Communist Manifesto

Manifesto
• this is a manifesto,
• not an academic study

https://monthlyreview.org/1998/05/01/the-
communist-manifesto-after-150-years/

Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Communist

Manifesto After 150 Years”
“The Communist Manifesto is just that: a
manifesto. It is not a long and comprehensive
scholarly study but a public declaration of a
political program, a short and dramatic
statement of purpose and a call to arms, written
at a time of political ferment, on the eve of what
turned out to be the nearest thing the world had
ever seen to international revolution….”
“Yet posterity has judged this political manifesto
not just as a manifesto but as many other things.
…
But only a very great work—which still has much
to say to us 150 years later—could invite this
kind of critical scrutiny. Nothing could give more
convincing testimony to the genius of the
Manifesto than the energy that has been
expended in attacking it.” (Ellen Wood)
“perhaps the most successful
political pamphlet of all time”
(Terrell Carver)
 Preface to the German Edition of 1872

“However much the state of things may have

altered during the last twenty-five years, the
general principles laid down in this Manifesto
are, on the whole, as correct today as ever. Here
and there some detail might be improved. The
practical application of the principles will
depend, as the Manifesto itself states,
everywhere and at all times, on the historical
conditions for the time being existing, and …
 Preface to the German Edition of 1872

…for that reason, no special stress is laid on the

revolutionary measures proposed at the end of
Section II. That passage would, in many respects,
be very differently worded today. In view of the
gigantic strides of Modern Industry in the last
twenty-five years, and of the accompanying
improved and extended party organization of
the working class, in view of
 Preface to the German Edition of 1872
…the practical experiences gained, first in the
February Revolution, and then, still more, in the
Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first
time held political power for two whole months,
this program has in some details become
antiquated. One thing especially was proved by the
Commune, vz., that “the working class cannot
simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery,
and wield it for its own purposes”. (Marx, Engels in
Tucker 470)
All history is the history of class struggles.

• The manifesto is not merely about

“the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie”.
• It’s about
“the oppressed vs. the oppressor”
“the exploited vs. the exploiter”
 The Outline of the Manifesto
1. Class struggle
2. Proletarian measures
3. Criticisms of other types of socialism
4. Communist tactics
 Class struggle
• There is a “more or less veiled civil war, raging
within existing society.” (482)

• The parties involved are classes.

 Class
• Defined by ownership or lack of ownership of
the means of production
 Bourgeoisie
• FN5: “By bourgeoisie is meant the class of
modern capitalists, owners of the means of
social production and employers of wage-
labor.” (Engels, English edition of 1888)
 “By proletariat,
• the class of modern wage-laborers who,
having no means of production of their own,
are reduced to selling their labor-power in
order to live.” (Engels, English edition 1888)
 Proletariatdef
• “a class of laborers, who live, only so long as
they find work, and who find work only so
long as their labor increases capital.” (p.479)
Materialistic conception of history
“Historical materialism begins with the simple
proposition that human beings obtain the
material conditions of their existence through
specific and historically variable relationships
with nature and with other human beings.”
(Ellen Wood)
 Base:
• Means of production and exchange (natural
resources+ raw materials+ instruments)
• Mode of production

• Productive forces
 Superstructure
• Law
• Religion
• Morality
• Ideology

• “The executive of the modern State is but a

committee for managing the common affairs
of the whole bourgeoisie”. (p.475)
 Relations of production

• There is a dialectical relation between base

and superstructure.
• The relations of production determine the
superstructure, and the superstructure
supports the relations of production.
• But the relations of production themselves are
dependent on the productive forces.

• The productive forces constantly evolve, and

they eventually outgrow the old modes of
production.
 Progress
• Growth in productive power is inevitable, and
has its own inner dynamic.
• When the extant relations of production can
no longer control the productive forces, they
are overthrown.

• History as progressive and directional

materialistic process
 Example
• “…the means of production and of exchange ,
on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built
itself up, were generated in feudal society. At
a certain stage in the development of these
means of production and of exchange,…the
feudal relations of property became no longer
compatible with the already developed
productive forces; they became so many
fetters….”
• “They had to burst asunder; they were burst
asunder.
• Into their place stepped free competition,
accompanied by a social and political
constitution adapted to it, and by the
economical and political sway of the bourgeois
class” (p.477-8)
• “A similar movement is going on before our
very eyes.”
 5 stages
1. Classless tribal communism
2. Slavery (despotic states)
3. Feudal society
4. Capitalism
5. Communism
 Question
Do we have enough examples in history that
validate the thesis that changes in productive
forces lead to changes in superstructure?
 Characterization of the Bourgeois Epoch

