Marx knew for a fact capitalism worked , and based his entire idea of the evolution of socialism on it . So what is your point ? There is no paradox . Marx and Engels spent most of the opening chapter of the Communist Manifesto talking up the enormous development that capitalism made possible . This , they argued , was what would enable socialism Capitalism tore apart the old bonds and traditions , and laid bare the economic exploitation and at the same time enables a level of economic growth never before seen . Marx argued strenuously that socialism would first be possible in an advanced capitalist economy exactly for this reason . In The German Ideology , written a few years before the manifesto , he arged paraphrased that a prerequisite for a socialist revolution was sufficient wealth that redistribution would not make want common , as if it did , it would just cause the class struggle to start all over again . In the Manifesto itself , he makes clear that the evolution of capitalism both is the enabling factor that brings sufficient development to make socialism economically viable , and the factor that due to the capitalist mode of production ends up pushing too far and creating sufficient need to in his mind make a socialist revolution inevitable . Subsequent reformist socialists what became social democrats built on this by arguing that the wealth produced by capitalism would be sufficient that substantial improvements could be brought gradually , through reforms . Socialism whether revolutionary or reformist was from the very start built on the premise that capitalism would deliver an enormous degree of economic growth . The issue is not that capitalism doesn ' t work in an economic sense , but what effect it has on workers . The entire cooperative movement is based on the further refinement of this idea that workers themselves can extract much of this value by building businesses that behave differently . If capitalism doesn ' t work in ecomic terms , then socialism is impossible . Socialism is either in Marxist terms the next stage after capitalism or in social democratic terms the foundation on which we build our reforms . Perhaps they are hypocritical in what methods they use I don ' t bother reading them much , so I don ' t know , but there is no paradox there .