Our Epoch, Our Manifesto
How dramatically can political mood and ideological discourse change in a mere couple of decades! In January 1989 the New Yorker greeted the collapse and crisis of pseudo-communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR with an article titled “Triumph of Capitalism”. The theme was widely echoed in the print and electronic media, while more serious works like The End of History and the Last Man (1992) also appeared on the scene.[1] The boastful assertion of TINA – There Is No Alternative (to capitalism) – rent the air.
Note : [1] In this widely discussed book Francis Fukuyama essentially says that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations, from which there can be no progression to an alternative system. Marxists like Perry Anderson have been among Fukuyama’s fiercest critics. Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx (1993) held that Fukuyama—and the quick celebrity of his book — was but one symptom of the anxiety to ensure the “death of Marx”. He strongly refuted Fukuyama’s celebration of liberal hegemony: “… it must be cried out, at a time when some have the audacity to neo-evangelize in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realized itself as the ideal of human history: never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity.”
Crisis of Neoliberalism and the Return of Karl Marx
But the triumphalism did not last long. With the onset of the South-Asian crisis of 1997-98, the same New Yorker in its October 20, 1997 issue announced “The Return of Karl Marx”. Marxist scholars and parties also came forward to revisit the classics. A number of new editions of the Communist Manifesto were published in 1998 (150th anniversary of its first publication) e.g., one with a Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm and another, published by the Monthly Review Press, with a Foreword by Paul M Sweezy and an Article by Ellen Meiksins Wood.
By the turn of the new millennium, TINA was yielding place first to the vaguely optimistic slogan of “Another World Is Possible” and then to the confident battle-cry of “21st-Century Socialism”.The world began to look increasingly like a turbulent sea of myriad mass movements.In a situation like this, Alain Badiou’s “The Communist Hypothesis” (2008) – which generated a lot of interest and provided the stimulus for an international conference devoted to the “Idea of Communism”, conducted chiefly by Slavoj Zizek, in London in 2009 – and Terry Eagleton’s “Why Marx Was Right” (2011) helped create a new awareness about the relevance of Marxism in the 21st century. Jason Barker, writer-director of the 2011 German documentary film “Marx Reloaded”, sounded quite convincing when he said, “[P]olitical thinking today is again converging on precisely the type of social conditions in which Marx lived”.
As a backdrop to the last-mentioned books, films and events, of decisive importance was the financial crisis-cum-economic recession that struck the world in 2007-08. While the bourgeois ideologues once again started screaming about the resurrection of the dead philosopher whom their counterparts in the 19th century used to grudgingly call “the Red Doctor” (a reference to the doctorate degree in philosophy Marx earned at the age of 21), the more intelligent among them were trying to explore if the Marxian theory could be used for saving capitalism. Among others, the Pope and the French President were reported to be consulting Capital to understand the causes (maybe cures too) of the ravaging crisis. Financial Times then conducted an extensive discussion focussed on Marx’s Capital and featured an interview with Jason Barker titled “Can Marx Save Capitalism?”; now The Economist has hailed Thomas Piketty as “The Modern Marx”. Well, they think they have found a sterilised, innocuous Marx, who is not questioning the foundations of capitalism – such as the extraction of surplus value – or the devastating ways of present day imperialism. A mellowed Marx, who instead of saying expropriators will be expropriated, solemnly declares: rentiers will be heavily taxed![2]
Such shifts in ideological-political discourse, considered in conjunction with various social upheavals, clearly point to a constant quest – going on at various levels of the conscious and the subconscious among ever larger sections of people – for a radical, viable alternative to capitalism. It is to aid this quest, particularly in our country, that we considered it necessary to bring out the present Indian edition of the seminal vision statement of communists – the Communist Manifesto – in English and different Indian languages. Of course, one cannot expect ready-made solutions to our contemporary concerns in a document this old and this brief. But definitely one would find here – in this panoramic view of the historical evolution and global spread of capitalism as well as its contradictions, crises and ultimate collapse – possibly the best point of entry into a serious, systematic study of the society we are born into. As Chris Harman observed,
“There is still a compulsive quality to its prose as it provides insight after insight into the society in which we live, where it comes from and where it’s going to. It is still able to explain, as mainstream economists and sociologists cannot, today’s world of recurrent wars and repeated economic crisis, of hunger for hundreds of millions on the one hand and “overproduction” on the other.”[3]
This is certainly true. Indeed there are passages – those on globalisation readily come to mind – which by common consent sound even more realistic and relevant today than they did when the document was published. We shall return to this shortly, but let us first acquaint ourselves with the specific historical setting in which this timeless classic appeared.
Notes :
[2] In Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty demonstrates that, as a rule, the rate of return on private capital (money, land, factories and other properties) has been significantly higher than the rate of growth of income and output. This implies that “Wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages…. The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor.” The result is a consistent (covering the past three centuries, save the period spanning the two world wars) growth of inequality of income and wealth, which was one of the major causes of the crisis of 2008 and which can endanger the whole system again. Interested readers may see a brief critical review of Piketty’s propositions in Liberation, June 2014.
[3] “The Manifesto and the World of 1848” in The Communist Manifesto (Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick). Bloomsbury, London: Bookmarks.
Socio-Political Backdrop of the Communist Manifesto
If the famous “Declaration of the Rights of Man” – the manifesto of the French Revolution – heralded the advent of what Eric Hobsbawm aptly called “The Age of Revolution” (the period between 1789 and 1848), the culminating point of that era was marked by the appearance of the Manifesto. Both these documents were historical milestones of great revolutionary significance, and the progression from the former’s grand idea of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” to the latter’s clarion call of “Working Men of the World, Unite!” represented a great leap forward in the history of human consciousness and the ever-ongoing march towards a better society.
However, the French Revolution, or the age of bourgeois revolutions as a whole,had not totally eliminated pre-capitalist relations and traditions either in economic base or in ideological-political superstructure. Germany for example was yet to experience a bourgeois revolution and when that took place soon after the publication of the Manifesto (as it had correctly predicted) it did not lead to a proletarian revolution (as the Manifesto had expected) but revealed a thoroughly conservative/counterrevolutionary character. But it was mainly Germany and, next to it, continental nations like France, Italy, Poland and the Netherlands that the Communist League (the organisation that issued the Manifesto) was focused on – not England, capitalistically the most advanced nation at the time, which would later provide the base for Marx’s Capital. In these countries, besides working class movement, various other struggles – of serfs against masters, peasants against landlords, common people including the bourgeoisie against the feudal aristocracy and so on – were quite significant. The Manifesto therefore attached much importance to unity of communists with democratic forces emerging from and leading those progressive struggles.
