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Chapter 14 The Communist Manifesto As International Relations Theory
Chapter 14 The Communist Manifesto As International Relations Theory
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Chapter 14
The Communist Manifesto as International Relations Theory
Peter Burnham
Introduction
In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, written between December 1847 and January 1848, Marx and Engels provide definite albeit brief indications of how a
class theory of international relations can be constructed. Taken together with passages from the Economic Manuscripts of 18578 (published in Moscow in 1939
under the editorial heading, Grundrisse der Kritik derpolitischen Ökonomie) and The Civil War in France, it is clear that although Marx did not live to complete
his proposed treatise on the world market and crises, he prepared a rudimentary analysis of international relations which challenges both realist statecentred
orthodoxy and fashionable neoGramscian approaches. 1
In many respects Marx's work also provides an alternative to the rather crude interpretations of Lenin and Bukharin which often dominate discourse on the far Left.
'Bukharinist' theories of the state as 'capitalist trust' can appear anachronistic and all too easily lend themselves to the mechanical functionalism characteristic of
determinist Soviet MarxismLeninism. Alternatively, dependency and world systems theory, which seeks to dispense with the analysis of interstate relations, opting
instead for sociological coreperiphery models, tends to disintegrate either into liberal institutionalism or display the worst traits of functionalism far removed from
Marx's focus on class as developed in the Manifesto.2
Faced with this crisis of theory many 'marxist' analysts simply adopt traditional realist or neorealist approaches to international relations. International outcomes are
explained in terms of the hegemonic dominance or decline of great powers and versions of 'superimperialism' are fashioned from traditions which owe more to
Machiavelli and Morgenthau than to Marx. The argument of this chapter is that such theorists need not relinquish Marx's class analysis when it comes to international
relations. Although many 'marxologists' and international relations writers are keen on presenting the view that Marx's work is essentially a 'domestic' study, which was
taken into the 'international arena' by Lenin,3 the alternative view of this paper is that Marx theorises bourgeois social relations as global class relations. It is simply
unnecessary to approach the study of international
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relations in terms of Waltzean or Poulantzean structural 'levels'. 4 By contrast I will argue that Marx views capitalism as a single system in which state power is
allocated between territorial entities. Class relations do not impinge on the state, they do not exist in 'domestic' society and make their presence felt by influencing the
state which operates in the 'international' realm. Rather the state itself is a form of the class relation which constitutes global capitalist society.5 Bourgeois social
relations appear, for example, as British relations on the world market. Yet as Marx clarifies in The Civil War in France, struggles between states are to be
understood as struggles between capital and labour which assume more and more the character of the national power of capital over labour.6
The world market is not therefore to be seen as an autonomous 'level', for this simply reproduces the domestic/international split which so bedevils realist and liberal
international relations theory. Rather the world market, existing in and through the territory of states, is where the disharmony of bourgeois social relations appear upon
their most magnificent scene, as the nationally separate component parts of bourgeois society struggle in competition.7 A class analysis of international relations does
not thereby proceed by dismissing the state or by seeking to divine how the 'economy' determines and is the 'real' motor behind the state. This would be to accept the
axioms of neoclassical liberalism which see the state as both irrelevant and absent from the 'autonomous realm' of the economy. Instead class analysis seeks to
understand how seemingly independent features of capitalist society are interdependent and contradictory aspects of an organic unity whose foundation is the struggle
between capital and labour. Neither the state nor the market exist simply as class relations but they are nevertheless the historically specific social forms taken by this
contradictory unity.8
The foregoing indicates that the aim of class analysis as presented in the Manifesto is to reveal the relations of struggle which lie behind the seemingly solid nature of
material categories. This does not mean that we should reject analysis of the categories themselves. Rather we need to begin our study by asking 'why this content has
assumed that particular form'.9 In respect of international relations, first, what it is about the development of the social relations of production under capitalism that
results in apparently separate 'economic' and 'political' forms,10 and, second, how are we to understand conflict and collaboration between states (and other actors) in
terms of the struggle between capital and labour?
