Karl Marx_ A Biography ( PDFDrive )

with their somewhat Utopian notions of 'community of goods' were set aside and the aims of the League were proclaimed as 'the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the domination of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society based on class antagonisms, and the establishment of a new society without classes and without private property'.131 At the end of the congress Marx and Engels were given the task of writing a Manifesto to publicise the doctrines of the League. There are no surviving records of these discussions, but the following vivid description of the impression made by Marx at that time was written much later by Frederick Lessner:

Marx was then still a young man, about 28 years old, but he greatly impressed us all. He was of medium height, broad-shouldered, powerful in build, and vigorous in his movements. His forehead was high and finely shaped, his hair thick and pitch-black, his gaze piercing. His mouth already had the sarcastic curl that his opponents feared so much. Marx was a born leader of the people. His speech was brief, convincing and compelling in its logic. He never said a superfluous word; every sentence contained an idea and every idea was an essential link in the chain of his argument. Marx had nothing of the dreamer about him. The more I realized the difference between the communism of Weitling's time and that of the Communist Manifesto, the more clearly I saw that Marx represented the manhood of socialist thought.132

On his return to Brussels Marx had little time to compose his Manifesto. He immediately began to give a course of lectures on wages to the German Workers' Educational Association.133 Here Marx was chiefly concerned to go beyond the idea of capital as simply composed of raw materials, instruments of production, and so forth. He insisted that it was only in given social conditions that such things constituted capital.

Capital, also, is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois production relation, a production relation of bourgeois society. Are not the means of subsistence, the instrument of labour, the raw materials of which capital consists, produced and accumulated under given social conditions, in definite social relations? Are they not utilised for new production under given social conditions, in definite social relations? And is it not just this definite social character which turns the products necessary to new production into capital?134

In order for capital to exist there had to be 'a class which possesses nothing but its capacity for labour'.13S Capital and wage-labour were complementary in function and entirely opposed in interest. Although for a time working conditions might improve this only meant that the working class could consider itself 'content with forging for itself the golden chains

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by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its wake'.136 And Marx went on to issue a categorical statement - to be revised in his later works - that with the increase in productive capacity and machinery wages would fall. In February Marx started writing up these lectures for publication, but was to be interrupted by his expulsion from Belgium.

Marx was also active in the Democratic Association to which, on his return to Brussels, he read the reply from the Fraternal Democrats that declared: 'Your representative, our friend and brother Marx, will tell you with what enthusiasm we welcomed his appearance and the reading of your address. All eyes shone with joy, all voices shouted a welcome and all hands stretched out fraternally to your representative.... We accept with the liveliest feelings of satisfaction the alliance you have offered us.'137 Marx helped to found a new branch in Ghent and was prominent in the meeting to celebrate the New Year where Jenny was complimented on her social capacity. It was on one of these occasions, too, that Jenny Marx refused categorically to be introduced to Mary Burns, Engels's mistress, whom Engels had had the temerity to bring with him. Stefan Born recalled that 'in matters of honour and purity of morals the noble lady was intransigent'.138 He also introduced Bakunin and d'Ester into the Democratic Association. Bakunin, however, would have nothing to do with the League or even with the Workers' Association. In his view Marx was 'spoiling the workers by making logic-choppers of them' and it was 'impossible to breathe freely"39 in the company of Marx and Engels. Nevertheless, Marx managed to get his ideas across to the Democratic Association in a speech on Free Trade he delivered on 9 January (it was along the same lines as one that he would have delivered at the September economic Congress, had he been allowed to speak). He summed up his thesis as follows: 'At the present time the system of protection is conservative, whereas the system of free trade is destructive: it dissolves old nationalities and pushes to the extreme the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat. In a word, the system of commercial freedom hastens the social revolution."'10

Meanwhile Marx had been working on the Manifesto. The London communists had supplied him with a sheaf of material that included at least three separate tentative drafts for the Manifesto. Engels had composed a draft incorporating the views of the first League Congress in June 1847 and this draft was discussed in the various groups in late summer and autumn.141 Moses Hess had proposed an alternative version which Engels ironically described as 'divinely improved'.142 Hess's version does not survive but two 'confessions of faith' that he composed around this time143 show differences from Marx and Engels both in ideas (in that Hess believed in appealing to eternal principles to justify his

policies) and in tactics (in that Hess considered that the next revolution should be a proletarian one). On behalf of the League's Paris branch Engels produced a third draft of which he wrote to Marx just before they left for London:

Think over the confession of faith a bit. I think it would be better to drop the catechistic form and call the thing a communist manifesto. As a certain amount of history will have to be brought in, I think the present form is unsuitable. I am bringing along what I have done here. It is in simple narrative form, but miserably edited and done in a terrible hurry.144

This draft, entitled 'Principles of Communism', a catechism of twentyfive questions and answers, was drawn on quite extensively by Marx. In places, however, there is a noticeable difference between the optimistic, determinist approach of Engels which stemmed from the Enlightenment and his experiences in industrial England, and the greater emphasis given by Marx to politics in the light of experiences of the French working class.14S Engels said later that it was 'essentially Marx's work"46 and that 'the basic thought... belongs solely and exclusively to Marx'.147 Notwithstanding the appearance of their two names on the title page and the persistent assumption about joint authorship, the actual writing of the Communist Manifesto was done exclusively by Marx.

