Basics,
Part 3
Bourgeois and Proletarians
Bourgeois
& Proletarians is the first of the three major parts of the Communist Manifesto, commissioned by
the Communist League, written in London by Karl Marx, at the age of 29, with
the help of his then 27-year-old friend Frederick Engels, and published in
January, 1848.
Also
included is the final page of the Manifesto, called “Position of the Communists
in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.”
Marx and
Engels were under pressure from the Communist League to get this job done
quickly. The brief was as difficult as it could be: to produce a short,
emphatic, unambiguous, motivational description of historic processes, and to
announce a credible determination to change the world under the leadership of
the most exploited class of people, the working class, also known as the
proletariat.
Marx and
Engels were convinced that the new masters, the capitalists, also known as
burghers, or burgesses, or bourgeoisie, that had grown up in the towns under
feudal rule, were sooner or later going to be overthrown by the proletariat
that the bourgeoisie had brought into existence.
Marx fell
behind the agreed deadline, but came through with a magnificent text just a few
weeks before the February, 1848 events in Paris that brought the
proletariat on to the stage of history to an extent that had not previously
been seen in the world.
The timing
was great, and the text turned out to be classic to the extent that every line
of it is memorable, especially in this first part. It is so rich and so
compressed as to be saturated with meaning, and hence practically impossible to
summarise. Therefore let us simply quote some of the most extraordinary
sentences, so as to encourage you to read the document, not once but many
times:
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 final
words of the Manifesto are as follows:
In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement
against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question
in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the
time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the
democratic parties of all countries.
WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Communist
Manifesto, Bourgeois and Proletarians, Marx and Engels.