The “Age of Revolution” was, naturally, also one of counterrevolutionary repression. A good number of revolutionaries (individually and in groups) who had been exiled, or fled, from Germany and other countries, began to interact and regroup mainly in London and Paris from 1830s onwards. Thus in 1833 the “Society of Exiles” was founded by German revolutionaries in Paris. Following a split, those under the influence of the French anarchist Blanqui formed the “League of the Just”. This organisation played a major role in the Paris uprising of 1839, which was ruthlessly crushed, where- upon some of them, including Karl Schapper, migrated to London. There they founded in 1840 an organisation named, largely as a cover to avoid police harassment, “Workers’ Education Society”.
Another leader of the League, Wilhelm Weitling, fled to Switzerland. There he published a book that called for revolution based mainly on the lumpenproletariat. Jailed and then sent back to Germany, he migrated to London in 1844. The arrival of this energetic and highly influential anarchist leader encouraged the émigrés there, including Schapper, to found “The Society of the Democratic Friends of All Nations”.
Interactions between The League of Just on one hand and the Chartists (in England) and various other fighting forces in different countries were also going on, and so was the debate between various schools of socialism/communism. In the process, most members of the League began to appreciate the superiority of the scientific socialism, being developed by Marx and Engels, over various utopian ‘systems’. League leaders like Heinrich Bauer, Joseph Moll and Karl Schapper issued a circular in late 1846 proposing an international communist congress to set up a “strong party”. That congress was held in London in June 1847. Marx, then in Brussels, could not attend but gave detailed advice to Wilhelm Wolf, the delegate from that city; Engels attended as a delegate from Paris.
The congress adopted the new name “Communist League” and adopted, as the basis of its programme, the “Communist Confession of Faith (or Credo)” drafted by Engels in the form of a revolutionary catechism – the form in which workers’ societies were then wont to formulate their programmes. As proposed by Marx and Engels, the congress replaced the utopian socialist motto “All Men Are Brothers” by the class-conscious rallying cry: “Working Men of the World, Unite!” Whereas the old slogan obfuscated the real situation and sowed the illusion that with sufficient propaganda, capitalists and landlords could be turned into brothers of workers and peasants, the new one pointed to the specific political task at hand – that workers must unite on a worldwide scale for class struggle, for the forcible overthrow of the old social order and the construction of a new society. This was a tremendous advance indeed.
Shortly after the Congress, a district committee of the Communist League was founded in Brussels under the leadership of Marx. For all practical purposes it began to act as the leading ideological centre, although the Central Committee was based in London. Marx and Engels felt that the illegal and relatively narrow organisational structure of the League – which was imposed on it by the absolutist states in Europe – should be surrounded with a network of open workers’ societies. They soon established the German Workers’ Society in Brussels and took an active part in founding the Brussels Democratic Association. Marx’s lectures in the Workers’ Society were later published as Wage Labour and Capital and he was elected one of the two vice-chairmen of the Democratic Association. The Association also did a good job in building a broad alliance of democratic forces in different countries.
Engels’ Principles of Communism, a revised and enlarged version of the Communist Confession of Faith, was regarded as an outline programme of the League. However, very soon Engels himself felt it necessary to “drop the catechism form and call the thing Communist Manifesto.” (Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, p 45). Marx readily agreed and that was what the second congress of the Communist League, held in London in November-December 1847, decided to bring out.
The League already included among its members leading Chartists and the congress was attended by delegates from most European countries including England. Marx fought vigorously against various erroneous ideas and, ably supported by Engels, secured a majority for his proposals. On a motion moved by Marx and Engels, the congress resolved that in its external relations the League should take an open stand as a communist party and entrusted Marx and Engels (as recorded in the Preface to the German Edition of 1872) with the task of drafting its Manifesto.
From Utopian to Scientific Socialism
By this time Marx already had to his credit such landmarks as The Holy Family (1845, written jointly with Engels) and Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and Engels, The Condition of Working Class in England (1844) and Principles of Communism (1847). The two friends had been working closely together since 1844 on various theoretical projects (writing The German Ideology, for example) and political organisational initiatives, as described above. Both worked in the Deutsche-Briisseler-Zeitung, a democratic-socialist fortnightly founded, incidentally, by a suspected police informer (without knowing this, of course) and turned it into an undeclared organ of the League.
Their first-hand experience of political work among workers, their interactions with various democratic forces and the intense, wide-ranging debates they had to conduct with Weitling, Bakunin and others – all these had helped the duo shape up their distinct world outlook and political-organisational views. Now, immediately after the congress, they conferred for days together in London and Brussels on how best to give concrete shape to their shared wealth of ideas. Marx then worked for a whole month to actually write down the document, to some extent drawing on the Principles.
He completed the work just on the deadline, after the CC had warned from London that should he fail to do his job by February 1, 1848, the task would be handed over to someone else. The pamphlet was published from London in German towards the end of February 1848, followed by Polish, Danish, French and English editions, while the first Russian one came out in the early 1860s.
Some scholars seem to find it fashionable to describe the Manifesto as a work of Marx alone. But what we noted above, read with Marx’s explicit statement that the Manifesto was “jointly written by Engels and myself”[4] completely refutes this position. In the last-named preface, Marx also mentioned the independent evolution of Engels’ theoretical thought to the same point as his and made particular mention of “his [Engels’] brilliant sketch on the criticism of economic categories”. So, the Manifesto was definitely a joint work of the co-founders of the communist movement, the modest words of Engels in the Preface to the German Edition of 1883 notwithstanding.
With the publication of this incisive and wide-ranging document, socialism no longer remained a grand utopia. The era of scientific socialism had begun.
Post publication, the Manifesto “had a history of its own”, as Engels wrote in the Preface to the German Edition of 1890. Its popularity rose and fell with crests and troughs in the working class movement, Engels pointed out, but the overall trend certainly was towards wider recognition. After the death of its authors, the classic was printed in all major languages all over the world, as fresh editions in many cases, and to this day it continues to attract new readers every year, everywhere. Beyond Left circles, it has won universal recognition, including from ideological adversaries, as the most widely read, most influential political document and the second best-selling book (after the Bible) of all time.
Note : [4] Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume I
Style, Structure and Method
Among the many sources of the Manifesto’s strong and enduring appeal, probably the first to strike the reader is the lyrical yet bold direct speech with profound power of penetration matching the immensely rich content. The free-flowing text sings here like a nimble mountain spring, thunders there as a mighty waterfall and, in the end, swells and beckons like an endless ocean, the ocean of world revolution. The beauty of brevity is simply enthralling; right from the famous opening sentence to the passionate concluding call, the gem sparkles with the lofty Promethean spirit of the modern proletariat.
