The Communist Manifesto

"It’s a manifesto! It’s meant to be easy to understand. Marx and Engels’s historical analysis is breathtakingly, brilliantly simple. I think it’s wrong but, again, you’ve just got to admire its genius. Obviously, without understanding the historical basis of Marx’s thought you can’t understand anything else in Marxism . So I always think The Communist Manifesto is a great place to start. Its brevity is one of its great virtues. The theory—that all history is class struggle, that it progresses dialectically, and that the key to the distribution of power is the distribution of the means of production, the basis of wealth—is comprised of stunning elements which one can’t fail to be favourably impressed by. And when you take into account the influence that Marx has had since The Communist Manifesto , it’s just an inescapably important book. If you’re talking about global history, it should be part of anybody’s top five. It’s because it’s ideological. He’s got a theory that really does explain everything, at least in his own opinion and that of Engels and their followers. It saves you troubling with the details because you have got a very slick formula which you can apply to anything that you’re studying. Of course, many Marxist historians did just that, sometimes with disastrous results for their own understanding of the detail. But I come back to my point that it doesn’t matter whether ultimately the theory fails or is based on false data. The brilliance of it and its influence qualify it for supreme importance. Yes, particularly since he was one himself and some of the things which he criticizes—particularly their shabby morals and their tendency to abuse power for sexual ends—was exactly how he behaved with his own maid."

