The Manifesto - a star to steer by

By Will Parry

This article was reprinted from the May 2, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

The Communist Manifesto, the most influential of all socialist writing, was written for the workers of 1848. One hundred and fifty years later, it remains astonishingly fresh as a guide for the workers of today.

The Manifesto expresses the views of two men, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, whose collaborative efforts over 40 years shook the 19th century world. Intellectual titans as they were, Marx and Engels concluded on the basis of their study of human society that the struggle between classes was the motor of history.

Having made that discovery, they dedicated their lives to one side in the struggle, the working class. Capitalism was in its vigorous youth in the 1840s, but the class struggle was already well under way. It was especially advanced in England, where the first important factory towns had brought thousands of workers together.

Marx and Engels, not yet 30 years of age, followed this unfolding struggle closely, probing for its roots and drawing conclusions as to the general direction of its development.

Inspired by the working class leaders of the day, Marx told a colleague, "You would do well to attend one of these French workers' meetings, to see for yourself the pristine freshness and nobility of these toil-worn men ... History is molding these =91barbarians' into a practical element for man's emancipation."

Engels, son of a wealthy mill owner, studied the workers in his father's Manchester spinning mill. He witnessed the inhumanity of capitalism, and the poverty and degradation imposed upon the workers.

In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels describes in great detail the lives and struggles of the spinners and weavers, tailors and dressmakers, glassblowers, metal workers, miners and farm laborers. Like Marx, he was deeply affected by the grandeur of their struggle for a better life.

Marx and Engels welcomed the advent of trade unions and economic strikes. Both knew unions were essential to defend workers' basic interests. Unions were an important beginning toward overcoming the competition between workers upon which the existence of the entire capitalist system depended.

But Marx and Engels also recognized the limits of even the most militant trade unions. The economic struggle alone, they knew, could not overturn capitalist rule. Workers needed to go further - to build a political movement, guided by scientific principles, which had as a conscious, declared objective the achievement of a socialist society.

To create the conditions for that political movement, they felt it essential to arm the workers with a theoretically sound program. That program, set forth in incandescent prose some 150 years ago, was the Communist Manifesto.

In the mid-1840s, events in Europe heralded a period of revolutionary storms. In 1846, Polish patriots rose up in the city of Cracow. In the following year, an economic crisis, aggravated by poor harvests, ravaged Europe. Hunger riots swept the continent. In France, mass strikes broke out. In England, huge rallies demanded the enactment of a People's Charter.

But the workers' movement was then in its infancy. Most enterprises were small, and most workers were artisans or individual laborers. The industrial proletariat was only beginning to coalesce around the larger mills and factories. Workers' protests tended to be more or less spontaneous responses to unbearable exploitation.

In this confused situation, Marx and Engels undertook the task of uniting the advanced elements of the European workers' movements into a single political working class party. To advance Communist ideas, and to strengthen ties among the leading workers and revolutionary intellectuals, they established "correspondence committees" in Brussels, Paris, London and several German cities. These committees served to rally working class support for the democratic movements in each nation, while providing an arena for ideological battle against utopian schemes and other dead- end theories.

Meanwhile, Marx and Engels had established connections with leaders of the League of the Just, an organization of radical emigrant German artisans based in Paris and London. Under their leadership the League changed its name to the Communist League and adopted a provisional program based on a scientific analysis of capitalist society.

Late in 1847, Marx was commissioned to write a finished program for the Communist League. Engels furnished Marx with a draft he described as "miserably composed, in an awful hurry." He urged Marx to "give the thing a title: Communist Manifesto." Marx adopted the suggestion and drew heavily upon Engels' draft. But the final product was Marx's. Keenly aware of the historic importance of the document, he labored for weeks, painstakingly writing and rewriting, determined to express, in relatively few pages and in memorably vivid language, the essence of his and Engels' revolutionary outlook.

Only one page of the rough draft of the Manifesto has survived. It reveals that Marx worked over each sentence, tirelessly seeking the right word. The Manifesto that finally emerged aroused and inspired the advanced workers and shook the capitalist factory owners of 1848. Its revolutionary message continues to reverberate today.

The Manifesto is not easy to summarize. We can, however, enumerate some of its central propositions, whose validity the course of capitalist development keeps reaffirming generation after generation. After a brief introduction, the section headed "Bourgeois and Proletarians" outlines the development of capitalism and the concomitant rise of capitalism's special product, its "grave diggers," the modern working class. The Manifesto makes it clear that the replacement of feudal society by capitalism was a necessary and progressive step for humanity.

In "scarce 100 years," declared the Manifesto, the capitalists have "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, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured up out of the ground - what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?"