No less instructive is the construction or presentation: simple and straightforward, often in a dialogic form, always without pretensions. The Manifesto begins with a clear and concise statement of purpose: to “meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself” (emphasis added to draw attention to what the authors actually meant by “spectre”). The pithy yet profound prelude is followed by the four sections with short simple titles indicating the logical structure or building blocks of the first international Marxist programme. Section I examines, in the context of the doctrine of class struggle, the principal class antagonists in capitalist society: “Bourgeois and Proletariat”. Section II, on “Proletarians and Communists”, clarifies the organic relation of the class to the organised vanguards and lays down certain core propositions of communism juxtaposed against the highly pretentious bourgeois common sense. But these propositions needed to be clarified also in contradistinction with various vulgar socialist and utopian communist ‘systems’ then in vogue; this is done in section III – a critical review of “Socialist and Communist Literature”. Section IV, on “Positions of Communists in Relation to Other Existing Opposition Parties”, explains the basic principles of communist strategy, tactics and united front policy.
Through these four sections, the basic propositions emerge effortlessly yet systematically one after the other and bind together in a neat theoretical coherence, even as the centrality of class struggle comes alive from pages of history to present times, finally leading to the crescendo – an open call to arms to those who have nothing to lose but their chains, and a world to win! Also embedded in this lofty futuristic vision is a broad outline of practical measures which the proletariat should begin to implement immediately after coming to power.
Although issued as a manifesto, i.e., a lean pamphlet for mass circulation, the document was intended to be – as we gather from the “Preface to the German Edition of 1872” – “a detailed theoretical and practical programme”. The authors managed to meet such contradictory demands in a marvellous manner. They did not write separate chapters on the dialectical worldview, the materialist interpretation of history, the doctrine of class struggle, detailed charters of practical demands in different countries, and so on. They rolled all these into one multi-dimensional but composite, seamless narrative.[5] What the world proletariat got as a result was a practical-political programme of action woven around a robust theoretical core. It was – and remains – a cogent summing up of the past, an insightful portrayal of the present and a scientific-imaginative foray into the future.
Without a doubt the Manifesto will forever be admired as a great historical watershed. But has not the march of time robbed the document of its practical-political relevance?
Well, it has and it has not. The authors themselves pointed out in 1872 that already by that time part of the text (the criticism of contemporary socialist literature, the assessment of opposition parties and the 10-point revolutionary programme) had become “deficient” or “antiquated”. But even here, as we shall see in our discussion of communist strategy and tactics, the scientific approach and the basic principles remain as valuable as ever.
Before we proceed, we must take note of another feature of the method adopted in the Manifesto. One should not expect here a photocopy or photographic details of reality. What is to be savoured are the broad, swift, powerful strokes of a creative artist who has a keen eye for observation that is better than the lens of the best camera, but who takes the liberty to highlight what she or he believes to be the most vital contours or features of the subject, leaving out certain others, so as to drive home the intended message.
As for our method of study, in the pages that follow we should, while focusing on this text of Marxism, check up with the subsequent developments in Marxist thought on some of the more important issues raised here. For thus alone can we begin to grasp Marxism as a live philosophy of praxis, continually trying to update and enrich itself in course of active engagement with the ever-changing world.
Note : [5] (See Lenin’s observation quoted at the beginning of this book)
Bourgeois Society: Then and Now
Remarkably enough, Marx and Engels did not use the term capitalism in the Manifesto. They preferred expressions like “bourgeois society”, “our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie” and presented the whole discussion in terms of class struggle between the basic classes of this era: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, depicting in the process the essential features and tendencies of capitalism.
They saw these features and tendencies as inseparable parts of a composite whole, but different people with different class viewpoints have tended to pay one-sided attention to this or that element, missing the wood for her/his favourable tree. Thus the World Bank in its 1996 World Development Report and Thomas Friedman in the 1999 bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree quoted select passages from the Manifesto on globalisation, with great appreciation, to describe the present world economy. What they chose not to look at was the discussion on inevitability of crises under capitalism.
The 1848 document brilliantly captures the motion of capitalism in the dialectical unity of its two opposite tendencies: towards global supremacy propelled by the most rapid and continuous development of productive forces on one hand, and on the other, recurrent, ever deeper crises brought about by the conflict of the expanding productive forces with the constricted relations of production.
And sure enough, this analytical framework has proved to be eminently useful for understanding bourgeois societies in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Let us consider the two sides of the same historical process one by one.
A corollary of the rapid growth of productive forces, the Manifesto observes, is a striving towards centralisation and concentration of economic and political power: “giant, modern industry” in place of manufacture, “the industrial millionaires” in place of “the industrial middle class”, “centralised means of production, and… concentrated property in a few hands”, “political centralisation” as a “necessary consequence” of this, and so on. This trend continued to grow and, as Lenin demonstrated about 70 years later in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, culminated in a global system of imperialism or monopoly capitalism – a qualitatively new and so far the highest stage of capitalism. Today, another hundred years on, we see a new phase of the imperialist stage of capitalism – neoliberal[6] globalisation.
Whereas in Marx and Engels’ time the principal vehicle of the globalising thrust was old-style colonialism, in our century the latter has been replaced by modern imperialism and neo-colonialism. The change from crude direct rule to more and more sophisticated indirect rule has been associated with a shift of emphasis from merchandise export to export of capital and the emergence of monopolies in all sectors of the economy and particularly the rise of an all-powerful financial oligarchy.
The change was succinctly described by Lenin mid-way through the period which separates us from the Manifesto: “It is characteristic of capitalism in general that the ownership of capital is separated from the application of capital to production, that money capital is separated from industrial or productive capital, and that the rentier who lives entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur…. Imperialism, or the domination of finance capital, is that highest stage of capitalism in which this separation reaches vast proportions. The predominance of finance capital over all other forms of capital means the predominance of the rentier and of the financial oligarchy”, and of “a small number of financially powerful states”. (Imperialism)
This “separation” of “money capital… from industrial capital” has by now grown much deeper, with international finance almost freed from its moorings in production and thriving on speculation in share, commodity and currency markets, investment banking and insurance, real estate, etc.
Similarly, while Marx and Engels point out that the expansion of the bourgeois order from the West to the East makes the latter dependent on the former, in our century this dependence has been perpetuated and perfected as “development of underdevelopment”. Through devices such as unequal exchange, selective discriminatory protectionism and the lure of debt trap, the larger part of “the East” – or the Third World in today’s terminology – has been systematically developed into a vast region of retarded, deformed, half-baked capitalism catering to the interests of the metropolitan centres.
