Author: Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels
Year: 2018 (1848)
Publisher: Modernista
Language: Swedish (translator unknown)
In November
1842, 22-year-old Friedrich Engels was on his way to Manchester, where his
father ran a successful cotton mill, to finish his internship which would
introduce him to the family business and prepare him for a professional life in
the cotton industry. As a young idealist, he had already read some of the
modest and little known publications of Karl Marx and as his journey to England
happened to go via Cologne, where at the time Marx was the editor-in-chief of
the daily newspaper Rheinische Zeitung, he decided to pop in. This would be the first time he and Karl Marx met in person and the beginning of a life-long
friendship, and philosophical and political cooperation.
Six years
later, the London-based Communist League commissioned the two, who were members
and co-founders of the League, to write a “declaration of faith” for the
communist party. As an atheist ideology, the term “faith” was subsequently
abandoned and in 1848, shortly before the attempted revolutions in France and
Germany, the pair published “Kommunistiska manifested” (“The Communist Manifesto”),
or as it is more accurately named: “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei”
(“Manifesto of the Communist Party”).
To be
honest, I hesitated a while to write about this work. Few pieces of political
literature are as divisive as the Communist Manifesto. It is a short book more
akin to a pamphlet. I read most of it
during a lunch break. Its brevity, however, was fully intended. It must be
understood when reading the Manifesto that it is not a philosophical essay; it
is a call to arms. It is agitation, not philosophy. It is designed not to
appeal to the intellect, but to the emotions.
Having said
that, its ideological roots are certainly implanted in rich philosophical soil
which would later produce more elaborate and valuable pieces of academic
literature, climaxing with the legendary “Das Kapital”. It is therefore of
immense importance, that this text be read carefully and with a critical mind. I
do not in any way claim to have the intellectual capacity to do that adequately
but I still allow myself to jot down the following notes. Please do not base
your school essay on them.
Here it
goes! Marx and Engels open with a bold statement. “The history of all hitherto
existing society is the history of class struggles”. They then go forth on a
historical exposition where they claim that the class struggle between
patricians and plebeians in ancient times, and lords and serfs in the medieval
era, is continued in our day and age by the bourgeoisie and the proletariat respectively.
The argument goes that one group oppresses the other by accumulating capital.
The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Both groups participate in the
production of goods and wealth, the difference being that the former brings capital and the latter labour to the table. The continued argument is that the
capitalist process will make the capital-owning elite more and more exclusive
and the wage-earning proletariat more and more numerous as time passes.
However, in
order to usurp the workers, the capitalists need to make a minimum investment
into them. Most essentially, they need to keep enough of them alive to populate
their factories and plants. Then they need to train them and they need to
provide them with tools and equipment. In so doing, the bourgeoisie will by
necessity put the weapons in the hands of the proletariat and the revolution
will be inevitable.
In the
second chapter, Marx and Engels claim that the Communist Party differs from the
other workers’ movements of the time (NB workers’ movement is not synonymous
with Socialism as is specified in chapter three) only in the respect that Communism does not allow itself to be
constrained by national borders. Workers, as Marx and Engels say, need to deal
with their own domestic bourgeoisie first and foremost, but as an ideology and
as a community, the proletariat is cosmopolitan. In fact, the authors go so far
as to claim that there is no philosophical or ideological basis for Communism
at all as it is simply a general expression of reality and a natural response
to the world system as it is. The response is not to abolish ownership of
property, but to abolish bourgeois ownership of property specifically. By this, Marx and
Engels specify that ownership of goods and valuables as a result of work is
perfectly acceptable. It is wealth generated by capital that they oppose since
it is in their definition the fruit of other people’s work and therefore the instrument
for oppression. My understanding is that all accumulation of the means of
production, such as land, machines, buildings, infrastructure, etc need to be
owned jointly by the people, whereas personal belongings such as clothes,
jewellery, toys, pets etc may have individual owners. To a certain extent.
The
Manifesto contains a list of “generally applicable measures” by which such abolition
private property can come about.
“1.
Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national
bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of
the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the
bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil
generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies,
especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition
of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution
of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory
labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial
production, &c, &c.”*
The third
chapter is dedicated to the literary heritage of the various coeval socialist movements
that Marx and Engels identify and which they forthwith reject. They group the
different kinds of socialist thinking into three main categories: Reactionary
socialism, Conservative or Bourgeois socialism, and Critical-Utopian socialism.
This is generally the least well-known part of the Manifesto, probably because much
of the literature and many of the ideologies that produced it have since then disappeared
into oblivion.
