Basics,
Part 3a
Proletarians
and Communists
We only need one text for one discussion per week, but the
Communist University always gives alternatives, which can also be used for
supplementary reading. Yesterday we took the first part of the Communist Manifesto. Here is the second
part, called Proletarians and
Communists.
As with the first part of this highly-concentrated piece of
writing, the simplest way to present it is with selected quotes. Here are some:
The Communists do not form a separate party
opposed to the other working-class parties.
They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat
as a whole.
They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to
shape and mold the proletarian movement.
The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by
this only:
(1) In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different
countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the
entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.
(2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the
working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and
everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
The text then deals with property, and with marriage, in
similar terms to “The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and The State”, which was written 35 years
later. One of the remarkable things about the “Manifesto” is that it summarises
ideas which had not yet been published and knocked into shape by controversy,
yet it did so very accurately, and the Manifesto still stands tall today. On
ideas, and on the struggle of ideas, it says, among other things:
The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling
class.
When people speak of the ideas that revolutionize society, they do but
express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have
been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the
dissolution of the old conditions of existence.
The history of all past society has consisted in the development of
class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different
epochs.
But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past
ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder,
then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity
and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas,
which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class
antagonisms.
The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional
relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture
with traditional ideas.
Finally,
the Manifesto arrives, at the end of the second part, at the following
tremendous vision of communism as the purest possible kind of human freedom:
Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of
one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat… by means of a revolution,
makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old
conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept
away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes
generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.
In place of the old bourgeois
society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association
in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Communist
Manifesto, Proletarians and Communists, Marx and Engels.
