The Communist Manifesto Revisited    

3,368 words

Some texts are not as daunting as their reputation makes them seem. Many years ago, an English talk-radio host named Nick Ferrari was in conversation with an American lady caller about some political scandal in her home country. The subject of the American Constitution came up, and the lady said that she presumed Ferrari, as a journalist, had read that document. He exploded into laughter: “Of course not! It must be hundreds of pages long!” American readers, at the very least, will know that the original Constitution is shorter than some of the essays here at Counter-Currents, and can be read comfortably and thoroughly in half an hour. Even with the added amendments it shouldn’t take much over an hour to get through. It is a model of simplicity, which is why it is such a powerful founding document for a new nation. What the British wouldn’t give right now for a First Amendment.

Textual complexity and unnecessary length are hallmarks of the left. In the UK, the Bible of accountancy is called Tolley’s Tax Guide, and is a prime example of deliberate complication. During the brief premiership of Gordon Brown from 2007, a man addicted both to Socialism and complexity, this book went from around 5,000 pages to over 11,000. It is estimated by British watchdog The Taxpayers’ Alliance that if the world’s fastest speaker were to read it out loud, it would take five days. “Even the individual guides for Income Tax, Corporation Tax and Capital Gains Tax are each longer than War and Peace,” the Alliance notes. Tolstoy’s classic novel is well over half a million words in its English translation, and closer to 600,000.

So it is that when someone asks an unknowing reader if they have read The Communist Manifesto (TCM), written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and published in 1848, they may well gasp that they don’t have the time for such a tome. But this is not Das Kapital, a book I started but could not finish (giving me at least something in common with Albert Camus). The edition of TCM I am considering here, in an ordinary paperback (Oxford World’s Classics edition), runs to a mere 39 pages, although the additional prefaces to various editions increase that by around half in my copy. As we shall see, this glorified pamphlet is outmoded because of its time and the immense changes which followed its publication, but at its core remain the vexatious oppositions which still plague us today.

I still smile when I look at the cover. It features a beautiful design taken from a French artist named Maximilien Luce, a detail from a painting entitled The Steel Works, but it is the sticker in the top right-hand corner of my copy that amuses me. I bought it in one of those bookstore deals, and the sticker reads: “Buy 1 Get 1 Free”. I’m not quite sure why, but somehow that seems emblematic of Communism. Having read TCM about 40 years ago, I wondered what kind of sense it might make now, when Communism is being openly spoken of once more.

Marx and Engels were in their late twenties when TCM was first published, intended as it was to be an introductory section to a longer work, The German Ideology. The two men hadn’t taken to one another at first, but on their second meeting, in Paris in 1844, they clicked, agreeing on all major points of ideology. They realized that a manifesto was required, and were commissioned to write one in London by the Communist League. Thus tasked with preparing a founding document for the future of their nascent movement, the pair were inseparable for 10 days as they worked on early drafts of TCM. The short book is divided into four chapters, the last seeming a little hurried as the pair were being pressured by British Communists to publish as soon as possible. The first section, Bourgeois and Proletarians, singles out the famous target of this manifesto, the bourgeoisie, as well as grounding its argument in the history of class struggle in its various forms, and the relation of that struggle to the “means of production”. The very first line sets the adversarial tone to come: “The history of hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Lord and serf, freeman and slave, the pairings reduce to an opposition we are used to today, now that Marxism has had gain of function and become cultural Marxism: oppressor and oppressed. The modern epoch of the bourgeoisie has “simplified the class antagonisms” that have always existed and created “new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle to replace the old ones”. Where the reciprocal ties that once bound serfs to their “natural superiors” had been reduced to the relations between men as those of “naked self-interest… and callous cash payment,” so too even the family is reduced to a cold exchange mechanism. It is curious to read these two authors criticizing attacks on the family, given that those who followed Marx and Engels in the USSR would make every effort to destroy that natural unit, although the attitude of the authors to the family is clarified and refined in the second section. What also stands out today is TCM’s critique of the massive bourgeois expansion, aided by technological advances, of the capabilities of the means of production:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

This reads very much like contemporary criticism of what we now call “globalism.” Midway through the 19th century, the authors find the bourgeoisie replacing “old local and national seclusion [with] universal interdependence of nations.” Marx and Engels seem to be bemoaning the disappearance of the nation-state and its replacement with global trade networks, much as many on the right do today. What follows also echoes 20th century voices usually associated with the political right.

A combination of this extra-national expansion and rapid technological advances in the means of production and exchange leaves bourgeois society “like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” There is “too much industry, too much commerce,” and the ending of old means of production, and their replacement by the feverish quest for new markets is seen as “paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises.”

