Bourgeoisie: “[B]y bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor” (79). The bourgeoisie developed out of feudalism and will be destroyed by the proletariat, whom they necessary exploit on account of their economic position.
Proletariat: “[B]y proletariat [is meant] the class of modern-wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live” (79). The proletariat developed as a result of bourgeois capitalism, but their economic condition deteriorates as the bourgeois economic condition improves. This reciprocal relationship will eventually cause the proletariat to rise up and destroy the bourgeoisie.
Dialectic: A process by which one element, the thesis, is contradicted by an opposing element, the antithesis. This contradiction is resolved by a synthesis of the thesis and antithesis. The synthesis then becomes the new thesis and the sequence repeats. This is the process by which Marx believes history proceeds, a dialectic of class antagonism. The proletariat victory will be an end to the dialectic and thus an end to history.
Capital: Money, or the bourgeois form of private property used to produce wealth. Exchange of capital replaces the exchange of commodities in feudal economies. Labor is valued in terms of capital, and workers receive monetary wages in compensation for their work.
Capitalism: An economic system based on the exchange of capital.
Socialism: A social system that favors collective ownership of the means of economic production and distribution.
Communism: A form of socialism proposed by Karl Marx, which intends to effect socialist reforms by advocating a revolution of the proletariat.
Quotes in contextual order:
o “A specter is haunting Europe: the specter of Communism” (78)
o “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (79)
o “Society as a whole is more and more splitting into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (80).
o “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for the managing of the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (82).
o “[The bourgeoisie] 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. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society” (93).
o “What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (94).
o “The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletariat parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, the overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat” (95).
o “…the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property” (96).
o “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that is does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labor of others by means of such appropriation” (99).
o “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” (105).
o “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” (120).
About the Communist Manifesto
In 1846 Karl Marx was exiled from Paris on account of his radical politics. He moved to Belgium where he attempted to assemble a ragtag group of exiled German artisans into an unified political organization, the German Working Men’s Association. Marx, aware of the presence of similar organizations in England, called these groups together for a meeting in the winter of 1847. Under Marx’s influence this assemblage of working-class parties took the name “The Communist League,” discussing their grievances with capitalism and potential methods of response. While most of the delegates to this conference advocated universal brotherhood as a solution to their economic problems, Marx preached the fiery rhetoric of class warfare, explaining to the mesmerized workers that revolution was not only the sole answer to their difficulties but was indeed inevitable. The League, completely taken with Marx, commissioned him to write a statement of their collective principles, a statement that became The Communist Manifesto.
After the conference, Marx returned to Brussels, carrying with him a declaration of socialism penned by two delegates, the lone copy of The Communist Journal, the publication of the London branch of the Communist League, and a statement of principles written by Engels. Although Marx followed Engel’s principles very closely, the Manifesto is entirely of his own hand. Marx wrote furiously, but just barely made the deadline the League had set for him. The Manifesto was published in February 1848 and quickly published so as to fan the flames of revolution, which smoldered on the Continent. When revolution broke out in Germany in March 1848, Marx traveled to the Rhineland to put his theory into practice. When this revolution was suppressed, Marx fled to London and the Communist League disbanded, the Manifesto its only legacy to the world.
The Manifesto has lived a long and illustrious life. While it was hardly noticed amongst the crowded field of pamphlets and treatises published in 1848, it has had a more profound effect on the intellectual and political history of the world than any single work in the past 150 years. It has inspired the communist political systems that ruled nearly half the world’s population at its height and defined the chief ideological conflict of the second half of the twentieth century, altering even those countries which stood firmly against communism, e.g. Western European and American Welfare States. Intellectually, Marx’s work has profoundly influenced nearly every field of study from the humanities to the social sciences to the natural sciences. It is hard to imagine an area of serious human inquiry that Marxism has not touched.
But even in the enormous body of work related to Marxism, The Manifesto is undoubtedly unique. Even at its short length (only 23 pages at its first printing), it the only full exposition of his program that Marx wrote. And while Marx developed his views throughout his career, he never departed far from the original principles outlined therein. The Manifesto is, without a doubt, Marx’s most enduring literary legacy, setting in motion a movement that has, although not in exactly the way Marx predicted, radically changed the world. As Marx famously asserted in his Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have interpreted the world in many ways. What matters is changing it.” No one has epitomized this as much as he.
Short Summary:
The Communist Manifesto opens with the famous words “The history of all hitherto societies has been the history of class struggles,” and proceeds in the next 41 pages to single-mindedly elaborate this proposition (79). In section 1, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” Marx delineates his vision of history, focusing on the development and eventual destruction of the bourgeoisie, the dominant class of his day. Before the bourgeoisie rose to prominence, society was organized according to a feudal order run by aristocratic landowners and corporate guilds. With the discovery of America and the subsequent expansion of economic markets, a new class arose, a manufacturing class, which took control of international and domestic trade by producing goods more efficiently than the closed guilds. With their growing economic powers, this class began to gain political power, destroying the vestiges of the old feudal society that sought to restrict their ambition. According to Marx, the French Revolution was the most decisive instance of this form of bourgeois self-determination. Indeed, Marx thought bourgeois control so pervasive that he claimed, “the executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (82).
This bourgeois ascendancy has, though, created a new social class that labor in the new bourgeois industries. These classes, the proletariat, “wage-laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live,” are the necessary consequence of bourgeois modes of production (79). As bourgeois industries expand and increase their own capital, the ranks of the proletariat swell as other classes of society, artisans and small business owners, cannot compete with the bourgeois capitalists. Additionally, the development of bourgeois industries causes a proportional deterioration in the condition of the proletariat. This deterioration, which can be slowed but not stopped, creates within the proletariat a revolutionary element that will eventually destroy their bourgeois oppressors. As Marx says, “What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (94).
In Chapter 2, “Proletariats and Communists,” Marx elaborates the social changes communists hope to effect on behalf of the proletariat. Marx notes firstly that the interests of communists do not differ from the interests of the proletariat as a class; they seek only to develop a class-consciousness in the proletariat, a necessary condition of eventual proletariat emancipation. The primary objective of communists and the revolutionary proletariat is the abolition of private property, for it is this that keeps them enslaved. Bourgeois economics, i.e., capitalism, requires that the owners of the means of production compensate workers only enough to ensure their mere physical subsistence and reproduction. In other words, the existence of bourgeois property, or capital as Marx calls it, relies on its radically unequal distribution. The only way the proletariat can free itself from bourgeois exploitation is to abolish capitalism. In achieving this goal, the proletariat will destroy all remnants of bourgeois culture which act to perpetuate, if even implicitly, their misery. This includes family organization, religion, morality, jurisprudence, etc. Culture is but the result of specific material/economic conditions and has no life independent of these. The result of this struggle will be “an a