150 years of the Communist Manifesto
1848-1998
Why bosses still fear Communist Revolution
Charlie van Gelderen
A hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels began The Manifesto of the Communist Party with the words: "A spectre is haunting Europe … the spectre of communism."
When the founders of scientific socialism wrote these words, there was no communist party anywhere, nor any other mass organisation of the working class.
The nearest approximation was the trade union movement in Britain, at that time the most advanced capitalist country in the world. This was the model on which Marx was to build his analysis of the development of capitalism – an analysis brilliantly outlined in the Manifesto and eventually elaborated in the Grundrisse and the three volumes of Capital.
Suddenly everyone is talking or writing about Karl Marx. Despite the collapse of the stalinized ‘communist’ system, academics, historians and economists are vying with each other to argue the relevance of Marx today.
There is almost unanimity in the tributes to Marx’s genius in his development of capitalism, his remarkable diagnosis of the revolutionary character of ‘bourgeois society’.
Globalisation
Perhaps this is not surprising. After all where can you find a better description of globalisation as we know it today than in the following passage from the Communist Manifesto?
"The need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the surface of the whole globe. It must settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere … through its exploitation of the world market [it has] given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood.
"All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material, drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.
"In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations …"
Liberal and reactionary academics, acquainted, perhaps, only with the sterile stalinized version of Marxism, are amazed that in 1848 Marx could draw such a vivid word-picture of the capitalism they know today.
But while they grudgingly give praise to Marx for his prescience, they fail to grasp the revolutionary content of his teachings, that spectre of communism which struck fear into the ruling classes in 1848 and in every succeeding epoch.
Braced by the temporary apparent success of the market economy and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, they refuse to accept that the self-destructive forces built into capitalist development must reach a point where: "modern bourgeois society, which has conjured up such gigantic means of production and exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the underworld which he has called up. Bourgeois relations have become too narrow to encompass the wealth created by them."
As Eric Hobsbawm put it: "What gives the manifesto its force are two things. The first is its vision that capitalism is not permanent, stable ‘the end of history’, but a temporary phase in the history of humanity, and, like its predecessors, one due to be superseded by another kind of society."
The locomotion to bring about this change is the class struggle, the battle of the modern, industrial proletariat against the owners of the means of production.
Class struggle
This is the essence of Marx’s teaching, and the aspect which the liberal academics find hardest to accept. Isn’t the class struggle dead, killed by Thatcherism and the overwhelming victory of market forces which brought down the ‘communist’ strongholds in Eastern Europe?
Where is the working class today? Wasn’t Marx and Engels wrong about the growing impoverisation of the masses and the middle classes disappearing into the working class?
Ladies and gentlemen, you delude yourselves. Today we see the rapid impoverishment of the great mass of the people in the countries on the periphery, the so-called developing world (formerly ‘Third World’), crushed by the unbearable burden of debt. In the economically advanced countries of the West, we see a rapidly growing gap between the rich and their middle class employees.
In Europe, despite over 20 million unemployed, weekly hours for those still in work rose. So did chronic sickness, crime and the numbers in prison.
The officially low rate of 5 per cent unemployed in the United States conceals the reality of an unprecedented lowering in workers’ real income over the past quarter of a century. In 1980, corporation executives there had earnings 30 to 40 times higher than the average of their employees. By 1990 this had increased to 130 to 140 times higher.
Production was moved to Taiwan or Mexico or Haiti, to exploit cheaper – often child – labour. People in blue collar, middle-class jobs were robbed of their pensions. Other employee benefits were reduced.
Far from being dead, there is a revival in the class struggle. According to Gallop, the proportion of voters who believe there is a class struggle in Britain rose from 60% in the 1960s to 81% in the mid—1990s. (The Economist 27 Sept. 1997).
There are a growing number of reports of strikes across the globe; in America, Canada, South Africa, South Korea, Mexico, France, Germany. Here in Britain, the Liverpool Dockers, the workers at Magnet, Critchley, Hillingdon, Noons and elsewhere have brought home the message — the class struggle is not dead.
Of course, such strikes do not represent the revolution which Marx and Engels anticipated, the final battle for the conquest of power. But they are powerful steps along the way, and Marx and Engels by their close collaboration with the conservative British Trade Unions showed their recognition of this.
From the start, however, the founders of scientific socialism realised that something else was required.
To achieve the ultimate goal, workers’ power as the route to socialism, Marx and Engels, and Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci after them, realised that the working class needed the leadership of revolutionary parties.
Marx and Engels tried to steer the burgeoning social democratic parties along Marxist lines. Without such parties, working class struggle will not move forward to socialist revolution.
Today’s Marxists can best commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto by uniting to build such a party – a party firmly grounded in the working class, nationally and internationally; a party which will learn from and try to avoid the mistakes of the past.
In Marx’s day, and again, in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, the cry was raised: "you communists want to introduce community of women." Engels gave a scathing reply to this in an earlier draft of the Manifesto:
"What influence will the communist order have on the family? It will make the relations between the sexes a purely private affair, which concerns only the persons involved, with no interference from society.
"It is able to do this because it abolishes private property and educates children communally, destroying thereby the two foundation stones of hitherto existing marriage – dependence of the wife upon her husband and of the children upon their parents conditioned by private property.
"Community of wives is a relation belonging entirely to bourgeois society and existing today perfectly in prostitution. Prostitution, however, is rooted in private property and falls with it."
Let anyone who would pour scorn of Marx’s prediction of the destructive effect of capitalism on the family look at the statistics – the growth of single-parent households in the developed world, and of child labour in the developing world, child labour which is exploited by the capitalist monopolies.
"Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children…? To this crime we plead guilty." (Marx & Engels, Communist Manifesto.)
Capitalism has proved that, despite its enormous potential – to which the Manifesto pays handsome tribute, on a global scale it cannot provide a livelihood, however miserable, for most of the working class.
Marx and Engels envisaged a world in which the working class, "the grave-diggers of capitalism" would bring it down, and build a new, more progressive
Capitalism has proved that, despite its enormous potential it cannot provide a livelihood, however miserable, for most of the working class
social order: but they did not exclude the alternative which was, as Rosa Luxemburg put it, the "descent into barbarism".
We have already seen the shape of this barbarism in the cruelties of colonialism, fascism and stalinism.
Despite the overwhelming triumph of capitalism, the spectre of communism is still haunting the ruling class. That is why little Cuba still has to battle against the embargo imposed by the mighty United States; that is why they invaded Grenada. The imperialists have not forgotten 1917.
This threatening catastrophe can only be averted if the working people of the world realise that they have nothing to lose but their chains, that they have a world to win, and respond to the ringing call to arms of the Communist Manifesto: "Workers of all countries, UNITE!"