Marx & Engels: The Communist Manifesto

Mark, Karl & Engels, Friedrich: The Communist Manifesto, Tr. Samuel Moore; Penguin Classics, London, 2002

This is another of those books that I'd always meant to read but hadn't.  I just remember so many references to marxism or its derivatives in the books, movies etc that I've seen growing up.  Though it all occurred over 100 years before my birth, the repercussions of marxism and socialism continued to reverberate in the century following.  That aspect of intolerance and paranoia and absolutism, of revolution spawned so much reaction and change.

From German preface 1883

all history has been a history of class struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development; that this struggle, however, has now reached a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie), without at the same time for ever freeing the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and class struggles…”

from preface to English edition of 1888

Socialists in 1847 were the adherents of various Utopian systems: Owenites in England; Fourierists in France; …

Communist was that portion of the working class that had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, that portion then called itself communist.

Produced the Utopian communism in France of Cabet, in Germany of Weitling

Socialism in 1847 was a middle-class movement; Communism a working-class movement

Socialism on the Continent was respectable, Communism the opposite

‘the emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class itself’

pg 38  The fundamental proposition of the manifesto is: 

that in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class -- the proletariat -- cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class -- the bourgeoisie -- without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.

 There is so much in this book that was prescient about capitalism - especially evident in the globalization we see today.  pg 67  “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

“The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.  It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere."  Pg 68  

“In place of old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.  In place of old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.  And as in material, so also in intellectual production.  The intellectual creations of individual nations becomes common property.”

“The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization.”

"The bourgeoisie increases urban at expense of rural."

“The necessary consequence [of concentrating property in a few hands] was political centralization.”  Pg 69

Marx and Engels write about the effects of the bourgeoisie in less than 100 years.

“Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture , steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation canalization of rivers…”  Pg 70

“…the history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule.”

“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.”  Pg 71

“the proletariat, the modern working class, […] a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.” Pg 73

This really sums up the constraints of wage labour - though we have seen some changes, probably through the trade unions, that have mixed it up where some wage earners can earn enough to be able to accumulate property and get ahead of the hourly wage trap and some of what would have been called the bourgeoisie, the professionals, don't make much hourly, have huge student loan burdens and are trapped in the hourly wage prison.

Interesting perspective on some gender elements on pg 73  

“The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women.  Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class…”

Pg75  “every class struggle is a political struggle”

The focus on property is interesting - I'm not sure in 2013 if it would seem so cut and dried.  Right now the potential oppressors are the institutions and those who control them.  This seems to involve sex and race more than class.  We also see the incredible power of money - not property but money in whatever form.  Crime can reward so much power via money.  

“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.  They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.”On Pg 77

“The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority.”

[The bourgeoisie] is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an overriding law.  It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery.”  Pg 78  

This is probably still true for much capital but with financial markets, information technology  etc, much money can be accumulated without wage labour.  “The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage labour.  Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers”

“…Man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life.”pg 86  

The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class

The language got a little over-elaborate at times:

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry 'eternal truths', all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public.

Pg 97   Discussion of Bourgeois Socialism  “They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.”

PROLETARIAT – lower class, working class – originally from Roman Constitution – census of citizens, those who didn’t have minimal wealth (equivalent to 11,000 asses) had their offspring noted instead as their only contribution to the state (from prole = offspring)

While trying to find some information on where the word proletariat came from I came across this great quote where Marx gave this description of the lumpenproletariat:

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.

I was really glad to have finally read this book.  I can see how young idealists in the late 19th c an early 20th c would have been attracted to this as a way to try and change centuries-old injustices.

a word to look up - Apodictic