The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years
by Ellen Meiksins Wood
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. In the century and a half
since its publication, it has been judged not only as a uniquely
influential document in the theory and practice of revolutionary
movements throughout the world, but also as a work of history, as
economic, political, and cultural analysis, and as prophecy. The
Manifesto has been judged as an account of past, present, and
future--not only the present and future of its authors but
those of every generation since, up to and including our own.
At first glance, it seems very unreasonable to judge a small
pamphlet--the product of collaboration by two young men very
early in their careers, written for a very specific and immediate
purpose--by such demanding measures. It is hard to think of any
other classic of Western social thought that has been judged by
such sweeping and rigorous standards. The Manifesto stands alone
in this respect no doubt because of its tremendous role in the
history of a vast political movement which has had an immeasurable
influence on the shape of the modern world. More particularly, the
Manifesto has been subject to uniquely critical scrutiny because
people in power, and their intellectual supporters, have felt that
much was at stake in debunking it.
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. So while
we have to remember the particular purposes for which it was written
and the very specific historical context in which it emerged, it
seems not so unreasonable after all to judge it in much larger
terms.
The Historical Context of the Manifesto
Let us first consider the context in which the Communist Manifesto
was written and how the specific historical conditions of its
composition affected its content.
The broad historical context of the Manifesto is, of course, the
emergence of industrial capitalism and the modern industrial
working class in Western Europe, together with the socialist
movements that grew out of these historical developments. There
had been earlier classics in what would become the socialist
tradition--such as the work of Winstanley in seventeenth century
England or Babeuf in eighteenth century France--but the social
movements with which they were associated, while influential in
various ways, remained on the margins of history. It was only
in the nineteenth century that substantial working class movements
emerged that could form a powerful political force and even
socialist parties. With the appearance of this new political
force came a body of socialist literature. First, there was a
diverse collection of writings often treated together (largely
thanks to the Manifesto itself) under the category "utopian
socialism," by thinkers such as Owen, St. Simon, and Fourier.
These writings would be overtaken by the far more penetrating
and systematic works of Marx and Engels, whose socialism was
deeply rooted in a critical analysis of capitalism of a kind
never attempted before. The Manifesto is certainly not the most
substantial of these works, but it is without doubt the most
well known, with a historical resonance probably unsurpassed
by any other single piece of secular writing, from any part of
the political spectrum.
Yet though the Manifesto was composed against the background
of those larger, long-term historical developments, it had a
more immediate context which helps to explain its particular
shape. The pamphlet was commissioned by the German Communist
League in 1847. Friedrich Engels (at age 27) first drafted
Principles of Communism (also included in this edition). He
handed it over to Karl Marx, then 29, for revision. Drawing
on Engels' Principles, Marx produced the theoretical and
literary masterpiece we now know as the Communist Manifesto,
which was first published anonymously in London in February 1848.
This was the year when revolution would sweep across Europe--
almost immediately after the publication of the Manifesto
(though obviously not because of it). Spreading like wildfire
from France to Germany to Hungary, Italy, and beyond, the
revolution covered an area that today takes in at least part
of ten different European countries, with effects as far away
as Latin America. In just a few weeks, one government after
another fell. These revolutions were to be very short-lived,
but it is hard to over-estimate the hopes and fears they aroused
as signals of an international revolution.
The Manifesto was written just before the outbreak of the revolution.
Although it cannot be said that the pamphlet played a major part in
the events that followed, it is a product of that very specific time
and that very specific revolutionary climate. In that historical
fact lie both many of its strengths and some unresolved problems.
The revolution, or revolutions, of 1848 took place in countries
with very diverse social, economic, and political conditions:
from a relatively "developed" country like France, or parts of
Germany (not yet a single unified state) such as the Rhineland,
to "backward" areas like southern Italy or Transylvania. But one
thing they had in common was that capitalism was not well advanced
in any of them, and in some cases not at all. For all their
differences, too, they all had predominantly rural populations.
Britain, the country in which capitalism was most advanced,
certainly saw eruptions of popular unrest and state repression
in the 1840s, but it did not experience the revolutionary upheavals
that occurred on the Continent. There was a mass political movement
in Britain too, the Chartist movement, but its political struggles
(for instance, the struggle for an extension of the franchise to
the working class, which would be won some time later) were being
overtaken by new kinds of class struggle. The growth of industrial
capitalism was already shifting the central terrain of class
conflict from the political arena to the workplace, the "point of
production."
If the various Continental revolutions had a common political
program, it was not the overthrow of something like a capitalist
system. It was rather the establishment of unified liberal or
constitutional states with a degree of civil equality, inspired
above all by the French Revolution in the previous century. In
some cases, like Hungary or Italy, the struggle for a more democratic
state was bound up with the fight for national autonomy.