In a day
and age, such as ours, where an increasingly vocal minority of cognitively
impaired Swedish voters seek what can only be described as a form of
masochistic gratification through rendering themselves fools in the eyes of the
educated masses, it may be useful to dwell for a moment on the third chapter of
the Manifesto. Marx and Engels here make a commendable effort to differentiate
Communism from other forms of Socialist movements. The feeling is mutual, as
Socialists in general and Social Democrats in particular, have for well over a
century considered Communism one of their main adversaries. It is therefore
useful to hear Marx and Engels elaborate on this contrariety from their
perspective.
The fourth
and final chapter is just a couple of pages long. It drives home the point that
wherever there are workers ready to revolt against the oppression of the
capital-owners, there will be communists. Although Germany is stated as the
main battleground for the Proletariat in Marx’ and Engels’ days, the final
chord is a call for action to all workers around the world: “Working Men of All
Countries, Unite!”
Any
critical reader will soon react to the fact that this short work is rife with
blanket statements and unfounded claims. From the outset, the two authors
venture into murky waters and suggest that class struggle is a universal
phenomenon. They do nothing to substantiate their claim and it is fair to argue
that this is a problematic statement. As different societies organise themselves
and their production in different ways, and the ownership of the production
functions varies, so will the set-up of the hierarchy. As one obvious example,
the fundamental thesis of the Communist Manifesto affords no space for
spiritual/religious oppression unless it is connected to the distribution of
capital. Nor do they actually care to
define the terms “Bourgeoisie” and “Proletariat”, and instead leave it to the
reader to deduce the meaning from the rest of the text. Perhaps the terms were
so well established in the 1840s that such a definition seemed superfluous. Friedrich Engels had previously written “The
Principles of Communism” in which the Proletariat was defined as “... that
class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not
draw profit from any kind of capital” or what in modern days would be called
”wage earners” which would hence include the large majority of what we today
consider a rather well-to-do middle class in most advanced economies. This is
helpful to us, but wouldn’t have been to the readers in 1848 as Engels’ work remained
unpublished until 1914.
Another
problematic term is ”ownership” or ”propriety” which are also decidedly
European-American concepts and which have no or vastly different meanings in
other social or cultural constructs (see e.g. Keen, Ian (2013). The language of
possession: Three case studies. Language in Society, 42(2),
187-214.) I also recommend a thorough reading of Bronislaw Malinowski’s
research on the Kula-trade in the Trobriand archipelago. For a phenomenon to be
so fundamental to a theory and, perhaps more decisive still, to a revolution,
it is lamentably inadequate not to define it more precisely than Marx and
Engels do.
Extrapolating
on that, in an effort to connect me to my final note, Marx and Engels say
nothing about what sort of political system they want to institute after the
Communists have toppled the current state of things? What governmental
institutions do they propose to uphold the new rule? The well-known term “Dictatorship
of the Proletariat” is never used in the Manifesto and was coined later by one
of Marx’ disciples. Although the text is both poignant and verbose on the point
of what the Communist revolution is against, it has precious little to say
about what it wants instead. A possible explanation to why the authors find no
reason to elaborate on this point may perhaps be found in their argument that
the developments they advocate are inevitable. “Its [the bourgeoisie]
fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.” One may surmise that the results
are expected to be organic, too.
Marx and
Engels go on to write that “The immediate aim of the Communists is the
same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat
into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power
by the proletariat.” If the proletariat is aiming at the conquest rather than
abolition of political power, then anarchy is off the table. We saw in chapter
2 what measures a Proletarian government may apply. High taxes, expropriation
of capital, free education, etc . All of this requires some sort of
administration.
The age-old
defence against the argument that whenever it has been tried, Communism has
irrefragably failed is “Has it ever really been tried, though?” This response
from left-wing sympathisers is routinely shrugged off as an attempt to move the
goalposts, but as I read the Manifesto, the question does have some merit. One
would no doubt be right to argue that the ten bullet-points in Chapter 2 were
actually implemented to greater or lesser degree in the USSR and that therefore
passing a verdict is fair. Yet, the very next sentence that follows the list in
the Manifesto complicates this argument:
“When,
in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all
production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the entire nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political
power, properly so-called, is merely the organised power of one class for
oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie
is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if,
by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such,
sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with
these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class
antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own
supremacy as a class.”
No community or nation where Communism has been tried, ever
reached this point. The state has in no instance been dissolved, the class
struggle never ended. Small elites of power-hungry men and women have continued
to exploit the populations, and capitalst elites have been replaced with
proletarian elites, the same way the bourgeois elite once ousted the
aristocracy. Historical conclusions, in fact, seem to land closer to the
thinking of Marx’ and Engels’ contemporary socialist activist and antagonist Louis
Auguste Blanqui who rejected the idea of a public uprising and instead favoured
the concept that a dedicated and highly qualified task force topple the
government and establish a rule on behalf of the proletariat. Marxism could
thus be said to have indeed failed, not so much because it was implemented and found
unfruitful, but rather because it has proven impossible to implement in the
first place.
*Quotes are
from Samuel Moore’s translation to English from 1888.
