more substantial pieces, were forcing Marx to modify his theory to allow considerably more autonomy for the state.
[12] It contends that the bourgeoisie found that the advantages of wielding direct power were under the circumstances outweighed by various costs and disadvantages, so they were willing to tolerate an aristocratic or despotic government as long as it did not act too detrimentally to their interests.
[13] Marx also suggests that it would be better for the bourgeoisie not to wield power directly because this would make their dominance too obvious, creating a clear target for proletarian attack.
Regarding France, he suggests that the bourgeoisie recognized that they had been better off under the monarchy (1830–1848) than during the brief period when they wielded power themselves (1848–1851) "since they must now confront the subjugated classes and contend against them without mediation, without the concealment afforded by the crown".