SPECIAL FEATURE:
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto 150 years ago. Its publication coincided almost exactly with the eruption of revolution throughout Europe. Since then it has been read by millions throughout the world. It both explains how capitalism arose and shows how the working class can change the system. The Communist Manifesto remains the best introduction to the ideas of Marx and Engels and a great revolutionary handbook for all those who still fight to change the world. In this special issue to mark its anniversary, we show the political background against which the Manifesto was written and look at its relevance today
The changes in capitalism since the 1840s have been dramatic. Even more reason, says Peter Morgan, to highlight the relevance of Marx's ideas to the modern world.
'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.' These are the opening words of one of the most powerful political pamphlets ever written. The Communist Manifesto remains one of the most popular pamphlets of all time. According to the Guinness Book of Records it remains second only to the Bible as the highest selling book ever. Last year when a new pocket sized edition was produced in Britain the publishers were amazed that over 60,000 copies were sold.
Yet it is often said that the Communist Manifesto is out of date - that it appealed to a group of radicals in an age gone by, and was written by two idealistic men with funny beards who believed the end of capitalist society as they knew it was just round the corner. Because capitalism has survived some 150 years since this pamphlet was first written it is argued that the system has proved far more durable than Marx and Engels predicted. And so the doomsday scenario that they talked about - revolution, the battle between contending classes, the victory of the proletariat - has been disproved.
However, the fact that the Communist Manifesto still appeals to a mass audience today is proof that it says something to thousands of people who desire some sort of better world but are unsure of how to get there. At a time when we are told that class and class struggle is a thing of the past, people are eager to read something that boldly and proudly sets out the revolutionary statement, 'The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.'
What, then, is it about the Communist Manifesto that makes it so appealing, and how does it relate to a world that, as even Marx and Engels would have admitted, is far different from what existed when they first wrote it some 150 years ago?
Anyone reading the Communist Manifesto for the first time gets a surprise, as it starts by praising the achievements of capitalism: 'The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part... It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.' This was written in the early days of capitalist development - at the time capitalism existed in only a few major industrial countries in the world such as Britain, parts of western Europe, the north eastern belt of the United States. But already in its early days Marx and Engels recognised what a great step forward this was. For the first time in the history of humanity, the material conditions existed for the creation of communism - human beings had control over nature, they had the ability to produce enough food on the planet so that no one would starve, enough housing and clothing to meet everyone's needs.
The achievements of capitalism - in technology, engineering, communications or medical science - have been far more than could have been imagined during past times. For example, at the turn of the 20th century, some 50 years after the Communist Manifesto was written, diseases such as cholera, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, scarlet fever, typhus and whooping cough affected millions and killed many. The discovery of penicillin in 1939 meant there was a powerful antibiotic agent to fight infection, and it was mass produced by 1941. In the US in the 1950s polio reached epidemic proportions with some 40,000 cases reported every year. Yet in 1954 a vaccine was developed that stopped polio spreading. By the end of the 1960s immunisation against polio had taken place throughout the world, which led to it being almost completely eliminated.
Under capitalism people have gone to the moon and sent probes to far off planets. On earth we have stopped the flow of powerful rivers and irrigated deserts. People can fly round the world. All of these are hinted at in Marx and Engels' revolutionary document:
'The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?'
But, having praised the achievements of capitalism, Marx and Engels had a sting in the tail. The very dynamic of the system that propels capitalism forward - competition between firms, the 'dynamism' of the market, the need to constantly change and improve the methods of production - is what also creates the conditions that send the system into crisis.
The periodic crisis, Marx and Engels argue, is an inherent feature of capitalist society. Whereas in the past society went into crisis because there was a scarcity of goods, under capitalism the crisis occurs because there is overproduction of goods. The boom-slump cycle of capitalism reaches a stage whereby firms cannot sell their goods on the market, the chain of buying and selling breaks down and the system grinds to a halt. 'In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of overproduction,' they say.
So today alongside stockpiles of food we have hunger and starvation; people sleep in the streets begging for money at the same time as thousands of houses lie empty; we are told there is not enough money to go round yet firms close factories and lay off workers who could be producing more wealth. So while capitalism produces enormous advances in production, it does so in a way that is barbarous and irrational in the extreme. As the 1996 United Nations Human Development Report shows, the total economic output of the world at the beginning of the 1990s was five times higher than it was in 1950, yet poverty in many parts of the world is as bad, if not worse, than it was 45 years ago. In a sentence Marx and Engels sum up the problem: 'Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism.'