• “The bourgeois cannot exist without

constantly revolutionizing the instrument of
of production, and thereby the relations of
production, and with them the whole
relations of society….
• All that is solid melts into air.”(p. 476)
 Characterization of the Bourgeois Epoch

• Constant growth
• “need of a constantly expanding market for its
products” and for raw materials
• “The cheap prices of its commodities are the
heavy artillery with which it batters down all
Chinese walls” (p.477)
 Characterization of the Bourgeois Epoch

-urbanization
-country dependent on town,
-nations of peasants dependent on nations of
bourgeois
-the East on the West
-concentration of property political
centralization
 End of Capitalism?
• “Modern bourgeois society […] is like the
sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the
powers of the nether world whom he has
called up by his spells.” (p.378)

• Two reasons
 caveat
“In reading the Manifesto it is important to
recognize that Marx’s economic analysis in
particular was still in its formative stages. Some
important ideas expressed there were
subsequently rejected by him, and others
substantially altered in their content. Two
important and linked examples concern
determinants of wages and of economic crises.”
(Anwar Shaikh)
 1. Material conditions
• Epidemic of overproduction

• Too much production, not enough ability to

consume
(because restriction of wages causes the
restriction of the demand for consumption)
 Later, Marx distinguishes between

• “mere business cycles • “general crises” (which

(which are disruptive) are system-threatening)
 and he links crises
• NOT to • But to the “theory of
overproduction/ falling rate of profit”
underconsumption
 2.Social conditions
Development of the proletariat class

“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.” (p.478)
 Social conditions
• Extended division of labor
• Deskilling of labor

+
Increased Communication/union of workers
 Absolute vs Relative
immiseration
Abolute Immiseration Relative immiseration
• “in his early works (1844– • the forces of capitalist
1850) Marx writes as if competition prevent real
capitalism always drives wages from rising as fast as
wages down to a worker’s productivity
subsistence level
 Union of workers?
• National differences?
 Percentage of shares received from world
wealth
in 1965 in 1990
• Poorest 20% gets 2.3  > 1.4
• Second 20% gets 2.9  > 1.8
• Third 20% gets 4.2  > 2.1
• Fourth 20% gets 21.2  > 11.3
• Richest 20% gets 69.5  < 83.4

(from Monthly Review May

1998, quoted in Ahmad)
 Section II.
What the Communists Will Do
• 1.Formation of the proletariat into a class
• 2.Overthrow of bourgeois supremacy
• 3. conquest of political power

• Abolition of private property

“The abolition of existing property relations
is not a distinctive feature of communism”
1. Every historical change and revolution brings
about a change in property relations.
2. Communism is the abolition of bourgeois
property.
3. “Bourgeois property is the final and most
complete expression of the system of producing
and appropriating products that is based on
class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the
many by the few…” (p.484)
 Therefore
• When bourgeois property is abolished, all
exploitation and class antagonisms will end.

• Proletariat as the universal class?

 Possible Objection
• Abolition of private property is the violation of
the individual right to property which is based
on individual labor.
 Marx and Engels’ Response
• Capital is a collective product.
• It is a social power, not a personal power.
 The bourgeoisie presents it as if
• “The communists want to transform individual
property into common property”
 Marxist response:
• “Bourgeois property is not individual property.
In fact, it is the bourgeoisie that transforms
individual property into bourgeois property—
i.e., property with a class character.”
• “You are horrified at our intending to do away
with private property. But in your existing
society, private property is already done away
with for nine-tenths of the population.”
(p.486)
• “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 labour of others by means of
such appropriation”. (p.486)
 Ideology
• Culture as “a mere training to act as a
machine”… (p.487)

• “That selfish misconception that induces you to

transform into eternal laws of nature and of
reason, the social forms springing from your
present mode of production and form of
property…this misconception you share with
every ruling class that has preceded you” (p.487)
 Family?
• “The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere
instrument of production.” (p.488)
 References
• Carver, Terrell. 1999. “Reading Marx: Life and Works”.
Cambridge Companion to Marx. Ed.: Terrell Carver.
Cambridge U Press.
• Shaikh, Anwar. “Economics and the Communist Manifesto.
Part I.”
https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/atc/1155.ht
ml
Date retrieved: Oct 20, 2020.
• Wood, Ellen Meiksins. “The Communist Manifesto After 150
Years” Monthly Review.1998/05/01.
https://monthlyreview.org/1998/05/01/the-communist-manif
esto-after-150-years/
Date retrieved: Oct 20, 2020.