A young Karl Marx |
In August I gave a talk on the Communist Manifesto at an
event organised by Counterfire in Newcastle. I have just got around to
collating my notes into readable form. I built my presentation, which focused
especially on themes of history and class struggle in the Manifesto (two other
sessions addressed different aspects), around a series of quotations from the
original text. Here we go...
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Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a manifesto
for the Communist League in late 1847. Economic crisis had affected much of
Europe in the previous couple of years. Revolution was in the air. Communists
were making connections across borders and beginning to get organised, but were
still small in number. The opening line of the Manifesto - ‘A
spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.’ – was more wishful
thinking than accurate description.Engels had drafted something in rather dry question-and-answer form, but it was Marx who turned this – in the space of a few weeks at the start of 1848 – into what would become the most widely-read, influential and famous political pamphlet ever published. It was the culmination of several years’ intellectual and political development in Marx’s thinking, an attempt to state clearly what communists stood for.
There was a culture of secret and conspiratorial societies at the time, but Marx and Engels rejected this. If the emancipation of the working class is to be the act of the working class, there is little purpose served by secrecy. Ideas must be stated openly and persuasively.
By the time it was published, revolution had broken out in a number of parts of Europe – 1848 would turn out to be an historic year of revolutionary upheaval, though most of it defeated. The Manifesto in fact turned out to be something quite different to what might be expected. It almost entirely avoided specific policy prescriptions. It contained a broad survey of historical development rather than keeping its attention trained on present politics. It was expressed in often powerful, even poetic, language.
At the core of the Manifesto is a particular conception
of history and how change happens: an understanding of society as being divided,
fundamentally, into classes, and history as a succession of class societies
(and class struggles). Marx writes:
'The
history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to
one another.’This is an important starting point: class is the main dividing line in society. This is not unique to capitalism , but rather has been true for thousands of years. It is a division that inevitably engenders conflict too.
Marx then provides a sweeping survey of the development
of early capitalism, moving on to the era of industrial capitalism through
which he was living:
'Society
as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two
great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From
the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest
towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were
developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh
ground for the rising bourgeoisie.’
So, capitalism grew out of an earlier feudal society.
Merchant capitalism increasingly replaced feudal relations, and in turn this
grew into industrial capitalism. A new urban elite developed: the bourgeoisie.
Although Marx refers to ‘two great classes’, this shouldn’t be taken to
indicate anything about their size: the proletariat, those who do the work, are
far greater in number than those who live off the surplus their labour
produces. Marx specifically traces the growth of industry:
‘Steam
and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture
was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle
class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies,
the modern bourgeois.’
This kind of language is almost celebratory – and the
tone often surprises first-time readers, expecting virulent denunciation of
capitalism’s evils from the beginning. Of course Marx doesn’t leave it there,
but he does take time to extol the progress represented by capitalism’s
development. He writes of the revolutionising role played by capitalism, its
economically dynamic quality and the way that overturns many established
certainties:
‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their
train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all
new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid
melts into air.’
Marx and Engels had first met a few years earlier (and
went on to be lifelong collaborators). In 1844 Engels wrote ‘The Condition of
the working class in England’ about the impact of industrial capitalism on the
living and working conditions of those drawn into the newly mushrooming cities.
It was an ugly and unromantic picture. Marx and Engels had no illusions about
the often grim reality of industrial capitalism for the proletariat, the
working class.
What they grasped was how capitalism accelerated the pace
of technological and economic change, went together with the growth of major
cities and created greater opportunities for wealth (largely concentrated,
though, among a tiny class of those who owned and controlled the means of
production).
The development of the modern nation state went together
with the growth of capitalism. This was a deeply contested process. The
English, American and French revolutions were all, whatever their differences,
about the rising bourgeois class asserting itself against the barriers
inherited from late feudalism. Political revolutions, with varying degrees of
success, accompanied the economic changes. Marx wrote:
‘Independent,
or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments,
and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one
government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and
one customs-tariff.’