But if 1848 was not a socialist or anti-capitalist revolution,
neither was it unambiguously a "bourgeois revolution" in the now
commonly understood sense: a revolution to liberate capitalism
from feudal constraints. The revolutionary "bourgeoisie" was not
a coherent capitalist class. Prominent among them were civil
servants, professionals, and intellectuals. Even in countries
where industrialization was more advanced, the industrial
bourgeoisie which opposed the dominant regime was small and
relatively weak, never able to act alone against the ruling
elite without the support of popular forces with different
material interests.
In all these cases, too, the popular forces, the people who fought
and died in the streets, the people who pushed the revolution
beyond the political objectives of the "bourgeois republic" or
the liberal state toward more far-reaching social transformations,
were not a modern mass proletariat. They included independent
craftsmen, small shopkeepers, peasants in some places (like Italy,
and even some parts of Germany), and the unemployed or underemployed
poor in towns with undeveloped economies still unable to absorb them.
Nowhere in revolutionary Europe was there a massive and developed
proletariat, a sizeable class of wage-laborers employed by capital
such as already existed in Britain. The nascent proletariat,
especially in France and more developed parts of Germany, had an
effect disproportionate to its numbers, but it could not yet
provide the social base for a successful revolution.
For that matter, there may have been no solid social base even for
a "bourgeois democratic" revolution. The revolutionary movements
relied, to varying degrees, on mass mobilization. Yet it was
precisely the dangers of mass mobilization that quickly drove
bourgeois liberals and radicals everywhere away from democracy,
or even liberalism, and back to rigid hierarchy, order, and reaction.
It might be said that the revolution both erupted and failed because
no single class was strong enough to sustain a stable regime of its own.
At any rate, when Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, they did not
believe that a socialist revolution, or a proletarian revolution of
any kind, was in the offing. They briefly hoped that the events, and
the failures, of 1848 might lead to something more, some further
longer-term development, a "permanent revolution" that would push
beyond the bourgeois republic to proletarian rule and finally
socialism. But any reader of the Manifesto must be struck by
the fact that the revolutionary hero of its eloquent narrative
is the bourgeoisie. The revolutionary victories of the bourgeoisie
were, of course, deeply contradictory for Marx and Engels, combining
benefits and costs in equal measure. They hoped, and confidently
expected, that the bourgeoisie's conquests would eventually be
overtaken by the triumph of the working class and socialism. But
even while the Manifesto calls workers to arms and foresees their
emergence as a truly revolutionary force, it tells the triumphal
story of the bourgeoisie.
"Bourgeois" or "Capitalist"?
It is commonly acknowledged that the "bourgeois revolution," with
the French Revolution of 1789 as the guiding light, forms the
background of the Communist Manifesto. But what exactly does this
mean, and what are its consequences for the argument of the Manifesto?
We cannot make sense of this classic without understanding that
the setting of its historical narrative is not an advanced capitalism.
The point is not simply that the pamphlet was written in the mid-nineteenth
century rather than at the end of the twentieth. It is not just that
Marx and Engels were talking about an earlier stage of capitalism than
the one we inhabit. The immediate context of their narrative is not
even the most advanced capitalism of their own day. They are writing
against the background of revolutionary ferment generated by social
forces and struggles that have as much to do with pre-capitalist
formations as with capitalist social relations: not just wage-laborers
pitted against capitalist employers, but non-privileged against
privileged classes, common people (including bourgeois) against
aristocracy, the nation against monarchy, peasants against landlords,
even serfs against masters, and everywhere the hungry poor against
the rich.
This is where we come to some interesting tensions in the Manifesto.
It is a manifesto of communism, of proletarian revolution against
capitalism. As a call to socialist struggle, it has never been
surpassed in its passion, its eloquence, its depth. It is also a
powerful and prophetic analysis of capitalism, which still stands
unrivalled as a portrait of the capitalist world in which we live
today, even on the brink of the twenty-first century. But the
Manifesto's immediate political inspiration belongs to a different
world, very unlike the capitalist world it so vividly portrays.
Marx's projections of the capitalist future are remarkable enough
even in relation to the most advanced capitalism of his day. But if
Britain was the model for his analysis of the capitalist system, it
was not the inspiration for the Manifesto's story of the bourgeoisie
as a revolutionary political force--a force that would, in turn,
launch the career of the proletariat as a revolutionary class.
The narrative of bourgeois revolution portrays the bourgeoisie as a
class which, at every stage of its development, was obliged to
struggle against the forces of reaction. It began, says Marx, as
an oppressed class fighting against the feudal aristocracy and,
only after centuries of class struggle and advance, ended with
its own modern representative state. In all these battles it was
obliged to enlist the support of laboring classes, and finally to
drag the modern proletariat into the political arena, giving the
working class the weapons to conduct its own struggle against the
bourgeoisie. This bourgeoisie also bequeathed to the working class
the most progressive aspects of its ideology: critical, anti-clerical
and anti-superstitious, liberal and up to a point egalitarian--in
other words, the culture of the Enlightenment.
