One of Marx's main ideas is his theory of history (or stage theory) which has both a beginning and a natural end, making Marx's approach to history teleological. The first stage is 'Primitive Communism' which is effectively a stone age society where all property is shared, people hunt and gather food, and the leader of tribes (not society) is determined by strength and respect. The second stage of Marx's theory is 'Slave Society' where the ideas of both class and state first surface. In this developing society, those in the highest class exploit the lower classes and make them slaves, working in awful conditions for only basic rewards in food and shelter. You could argue that this is a mirror of the society that Marx is hoping to abolish. Following the collapse of this 'Feudalism' emerges where a monarch heads the state and the aristocracy enforces laws and legislations on the peasantry. Feudalism also overlooks the development of Nations with their own characteristics. Eventually this gives way to 'Capitalism', the society in which we now live where profit margins determine whether a business succeeds or fails, and also determines your class. The scourge of Marx and his disciples. Now we enter hypothetical land where Marx attempts to predict what happens next. His first step into the future takes us to 'Socialism', a society where machinery and capital are all centralised to the State. Finally, we advance to 'Communism', a Stateless, Propertyless and Classless Utopia where everyone is free to act and do as they please, there are no laws or boundaries. The people of society work for each other. In the Communist Manifesto (which we will now explore), Karl Marx outlines what he feels needs to be done to advance to Socialism from Capitalism, and eventually hit the natural end: Communism.
In the very first line of Chapter One - Bourgeoisie and Proletariats, Marx states that history is full of class struggles and goes on to cite various examples including the freeman and the slave, guild-master and journeyman and lord and serf. Marx insists that the current struggle in society is between the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. In short, the Bourgeoisie are the ruling classes - the factory owners, the land owners, the people at the top of the tree dictating through legislation and wages what those beneath them can do. The Proletariat are the people they suppress, the working class man living a tough life to keep his family fed and watered, and also trying to power their way past endless competition for jobs, inevitably hitting a glass ceiling at every opportunity they get to better themselves and the conditions they live in.
Marx says that this is social injustice was caused by the Industrial Revolution which runs in tandem with the growth of the Bourgeoise society. This approach is understandable, especially from a Marxist perspective as he was a technological determinist, someone who believed that the growth of technology drives society forward, something that the Revolution gave an abundance of evidence for. The growth of factories and machinery certainly thrusted factory owners into the big-time. Further evidence of Marx's technological determinist approach comes from his suggestion that competition drives the bourgeoisie to create new production methods, as if they don't they could fall behind their rivals. In a view that is typical of Marx, he says that this machinery costs money so the labourers are paid less and less.
"In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." In this quote Marx unleashes a devastating attack on the treatment that the Bourgeois society hands out to Proletariats, making them work for long hours on low ages to satisfy their own greed for capital, without a second thought for the hell that they put their labourers through. Proletariat are created at the same pace as capital, the more money a factory owner has the more labourers he can employ. However, competition for jobs is rife as the work on offer is unskilled. Due to advances in machinery, the work of the skilled proletariat is severely reduced to the extent that they now become simple button-pressers. A simple job equates to a low, simple wage. But with the Proletariat outnumbering the Bourgeoisie, any unrest will be hard to quell.
Marx claims that by mass-producing goods and products, and by sourcing materials from around the world, they are creating a society in their own image, but it's a market-model that will lead to their inevitable downfall. "The conditions of Bourgeois society are to narrow to comprise the wealth created by them." Here Marx is saying that once you've created a market there's only a certain amount of people it can appeal to. To remedy this the Bourgeoisie must continue to exploit both current and new markets, creating a crisis on a larger scale when they run out of ideas again, at which point they will be destroyed by their own weapons.
Wielding these weapons, he states, are the Proletariats. The exploited, the Underdogs. As a group they have never had it easy - Marx states that their battle with the Bourgeoisie starts as early as birth and they can only take so much repression. Their impending revolution starts off with individuals rising in factories, followed by the entire factory and in their wake the towns and cities. Factory by factory, they destroy the machinery and head back to their skilled jobs with the Bourgeoisie safely destroyed.