This is the first appearance of two famous threads that run throughout Marxism: the internal and inevitably self-destructive fault-lines running through bourgeois capitalism, and the selling of the rope to capitalists “with which they shall hang themselves” by the gathering together of the worldwide proletariat workforce into a Communist International. But there is a technophobia present in TCM which will later be repeated in the work of Spengler, Heidegger and Evola, and the fear is not simply of technology in itself, but the process by which the proletariat are themselves treated as technological components. In the same way that Heidegger, in The Question Concerning Technology and elsewhere, will go on to talk about the reduction of the human worker into one “reserve” among others, Marx and Engels warn against the mechanization of the workforce. Workers become “an appendage of the machine” which enslaves them. But the workers will rise against the machine, as the last line of chapter one predicts: “What the bourgeoisie… produces is its own grave-diggers [and] its fall and the rise of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

Act two opens with the entry of Communism, which would certainly ensure that the job of grave-digger in the Communist regimes of the future would mean that at least some members of the proletariat had full employment. Proletarians and Communists outlines the relation between the two, and a type of globalism does make its appearance. The authors stress a “totalist” approach to the class struggle, and Communists are not a party in opposition to other working-class parties, having “no interest separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole”. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie and “the conquest of political power by the proletariat” is a main pillar of Communism, but perhaps its central support is at the core of the project: the abolition of private property. This is the point at which Communism betrays one of its great fallacies:

You are horrified with our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

This is equivalent to saying today, well, why do the rich guys have offices bigger than my apartment? We may wish to ask what sort of society there would be, unequal or not, without private property. It is not the ownership of property but the use to which it is put that is the issue, although what sticks in the Communist craw is simply that there are haves and have-nots. The center of gravity of this argument is that, for Communism and Marxism, the idea of a natural order – and thus a natural hierarchy analogous to that found in the animal kingdom – is anathema. Private property is not maliciously and unfairly dealt out by an unjust fate or deity, but rather the outcome of economics as a human (perhaps all-too-human) activity rather than something which can be programmed and controlled centrally.

Marx and Engels were not quite as dismissive of Christianity as is popularly believed, and it is worth noting that Saint-Simon is referenced on a number of occasions in TCM. Saint-Simon believed that Christianity could be revitalized as a political force and transformed into Socialism, and was a writer much favored by Britain’s Fabian Society, whose founder believed that Christianity and Socialism were interchangeable terms. And so, in TCM, we read that “nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge”. Christ, after all, famously declaimed against materialism and property.

Before the program for reallocation of property and resources which closes the second chapter, a proto-Soviet attitude towards the family becomes clearer:

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce as instruments of labour.

The 10-point list of necessary conditions for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the rise of the proletariat includes many of the demands made by the modern left. “Heavy, progressive” taxation, abolition of the right of inheritance, centralized credit, transportation, and industry, free education; today, these are not merely talking-points for old-fashioned Marxists arguing in smoky cellars but central policy points for many Western governments. The result of implementing the program found in TCM as chapter two closes will, the authors declare, herald the glorious new dawn of Communism:

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Put another familiar way, from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs, the ideological underpinning of the modern welfare state.

The third section compares current Socialist collectives and makes the case for Communism as their natural successor. Once the bourgeoisie have been “swept out of the way,” in a practice-run for today’s “great replacement,” the proletariat take over the means of production and the land on which those means operate. These are not bands of prole rebels such as Luddites or Shakers, but are now backed by the centralizing power of the new state. A further criticism of the bourgeoisie is that they are “desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society”. Again, this has a familiar ring to it in our era of politics as attenuated grievance.

We are all too aware of “virtue-signaling,” a hackneyed phrase but one which still serves its purpose. It accurately describes a middle-class pastime intended to show one’s moral superiority with an inventory of injustices only they can put right. We can at least credit the founders of Communism with being able to spot a fake when they saw one. The list of bad actors provided by Marx and Engels is, of course, outmoded today, but some of the usual suspects still lurk in their analysis:

To this section belongs economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the conditions of the working class, organisers of charity, members of the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every conceivable kind.

It wasn’t good enough for Marx and Engels that these poseurs and charlatans should not be exposed for their hypocrisy, nor should we fail to learn lessons from Communists, however woeful their main beliefs. The novels of Charles Dickens were full of these middle-class do-gooders, although Dickens himself may have earned the disapproval of Marx and Engels for his own work on behalf of London’s working class.

Replacement of one class, at least in terms of the power it wields, cuts both ways. In modern societies, write the authors, a new type of bourgeoisie has formed, which alternates between proletariat and the ruling class. This is the petit bourgeois, those Balzac would describe in 1855 in his novel usually translated as The Lesser Bourgeoisie or The Middle Classes. This new median class, however, is vulnerable to changes in the market:

The individual members of this class… are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society, to be replaced, in manufacture, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs, and shopmen.

