The second biggest-selling book ever published
In the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, global capitalism became entrenched in its modern, neoliberal form. Its triumph was so complete that the word “capitalism” itself fell out of use in the absence of credible political alternatives. But with the outbreak of financial crisis and global recession in the twenty-first century, capitalism is once again up for discussion. The status quo can no longer be taken for granted.
As Eric Hobsbawm argues in his acute and elegant introduction to this modern edition, in such times
The Communist Manifesto emerges as a work of great prescience and power despite being written over a century and a half ago. He highlights Marx and Engels’s enduring insights into the capitalist system: its devastating impact on all aspects of human existence; its susceptibility to enormous convulsions and crises; and its fundamental weakness.
Eric Hobsbawm's Introduction to the 2012 Edition of Marx & Engels 'The Communist Manifesto'
I
In the spring of 1847 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels agreed to join the so-called League of the Just [Bund
der Gerechten], an offshoot of the earlier League of the Outlaws [Bund
der Geächteten], a
revolutionary secret society formed in Paris in the 1830s under French
Revolutionary influence by German journeymen – mostly tailors and
woodworkers – and still mainly composed of such expatriate artisan
radicals. The League, convinced by their ‘critical communism’, offered
to publish a Manifesto drafted by Marx and Engels as its policy
document, and also to modernize its organization along their lines.
Indeed, it was so reorganized in the summer of 1847, renamed League of
the Communists [Bund
der Kommunisten], and committed to the
object of ‘the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the
proletariat, the ending of the old society which rests on class
contradiction [Klassengegensätzen] and the establishment of a new
society without classes or private property’. A second congress of the
League, also held in London in November–December 1847, formally accepted
the objects and new statutes, and invited Marx and Engels to draft the
new Manifesto expounding the League’s aims and policies.
Although
both Marx and Engels prepared drafts, and the document clearly
represents the joint views of both, the final text was almost certainly
written by Marx – after a stiff reminder by the Executive, for Marx,
then as later, found it hard to complete his texts except under the
pressure of a firm deadline. The virtual absence of early drafts might
suggest that it was written rapidly.[i] The resulting document of twenty-three pages, entitled
Manifesto of the Communist Party (more generally known since 1872 as
The Communist Manifesto), was ‘published in February 1848’, printed in the office of the Workers’ Educational Association (better known as the
Communistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein, which survived until 1914), at 46 Liverpool Street in the City of London.
This small pamphlet is by far the most influential single piece of political writing since the French Revolutionary
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. By
good luck it hit the streets only a week or two before the outbreak of
the revolutions of 1848, which spread like a forest fire from Paris
across the continent of Europe. Although its horizon was firmly
international – the first edition hopefully, but wrongly, announced the
impending publication of the Manifesto in English, French, Italian,
Flemish and Danish – its initial impact was exclusively German. Small
though the Communist League was, it played a not insignificant part in
the German Revolution, not least through the newspaper
Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848–49),
which Karl Marx edited. The first edition of the Manifesto was
reprinted three times in a few months, serialized in the
Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, corrected
and reset in thirty pages in April or May 1848, but dropped out of
sight with the failure of the 1848 revolutions. By the time Marx settled
down to his lifelong exile in England in 1849, the Manifesto had become
sufficiently scarce for him to think it worth reprinting Section III
(‘Socialistische und kommunis- tische Literatur’) in the last issue of
his London magazine
Neue Rheinische Zeitung, politisch-ökonomische Revue (November 1850), which had hardly any readers.
Nobody
would have predicted a remarkable future for the Manifesto in the 1850s
and early 1860s. A small new edition was privately issued in London by a
German
émigré printer, probably in 1864, and another small
edition in Berlin in 1866 – the first ever actually published in
Germany. Between 1848 and 1868 there seem to have been no translations
apart from a Swedish version, probably published at the end of 1848, and
an English one in 1850, significant in the bibliographical history of
the Manifesto only because the translator seems to have consulted Marx –
or (since she lived in Lancashire) more probably Engels. Both versions
sank without trace. By the mid-1860s virtually nothing that Marx had
written in the past was any longer in print.
Marx’s prominence in
the International Working Men’s Association (the so-called ‘First
International’, 1864–72) and the emergence, in Germany, of two important
working-class parties, both founded by former members of the Communist
League who held him in high esteem, led to a revival of interest in the
Manifesto, as in his other writings. In particular, his eloquent defence
of the Paris Commune of 1871 (commonly known as
The Civil War in France) gave
him considerable notoriety in the press as a dangerous leader of
international subversion, feared by governments. More specifically, the
treason trial of the German Social-Democratic leaders, Wilhelm
Liebknecht, August Bebel and Adolf Hepner in March 1872 gave the
document unexpected publicity. The prosecution read the text of the
Manifesto into the court record, and thus gave the Social-Democrats
their first chance of publish- ing it legally, and in a large print run,
as part of the court proceedings. As it was clear that a document
published before the 1848 Revolution might need some updating and
explanatory commentary, Marx and Engels produced the first of the series
of prefaces which have since usually accompanied new editions of the
Manifesto.[ii]
For legal reasons the preface could not be widely distributed at the
time, but in fact the 1872 edition (based on the 1866 edition) became
the foundation of all subsequent editions. Meanwhile, between 1871 and
1873, at least nine editions of the Manifesto appeared in six languages.