However, Marx and Engels could not have predicted the depths of barbarism that capitalism propels us into. The two great wars of this century, the Holocaust or the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the famine in Africa or the slave labour that exists in much of the Third World today - all are a product of the capitalist system. The scale of the crisis today is insurmountably larger than it was at the time of Marx and Engels. The difference between then and now is not, as some economists and Labour politicians would tell us, that capitalism has overcome its tendency to go into crisis, rather that the crises of the 20th century have been on a larger and more terrible scale.
The system has expanded massively since the 1840s. Today the total output of the world's economy is 20 or 30 times what it was in the 1840s. When the crisis hits today it is not just one or two small firms that may go to the wall, but whole multinationals or, indeed, the very existence of some countries are at stake. Thus the crisis affects not just tens or hundreds of people, but thousands and millions.
What makes the Communist Manifesto so appealing to those who feel the brunt of the crisis is that it shows a way out. It points to the very contradiction at the heart of capitalism that, ultimately will create its own destruction - firstly, the concentration of capital in fewer hands, and secondly, the creation of the working class: 'The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands.' And Marx and Engels go on to say, in one of their most famous phrases, 'What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all, is its own gravedigger.'
The size of capitalist firms today is greater than ever imagined during the last century. The world's biggest corporations include such giants as Mitsubishi, General Motors, Ford, AT&T, and Exxon, which employ hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world, with sales that reach into billions of dollars. The 15 biggest firms listed in the US magazine Fortune have a combined income greater than that of over 120 countries. Today it is estimated that the 500 biggest transnational corporations control two thirds of world trade. If any of these go bust they have the potential to throw the whole system into crisis.
Alongside the concentration of capital goes the concentration of people. In the days of Marx and Engels the number of people living in cities was tiny. Today the world is dominated by large cities which bring together millions of people. In 1940 only New York and London had populations of over 5 million people. In the 1990s 22 cities surpassed the 8 million figure, ten of which are in Asia. The tendency worldwide is towards more and more people leaving the land and traditional occupations and moving to gigantic cities.
As capital has been concentrated into larger units in fewer and fewer hands, so people have been forced to follow it
wherever it moves throughout the globe. This is an enormous step forward for humanity. As the Communist Manifesto puts it: '[capitalism] has rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.' Today this means that just a tiny proportion of the world's population can feed the vast majority, which in any sane rational world would allow everyone else to engage in other productive activity.
But while the means of production became more and more the exclusive possession of a tiny number of capitalists, so too the nature of production changed. Factory production is socialised labour. It depends on the joint effort of large numbers of people. While in feudal society peasants could work the land and produce largely through their own individual efforts, for the worker nothing can be produced without the cooperation of many other workers. So capitalism, by necessity, brings together people in the world of work, each with a common interest, each exploited by the same boss and the same system.
One of the most common arguments which claim that the Communist Manifesto is out of date is to deny the revolutionary potential of the working class. This is an argument that takes two forms. The first is to try to downplay the total size of the working class. But today there is not a country in the world that has not seen the proletarianisation of large sections of its population - a far cry from the days of Marx and Engels. In many of the major industrial countries - the US, Canada, Japan, Germany, Britain, Russia - the majority of the population are involved in wage labour. But if we look at the less developed world we also see a similar picture - Antigua has 45 percent of its population involved in waged labour, Chile 39 percent, Colombia 45 percent, Thailand 56 percent, India 38 percent, South Africa 38 percent, Uruguay 45 percent. This points to a world in which more and more people are being pulled into wage labour, in which the main activity for how people meet their daily needs is through selling their labour power. We are facing a world not where the working class is shrinking, but a world in which workers have never been as numerous as they are today.
The second argument is the claim that the working class is changing, that the decline of manufacturing industry has blunted the revolutionary edge of the working class. This is put most clearly by Eric Hobsbawn in his book Age of Extremes:
'Britain lost 25 percent of its old manufacturing industry in 1980-84. Between 1973 and the late 1980s the total number employed in manufacturing in the six old industrial countries of Europe fell by seven millions, or about a quarter, about half of which was lost between 1979 and 1983... It was a long way from the old Marxist dream of populations gradually proletarianised by development of industry until most people would be (manual) workers.'
Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto did not define the working class simply by whether they worked in a factory or not. They said that 'the modern working class [is] 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.' Thus the working class comprises not only male blue collar workers, but also white collar workers, service workers, women workers and so on. Marx and Engels break down the distinction between white and blue collar work. Class does not depend upon the type of work people do, but on their objective position in the productive process - whether they are exploited or not. If we take this as our definition then the working class is incomparably larger and stronger than it was during the days of Marx and Engels.
This was a point made by the American Marxist Harry Braverman over 20 years ago in his book Labour and Monopoly Capital when he looked at the changes in clerical work since the days of Marx and Engels. Up until the end of the 19th century clerical work was characterised by its small scale and personalised nature. Clerks required a high degree of education and they had close personal contact with their employer. But as capitalism developed throughout the 20th century, and as the system needed a larger commerce and financial sector, so the nature of clerical work changed. White collar work became more routinised and subject to the same pressures as manual work. The new offices swallowed up new labour, especially women, and at the same time downgraded their pay and conditions of work. As the Communist Manifesto puts it, 'The work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently, all charm for the workman.' Today this is as applicable to white collar work as it was to blue collar work in the days of Marx and Engels.
Thus the working class has not shrunk - it has changed but it has grown at the same time. As the productive process under capitalism is constantly transformed, so the working class changes as well.
It is for these reasons that the Communist Manifesto argued the working class could overthrow capitalism. This has been proved by the events of the 20th century. Every decade has witnessed mass strikes and upheavals that have threatened to bring the system tumbling down - the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the British General Strike of 1926, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the revolutionary events of 1968, the rise of Solidarity in Poland in 1981, and the political revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989. All these events prove the case made by the Communist Manifesto. Today when revolt happens it does so on a far greater scale than ever before. There has never been a time when the working class has been more powerful.
However, even though Marx and Engels talk about the fall of capitalism, there is nothing automatic about the process. They say of the role played by the Communists in the working class movement that Communists (what today we would call revolutionary socialists) are not sectarians, but their principles flow from the way in which the working class movement has developed as a class separate from and opposed to the interests of the bourgeoisie. Communists are distinguished from other tendencies in the movement in two ways: they are internationalists and 'they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole'. Both of these follow from the nature of the working class as an international class, which can only act in its own interests if it transcends national limitations and sees that it has more in common with the working class in other countries than it does with bosses in its own.
This gives Communists two advantages. 'Practically' they are 'the most advanced and resolute section of the working class movement, 'that section which pushes forward all others.' And 'theoretically they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.'
Sometimes it is said that socialists today who stress building a revolutionary party are departing from the principles of the Manifesto. And it is true that Marx and Engels talk about the Communists not forming 'a separate party opposed to other working class parties'. But that it is to misunderstand the context. Marx and Engels were determined to break from the dominant tradition of their times, which favoured the idea of conspiratorial revolutionary groups acting on behalf of the working class.
All the revolutionary crises of the 20th century have shown that if workers are to change society for themselves they will also need to forge a weapon, a revolutionary party, which brings together theoretically all the lessons that the movement has learnt and apply it practically so as to lead the working class to victory.Written in German and published in London in February 1848, the Manifesto itself states that it is to be translated into English, French, Italian, Flemish and Danish. In fact the only definite translation which appeared that year was in Swedish. The first English version came out in 1850 and was serialised in the Chartist journal, the Red Republican. The translator was Helen Macfarlane, a socialist from Burnley who was in contact with Marx and Engels. Her translation contains the opening line 'A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe.' The English translation of 1888 had Engels' hand in it and was done by his and Marx's friend and collaborator Sam Moore.
By the 1880s the working class movement was on the rise again, and ideas of socialism were stirring in Britain for the first time since the defeat of Chartism. In the same period the Manifesto was translated into Italian in 1891, into Polish in 1883, into Yiddish in 1899, Danish in 1884 and into Russian in 1882. This translation was done by the Marxist Plekhanov, but Lenin did a translation from the German between 1889 and 1893 when he was living in Samara, presumably because the Plekhanov translation wasn't available there.
These translations coincided with the founding of the Socialist or Second International which Engels supported, and in which Marx's daughter Eleanor was centrally involved.