[Translated from Gegenstandpunkt No. 2 1998]
If the old agitation writing of Marx and Engels had not turned 150 years old this year no rooster would have crowed today. However, the critical minds of the liberal public could not simply shut themselves to the fascination of the round-numbered year: reviews and critical appreciations of the early work by the "ancestral fathers of communism" stack up. Certainly, less than ever is anything held of their long-term consequences: Since Soviet power has dissolved, their system is increasingly considered only as a crime. However, the occidental spirit, as a winner of history, can find something again interesting in what it recently felt threatened by and therefore had to take more seriously than it would have liked:
“However now, because there is no longer a Marxism to be taken seriously, the opportunity exists to impartially consider the pages of the Marxist work, that which he surely got right." (Nicholas Piper, SZ 21.2.98)
With the greatest matter-of-factness this representative of the absolutely non-partisan and independent "fourth estate" confesses to party thinking in the service of his authority. As long as there was a really existing alternative to the marvelous system of market economy and democracy, the critical expertise residing in western editorial staff offices had absolutely no chance for an impartial analysis of left literature. At that time propaganda against the left system opponents was just a requirement of freedom. Now that the dangerous specter is past, one can first of all admit it calmly and secondly turn quite uninhibitedly to the question as to what the "specter" in the Communist Manifesto has to say to us today. The answers are appropriate.
Consensus prevails in the world of professional literary-criticism: Marx, he could write! With "almost biblical eloquence " the text which the two socialist agitators wrote 150 years ago should at least be “a masterpiece of the world literature" (Umberto Eco), "one of the most wonderful prose pieces of German literature of the 19th century" (Marcel Reich-Ranicki). A text, like a symphony: “It begins with a drumbeat, like the fifth of Beethoven" (Umberto Eco once more)... One can produce textual analyses page by page, one can ramble on about the "terse sentences" with their "creative eruptions" and "unforgettable aphorisms" (a specter haunts!, chains to lose... a world to win!), one can recommend the text as training material for advertising experts, allegedly because its compelling strength as literature cannot be ignored, without being keen on the contents of the writing at all. Never mind that this content cannot be ignored. The enthusiastic fuss over the motto: "They said it so beautifully!" is conceivably the furthest distance one could take from the old agitation writing. Because Marx and Engels did not want to write another poem, but to rouse the workers to a proletarian revolution.
Not only in the literary field, but also in the field of economics the authors of the Communist Manifesto are said to have performed magnificently. Avowed anti-communists discover in the Communist Manifesto:
Marx and Engels allegedly did not foresee the future of worldwide capitalism with crystal clarity and were, besides, sparing in their praise for its grandiose acts. Nevertheless, this is to have been an astonishing achievement when
“Industrial capitalism, only at the beginning of its own, extremely dynamic world revolution, was praised in the Communist Manifesto. " "In 30 pages the text correctly forecast the economic concentration process at the expense of the former petite bourgeois, small industrialists, craftsman and farmers. With the thundering voice of the Old Testament prophets it announced globalization 150 years ago." (Friedjof Meyer, Spiegel, 16.3.98).
"Capitalist globalization was never more grandly celebrated than when it had hardly begun in February 1848." (Mathias Greiffrath, Die Zeit, 5.2.98)
Even a business journal must pay tribute to the predictive power of Marxism:
" ... some of its predictions have been confirmed by developments and today can even be reread as descriptions of conditions in the editorials of bourgeois newspapers." (Hans Mundorf, HB 25.2.98)
Precisely in this first inflammatory piece of writing against international capitalism they want to constitute nothing less than their own idle chatter about globalization with its dangers and opportunities for the investment-site Germany. This enthusiasm from all the friends of the globalization ideology arises in view of the following passage:
"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations… In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations." (Quoted from Handelsblatt v. 25.2.98, but similarly found in all the other eulogies to the predictive Marx)
Further down in the business journal text:
"Could this not have been said by the president of the Federal Association of German Industry, Hans-Olaf Henkel, in one of his location speeches, namely not as a prediction, but as a warning to the reactionaries who still stick to autonomy in bargaining, to the welfare state, the nationality of a currency, the economic system and control system? And who in 1998 wants to contradict the statement of Marx from 1848 that there is a law of concentration in the economy, ' that the earlier petite bourgeois, the small industrialists' fall victim to the competition of the large-scale enterprises? In place of the industrial bourgeoisie steps big industry, the 'chiefs of whole industrial armies'."
No, we must not allow it to be repeated that old Marx’s text would deliver a successful speech model for today’s capitalist boss. As opposed to all the modern investor-location speakers and editorial writers who swear to a phenomenon called "globalization" that is supposed to be our fate and which nobody -- no politician, no entrepreneur, no trade union leader -- can avoid, and which leads, therefore, always to that small, primary capitalistic objective constraint: the terms of trade for capital must be improved, wages must be lowered drastically ... – as opposed to types like Henkel and Co., the Communist Manifesto designates, first of all, a subject which re-shapes the globe according to its conditions. When Marx writes: "the bourgeoisie [chases] over the entire surface of the globe", the capable modern friends of the "globalization debate" refer only selectively to: " ... if globe = chases over the surface of the globe = globalization = we all sit in the globalization trap = wages must go down then!" While the modern apologists of international capitalism want to know nothing of the active agents and beneficiaries of this mode of production but only affected persons, the Communist Manifesto explains, secondly, the necessity for the conflict of interests between capital and the working class. In a period in which the capitalist mode of production was imposed by force against the remnants of feudal interests, Marx and Engels recognized the nature of the new, irreconcilable conflict of interests that was established with the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal social order. They wanted to instigate the proletariat, a class of property-less wage-laborers who were only recently produced by the bourgeois revolution, to a battle against the new ruling class which "creates a world after its own image.” Because it was clear that a hitherto unseen barbarism was imposed internationally by the newly advancing mode of production:
“In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.”
Here Marx and Engels ventured not a prediction forecasting the economic and financial crises of the end of the 20th century, but appealed for battle against a social order in which the creation of wealth necessarily produces misery. A mode of production in which poverty is no longer the result of scarcity but the compulsive result of an unbridled increase of capitalist wealth. The monstrousness of this new relation of production was clear to them at the moment of the establishment of capitalist private property: It is based on the constantly reproduced exclusion of the masses without property from the wealth growing in never seen before dimensions which forces them as wage earners to work for their factory masters.
That with the victory of the bourgeoisie this new class conflict becomes all decisive, that before it "all that is solid melts into air" and all other social conflicts and problematic situations become secondary, the Communist Manifesto wanted to point out to the "proletarians of all countries". It was the demand that the masses involved in all kinds of struggles should not be the means for the immediately occurring struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal order, but should immediately make the transition to the all important class struggle against private property.
It demands a considerable level of illiteracy to read the old Communist Manifesto, which calls for the abolition of private property and an attack upon the capitalist relations of production, and to flatly eliminate Marx's diagnosis of class conflict and instead pick out a successful description of the difficult position of our current leading industrialists with their "location concerns."