Although not yet unionised, the proletariat start by attacking the enemies of their enemy, gaining small victories for the Bourgeoisie, who'll then employ and exploit more people, without the knowledge that they are nurturing the army of their demise. As the amount of competition reduces, the bourgeoisie will have to tempt a workforce with better wages than their competitors. With more workers at their disposal, the Proletariat will unionise and occasionally revolt for better working conditions. From here the Bourgeoisie will start fighting with their foreign rivals and will drag their workers into the battle, giving them an education and a step into the political circuit that they can later exploit for their own doings. As the inward fighting amongst the Bourgeoisie becomes too much history will repeat itself and more and more will defect to the revolutionary Proletariat movement, similar to the aristocrats unifying with the nobility. As this process continues the Bourgeoisie in each country will be defeated and they will become incompatible with the society they once ruled as their kind of exploitation will no longer be tolerated. The Bourgeoisie will have dug their own graves.
Chapter Two - Proletariats and Communists looks at the alignment between the two groups of people. Marx quickly says that the Communists will never form an opposing party to the revolutionaries, but that they do have differing interests in that the they represent the Proletariats of every nationality and that they will continue to represent the feelings and interests of the movement as a whole. In this, Marx is effectively saying that Communists are just at a more advanced stage than the current group of Proletariats and are not an entirely different group of people. Eventually, the Proletariat will become them. The aim of the Communists, he says, is to form a large class out of the Proletariat and use them to overthrow the Bourgeoisie, before leading them on a political conquest. On the subject of politics, the Communists are against the outcome of the French Revolution in which all feudal property was repossessed, as it were, by the Bourgeoisie. The Communists aim to abolish all private property and hand it over to the State. At this stage the machinery is at it's most advanced stage, so the State could use it to create a better, more equal society for everyone, not just the select few and the elites.
Marx argues that a Capitalist is someone who has a social status in production, which, in this case, will be those who are the factory owners and their managers. These people are the ones who gain from Capitalism, not those who they are exploiting who are only trying to earn an honest living and provide for their families. Capital in itself is a social power, you can use it to buy things to heighten your social status, to show off to your friends and tell the world you have money. Wage labour is not capital as you cannot do anything with it other than live off the bare basics. The average of wage labour is the minimum wage, leaving no space to save for anything or create a better lives for their families. You can now understand what Marx meant when he said that the battle with the Bourgeoisie starts at birth. At this stage, Communists don't want people to stop earning property or money, they want to abolish the 'miserable character' of it which only lets people live as much as the Capitalist society allows them.
The next quote I am taking from Marx highlights how he feels the Bourgeoisie have manipulated people to think the way they do: "The selfish misconception that induces you to transform the eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property - historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production - this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you." The passage of thought that you need money to live and you must work for a living has been passed down for generations and implanted into your mind as if it were natural.
Next, Karl Marx goes on to reply to some criticisms that have been flung at Communism, interestingly that the aim of Communists is to abolish families from society. Marx responds to this saying that Communists want to abolish Capitalist families, the ones that rely on money to enjoy their lives and don't count love and happiness as being fruitful, the families who only gain pleasure through Capitalist means. The ideal Communist family appreciates the people around them more than their possessions and they seek to keep it that way. Also, they won't exploit their children in workhouses in order to gain money.
Another criticism that Marx attacks is that Communists seek to abolish countries and nationality. Marx says that you can't take from someone what they don't have - working men don't have a country to identify themselves with as they don't have an individual identity. He claims that there will now be a nation of Proletariats all pulling in the same direction on the road to Communism, and then counters the argument by stating that by creating a worldwide market the Bourgeoisie are destroying nations with trade.
At the end of the chapter the Manifesto states that for the revolution to be successful ten individual steps must be fulfilled:
1) Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
- This means to take away all private land from it's owners and giving it back to the people. A farmer will no longer have to pay rent on his land, but instead will have to give a percentage of his crops to the State.
2) A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
- The more money you earn the more you pay back to the State. This helps keep everyone on an equal footing.
3) Abolition of all right to inheritance.
- When someone dies their property and belongings goes back to the State. If you inherit a large piece of land it will go to the State and be divided equally between people. Again, this keeps the system equal.
4) Confiscation of property from emigrants and rebels.
- Once you leave the country you will lose your land, you will also lose it if you rebel against the State in any way.
5) Centralise credit in the hands of the State, a national bank.
- The state looks after the public's money.
6) Centralise communication and transport to the State.
- Now all modes of communication and transport are State run to stop the development of entrepreneurs.
7) Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; cultivate wastelands and improve soil.
- Creates larger production factories to feed the nation and gives those in agricultural areas better land to farm.
8) Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industry armies, especially for agriculture.
- Everyone will have to work, no matter how high up the chain you are. Farmers will now have more people working the land, enabling them to grow more crops.
9) Combine agriculture with manufacturing, no distinction between town and country, equal distribution of people over the country.
