III.

The Communist Manifesto

With Engels, Marx drafted in 1848 what turned out to be his most widely read work: the Communist Manifesto, commissioned by a small leftist sect of little historical significance known as the Communist League. At that time the meaning of the term “communist” was quite different from that acquired in the 20th century when communism became the official ideology of the Soviet Union. In the mid-19th century communism did not denote a political regime but a somewhat ill-defined and utopian society characterized by communal ownership of the means of production and the absence of political institutions. It was a state of affairs described by Marx in The German Ideology as one where “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, herd cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, cowherd, or critic.” It did not entail a centralized state, or the use of repression and political violence.

The Communist Manifesto was a relatively short work of some 12,000 words. It opened with the bombastic claim that: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism”, at a time when the authorities in most of Europe were far more worried by liberal demands for the suffrage, constitutional rights, national independence, or republicanism than by communism. It ended with a memorable rousing call: “Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.” It provided a historical account of developments since the Middle Ages, criticized rival views of communism, and indicated the main reforms to be pursued in the immediate future including a progressive income tax, abolition of the rights of inheritance, state control over some sectors of the economy such as banks and transport, free education, and abolition of child labour.

Most of the Communist Manifesto, however, was devoted to a celebration of what, on a cursory reading, appeared to be the opponent, namely the industrial bourgeoisie. The merit of capitalism, according to Marx and Engels, was that it “has established the world market” and “given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land.” The bourgeoisie is pushed by the imperative need to expand the markets for its products over the whole surface of the globe: “It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” In so doing, the capitalist bourgeoisie has “given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” In what clearly emerges as the first major statement on globalization, Marx and Engels added that capitalism creates new wants that can be satisfied only by the products of distant lands and climes. “The bourgeoisie”, they continued, thanks to immensely facilitated means of communication, “draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization” and forces them “to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In other words, it creates a world after its own image.” The chief reasons behind Marx’s praise of capitalism was that this was demolishing traditional society and creating one of the chief conditions for communism, namely a society of plenty in which people would be freed from the compulsion of necessity.