But it gets even better: the economic expert of the business journal sighs for a "new Marx" so that he and the likes of him can find their way through the – always praised by him and his peers – "free play of the markets," which functions so marvelously without any design, as is well known, and corresponds so inimitably to human nature – or could at least receive a few tips on where investments are still worthwhile...
"Marx and Engels understood a lot about the economy of their time. If they lived today, they would probably not be communists, but liberals, that is, official professors of economic science. In this they would certainly have done better than to ceaselessly reproduce quotes of Adam Smith. However, perhaps they would have had the courage to look directly into the future and develop at least a theory of globalization. Because if production and consumption must always become cosmopolitan if the ground is pulled from beneath the feet of national industries, if all that is solid must melt into air, from the national currencies up to the national rate systems and social systems: Why is there no ‘general theory’ of such transformations? Why are there no concepts for what could take the place in Germany of autonomy in bargaining, how can social securities be financed with sinking wages, which transfer necessary services to Europe when the competition of currencies is repealed? And why must the world always be surprised by monetary crises like in South America, Mexico or the Asian tigers? Why is the available knowledge about the frailty of such governments always only after the fact and never in time?"
Certainly, the business journal writer was sure a few lines before that "Marx and Engels were certainly good diagnosticians, but incompetent therapists" – but what the hell: the small adjacent contradiction no longer occurs to a person who reports indifferently that the economic mode, whose one hundred percent supporter he is, functions according to laws which none of its participants or ideologists can see through. Therefore, to this nervous economic expert it is also completely natural that a "theory of globalization" never ever comes down to a fundamental criticism of an economy that produces such crazy conditions. No, market-economy realism is at home in the business journal, and for him "theory" is about the same as a concept for "socially acceptable lowering of labor costs" in the investment-location Germany or a few good tips for finance capital as to which "emerging market" the day after tomorrow will still be one... Such concepts are now really massively produced by "liberal economics professors" and economic research institutes; one should not have to dig out old Marx and give him too the status of a civil servant posthumously! But, strictly speaking, the man from the business journal sighs neither for a "theory of globalization" nor current economic concepts and predictions, but for an unbeatable strategy for the success of the economic location Germany in international competition. There he will probably be able to busy himself in the future also with his incessant whining that in view of the "free competition of the markets" one always knows only after the fact whether a business has been worthwhile or not. If in the improbable case that sometime he wants to know why this is, he should perhaps simply study a little Marxist theory...
This would also not harm another critical thinker who refers to having read not only the Communist Manifesto, but also Capital in order to then come to the following realization:
"At least Capital is, as even economists understand, not a program for the abolition of, but on the contrary a kind of Bible of capitalism, like many prophetic books in which the development of the world and economy becomes frighteningly exactly accounted for in advance, including globalization and money trade insanity. And insanity is thus only a journalistic gaffe; Marx, cool at heart, stated that this must be so. And the little word 'unfortunately' is not even used, anyhow not in Capital. The analytic part of the Communist Manifesto is also not stupid. If only its peculiar concluding sentence was not: 'Proletarians of all countries, unite!' Yes, for what then, heaven?" (Rainer Stephan, SZ 3.3.98)
Quite stupid, the analytic part. But we gladly spell out one more time for the illiterates of all countries: this "peculiar concluding sentence" is arrived at this way: After the class enemy – the bourgeoisie – is characterized, their necessary victims – the "proletarians of all countries" -- are called upon to wage class warfare against the international rule of private property and its political guarantors. We only doubt that this explanation is useful in view of Mr. Stephan’s considerable intellectual achievement of simply whiting out the opposition to private property from Marx's writing. Or, as usual, should one see a kind of "Bible of capitalism" in Capital that explains "only”, even "coolly", that in capitalism everything must be the way that it is? Yes, if the little word "unfortunately" had been used, at least now and then, one could imagine that Marx as a moral person perhaps had something fundamental to object to about capitalist conditions. But he has “only” analyzed the systematics of the capitalist mode of production and explained the necessity for the misery of a whole class. And because he has analyzed these necessities of the system, Marx also knew that the misery of this world is not to be considered "unfortunate" with a heartrending sigh – he leaves that to the clerics and the system reformers. Because -- directly because -- of capitalism, as long as it exists, then it just must function as it functions is why Marx insisted that this system must not be improved, but abolished. Mr. Stephan preferred to not want to know all that. He notes he is for getting by: "Capitalism is an amoral system" – but what must be, must be fine, unfortunately, unfortunately...
On the other hand, it cannot be stressed often enough that the "unfortunate conditions of Manchester capitalism" which, according to the current reviewers of the Communist Manifesto, were quite rightfully denounced in that time, have long since been overcome. If one reads it correctly, the Communist Manifesto is:
Not only in their diagnoses – or more exactly: in their alleged prognoses – but also in their suggested remedy, the authors of the Communist Manifesto receive copious praise from their modern fans. They enthusiastically seize its 10 demands which are listed at the end of the 2nd chapter as fitting next steps for the proletarian revolution: a slightly peculiar, motley collection of demands: some interesting material is offered here for modern ideologists by the expropriation of property and the use of ground rent for public expenditures, the introduction of a progressive tax up to centralization of credit in the hands of the state and the removal of the difference between city and country.... One does not necessarily want to accuse every one of the erudite commentators on the Communist Manifesto of not having read the foreword to its second edition from 1872. Although then they would have known that Marx and Engels quite soon after the appearance of the Communist Manifesto had better, leveler heads and dissociated themselves from these 10 demands. Concerning the reading of the Communist Manifesto, however, again a distinct weakness in the reading of the reviewers must be pointed out. Because these demands are nevertheless characterized there as “measures … which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.” The two revolutionaries could imagine "real partial successes" on the way to the real aim of the proletarian revolution – one of the worse ideas of the Communist Manifesto, but more on that later. The authors clearly wrote that the fulfillment of these demands should not be confused with the final goal of the revolution that they wanted to incite. But what can be done if posterity does not want to read, but to praise itself?