1848 was itself a year of bourgeois revolution. Although
mostly unsuccessful, the uprisings left their mark – and in the decades that
followed there was much greater political unification and centralisation in
many parts of Europe, (limited) advances in democratic reform, the
strengthening of modern state institutions (e.g. police forces), and so on.
But capitalism did something else, something enormously
important for Marx, Engels and their comrades in the small Communist League. It
created the working class. It brought together large numbers of workers in
factories, mills and elsewhere - a process that was dangerous for the
capitalists:
‘The
advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces
the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary
combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore,
cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces
and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all,
are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are
equally inevitable.’
There is a lot packed in to this quotation. Firstly, it
is identifying that growing industry brought turned people who had previously
worked on the land, or perhaps as artisans, into workers - wage-labourers
dependent on selling their labour power to the capitalist to make a living.
Secondly, proletarianisation (working class formation) is a collective process,
bringing workers together in combination. So, too, is proletarian resistance to
capitalism a collective matter. Workers’ power is not as individuals, but as a
collective force. Finally, this
collective power of workers is so potentially great that it can defeat the
bourgeoisie and end capitalism, a system that has paradoxically created its own
gravedigger.
Marx’s account of history, specifically the rise and
development of capitalism (and the potential for moving from capitalism to
socialism), therefore has class division at its heart, but also an awareness of
the centrality of class struggle. The division into classes, and the
exploitation at the heart of class relationships, inevitably generates conflict
over what is produced and how the surplus wealth is allocated.
But Marx also had interesting things to say about the
battle of ideas in society, and how that is shaped by material realities.
Imagining himself addressing the bourgeois class, he wrote:
‘The
selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature
and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production
and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the
progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class
that has preceded you.’
This is a brutal warning and a reality check. Every
ruling class imagines its own ideas and values to be a kind of ‘common sense’:
universal values, taken for granted and seemingly obvious. In fact ideas change
over time. The dominant ideology of one age may later seem antiquated. Changing
ideas are shaped by material changes in the conditions of society: ‘the social
forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property’.History moves forward. Material production – the forces and relations of production – changes over time. So, with it, do the dominant ideas change:
‘What
else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes
its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas
of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’
Marx points here to another vital aspect of ideology: it
is the ideas of the ruling elite that are universalised as the ideas of a whole
society. Whether through control of state religion, or schools and
universities, or the media, the ruling class – the tiny elite possessing wealth
and power – asserts its own ideas and values.
Yet there is no fatalism in the Manifesto. Running
through it is an acute consciousness of historical change – transformation
indeed – and the potential for further transformation in the future. The
working class, identified as the collective agent of transformation, is not
doomed to be tied to the ruling ideology. It is driven to resist by
exploitation.
The working class is gathered together in large numbers
and can organise collectively. Writing against the backdrop of Chartism, a mass
working class movement coming to its end in 1848, Marx and Engels were aware of
what was possible. There had been the earliest examples of strike action by the
1840s. There had been early efforts at building trade unions.
The class that can organise and resist collectively, can
also set about creating a new world – one characterised by co-operation,
equality and democracy, not the rule of the few over the many. There is little
detail on what a communist or socialist society might look like, but this is a
starting point:
‘In place
of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall
have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for
the free development of all.’
So communism is, ultimately, to be a classless society. And
in that state of equality and interdependence lies the potential for human
development and liberation. But there’s also recognition that such a future
vision must be linked to current struggles, if it is to be anything more than a
utopian dream. Marx succinctly outlines the tasks of communists:
‘In
short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against
the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they
bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no
matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour
everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all
countries.’
Three points here, all of them acutely relevant as the
Manifesto was circulated amidst growing revolutionary tumult in 1848:
communists support democratic or bourgeois revolutions (whatever their
limitations might be), working class economic and social interests (‘the
property question’) must always be forefront, and the movement must be
international, uniting workers across national boundaries and opposing a common
enemy. Class, not nationhood, is what unites us.
The Manifesto ends, then, with these stirring words:
‘The
proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!’
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