Chapter 1 - Bourgeois and Proletarians
-Marx instantly notes that history is full of class struggles
-Freeman + Slave, Guild-Master + Journeyman, Lord + Serf ----- Oppressor and Repressed
-Bourgeoisie (ruling class) and Proletariats (workers) in a constant struggle against each other
-Links the growth of the Bourgeoisie with the industrial revolution and growth of manufacturing to meet high-demands. Factory owners were oppressing their workforce more and more, pushing the two classes further apart in terms of wealth and worth. Lower classes that have existed for centuries were being “pushed into the background.”
-The bourgeois exploit the proletarians for money and demand, creating free trade: “In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
-Bourgeoisie can’t exist without ever-changing production methods which keep them ahead of their competitors. This means paying cheaper wages to the proletariat and thus causing them further social decline.
-They create products that are purchased around the globe, eradicating the need for local produce and goods.
-By using materials from remote places, the bourgeoisie force those nations into civilisations, creating a world in it’s own image.
-Suggests that the bourgeoise society will destroy itself through over-greed and over-production. “The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.” Remedy this by exploiting current markets and conquering new ones, which Marx says will lead to a bigger crises when it happens again. Eventually the bourgeois will run out of ideas and be killed by it’s own weapons.
-Marx argues that “wielding these weapons” are the proletariat. The proletariat are ‘produced’ at the same rate capital (money) is produced. Due to the growth of machinery, the proletariat are needed for less skilled jobs (pressing buttons etc), so even the most skilled face competition for the simplest of jobs, as anyone could do them. Simple jobs = low, simple wage.
-”Modern industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist.” Labourers become like soldiers, and as the lowest rank, are effectively slaves to the bourgeois.
-Modern industry forces tradespeople, shopkeepers, handicraftsmen and peasants into the proletariat as they cannot compete with the large scale manufacturing and cheap prices.
-Proletariat stages of development:
Birth - struggle begins with bourgeoisie
Individuals rise first, then workpeople of factory, then operatives of the trade, then locality; all against the bourgeois that are exploiting them
Attack the machinery, the factories and then leave their jobs and go back to their skilled trades with the bourgeois destroyed
-Not unionised yet, so the prol’s attack the enemies of their enemies, gaining victories for the bourgeois, allowing them to expand and increase the number of prol’s. These will become soldiers against the borg’s. They become more concentrated as a unit. Borg’s in direct competition with each other are forced to compete on rising wages in order to attract workers. Trade unions are created due to clashes between borg’s and prol’s, who then act together to push up wages and occasionally revolt. People power. Fights between the classes.
-Bourgeoise drag the prol’s into their own battles against foreign borg’s, aristocracy and other borg’s who hold back industry. This gives the prol’s both education and a step up into the political arena which they can later use against their rulers.
-As borg’s inward fighting becomes violent and destructive, as history suggests (nobility to bourgeoisie), parts of the borg will merge with the revolutionary class, the prol’s. The forces of revolution continue to grow and outnumber the borg’s.
-The prol’s of each country must overcome it’s own borg’s before it can progress.
-Borg’s no longer compatible with society as nobody will stand for the conditions that they have had forced on them any more. Whole foundation of society falls out from under the feet of the borg’s who created it as they no longer have anyone to work for them or produce goods, machines can’t operate themselves. Modern industry creates the borg’s grave-diggers. It’s fall and the victory of the prol’s are equally inevitable.
Chapter 2 - Proletarians and Communists
-Communists don’t form any opposing parties to the prols, they have the same interests as the prols, but differ in that:
-They point out common interests of the prols among every nationality
-In every stage of the battle against the Bourg they represent the interests of the movement as a whole.
-Commies are the advanced version of working class parties in every country and are the driving force behind the revolution
-Aim of the Communist: form prols into a class, overthrow the borg, conquest of political power by the prols
-The anti-French Revolution
-FR abolished all feudal property in favour of bourg prop
-Commies abolish bourg property
-Abolition of private property (in it’s most advanced state of machinery)
-A free for all
-Wage labour doesn’t create property for labourer, but capital instead.
-Capital exploits wage-labour
-Property atm is based on antagonism of wage-labour
-Capitalists have a social status in production. Someone working to afford food isn’t a Capitalist, those who do the exploiting are.
-Capital is a social power
-Average of wage-labour is minimum wage which is enough to create a bare existence, therefore that’s all it can reproduce. No space for someone to save money and create a better life for themselves and their family.
-Communists don’t want to change people earning/gaining property, they want to abolish the ‘miserable character’ of it, that means the labourer only exists to increase capital and can only live so far as the interests of the ruling class allow them.
-In a Commie society accumulated labour is a way to “widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer”
-”The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into 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.” You’ve been manipulated to think the way you do.
-Abolish the borg/capitalist family!
-Based on capital
-Vanish along with capital
-Stop exploitation of children by their parents (sending them to work)
-Replace home education with social
-Rescue education from the ruling class
-Who turn children into “articles of commerce and instruments of labour.”