"The true executors of the Communist Manifesto were the social democrats who conquered universal electoral rights and with it the state... The democratic socialists – even if they were not always called that – subjected property to the well being of the general public, half of the gross national product to management by the democratic state. They did not orient the wage any longer to the lowest maintenance cost, but to the merit principle – according to Marx (1875), the distinguishing feature of a socialist social order, while the targeted paradise of a 'communist social order' should assign to each according to his needs much later. This applies at the lowest level in Germany already to the social assistance recipient, an achievement with the force of gravity. In any case, the proletarians have for a long time had more to lose than their chains, they asks themselves only whether they can still keep it. The emergency program of the Communist Manifesto is almost realized de facto, even if a new Manchester period tries to turn it backwards – from the strong progressive tax up to public free education and the overcoming of the conflict between city and country." (Friedjof Meyer, Spiegel, 16.3.98)
What can one still say? Has this man who is presented in Der Spiegel as an authority on the subject, i.e. as a "young socialist of 1961", ever read one line of the chapters on wages in the first volume of Capital? If so, it surely speaks only against his state of mind. There Marx explains piece wages by no means as a step in the right direction to the "transitional society" in which "each receives from the total social wealth what he contributes to it”, but as a means of wage lowering for the dependent wage-laborers who from the beginning are excluded by the form of payment from disposing over the wealth that they produce. It is also a quaint idea that German social welfare support – with its sumptuous "baskets" -- 1 movie ticket per month, 1 pair of shoes per season, 1 box of cigarettes per week – should be celebrated as initiating the principle of "to each according to his needs" – even if "at the lowest level" this might do for a man whose need horizon succumbs to the "gravity" of the level of need satisfaction defined by the West German social welfare offices. An enlightened mind knows the way to Jedem das Seine [translator’s note: literally, to each according to his merits; a phrase at the entrance of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp]. He goes into raptures about the beautiful conception of an association “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" and writes a few lines farther down that he can imagine nothing else, anyhow, for a worthwhile "paradise" – which incidentally was never planned in Marx and Engels’ program – than one big social welfare office which assigns "to each" what is entitled to him. This really needs no socialist revolution; here the man is exceptionally correct.
Other original commentators also make the same virtuoso equation "communism = paradise = FRG social policy":
“The Communist Manifesto describes a social paradise after the conquest of the political rule by the proletariat and the expropriation of the bourgeoisie as follows: introduction of a progressive income tax; the use of ground rent for public expenditures; abolition of the law of inheritance; the centralization of credit by a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly; centralization of transportation in the hands of the state; free and public education for all children, the banning of children in factory work... The progressive income tax, the real estate tax, the death tax, the Central Bank, the state railroad, the prohibition of child labor, free education for children: now all this are self-evident facts in a democracy with universal electoral rights. For these achievements, which were still utopian for Marx, no communist revolution was necessary." (Hans Mundorf, HB 25.2.98)
We refrain again from pointing out that these demands are by no means exhausted in the Communist Manifesto as the final goal of the revolution. And we refrain from a few small misinterpretations of the demands quoted by the writer of the business journal – e.g., public and free education of all children is something slightly different than free instruction in public schools; as far as we know, the burdens of raising the young, including the not insignificant costs of at least a "higher" education, are furthermore fully and completely the private concern of the happy parents; and only surely the abolition of inheritance, gently said, is a somewhat more radical intervention into the agenda of private property than the collection of a death tax; anyhow, we can anticipate the screams about expropriation from the editorial staff of the business journal if a single government authority were to consider for a minute abolishing the law of succession... But as said: If one refrains from all this, we can assume confidently that Marx and Engels would today be guest commentators for the business journal.
If they were not so busy writing Sunday sermons. Because despite all excesses the Communist Manifesto is even exposed as
The FAZ permits an American philosopher to praise the Communist Manifesto, along with the New Testament, as "documents of hope" which can contribute a lot to the moral education of the youth today:
"Parents and teachers should encourage young people to read both books. The young will be morally better for having done so. We should raise our children to find it intolerable that we FAZ-readers who we sit behind desks and punch keyboards are paid ten times as much as people who gets their hands dirty cleaning our toilets, and a hundred times as much as those who fabricate our keyboards in the Third World. We should ensure that they worry about the fact that countries which industrialized first have a hundred the wealth of those which have not yet industrialized. ... It is as true as it was in 1848 that the rich will always try to get richer by making the poor poorer, that total commodification of labor will lead to the immiseration of the wage-earners, and that “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”.... It would be best, of course, if we could find a new document to provide the children with inspiration and hope – one which is as free of the defects of the New Testament as those of the Manifesto. It would be good to have a reformist text, one which lacks the apocalyptic character of both books – which does not say that all things must be made new, or that justice “can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” It would be well to have a document which spells out the details of a this-worldly utopia without assuring us that this utopia will emerge full-blown, and quickly, as soon as some single decisive change has occurred – as soon as private property is abolished, or as soon as we have all taken Jesus into our hearts.” (Richard Rorty, FAZ 20.2.98)
We are happy with this, prepare the children only for "grief and worry" about the misery of the world; still suggest that has something to do with the "collective affairs of the bourgeoisie" only to then land then on the wise admonition that nothing could be more fatal than an overthrow of the social relations which supply so much material for grief and worry. And what then do the children do with all their grief? No question: They become worried moralizers who allow the rest mankind to be blessed with their dreams of a worldly paradise – if they have the luck to get hold of one of those rare well paid jobs with a keyboard. For somebody for whom “abolish private property" and "allow Jesus into all our all hearts” are about the same, the re-conversion of Marxism from science into utopia is one of the easier exercises.
If he had not skimmed the Communist Manifesto only in search of his humanity-uplifting inspiration, perhaps the professor from America would have tripped over the criticism that the two communists wrote 150 years ago of certain moral cranks:
"A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society. To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organizers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems."
It is hot off the press, really, again, old Marx...
The reviewer who "Der Zeit" assigned the occasion of the round birthday of the Communist Manifesto sets on this: He just picks his special "system of bourgeois socialism" from the paper:
“History rolls backwards. Policemen expel beggars from the shopping malls, reform of the education system is demanded, the chancellor reminds the churches to care more about the souls of lambs than the justice of the markets. The sociologist Ulrich Beck propagates the re-establishment of medals for public work, and the leading intellectual force of the CDP, Klaus Haefner, suggests supplying the superfluous third of the population, instead of with money, with state-produced, cheap, natural produce (clothes, dinner, house). Piece by piece an order disappears in which self-development, security and justice were given with the status of worker-citizen." (Mathias Greiffrath, Der Zeit 5.2.98)
Here we see how the former times of West Germany’s "economic miracle capitalism" are glorified. We hold firmly that the conditions that the man thinks that he cannot tolerate and interprets as history "rolling backwards" are produced by capitalist society. Why then does he think a few lines later that the following Nietzsche quote sums up the point?
"But progress 'is possible', wrote the skeptic Nietzsche, if a 'conscious culture' administers 'the earth as a whole economically' and 'man has to set himself ecumenical goals embracing the whole earth.’ Today this means bringing about unequal development in a politically democratic system of the world: one compatible with the survival of the natural basis, sustainable growth in the south, an ecological disarmament of the energy- and raw material-gorging north... Today the word 'proletariat' is as worn out as 'class struggle', but in the idea of a world-wide learning movement, not in an earthly paradise, lies the still valid idea of the 'Manifesto': in the postulating of a humanity in which each and everyone thinks, feels and also acts as a species being." (a.a.O.)
It is so simple: by simply saying that words can be "worn out" (by too frequent use?), the thing they designate is also removed from the world. The result: "proletariat" and "class struggle" are out, "learning movement" and "species being" are in. What bothers is that "humanity" expresses more or less the opposite of what was determinate with Proletariat. Because, on the contrary, "species being" probably means: "we" – “entrepreneurs" and "workers", "politicians" and "subjects" – all sit in the same boat – the "spaceship earth" or something and, finally, must make ecology the "learning movement" .... No, Marx was not so silly. Certainly, he already criticized, over 100 years ago, the ruining of the environment – although it was not called that at that time. However, he always promised that the commercial principles of capitalist economy would ensure the growing misery of the masses and the poisoning of their natural living conditions.
