Strong makes an interesting point that ideas of socialism inevitably arise after the bourgeois revolution, with comments how "abolition of poverty [is] already technically possible" and references to the productive forces "released" by "science and technical knowledge" which "seem adequate to abolish poverty, yet which at present give increasing unemployment, economic crises, and wars."

Given a huge increase in productivity of use-values resulting from modern industry, there were two perceptions about the abundance of use values, based on the observer's class position:

• To the bourgeois, the possibility of immense personal wealth not known in prior epochs.
• To the proletarian, the possibility to reduce working hours and increase the general standard of living.

On this second point, I think this is the essential basis of modern socialism. Certainly there were historical, "primitive" forms of "communalism" or society founded on common property. But this bourgeois era of human history entails a specific form of this idea, called socialism, which is intrinsically linked to the abundance deriving from modern industry. It is worth pausing to contemplate a world prior to modern industry, because it was not always technically possible to produce so much that a high standard of living is possible for every human being. Only when this is possible, ideas of socialism proliferate.