Over
the next forty years the Manifesto conquered the world, carried forward
by the rise of the new (socialist) labour parties, in which the Marxist
influence rapidly increased in the 1880s. None of these chose to be
known as a Communist Party until the Russian Bolsheviks returned to the
original title after the October Revolution, but the title
Manifesto of the Communist Party remained
unchanged. Even before the Russian Revolution of 1917 it had been
issued in several hundred editions in some thirty languages, including
three editions in Japanese and one in Chinese. Nevertheless, its main
region of influence was the central belt of Europe, stretching from
France in the West to Russia in the East. Not surprisingly, the largest
number of editions were in the Russian language (70) plus 35 more in the
languages of the Tsarist empire – 11 in Polish, 7 in Yiddish, 6 in
Finnish, 5 in Ukrainian, 4 in Georgian, 2 in Armenian. There were 55
editions in German plus, for the Habsburg Empire, another 9 in Hungarian
and 8 in Czech (but only 3 in Croat and one each in Slovak and
Slovene), 34 in English (covering the USA also, where the first
translation appeared in 1871), 26 in French and 11 in Italian – the
first not until 1889.[iii]
Its impact in southwestern Europe was small – 6 editions in Spanish
(including the Latin American ones); one in Portuguese. So was its
impact in southeastern Europe (7 editions in Bulgarian, 4 in Serb, 4 in
Romanian, and a single edition in Ladino, presumably published in
Salonica). Northern Europe was moderately well represented, with 6
editions in Danish, 5 in Swedish and 2 in Norwegian.[iv]
This
uneven geographical distribution did not only reflect the uneven
development of the socialist movement, and of Marx’s own influence, as
distinct from other revolutionary ideologies such as anarchism. It
should also remind us that there was no strong correlation between the
size and power of social-democratic and labour parties and the
circulation of the Manifesto. Thus until 1905 the German
Social-Democratic Party (SPD), with its hundreds of thousands of members
and millions of voters, published new editions of the Manifesto in
print runs of not more than 2,000–3,000 copies. The party’s
Erfurt Programme of
1891 was published in 120,000 copies, while it appears to have
published not many more than 16,000 copies of the Manifesto in the
eleven years 1895 to 1905, the year in which the circulation of its
theoretical journal,
Die Neue Zeit, was 6,400.[v]
The average member of a mass Marxist social-democratic party was not
expected to pass examinations in theory. Conversely, the 70
pre-Revolutionary Russian editions represented a combination of
organizations, illegal for most of the time, whose total membership
cannot have exceeded a few thousand. Similarly, the 34 English editions
were published by and for the scattering of Marxist sects in the
Anglo-Saxon world, operating on the left flank of such labour and
socialist parties as existed. This was the milieu in which ‘the
clearness of a comrade could be gauged invariably from the number of
earmarks on his
Manifesto’.[vi] In
short, the readers of the Manifesto, though they were part of the new
and rising socialist labour parties and movements, were almost certainly
not a representative sample of their membership. They were men and
women with a special interest in the theory that underlay such
movements. This is probably still the case.
This situation
changed after the October Revolution – at all events, in the Communist
Parties. Unlike the mass parties of the Second International
(1889–1914), those of the Third (1919–43) expected all their members to
understand – or at least to show some knowledge of – Marxist theory. The
dichotomy between effective political leaders, uninterested in writing
books, and the ‘theorists’ like Karl Kautsky – known and respected as
such, but not as practical political decision-makers – faded away.
Following Lenin, all leaders were now supposed to be important
theorists, since all political decisions were justified on grounds of
Marxist analysis – or, more probably, by reference to the textual
authority of ‘the classics’: Marx, Engels, Lenin and, in due course,
Stalin. The publication and popular distribution of Marx’s and Engels’s
texts therefore became far more central to the movement than they had
been in the days of the Second International. They ranged from series of
the shorter writings, probably pioneered by the German
Elementarbücher des Kommunismus during the Weimar Republic, and suitably selected compendia of read- ings, such as the invaluable
Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels, to
Selected Works of Marx and Engels in two – later three – volumes, and the preparation of their
Collected Works [Gesamtausgabe];
all backed by the – for these purposes – unlimited resources of the
Soviet Communist Party, and often printed in the Soviet Union in a
variety of foreign languages.
