The Communist Manifesto

In preparation for the Dramatic Literature course I'll be teaching in the Spring, I recently re-read "The Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I performed a close reading of the text, the way I would like my students to comb through the document, and after looking at the notes I decided to post them here on my blog. The are two main reasons for this. First, I wonder how many people are familiar with this iconic text. I doubt that high schools teach it, and with the upcoming Texas textbooks I expect the likelihood of high-schoolers encountering this manifesto will decrease dramatically. Second, there are times when you can't get to a text; when, for whatever reason, you just can't make yourself read through something all the way. If this case fits your situation, then please read this abridged text, cobbled together from key quotations, as an alternative. If you paste this text into a Word document, it will be approximately nine pages in length. This is significantly shorter than the edition I used and that you are likely to find in a library.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The Communist Manifesto”
Notes

From Edgar E. Knoebel, ed., Classics of Western Thought, vol. 4 (The Modern World), 4th edition (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988) 367-90.

368.
“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.”
- Communism is “not yet.” There is only a spectral trace of it summoned by the dissention of critical parties (the Pope, the Tzar, the King, etc.)
- The manifesto will enact the substantiation of Communism by encouraging the proletariat to unite. Plenty of rhetoric to unpack
- Not just the manifesto, but also the fears of the dissenting parties will lead to the forming of the Communist party

369.
Section I: Bourgeois and Proletarians

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
- As opposed to what, one may ask?
- Pedagogical section in which the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is explained historically and analogically
- The purpose of this is, ultimately, to forecast the downfall of the bourgeoisie

Here is the historical analogy:
“In the earlier epochs of history we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold graduation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guildmasters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.”

The bourgeoisie is not new, but, instead, is a new ordering of the same historically class antagonisms:
“It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.”

369-370.
The bourgeoisie has done one new thing: simplified the multiplicity of class struggles into one major antagonism, that between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Note:
Footnote 7, defines Bourgeoisie: “The small class of entrepreneurs and capitalists who own and control the means of production.”
- Why “small”? To show that the majority is occupied by the oppressed

Footnote 8, defines Proletariat: “The large and ever-increasing number of wage earners who neither own nor control the means of production.”

370.
The Bourgeoisie in fact emerged from its own revolution, made possible by the increase in goods and ideas brought back from America and from the trade routes opened around the Cape of Africa.

Introduction of “Modern Industry”
- Marx turns it into a kind of subject, almost anthropomorphizing it as that entity which “has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way.”

371.
The bourgeois is not just a professional. He/She is also a politician. By extension, the bourgeoisie is also a political party or sorts:
“Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class.”

“[S]ince the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market, [the bourgeoisie] conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”
- The purpose of establishing the bourgeoisie’s validity is precisely to forecast its downfall
- Thus, the next sentence, “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part,” imagines a reversal in which the revolutionary bourgeoisie will be revolted against

The critique against the bourgeoisie: What has it done?
- Installed “cash payment” as the only tie/transaction between men
- Drowned religious fervor in ice cold calculation
- “It has resolved personal worth into exchange value”
- Erected “Free Trade” as The Freedom against the many freedoms of humanity
- All professions are now just paid wage laborers (thereby dissolved of their unique contributions to mankind)

372.
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instrument of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”
- “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.”
- “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

374.
But the rise of the bourgeoisie brings the downfall of the same
- It is like the sorcerer “who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

“[T]here is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forced at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property.”

375.
Finally
“The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.”
- What, or better who, are these weapons? The wage laborers on which the bourgeoisie depends. The proletarians.

Marx paints a bleak picture of the wage laborer
- “These laborers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce…”
- “He becomes an appendage of the machine”
- Slaves of the bourgeois class; slaves of the machines under which they work

376.
“No sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer so far at an end that he receives his wages in cash, then he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, and so forth.”

How the wage laborer becomes the proletariat
- “The lower strata of the middle class […] sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried on…
- “Thus, the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.”

From groups of laborers to the proletariat:
“At this stage the laborers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie. Thus the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.”
- Gist: The division of labor within the mode of production promulgated by the bourgeoisie during the Modern Industrial period (i.e., the period during which Marx is writing) engineers a situation in which wage laborers compete against each other, and therefore they do not turn their attention to the true enemy, the bourgeoisie, those people who keep them laboring.
- Oddly, it is this mode of production that has created the condition for the amassing of the disparate groups of wage laborers into one proletariat. However, the wage laborers have not realized this advantage.
- Instead, as an unconscious proletariat, mobilized by the bourgeoisie, the workers actually fight against themselves and against the competitors of the bourgeoisie (landowners, non-industrial bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie, etc.)

377.
The slowly awakening consciousness of the workers results, at first, in the organization of unions:
“Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers.”

“This organization of the proletarians into a class and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again; stronger, firmer, mightier.”
- This works into the rhetorical schema of development created by Marx, which makes the formation and eventual triumph of the proletariat seem a matter of course.