This portrait of a politically progressive bourgeoisie, anti-
aristocratic to its core and more or less liberal, owes more to
the history of Continental bourgeois struggles than to the
development of British capitalism. The classic "bourgeois"
struggle, the French Revolution of 1789, had little to do
with capitalism. The core of the revolutionary bourgeoisie
did not consist of capitalists, or even of commercial classes
of a pre-capitalist kind, but of office-holders and professionals.
The revolutionary objectives of people like this had to do not with
liberating capitalism but with aspirations to civil equality and
"careers open to talent." These bourgeois objectives are not those
of a society in which capitalist wealth is the highest goal. They
were better suited to a society in which public office was a
lucrative economic resource and the highest bourgeois career.
As for British capitalism, it was never simply, or even primarily, a
"bourgeois" career. The British landed aristocracy was no less
capitalist than were urban classes. Nor did capitalism establish
itself in England by means of politically progressive "bourgeois"
struggles against a reactionary aristocracy. Many large property
owners in England, both landed and urban, had certainly fought
against the king in the English revolution of the seventeenth
century, when their partnership with the Crown threatened to
give way to an "absolutist" monarchy; and they were obliged to
resort to popular mobilization to achieve their anti-absolutist
goals. In that struggle, they espoused certain principles of
parliamentary rule and "limited" government, and the popular
forces they unleashed (and soon suppressed) produced some of
the most radically democratic ideas the world had ever seen.
But the revolution was never a class struggle between a landed
aristocracy and a rising bourgeoisie, capitalist or otherwise.
If capitalists in Britain were ever compelled to engage in class
struggle to ensure their own class interests, it was not a struggle
against a ruling class. In a sense, capitalists--at least agrarian
capitalists--were born a ruling class in England. Even in the
nineteenth century, when conflicts erupted between landed and
industrial classes, they were essentially conflicts between two
kinds of capital. If British capitalism required class struggle
to free itself from political and economic constraints, it was
primarily against subordinate classes, such as the small proprietors
whose property rights (and sometimes dangerously radical ideas)
interfered with capitalist accumulation.
So it was not really capitalists who supplied Marx with his
principal model of a politically progressive bourgeoisie. Yet
that progressive model did affect his view of capitalism. It is
difficult to say how much his hopes for proletarian revolution
were encouraged by this image of a politically progressive
bourgeoisie which launched the proletariat onto the political
stage and furthered its political development. But one thing
seems clear: the picture of capitalism itself as a progressive
force--which is so much a part of the Manifesto's story--is
colored by the revolutionary career of the Continental, and
especially the French, bourgeoisie.
We have to draw some distinctions in the Manifesto between the
story of political, cultural, and ideological progress, on the
one hand, and the analysis of material or economic development,
on the other. Or, more precisely, we have to distinguish between
those political, cultural, and ideological developments that are
clearly associated with capitalist economic development and those
that are not so clearly connected with capitalism. The different
aspects of Marx's narrative, conflated in his own account, are
typically lumped together by commentators, often under the general
heading of "modernity." But it will make for a better understanding
of capitalism if we try to disentangle some of the different strands
in his narrative. This will bring out in sharper relief Marx's own
remarkable, and to this day unrivalled, insights into the nature of
capitalism.
It is not at all clear that the development of capitalism required,
or brought into being, the best of Enlightenment principles. For
instance, that part of the French bourgeoisie which in the eighteenth
century adopted as its guiding ideology the Enlightenment commitment
to human improvement, the improvement of the human mind, the
eradication of ignorance and superstition, or the commitment
to civil equality and "careers open to talent," was not in the
main a capitalist class. It was a class of professionals, office-
holders, and intellectuals, with material interests distinct from
those of capitalists. It can even be argued that the mature development
of capitalism has brought an end to that kind of bourgeoisie and its
specific cultural formation.
In the twentieth century we know all too well that capitalism, while
it certainly requires a "rational" (that is, an "efficient" or
profitable) organization of production, has little need for
"rationalism" in the best Enlightenment sense: the submission of
all authority to the scrutiny of critical reason. Capitalism needs
a disciplined and docile workforce. It has no need at all for a
critical citizenry. In fact, a worker who has a habit of using
her critical reason may be much more dangerous to the "rational"
organization of production (not to mention the power and property
of capital) than would, say, a worker committed to some irrationalist
superstition or certain kinds of religious fundamentalism which
repudiate Enlightenment principles. Right-wing political movements
in the U.S., for instance, have without any difficulty combined
anti-Enlightenment values with a deep commitment to capitalism.