The Communist Manifesto benefited
from this new situation in three ways. Its circulation undoubtedly
grew. The cheap edition published in 1932 by the official publishing
houses of the American and British Communist Parties in ‘hundreds of
thousands’ of copies has been described as ‘probably the largest mass
edition ever issued in English’.[vii]
Its title was no longer a historical survival, but now linked it
directly to current politics. Since a major state now claimed to
represent Marxist ideology, the Manifesto’s standing as a text in
political science was reinforced, and it accordingly entered the
teaching programme of universities, destined to expand rapidly after the
Second World War, where the Marxism of intellectual readers was to find
its most enthusiastic public in the 1960s and 1970s.
The USSR
emerged from the Second World War as one of the two superpowers, heading
a vast region of Communist states and dependencies. Western Communist
Parties (with the notable exception of the German Party) emerged from it
stronger than they had ever been or were likely to be. Although the
Cold War had begun, in the year of its centenary the Manifesto was no
longer published simply by communist or other Marxist editors, but in
large editions by non-political publishers with introductions by
prominent academics. In short, it was no longer only a classic Marxist
document – it had become a political classic
tout court.
It
remains one, even after the end of Soviet communism and the decline of
Marxist parties and movements in many parts of the world. In states
without censorship, almost certainly anyone within reach of a good
bookshop, and certainly within reach of a good library, can have access
to it. The object of a new edition is therefore not so much to make the
text of this astonishing masterpiece available, and still less to
revisit a century of doctrinal debates about the ‘correct’
interpretation of this fundamental document of Marxism. It is to remind
ourselves that the Manifesto still has plenty to say to the world in the
first decades of the twenty-first century.
II
What
does it have to say?It is, of course, a document written for a
particular moment in history. Some of it became obsolete almost
immediately – for instance, the tactics recommended for Communists in
Germany, which were not those in fact applied by them during the 1848
Revolution and its after- math. More of it became obsolete as the time
separating the readers from the date of writing lengthened. Guizot and
Metternich have long retired from leading governments into history
books; the Tsar (though not the Pope) no longer exists. As for the
discussion of ‘Socialist and Communist Literature’, Marx and Engels
themselves admitted in 1872 that even then it was out of date.
More
to the point: with the lapse of time, the language of the Manifesto was
no longer that of its readers. For example, much has been made of the
phrase that the advance of bourgeois society had rescued ‘a consider-
able part of the population from the idiocy of rural life’. But while
there is no doubt that Marx at this time shared the usual townsman’s
contempt for – as well as ignorance of – the peasant milieu, the actual
and analytically more interesting German phrase (‘dem Idiotismus des
Landlebens entrissen’) referred not to ‘stupidity’ but to ‘the narrow
horizons’, or ‘the isolation from the wider society’, in which people in
the country- side lived. It echoed the original meaning of the Greek
term ‘idiotes’, from which the current meaning of ‘idiot’ or ‘idiocy’ is
derived: ‘a person concerned only with his own private affairs and not
with those of the wider community’. In the course of the decades since
the 1840s – and in movements whose members, unlike Marx, were not
classically educated – the original sense had evaporated, and was
misread.
This is even more evident in the Manifesto’s political
vocabulary. Terms such as ‘Stand’ (‘estate’), ‘Demokratie’ (‘democracy’)
or ‘Nation/national’ either have little application to
late-twentieth-century politics, or no longer retain the meaning they
had in the political or philosophical discourse of the 1840s. To take an
obvious example: the ‘Communist Party’ whose Manifesto our text claimed
to be had nothing to do with the parties of modern democratic politics,
or the ‘vanguard parties’ of Leninist Communism, let alone the state
parties of the Soviet and Chinese type. None of these as yet existed.
‘Party’ still meant essentially a tendency or current of opinion or
policy, although Marx and Engels recognized that once this found
expression in class movements, it developed some kind of organization
(‘diese Organisation der Proletarier zur Klasse, und damit zur
politischen Partei’). Hence the distinction in Section IV between the
‘existing working-class parties ... the Chartists in England and the
agrarian reformers in America’ and the others, not yet so constituted.[viii]
As the text made clear, at this stage Marx’s and Engels’s Communist
Party was no kind of organization, nor did it attempt to establish one –
let alone an organization with a specific programme distinct from that
of other organizations.[ix] Incidentally, nowhere is the actual body on whose behalf the Manifesto was written, the Communist League, mentioned in it.
Moreover,
it is clear not only that the Manifesto was written in and for a
particular historical situation, but also that it represented one phase –
a relatively immature phase – in the development of Marxian thought.