The Communist Manifesto has four sections. The first section gives a history of society as class society since the Middle Ages and ends with a prophecy of the victory of the proletariat over the present ruling class, the bourgeoisie. The second section describes the position of communists within the proletarian class, rejects bourgeois objections to communism and then characterises the communist revolution, the measures to be taken by the victorious proletariat and the nature of the future communist society. The third section contains an extended criticism of other types of socialism - reactionary, bourgeois and Utopian. The final section contains a short description of communist tactics towards other opposition parties and finishes with an appeal for proletarian unity.

The opening words typify Marx's approach to history:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster 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.148

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' T he present age' he continued, in a passage that summarised conclusions reached in the first part of The German Ideology, was unique in that class antagonisms had been so simplified that there were now two hostile camps facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat. T h e bourgeoisie, from its origins in feudal society, helped by the discovery of America, the development of a world market and modern industry, had everywhere imposed the domination of its class and its ideas. In a wellknown phrase that fitted contemporary France more than any other country, Marx described the modern state as merely 'a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie'.149 Historically, the bourgeoisie had been a most revolutionary class: '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'.150 But this progress had to continue: the bourgeoisie could not exist without constantly revolutionising the means of production. And just as the bourgeoisie had caused the downfall of feudal society, so now they were preparing their own downfall 'like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether

Marx then described the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. Workers had become mere appendages of machines. To the extent that

The lower strata of the middle-class - the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants - all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, pardy because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.152

T h e proletariat itself went through several stages: at first their principal aim had been to restore to the working man the status he had lost since the Middle Ages; with increase of numbers they began to form trade unions; finally the class struggle became a political struggle. As the struggle neared its decisive hour, a process of dissolution set in within the ruling class, and a small section (of bourgeois ideologists in particular) went over to the proletariat. No other class in society could fulfil the

revolutionary role of the proletariat: the lower-middle class were in fact reactionary in that they tried to roll back the wheel of history; and the 'dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lower layers of society',153 was ripe for bribery by reactionary intrigue. Marx summed up this section with the words:

The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, 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, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.154

Obviously Marx was here projecting into the future tendencies he saw at work in the present. In Germany at that time the proletariat in fact

In the second section Marx raised the question of the relationship of the communists to the proletariat as a whole. T h e communists were not opposed to other working-class parties; their interests were those of the proletariat as a whole. Two factors distinguished them from other working-class groups: they were international, and they understood the significance of the proletarian movement. Communist ideas were not invented or discovered: they merely expressed actual relations springing from an existing class struggle and could be summed up in a single sentence: abolition of private property.

Marx then dealt with objections.

T h e first objection was that communists desired to abolish 'the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour'.155

His reply was that the property of the petty artisan and small farmer was being abolished anyway by the power of capital; the proletariat did not have any property; and capital, being a collective product and the result of the united action of all members of society, should be owned collectively. Private property was bourgeois property and all arguments against its abolition were bourgeois arguments.

Similarly, in reply to a second criticism he argued that the abolition of the family meant the abolition of the bourgeois family - whose counterpart was the practical absence of family life among proletarians, and public prostitution.

To meet a third objection Marx maintained that the real point about the so-called 'community of women' was to do away with the status of

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women as mere instruments of production; the present system was merely public and private prostitution.

It was also said that communists wished to abolish countries and nationality. But working men had no country. Modern industry was abolishing national differences and, with the disappearance of class antagonisms, hostility between nations would also end.