-Bourg’s are unfaithful
-Take each other’s wives
-Communists are reproached to abolish countries and nationality
-Marx defends this and says you can’t take from someone what they don’t have;
working men don’t have a country.
-The proletariat is national, but first must rise to the leading class of a nation.
-A nation of prols but not nation as in borg, nation as in a world-wide class
-Nationalities are being shunned aside by the borg as commerce and the world- market expand.
-Rise of the prols will make this happen further, united action is needed for the proletariat to take control
-10 measures to ensure a switchover happens:
1) Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes
-Give all private land back to the people
- A heavy progressive or graduated income tax
- The more you earn the more you pay the state, keep everything more equal
- Abolition of all right of inheritance
- If someone dies it goes to the state
- Confiscation of property of emigrants and rebels
-If you don’t come from there and don’t behave lose stuff
- Centralise credit in the hands of the state, national bank
-The state looks after money
- Centralise communication and transport to the State
- All these means are state controlled to stop personal monopolies
- Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; cultivate wastelands and improve soil
- Improve means of mass production and give better land to farm
- Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture
- Everyone has to work, use machinery in agriculture
- Combine agriculture with manufacturing, no distinction between town and country, equal distribution of population over the country
- Wider spread, everyone working together for the cause of the State
- Free education for all children in public schools. Get rid of children’s factory labour how it is and mix education with industrial production
-Creates equality that wasn’t there before
Chapter 3 - Socialist and Communist Literature
Part I
- Feudal Socialism
-”Half lamentation [sorrow/grief], half lampoon [satirical, ridicule, irony], half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.”
-A effort to attract the working classes together by the aristocracy to take over the bourgeoisie, but the working classes see their crest of arms and laugh them off
-Feudalists say that their mode of exploitation was different to the bourg, but forget that the circumstances and conditions that they exploited under are old and no longer exist. Forget that the bourg are their society’s own offspring.
-Aristocracy find faults with the fact that bourg creates a revolutionary prol, so they join the bourg in politics to try to pin them down
- Petty-Bourgeois Socialism
-Shop owners, Factory management etc. in modern, fully developed civilisation, hurled into the prols by competition
-Development of modern society makes them disappear and replaced by overlookers, baliffs and shopmen
C. German, or “True”, Socialism
-German’s lined up their ideas with those that had sprung from the French Revolution, eg. under the criticism of economic function of money they wrote ‘Alienation of Humanity’, and under criticism of bourgeoise State they wrote ‘dethronement of the Category of the General.”
-Represented the requirements of truth; not prols, but Human Nature, Man “who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.”
-”True” Socialism gets opportunity to confront political movements with Socialist demands
-against representative government
-Against bourg competition
-Bourg freedom of press
-Bourg laws and legislation
-Bourg liberty and equality
-Telling masses that they have nothing to gain but everything to lose against the bourg movement
-Absolute governments saw this as a ‘scarecrow’ towards the threat of the bourg
-German State was made of petty-bourg class, to keep this class would only keep things the same in Germany, nothing would change. Bourg (industrial and political supremacy) can destroy this class, allowing “True” Socialism to kill both with one hit.
Part 2 - Conservative, or Bourgeoise, Socialism
-Attempt to amend social grievances to keep the existence of the bourg society
-Economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, cruelty to animals groups etc etc. Two systems:
-1. Socialist bourg want advantages of modern social conditions without struggle and dangers that come from it. Want current state of society without revolutionary and disintegrating elements. Bourg with no prols. Prols become worthless as must remain in boundaries of society without hateful ideas aimed at the bourg
- Knock down revolutionary movements in the working class, instead changing material conditions of existence (economically) would be more of an advantage. No abolition of bourgeois relations of production, which can only be done by revolution. Don’t affect the relations between capital and labour, but lessen the cost, simplify admin work of bourg government.
-Free trade for benefit of working class, protective duties for working class, prison reform for working class. Bourgeoise for the benefit of the working class
Part 3 - Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism
-First attempts of prol to gain own means failed due to undeveloped prol, absense of economic conditions that hadn’t been produced yet.
-Socialists of this kind feel superior to class antagonisms. Improve condition of everyone in society, appeal to society at large, preference to ruling class.
-Reject all political and revolutionary action to achieve their ends in a peaceful way
-Attack every principle of Society, yielding valuable materials for the working class.
-Very Utopian ideas attacking problems that were just cropping up
-Abolition of distinction between town and country
-Family
-Industries for account of private industrials
-Wage systems
-Proclamation of social harmony
-Convert functions of state into superintendence of production
-Ongoing modern class struggle developing and taking shape, these attacks on it lose practical value and justification. The ideas are revolutionary but disciples are now reactionary, trying to reignite class antagonisms
Chapter 4 - Positon of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties
-Work for the future by allying themselves with other parties, all against the current social and political order of things
-Chiefly working with Germany as they have the most advanced prol
-WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
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