As for political progress, it is certainly true that feudal hierarchy
and aristocratic privilege did, as Marx suggests, give way to the
"modern representative state." In fact, since Marx wrote those words
the "bourgeois" representative state has itself given way to something
we now call "democracy." The bourgeoisie is not now a "ruling" class
in the literal sense: its class dominance does not depend on exclusive
access to political rights or on a clear and legally defined division
between capitalist rulers and proletarian subjects. Workers are citizens
with full voting rights, and capitalism has proved itself able to
tolerate universal adult suffrage in a way that no other form of
class domination has ever been able to do.
But this political advance has been deeply ambiguous. The ambiguity
goes beyond the obvious fact that in capitalist "democracy" wealth
still means privileged access to political power, or the fact that
the state, as Marx and Engels maintained, generally acts in the
interests of the capitalist class. Nor is it just that capitalism
can readily tolerate, and sometimes needs, authoritarian rule.
There is an even more fundamental contradiction in capitalist
"democracy."
Capitalism can tolerate "democracy" because capitalists control the
labor of others not by means of exclusive political rights but by
means of exclusive property. Although capital needs the support of
the state, workers are compelled to sell their labor power for purely
"economic" reasons. Since they do not own the means of production, the
sale of labor power for a wage is the only way they can gain access to
the conditions of subsistence, and even to the means of their own labor.
There is no immediate need for direct political coercion to make them
work for capital. Purely "economic" compulsions are generally enough.
This means that even in its best and most "democratic" forms, capitalism c
an, and must, confine equality to a separate "political" sphere which
does not, and must not, intrude into the economic sphere or subvert
economic inequality. A kind of democracy may prevail in the political
sphere, but people in capitalist societies spend most of their waking
lives in activities and relationships where there is no democratic
accountability at all. This is true not only in the workplace, where
they are likely to be under the direct control of others, but in all
spheres of life that are subject to "market" imperatives.
So capitalism has created a political sphere governed by "democracy," b
ut it has at the same time, and by the same means, put large areas of
human life outside the reach of democracy. In other words, much of what
capitalism has given with one hand it has taken away with the other.
Marx's analysis of capitalism is so rich precisely because it exposes
the system's fundamental contradictions. The tendency to conflate
"bourgeois" and "capitalist," and to tell their stories as a single
story of "modernity" and progress, can obscure those contradictions.
It may detract from those aspects of Marx's analysis which give us
an insight, sharper and deeper than ever before or since, into the
nature of capitalist society. In his later work, and especially in
Capital, Marx would provide a much more exhaustive analysis of
capitalism. But in the few pages devoted to it in the Manifesto,
in poetic and passionate prose yet with stark and penetrating clarity,
he captures, as no one else has ever done, the essence of capitalism,
with all its dynamism and destructiveness.
Capitalism and Historical Materialism
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. Conservation of the old
modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first
condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant
revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbances of all
social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish
the bourgeois era from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen
relations ... are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned....
In this, one of the most famous passages in the Manifesto, Marx sums
up the nature of capitalism. Unlike all other earlier social forms,
capitalism demands constant change, constant improvement of productive
forces to enhance the productivity of labor in a constant quest for
profit. The need for profit, the need to accumulate endlessly, is
imposed on capital by the very nature of the system: it must accumulate,
it must maximize profit, just to survive. No earlier system was ever
subject to such pressures.
This characterization of capitalism as a specific mode of production
different from others is based on the principles of historical
materialism, which Marx and Engels had been elaborating for
several years and which they would develop more fully after
1848. 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. The most basic fact about any form of
social organization is the nature of those relationships, the
specific ways in which any given society goes about providing
the material conditions of existence.
There came a point in human history when the social organization
of material life took the form of class divisions, the divisions
between people who labored and those who exploited the labor of
others. That division inevitably led to conflict, and since then
history, the Manifesto proclaims, has been propelled by those
class struggles, as exploited classes have resisted exploitation.
But while class struggle has been a moving force of history since
the beginning of class society, it has taken different forms in
different societies. Each particular mode of production, each
system of class relations, has its own internal logic, its own
requirements, its own conditions of survival and success, its own
dynamics, its own forms of conflict and struggle. And capitalism
has very specific conditions that, unlike any previous mode of
production, demand the constant revolutionizing of productive
forces.
In Principles of Communism, Engels suggests that history from
the beginning has been moved forward by the constant progress of
productive forces, especially technological improvement, and that
social relations have been compelled to adapt to these developing
forces. This conception of technological progress, which owes much
to the Enlightenment and to classical political economy, appears
in the Manifesto too.
But in Marx's version, the emphasis is less on some transhistorical
process of technological progress and more on the historically
specific effects of particular social relations. His emphasis
is above all on the ways in which the distinctive conditions of
capitalism, the relationship between an exploiting class of
capitalists and a propertyless class of wage laborers, has been
accompanied by a historically unique drive to revolutionize
productive forces. Throughout history, there has certainly been a
long-term improvement of productive forces; but, as Marx tells us,
all societies before capitalism had a built-in tendency to keep
production as it was. Only capitalism has broken that universal
rule and created new pressures constantly to enhance labor
productivity by technical means.