This is most evident in its economic aspects. Although Marx had begun to
study political economy seriously from 1843 onwards, he did not set out
to develop the economic analysis expounded in
Capital until he
arrived in his English exile after the 1848 Revolution, and acquired
access to the treasures of the British Museum Library in the summer of
1850. Thus the distinction between the proletarian’s sale of his
labour to the capitalist and the sale of his
labour-power, which
is essential to the Marxian theory of surplus-value and exploitation,
had clearly not yet been made in the Manifesto. Nor did the mature Marx
hold the view that the price of the commodity ‘labour’ was its cost of
production – that is, the cost of the physiological minimum of keeping
the worker alive. In short, Marx wrote the Manifesto less as a Marxian
economist than as a communist Ricardian.
And yet, though Marx and
Engels reminded readers that the Manifesto was a historical document,
out of date in many respects, they promoted and assisted the publication
of the 1848 text, with relatively minor amendments and clarifications.[x]
They recognized that it remained a major statement of the analysis
which distinguished their communism from all other projects for the
creation of a better society. In essence this analysis was historical.
Its core was the demonstration of the historical development of
societies, and specifically of bourgeois society, which replaced its
predecessors, revolutionized the world, and in turn necessarily created
the conditions for its inevitable supersession. Unlike Marxian
economics, the ‘materialist conception of history’ which underlay this
analysis had already found its mature formulation in the mid–1840s, and
remained substantially unchanged in later years.[xi]
In this respect the Manifesto was already a defining document of
Marxism. It embodied the historical vision, though its general outline
remained to be filled in by fuller analysis.
III
How
will the Manifesto strike the reader who comes to it today for the
first time? The new reader can hardly fail to be swept away by the
passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and
sty- listic force, of this astonishing pamphlet. It is written, as
though in a single creative burst, in lapidary sentences almost
naturally transforming themselves into the memorable aphorisms which
have become known far beyond the world of political debate: from the
opening ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’ to the
final ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They
have a world to win.’[xii]
Equally uncommon in nineteenth-century German writing: it is written in
short, apodictic paragraphs, mainly of one to five lines – in only five
cases, out of more than two hundred, of fifteen or more lines. Whatever
else it is,
The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost bib- lical force. In short, it is impossible to deny its compelling power as literature.[xiii]
However,
what will undoubtedly also strike the contemporary reader is the
Manifesto’s remarkable diagnosis of the revolutionary character and
impact of ‘bourgeois society’. The point is not simply that Marx
recognized and proclaimed the extraordinary achievements and dynamism of
a society he detested – to the surprise of more than one later defender
of capitalism against the red menace. It is that the world transformed
by capitalism which he described in 1848, in passages of dark, laconic
eloquence, is recognizably the world in which we live 150 years later.
Curiously, the politically quite unrealistic optimism of two
revolutionaries, twenty-eight and thirty years of age, has proved to be
the Manifesto’s most lasting strength. For though the ‘spectre of
Communism’ did indeed haunt politicians, and though Europe was living
through a major period of economic and social crisis, and was about to
erupt in the greatest continent-wide revolution of its history, there
were plainly no adequate grounds for the Manifesto’s belief that the
moment for the overthrow of capitalism was approaching (the bourgeois
revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately
following proletarian revolution’). On the contrary. As we now know,
capitalism was poised for its first era of triumphant global advance.
Two
things give the Manifesto its force. The first is its vision, even at
the outset of the triumphal march of capitalism, that this mode of
production was not permanent, stable, ‘the end of history’, but a
temporary phase in the history of humanity – one due, like its
predecessors, to be superseded by another kind of society (unless – the
Manifesto’s phrase has not been much noted – it founders ‘in the common
ruin of the contending classes’).The second is its recognition of the
necessary
long-term historical tendencies of capitalist
development. The revolutionary potential of the capitalist economy was
already evident – Marx and Engels did not claim to be the only ones to
recognize it. Since the French Revolution some of the tendencies they
observed were plainly having substantial effect – for instance, the
decline of ‘independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with
separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation’ before
nation-states ‘with one government, one code of laws, one national class
interest, one frontier and one customs tariff’. Nevertheless, by the
late 1840s what ‘the bourgeoisie’ had achieved was a great deal more
modest than the miracles ascribed to it in the Manifesto. After all, in
1850 the world produced no more than 71,000 tons of steel (almost 70 per
cent of that in Britain) and had built less than 24,000 miles of
railroads (two-thirds of these in Britain and the USA). Historians have
had no difficulty in showing that even in Britain the Industrial
Revolution (a term specifically used by Engels from 1844 on)[xiv]
had hardly created an industrial – or even a predominantly urban –
country before the 1850s. Marx and Engels did not describe the world as
it had already been transformed by capitalism in 1848; they predicted
how it was logically destined to be transformed by it.
