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... ndi viduals, whose social relationships are their own communal relations, and therefore subjected to their own communal control. [ 9 ] Thus Marx's entire picture of the movement of history is bound up with his conception of a truly human society, and the obstacles to it within our existing way of life. Marx does not present us with a static picture of bourgeois social relations, as a sociologist might try to do. Instead, he gives a succinct outline of the birth, development and death of an oppressive and exploitative social order. He shows how the bourgeoisie... has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his 'natural superiors', and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than 'callous cash payment'. [ 10 ] The class struggle, which has raged over the centuries, has been simplified by the modern bourgeoisie.
Society is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. [ 11 ] This opening section of the Manifesto is concerned with the joint historical development of these classes, including the struggle between them, and the stages of this process are related to the development of modern industry. Thus the huge advances of human productive powers since the eighteenth century have taken the form of the growth of new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. [ 12 ] The outcome is that man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. Just as the development of these means of production and exchange outgrew the feudal relations within which they had developed, now, the powers of modern industry have collided with the bourgeois relations that have conjured them up. [ 13 ] Now, Marx describes the growth of the proletariat, the class of labourers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work on as long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity like every other article of commerce... Owing to the extensive use of machinery, the work of the proletarian has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine. [ 14 ] The account of wage-labour given here is far from the developed analysis Marx was able to make in Grundriss e, ten years later, and, after still another decade's work, in Capital, but it still gets to the heart of the matter.
What is unprecedented about this particular form of class struggle, Marx explains, is that it prepares the objective ground for the transcendence of classes as such, and of all forms of oppression. All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other mode of appropriation... The proletariat cannot raise itself up without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. [ 15 ] Throughout the Manifesto, Marx stresses the cosmopolitan character of bourgeois society, reflecting the development of a world market. The need of a constantly-expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.
It is because of this that the struggle of the proletariat, while national in form, is international in substance. [ 16 ] Marx's account of bourgeois society as the objective preparation for the proletarian revolution is bound up with the emergence of the consciousness necessary for the transformation of the whole of world society. The Marxists attributed to Marx a philosophical outlook called historical materialism, a way of explaining the world. This was sometimes presented as a mechanical model of history, in which material conditions caused changes in consciousness. But this directly contradicts what Marx himself was doing.
After all, was he not engaged in the struggle for the development of consciousness, and wasn't communism precisely the way for humanity to take conscious charge of history? Bourgeois society, the last possible form of the class struggle, had also to bring forth the subjective elements needed for its conscious transcendence. Central to this is the organisation of the proletarians into a class and consequently into a political party, and that means its self-organisation. But that is not all. In a vitally important paragraph, Marx describes how the break-up of the old order, and of the ruling class itself, has another consequence: A small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class, the class which holds the future in its hands...
in particular a portion of the bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending the historical movement as a whole. [ 17 ] This is a remarkable passage. These bourgeois ideologists undoubtedly include Marx and Engels themselves. In 1847, how many others could there have been? Never before had an author been able to put himself into the picture in this way, explaining the origin of his own work in terms of the objective conditions it was investigating.
Thus the objective, material development of modern industry is bound up with the development of the understanding of the need to emancipate these forces from the perverting power of capital. When Marx speaks of the proletariat, he does not mean the members of a sociological category, the collection of those who can be labelled as wage-earners. He is talking about a real movement, an objectively founded aspect of modern social life. People who sell their ability to labour find themselves involved in an antagonistic relation to the owners of capital, whether they like it or not, and whatever they may think. The proletarian movement is the independent [ 18 ] movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority. [ 19 ] Obviously, many of the details of the picture of the world presented by Marx in 1848 are hardly to be found in the world of today. As Marx himself realised a short time later, his time-scale was extremely foreshortened.
But, a hundred and fifty years on, it is amazing how many of its essential features are still at the heart of our problems. The second section, Proletarians and Communists, largely consists of an imaginary dialogue with a bourgeois objector to the idea of communism. It begins by situating the Communists in Marx's picture of the development of the proletariat. Many of its ideas are drawn from the doctrines of previous socialist and communist groups, and also from Engels' draft. But, from his standpoint, set out in the previous section, he transforms them into something quite new. The members of the League gave their declaration the title Manifesto of the Communist Party.
They could not anticipate how much misunderstanding this word party would cause for future decades, when it had so changed its meaning. For Marx and his comrades, it certainly did not mean the type of bureaucratic structure with which we associate it today, but a section of society, a social-political trend. Again stressing the open, anti-conspiratorial nature of communism, Marx declares The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties. They 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 mould the proletarian movement... The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of power by the proletariat...
The theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. [ 20 ] Objects have been privately owned for millennia, so that individuals have been able to say of something, or even somebody, this is mine. But the latest form of private property is different. Capital is a collective product, set in motion only by the united action of all members of society... not a personal, but a social power. [ 21 ] Abolishing this power, capital, is the only way to ensure that accumulated labour becomes a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer. Marx goes on to summarise the communist critique of the false bourgeois conceptions of freedom, individuality, culture, the family and education, attacking in particular the oppression of women within bourgeois society. After this, he outlines the nature of the proletarian revolution, to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to win the battle of democracy, and identifies the resulting state with the proletariat organised as the ruling class. [ 22 ] The 10 -point political programme for the first steps of the revolution with which this section ends, is interesting mainly for its surprisingly mild character.
Clearly, Marx does not consider revolution as a sudden overnight transformation, resulting from some kind of coup d'tat, however violent it might be. He refers to the situation following a prolonged historical transition, 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. [ 23 ] Then, he anticipates, the public power will lose its political character. The proletariat will have abolished its own supremacy as a class. 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. [ 24 ] This sentence summarises a world of ideas which Marx has extracted and negated from the history of philosophy and political economy.
It embodies his entire conception of what it means to live humanly. Potentially, humans can be free, but only when the freely created life of the whole of society is completely and visibly bound up with the growth of each individual. Private property stands as a barrier to such freedom. The third section of the Manifesto deals scornfully with most of the previous socialist doctrines, all of which have by now long disappeared from history. However, its final pages refer to Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism with great respect. Marx attributes the limitations of the work of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others to the unconscious reflection of the early undeveloped period...
of the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. While being full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class, they could see the proletariat only as a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement, as the most suffering class. Because, in their time, the economic situation... does not offer them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat, they could do no more than search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.
That is why they could be no more than Utopians, who merely painted fantastic pictures of future society. [ 25 ] In contrast to them, Marx insists that communism is a real movement, not a dream. Bibliography:
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