State and Revolution, Part 5b
The Communist Manifesto is
constantly re-published
Bourgeois,
Proletarians and Communists
The Communist Manifesto is
a classic by any standards. It is never out of print and it is stocked in
ordinary bookshops all over the world, selling steadily year after year.
The work was started in
mid-1847 in England by Frederick Engels and Karl Marx when Marx was 29 and
Engels 27, and was published in January or February of 1848, just in time for
the outbreak of revolutions all over Europe.
All of the Communist
Manifesto is memorable, but especially the first two parts (“Bourgeois and Proletarians”,
and “Proletarians and Communists”)
given in the downloadable file, linked below. The third part is called “Socialist and Communist
Literature” and the fourth part of one page is called “Position of the Communists in
Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties”. A fifth part that
was not included is the catechism- or FAQ-style document called “The Principles of Communism”
drafted by Frederick Engels.
Bourgeois and Proletarians
The new masters, the formerly
slave-owning but now capitalist bourgeoisie, also known as burghers or
burgesses, were a class that had grown up in the towns under the rule of
rural-based feudalism (“traditional leadership”). Marx and Engels were
convinced that the bourgeoisie were themselves sooner or later going to be
overthrown by the working proletariat, the class of free citizens owning nothing
but their Labour-Power, that the bourgeoisie had brought into existence by
employing them. The bourgeoisie had taken over from the feudal lords by
revolution. They would themselves be toppled by revolution, said Marx and
Engels.
Commissioned to write the
Manifesto by the Communist League, Marx and Engels struggled to meet the agreed
deadline, but came through with a magnificent text published just prior to the
February, 1848 events in Paris. These events 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.
Short as it is, the Manifesto
is so rich and so compressed as to be saturated with meaning, and practically
impossible to summarise. 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.
The second part shows, among
other things, 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.
“Proletarians and Communists”
also looks forward to the way that society can be changed, 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.
“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.”
They finish the section with
this unforgettable, classic vision:
“…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 is to
introduce the original reading-text: Bourgeois and Proletarians; Proletarians and Communists, Communist
Manifesto, Marx/Engels, 1848.
