Manifesto should be available to all who labor

By Jim West

This article was reprinted from the May 16, 1998 issue of the People's Weekly World. For subscription information see below. All rights reserved - may be used with PWW credits.

As we move into the 21st century, "the free marketeers," global investors and multinational corporations riding the crest of mountain-high profits are singing the praises of capitalism, "now and forever."

This apparent high-water mark of capitalist development is being haunted by a specter, the specter of the Communist Manifesto written 150 years ago by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Often proclaimed dead, the Manifesto has become a best seller in many countries, deluxe editions have become profitable for enterprising publishers and long commemorative articles appear in bourgeois papers.

Awareness is growing that the "free market economy," far from free, is controlled by a handful of mega-banks and corporations.

Awareness is also growing that there is a lot happening in the world about which the commercial media say little or nothing and that the labor and peoples movements are being frozen out of major developments that are shaping the economic future of our country and the world.

The $400 trillion a year world economy is the arena in which the globalization drive is taking place. The handful of mega-giants of finance and industry is spinning its webs to ensnare and control markets and trade, regulate international intercourse in all fields, make their investments more secure and have the dominant say at the expense of national sovereignties.

Many of the agreements among the megamonopolists of the main imperialist countries are arrived at in secret, behind the backs of governments and the public.

There is absolutely nothing democratic about the globalization drive of Big Capital. All the propaganda about the identity of interests of democracy and the free market economy - that you can't have one without the other - is so much hogwash.

Recall how the spread of capitalism in East Asia was hailed as the triumph of the marriage of democracy and the "free market economy." The result is a devastating crisis and mass unemployment.

The democratic sugar-coating rhetoric covered up the bureaucratic, corrupt system of exploitation which further increased the wealth of foreign investors at the expense of workers and peasants of those countries.

What was held up as the benefits of capitalism and its glories in East Asia, has, in a relatively short time, proven to be a prime example of the failure of capitalism to solve the problems of developing countries and meet the needs of their peoples.

What is happening now on a global scale is a concerted push by the most powerful monied-interests to spin world-encircling webs to bring the economies of whole countries under their control.

Much of this is done in secret without public awareness or involvement and often outside of government scrutiny. Organized labor, consumer, health, ecological organizations are by-passed and ignored.

All of it is done in the name of the holy-of-holies for capitalism: the so-called free market and the unrestricted pursuit of profit.

Yet all these manipulations and machinations by the monopoly-power have a direct bearing on the lives, incomes, living costs, health and well-being of working class families in all areas of labor, be it manual, skilled, intellectual, white collar or blue collar.

But it is exactly their interests - the interests of all who live by their labors - that is absent from these international moves by big capital. And that is because these international connivings by big money are at the expense of labor.

This awareness is dawning in the minds of millions. That is why millions are turning to the Communist Manifesto, to make the great discoveries which are opened up in its pages. Those who now write so glowingly about the Communist Manifesto on the occasion of its 150th anniversary would do well to read and study more by Marx and Engels.

After all, they wrote it not as a literary essay but as a ringing call to action; not as a homage to the young days of capitalism when it was historically progressive in proving itself superior to feudalism.

They wrote it as a compass for the road to socialism, the next, higher stage of development toward a world free of exploitation, war and oppression: socialism. That is why it places the working class, all who labor in the van of the procession to socialism and why it calls on the workers of the world to unite.

So long as society rotates around the free market mechanism as the be-all and end-all determining everything else, so long will it be unstable, anarchic, subject to tremendous and growing gaps between classes and nations, between oppressors and oppressed, exploiters and exploited.

Karl Marx said it all when he said, "Society will not be able to reach a balance until it begins to rotate around the sun of labor." Those words of Marx should be framed and hung in all meeting places of trade unions, environmental, consumer, peace, social and other peoples' organizations.

And the Communist Manifesto should be available to all who labor, at whatever level and whatever field, in all union halls, community centers, libraries, and institutions of learning.

Jim West is a member of the National Committee of the CPUSA.