Writing in 2008, Michael Löwy gave a lively picture of the advanced stage globalisation has now reached:
“In fact, capital has never succeeded as it has in the 21st century in exerting a power so complete, absolute, integral, universal and unlimited over the entire world. Never in the past was it able, as today, to impose its rules, its policies, its dogmas and its interests on all the nations of the globe. International financial capital and multinational companies have never so much escaped the control of the states and peoples concerned. Never before has there been such a dense network of international institutions – like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation – devoted to controlling, governing and administering the life of humanity according to the strict rules of the capitalist free market and of capitalist free profit. Finally, never at any time prior to today, have all spheres of human life – social relations, culture, art, politics, sexuality, health, education, sport, entertainment – been so completely subjected to capital and so profoundly plunged into the “icy water of egotistical calculation”. (The Communist Manifesto 160 Years Later)
But this full-spectrum domination of capital has been accompanied by an unprecedentedly universal spread of the crisis (during the last comparable crisis in the 1930s, the Soviet Union remained outside its pale).[7] The twofold contradictory tendencies of capitalism noted above are thus most conspicuous today.
Closely related to this there is another and perhaps even more important tendency inherent in this mode of production. The very methods on which capital relies for overcoming recurrent crisis, the Manifesto tells us, are precisely the ones that pave the way for more destructive crisis and reduce the means available for preventing them in future. This is also proving to be truer than ever.
The two basic methods capital resorts to are: “conquest of new markets” and “more thorough exploitation of the old ones” (Section I). But capitalism is now a universal system in economic terms, so there is no further scope for external expansion by old methods like colonising new regions or prising the markets of (erstwhile) socialist countries. The only way traditionally available to global capital was unprecedentedly more intensive exploitation of old markets by various means such as enhanced market penetration into personal and social life with commodities like mobile phones and other electronic gadgets, various lifestyle products, social net-working services, etc. However, such expansion of commodities and services catering to expanding human needs is not enough to satisfy capital’s growing hunger for profit. So new techniques had to be adopted, both in the global North and the global South.
In the former, the principal instruments were financialisation and speculative activities as major sources of profit and easy credit as a means to promote effective demand even as wage levels are kept low. In the South, especially the so-called “emerging economies” including our country, the foremost weapon was LPG (Liberalisation-Privatisation-Globalisation) which ensured for big capital, indigenous and foreign, hefty profits and asset accumulation by dispossessing the people and the nation.
But in both the North and the South, the temporary boost to GDP growth provided by these measures were more than offset by dangerous ‘side-effects’ like rising inequality, growing disconnect between the swelling financial sector and the stagnating real economy and so on, eventually leading to the crisis that began to spread around the world from ‘the most successful’ capitalist economy in 2007-08.
This latest round of periodic crisis is evidently proving to be exceptionally prolonged and deeply structural, reminding us of the Manifesto’s observation that crises “by their periodical return put on trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society” (Section I). In such hopeless circumstances the highest and leading echelons of the bourgeoisie, while doggedly continuing with the strategy of financialisation, are now relying more and more on redistribution of incomes and wealth – inter-class (from producers of surplus value to its appropriators, more generally, from the poor to the rich and the upwardly mobile middle classes), intra-class (from lower to higher to the highest strata of the bourgeoisie by way of centralisation/monopolisation as well as a slew of other measures), from peripheries of the global economy to the centre (from underdeveloped nations to metropolitan countries).
But this is manifestly furthering recessionary trends in rich as well as poor countries. In fact the triad of the bourgeois order today – North America, Western Europe and Japan – is in the grip of what John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney have called the stagnation- financialisation trap (See “The Endless Crisis”, Monthly Review Press). Early this year (2014) Christine Lagarde, managing director of IMF, even went to the extent of ringing the alarm bell about the threat of deflation – the dreaded ogre that wrought havoc in the US in the early 1930s.
So much for globalisation and the crisis of capital. In these vital respects, capitalism has no doubt changed a lot, but mainly in the direction indicated in the Manifesto.
The other most important characteristic of the bourgeoisie/the bourgeois order lies in its revolutionary role. We are used to viewing this generally in the historical fact of replacement of the outmoded feudal order by a relatively advanced socio-economic system; for Marx and Engels this role lay also, and above all, in the creation of both the material and cultural foundations for communism and the class force capable of realising this great transformation. The Manifesto gives us a fairly detailed analysis of the process involved.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising, the Manifesto states, (a) “the instruments of production” (machines, skills and technologies); (b) “and thereby the relations of production” (basic relations among all economically active men and women, e.g., capitalists and workers, which together constitute the economic structure of a particular society); (c) “and with them the whole relations of society” (familial, cultural, political). For instance, the rule of money and “egotistical calculations” turn love, dignity, family ties and knowledge into objects to be bought and sold, while “exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions”, is substituted by “naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation”. More important, these are not one-time changes. Constant flux in all realms is a basic, inalienable feature of the bourgeois epoch (Section I).In this dynamism, we could add in the light of post-Manifesto experience, lie the basic strength of capitalism, as also the source of many a new contradiction.
But how about the reactionary side of the bourgeoisie? Two things are notable here. First, the Manifesto, never intended to be a comprehensive critique of the emerging bourgeois order, does not go into all its imperfections, deviations and distortions. Thus, cheap commodities are singled out as “the heavy artillery” with which the East was won, but there is only a veiled hint – “expeditions” – at the physical torture and real guns widely used for the same purpose. There is, again, no mention of the physical violence and cultural coercion involved in the metropolitan bourgeois project of “create[ing] a world after its own image”.
Some of such omissions might be due to lack of information and the compulsion to keep the text short, but mainly they seem to be deliberate. The intention probably was to hammer home the principal aspect: the transformational role of the bourgeoisie, which has made the world ripe for another, and more fundamental, transformation.
Second, while the authors were well aware of the lack of capitalist development in much of the West (cf. Engels, The Civil War in Switzerland (1847), Collected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. VI) the real reactionary/conservative/counterrevolutionary role of the bourgeoisie came into full view only during and after the revolutions of 1848, i.e., after the Manifesto was written. Marx was quick to take note of this in The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-revolution (Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Vol. I). Written in the same year (December 1848) in almost the same style, it contains a very strong indictment of the bourgeoisie that could well be read as an epilogue or afterword to the Manifesto:
“The Prussian bourgeoisie reached the political summit, not by means of a peaceful deal with the Crown, as it had desired, but as the result of a revolution. It was to defend, not its own interests, but those of the people – for a popular movement had prepared the way for the bourgeoisie – against the Crown, in other words, against itself. …
“The March revolution in Prussia should not be confused either with the English revolution of 1648 or with the French one of 1789.
