Early in his life, Marx had perceived the prevailing social system as being so deeply flawed as to be irreparable. He was as impatient with utopian fantasies as he was with mere tinkering, and so he was driven to develop not only the intellectual forecast of bourgeois capitalism's necessary demise but also the plan of human action that would at once hasten that demise and school the revolutionary actors for the post-revolutionary task of constructing...