Reveiw of the Communist ManefestoEssay title: Reveiw of the Communist ManefestoThe Communist Manifesto opens with the famous words “The history of all hitherto societies has been the history of class struggles.” In section 1, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” Marx delineates his vision of history, focusing on the development and eventual destruction of the bourgeoisie, the middle class. Before the bourgeoisie rose to prominence, society was organized according to a feudal order run by aristocratic landowners and corporate guilds. With the discovery of America and the subsequent expansion of economic markets, a new class arose, a manufacturing class, which took control of international and domestic trade by producing goods more efficiently than the closed guilds. With their growing economic powers, this class began to gain political power, destroying the vestiges of the old feudal society, which sought to restrict their ambition. According to Marx, the French Revolution was the most decisive instance of this form of bourgeois self-determination. Indeed, Marx thought bourgeois control so pervasive that he claimed, “The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. This bourgeois ascendancy has, though, created a new social class in which labor in the new bourgeois industries. This class, the proletariat (the lower class in economic status) are the necessary consequence of bourgeois modes of production. As bourgeois industries expand and increase their own capital, the ranks of the proletariat swell as other classes of society, artisans and small business owners, cannot compete with the bourgeois capitalists. Additionally, the development of bourgeois industries causes a proportional deterioration in the condition of the proletariat. This deterioration, which can be slowed but not stopped, creates within the proletariat a revolutionary element, which will eventually destroy their bourgeois oppressors. As Marx says, “What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable”.
In Chapter 2, “Proletariats and Communists,” Marx elaborates the social changes communists hope to effect on behalf of the proletariat. Marx notes firstly that the interests of communists do not differ from the interests of the proletariat as a class; they seek only to develop class-consciousness in the proletariat, a necessary condition of eventual proletariat emancipation. The primary objective of communists and the revolutionary proletariat is the abolishment of private property, for it is this that keeps them enslaved. Bourgeois economics, capitalism (a system based on owning your own property that you buy and make profits off of whatever you sale) requires that the owners of the means of production compensate workers only enough to ensure their mere physical subsistence and reproduction. In other words, the existence of bourgeois property, or capital as Marx calls it, relies on its radically unequal distribution. The only way the
end in which communism and the proletariat can get through the current world crisis is for the proletarians to unite and overthrow state capitalism and the capitalist system of the state. As Marx explained:
We must unite to the exclusion of capital in the process of socialist revolution in order to win control over it. After that, if we are able to do this, we will be able to break through the existing bourgeois domination of state capitalism. The question is whether it will last long, or whether we really are victorious.
In fact, with only 10% of world trade still owned, Marx and Engels predict that it is not about to end. Only 20% of world trade is owned by people. This means that with only 3 percent of world trade, it has a surplus. As we shall see in an article, this will prove an insurmountable obstacle to revolution, but it will undoubtedly lead to the downfall of some sections of the “proletarians” (those proletarians who are simply going to go ahead with a revolution and have people vote for them), and to a complete breakdown of the social order in general.* The same argument applies to the peasantry. What is the “correct” way to get the peasantry to participate in the revolution? In the early 1840’s the French peasantry had four different paths: — First, take up arms to fight in the revolution against the “secular ” class, and join the peasants. This was the first step the peasantries could make in combating the reactionary and social-democratic regime; and the peasantry would continue to do it to the end, until a new revolutionary order could be formed. The second was to give up agriculture to the bourgeoisie (by this I mean not to join the peasants themselves). The third was to take up arms against the “liberal ” class and the anti-clerical party, while still supporting our struggle at the political level as it still held true against “the “sovereigntists” of the period. Finally, in exchange for the “private land” belonging to the peasantry as our main aim, and through the revolutionary struggle of working class peasants against the reactionary monarchy, we would take up arms against the “secular” landlords and the “secular” capitalists, while still using our own land in the revolution for the common good and for our land to go into the hands of the peasants.
Of course, this was an ambitious policy, and in fact, the peasantry must have had to be convinced before the end of the century that the revolution is indeed happening in the first place. In 1844 the French peasants participated in the revolutionary campaign against the imperialist powers, which was organized into “the Paris Commune”… but by this time the French Revolution only had just begun, and was rapidly losing its control even before there was sufficient force to crush it. The third and most important step taken by the proletariat in this struggle was to unite the peasantry in resistance to the capitalist system and the bourgeois revolution. In this case, the process of struggle for revolutionary autonomy under the dictatorship of the proletariat, which had begun with the peasants at the end of 1843 only, would prove arduous. If, as Marx points out, the “secular” workers, who had participated in the struggles of 1843 and 1845, could have no chance of succeeding in fighting for a proletarian revolution under the proletarian dictatorship and in waging a class struggle under the dictatorship of the bourgeois revolution, then we could expect to have to make up the losses of the “secular” workers during the whole of the 1845 campaign. It would be in the same situation that 1854, when the peasants took up arms against the “secular” landowners… did take the field in the first place. But this failed miserably, because the peasants couldn’t fight the ”