The Significance of the Communist Manifesto
A full account of Marx's approach to international relations rests upon mastering his critique of classicalpolitical economy presented in Capital and in Theories of
Surplus Value. The clear and insistent arguments present in this critique
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undermine the claim that Marx's project is flawed because of too many 'silences' and 'absences'. 11 Moreover it seems reasonable to infer from Engels's preface to the
English edition of the Communist Manifesto of 1888 (and from the joint preface of 1872), that, with a few minor changes, the authors continued to adhere, well after
1848, to the general principles laid down in the Manifesto. In many ways therefore the Manifesto remains the essential starting point for understanding Marx's
approach to international relations. In the course of his analysis in the Manifesto Marx develops four main arguments indicating how a radical theory of international
relations can be fashioned. These arguments focus on class struggle and the constitutive power of labour; the 'revolutionary' dynamic of industrial capitalism;
dependence and uneven development in the global system; and the centrality of the notion of crisis.
Class Struggle and the Constitutive Power of Labour
The central proposition of the Manifesto, that 'the history of society up to now is the history of class struggles', has been much misunderstood.12 If, as is often the
case, class struggle is taken to mean overt political action or conscious, collective industrial dispute then it is easy to conclude that Marx's statement is false. However,
as de Ste Croix points out, this interpretation makes nonsense not merely of the Manifesto but of the greater part of Marx's work.13 By contrast if we interpret the
Manifesto's opening statement in line with the centrality Marx gives to exploitation in Capital, a much more coherent explanation is produced. In a famous passage in
Capital, Volume 3, Marx argues:
the specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly
out of production itself and reacts back on it in turn as a determinant . . . it is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate
producers in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice and hence also the political form of the relationship of sovereignty and dependence,
in short, the specific form of state in each case.14
What Marx is concentrating on, and as de Ste Croix points out what is so often overlooked, is not the way in which the bulk of the labour of production is done, but
how the extraction of the surplus from the immediate producer is secured.15 If we see exploitation as the hallmark of class struggle then it is feasible to view history as
involving a permanent struggle between exploiting and exploited classes, and in a sense 'even slaves who are kept in irons and driven with a whip can conduct some
kind of passive resistance, if only by quiet sabotage and breaking a tool or two'.16 In short, by understanding class struggle
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as the fundamental relationship between classes involving exploitation and resistance to it, we have a more coherent view of struggle encompassing overt/covert, active
and passive forms of resistance to the restructuring and intensification of the imposition of work. 17
In this sense it is the organisation of the social relations of production, and in particular the social determination of labour, which forms the starting point for Marx's
analysis, 'it is the general light tingeing all other colours and modifying them in their specific quality; it is a special ether determining the specific gravity of everything
found in it'.18 For Marx the importance of the social relations of production, and the disposition of power which thereby obtains between the working class and the
ruling class throughout history in classdivided societies, cannot be overemphasised. By rooting his study in the analysis of the direct relationship of the owners of the
conditions of production to the immediate producers, Marx offers a unique theorisation of the entire social edifice and, thereby, its changing political form. In
capitalism, as Meiksins Wood points out, the disposition of power between the individual capitalist and worker has as its condition the political configuration of society
as a whole. The balance of class forces and the powers of the state permit the expropriation of the direct producer, the maintenance of private property for the
owners, and their control over production and appropriation.19
In developing the concept of the social relations of production—the relations established by individuals in the reproduction of their life—Marx is able to understand the
state and the market as historically specific reified forms, which are to be grasped neither from themselves nor from the socalled general development of the human
mind, but rather have their roots in the 'material conditions of life, the totality of which Hegel . . . embraces within the term "civil society".20 To grasp the laws of
motion of bourgeois society, and thereby to understand the contradictory unity of state and market, it is necessary to briefly characterise the social relations of feudal
production and trace their dissolution since, 'the whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of
commodity production, vanishes . . as soon as we come to other forms of production'.21 This is the task Marx achieves in his seminal Contribution to a Critique of
Hegel's Philosophy of Law, and which is later reiterated in the Grundrisse and Capital and again with passion in The Civil War in France.