“In 1648 the bourgeoisie was allied with the modern aristocracy against the monarchy, the feudal aristocracy and the established church.
“In 1789 the bourgeoisie was allied with the people against the monarchy, the aristocracy and the established church. …
“In both revolutions the bourgeoisie was the class that really headed the movement. …
“The revolutions of 1648 and 1789 were not English and French revolutions, they were revolutions in the European fashion. They did not represent the victory of a particular social class over the old political system; they proclaimed the political system of the new European society. The bourgeoisie was victorious in these revolutions, but the victory of the bourgeoisie was at that time the victory of a new social order, the victory of bourgeois ownership over feudal ownership, of nationality over provincialism, of competition over the guild, of partitioning [of the land] over primogeniture, of the rule of the landowner over the domination of the owner by the land, of enlightenment over superstition, of the family over the family name, of industry over heroic idleness, of bourgeois law over medieval privileges. The revolution of 1648 was the victory of the seventeenth century over the sixteenth century; the revolution of 1789 was the victory of the eighteenth century over the seventeenth. These revolutions reflected the needs of the world at that time rather than the needs of those parts of the world where they occurred, that is, England and France.
“There has been nothing of this in the Prussian March revolution.
“…Far from being a European revolution it was merely a weak repercussion of a European revolution in a backward country. Instead of being ahead of its century, it was over half a century behind its time. …It was not a question of establishing a new society, but of resurrecting in Berlin a society that had expired in Paris. …”[8]
Such counterrevolutionary traits continued to grow, and after the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution they became the predominant feature of the bourgeoisie. To save itself from the sporadic but mighty advances of the working people, the bourgeoisie recoiled completely from its revolutionary disposition and joined hands with the reactionary forces and trends like feudalism, religious fanaticism, racism etc. On a world scale, imperialism under the rule of finance capital became the vehicle of decadence and reaction. In countries like India and China comprador capitalism emerged in close alliance with feudalism and colonialism. Europe witnessed fascism – first as a campaign and then in power. Later the so-called “Asian tigers” and some other countries like India saw the emergence (and crisis) of crony capitalism. In recent decades, the official secular religion of neoliberalism spread – from the West across the world – in covert connivance with ultra rightist trends like neo-fascism, communalism and the like.
We are thus living in a world where spectacular progress in production, communications and all branches of science and technology go hand in hand with arch-reactionary trends in economics, politics and culture and alarming ecological degradation. While there can be no two opinions about such achievements of the bourgeois epoch as the internationalisation of intellectual-cultural creations of different nations, a certain erosion of national narrow-mindedness among the people etc. (as mentioned in Section I), we cannot therefore ditto the Manifesto where it speaks of vanishing national antagonisms and things like that. In the age of imperialism, probably no less important, if not the main trend, is the non-fulfilment of many of the lofty promises of the dawn of the bourgeois epoch – in fact a certain regression from its initial achievements.
Now for another characteristic feature of this social order, as observed by the authors of the Manifesto: “society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps – the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.” In this sense, they held, this era “has simplified the class antagonisms.” How far do these observations correspond with the present-day reality?
The Manifesto defines “the proletariat, the modern working class” as “a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.” Engels’ Principles of Communism (1847) also defines it as “that class of society which procures its means of livelihood entirely and solely from the sale of its labour and not from the profit derived from some capital.”
Apart from substituting for sale of “labour” the more correct expression “labour power”, Marx and Engels never changed this definition. And it clearly covers ordinary employees (excluding the top state functionaries, corporate executives etc. who earn enough to become capitalists and whose incomes usually include large dividends from shares, interests from other investments etc), including computer-operators in offices, banks etc., who live by selling their (intellectual) labour power. When these sections, including workers in the huge informal sector – agriculture and allied sectors in our country, for example – are counted, their numbers are growing, certainly in absolute numbers and probably also as percentage of the population in many countries. Our country for instance has witnessed in recent decades a great expansion of the rural proletariat including, but not limited to, agrarian labourers. Many Latin American countries are experiencing a noticeable growth in the number of rural proletariat thanks to the spread of commercial agriculture under the auspices of foreign corporations. Moreover, primitive (according to some scholars, a more correct word for the German original would be primary) accumulation of capital – a spreading menace across the third world today – is leading to fresh additions to the ranks of proletariat, mainly the industrial reserve army, from various categories of petty producers/self-sustaining poor people such as the adivasis in our country.
To be brief, in the broad sense of buyers and sellers of labour power, this process of polarisation has generally (with some exceptions, that is) and in a somewhat modified form continued since the nineteenth century, gaining in the 21st a new political expression in the slogan “ the 99% against the 1%”.
Still, the Manifesto’s observation needs to be qualified on at least three counts. First, in all countries we find a very large number of self-employed persons – from small traders to street vendors and hawkers, and from small/middle peasants to various professionals. Secondly, stratification within the camp of wage and salary earners has grown appreciably. The conditions of work and life styles of workers differ widely across various sectors even in the same country: for example in rural and urban occupations, in sunset and sunrise industries, in blue collar and white collar jobs, in formal and informal sectors.
Thirdly, non-class identities like gender, race, nationality, caste etc. have emerged as important bases for various kinds of mobilisations against dominant social forces. This relates in some cases to the nature of capitalism itself (its historic and continuing reliance on patriarchy and racialised imperialism for example), and in others to its uneven development and the various specific historical alliances between capitalism and pre-capitalist and retrograde forces. Marxists therefore now have to engage with and wherever possible contribute to these movements for social justice, demonstrating how these forms of oppression are related to capitalism, alongside and as part of their basic task of promoting and guiding class struggle.
Notes :
[6] The prefix ‘neo’ alludes to the emphatic return to liberal capitalism freed from the government interference imposed during the quarter-century of post-war welfare statism and social democracy. The latter represented a compromise thrust upon old-style laissez-faire capitalism by advancing waves of mass movements and the growing appeal of socialism. A whole range of measures were adopted, such as free/subsidised education, employment guarantee and unemployment benefits, vital services like transportation, communications etc. provided through a non-profit public sector, a considerable degree of state control on economic affairs, and so on. All these together provided capitalism – ailing if not moribund – with a new lease of life, as it were. The inevitability of periodic crises was, of course, still a law of capitalism and when it struck in the 1970s, the most powerful sections of the bourgeoisie ventured upon a rollback of welfare statist/social democratic measures and restoration of a new, more aggressive version of liberalism or market fundamentalism.
