[Alan]

Sorry, I should have responded to this earlier. I guess you already delivered the paper but if it helps you in the future here are some things:

In my harshest criticism, you didn't accomplish what you wanted to do. You explained Marx's basic ideas, and how capitalism is only historically contingent, but you didn't explain why.
Capitalism is undesirable for the majority of the people, so they will want its end, and then it will be replaced with socialism according to Marx, but why would this happen? We see it's desirable but how would it be possible? And if it's possible, why hasn't it happened yet?
That would be the real essence of a paper on the self-destruction of capitalism.


But if it didn't have to be specifically about that, it's a good paper. It reads like a wikipedia entry, which to me, unless you're making a dissertation, is a good quality, not a bad one.
If you want to put more depth in it but still keep it well within the grasp of any reader, you could expand on Marx's philosophy as a materialist extension of Hegel. Your paper sounds very American. "Why must this happen? Because it's good that it does." Karl Marx would say something more within the likes of "Why must this happen? Because it's the only logical direction capitalism can follow."
The former is pragmatist, the latter is Hegelian. Don't think of them as dichotomous, but amending the former with the latter would take away the vague idealism of it ("We want liberty and equality") and anchor it to humankind's real historical development ("THIS is what liberty means. THIS is what equality means. And we want it now.")
That difference would also be a good way of brushing off the claims that Marx was utopian, when in fact there was a whole branch of socialism rightly called utopian socialism, and Marx was one of their biggest critics.

Other things would be to specify what "oppression" really means. It's not as simple as it seems.
You could also further expand on the role of the bourgeoisie in capitalism and socialism. Marx didn't see the bourgeoisie as the enemy, so much as the existence of a bourgeoisie. The people who are born bourgeois have as much to win as the proletariat, but they won't be the ones to go against the structure - not as a class. They have much to win but they also have much to lose. The proletariat has nothing to lose.

Finally, going back to just capitalism, if you want to go further than just Marx, you could also talk about Lenin's idea of imperialism as the highest form of capitalism. Capitalism needs external markets for it to keep growing, because capitalism can't NOT grow. We see examples like the Opium Wars to open a whole new market.
So imperialism is desirable for capitalism, but what happens when the whole world is already one of empires and colonies? What happens when there's no more geographic space for capitalism to expand?
That was the main difference between Marx's times and Lenin's times. The world had already been claimed by the major powers. Capitalism would need a whole new strategy to stay alive, or to delay its impending suicide if you will. In the age of imperialism capitalism must go past primitive accumulation to survive.