COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

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.