The authors of the Communist Manifesto wanted to appeal not to a collection of "responsible species beings", but to make clear that the capitalist production of wealth leads to the international pauperization of the workers. They held it to be an intolerable contradiction that demands dissolution. But a dissolution that does not take place inevitably; otherwise they could also have saved themselves the trouble of composing a Communist Manifesto. They were convinced of the necessity of a proletarian revolution in the sense that it must be made.
However, precisely in this respect the Communist Manifesto is quite criticizeable.
The Communist Manifesto begins with an overview of the social conditions that extend over the world with the capitalist mode of production. The intention of the authors is clear: to determine the class enemy. A new ruling class remodels the world "after its own image". Their materialism of money drives them not only to overcome all traditional relations, but also to constantly revolutionize their own self-established relations:
"Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones."
Even the state authority becomes a mere “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” And the whole thing happens at the expense of the equally new working class: the wage-laborers are the necessary victims of a mode of production in which the creation of gigantic wealth is based on the poverty of those who produce it. A never before seen class conflict enters the world: a completely new "brazen" form of "exploitation".
So far, the depiction of the state of affairs. How then do the authors of the Communist Manifesto arrive at the idea of offering a short passage about the history of humanity to explain these conditions, in which all the correct statements about the bourgeoisie are packed into a theory about an allegedly perpetual developmental principle of history – because: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”? This is the assertion:
"We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.” Even if it has been true that "oppressor and oppressed stood, in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” – what would be gained with this for the apprehension of modern class society?
Indeed this classification by Marx and Engels of the new bourgeois rule into a universal history of human exploitation actually does not even fit what they have to say about the subject. Not only cannot the eloquently sworn-to triumph of the capitalistically producing bourgeoisie over the old feudal relations truly be said to be a revolt by the suppressed against their oppressors: Also they communicate completely different things about the new class conflict opened by the triumphant bourgeoisie, that it would be a new version of the old story of "freeman and slave, patrician and plebian," etc. In the capitalistically produced wealth it strikes them that a never before seen sort of misery is produced:
"In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism … And why? Because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce."
The authors correctly note the capitalist absurdity that the production of abundance leads directly to distress. So they know for the moment that with the imposition of the new production relation, the worldwide poverty which private property necessarily produces has absolutely nothing to do with the absence of food, unlike the famines of past epochs. They subsume this knowledge, however, under the assertion that in the end this has always been so, and they make the abstract corny joke:
“At a certain stage in the development … relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces”
This contradiction is supposed to have led to the previous fall of feudalism; now the same contradiction is to be the final cause of the fall of the bourgeoisie:
"The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them… The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself."
In capitalist crises – over-production on the one hand and hunger on the other – the authors of the Communist Manifesto want to recognize a historical inevitability according to which the bourgeoisie with their imposition pursues their own overthrow as well.
In his critique of political economy Marx provides the criticism of this idea. In the 15th chapter of Volume 3 of Capital, when he analyzes the regularities of capitalist crises, there is no more talk of “bourgeois conditions becoming too narrow for the wealth created by them”. There he analyzes the fact that in times of overaccumulation capitalist wealth is destroyed so that the whole circus then begins anew "under expanded conditions of production, with an expanded market and increased productive forces." Overaccummulation periodically leads to the depreciation and destruction of productive forces and this is the condition for the next cycle, for the "conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones,” as it also already says in the Communist Manifesto – however, this is not the same as a crisis of capitalism or even the beginning of its inevitable end because of a definite incompatibility between the productive forces and "bourgeois ownership structures".
However, the Communist Manifesto puts a lot of importance precisely on the assertion of an historically inevitable failure of the bourgeoisie because of their own achievements – precisely the Communist Manifesto that wants to give the impetus to a proletarian revolution, that thus assumes the rule of the capitalist class does not finish itself off automatically. The question one more time: How have the two authors, who have written better, really, arrived in 1848 on the idea that the revolution to which they want to rouse the workers is, actually, already completely automatically on the way and on schedule?
Obviously for them it was a courage-giving justification for the worker revolts taking place all over Europe at that time. The fighting proletarians should be set a picture about the real meaning of their struggle: No matter whether they saw it as such or not, they were welcomed as executors of a historic necessity. They could draw courage – according to the logic of the Communist Manifesto – from this historical classification because the best chance for success was thereby certified to their labor disputes from a quasi-higher control room: the victory of their cause cannot be far away because the interest in their struggle does not lie with themselves, but stands in harmony with the historic tendency, namely with the – finally – inevitable self-destruction of the bourgeoisie.
Now, however, this is a rather twisted way to instigate an exploited class to revolution. Accordingly, this turns out to be questionable as the text continues:
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons -- the modern working class -- the proletarians.
One hundred fifty years later, this sort of metaphor still compels the united "popes of literature" of all cultured nations to sing hymns of praise about "eloquence" and "magnificent prose". However, one could easily overlook the bombastic mode of expression if the message was at least correct – if it thus meant: “All appeals to something like a necessary failure of the bourgeoisie, that their self-produced contradictions lead by an automatic ‘course of history’ to the proletarian revolution, are a rhetorical game; everything depends on the modern workers, this characteristic product of the capitalist mode of production, drawing the correct conclusions from their hopeless position and defeating the bourgeoisie by refusing the services for which they are needed.” However, it does not continue exactly in this way. Some references follow the statement that the proletariat is the class of wage-laborers that is itself the product of the capitalistically economizing bourgeoisie, such as – complementary to the international, revolutionary machinations of the bourgeoisie – what modern exploitation and the exploited class looks like: that the "modern working class ... live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital"; that in the enterprise they are used as "appendages of the machine"; that the wage which is paid to them does not make them rich, but a whole bunch of other figures – "house-owner, shopkeeper, pawnbroker" ... etc However, it is worth no other consideration for Marx and Engels that this miserable class is grasped and organized as a means of capitalist enrichment of the bourgeoisie, as an immanent component of the new social relations. At least, they do not consider it necessary in their agitation – as they did later, e.g., in the critique of the Gotha program of German social democracy – to attack the miserable interest in jobs and wages that binds the working class to their exploiters. It is clear that the wage is not even a suitable means of survival; however, they see far and wide no reason to take on the men “called into existence” by the bourgeoisie as people – never mind to address appropriately – who position themselves in the absence of a better means of life with the point of view of money acquisition by wage labor and thereby make themselves the exploited foot-soldiers of the bourgeoisie. The fact that the proletariat is a product of the bourgeoisie they consider directly equivalent to it being the born fighter against the bourgeoisie:
The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie.
They can’t help it, the good proletarian "men", from rising against the bourgeoisie; their affiliation to capitalist relations is equivalent to their abolition. They are the personified realization of the contradiction that the bourgeoisie prepares their own downfall by the development of the productive forces: This is the meaning that the authors of the Communist Manifesto make of their finding that the bourgeoisie produces the modern proletariat. All references to the necessity for the injury which the working class takes in this system stand in the service of this main and universal thought: the proletariat is the executor of the anyway inevitable downfall of the bourgeoisie.
