Marx’s Capital Volume 1, Part 1a
Various editions of the
Communist Manifesto
Bourgeois, Proletarians and Communists
The Communist Manifesto
was written in London by Dr Karl Marx when he was 29, with the help of his
27-year-old friend Frederick Engels, and it was published in January or
February of 1848. It has been a “best-seller” ever since, is constantly republished,
and is always in print.
Bourgeois and Proletarians
Marx and Engels saw the new
masters, the formerly slave-owning but now capitalist bourgeoisie, also known
as burghers, or burgesses, that had originally grown up in the towns under
feudal rule, and had by then in some places taken over from the feudal lords by
revolution.
Marx and Engels were already
convinced that sooner or later, this bourgeoisie was going to be overthrown by
the class of working proletarians (i.e. free citizens owning nothing but their
Labour-Power) that the bourgeoisie had brought into existence.
Commissioned to write the
Manifesto by the Communist League, Marx and Engels fell behind the agreed
deadline, but came through with a magnificent text published just prior to the
February, 1848 events in Paris - events which brought the proletariat as actors
on to the stage of history to an extent that had never been seen before,
thoroughly vindicating Engels and Marx.
The timing was great. The
text turned out to be a classic to such an extent that every line of it is
memorable. The first two parts
(“Bourgeois and Proletarians”, and “Proletarians and Communists”) are given in
the attached two files.
Short though it is, the
Manifesto is so rich and so compressed as to be saturated with meaning and
practically impossible to summarise. So without summarising, here are some of
the most extraordinary sentences of the first section of the Manifesto:
The history
of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Society as a
whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two
great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat.
The executive
of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the
whole bourgeoisie.
All fixed,
fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, 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, and man is at last
compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his
relations with his kind.
The need of a
constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the
entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere,
establish connections everywhere.
Proletarians and Communists
The second part of the
Communist Manifesto contains statements about the Communist Party, about the
family, about religion, and frank statements about the bourgeoisie.
It is included here with this
set of readings of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, particularly because it shows,
within the broadest possible context, the centrality of the relations of
production that create and sustain the effect known as capital, which then in turn
defines everything else in bourgeois society.
It also looks forward to the
way that society can be changed yet again, and thus serves to remind us that
Marx’s work is always intentional, and is never merely empirical, descriptive
or disinterested.
“The average price of wage
labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence
which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a
labourer,” wrote Marx and Engels, already
making a great step forward from Marx’s “Wage Labour and Capital” that had been
published in the previous year, 1847.
“But does
wage labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates
capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labour, and which
cannot increase except upon conditions of begetting a new supply of wage labour
for fresh exploitation.”
“…a vast association of the whole nation… in which the
free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
·
The above serves to
introduce the original reading-text - Marx’s and Engels’ 1848 “Communist
Manifesto”, Part 1 and Part2.