Now, in
the third millennium of the Western calendar, we live in a world in
which this transformation has largely taken place. In some ways we can
even see the force of the Manifesto’s predictions more clearly than the
generations between us and its publication. For until the revolution in
transport and communications since the Second World War, there were
limits to the globalization of production, to ‘giv[ing] a cosmopolitan
character to production and consumption in every country’. Until the
1970s industrialization remained overwhelmingly confined to its regions
of origin. Some schools of Marxists could even argue that capitalism, at
least in its imperialist form, far from ‘compel[ling] all nations, on
pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production’, was by
its nature perpetuating – or even creating – ‘underdevelopment’ in the
so-called Third World. While one-third of the human race lived in
economies of the Soviet Communist type, it seemed as though capital- ism
would never succeed in compelling all nations ‘to become bourgeois
themselves’. It would not ‘create a world after its own image’. Again,
before the 1960s the Manifesto’s announcement that capitalism brought
about the destruction of the family seemed not to have been verified,
even in the advanced Western countries where today something like half
of all children are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of
all households in big cities consist of single persons.
In
short, what might in 1848 have struck an uncommitted reader as
revolutionary rhetoric – or, at best, as plausible prediction – can now
be read as a concise characterization of capitalism at the end of the
twentieth century. Of what other document of the 1840s can this be said?
IV
However,
if at the end of the millennium we must be struck by the acute- ness of
the Manifesto’s vision of the then remote future of a massively
globalized capitalism, the failure of another of its forecasts is
equally striking. It is now evident that the bourgeoisie has not
produced ‘above all ... its own gravediggers’ in the proletariat. ‘Its
fall and the victory of the proletariat’ have not proved ‘equally
inevitable’.The contrast between the two halves of the Manifesto’s
analysis in its section on ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’ calls for more
explanation after 150 years than it did at the time of its centenary.
The
problem lies not in Marx’s and Engels’s vision of a capitalism which
necessarily transformed most of the people earning their living in this
economy into men and women who depend for their livelihood on hiring
themselves out for wages or salaries. It has undoubtedly tended to do
so, though today the incomes of some who are technically employees hired
for a salary, such as corporation executives, can hardly count as
proletarian. Nor does it lie essentially in their belief that most of
this working population would consist of a workforce of
industrial labour.
While Great Britain remained quite exceptional as a country in which
wage-paid manual workers formed the absolute majority of the population,
the development of industrial production required massive and growing
inputs of manual labour for well over a century after the Manifesto.
Unquestionably this is no longer the case in modern capital- intensive
high-tech production, a development not considered in the Manifesto,
though in fact in his more mature economic studies Marx himself
envisaged the possible development of an increasingly labourless
economy, at least in a post-capitalist era.[xv]
Even in the old industrial economies of capitalism, the percentage of
people employed in manufacturing industry remained stable until the
1970s, except for the USA, where the decline set in a little earlier.
Indeed, with very few exceptions – such as Britain, Belgium and the USA –
in 1970 industrial workers probably formed a larger proportion of the
total occupied population in the industrial and industrializing world
than ever before.
In any case, the overthrow of capitalism envisaged by the Manifesto relied not on the prior transformation of the
majority of
the occupied population into proletarians but on the assumption that
the situation of the proletariat in the capitalist economy was such
that, once organized as a necessarily political class movement, it could
take the lead in, and rally round itself, the discontent of other
classes, and thus acquire political power as ‘the independent movement
of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’.Thus
the proletariat would ‘rise to be the leading class of the nation ...
constitute itself as the nation’.[xvi]
Since
capitalism has not been overthrown, we are apt to dismiss this
prediction. Yet – utterly improbable though it looked in 1848 – the
politics of most European capitalist countries were to be transformed by
the rise of organized political movements basing themselves on the
class- conscious working class, which had barely made its appearance
outside Great Britain. Labour and socialist parties emerged in most
parts of the ‘developed’ world in the 1880s, becoming mass parties in
states with the democratic franchise which they did so much to bring
about. During and after World War I, as one branch of ‘proletarian
parties’ followed the revolutionary road of the Bolsheviks, another
branch became the sustaining pillars of a democratized capitalism. The
Bolshevik branch is no longer of much significance in Europe, or parties
of this kind have assimilated to social-democracy. Social-Democracy, as
understood in the days of Bebel or even Clement Attlee, is fighting a
rearguard action. Nevertheless the social-democratic parties of the
Second International, sometimes under their original names, are still
potentially the parties of government in several European states. Though
such governments were less common in the early twenty-first century
than they had been in the late twentieth, these parties have shown a
unique record of continuity as major political agents over more than a
century.