Sweeping value-laden condemnation of communism was not worthy, in Marx's view, of serious consideration. In a passage which minimised to the point of caricature the role of ideas in society Marx asked:

Does it require intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

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.'56

Having dealt with these objections, Marx outlined the measures that would be taken by the proletariat once it had become the ruling class:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.157

In a section that was very largely inspired by Engels' draft, there followed a programme which included the abolition of landed property and inheritance, the imposition of income tax, the centralisation of credit and communications, state ownership of factories, and free education. He concluded:

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and as such, sweeps away by force the old condition of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antag-

onisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.'58

The third section of the Communist Manifesto contained criticism of three types of socialism - reactionary, bourgeois and Utopian. The first was a feudal socialism preached by the aristocracy to revenge themselves on the bourgeoisie who had supplanted them as the ruling class. Hand- in-hand with feudal socialism went Christian socialism which Marx simply dismissed as 'the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heartburnings of the aristocrat'.159 The second type - petty-bourgeois socialism - was chiefly represented by the French economist Sismondi. This school had well analysed the contradictions inherent in modern methods of production; but in its positive proposals it was reactionary, wishing to restore corporate guilds in manufacture and patriarchal relations in agriculture. The third party, labelled by Marx reactionary socialists, were the 'true' socialists. These were the German philosophers (mainly the followers of Feuerbach) who had emasculated French socialism by turning it into a metaphysical system. This was inevitable in an economically backward country like Germany where ideas tended not to reflect the struggle of one class with another. These philosophers thus claimed to represent ' . . . not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.'160

In the Manifesto's review of socialist and communist literature the second section - devoted to bourgeois socialism - was short. Proudhon was the main representative of this tendency and Marx had already devoted considerable space to examining his theories. Here he confined himself to observing that 'the Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and distintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat.'161 Thus the reforms advocated by these socialists in no respect affected the relations between capital and labour, but they did at least lessen the cost and simplify the administrative work of bourgeois government.

The final school discussed was the 'critical-Utopian' school represented by such writers as Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen. It originated during the early, inchoate period of the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These writers had perceived class antagonisms; but in their time the proletariat was still insufficiently developed to be a credible force for social change. Hence they wished to attain their ends by peaceful

means and small-scale experiments, rejecting political - and in particular revolutionary - action. Their Utopias, envisaged at a time when the proletariat was still underdeveloped, 'correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society'.162 But at the same time these Utopian writings also contained critical elements: since they attacked every principle of existing society, they were full of insights valuable to the enlightenment of the working class. But as the modern class-struggle gathered strength, these Utopian solutions lost all practical value or theoretical justification. Thus 'although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects'.165

T h e fourth and concluding section of the Manifesto dealt with the attitude of communists to various opposition parties: in France they supported the social democrats, in Switzerland the radicals, in Poland the peasant revolutionaries, in Germany the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless in Germany they never ceased to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the inherent antagonism between bourgeoisie and

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!164

In a sense, of course, virtually all the ideas contained in the Communist Manifesto had been enunciated before - particularly among French socialists in whose tradition the Manifesto is firmly situated.165 Babeufs ideas on revolution, Saint-Simon's periodisation of history and emphasis on

of class - was used long before by French bourgeois historians.166 But the powerful, all-embracing synthesis and the consistently materialist approach were quite new.

T h e Manifesto was a propaganda document hurriedly issued on the eve of a revolution. Marx and Engels considered in 1872 that 'the general principles expounded in the document are on the whole as correct today as ever' though they would doubtless have modified radically some of its ideas - particularly (in the light of the Paris Commune) those relating to the proletariat's taking over of the state apparatus and the rather simplistic

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statements on pauperisation and class polarisation.167 For all the clarity and force that later made it a classic, the publication of the Manifesto went virtually unnoticed. Before it was off the presses, the 1848 revolutions had already begun.

N O T E S

1.Jenny Marx to Marx, MEGA 1 v 449.

2.The date of her birth on the Highgate cemetery stone is mistaken. See H.

5.Weydemeyer to Luise Liining, Munchner Post, 30 April 1926.

6.Cf. MEW HI 537.

7.Engels to Marx, MEW XXVII 16.

8.Cf. MEW 11 519.

9.MEW xxi 212. Engels' 'History of the Communist League' is translated in

The Birth of the Communist Manifesto, ed. D. Struik (New York, 1971). 10. MESW 1 29.

11 . F. Engels, 'Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen Deutschen Philosophie', MEW xxi 264.

12. K. Marx, 'Preface to A Critique of Political Economy', MESW 1 364.

13.K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow, 1968) p. 659.

14.Ibid.

15.Ibid., p. 660.

16.Ibid.

17.Ibid., p. 662.

19.Cf. Marx to Leske, MEW xxvii 450.

20.Engels to Marx, MEW xxxn 510.

21. On Harney and the Fraternal Democrats see further: A. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge (London, 1958) pp. 143 ff; J. Braunthal, History of the International

(London, 1967) 1 62 ff.

22.The landlord.

23.Jenny Marx to Marx, quoted in L. Dornemann, Jenny Marx, p. 81.

24.Marx to Leske, ME W XXXVII 448 f.

25.B. Bauer, 'Charakteristik Ludwig Feuerbachs', Wigandsvierteljahrschrift (1845) HI 138.