- There will be a wider spread of manufacturing and agricultural grounds across the country, with more people across the country no land will be wasted.
10) Free education for all children in public schools. Get rid of children's factory labour as it is and mix education with practical skills and industrial production.
- This creates an equality that did not exist before, one that allows everyone of a certain age access to education, whilst still learning the ropes of the machinery in order to prepare them for helping the push towards Communism.
Now we press on to Chapter 3 - Socialist and Communist Literature, a chapter that is split into three main segments.
Part One - A) Feudal Socialism explores the idea that Feudalism and Socialism can be mixed. "Half-lamentation [sorrow/grief], half lampoon [satirical/irony], half echo of the past, half menace of the future, at times witty and incisive criticism, striking the Bourgeoisie to the heart's very core; but always ludicrous in effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern society." A scathing criticism from Marx who clearly feels that for it's all it's huff and puff, Feudal Socialism is seen as too much of a comedic figure to blow down the Bourgeoisie. The idea seems deadly but a feudal society could not logically work with Socialism as they are entirely different entities.
Section B of Part One briefly analyses Petty-Bourgeois Socialism, an idea that sees shop owners and small factory owners cast into the Proletariat by their competition. These are the people who can't keep up with the advancements in technology and end up getting left behind. They become replaced by overlookers and bailiffs as they lose everything they have.
The final section of Part One concerns itself with German, or "True", Socialism. Here German's lined their ideas up with those that were spewing out of post-Revolution France, for example, under criticism of the reliance of the economy on money they would write 'Alienation of Humanity'. They felt that the true values of human society were being over-ran by Capital, leaving those without it feeling alienated from society as a whole. Believers of this form of Socialism say that it gets an opportunity to confront Bourgeois politics with Socialist demands as they're against that form of government and also against Bourgeois freedom of the press, Bourgeois laws and legislation and Bourgeois liberty and equality, all of which reflect nothing but the interests of the few who have power. Absolute governments saw this as a scarecrow towards the threat that the Bourgeoisie pose, and with the German state mainly consisting of the Petty-Bourgeoisie the true Bourgeois can destroy that class, then this form of Socialism will take them out too.
Part Two - Conservative, or Bourgeoise, Socialism looks at a form of Socialism that was an attempt the Bourgeoisie made to keep their society on top by amending some of the social grievances, a plan for which they had two systems:
1) The Socialist Bourgeoisie want the advantages of the current system but without the unrest that cause threats of revolution. To eliminate this they would have to eliminate the Proletariat which would mean eliminating cheap labour and improving conditions. This does not effect the labour
2) The second system would involve knocking down any revolutionary movements within the Proletariat by improving the conditions for them. This does not involve abolition of their methods of production, as that would need a revolution and there's still no effect on the relations between capital and labour, but it does open the doors for free trade for the working class, along with protective duties for them and prison reform. This was a Bourgeois society for the working classes.
Part 3 deals with Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism, the first attempt at revolution from the Proletariat which failed due to underdevelopment and the fact that the correct conditions for revolution were yet to be produced. This group would reject any form of conflict and would rather do their job quietly, however, nobody hears a quiet revolution so this goes some way to explaining why this movement failed so emphatically. They attacked every principle of society, feeding the working class with plenty of ammunition which they did not use, and the ideas they came up with stunk of Utopia and did not seem possible, but they did aim to address issues that were only just being raised, including social unrest.
The final chapter of the manifesto is short and sweet, explaining the different political parties that Communists aligned themselves with to keep their plight relevant and take down the ruling classes in each independent nation. Marx's final words in the manifesto "WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!" is an incredible call to arms, an aim to drag the Proletariat out of the factories and fight for their freedom. As Rousseau said "man is born free, and forever in chains," well now it was time to shake off those shackles.
It goes without saying that the Communist Manifesto is one of the most important and revolutionary social writings in history, but when it got the chance to shine it was as the catalyst as the failed Soviet Union which attempted to speed up Marx's stage theory by creating a Proletariat from scratch. Despite this, the Union went on to name Marx as a 'Honorary Russian' even though the the fact remained that he'd never stepped foot in the country. Karl Marx will have to wait patiently in his London grave for the Manifesto to get a second bite of the cherry, and whose to say it won't if society crumbles again? Me, that's who. People won't be happy to give up their possessions and authority for absolute equality, they won't be happy that everything they worked to achieve was for nothing. This is why no matter how often Capitalism fails it will always be patched up.
The Communist Manifesto is first published in February 1848,is a German novel.
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