For our purposes, the Manifesto indicates that the key characteristic of capitalist social relations is that for the first time in history the means whereby the surplus is
pumped out of the direct producer is 'purely' economic in form, given the generalisation of commodity production and exchange. Whilst all other classdivided
societies have operated through direct extraeconomic sanctions, based on kin, custom, religion, law or force, the capitalist class achieves subordination through the
generalised imposition of the commodity
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form. 22 The ability to participate in consumption is thereby regulated by the ability to amass exchange value. For the mass of propertyless individuals this is only
possible through the sale of labour power. The struggles of the bourgeoisie against the feudal nobility thereby sought to replace connections based on primitive blood
ties, nature, and relationships of lordship and bondage, with the 'icy waters of egotistical calculation'23 in the shape of the commodity form and a market society. The
linchpin of bourgeois society is, as the Manifesto makes clear, private property. Although, as Marx points out, production based on exchange value may appear to
posit property as the result only of labour, actually capitalist relations presuppose and produce the separation of labour from its objective conditions.24 The
transformation of money into capital and the final consolidation of market society presupposes the historical process which separates the worker from ownership of the
means of production and subsistence. Once capital has come into being, the effect of its process is to subject all production to itself, and everywhere to develop and
complete the separation between labour and property, between labour and the objective conditions of labour. However, despite the 'separation' between the 'moment
of coercion' and the 'moment of appropriation' in capitalism, absolute private property, the contractual relation which binds producer to appropriator and the process
of generalised commodity exchange itself are all maintained through legal and political forms. Therefore in bourgeois civil society, the 'economic' rests firmly on the
'political' despite their 'differentiation'.25 This, as I indicate below, is of fundamental importance in Marx's approach to international relations.
In the place of unreflective statecentrism, Marx suggests we understand that the apparent solidity of the 'state' masks its existence as a contradictory form of social
relationship. The state is not only an institution but a formprocess, an active process of forming social relations and therefore class struggles channelling them into non
class forms—citizens' rights, international human rights—which promote the disorganisation of labour.26 The key to comprehending capitalist society is that it is a
social system based on the imposition of work through the commodityform. The reproduction of bourgeois social relations at all levels (from the overseer, to the
managing director, the government, international agencies and alliances between states) rests upon the ability of capital (in all its forms and guises) to harness and
contain the power of labour within the bounds of the commodityform. The struggles which ensue over the imposition of work, the regulation of consumption through
the commodification of labour time as money and the confinement of the production of use values within the bounds of profitability produce constant instability and
crisis. It is the everyday struggles in and against the dominance of the commodityform which are manifest as 'national' economic crises or balance of payments
problems or speculative pressure on currency. Thus Marx's approach sees relations between
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national states in terms of the social relationships which constitute states as moments of the global composition of class relations.
The 'Revolutionary' Dynamic of Industrial Capitalism
The foregoing analysis of the constitutive power of labour is summarised by Marx towards the end of Section I of the Manifesto, in the following terms: 'The essential
condition for the existence and for the rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of private individuals, the formation and expansion of
capital, and the essential condition for capital is wage labour.' 27 The bourgeoisie harnessing the power of labour has, Marx notes, been the first to show what human
activity can really bring about. However although the bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part in the development of society, Marx is adamant
that it is the law of value (to which the bourgeois class is also subject) and the accumulation of capital that forces the pace of change:
The bourgeois relations of production and trade, bourgeois property relations, modern bourgeois society which has conjured up such powerful means of production and of trade,
resembles the sorcerer who could no longer control the unearthly powers he had summoned forth.28
Whilst the discovery of America and development of giant modern industry gave an immense boost to the rising bourgeoisie, these features have now reacted back on
the capitalist class. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and 'The need for a constantly expanding market for
their products pursues the bourgeoisie over the whole world'.29 This situation has two main consequences for international relations. First, in the place of old local and
national seclusion, 'we have a universal commerce, a universal dependence of nations on one another'.30 Prefiguring by almost 130 years the 'interdependence school'
of international relations,31 Marx suggests that national selfsufficiency becomes more and more impossible. Not only is this likely to destroy 'national' industries (and
lead to the 'internationalisation' of production) it also fuels international trade by creating 'new wants' and produces from national literatures a cosmopolitan 'world
literature'.32
Second, rapid improvements in production and communication force all nations, regardless of their dominant mode of production to adopt capitalist social relations.