In short, what is wrong is not the Manifesto’s
prediction of the central role of the political movements based on the
working class (and still sometimes specifically bearing the class name,
as in the British, Dutch, Norwegian and Australasian Labour Parties). It
is the proposition: ‘Of all the classes that stand face to face with
the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary
class’, whose inevitable destiny, implicit in the nature and development
of capitalism, is to overthrow the bourgeoisie: ‘Its fall and the
victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’
Even in the notoriously ‘hungry forties’, the mechanism which was to ensure this – the inevitable pauperization[xvii]
of the labourers – was not totally convincing; unless on the
assumption, implausible even then, that capitalism was in its final
crisis and about to be
immediately overthrown. It was a double
mechanism. In addition to the effect of pauperization on the workers’
movement, it proved that the bourgeoisie was ‘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’. Far from providing the profit
which fuelled the engine of capitalism, labour now drained it away. But –
given the enormous economic potential of capitalism so dramatically
expounded in the Manifesto itself – why was it inevitable that
capitalism could not provide a livelihood, however miserable, for most
of its working class or, alternatively, that it could not afford a
welfare system? That ‘pauperism [in the strict sense; see Note 17]
develops even more rapidly than population and wealth’?[xviii]
If capitalism had a long life before it as became obvious very soon
after 1848 this did not have to happen, and indeed it did not.
The
Manifesto’s vision of the historic development of ‘bourgeois society’,
including the working class which it generated, did not
necessarily lead
to the conclusion that the proletariat would overthrow capitalism and,
in so doing, open the way to the development of communism, because
vision and conclusion did not derive from the same analysis. The aim of
communism, adopted before Marx became ‘Marxist’, was derived not from
the analysis of the nature and development of capital- ism but from a
philosophical – indeed, an eschatological – argument about human nature
and destiny. The idea – fundamental for Marx from then on – that the
proletariat was a class which could not liberate itself without thereby
liberating society as a whole first appears as ‘a philosophical
deduction rather than a product of observation’.[xix]
As George Lichtheim put it: ‘the proletariat makes its first appearance
in Marx’ writings as the social force needed to realise the aims of
German philosophy’ as Marx saw it in 1843–44.[xx]
The ‘positive possibility of German emancipation’, wrote Marx in the
Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, lay:
in the formation of a class with
radical chains ... a
class which is the dis- solution of all classes, a sphere of society
which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal,
and which claims no
particular right because the wrong committed against it is not a
particular wrong, but wrong
as such.... This dissolution of society as a particular class is the
proletariat.... The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of
the human being. Philosophy is the
head of this emancipation and the
proletariat is its
heart. Philosophy
cannot realise itself without abolishing the proletariat, and the
proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality.[xxi]
At
this time Marx knew little more about the proletariat than that ‘it is
coming into being in Germany only as a result of the rising industrial
development’, and this was precisely its potential as a liberating
force, since, unlike the poor masses of traditional society, it was the
child of ‘a
drastic dissolution of society’, and therefore by its existence ‘proclaim[ed] the
dissolution of the hitherto existing world order’. He
knew even less about labour movements, though he knew a great deal
about the history of the French Revolution. In Engels he acquired a
partner who brought to the partnership the concept of the ‘Industrial
Revolution’, an understanding of the dynamics of capitalist economy as
it actually existed in Britain, and the rudiments of an economic
analysis,[xxii]
all of which led him to predict a future social revolution, to be
fomented by an actual working class about which, living and working in
Britain in the early 1840s, he knew a great deal. Marx’s and Engels’s
approaches to ‘the proletariat’ and communism complemented one another.
So did their respective conceptions of the class struggle as a motor of
history – in Marx’s case derived largely from the study of the French
Revolutionary period; in Engels’s from the experience of social
movements in post-Napoleonic Britain. It is no surprise that they found
themselves (in Engels’s words) ‘in agreement in all theoretical fields’.[xxiii]
Engels brought to Marx the elements of a model which demonstrated the
fluctuating and self-destabilizing nature of the operations of the
capitalist economy – notably the outlines of a theory of economic crises[xxiv]–
and empirical material about the rise of the British working-class
movement and the revolutionary role it could play in Britain.
In
the 1840s the conclusion that society was on the verge of revolution was
not implausible. Nor was the prediction that the working class, however
immature, would lead it. After all, within weeks of the publication of
the Manifesto a movement of the Paris workers overthrew the French
monarchy, and gave the signal for revolution to half of Europe.
Nevertheless, the tendency for capitalist development to generate an
essentially
revolutionary proletariat could not be deduced from
the analysis of the nature of capitalist development. It was one
possible con- sequence of this development, but could not be shown to be
the only possible one. Still less could it be shown that a successful
overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat must necessarily open the way
to communist development. (The Manifesto claims no more than that it
would then initiate a process of very gradual change.)[xxv]
Marx’s vision of a proletariat whose very essence destined it to
emancipate all humanity, and end class society by its overthrow of
capitalism, represents a hope read into his analysis of capitalism, but
not a conclusion necessarily imposed by that analysis.
