The Engine of History: Class Struggle

• Marx begins by talking about class struggle as the engine of history, something that has predated even capitalist society.
• As Marx says of class struggleFreeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master⁽³⁾ and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
• Common ruin of all classes is what happens when class struggle is not able to foment itself and all classes suffer
• The opening line is why this is famous.

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Capitalism’s Simplified Class Structure

• Capitalism to Marx is different, however, because rather than having a complicated class society, it’s gearing toward only two classes: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
• Capitalism to Marx reproduced itself.
• This allowed for the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie for a classless, moneyless society, unlike other classes which before had to deal with complicated strata.

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The Rise of the Bourgeoisie

• Marx is also able to trace the rise of the bourgeois out of the burgess classes and guilds who, emboldened by ever-increasing world markets (discovery of the Americas, etc.) and trade, began forming the earliest stages of capitalism (in Grundrisse he mentions they had some of the earliest constant capital).
• With the introduction of the industrial age, we entered our modern-day bourgeoisie, rising out of those burgess merchant guild classes, and modern-day industrial proletariat that sells their labor power to the bourgeoisie.
• The bourgeoisie went from middle class to ruling class due to vast revolutions in modes of production (productive forces).
• The bourgeoisie was created only recently.
• The bourgeoisie rules the state: ‘the executive of the modern state is a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’ and the world markets.
• Its rule of the world markets is unique.

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The Historically Progressive and Destructive Role of the Bourgeoisie

• The bourgeoisie used to be historically progressive (it ended feudal and patriarchal relations).
• In its seeking of free trade, the bourgeoisie has created one of the simplest class relations based on exchange value—no feudal nonsense or stringent hierarchies, just naked exploitation and greed.
• ‘The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil and turned the family relation into a mere money relation.’
• The nuclear family is a temporary development and will fade away, too.
• Marx admits the bourgeois has done many progressive things; it is constantly revolutionizing the modes of production and the superstructure.
• The bourgeois seeking of markets is a never-ending beast; it integrates the most isolated economies.
• The bourgeois mode of production strips laborers of their previously skilled work; it turns them into unskilled laborers on an assembly line.
• In addition, Marx mentions the dialectical inversion, in which man goes from controlling tools to becoming a vestige of industrial machines that are able to run twenty-four/seven. They’re no longer extensions of his body, but he’s an extension of these industrial machines and keeps them going; he is their tool.

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The Proletariat as the Revolutionary Force

• Marx saw the proletariat as a historically progressive force, and not because of a moralistic judgment.
• If Marx had wanted to be moralistic and talk about the class that was the worst oppressed, he would have talked about the peasantry. However, he identified the proletariat as a revolutionary force.
• This is because the proletariat was an ever-growing force that was:
  • Collectivized in urban centers.
  • Constantly being reproduced from all classes, as peasants, shopkeepers, and artisans all entered the proletariat as they were kicked out of business.
• In addition, it was just where history was heading: toward capitalism winning and feudalism losing.
• Marx described people like Luddites, who wanted to go back to an earlier mode of production, who smashed machines and burned factories. However, once the cat is out of the bag, you cannot return to an earlier mode of production, especially when a superior one has been created, such as industrial machines over peasant work.
• And finally, the working class itself has been given the tools to overthrow the bourgeoisie.
  • It knows how to run the factories.
  • It has a simple education.
  • Everybody can talk to each other; it’s interconnected. These are not things that exist in the peasantry or existed in previous modes of production.
• In addition, capitalism is a culmination of so many trends within human society (law of value, commodity production have all come to the forefront) and the proletariat was one of the first classes in history who, when in power, rather than abusing it to reproduce its own mode of production (slave mode to noblemen to capitalists), would abolish classes all together.
• Hegel and Lenin called human history a spiral in this way (primitive communism →Slave Society→Feudalism→Capitalism→Communism).
• But now this Communism has new productive forces beyond what our hunter gatherer ancestors could have imagined with a similar social relations
• The proletariat is also a class that constantly is falling into more and more despair.
• Marx identifies capitalism as wage labor where proletarians are in constant competition with each other.
• This, however, by sinking the proletariat into lower and lower conditions, produces the grave digger of capitalism.

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Communism, Private Property, and Idleness

• Marx says the aims of communists are the abolishment of private property.
• He even has a comeback at people who say, “Well, what about artisans or small business owners?” saying capitalism has already naturally destroyed most of them.
• In capitalist society, living labor is simply used to get accumulated labor; in communist society, accumulated labor is a means to improve the lives of workers.
• On the “socialism will make people lazy” point, Marx had a great quote: ‘According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work.’

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The Bourgeois Justification of Power

• In addition, Marx attacks the whole idea of individualism and freedom under capitalism.
• These are just idealist justifications that the ruling classes use to secure their power.
• Marx says to the bourgeoisie: ‘The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class.’
• Or basically, every ruling class has claimed its system was human nature.
• ‘What else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’
• Marx even calls out the bourgeoisie for always cheating on their wives while claiming communists just want free sex. “You already have that,” basically he says.

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A Ten-Point Plan for Transition

• Marx then gives a general plan for what the proletariat could do upon seizing power:
  1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
  2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
  3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
  4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
  5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
  6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
  7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
  8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
  9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
  10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
• Some Marxists have told me this plan is negated by Marx’s 1872 introduction to the Manifesto, but I think it shows he was thinking about that transition to socialism and then communism flexibly and scientifically.
• And that ultimately, what the specific details would look like would really depend on the conditions of the people at that time in the future; otherwise, we’d be utopians.
• That is to say, he was giving the best general plan for his time period but keeping it vague enough to get specific if the proletariat overthrew capital.
• Even in Gotha Critique, Marx’s plan for the transition to socialism and communism remains somewhat vague (dictatorship of the proletariat, labor vouchers); none of these are given much detail because him trying to predict exactly how to do it all the way in the 1800s without knowing the conditions of future revolutionaries would have been pure utopianism.

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Varieties of Socialism

• Finally, Marx talks about various types of Utopian and reactionary socialisms.
• The most important is bourgeois socialism, which seeks reforms: ‘but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour’.
• This could basically be a modern-day reformist figure (Bernie Sanders especially)

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The Closing Call

Marx ends the Manifesto by saying:

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

Working Men of All Countries, Unite!