Only after this historical review did Marx proceed to a section about communism, but it said little about a future communist society. Instead, this section was an exposition of the Feuerbach chapter’s account of ideology. Attacks on communism as contradicting justice or morality were met with the sharp retort that “the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class.” Moral values were ideological, based on existing systems of production, so that communism was not an offense against justice and morality, but just against capitalist justice and morality. Also following the Feuerbach chapter, Marx insisted that the advocacy of communism was not itself ideological, but the “universal expressions of the actual relationships of an existing class struggle. . . .”
The analysis of history under the sign of class struggle and attacks on the denunciation of communism formed the familiar, often-cited portions of the Communist Manifesto. Although based on Marx’s understanding of the socioeconomic and political circumstances of the 1840s, they read and have been read as universal historical and sociopolitical commentary. The remaining 35 percent of the pamphlet was much more specific to the time and place, and so less often considered. But it is crucial to understanding Marx’s actions in the Revolution of 1848 and for seeing the development of his political polemics. The section on communism concluded with a ten-point program for a future communist government. There followed an analysis of other theorists of socialism and communism, giving Marx another opportunity to attack the True Socialists and to emphasize the differences in his understanding of socialism compared to his contemporaries. A very brief concluding segment offered an overview of political conditions in Europe and North America, highlighting the communists’ relationship to the “party of movement.” The work ended on a celebrated note of revolutionary bravado: “May the ruling classes tremble at the thought of a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose in that revolution but their chains. They have a world to win”; and then, appearing in public, printed form for the first time, Karl Schapper’s motto: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” A detailed commentary on the Manifesto would entail a book in itself, so I will just try to show some of the ways that Marx poured his own past experiences and intellectual development into a political program.
The trumpet blast of the introductory paragraph announced the “specter [or ghost] of communism” haunting Europe, invidiously comparing this childish “fairy tale” of ghosts with the reality of communist ideas. Marx had used precisely this comparison in his May 1842 article on freedom of the press in the Rhineland News. Then, it was the conservative Prussian government that had a childish belief in ghosts, seeing the demand for freedom of the press as a “French specter.” Marx had posed the comparison philosophically, contrasting the Prussian government’s naive and childlike belief in unreflected sensory perception with human rights as developed in the philosophically more advanced and mature Hegelian political spirit. In the Manifesto, the same contrast emerged in political terms, as the “powers of old Europe” perceived the specter of communism naively and in childish form. Contrasted to this childish understanding, this “fairy tale of a specter of communism,” were the actual “viewpoints, goals and tendencies” of the communists themselves that the Manifesto would provide.14
In this dramatic introduction, Marx asserted that conservative European governments denounced political opposition as communistic—a fair enough observation. But he went on to make another, stranger suggestion, that radical political oppositionists denounced their conservative opponents as communistic. That was hardly typical of radical opposition in 1840s Europe, but it was something Marx himself had done. As editor of the Rhineland News, he had responded to the Augsburg General News’s condemnation of his editorial policies as communistic by denouncing conservative thinkers, ostensibly supported by the Augsburg newspapers, as the real communists.15
A particular target of Marx’s ire as a Young Hegelian and editor of the Rhineland News was the government of Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, and its Romantic, born-again Christian conservative supporters, with their strong sympathies for the pre-1789 society of orders. One feature of the Manifesto’s discussion of the consequences of capitalism that is important but invariably overlooked was an assertion of the anachronistic and doomed nature of the Prussian government and its proponents. As observers have often noted, the Manifesto included an encomium for the bourgeoisie. Praising its “highly revolutionary role,” Marx admired the brutal energy of the bourgeoisie in tearing down existing social, economic, and intellectual systems to build its own, characterized by ceaseless change. The encomium culminated in a celebrated sentence; to quote the standard translation: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned and man is at last compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”16 An entire literature of cultural criticism has been built around this assertion of ceaseless, kaleidoscopic change, relating it to the modernist and post-modernist cultural scene, and to the seemingly endless, ever more accelerated innovations of late-twentieth and early twenty-first-century capitalism. This interpretation has helped preserve Marx’s reputation as a prophet, when some of his other predictions, such as the impoverishment of the working masses, have not quite worked out as planned.17
But such an interpretation is based on a mistranslation of the original German. The famed sentence, beginning in the original “Das stehende und das ständische verdampft,” would be more accurately, if not quite so elegantly, rendered in English: “Everything that firmly exists and all the elements of the society of orders evaporate, everything sacred is deconsecrated and men are finally compelled to regard their position in life and their mutual relations with sober eyes.” The bourgeoisie, in other words, would defeat the Prussian conservatives Marx had battled while editing the Rhineland News. Economic power deriving from the capitalists’ steam engines (“to evaporate” in German is verdampfen, containing within it Dampf or “steam”) would terminate the anachronistic society of orders that Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his supporters idealized. Following Marx’s theory of ideology, the intellectual and artistic correlates of that society, particularly Romantic glorification of the devout Middle Ages, would also end. Its place would be taken by the secularized worldview and the cool, detached perceptions of artistic realism, already circulating among the authors of Young Germany, most prominently Marx’s Paris friend Heinrich Heine.