Marx and Engels propose here, expressed in a different way, a dishonest game with the category of “historic necessity”. There are in capitalist society automatically functioning objective constraints – precisely the exploitation of a class of wage laborers; and exactly, therefore, no objective constraint exists which would put an end to it. Instead there is a historic necessity for the proletarian revolution – in the practical sense that this class arrives at relief in no other way: their political economic regulation, to serve the capitalist bourgeoisie as dependent, exploited tools of its enrichment, cannot be gotten rid of in any other way than by the radical abolition of its employer-employee wage relationship. The proletarians have nothing at all – they have no other choice: to escape from their exploitation they must make the proletarian revolution that overturns the capitalist mode of production. However, this necessity is not enough for the authors of the Communist Manifesto; they still want to infer from the fact that there is no alternative to a proletarian existence that the whole of capitalist exploitation therefore inevitably approaches its “natural” end, pursues to a certain extent its self-liquidation. Also the sentence which emphatically cites the "weapons" that the proletarians “are to wield" does not talk at all about the weapons that the workers would have to seize, but again means the "contradiction between the productive forces and relations of production" which Marx and Engels press idealistically into the fighting fists of the plebs. Whenever the Communist Manifesto begins to talk about the position of the working class it strives for an explanation of a "historic necessity for class struggle" in the sense of a mechanism that pushes the plebs allegedly perforce on the revolutionary path. And this mechanism should be the work of the class enemy.
After this default the Communist Manifesto constructs its picture of the “necessarily” fighting – and in the end victorious -- working class:
"But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more... the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (trade unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts… The real fruit of their battles lie not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. It was just this contact that was needed to centralize the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes… This organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently, into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier."
The authors of the Communist Manifesto know quite well that the workers must overcome their competitive point of view against each other in order to organize something against the bourgeoisie. It is well known to them that the wage-laborers are forced by capital into conditions in which they stand against each other for their vital interests. They themselves do not even make anything of their previous point that this necessity "continually upsets" the "organization" of the wage-laborers "as a class". The reason for it – evidently, the workers fighting for wages relate to the living conditions forced upon them in such a way that they see their life perspective in the service of capital – however, they do not want to notice this; and the announcement of a few good reasons as to why the proletarians should repeal their competition against each other and decide to unite together in a front against capital appears to them completely dispensable in their Communist Manifesto. Instead the authors spread the consoling assurance that the bourgeoisie drives the workers again and again on a much higher ladder into a revolutionary combination. They take the liberty of seeing in the wage conflicts not the periodic interruption of competition, but a consistent line for the fighting revolutionary class that is interrupted only sporadically by relapses into competition. The program, which the addressed proletarians would have to see and put into practice, becomes in the light of this interpretation a process of development that is automatically ensured by the machinations of the bourgeoisie:
"The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie" – in the first part of the chapter this class is still quite a go-getting revolutionary association! – "replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition" – as if this was a question of the productive technology! – “by the revolutionary combination, due to association" – as if the workers did not only have to decide on it! “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."
One does not need to explain the basic reasons for this to the proletarians at all; their struggle automatically aims at the correct thing; for victory over the bourgeoisie it needs only the union of its victims, and finally makes itself automatically ...: in their characterization of the proletariat the authors of the Communist Manifesto assume it to be the most self-evident fact that everything that is clear to them about modern capitalist exploitation and the struggles for survival of the working class stand without further ado clearly in front of the everyone’s eyes, and to the affected persons directly. In this sense, in the first sections of their writing on the world-shaking achievements of the bourgeoisie, they already granted the mode of exploitation the advantage of absolute unmistakeableness: Nobody who looks around the society should still be able to hold illusions about the main front between exploiters and exploited.
In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation…. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
Here effects are ascribed to bourgeois society in the area of consciousness raising which are simply not correct: precisely in capitalism, in the relation of factory owner and free wage-laborer, or in modern terms -- employer and employee -- exploitation should stand naked and shameless before everyone’s eyes! It may be correct that the bourgeois subject shifts the whole world to their materialism of money and all the rest of society to the status of paid wage servants. But that there would be therefore no more false consciousness and no ideologies about this relation of production, with its "meritocracy" and its "free market economy", cannot possibly be true. Exactly this is maintained, however, by the same man who later explained commodity fetishism in chapter 1 of Volume 1 of Capital:
"Let us now transport ourselves … to the European middle ages …. Here the particular and natural form of labour, and not, as in a society based on production of commodities, its general abstract form is the immediate social form of labour. Compulsory labour is just as properly measured by time, as commodity-producing labour; but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord, is a definite quantity of his own personal labour power. The tithe to be rendered to the priest is more matter of fact than his blessing. No matter, then, what we may think of the parts played by the different classes of people themselves in this society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour, appear at all events as their own mutual personal relations, and are not disguised under the shape of social relations between the products of labour…. Those ancient social organisms of production are, as compared with bourgeois society, extremely simple and transparent." (MEW 23, S. 91FF)
The "old" Marx was smarter than the "young" – but he was not stupid either. How did he come to state that with the victory of the bourgeoisie "naked, shameless exploitation" would be so clear to anyone with eyes like himself? It had evidently become clear to him and his comrade Engels from the bitter workers’ battles that the proletariat could not survive absolutely without defending itself against the bourgeoisie. With its resistance the recently appeared working class reacted to life circumstances that the ardent supporters of our modern "social market economy" also condemn as "Manchester capitalism". It could not be overlooked that the absolute rule of private property leaves the workers no chance of survival so that their battle against the bourgeoisie is a condition for their survival. From this Marx and Engels drew the incorrect reverse conclusion that the survival of the proletarians as a class, basically of class society in the interests of the ruling class, would also be incompatible with their class rule:
It [the bourgeoisie] is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him.
Therefore, every worker's fight, every success in the battle for the preservation of the proletariat could only be another step in the abolition of the bourgeoisie:
"All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air."
The objective for which the proletariat "rises" appears to the authors of the Communist Manifesto here as completely insignificant – although this only depends on whether with such a revolt the whole "official society [is] sprung into the air” or exactly vice versa the proletarians are functionalized into the employer-employee relationship. They paint a rather mechanical picture of a revolution in which the “raising” of the “lowest,” quantitatively strongest “stratum” must inevitably blow away the higher, thinner “strata.”
"In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat."
So the Communist Manifesto propagates a revolution-expectant version of a very modern self-satisfied counter-revolutionary mistake: the creation and preservation of a useful working class is the same thing as its abolition. Today bourgeois ideologists want to be able to discover far and wide no more proletariat because there is, finally, an absolutely viable work force – even social welfare assistance for those who are sustained "by capital" must be done away with because capital does not need them for its increase; and "Manchester capitalism" anyhow does not predominate anywhere in the capitalist metropolises or at least in the nicer quarters… In reverse, the authors of the Communist Manifesto regarded it as impossible for capital to be forced to respect its own all-important condition for success, namely the preservation of a functional working class – by forcing a functional survival from paid wages, namely by the welfare state authority ordering it to the proletariat: nevertheless, they believed that the self-fought for survival of the working class would coincide with its victory over their exploiters...