"Yes, it is. I chose The Communist Manifesto , rather than, say, Capital because it shows in a much easier-to-read, shorter work something that is central to Marx’s vision . Capital is much drier, and a lot of it is focused on economics, although there are some remarkable passages of Capital describing the conditions of industrial workers in England at the time. The Communist Manifesto is an early work, published in February 1848, the year of revolutions in Europe, when Marx was not quite 30. The Manifesto shows Marx still thinking within the framework of Hegel’s ideas about contradiction but transforming them from something that’s happening in our consciousness to something that’s happening in the material world. Marx agrees with Hegel that history is progress towards freedom or liberation, that humans are in some sense a unity. But he disagrees that this process is all happening in our consciousness. Instead, for Marx, it happens in the way we produce to satisfy our material needs, the way we produce our food or our shelter. That’s what gives rise to certain economic relations between humans, and those economic relations in turn give rise to our ideas. Our ideas are supervenient on the underlying economic realities. But, just as with Hegel, progress occurs through the generating and transcending of contradictions, and it leads to liberation. This is sketched out by Marx and Engels, his co-author (though Marx wrote most of it), in The Communist Manifesto . You have an economic system, the economic system of their time, which was capitalism. In that system, you have people who own capital, and you have people who have no capital, and have to sell their labour power because that’s all they have. The result of this is that when you work under capitalism you are putting your labour power into making profits for the capitalists. Thus the more the labourer works, the more he enriches his opposite, the capitalist. The capitalist uses the profits to extend the factory, perhaps to put in machines that can do the work of five, ten, fifty people. So the labourer generates profits that work against himself, putting many labourers out of work. In Marx’s view, the capitalist class actually shrinks in terms of numbers: instead of many small capitalists you have fewer big ones, and the small capitalists have to become labourers. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The proletariat, the working class, expands as more and more people are forced into it. The laws of supply and demand keep them at the edge of starvation. Capitalists need workers, and these workers need to eat, they need to reproduce, but the competition for jobs means they will, over the long-term, hover around the bare minimum needed to survive and reproduce. Marx has some moving images, and one of them is of a forest of uplifted arms seeking work, with the forest becoming ever thicker, while the arms themselves become ever thinner. Marx saw this as a contradiction within capitalism because the small capitalist class, in the end, would inevitably be overthrown by the vastly larger working class. Hegel was a kind of historical determinist, as you pointed out earlier, and so too was Marx. For Marx, the nature of capitalism had this inherent contradiction within it, and that’s the vision that’s spelled out in The Communist Manifesto . It’s a very powerful piece of writing, especially the first section. As well as spelling out this story of what’s going to happen, it does portray capitalism in a way that hadn’t been done before. Marx and Engels show how, under capitalism, money becomes the universal solvent. All the older ideas, like feudal ideas about loyalty and the obligations of the lord to his vassals, or for that matter the value of being skilled at a craft like weaving, all of this gets washed away by capitalism which converts everything into cold hard cash. The nexus between man and man ceases to be bonds of loyalty or obligation, or even love, and just becomes one of money. No. I’m certainly not a Marxist. And I’m not a historical determinist either, as you correctly pointed out earlier. Marx’s predictions were quite wide of the mark. I think we can see that now, with enough distance between us. For one thing, it’s not true that under capitalism the workers remain close to that level of bare survival. In fact, capitalism has produced, even for the working class and despite a great deal of inequality, a situation in which almost everyone is wealthier than the majority were in previous centuries. You could argue that the vast majority of people in the United Kingdom, or the United States, or Australia, or Europe, are much better off than most people were in earlier centuries: they eat better, they live more comfortably, they have electricity and flushing toilets, and so on. So Marx was wrong to think that the working class was going to be constantly struggling to meet their basic needs. Marx was also wrong to think that capitalism was going to collapse from some inherent contradiction. He thought that capitalism would collapse in the most advanced countries because that’s where capitalism had developed most, and the capitalist class would be the smallest and most vulnerable. Because he thought this, he was never troubled by the idea that the communist revolution would need to be defended against more powerful capitalist nations. It would be precisely the most powerful, most advanced nations that would have become communist. But capitalism didn’t collapse in the most advanced nations, and the communist revolutions that did break out happened either in less-developed, partially capitalist economies like Russia, or in places that were not really capitalist at all, like China and Cuba. “There are some ideas in Marx that we now all would accept to some extent” Marx’s materialist theory of history was not wrong in the same sense as the predictions I have just mentioned, but it was often stated too crudely. At one point, Marx suggested that the hand mill—the mill that you use to mill flour by hand—gives you the society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, in contrast, gives you the industrial capitalist. I don’t think that was Marx’s considered view, but he didn’t allow an adequate role for ideas as independent forces, which I believe they can be. Still, there’s a lot to be taken from Marx and his materialist conception of history, as compared to others who treated the realm of ideas as autonomous and independent of material or economic forces. Marx directed our attention to the influence that economic factors have. We developed a capitalist system in which employers needed workers to be free to move where the factories are. So the bonds of feudalism collapsed, people became more mobile, and the power of money prevailed. We developed an ethic that no longer upheld the feudal values of obligation and loyalty to place and instead valued freedom of contract. Marx got something right here. He has provided us with a framework that we can use to look at our society. Why is it so difficult, for example, to take the action that almost all scientists say we need to take against climate change? Well, at least part of the story is that there are some very powerful people who’ve made their money from coal and oil, and they have considerable influence on our ideas and on political decisions. You don’t have to look very hard in the United States to see that happening. There are some ideas in Marx that we now all would accept to some extent, without going to the extreme of accepting his historical determinism."

"It was a 50-page-long pamphlet, originally written in German for a small group of working class activists trying to create a socialist society who were called The Communist League. They asked Marx and Engels, who were friends and collaborators, to write a document that they could use for political education. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The manifesto is the most widely read tract Marx ever wrote. It explains capitalism, where it came from and how they see it as being in its late stage. They argue that capitalism laid the groundwork for socialism by making the world into one capitalist market and doing away with nationalist loyalties. There is one famous sentence: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” They believed that capitalism was equipping the proletariat to take control of the engine of capitalist production and turn it over to social uses. There’s a lot of critique of other socialists as well, but those sections are outmoded. The bulk of it is a very powerful statement of the nature of capitalism. It was influential all over the world and has been translated into who knows how many languages – over 200 I’m sure. The occupiers are making an analysis of hierarchy in the economy and in society. Almost all of those kinds of analyses go back to Marx. You can see the paradox that Marx and Engels describe in these occupations. On the one hand people have computers and iPhones. They’re using the latest technological gadgets – which of course were created by capitalist societies and entrepreneurs – to organise against capitalism and try to bring about a radical transformation of society which would at least lead to a more egalitarian capitalism, if not a different kind of society altogether."