[7] For a relatively detailed discussion of the latest outbreak of capitalist crisis, see our trilogy Capital in Crisis: Causes Implications and Proletarian Response (2009); Crisis of Neoliberalism and challenges before Popular Movements (2013) and India in the Grip of Deep Economic Crisis: Causes and Quests for Solution (2014).
[8] From Marx/Engels Internet Archive, accessed on 30th March, 2014.
The Proletariat: Then and Now
The Manifesto was written at a time when the proletariat in Europe and America was rapidly developing from a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself – a class that is conscious about the conditions of its own emancipation and its world-historic mission. Its two characteristics, as noted in this document, were quite conspicuous: chronic pauperisation and revolutionary zeal. What is the situation today in these respects?
As in our time, so in those days, there were considerable wage differentials across and within countries, with certain sections of workers getting relatively better pay packets. In fact capitalism never entailed a secular and linear decline in wages; nor did Marx and Engels ever say so. Such a theory about the “iron law of wages” was actually propounded by Lassalle and thoroughly refuted by Marx.
Marxists recognise that under certain conditions and in certain periods – e.g., during periods of boom, when enhanced demand for labour tends to augment the bargaining power of workers and enables them to extract higher wages while higher profits prompt the capitalists to grant that rather than face a strike; during periods of exceptional growth of productivity; during high tides of working class movement – real wages may rise, while in opposite circumstances they tend to fall. Obviously, such upward and downward trends vary considerably from country to country and even between industries in the same country, the most important among the determining factors being the relative strength of the belligerent classes – the capitalists and the workers.
Under this general rule, impoverishment/pauperisation is possible in both absolute and relative terms. The former can happen among sections like (a) “the reserve army of labour”, i.e., the unemployed, (b) the old, disabled etc, who are permanently thrown out of employment, and (c) certain sections of the unorganised or the lowest rungs of even organised workers. As noted earlier, before our very eyes the process of primary accumulation of capital or accumulation by dispossession is leading to pauperisation of large sections of already marginalised working people.
As for relative impoverishment, first of all we must remember that poverty, like affluence, is a thoroughly relative term. The minimum needs of the workers and employees increase steadily as a result of intensification of labour; higher skills, education and training required; higher costs of living thanks to growing urbanisation and also in response to overall improvements in standards of living throughout society. So, when nominal wages go up or even real wages (wages measured not in money terms but in terms of the goods and services they will buy, i.e., the nominal wages adjusted for changes in the price index) remain constant or rise slightly, there can be relative impoverishment of workers, whose real needs rise faster. This is what actually happens in most cases, and can be measured in terms of the relative share of wages vies-a-vies profit in national income or, at a disaggregated level, in specific sectors of the economy. A few practical examples will help clarify the matter.
In our country, the brief periods of high manufacturing growth in the mid-1990s and the 2000s were propelled by increased productivity of labour. But labour was denied the fruits of growth. Wages as a share of net value added in the manufacturing sector were close to 30% in the 1980s, declined to around 20% in the 1990s and dropped to an all-time low of 10% by 2008-2009. Naturally, the share of profits in net value added, which was around 20% throughout the 1980s, climbed above 30% in the 1990s, and rose to an incredible 60% in 2008. The same story was repeated in the service sector. Here the share of wages declined from more than 70% in the 1980s to less than 50% by 2009 while profit- share increased from 30% in the 1990s to more than 50% after 2004-05.
Aspects of India’s Economy No. 55[9] tells a fascinating story about the growing deprivation of Indian workers, their fight-back, and partial success.
In the decade ending 2009-10, real wages – particularly in the automobile sector – had fallen steeply. But the Annual Survey of Industries (2011-12) indicates that reversing a trend of many years, the real wages of factory workers rose by 8.5 per cent in 2010-11 and 6.3 per cent in 2011-12. However, wages still remained below 1995-96 levels. This is true for the automobile sector also, where real wages rose by 6.3 per cent and 3 per cent respectively in the last two years. As a price for this, Maruti workers had to face unprecedented repression: 148 of them rotting in jail for months on end and over 2,000 dismissed.
The story of workers’ deprivation can be studied from another angle: the relative share of workers’ wages, vis-à-vis that of managerial salaries, in ‘total emoluments’. From 64.8 per cent in 1991-92, the former fell to 56.9 per cent in 1997-98, to 48.4 per cent in 2007-08 and then to 46.5 per cent by 2011-12. That is, less than half the ‘wage bill’ of industry now goes to workers.
The same trends are visible almost all over the world, at least on the longer term. Take the case of the world’s wealthiest nation for example.
Between 1979 and 2007, the average inflation-corrected hourly wage of non-supervisory workers in the US declined by 1 percent, while inflation-corrected nonfinancial corporate profits after taxes rose by a stunning 255 percent. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in that country productivity rose by 93 percent between 1980 and 2013, while pay rose by 38 percent (all inflation-adjusted). Real wages for most US workers have virtually stagnated since the 1970s, but salaries and perks for the top 1 per cent have risen 165 per cent, and for the top 0.1 per cent have risen 362 per cent. At the same time, over the last 40 years, the top marginal tax rate in the US has declined from 70 to 35 per cent. But the biggest tax reductions have come on capital income, including corporate and inheritance taxes.
Like pauperisation, the revolutionary character of the working class was never seen by Marx and Engels as an abstract, absolute truth. They were aware of various non-proletarian tendencies in the working class; Engels even spoke of a “bourgeois proletariat” in England bribed by the British bourgeoisie out of the excessive profits made from its colonial exploits and industrial supremacy.[10]
Lenin later elaborated the concept of “workers’ aristocracy” – a small section raised in all imperialist countries on the strength of super profits made in colonies, locating here the economic basis of reformism/right opportunism.[11] At the same time, however, he showed that in Russia the highest-paid metal workers played the most advanced role in the revolution of 1905. In our country too we have seen many instances, in yesteryears as well as in the recent past, of organised and better-paid workers in ports and docks, the rail, coal and power sectors, banks, the automobile sector, etc. playing a vanguard role as a bloc. On the other hand, we know of innumerable instances – in Russia, in our country and elsewhere – of the most pauparised sections of workers playing an exemplary role in revolution.
So facts of history tell us that there is no mechanical one-to-one relation between poverty and revolutionism, that everything depends on the summation of various aspects of the objective situation and, equally important, on adequacy of subjective preparations and correctness (or otherwise) of principles and tactics adopted.