But the Manifesto also hands down an unsparing indictment of capitalist society, its brutal exploitation of workers, its pervasive immorality and its subordination of human dignity to the sovereign rule of money. Capitalism ravages entire continents, plunges nations into colonial bondage, and launches bloody wars of conquest in pursuit of global markets, the Manifesto declares. From the world-wide economic hegemony of capitalism there followed inexorably its rule in the sphere of politics: "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," Marx wrote.

The capitalists, says the Manifesto, "cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society." This process continues today, with the introduction of robots, the dramatic advances in communication and the computerization of industry. Every few years ferocious competition between capitalists overwhelms the market with a glut of products. Crises ensue, in which hunger and want accompany a surfeit of goods. Each crisis is overcome, in part, by idling or destroying productive equipment, in part "by the conquest of new markets and by the more thorough exploitation of old ones."

Inevitably, the capitalist class recruits and brings onto the stage of history the class that is destined to work its overthrow - the modern working class, defined in the Manifesto as "a class of laborers who live only as long as they find work, and who find work only as long as their labor increases capital." From its inception, the working class is compelled to struggle against its capitalist employers. At first, in blind fury, the workers smash machinery and set factories ablaze.

But as industry develops, as workers become disciplined by the very conditions of their labor, as that labor becomes more mind-numbing, as wages are driven down to a bare subsistence level, the workers begin to form unions to mitigate the savagery of their exploitation. In time, the workers of different localities come in contact, creating the conditions for the formation of a working class political party. The working class is distinguished from all previous exploited classes, declares the Manifesto: "All previous historical movements were movements of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority in the interests of the immense majority."

But if this movement is to be "self-conscious," it must develop from within its ranks a conscious element, the Communists. The Manifesto points out that Communists are distinguished, first of all, by emphasizing the international aspects of the struggles of workers in each country; and second, by representing in each specific struggle "the interests of the movement as a whole."

The Communists are "the most advanced and resolute section" of the class, with the "advantage of clearly understanding the line of march" and the ultimate goals of the working class. At the same time, "they have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole."

The revolutionary aim of the Communists is set forth openly and proudly: "Formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat." The Manifesto stressed the need for Communists to act in response to actual historical circumstances, not with preconceived formulas.

It set before the Communists these challenging but essential tasks: To keep in view the long-range interests of the class in the struggle around immediate issues; to find the unity between the national and international interests of the class; and to support all progressive trends while maintaining a critical attitude toward the illusions of its allies.

The spirit of working class unity and internationalism pervades the entire manifesto - indeed the entire body of Marx's and Engels' writings. On the Manifesto's very first page, Marx emphasizes that it is "to be published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages." And its final words express an internationalist imperative that still echoes around the globe: "Working men of all countries, unite!"

In later years Marx and Engels exposed and condemned instances of national oppression, with Marx warning that English workers could not be free so long as Irish workers were oppressed.

In his very trenchant commentaries on the U.S. Civil War, Marx pressed Lincoln to free and arm the slaves, and hailed the Emancipation Proclamation as "the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union."

His declaration that "labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin, where in the black it is branded" has the force of a law in today's ongoing struggle for working class unity.

One-third of the Manifesto is devoted to criticism of the opportunist programs, goals and tactics that plagued the early workers' movements. Some of these programs projected utopias. Others sought to reverse the course of history, to restore the social relations of feudalism. Still others advocated conspiratorial sects and acts of individual terror. The Manifesto clarified for the workers why these trends were dead-end diversions from a scientific program of conscious class struggle.

Although the specific expressions of opportunism in the 1840s have long since been consigned to oblivion, contemporary sectarians and phrasemongers continue to sow confusion today. The Manifesto furnishes modern workers with a superb model of how to deal with such aberrations.

In his preface to an 1888 edition, Engels termed the Manifesto "the most widespread, the most international production of all socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California." Its stature stems in part from its scientific analysis of the fundamental laws of historical development - an analysis still amazingly applicable - and in part from its intensity, passion and partisanship.

Today's world is, of course, dramatically different from that of 1848. The advance of science and technology; the creation and overthrow of colonial empires; the struggles of the peoples of every land against oppressors and exploiters have transformed many aspects of reality. Yet capitalism remains capitalism and the class struggle continues with unabated intensity everywhere.

The brilliant projections of Marx and Engels have proven remarkably prescient. To cite only one powerful instance, we need to remind ourselves that a great part of the globe experienced 70 years of working class power, of actual living socialism. Yes, socialism has been tragically sidetracked by counterrevolution. But viewed historically, counterrevolutions are doomed. History's clock does not run backward.

The working class parties of today, armed with the science of Marx, Engels and Lenin, will learn from past errors. The basic goal - the wresting of state power from the capitalist class and the establishment of a just and humane socialist society - remains the great unfinished task of the workers of our country and the world. Through the ages, hundreds of political manifestos have been penned - only to end up in dusty archives. The Communist Manifesto is imperishable.