This predicts, in an approximate way, two such replacements of those who live on the shadow-line between bourgeoisie and proletariat. The first, in the 20th century, was the rise of a new ruling sector of society described in James Burnham’s 1941 book, The Managerial Revolution. For the second great replacement, these interim economic actors would have to wait until our current time, and the rise of automation and AI.

Marx and Engels were political economists writing almost two centuries ago, at a time when their model was still the primary (extractive), secondary (manufacturing), and tertiary (administrative) industries. How could TCM relate to our world of knowledge-based economies and AI? Obviously, TCM is antique in those terms, and reading it as an economist now is akin to a modern architect reading Vitruvius’ De Architectura, written at a time when the only real materials used in buildings were stone and wood. Vitruvius was no more able to predict the use of alloys, plastics, glass and so on in construction than Marx and Engels could see into the future with regard to economic development. Only in science fiction (just beginning at the time TCM was published) were such things as the internet and AI presaged. But, for us, the importance of TCM is that its core concept remains with us today, albeit transposed onto culture rather than revolutionary political economics.

The binary of oppressor/oppressed is Marx and Engel’s re-imagining of Hegel’s famous master/slave dialectic, and Marx wished to ground Hegel’s abstractions in the real world. A scholar once remarked that he had wandered into Hegel’s philosophy as a young man, and wandered out again 20 years later, so we are better off not following him into that enchanted forest. But oppressor and oppressed form a trope very familiar to us in these times of race- and gender-based identity politics.

The last line of TCM is famous: “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”

The upper-case lettering is appropriate, as one could be forgiven for thinking that those on the far left actually think in upper-case. Now, of course, the most intransigent Marxist in the West would have hauled Marx and Engels over the ideological coals for restricting their call to arms to men, those dreaded patriarchs. As the 20th century progressed, where were the women and, later, where were the gays? As the millennium turned, where were the transgender folk, the two-spirit community, the furries? It is unlikely that the workers of the world would have had much time for uniting with such oddities. And it is a moot point as to what Karl and Friedrich might have made of some of the people calling themselves Communists today.

“Communism” is coming back into vogue on both sides of the great political divide and the Atlantic Ocean, both as an accusation and an actual political presence. New York Mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani is openly being called a Communist, and many Democrats flirt with that image, like a teenager trying to shock Daddy and Mommy by being a punk-rocker or joining Antifa. White New Yorkers are apparently already fleeing the city as Mamdani looks likely to take over from the woeful Eric Adams, and some of the Muslim candidate’s proposed policies would perhaps have made even Marx and Engels blench.

In Europe, the Communist Party itself is still active in politics in various countries, albeit as an outlier, as a random recent example shows. The Uachtarán na hÉireann may be a mouthful to pronounce if you are not Irish, but it is Éire’s office of President and is largely symbolic, with political pronouncements constitutionally discouraged. With campaigning having started for the next Irish Presidential election, this constitutional injunction has not stopped the following statement being released: “The Communist Party of Ireland supports Catherine Connolly’s campaign for the office of Uachtarán na hÉireann.”

There may not be a morbid fear of “Reds under the bed,” as the great obsession of the McCarthyite era in the US was summed up, but Communists have not gone away.

I wrote a piece recently in The Occidental Observer about Britain’s Fabian Society in which I noted that the word “Socialism” is the preferred term of choice for the left rather than “Communism,” due to the positive connotations of the word “social”. The editor of the Oxford Classics TCM, David McLellan, makes the same point:

Marx considered himself to be a Communist – whereas ‘Socialism’ tended to be a rather pacific term associated with Utopian schemes, ‘Communism’ tended to be a more militant term, connoting the revolutionary abolition of private property, with echoes of the Parisian Commune of 1793.

Whereas the Fabian Society, founded in Britain almost 40 years after TCM, believes in gradualism rather than revolution, in entryism and the slow subversion of existing societal institutions, Marx was always more concerned with the clenched fist rather than the “boiling frog” approach to introducing Communism, which is adversarial and combative rather than subtly and incrementally subversive. The emergence of bourgeoisie and proletariat which polarized the class struggle and had now emerged into full visibility was not something Marx and Engels claimed to have discovered. Rather, they wished to show that it was always there, and that their work simply brought it to light. The preface to the German edition of TCM of 1883 gives a thumbnail sketch of the authors’ main thesis:

The basic thought running through the Manifesto – that economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation of the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles.

Now was the time, wrote Engels in 1883 (Marx had died earlier that year), of the proletariat, and the end of bourgeois rule. As we now know, it didn’t quite work out that way, but Communism did not fail, it simply shifted its base of operations. The authors of TCM cannot have known the carnage their work would lead to in the century that followed its publication but, as Machiavelli wrote: You sow hemlock, and yet you expect corn to ripen.