Now to sum up our discussion on the proletariat. The Manifesto traces the revolutionary role of the working class mainly to its objective position in capitalist organisation of production and distribution, in its status in the class hierarchy of the capitalist system. Being “the lowest stratum of our present society”, it “cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.” (Section I) In The Holy Family the authors of Manifesto had given an even clearer exposition of the matter:
“If Socialist writers attribute this world-historic role to the proletariat, this is not at all because they regard the proletarians as gods. … It is not a matter of knowing what this or that proletarian or even the proletariat as a whole conceives as its aim at any particular moment. It is a question of knowing what the proletariat is and what it must historically accomplish in accordance with its nature”.
Proceeding from this theoretical premise, and in the light of experience gained over the past nearly 170 years, we can conclude that (a) the composition of working class (the relative numerical strength of “blue-collar” and “white-collar” workers, and formal and informal sector workers, for example) has been, and will be, changing inevitably with the changing structures of capitalist production and distribution, (b) such changes, as well as those in their working and living conditions, do help or render more difficult the process of movement and organization, (c) despite the changes, being the class with no stake in the preservation of private property in the means of production, the proletariat is objectively best placed to fight for abolition of that private property, i.e., of leading capitalism’s transformation into socialism, and (d) subjectively the working class needs to be trained and organized for this historic mission by its revolutionary party, the communist party, in which this objective destiny attains self-conscious and concentrated expression.
This brings us to the question of strategy and tactics to be adopted by communist parties.
Notes :
[9] http://rupe-india.org/55/wages.html
[10] See Engels’ letter to Marx, 7 October, 1858 where he reports from London: “…the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois” (Marx Engels Selected Correspondence)
[11] See, in particular, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism (Collected Works of Lenin, Volume 23)
Communist Strategy and Tactics
Among the basic Marxist canons of which the Manifesto remains a treasure house, we would like to draw the reader’s attention especially to certain cardinal principles of revolutionary strategy and tactics. For despite the numerous changes in socio-political conditions and consequently in the nature of communist activities, these principles still constitute invaluable guidelines for, and a trusted touchstone to judge, all parties claiming to be Marxist.
To start with, look at the first nine paragraphs of section II. In place of the boastfulness and arrogance of many a ‘Marxist’ party and leader of our time, we find here the natural modesty of true communists; in place of the petty bourgeois sectarianism that vitiates the Left movement today, the proletarian vanguard’s largeness of mind, which does not even recognise any special interests of a communist party apart from those of the entire working class, and sees its role not in fighting other working class parties but in leading them forward. Even the theoretical superiority of communists is viewed not as a great discovery by some “would-be universal reformer”, not as power of omniscience (as vulgar ‘Marxists’ tend to do) but as “merely express[ing], in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.” But who does not know that this “mere” general expression did to social science what another ‘simple’ generalisation E=mc2 did in modern physics?
The sobriety and the spirit of unity, however, did not prevent the authors of the Manifesto from mounting a merciless attack, in Section III, on the existing schools of “reactionary” and “bourgeois” socialism, complete with a relatively respectful though straight-forward criticism of the followers of deceased utopian socialists like Charles Fourier, Saint Simon and Robert Owen. This they considered as necessary for educating the ranks of the proletariat as the aggressive defence of the basic communist positions against virulent bourgeois propaganda, which they did in Section II.
Another distinctive quality of communist politics highlighted in Manifesto is this: “The communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.” (Section IV) Marx and Engels speak here of a continuous and consistent linking of the immediate task to the ultimate goal, of tactics to strategy, and this principle can act as a powerful preventive against the instinctive striving towards easy success in disregard for future consequences.
But in practice we are pained to see, for example, how parties professing by Marxism often keep themselves confined within the immediacy of economism and how the long-term interests of the working class are sacrificed at the altar of immediate parliamentary gains, sought to be secured through unprincipled alliances with bourgeois parties, thereby corrupting the consciousness of the working people. In this way, abandonment of this mandatory principle of Marxism, this bulwark against opportunism, gives rise to the opposite of Marxism – to revisionism:”To determine its conduct from case to case, to adapt itself to the events of the day and to the chopping and changing of petty politics, to forget the primary interests of the proletariat and the basic features of the whole capitalist system, of all capitalist evolution, to sacrifice these primary interests for the real or assumed advantages of the moment – such is the policy of revisionism.” (Lenin in “Marxism and Revisionism” (1908))
Then there is the principle of broad-based unity with all fighting forces against the common enemy together with full political independence of the Communist Party, including the right to freely criticise the allies. Principled relations of unity and struggle were developed with militant reformists like Chartists in England; Agrarian Reformers in America; Social Democrats in France; the insurrectionists in Poland and so on(Section IV). The next, wider, circle of unity was the “union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries”. Here “parties” referred to various fighting democratic parties as well as forces/parties in the making, with a good many of whom Marx had direct link as one of the vice-chairmen of the Brussels Democratic Association, and certainly not to those who were democratic in name alone.
What about communists’ relation with the bourgeoisie? Obviously it is antagonistic. But in the era of democratic revolution, under certain conditions there could be elements of unity too. In Germany, the Manifesto declares, Communists “fight with the bourgeoisie wherever it acts in a revolutionary way” (emphasis ours) even as they educate the proletariat about its “hostile antagonism” with that class, so that it embarks upon a struggle against the bourgeoisie itself as soon as the latter comes to power.
The absolute condition for communist support to the bourgeoisie – or a section/sections of it, we may add – is very clear: the latter must prove itself to be revolutionary in action, not merely in words. Experience of the past 160 years and more tells us that such an occasion arises extremely rarely. It never arose in Russia, which was why Bolsheviks never accepted the Menshevik line of unity with the Cadets – for example in Duma elections in the name of warding off the Tsarist black hundreds. In China the Kuomintang did act in a revolutionary way for brief periods by conducting armed struggle against Japanese aggressors; during those periods the Communist Party of China joined them in the war of national liberation while simultaneously continuing political struggle against it. In contrast to such positive examples, we find Indian Mensheviks uncritically allying themselves with this or that bourgeois party in the name of keeping the “main enemy” at bay and often with the explicit calculation of securing some immediate electoral gains – the be-all and end-all for those who do not “represent and take care of the future” of the communist movement in India.
The Manifesto’s directive that communists should prepare seriously for, and “immediately begin”, the struggle against the bourgeoisie after the latter attains political supremacy, in a way introduces the concept of uninterrupted revolution – the seamless progression from democratic to socialist revolution. As we know, Lenin and Mao developed this idea consistently and successfully in their respective countries; the majority of Indian Marxists are also committed to this strategic-tactical principle, calling the first stage the stage of people’s or new or national democratic revolution so as to distinguish it from the old type of democratic revolution led by the bourgeoisie.