What the
Manifesto’s analysis of capitalism could undoubtedly lead to –
especially when it is extended by Marx’s analysis of economic
concentration, which is barely hinted at in 1848 – is a more general and
less specific conclusion about the self-destructive forces built into
capitalist development. It must reach a point – and in 2012 it is not
only Marxists who will accept this – where:
Modern bourgeois
society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a
society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the
powers of the nether world, whom he has called up.... The conditions of
bourgeois society arc too narrow to encompass the wealth created by
them.
It is not unreasonable to conclude that the
‘contradictions’ inherent in a market system based on ‘no other nexus
between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash
payment”’, a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can
never be overcome; that at some point in a series of transformations and
restructurings the development of this essentially self-destabilizing
system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described
as capitalism. Or – to quote the later Marx – when ‘centralisation of
the means of production and the socialisation of labour at last reach a
point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument’,
and that ‘integument is burst asunder’.[xxvi]
By what name the subsequent state of affairs is described is
immaterial. However – as the effects of the world economic explosion on
the world environment demonstrate – it will necessarily have to mark a
sharp shift away from private appropriation to social management on a
global scale.
It is extremely unlikely that such a
‘post-capitalist society’ would correspond to the traditional models of
socialism, and still less to the ‘really existing’ socialisms of the
Soviet era. What forms it might take, and how far it would embody the
humanist values of Marx’s and Engels’s communism, would depend on the
political action through which this change came about. For this, as the
Manifesto holds, is central to the shaping of historical change.
V
In
the Marxian view, however we describe that historic moment when ‘the
integument is burst asunder’, politics will be an essential element in
it. The Manifesto has been read primarily as a document of historical
inevitability, and indeed its force derived largely from the confidence
it gave its readers that capitalism was inevitably destined to be buried
by its gravediggers, and that now – and at no earlier era in history –
the conditions for emancipation had come into being. Yet contrary to
widespread assumptions – inasmuch as it believes that historical change
proceeds through men making their own history, it is not a determinist
document. The graves have to be dug by or through human action.
A
determinist reading of the argument is indeed possible. It has been
suggested that Engels tended towards it more naturally than Marx, with
important consequences for the development of Marxist theory and the
Marxist labour movement after Marx’s death. However, though Engels’s own
earlier drafts have been cited as evidence,[xxvii]
it cannot in fact be read into the Manifesto itself. When it leaves the
field of historical analysis and enters the present, it is a document
of choices, of political possibilities rather than probabilities, let
alone certainties. Between ‘now’ and the unpredictable time when, ‘in
the course of development’, there would be ‘an association, in which the
free development of each is the condition for the free development of
all’ lies the realm of political action.
Historical change
through social praxis, through collective action, is at its core. The
Manifesto sees the development of the proletariat as the ‘organization
of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political
party’. The ‘conquest of political power by the proletariat’ (the
winning of democracy’) is ‘the first step in the workers’ revolution’,
and the future of society hinges on the subsequent political actions of
the new regime (how ‘the proletariat will use its political supremacy’).
The commitment to
politics is what, historically,
distinguished Marxian socialism from the anarchists, and the successors
of those socialists whose rejection of all political action the
Manifesto specifically condemns. Even before Lenin, Marxian theory was
not just about ‘what history shows us will happen’, but also about ‘what
must be done’. Admittedly, the twentieth-century Soviet experience has
taught us that it might be better not to do ‘what must be done’ under
historical conditions which vir- tually put success beyond reach. But
this lesson might also have been learned from considering the
implications of
The Communist Manifesto.
But then, the
Manifesto – and this is not the least of its remarkable qualities – is a
document which envisaged failure. It hoped that the outcome of
capitalist development would be ‘A revolutionary reconstitution of
society at large’ but, as we have already seen, it did not exclude the
alternative: ‘common ruin’. Many years later, another Marxian rephrased
this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will
prevail is a question which the twenty-first century must be left to
answer.
[i] Only two items of such material have been discovered – a plan for Section III and one draft page. Karl Marx–Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 6 (London 1976), pp. 576–7.
[ii]
In the lifetime of the founders they were: (1) Preface to the (second)
German edition, 1872; (2) Preface to the (second) Russian edition, 1882 –
the first Russian translation, by Bakunin, had appeared in 1869,
understandably without Marx’s and Engels’s blessing; (3) Preface to the
(third) German edition, 1883; (4) Preface to the English edition, 1888;
(5) Preface to the (fourth) German edition, 1890; (6) Preface to the
Polish edition, 1892; and (7) Preface ‘To Italian Readers’, 1893.
[iii] Paolo Favilli, Storia del marxismo italiano. Dalle origini alla grande guerra (Milan 1996), pp. 252–4.