The pressure to accumulate and to revolutionize the instruments of
production is rooted in the capitalist mode of exploitation, the
means by which capital extracts labor from workers. Capitalists
are dependent on the market both to acquire the means of producing
goods or services and to sell those goods or services. Even the
labor-power of workers is a commodity, which capitalists buy for
a fixed period of time in exchange for a wage. Capital then puts
that labor-power to work and seeks to obtain the maximum output
in limited time at minimum cost. So capital is constantly seeking
new techniques, new instruments, new modes of organization and
control, to increase the productivity of labor, in order to meet
competition in the market. To produce "competitively" for the
market inevitably means constant accumulation and profit-maximization.
It also means constant change: new technologies, new commodities,
new services, new needs, new forms of organization, and new social
arrangements.
Marx emphasizes the historical uniqueness of a system in which the
provision of virtually all human needs and wants is organized in
this unprecedented way, where everything, even the most basic
requirements like food and shelter, is produced for a profit.
The effects of such a system on human life and social relations,
not to mention nature itself, are bound to be drastic and far-reaching.
In a few short passages, Marx dramatically conveys the consequences of
a system in which everything--not only things, but nature and human
activity--becomes a commodity to buy and sell on the market, and
where human relations are reduced to "callous cash payment."
On the eve of the twenty-first century, when the commodification of
life has gone so far that it is hard to imagine how it could go any
further, when everything from food to culture to health care is
distorted by market imperatives, we know all too well what this
means. We know how destructive these market imperatives can be
to the social fabric and the natural environment. We know their
costs in poverty, in crime, in environmental pollution, in the
waste of natural resources and human lives. Yet in Marx's day
the process of commodification was far less advanced, and his
prescience is truly remarkable.
Remarkable, too, is his insight into the effects of this system
on labor. The exploitation of workers, their compulsion to work
not only to sustain themselves and their families but to create
maximum profits for their employers, is the essence of the story.
But there is also the question of what happens to human labor when
it is transformed from the exercise of human creativity into just
a profit-making activity, or a commodity, whose value lies not in
the satisfaction it gives to the worker or in its benefits to the
community but in the gains it can realize in the market and in its
contribution to capital accumulation.
It should be obvious that work is bound to be organized, and
experienced, in different ways according to its purpose. The
need to extract maximum output at minimum cost imposes very
particular requirements, which inevitably have significant
effects on human well-being. Marx describes the degradation
of work when it is organized for the sole purpose of maximizing
profit for the capitalist owners of the means of production.
The effects are most visible where workers become mere "appendages"
of the machine in an assembly line, but similar effects occur
wherever the maximization of profit is the main motivation in
the organization of work. What ought to be a creative and
fulfilling activity is more likely to become just meaningless
drudgery.
Yet capitalism also has, from Marx's point of view, some positive
effects. The bourgeoisie, he says, "has accomplished wonders far
surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals."
It has "created more massive and more colossal productive forces than
have all preceding generations together." Its revolutionizing of
productive forces has created an unprecedented capacity to produce
the material conditions of well-being for everyone.
But here is another paradox: if capitalism has created unprecedented
material wealth, the capacity to maximize material well-being for
everyone remains only a capacity, not a reality. Capitalism, indeed,
prevents it from becoming a reality. One of the most fundamental
contradictions of the capitalist system is the huge disparity
between its "colossal" productive capacity and the quality of
life it delivers.
One obvious sense in which this is true is that capitalist development
has been inseparable from imperialisms of various kinds, from
traditional forms of colonial exploitation to the current burden
of debt in the third world, or the exploitation of cheap third
world labor by today's "transnational" companies. The contradiction
between capitalism's productive capacity and the quality of life is
manifest today in the growing polarization between an opulent North
and an indigent South. But the same contradiction is evident within
the advanced capitalist economies themselves.
In a system where all production is for profit, the allocation of
resources and labor will, of course, be determined not by their
contribution to the well-being of as many people as possible but
by their contribution to profitability. The society's productive
capacities are much more likely to be devoted to producing, say,
new model cars every year for those who can afford them, or computers
designed to be obsolete as soon as they hit the market, than to
providing decent affordable housing for all. So Marx would not
be surprised that a society like the U.S., with the capacity to
feed, clothe, house, educate, and provide health care for all its
members, nevertheless has widespread poverty, homelessness,
malnutrition, health care costs that many people cannot afford,
and a system of education that leaves many functionally illiterate.
Nor is it surprising that, in a society with such built-in inequities,
there are deep social divisions, in which, for example, class
exploitation and racism reinforce one another.