But how will the proletarian revolution forge ahead? The Manifesto spells out the basic steps:
“The proletariat of each country must… first of all, settle matters with its own bourgeoisie”, i.e., “acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the (italics in the original) nation” and thus “win the battle of democracy”. (Section II) That is to say, it will strive to carry the democratic revolution to consummation under its leadership.
It will then “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organised as a ruling class;” and to rapidly develop the productive forces. “[I]n the beginning” this will involve “despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” Gradually these measures will outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order” and eventually lead to “entirely revolutionising the mode of production”. (Ibid)
Clearly, what is envisaged here is “revolution in permanence”, as the authors of the Manifesto would call it shortly afterwards[12]. A general idea about the proposed practical measures – the transitional steps bridging the democratic and the socialist revolution – is given in ten points at the end of section II, but it is categorically stated that (a) these are relevant only for capitalistically “most advanced countries” and (b) they will differ from country to country and, as stated in the Preface to the German Edition of 1872, from time to time depending on the actual conditions.
A couple of most important and widely debated themes presented here merit our attention.
One, the Manifesto declares: “though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle.” There is no hint at all that the working class in a particular country must not take power so long as its counterparts in at least several other countries have prepared themselves to do the same. On the contrary, Germany was singled out as the country where “the bourgeois revolution… will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.”
It is another matter that this expectation did not come true, but there is evidence that Marx and Engels took it very seriously. In March 1948 they fought vigorously against the “export revolution” plans of a good many foreign immigrants in Paris (plans for sending armed legions to their home countries to start revolutions there) and drew up, on behalf of the Communist League, Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, which elaborated on the brief ten-point outline programme of the Manifesto in the specific context of Germany. This national programme was widely circulated in France and Germany. From Paris (where Marx, after being arrested in and exiled from Brussels, had come to settle in March and setup the new CC of the League along with Engels and others) more than 300 German workers were sent one by one to participate in the unfolding revolution in Germany. In early April both Marx and Engels themselves proceeded to their native land to try and veer the revolution to a socialist course. Never did they subsequently say that this attempt at seizure of political power in a single country was a mistake.
From all this, one point clearly stands out. Marxists are staunch internationalists; they know that the struggle for socialism is essentially an international struggle that can be consummated only by the joint effort of the proletariat in all, or at least the most developed countries. But this does not prohibit the working class in one country to initiate that struggle if conditions are conducive there.
Second, the Manifesto offers us a preview of sorts about the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It appears towards the end of Section II, just before and after the ten point programme. We find that proletarian dictatorship is conceived as a necessary link – the last link – in a long chain of historical developments. The working class, the authors say, “is compelled by the force of circumstances” (emphasis added) to organise and fight as a class; in course of that fight makes itself the ruling class; forcibly sweeps away the old, oppressive socio-political system and ushers in a classless society, thereby abolishing also “its own supremacy as a class”. Public power, no longer an organised political power in the hands of one class (the bourgeoisie under capitalism, the working class during dictatorship of the proletariat) to rule over other classes, is now vested in “a vast association of the whole nation”, where “the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all”.
Has there ever been, before or after the Manifesto, a more radical yet constructive view of the abolition of the state, a nobler vision of free, all-round, synchronised development of one and all, of the individual and the collective?
Very clearly, then, the point of departure and axis of socio-historical progress is class struggle and the destination – classless communist society. In this forward march of history across millennia, proletarian dictatorship is a relatively very short but extremely challenging last leg – the last bridge leading humanity from its strife-torn “prehistory”[13] – as Marx would call it later – to the beginning of the true history of humanity as such, which is no longer split into antagonistic classes.
Inchoate ideas like these were subsequently developed in such works as The Civil War in France; Critique of the Gotha Programme (both by Marx), Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (three chapters from Engels’ Anti-Duhring) – not exhaustively though, because the authors of the manifesto refused, as a matter of principle, to compose the music of the future. They took the Paris Commune –where, as they pointed out, the proletariat established majority rule for the first time in history – as a primary model of proletarian dictatorship and highly appreciated the Commune’s non-formalistic, participatory-democratic features such as universal suffrage, people’s right to recall elected representatives and merging of legislative and executive functions of the state. In these features Marx saw a “thoroughly expansive political form” and observed that a bureaucratic structure in their place would go completely against the spirit of the commune.
In this view, proletarian dictatorship is to be founded on the direct, active and enthusiastic participation of the masses in policy-making and governance. Herein is rooted the prospect and promise – and also the necessary condition – of gradually overcoming or transcending the dictatorship and its practical embodiment – the state – in course of socialist material and cultural construction.
Notes :
[12] See Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League (March 1950)
[13] Marx in Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (op. cit) described bourgeois society as the last social formation based on class antagonism which “brings… the prehistory of human society to a close.” The implication is that antagonistic history would end with capitalism yielding place to communism, which will necessarily involve a form of direct democracy.
A World to Win
“[M]ankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.” (Karl Marx in Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).
At the turn of the nineteenth century humankind set itself, with full courage of conviction, the lofty task of ushering in a harmonious society freed of exploitation and oppression. By that time, the material abundance required for fulfilling the basic needs of the entire human race were rapidly developing in the womb of capitalism; the foundations or components of the theory required to guide this great transformation had started taking shape in the works of outstanding philosophers, economists and social scientists; and the historical agency – the social force capable of actually executing this revolutionary change i.e., the potential “grave-diggers” of capitalism – had already appeared on the stage of history, ideologically not yet fully prepared though to execute its mission. But the presence of these conditions did not mean that capitalism would collapse automatically. For that, what still remained to be done was to connect, and build on, these disparate ingredients so as to (a) arm that social force, the modern proletariat, with a holistic, consistently revolutionary worldview, (b) formulate a correct and widely acceptable strategic vision with an immediate action programme, and (c) build an ideologically consolidated communist party to lead the expanding movement. The Manifesto magnificently achieved the first two conditions and proceeded to fulfil the third, thereby flagging off the proletariat’s conscious march to conquer the world for the Wretched of the Earth.
The march has continued ever since through ups and downs along a tortuous hilly track.
Today, in the age of globalisation and the world-wide-web, no “spectre of communism is haunting Europe”, but the entire global order is visibly shaken by a terrible triple crisis: economic, environmental and socio-cultural – bringing in its trail large-scale social churnings and upheavals. Let all of us join the protracted war to reclaim the globe from the clutches of imperialism and its running dogs, to win the battles of democracy and socialism in the spirit of the Manifesto, which belongs as much to our age as it did to the past two centuries. The task humankind set itself in the nineteenth century can and must be accomplished in the twenty-first.