At this point it is necessary to reproach the otherwise esteemed comrades Marx and Engels not only for a false conclusion, but of a proper "blackout": the same authors who were confronted continuously in practice by the government authority and its machinations and who were, besides, also state-theoretically fully at their height – e.g. in the debates with Hegel and Bruno Bauer they knew how to differentiate correctly and clearly between "citizen" and "bourgeois": just nothing intelligent occurs in the Communist Manifesto about the political rule of the bourgeoisie. They mention that the modern bourgeois government authority is nothing but a "committee" which has the collective affairs of the whole ruling class under control. About that point, however, everything that this committee performs, as opposed to the narrow-minded bourgeois class interest in private enrichment, in which the above-mentioned "collective affairs" of the ruling class as such actually exists; why they need comprehensive force for its administration; what service the public authority produces for the maintenance of the capitalist system of rule: they remain silent about all this – so that today every nonentity of a welfare state apostle can hold out triumphantly that now everything is regulated in the best way in the interests of the workers. What occurs to them then, however, about the political rule of the bourgeoisie is just one more point where they again switch to their theory of the self-caused downfall of bourgeois class rule: The bourgeoisie could need – and actually one day did need – the support of the proletariat for their struggle for state power against the old feudal relations of rule, as well as for the interests of the new bourgeois community; therefore, it would have to supply a lot of "elements of political and general education" that would then inevitably benefit the proletarians in their class struggle. That the bourgeoisie also actually got this support, and to be sure without it their rule would have gone right afterwards into the pillory, does not disturb the authors of the Communist Manifesto in the least. They do not become loony by their estimation that the revolutionary cause would be advanced thereby quite well in principle. On the contrary! The fatal circumstance that the proletariat has too often fought for its new bourgeois masters – and not to seldom! – is easily integrated into the general verdict: the bourgeoisie works on their decline.
"Altogether, collisions between the classes of the old society further in many ways the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.'
Proles can be used by the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy; they line up as "allied comrades" against the bourgeoisie "of foreign countries" – but no queasy feeling comes over the authors of the Communist Manifesto. They welcome the political service of the proletariat in the state of the bourgeoisie like a “cunning of reason” for the consolidation of the proletariat by its class enemy. And the small supplementary contradiction does not even strike them that their statements about the absolutely not existing interest of the bourgeoisie in sustaining the proletariat cannot be the whole truth or requires at least modification, if it depends on the wage-working masses not only as a production factor and cost factor, but also as serviceable state people: certainly, the bourgeoisie have no excessive interest in the sustenance of the proletariat; to the extent that they need the proles, however, they provide for their foot-soldiers under the higher viewpoint of national self-preservation...
It is not just that the Communist Manifesto lacks a smart state theory. It is worse: Marx and Engels know about the functionalization of the proletarians for the political rule of the bourgeoisie – and want to know nothing other than the expected and not occurring positive effect: the revolutionary class would be thereby only yet bigger and more powerful...
Marx and Engels do not come down from these mistakes in their Communist Manifesto.
If this is how the society, the class struggle and the proletariat now stands: then what do the communists want? The answer of the Communist Manifesto is peculiar: First of all, they want allegedly nothing different than all the other workers' parties! If that were really the case, then they would not need their own party. How necessary they find this, however, and why the maintained agreement in principle with the rest of the labor movement does not go very far, Marx and Engels emphatically clarify when they criticize the leading thinkers of the other socialist movements, more or less widespread at that time, in the 3rd chapter of the Communist Manifesto.
The second assurance is yet more questionable:
"They [the communists] have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement."
Here the leading theoreticians of communism write a Communist Manifesto, meaning that they have something to communicate to the workers which they should take good head of, and deny at first every real difference between themselves and the addressed masses. They want only one difference to pertain: that communists "always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole” and actually have the advantage of "clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement” ahead of the rest of the team. Which is it: one fights away more or less without ideas, the other knows where it goes in the long run – but the central issue is that one does not differ in principle?! If no communists are needed to represent the "interest of the whole movement" then there can hardly be talk of a "whole movement" and their "interest" does not already exist at all – except in the heads of the communists: as their program which they intend to make accessible to the workers. What exists on the side of the fighting workers are obviously in the meantime only individual interests, which proves that there is still no revolutionary "total movement". With their construction of an overarching general interest over which the communists watch as "practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties” Marx and Engels also admit on the one hand that in the labor disputes of that time quite different interests were defended than a proletarian revolution in their sense. On the other hand, they deny exactly this difference between their point of view and the goals for which the workers fight if they argue "simply" about the improvement of their conditions as wage laborers. They broadmindedly ignore the competitive point of view of the wage-laborers that they find in the struggles for individual interests and easily state that these act as parts of the big battle for the whole. If they state that only the communists "clearly understand the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement," then it is probably correct that the rest of the team pursues other objectives than the communist revolutionaries. With their doubtful praise of the fighting workers – that have, certainly, no idea, but somehow are already on the correct steamboat – they subordinate a conflict between their program and the will and consciousness of the proletariat and explain it at the same time as insignificant.
In the 4th chapter of the Communist Manifesto, which gives in detail the "relations of the communists to the various opposition parties" in various countries, the authors sum up this mistake one more time as follows:
"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."
If one must constantly emphasize the "property question" because it is evidently more or less “undeveloped” in the various opposition movements, then one should better note immediately that these movements are worried about other "basic questions" than the abolition of private property. Then, however, it is also considerable nonsense to act as if communists only have to remind all members of the opposition all the time, all the same what they just fight for, and only of the fact that for them too, nevertheless – finally – it is also about the property question.
How do communists arrive at such well-meaning self-denial? Obviously at that time Marx and Engels recorded a lot of working class struggles whose immediate aims they did not share, but which they also did not want to criticize. Instead they welcomed them under the abstraction "class struggle" and presented to the proletariat the reassuring offer that the communists always keep the correct overview about where the fighting proletariat must go and wants to go. Instead of agitation and criticism they shifted to a kind of public relations: communists trust that the proletariat is on the right track completely by itself already – vice versa, the proletariat can rely on the communists as a "signpost". Altogether this denial of the difference between communists and proles fulfills the facts of the hypocrisy – and with just such a sucking up to the addressees who they still grant have no notion of the aims of the revolution, the authors of the Communist Manifesto believe they can inspire the workers to a revolution!
The position that Marx and Engels take here to the proletariat shows which "intellectual school" the two recently said goodbye to. Obviously, as good communists, they recognized not only the class struggle of the proletarians against their exploitation as a practical necessity for a decent life, but as idealists of a due progress for humanity interpreted a deeper meaning into the struggles actually taking place. Then only someone on the path "from utopia to science" would hold the following worth communicating:
"The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism."