The cheap price of commodities 'batter down all Chinese walls' despite 'even the most intense xenophobia'. In short:
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It forces all nations to adopt the bourgeois mode of production or go under; it forces them to introduce socalled civilisation amongst themselves, i.e. to become bourgeois. In a
phrase, it creates a world in its own image. 33
The recent history of international relations 'postCold War' and the experience of attempts to devise 'socialism in one country' would appear to lend renewed
significance to this insight of the Manifesto.
Dependency and Uneven Development
Whilst Marx recognises that the power of the bourgeoisie rests on its ability to impose work through the commodityform, hence extracting maximum surplus from the
working class, he is equally clear that relations between states involve exploitation. Unlike Adam Smith and David Ricardo, who argue that international relations can
be a positive sum game with all nations benefiting from a global division of labour (encapsulated in Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage),34 Marx indicates that
there is no basis for 'catchup' or even development. The 'less developed' nations are likely to remain disadvantaged in the global system, becoming increasingly
dependent on 'advanced' states. In the same way that the bourgeoisie has made the countryside dependent on the towns:
It has made undeveloped and semideveloped nations dependent on civilised ones, peasant societies dependent on bourgeois societies, the East on the West.35
When placed in the context of the dynamic of industrial capitalism Marx and Engels offer a clear statement that whilst all nations will be drawn into the bourgeois mode
of production they will not exist on equal terms. Growing competition among the bourgeoisie indicates that conflict and collaboration is the norm in the global system
and is manifested in national terms as a struggle between states. A dialectic of nationalisation within states and internationalisation between states is set up prefiguring
both the 'dependency' school and more orthodox Leninist treatments of international affairs. However whilst the latter traditions have on occasion been guilty of
reifying the state and producing a static analysis, the Manifesto continues the theme that, 'everything feudal and fixed goes up in smoke',36 by placing the notion of
crisis and class struggle at the heart of its explanation.
Social Crisis and Political Struggle
Insofar as Marx grounds a theory of global relations in an analysis of struggles between labour and capital he offers a unique contribution to international
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relations that transcends the artificial separation between 'economics' and 'politics'. Capital, he emphasises, is not a personal, it is a social power, and only by the
united action of all members of society can it be set in motion. This points to the instability of capitalist relations and the permanence of class struggle. Whilst the
bourgeoisie is involved in an unceasing process of harnessing the power of labour (and the working class in permanent resistance to the imposition of work), it is
moreover engaged in fierce competition and ultimately bound by the law of value. The system of private property, on which the class antagonism rests, periodically
produces an epidemic of crises that in earlier epochs would have seemed absurd—an 'epidemic of overproduction'. 37 Here Marx refers not only to the standard
economics meaning of not enough 'effective demand' (demand backed by the ability to pay). He primarily draws attention to the social crisis at the heart of society
based on private property—'bourgeois social relations have become too narrow to encompass the wealth they produce'.38 Periodically not only the products of
labour but largescale productive forces themselves are destroyed (and society finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism) because 'there is too much
civilisation, too many goods, too much industry, too much commerce'. In an effort to mitigate such crises we see on the one hand, the enforced destruction of a mass
of productive forces; and on the other the conquest of new markets and the more thorough exploitation of old ones. As a consequence the bourgeoisie paves the way
for more extensive and destructive crises and diminishes 'the means for preventing them'.39
Just as the bourgeoisie is involved in a constant battle with the working class (and is of course fragmented in terms of nationality), the proletariat conducts its daily
struggle in localcumnational settings. Whilst recognising that the 'Workers have no nation of their own' Marx and Engels nevertheless maintain that:
Since the proletariat must first of all take political control, raise itself up to be the class of the nation, must constitute the nation itself, it is still nationalistic, even if not at all in the
bourgeois sense of the term.40
Moreover, united action of the 'leading civilised' countries is 'one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat'. In an important passage Marx resolves
what at first sight seems to be a contradiction in his understanding:
The struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie is at the outset a national one in form, though not in content. Naturally the proletariat of each country must first finish off its
own bourgeoisie.41
In consequence, as the exploitation of one individual by another is put to an end, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put to an end: 'As internal
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class conflict within a nation declines, so does the hostility of one nation to another.' 42 In short, Marx develops a careful argument that rejects nationalism as the basis
of workingclass organisation, yet recognises that global relations are expressed in national terms. Hence the national struggles of the workers bring to the fore the
common interests of the entire proletariat, 'independent of all nationality'.
