Is the Communist Manifesto still relevant?
The Communist Manifesto
By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
With a commentary by Leon Trotsky
Resistance Books, 1998
80pp., $6.95 (pb)
Review by Chris Slee
Generations of socialists have read the Moscow editions of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto. For new activists, this source has dried up (ironically as Russia provides fresh evidence for Marx's views on the irrational and destructive nature of capitalism). Older activists find their Moscow editions getting a bit dog-eared. So it is pleasing to see that a new edition of the Communist Manifesto has been published as part of Resistance Books' Marxist Library series.
The new edition includes an introduction by Doug Lorimer, a leader of the Democratic Socialist Party, Leon Trotsky's 1938 introduction and several prefaces written by Marx and Engels.
The Manifesto first appeared in February 1848, on the eve of an explosion of revolutionary struggles in France and Germany. Marx and Engels started their political lives as radical democrats in Germany fighting for constitutional rights, freedom of the press, popular representation and the abolition of feudal privileges. They evolved into communists who advocated a classless society based on the common ownership of productive wealth, to be achieved through the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. The Manifesto was a concise summary of their views.
Marx and Engels wrote the book on behalf of the Communist League, a small revolutionary group of which they were leading members. Lorimer outlines both the development of Marx and Engels' ideas and their struggle to win the Communist League to support their views.
The Manifesto is divided into four parts. The first, opening with the statement: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles", outlines the rise of capitalism out of the decay of feudalism. Modern society "is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat". As Engels explains in a footnote: "By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage-labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power in order to live."
The Manifesto points out that capitalism was not at first an impediment to social progress: "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society."
However, the powerful productive forces created by capitalism are no longer compatible with the private ownership of the productive resources:
"Modern bourgeois society ... is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells ... It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society ... In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity — the epidemic of overproduction."
The working class (proletariat) that capitalism creates is the new revolutionary class, destined to be capitalism's "grave digger".
But whereas the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal classes involved the replacement of one exploiting minority by another, the victory of the proletariat will bring to power the exploited majority which can only liberate itself by abolishing all class exploitation and oppression: "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air."
The second section of the Manifesto explains the role of the communists in the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class. It speaks of the need for communists to be non-sectarian, but to play the leading role: "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."
This section also outlines both the immediate and the longer goals of communists: "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 third section takes issue with other schools of political thought that presented themselves as socialist at the time. The fourth section discusses the immediate tasks of communists in the impending bourgeois democratic revolution in Germany.
Is the Communist Manifesto still relevant?
Lorimer says in the introduction: "In the 150 years since the Manifesto was written there have been tremendous changes in the world, but none refute the basic ideas contained in the Manifesto. Indeed, the 'really existing' capitalist world today is much closer to the 'abstract' model of capitalism that is portrayed in the first section of the Manifesto than the actually existing world of 1848."
Trotsky also discusses the relevance of the Manifesto, pointing to: the materialist conception of history; the centrality of class struggle; the analysis of the anatomy of capitalism; the tendency of capitalism to lower the living standards of workers and transform millions into paupers; the catastrophic economic crises; the role of the executive of the modern state as "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie"; the need for a working-class political party; the need for a revolution in which the proletariat seizes political power; the international character of the revolution; the disappearance of the state once class distinctions have been abolished; and the idea that workers "have no fatherland".
Trotsky notes that whatever corrections are necessary to the Manifesto can be successfully made only by "proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the foundation of the Manifesto itself".
While the Manifesto said that capitalism had become an obstacle to further development, Trotsky points out that in Marx's time this was only relative. Further economic development was possible, and did occur in the second half of the 19th century. Prolonged prosperity enabled the capitalists to buy off a section of the working class (the labour aristocracy), leading to the degeneration of the social democratic parties.
Trotsky also points out that the Communist Manifesto did not anticipate capitalism's imperialist stage. It contains no reference to the struggle of colonial and semi-colonial countries for independence. Only later did Lenin develop a revolutionary strategy for the colonial countries.
The Manifesto does not specify what form of state will exist after the proletarian revolution. The experience of the 1871 Paris Commune and the Russian soviets (the workers' and peasants' councils that seized power during the 1917 revolution) gave a clearer picture of the new state that must replace the old.
Writing during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Trotsky argued that capitalism was now "absolutely reactionary" and that socialism was an urgent necessity. The key problem was the crisis of revolutionary leadership.