377-378
Conclusion of this line of thought:
“The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.”

378.
“Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.”

Distinctions:
1. Anyone who does not fight against the bourgeoisie but fights only to earn a living from the bourgeoisie is “conservative.” “Nay, more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.”
2. For these people to become revolutionary, they have to enact a kind of temporal advance. “If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat, they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.”
- This is the psychagogical dimension

378-79.
Characteristics of this new subjectivity of the proletarian:
- “The proletarian is without property”
- “his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations”
- He is stripped of every trace of national character
- “Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.”

379.
“The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.”

“All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of society being sprung up into the air.”
- Though this is true, Marx suggests that each national assembly of proletarians has first to get its affairs in order before uniting trans-nationally.

379-80.
Why is the bourgeoisie unfit to be a ruling class?
“It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him instead of being fed by him. “
- Evidence for this: pauperism. The worker in the modern industrial world is starving even though he works. Having work does not guarantee living means of subsistence.

380.
The grand summation to this section:
“The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of modern industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”
- Capital has within itself the seed of its own destruction
- This destruction is inherent to the bourgeois mode of production, and therefore inevitable
- Of course, this is the point that post-Marx scholars have discussed ad nauseum: if it’s inevitable, why hasn’t it happened?

Section II: Proletarians and Communists

380.
The scope of the section is laid out in the first sentence:
“In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?”

“The Communists are distinguished from the other working class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independent of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.”
- Relation to the avant-garde? “the most advanced and resolute of the working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others.”
- The elite of the proletariat?

381.
Property relations
“The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonism, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

“In this sense the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
- Not the same as “the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant.”

Detailing the argument:
“Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage-labor.”

381-82.
First side, Capital:
“Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not a personal, it is a social power.

When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.”
- First, wage-laborers don’t produce property. They produce capital.
- Second, capital is always already socially produced. Why is it not then owned socially? Why is capital not always “in common”?

Second Side, Wage-labor:
“What, therefore, the wage-laborer appropriates by means of his labor [i.e., minimum wage, subsistence wage], merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labor of others.”
- Laborers would “get paid” with the product of their labor, those items which help to sustain the life and well-being of the worker
- This is different than receiving a minimum wage salary with which one would buy back the very products he or she produced in the factory
- When laborers use their salary to buy back the products they themselves produce, this stimulates the creation of surplus, which Marx attacks here as the very motor of the command of labor from others

“All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the laborers lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interst of the ruling class requires it.”

The big difference:
“In bourgeois society, living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor. In communist society, accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.”

Yes, this is the abolition of “freedom” as understood by the bourgeoisie:
“By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.”

383.
Rhetorical maneuvers

“You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property.”
- Here begins an interesting rhetorical maneuver. Marx begins to address the supposed antagonists of this manifesto. Are we to assume that they have been the audience the entire time, or has the audience been the wage laborer who would ostensibly join the proletariat?
- As we will see, Marx even goes as far as to speak lines from the point of view of the antagonists

“In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.”
- This maneuver gives an added force to the manifesto

Here is the argument/counter-argument, constructed by speaking lines from the “imagined” bourgeois response to this document:

Counter-Argument [bourgeois]:
“From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent…you say individuality vanishes!”

Argument [Communist]:
“You must, therefore, confess that by ‘individual’ you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle class owner of property, This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.”

On Intellectual products:
“Just as, to the bourgeois the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.”
- “Culture” here equals ideas unique to a given place and people; the products of intellectual labor

384.
This argument/counter-argument scheme allows a two-fold procedure. On the one hand, it allows Marx to defend the positions of the Communists while simultaneously, on the other hand, allowing him to aggressively attack the bourgeois positions.

For example:
“Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.”
- The first sentence is spoken from the position of the bourgeoisie, as “flare up” against the position of the Communists
- This is a defensive posture

“On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed for this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.”
- This is the attack: bourgeois notions of family actually deprive that notion of family from everyone else

One step further with the simultaneous attack/defense:
“Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.”

Another example:
“But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the whole bourgeois in chorus.”
- Highly theatrical: Marx plays the part of the bourgeois and then underscores the theatricality with a type of stage direction

385.
All of this is in service to a revelation of the bourgeois family structure as corrupt and predicated on insincerity:
“Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common, and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women. For the rest is it self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, namely, of prostitution both public and private.”

385-86.
More rhetoric in the summation:
“The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and generally, form an ideological standpoint are not serving of serious examination.”
- Of course, he just examined some of those charges seriously…

387.
Forecast the immediate future: Marx starts speaking as though his imagined future, forecasted through this manifesto, is immanent. What remains, then, is to lay out the plan for immediate political action:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, that is, of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”

Section III: Communism positions itself against other oppositional parties

389.
Ends with this line:
“Working men of all countries, unite!”
- To enact what has jut been laid out
- To make the specter a substantive reality