Capitalism and Socialism
Still, capitalism has produced the capacity to maximize material
well-being, and in that sense, it has laid a foundation for a
different kind of society. Socialism would build on the productive
forces created by capitalism, but it would eliminate the pressures
for profit-maximization and capital accumulation which cause the
disparity between productive capacity and the quality of life.
Capitalism has also, the Manifesto argues, created a social force,
a class, with the capacity to overthrow capitalism and put socialism
in its place. By giving birth to a mass proletariat, Marx maintains,
capitalism has brought into being its own gravediggers. But many
commentators, even on the socialist left, would now probably regard
this as the most questionable assumption in the whole pamphlet. It
is certainly true that capitalism has created a mass working class,
both "blue collar" and "white collar" workers of various kinds who
have in common their exploitation by capital. These workers are
strategically situated at the heart of a system which depends
on their labor, and that strategic location gives them a social
power that could, as no other social force can, transform capitalism
into socialism. It is also true that working class movements have
fought many historic battles, won many important victories, and
acted as a revolutionary force in many parts of the world. But,
while Western Europe and North America have seen many episodes
of mass working class radicalism, and some Western European
countries may even have been brought to the brink of revolution,
the working class has never yet brought about socialism in the
advanced capitalist countries that seemed to Marx and Engels the
most likely candidates. The result has been that even many
socialists have become skeptical about the prospects for a new
society.
We cannot assume that Marx's own optimism about the political
development of the working class was quite as unalloyed as it
seems in the Manifesto. He certainly knew that there were forces
dividing as well as uniting the working class, and that much
organizational and educational effort would be required to turn
the working class into an effective political force. But it was
clearly not his intention in a political manifesto to dwell on
the obstacles, and the picture is obviously a great deal more
complicated than the one he paints in his rousing call to arms.
The prediction that the organization of production in industrial
capitalism, together with improvements in transportation and
communication, would increasingly unite the working class into
a cohesive force has come true in some respects. And no one can
deny that working class struggles have achieved major gains
which have improved the quality of life for everyone, gains
we now take for granted such as a shorter working day and
unemployment insurance. But unifying tendencies have also
been counteracted, and for the time being overcome, by other
forces that fragment the working class. Workers are divided
by race, gender, and many other "identities," not to mention
by the resurgent nationalisms which have defied Marx's conviction
that the global economy created by capitalism would be followed by
a new kind of internationalism.
These are not the only factors that divide the working class.
Paradoxically, it tends to be fragmented by the very organization
of production in capitalism. Capitalist production tends to focus
the grievances and struggles of workers on their individual workplaces
and against their own particular employers. When Marx suggests that
"every class struggle is a political struggle," he undoubtedly means
that every class struggle, even in the workplace, and even over purely
"economic" issues, is about class power and resistance to domination.
But what this proposition does not say is that capitalism has created
a distinctive kind of relation between the "economic" and the "political."
Capitalism has in a sense separated "economic" from political struggles,
simply because the "economy" now has a life, and a power structure, of
its own. The capitalist market has its own "economic" imperatives; the
capitalist workplace has its own hierarchies, authorities, and rules;
and the dominant class, unlike any class before it, has economic powers
that do not depend directly on political power, even though it ultimately
depends on the state to sustain the system of property on which its class
power rests. So workers may be, and often have been, very militant in
their industrial conflicts with capital without their class struggles
spilling over into the political sphere.
The Manifesto's optimism about the coming of socialism has, of course,
been contradicted by another, truly spectacular, development: the end,
in the 1980s and 1990s, of the system brought into being in the decades
following the Russian Revolution of 1917. It is true that the revolution
was far from the ideal test of Marx's predictions. Russia was not an
advanced industrial capitalism with a mass proletariat, the kind of
society that Marx regarded as the right foundation for a socialist
transformation. At the time of the revolution, there were certainly
pockets of fairly advanced industry and, at least in the principal
large cities, a very militant industrial proletariat. At the same
time, Russia remained a largely peasant country, and many industrial
workers themselves remained rooted in their peasant villages. In
these and other ways, the Russian heartland itself would not have
met Marx's criteria for an advanced capitalist society--even by
the standards of his mid-nineteenth century model, Britain; and
if we add what might be called the "third world" regions of the
czarist empire, this massive country could hardly be said to meet
Marx's prerequisites for a transition from capitalism to socialism.
At any rate, what eventually emerged in the Soviet Union was very
different from the democratic society Marx envisaged when he talked
about a socialism based on the "free association of direct producers."
In fact, it should be emphasized that much of what has gone under the
name of Communism in the twentieth century has had little to do with
what the Communist Manifesto meant by the term or with the Communist
movement to which Marx and Engels belonged. Even when Marx began to
expect some kind of revolution in Russia, he always assumed that a
truly socialist revolution would have to take place in a capitalist
country with more advanced productive forces and a more developed
proletariat, a country like Britain or the U.S. Only in tandem with
a proletarian revolution in such an advanced capitalist country could
a Russian Revolution become a transition to socialism. He seems to
have assumed that only well developed productive forces and a mature
mass proletariat could direct production toward the fulfillment of
the whole community's needs--not for capitalist profit nor for the
benefit of any other kind of ruling class, and not controlled from
above by an authoritarian state but under the democratic control of
the "freely associated direct producers," the workers themselves.