Conclusion
Whilst a quick survey of contemporary international relations points to the durability of national states and the world market, class analysis, as developed in the
Manifesto, probes behind this apparent solidity to reveal the incessant struggles between labour and capital, which, as Marx indicates, are just so many mines to blow
bourgeois society to pieces: 'a multitude of antagonistic forms of the social entity, whose antagonism, however, can never be exploded by a quiet metamorphosis'.43
Capitalist society, built on generalised commodity production, fetishises social relations to the extent that the dead categories 'trade', 'competition', 'profitability', and
the 'economy' itself, limit our vision and threaten to constrain political action by obscuring the historical specificity of the present form of social organisation.
Not only is the notion of the 'economy' a reified abstraction, but even a seemingly innocuous idea such as the 'national balance of payments' is revealed on closer
inspection to have only a virtual existence—an accountant's attempt to chart the spatial (national) containment of the power of labour within the commodity form. As
Marx records in relation to trade, however much the private interests within every nation divide it into as many nations as there are fullgrown individuals in it, and
however much the interests of the exporters and the importers of the same nation here conflict with each other—the rate of exchange creates only the semblance of
the existence of a national trade.44 Similarly, 'competition' tends to be understood by liberal and realist writers alike as the relation between firms which fuels capitalist
growth. However, 'price competition' and 'product differentiation' are simply the forms through which the class struggle between labour and capital is organised.45
New job hierarchies, infinite model variations, marketing strategies and definitions of skill are methods employed globally by capital to gain control over (principally by
dividing) labour.
The Manifesto indicates that the aim of Marxian class analysis is to reveal the relations of struggle that lie behind the seemingly solid nature of material categories.
Marx rejects studies of international relations which begin either from the 'isolated individual' of economic liberalism or the 'likeunits' (sovereign states) of the realist
tradition. The 'isolated individual' is 'nothing but the aesthetic illusion of the small and big Robinsonades'.46 Individuals exist
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only in definite social relations, 'man is a social animal in the most literal sense: he is not only a social animal, but an animal that can isolate itself only within society'. 47
Furthermore, states do not exist independently of society—they are simply the political form of the social relations which constitute society ('Political power in its true
sense is the organised power of one class for oppressing another').48 By guaranteeing private property and thereby upholding the rule of the market through law and
money, states manage the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. In effect, states exist as political nodes in the global flow of capital.
The relevance of the Communist Manifesto is that it implores us to trace international relations back to the contradictory movements of the labourcapital relation. In
this way, Marx and Engels offer a 'political' theory of international relations which forges an allimportant link between global class struggles and the national
formulation of policies, designed to rechannel the power of labour and disorganise its potential for political unification. Based on this reading of the Manifesto,
international relations is redefined as the study of the national processing of global class relations and the forms of resistance to this precarious 'containment', from the
workplace to the Earth Summit.