Anyone who thus protests the realism of his ideas is very reminiscent of all modest intellectuals who always want their ideas to only be an expression of reality – and tacitly assume that "reality" is nothing else but the expression of their ideas. Thus the historical teleological talk in search of a really existing executive agent for their idea – or expressed somewhat friendlier: this is how someone talks who forges ahead directly from the "misery of philosophy" to scientific economics. A communist diagnosis which bases its judgments not on philosophic ideas, but on the analysis of social reality does not have to insure its proximity to reality – with the stupid methodological "argument" that "reality" has not already been purged from this analysis. The recommendation to the wage-laborers, that they should overturn the wage system because otherwise their material interests have no chance anyway, gains nothing with the assertion that it would only be "an expression of" a subversive movement which takes place in the society anyway – and only too surely nothing with the statement that in earlier epochs of history social relations were also overturned and in so far as "the abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.” In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels regard this announcement, however, as eminently important: They held it as a crucial message that communists differ fundamentally from philosophic cranks who think that ideas change the world; as if their methodical insight that philosophy has been "turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet" would be a message which the fighting proletariat eagerly awaits. It speaks for Marx and Engels that they said goodbye to philosophy, thus also to this point of view and dedicated themselves instead to the criticism of political economy – and the wrong objectives of the social democratic workers’ movement.
After the world-historical meaning of the ongoing worker's struggles is clarified in this respect, the authors busy themselves with the rejection of unjustified reproaches against the communists. It should not to be misjudged that they argue here with objections that were raised not only by the bourgeoisie who they directly address polemically. Their answers to the usual anti-communist accusations are basically a point for point confession as to how little in agreement the communists actually are with the demands of the fighting proles than their talk would indicate – and exactly the same for their many incorrect disclaimers.
On property it occurs to them that:
"The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property… When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character."
The distinction between property in general and its social character poses an enigma to Marxists. Because this is what makes up property: exclusive control over objective wealth has general validity only owing to state decree and is the basis of the capitalist relations of production – the authors can’t possibly have had this in mind if they wanted to make a distinction between virtually eternal property and one social form of property existing apart from it. (Probably they thought of Hegel’s idea: the “will which must give itself an exterior reality through labor” and similar insights from philosophy’s world of ideas.) Obviously Marx and Engels, in writing the Communist Manifesto, have not yet stood their Hegel so completely “from his head onto his feet"...
Otherwise the following antithesis would not have occurred to them in the figure of the capitalist:
"To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social STATUS in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power."
The discovery that capitalist property is a "collective product" and, as means of production, part of a social production process may be adequate for breaking the spell of the idea of a personality that is realized in one’s property and for making a fool of the capitalist by its application. However, it just does not follow from the findings that the proletarians only need to chase away the capitalists like a superfluous addition to the long ago realized total social division of labor, and the “true” social nature of capital would appear and assert itself against its “alienation” in the light of an individual relation between capitalist and production. The "social position" of the capitalist "in production" consists rather in that he disposes completely personally over it by the force of legally protected property. The fact that one "collectively" produces does not stand in – exposed – contrast to the privacy of capital; his private power is rather social in the whole mode of production. And, therefore, communism also does not have in mind only a modification of the "social character of property" if, as the Communist Manifesto absolutely announced, it demands the "abolition of private property": It is already against property itself not because it has one or another "social character", but because it causes the "character" of the whole society, i.e. its mode of production.
From their doubtful theory of property the authors go on without a break to a bad wage theory:
"The average price of wage labor is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage laborer appropriates by means of his labor merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it…. Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations."
This sounds a little bit like a reassurance: the communists definitely do not want to take anything away from the workers completely! And for this a wage theory of limited appropriation is attempted. The authors here should have first clearly decided: the wage is an appropriation of the means of subsistence which communists do not want to also take away from the workers; – or wage labor means that the worker "lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it”? If then the latter, then the wage is not only the subsistence of the workers in a very cynical sense, i.e. it is not at all their means; then it is rather, first of all, a means of capital – and one can confidently expect the message to the workers in a Communist Manifesto: communists abolish the wage, by the way.
Somehow this is also in there -- "there can no longer be any wage labor when there is no longer any capital"; the Communist Manifesto calls this a "tautology". But that the wage is not divided into “an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life” from the worker and a "miserable character of this appropriation", i.e. the conditions set by the bourgeoisie for acquiring a wage, Marx explained only later in his "criticism of political economy". The wage is a part of capital – "variable capital"; on the side of the workers it presupposes propertylessness and reproduces it. The wage-laborer actually appropriates nothing from the work product at all; absolutely nothing belongs to him of the products that he produces. Hence all the so nicely appeasing "onlys" that are put in the text of the Manifesto are incorrect: With the abolition of capital not "only" a "miserable" form of appropriation of labor products is replaced by a better one, but a sort of labor is abolished which from the start produces nothing but capitalist private property – thus wage labor itself. And, therefore, it is also not correct that "communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society" but only “deprives him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriations": The “social" in the products of capital is precisely that they are not at all available for anyone to appropriate, but are from the start capitalist private property; production by wage-labor and appropriation through capital are one and the same; therefore, the "power to subjugate the labor of others" is not added to a “normal” way of goods appropriation, but is the whole economic content of the whole appropriation process, the starting point and the end point of all commodity production. The removal of this power is thus surely no "only", and it also lets no conventional kind of “personal” appropriation of “social products” exist – rather communism creates for the first time such a relation...
The remarks of the Communist Manifesto on personality and freedom are also not top performances in Marxist theory. We find out that communists allegedly have nothing against these high values in themselves, but have in mind only the "abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom". That not only the bourgeois stands on exchange value, but that bourgeois freedom actually has no other content than the unconditional acknowledgment of exchange value, thus the bondage of the "personality" to property as its sole sustenance, this was obviously not yet quite clear to the authors of the Communist Manifesto. In the 2nd chapter of Volume 1 of "Capital" it is no longer ambiguous: the person is nothing other than the "guardian of commodities", the trustee of the price form; the mutual acknowledgment of persons as private owners is given virtually materially by the economic relationship established by the commodity character of wealth:
"The persons exist here for one another only as representatives of commodities, therefore as commodity owners. As we proceed to develop our investigation, we shall find, in general, that the persons’ character masks are mere personification of the economic relations, as whose carriers they confront each other."
This is how the personality lives and breathes in bourgeois society: as personifications of the price form their members always line up against each other. Everyone stands under the premise that he is only in it for himself, just trying with his means to do the best for himself and his life. Everyone, including the proletarian, stands only in a commodity relation with the rest of society – also to the entrepreneur who employs him. Modern personalities are so thoroughly representatives of the price form that they bring this up in every situation in which they impact each other: everything – up to the love life – becomes a question of the acknowledgment and investigation of the other’s evaluated personality – after the pattern: "What do I get from you for what I invest in you?" So the self-confident members of bourgeois society handle each other without having the slightest consciousness of the fact that they are nothing other than "character masks of the economic relations". The wage-laborers also do not go into the factory to serve capital, but to provide for their own living costs. The working class exists in capitalism as loudly free, thinking-only-for-themselves personalities. Therefore, communism abolishes not only the "bourgeois personality" but also the proletarian personality because all worthy persons of bourgeois society behave as nothing other than "personifications of economic relations".