Capitalism had taken centuries to create a mass proletariat and to
accomplish even the development of productive forces available in
Marx's day. It had done these things with many oppressions, atrocities,
and tragedies along the way. Marx never sought, nor has anyone else yet
found, a democratic, socialist way of achieving that kind of development.
He regarded this contradictory achievement not as the task of socialism
but as its precondition.
This is not to deny that the Soviet Union did, in fact, succeed in
developing productive forces far beyond what Marx could have foreseen,
and with exceptional speed. The point is rather that it would have been
very difficult to accomplish such intensive development by means of the
democratic organization of production that for Marx was the essence of
socialism. To attain that level of development required a process of
accumulation which capitalism had accomplished, over several centuries,
not by democratic means but by expropriating small proprietors and by
exploiting workers to the limits of their physical endurance. It would
not have been easy to devise a democratic means of achieving comparable
results. A truly democratic socialist party, a party very different from
the oppressive Stalinist regime, would certainly have avoided the
monstrosities of Stalinism. But even the most democratic socialist
party, if obliged to administer the process of accumulation and to
enforce the kind of intensive labor this required, would have found
itself in a very difficult and contradictory relationship with the
working class it was supposed to represent.
No one would claim that Marx foresaw what might happen if a revolution
in the name of communism did take place in a less developed country.
It is even less likely that he could have foreseen the crimes perpetrated
by Stalinism in the name of communism. But we should not underestimate
the significance of his assumption that a socialist revolution would be
most likely to succeed in the context of a more advanced capitalism. In
that sense, it could be argued that the ultimate failure of the Russian
Revolution, which occurred in the absence of those preconditions,
fulfilled his predictions all too well. Yet if that failure has not
by itself proved him wrong, the fact remains that, on the eve of the
twenty-first century, socialists do not seem to have very much to be
optimistic about.
The Manifesto and the Future
But the story is not finished. Nor have we reached the end of what
the Manifesto has to teach us. There is still much to be learned even
from its predictions. Marx has been proved uncannily right about many
things, but nowhere has he been vindicated more completely than in his
account of capitalist expansion. It is true that he underestimated the
durability of capitalism and how long it could keep on expanding. But
for all today's fashionable talk about "globalization," it would be
hard to find a more effective description of what is happening today
than what he wrote 150 years ago. Capitalism has indeed "battered down
all Chinese walls" (including the "walls" of "communist" China),
creating a global market and compelling "all nations, on pain of
extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production." Capitalism
has indeed created a world "after its own image."
In Marx's day, that process of "globalization" was still in its early
stages. But today capitalist imperatives of accumulation and competition
really do reach into every corner of the world. Many people have argued
that this is the final and irreversible triumph of capitalism. Yet in
the face of events like the recent financial crisis in Southeast Asia,
in economies hailed only yesterday as "Asian tigers," these triumphalist
pronouncements have a somewhat hollow ring. Mainstream economists who
usually like to use more benign terms like "business cycles," or "slumps,"
or "recessions" are uttering the word "crisis" with increasing frequency,
and some more pessimistic commentators have gone beyond Marxists in their
talk of "collapse." Against that background, the Manifesto's portrayal of
capitalist expansion as a deeply contradictory process is rather more
convincing than capitalist triumphalism: a society that has conjured up
such gigantic means of production and exchange 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.... It is enough to mention the commercial
crises that by their periodical return put the existence of the entire
bourgeois society on trial.... In these crises, there breaks out an
epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity--
the epidemic of over-production.... And, the Manifesto continues, the
very methods on which capital relies to overcome these crises are the
very methods by which it paves the way for more destructive crises and
reduces the means of correcting and preventing them.
Capitalism, for instance, used to escape its internal crises by
moving outward, into new markets and colonies. Today, having become
a virtually universal system, it no longer has the same scope for
external expansion which used to save it from its internal contradictions,
so it has become subject to those contradictions in historically new ways.
Capital today no longer seems able to sustain maximum profitability by
means of commensurate economic growth. It is now relying more and more
on simply redistributing wealth in favor of the rich, and on increasing
inequalities, within and between national economies, with the help of
the "neoliberal" state. In advanced capitalist countries, the most
visible signs of that redistribution are a growing polarization
between rich and poor, and the attack on the welfare state. So it
is not just in the occasional dramatic crisis but in its "normal"
and long-term development that capitalism has been vindicating Marx's
predictions about its contradictory expansion.