Notes
1. For a defence of statecentred orthodoxy see S. Krasner, 'International Political Economy: Abiding Discord, in Review of International Political Economy, Vol.
1, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp. 1319. For an early assessment of neoGramscian approaches see P. Burnham, 'NeoGramscian Hegemony and the International Order,
in Capital and Class, Vol. 45, Autumn 1991, pp. 7391.
2. A useful overview of the limits of dependency can be found in R. Kiely, Sociology and Development: the Impasse and Beyond (London, UCL Press, 1996).
The classic critique of functionalism remains J. Rex, Key Problems of Sociological Theory (London, Routledge, 1961).
3. For example see J. S. Goldstein, International Relations (New York, HarperCollins, 1994), p. 477.
4. For a critique of Poulantzas see S. Clarke, 'Marxism, Sociology and Poulantzass Theory of the State', in Capital and Class, 2, 1977. The classic structural realist
text is Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York, Random House, 1979).
5. See W. Bonefeld, 'Social Constitution and the Form of the Capitalist State', in W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn and J. Holloway (eds), Open Marxism, Vol. 1 (London,
Pluto, 1992).
6. C.W., Vol. 22, p. 329.
7. C.W., Vol. 28, p.10.
8. For further elaboration see P. Burnham, 'State and Market in International Political Economy, in Studies in Marxism, 2, 1995.
9. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976), p. 174.
10. The seminal analysis is J. Holloway and S. Picciotto, 'Capital, Crisis and the State', in Capital and Class, Vol. 2, 1977.
11. For example, in an otherwise useful overview Andrew Linklater criticises Marx for
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failing to reflect systematically on 'the manifold patterns of alienation, exploitation and estrangement based on ethnicity, race and gender' (A. Linklater, 'Marxism',
in S. Burchill and A. Linklater, Theories of International Relations (London, Macmillan, 1996), pp. 1245). On 'silences' and 'absences' in Marx, see S. Clarke,
'Althusserian Marxism', in S. Clarke et al., OneDimensional Marxism (London, Allison and Busby, 1980).
12. Manifesto, p. 14.
13. G. E. M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London, Duckworth, 1981), p. 57.
14. K. Marx, Capital, Vol. 3 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1981), p. 927.
15. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle, p. 52.
16. Ibid., p. 66.
17. Ibid., p. 44. To illustrate the consistency of this view, de Ste Croix notes a comment made by Marx and Engels to Babel and others in 1879 when reflecting on the
Manifesto: 'For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving power of history'. Ibid., p. 47.
18. C.W., Vol. 28, p. 43.
19. Ellen Meiksins Wood, 'The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism', in New Left Review, 127, 1981.
20. C.W., Vol. 29, p. 262.
21. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 169.
22. P. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London, Verso, 1979), p. 403; H. Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically (Sussex, Harvester, 1979) p. 72.
23. Manifesto, p. 16.
24. C.W., Vol. 28, p. 433.
25. Meiksins Wood, 'The Separation'.
26. J. Holloway, 'In the beginning was the scream', in Common Sense, 11, 1991.
27. Manifesto, p. 23.
28. Manifesto, p. 18.
29. Manifesto, p. 18.
30. Manifesto, p. 16.
31. The classic interdependence text is R. Keohane and J. Nye, Power and Interdependence (Boston, Little Brown, 1977).
32. Manifesto, p. 17.
33. Ibid.
34. D. Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London, Everyman, 1973), pp. 827.
35. C.W., Vol. 6, p. 488.
36. Manifesto, p. 16.
37. Manifesto, p. 18.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Manifesto, p. 27.
41. Manifesto, p. 22.
42. Manifesto, p. 27.
43. C.W., Vol. 28, pp. 967.
44. C.W., Vol. 28, p. 96.
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45. See H. Cleaver, 'Competition or Cooperation?', in Common Sense, 9, 1990.
46. C.W., Vol. 28, p. 17.
47. Ibid., p. 18.
48. Manifesto, p. 29.