On the family: it might once have been quite nice to punch the ears of the bourgeoisie which pretends to be a keeper and rescuer of family life for their hypocrisy in regard to conjugal loyalty and morality. The limit to this sort of polemic becomes clear if it is no longer quite clear whether someone who raises the reproach of hypocrisy sides with the ideal with which he kicks the "hypocrites" all the time. It might be refreshing if the Communist Manifesto expressed itself for an open, honest polygamy. Not in order to go against it when it is represented by the model: finally, nevertheless, we communists complete "only" a work of destruction of custom and behavior that the bourgeoisie already began long ago – even if only secretly. In the end it still comes off as if the bourgeois head with his morally denied immorality was just a model and forerunner of the communist criticism of family life.
This pattern of argumentation becomes particularly fatal with the polemical treatment of the reproach "communists want to abolish the fatherland, the nation". One could simply say: Exactly, we want to do this, and we also have good reasons for it... Instead the Communist Manifesto also strives here to prove that the bourgeoisie already – just! – works on the disappearance of the nations:
"National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto. The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster."
The worldwide leveling of living conditions by capital is one thing; concerning the "national differences between peoples", Marx and Engels are correct. However, the “antagonisms between peoples” are another thing altogether: They do not disappear at all "owing to the development of the bourgeoisie"; they generally receive only a more solid foundation in the growing competition of the national state powers whose wealth is based on their respective capitalist economies. This is even suggested a few lines farther down in the Communist Manifesto:
"In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end."
If in order to end the hostilities between nations the abolition of class antagonism is necessary domestically – thus requiring nothing less than a revolution – then the fact that the modern nation state is the way that the bourgeoisie rules politically suggests that this form of rule includes lots of reasons for strife between nations. Then, however, in this question also one should better not state that communists want “only” to complete a historic tendency that the bourgeoisie has already introduced.
Finally, the concern with "eternal truths like freedom, justice, etc," which communists are charged with undermining. It is already extremely tangled to protest against this reproach that new rulers have always cleared away old ideologies, and that is why the advance of the class struggle only continues and completes the destructive work of the bourgeoisie in the world of ideas of feudalism. This reply is introduced with a rather crude theory of false consciousness:
"The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”
If one looks around the world of higher nonsense, this cannot be the whole truth. In any case, the actual ruling ideas are often so confusing that the ruling class has difficulties understanding them. But if it should already be about the ruling ideas, just Marx and Engels would have more to offer – in other writings they proved it – in criticism than the general reference "that the social consciousness of past ages ... moves within certain common forms". And to explain the communist aversion to religion and morality with the fact that, nevertheless, it is "no wonder" with people who want “the most radical rupture with traditional relations” is almost more an excuse than a contribution to the fight against false consciousness.
"But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to communism."
Only the last page of the 2nd chapter of the pamphlet really represents anything like a Communist Manifesto. Here programmatic demands are raised – only for what!
As the first step we find out that the proletariat must seize political supremacy. Here one can only say: what else! Even if we, after our knowledge of modern democracy, would never ever equate this with "winning the battle of democracy". But anyway:
The following economic program is outlined conspicuously less clearly. If it says there:
"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie…"
then, nevertheless, one would like to insist that "wresting away" and "abolishing" are not exactly the same. No question also about the loss of power of the bourgeoisie.
"Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production."
But why in the world should these "measures" “appear economically insufficient and untenable” and justify themselves only by the fact that they inevitably "necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production"? Should the power of the state conquered by the proletariat initiate yet again a self-regulating economy, a historical mechanism that helps the goals of the proletarian revolution break through virtually "behind the back" of the active subjects? A final goal which nobody wants: the abolition of capitalism should be initiated by means of "partial victories" which have nothing to do, indeed, with a communist revolution for which one looks for some allied comrades, at least in the "most advanced countries".
This vision corresponds to the 10 demands at the end of the 2nd chapter which today’s ideologists of the "social market economy" refer to so enthusiastically because they see them fulfilled – with the necessary "realistic" reductions, to be sure ...-- in modern capitalism
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. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization 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 obligation 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 labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
It speaks for Marx and Engels that they later dissociated themselves from this "emergency program". However, during the composition of the Communist Manifesto they were convinced that striving for radical demands that simultaneously try to undo the given relations and to bring up corrections to them would be an adequate opening for a total revolution of the society. And the demands may also be so radical – still partly extremist for a modern bourgeois community, in any case completely subversive in 1848: They are thoroughly opportunistic. Existing reform movements agree and set at the same moment on the fact that with every bourgeois reform nothing less would be accomplished than another step for the abolition of bourgeois society. However, a "strong progressive tax" on capitalist wealth is not yet a particularly appropriate combat measure to snatch all capital away "from the bourgeoisie gradually"; let alone that it would initiate the replacement of the capitalist mode of production by a reasonable social plan – at most the government authority may assume the role of the capitalists, which to be sure most of the other demands also aim at. As if the state, when it merely centralizes the wealth of the society and replaces the capitalists with itself, was aiming at what communists want with their criticism of political economy, or at least a good condition for it and exactly what a triumphant proletariat would have to create with its conquered power!
In short: It shows that ways to the proletarian revolution “that outstrip themselves" are no guarantee. Because this is what the whole thing should result in:
"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 whole nation, the public power will lose its political character…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."
The final goal of this ”development" is rather the only step in the history of the world which happens completely definitely not as an objective constraint "behind the backs" of the social character masks, but only when individuals really "associate themselves" with will and consciousness about what they plan. If anything, then such an association in which the "free development of each is the condition for the free development all" – we allow this to count as a communist "answer" to the bourgeois ideal of the "freely developed personality" – not as an unconscious "self-surpassing" of a "historical development" but only as the common plan of people who know what they do.
Given. The authors themselves explained in the foreword to the 2nd edition of the Communist Manifesto their reckoning with contemporary reactionaries and progressives was outdated. As well as
"Further, it is self-evident that the criticism of socialist literature is deficient in relation to the present time, because it comes down only to 1847; also that the remarks on the relation of the Communists to the various opposition parties (Section IV), although, in principle still correct, yet in practice are antiquated, because the political situation has been entirely changed, and the progress of history has swept from off the earth the greater portion of the political parties there enumerated." (Marx/Engels, Foreword to the 1872 German Edition of the Communist Manifesto)
The last section of the text still remains. Certainly, it could do with a little less theatrics; then, at least, later representatives of the "ruling ideas" would not elevate its beautifully formed oratory instead of "trembling before a communist revolution.” But essentially to keep to this concluding avowal of the communist maxim of denying nothing and varnishing nothing:
"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win."
If only in the preceding pages of their Communist Manifesto the authors had kept to their maxim!