These developments may after all prove Marx right about the effects
of capitalism on the political development of the working class. The
conditions that led him to his conclusions about the formation of
working class consciousness and organization are still present; and
the working class, strategically situated at the heart of capitalism,
is still the only social force with the capacity to transform it. At
the same time, capitalism is evolving in ways that may overcome the
factors that have up to now worked against those processes of class
formation.
As neoliberal states step up their attacks on social provision and
adopt austerity measures to enhance "flexibility," the complicity
between the state and "globalized" capital is becoming increasingly
transparent. As a result, it may turn out that economic class struggles
will indeed move onto the political plane, and that the working class
will indeed be unified in new and unprecedented ways. In many countries,
labor movements which have been dormant for some time show signs of
reawakening. And we have certainly seen many dramatic examples recently
of people joining together in the streets--from Canada to Mexico to
France to South Korea--to protest "neoliberalism," "globalization,"
and all the policies that capitalist states today are implementing
to maintain the "competitiveness" of their own national economies.
Contrary to much conventional wisdom today, "globalization" has made
the state not less but more important to capital. Capital needs the
state to maintain the conditions of accumulation and "competitiveness"
in various ways, including direct subsidies at tax-payers' expense; to
preserve labor discipline and social order in the face of austerity and
"flexibility"; to enhance the mobility of capital while blocking the
mobility of labor; to administer huge rescue operations for capitalist
economies in crisis (yesterday Mexico, today the "Asian tigers")--
operations often organized by international agencies but always paid
for by national taxes and enforced by national governments. Even the
imperialism of the major capitalist states requires the collaboration
of subordinate states to act as transmission belts and agents of
enforcement. "Neoliberalism" is not just a withdrawal of the state
from social provision. It is a set of active policies, a new form of
state intervention designed to enhance capitalist profitability in an
integrated global market.
Capital's need for the state makes the state again an important and
concentrated focus for class struggle. And the fact that the state
is visibly implicated in class exploitation has consequences for
class organization and consciousness. It may help to overcome the
fragmentation of the working class and create a new unity against
a common enemy. It may also help to turn class struggle into political
struggle.
Whatever happens, the Manifesto's critique of capitalism and its
vision of socialism will remain very much alive as long as capitalism
exists. Parts of the Manifesto's political program have been implemented
within capitalist society. Child labor in factories has generally been
abolished in advanced capitalist countries, though it still exists on
a large scale, for instance, in U.S. agriculture, and it is certainly
widespread in third world economies--often exploited by "transnationals"
based in Western capitalist countries. Progressive income tax is the
general rule--though it is under growing attack from the right. In
advanced capitalist countries there is free education for all, up to
a point--though even this is being eroded now in various ways. Some
means of communication and transportation, as well as other enterprises,
are, or have been, in public ownership in capitalist societies, and some
capitalist countries have state banks.
All this has happened without destroying the capitalist system. In fact,
capitalism has been saved from its own destructive tendencies by the
public services, the social provision, and the "safety nets" that
working class movements in the past have struggled long and hard to
achieve.
The kind of public ownership we know today has, to be sure, little in
common with enterprises run under direct democratic control, by "free
associations of direct producers." For that matter, even public enterprises
themselves--not just the means of communication and transportation, but
health care and education--can be, and in capitalism are, subjected to
the logic of the capitalist market. The objective of today's neoliberal
politics is to "privatize" anything that could conceivably be run for
capitalist profit--from prisons, to postal services, to old-age pensions.
But it has also set out to ensure that every public enterprise, every
social service, that cannot be profitably "privatized" will still be
subject to market imperatives.
Here, then, is another contradiction: capitalism today, in its efforts
to remain "competitive," is destroying the very services and institutions
that have often rescued it from self-destruction. But even if neoliberalism
does not completely succeed in its wrecking operations, the capitalist
system will always restrict any efforts to limit the damage it does to
people and nature. It begins to looks as if the logic of the system has
now reached the point where the destructive force of capitalism is
outstripping its capacity to repair or compensate for the harm it inflicts.
Capitalism will also always restrict the scope of democracy. It can never
permit a truly democratic society where there are no oppressed and
oppressing classes; where "accumulated labor is but a means to widen,
to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer" and not just to
enhance capitalist profit; where reproduction, child care, and relations
between the sexes are not deformed by capitalist imperatives; where no
nation oppresses another; where culture is free of distortion by the
market; and so on. As long as we live under capitalism, we will live
in a society where the needs and actions of undemocratic and
unaccountable capitalist enterprises, both by the direct exercise of
class power and through the "market," shape our social and natural
environment and determine the conditions of life for every living
being that comes within their global orbit.
Now more than ever it should be obvious, as it was to Marx and Engels,
that a society driven by the imperatives of capital accumulation has
to give way to a more humane and democratic social order. For such a
transformation to take place, the main moving force will still have
to be class struggle.
--
La norme bourgeoise, zut!
--
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