[iv] I rely on the figures in the invaluable Bert Andréas, Le Manifeste Communiste de Marx et Engels. Histoire et Bibliographie 1848–1918 (Milan 1963).
[v] Data from the annual reports of the SPD Parteitage. However, no numerical data about theoretical publications are given for 1899 and 1900.
[vi] Robert R. LaMonte, ‘The New Intellectuals’, New Review II, 1914; cited in Paul Buhle, Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to the Present Day (London 1987), p. 56.
[vii] Hal Draper, The Annotated Communist Manifesto (Center for Socialist History, Berkeley, CA 1984), p. 64.
[viii]
The original German begins this section by discussing ‘das Verhältniss
der Kommunisten zu den bereits konstituierten Arbeiterparteien ... also
den Chartisten’, etc. The official English translation of 1887, revised
by Engels, attenuates the contrast. A more faithful rendition would
compare the ‘already constituted workers’ parties’ such as the
Chartists, etc., with those not yet so constituted.
[ix]
‘The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other
working-class parties.... They do not set up any sectarian principles of
their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement’
(Section II).
[x]
The best-known of these, underlined by Lenin, was the observation, in
the 1872 preface, that the Paris Commune had shown ‘that the working
class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and
wield it for its own purposes’. After Marx’s death Engels added the
footnote modifying the first sentence of Section I to exclude
prehistoric societies from the universal scope of class struggle.
However, neither Marx nor Engels bothered to comment on or modify the
economic passages of the document. Whether Marx and Engels really
considered a fuller ‘Umarbeitung oder Ergänzung’ of the Manifesto
(Preface to German edition of 1883) may be doubted, but not that Marx’s
death made such a rewriting impossible.
[xi]
Compare the passage in Section II of the Manifesto (‘Does it require
deep intui- tion to comprehend that 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?’) with the corresponding passage in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy (‘It
is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but,
on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their
consciousness.’).
[xii]
Although this is the English version approved by Engels, it is not a
strictly correct translation of the original text: ‘Mögen die
herrschenden Klassen vor einer kom- munistischen Revolution zittern. Die
Proletarier haben nichts in ihr [‘in it’, i.e. ‘in the Revolution’; emphases added] zu verlieren als ihre Ketten.’
[xiii] For a stylistic analysis, see S.S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Verso,
New York 2011), pp. 148–9. The translations of the Manifesto known to
me do not have the literary force of the original German text.
[xiv] In ‘Die Lage Englands. Das 18. Jahrhundert’ (Marx–Engels Werke I, pp. 566–8).
[xv]
See, for example, the discussion of ‘Fixed capital and the development
of the productive resources of society’ in the 1857–58 manuscripts. Collected Works, vol. 29 (1987), pp. 80–99.
[xvi]
The German phrase ‘sich zur nationalen Klasse erheben’ had Hegelian
connotations which the English translation authorized by Engels
modified, presumably because he thought it would not be understood by
readers in the 1880s.
[xvii]
Pauperism should not be read as a synonym for ‘poverty’. The German
words, borrowed from English usage, are ‘Pauper’ (‘a destitute person
... one supported by charity or by some public provision’: Chambers’ Twentieth Century Dictionary) and ‘Pauperismus’ (pauperism: ‘state of being a pauper’: ibid.).
[xviii]
Paradoxically, something like the Marxian argument of 1848 is widely
used today by capitalists and free-market governments to prove that the
economies of states whose GNP continues to double every few decades will
be bankrupted if they do not abolish the systems of income transfer
(welfare states, etc.), installed in poorer times, by which those who
earn maintain those who are unable to earn.
[xix] Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, vol. 1, The Founders (Oxford 1978), p. 130.
[xx] George Lichtheim, Marxism (London 1964), p. 45.
[xxi] Collected Works, vol. 3 (1975), pp. 186–7. In this passage I have generally preferred the translation in Lichtheim, Marxism. The German word translated by him as ‘class’ is ‘Stand’, which is misleading today.
[xxii] Published as Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy in 1844 (Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 418–43).
[xxiii] ‘On the History of the Communist League’ (Collected Works, vol. 26, 1990), p. 318.
[xxiv] ‘Outlines of a Critique’ (Collected Works, vol. 3, pp. 433 ff). This seems to have been derived from radical British writers, notably John Wade, History of the Middle and Working Classes (London 1835), to whom Engels refers in this connection.
[xxv]
This is even clearer from Engels’s formulations in what are, in effect,
two preliminary drafts of the Manifesto, ‘Draft of a Communist
Confession of Faith’ (Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 102) and ‘Principles of Communism’ (ibid., p. 350).
[xxvi] From ‘Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’, in Capital, vol. I (Collected Works, vol. 35, 1996), p. 750.
[xxvii] Lichtheim, Marxism, pp. 58–60.