Marx’s confrontation with Prussian conservatives was included in another of the Manifesto’s observations about the cultural characteristics of capitalism: the imminent end of nations and nationalism. “National distinctiveness and conflicts between nations disappear more and more with the development of the bourgeoisie, with free trade, the world market, the uniformity of industrial production and the relations of life corresponding to them.”18 This passage was one of Marx’s least successful predictions, in view of the ever greater importance of nationalism in pre-1914 Europe, beginning with the revolutionary outbursts of 1848, and reaching a tortured, nightmarish climax during the First World War. Yet if we remember Marx’s own organizational efforts and experiences in the months immediately before writing the Manifesto—attending the International Congress of free trade economists in Brussels, or working with the London Fraternal Democrats and the Brussels Democratic Association, both of which were based on the cooperation of radicals of different nationalities—then we can see how such an argument might have originated.
In this respect, Marx’s attitude would have been hardly atypical for radicals in 1840s Europe, who imagined different nationalist movements cooperating against undemocratic, monarchical rule. Marx though, and Engels as well, had a noticeably negative view of some versions of 1840s German nationalism. They poured scorn on nationalists who derived national qualities from the ancient Teutonic forests, or the Germanic Middle Ages, and talked about a “Christian-Germanic” nation. Friedrich Wilhelm IV and his conservative supporters sometimes liked to patronize this kin
d of German nationalism and oppose it to a godless and revolutionary France. Such nationalism, tied to conservatives with a hankering for the society of orders, was for Marx yet another past relic that capitalism was eliminating.19
In these passages, Marx was recycling the earlier arguments he had devised as a Young Hegelian newspaper editor and democratic opponent of authoritarian Prussian rule for communist revolutionary purposes. He was also reinterpreting his own Young Hegelian past, making the causes he espoused examples of the brutal yet triumphant forward progress of a capitalist bourgeoisie in central Europe. Reaching even further back into his life, he pressed into service the ideas of his Berlin teacher, Eduard Gans, to evoke human history as the history of class struggles. Comparing Gans’s memoirs with the Manifesto highlights Marx’s use of his teacher’s text.
* * *
Free man and slave, patrician and plebian, baron and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in short oppressor and oppressed, stand in constant conflict to one another. . . . In ancient Rome, we have patricians, kings, plebians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild masters, journeymen and serfs. . . . [In] Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie. . . . The entire society divides ever more into two great hostile camps, in two great classes, standing directly against each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat.
(Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto)
* * *
Hegelian themes were also present in two aspects of Marx’s very scanty discussion of communism. Marx used Hegelian reasoning to escape a self-reflexive theoretical dilemma: how could he and Engels, good bourgeois both, possibly be communists, since their theories tied ideas and political allegiances to class standing and tied communism to the opposition of the proletariat to the bourgeoisie? The answer Marx gave was by an analogy to the origins of the French Revolution, when some nobles had joined the cause of the bourgeoisie. He was referring to the revolutionary episode at the meeting of the Estates General in June 1789, at which some of the noble and clerical deputies of the first two Estates joined with the Third Estate, to create the National Assembly. Evidence of an impending proletarian revolution, analogous to the bourgeois French Revolution, was that some bourgeois had gone over to the proletariat: “a part of the bourgeois ideologues who have worked their way up to a theoretical understanding of the entire historical movement.” This was, of course, a reference to Marx and Engels themselves. It was also a tribute to Hegel’s philosophical notion of self-consciousness as the highest form of proof, and that to understand a process was to transcend it and leave it behind. Because they could understand their relationship to their social class and to the place of that class in history, Marx and Engels could go beyond the bourgeois forms of thought to which their theories of ideology would otherwise consign them and affiliate with the proletariat: a distinctly Hegelian and idealist element in a self-consciously materialist theory of socioeconomic and political conflict.
* * *
Just as once, master and slave, later patrician and plebian, then feudal lord and vassal stood against each other, so now the idle man and the worker. If one visits the factories of England, one will find hundreds of men and women, hungry and impoverished, in the service of just one individual sacrificing their health, their enjoyment of life, just for their continued impoverished existence.
(Gans, Memoirs)20
* * *
The sole description of a communist society in the Manifesto was the assertion that it would be “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” This was the latest version of the ideal of a social organization reconciling the particular interests of individuals and the general interests of state and society, first evoked in Marx’s unfinished 1843 essay on Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. There described in explicitly Hegelian terms as the reconciliation of the universal and the particular, this ideal persisted through Marx’s affiliation with Feuerbach’s materialist humanism, his initial, Feuerbachian version of communism, into the more hard-edged, agitational, rhetorically distinctly un-Hegelian Communist Manifesto.
If the Manifesto had little to say about the future communist order, it was quite explicit on how such an order would be reached, presenting a ten-point program for a future communist government, taken almost verbatim from Engels’s draft program of the Communist League. The measures proposed included ideas common to the radical left of the 1840s, and by no means exclusively communist, such as a progressive income tax, as well as others proposed by the French socialists, like abolition of inheritance or the creation of a state bank, with a monopoly on credit.
The state bank was a signature idea of Proudhon, whom Marx had fiercely attacked. It might seem unfair of Marx to denounce Proudhon while adopting his ideas, but for Marx the crucial feature of socialist measures was their political context. Proudhon had envisaged such a bank as coming into existence within a legally, constitutionally, and economically regularly functioning capitalist society, rather than as part of a revolutionary upheaval. The ten-point program in the Manifesto was designed specifically for a revolutionary government, one modeled on the radical, Jacobin phrase of the French Revolution of 1789.
This was evident in the program’s fourth point, the “confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels,” a measure the Jacobins had practiced with considerable success. The model of the French Revolution was still more apparent in Engels’s draft, which called for the expropriation of the property of large landowners, industrialists, and owners of railroads and shipyards, offering them compensation in assignats, the paper currency of the French Revolution.21 Even more to the point was the assumption that there would be emigrants and rebels in the first place. The action program of the Manifesto was a plan for revolution and civil war, based on the previous experiences of the Reign of Terror, the most radical phase of the French Revolution in the years 1793–94. Marx had studied this period extensively when he was in Paris, at one point even planning to write a history of the Convention, the revolutionary parliament of the period. Here too, Marx was reflecting a common radical perception of the 1840s that perceived future revolutions in terms of the great past model of revolutionary action.
The transition from capitalism to communism was to occur through just such a revolutionary upheaval. Before listing the ten-point program, the Manifesto explained its basic idea: “despotic impositions into property rights and into bourgeois relations of production, through measures that appear economically insufficient and unsupportable but in the course of the movement go on beyond themselves. . . .” Seen in the light of the history of the radical phase of the French Revolution, Marx and Engels were proposing to take measures such as seizing some capitalists’ property. This would lead to unrest—those “emigrants and rebels”—but also to other capitalists refusing to cooperate with the communist government, creating an economic crisis, which in turn would allow the government to take still more drastic measures—precisely how things worked in France between 1792 and 1794.
This version of communism, in which the emphasis was placed on the violent, revolutionary process of creating a communist regime, rather than on the post-capitalist society itself, was one that Marx and Engels sharply differentiated from competing forms of socialism. They denounced “reactionary” socialism, by which they meant conservative critiques of capitalism. A few of these were circulating in Prussia at the time, particularly in the Rhenish Observer, a government-supported newspaper in Cologne that Marx had vigorously attacked in the pages of the German-Brussels News.22 Marx and Engels made short shrift of “bourgeois” socialism—what we would today call social reform—the amelioration of the condition of the working class within the existing capitalist society. There was also a discussion of “critical-utopian” socialism, practiced by the followers of Charles Fourier in France and Robert Owen in England, who proposed to start communist experiments within a capitalist society. Marx’s and Engels’s skepticism of the possible success of such measures was widely shared
by contemporaries; even their bête noire, Karl Grün, had strong doubts about the viability of these schemes.23
These critiques of other versions of socialism were taken from Engels’s “Fundamentals of Communism,” but Marx inserted an additional version not in Engels’s draft. This was True Socialism, the only socialism or communism known in Germany on the eve of the 1848 Revolution. Marx continued his previous attacks on the True Socialists for replacing French socialist criticisms of the capitalist economy with Hegelian language, such as “the externalization and emptying out of human essence,” concepts Marx himself had used in his True Socialist phase. The True Socialists were also denounced as philistine German petit bourgeois, another familiar motif. But the Manifesto introduced a new reason to attack this group, namely, as tacit or open supporters of the absolutist German governments.
Marx asserted that the problem with the True Socialists’ attack on capitalism was that it extended to the political aspects of capitalist society: the rule of law, a constitutional and representative government, and guarantees of civil liberties. It was fine to denounce these as adjuncts to capitalist exploitation of the workers in countries like France and England that already had liberal political institutions. In the German states, such as Prussia, where the liberal opposition was vigorously demanding a constitution by 1847, attacks on liberal institutions just “served the German absolutist governments, with their retinue of rotten priests, school teachers, backwoods noble landlords and bureaucrats, as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening upward aspirations of the bourgeoisie.” This scathing invective was taken from a similar, if less colorful description, in Engels’s draft, but there it was used to describe the beneficiaries of governmental, conservative socialism.24
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