Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch! (Workers of the world unite!)
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Marx, the father of Communism, wrote from his own experience and miseries. A Jewish outcast, three of
Mar’s seven children did not survive to adulthood due to poverty. Marx made a living from journalism and
his books served him solace in times of hardship. He was fully devoted to his family and was heartbroken
when his eldest daughter and wife died that he fell ill and also died shortly after. Only 11 people including
his friend and patron Friedrich Engels attended his funeral, with people thinking the man would never
leave a mark in the world. Gone was Marx and his family and so was his philosophy.
But they were mistaken. Marx’s writings posthumously awakened the dampened spirits of his fellow
laborer and the world would never be the same.
Minimum wage pay, working hours, leave benefits, rest periods, security of tenure, collective
bargaining. These are labor rights that have become standard today, but a hundred years earlier,
it took a bloodbath to enforce labor reforms when labor unions, spreading through the masses,
from Russia to Cuba, were unified by Marx’s call.
The Philippine centavo during the American occupation. It was minted, in a capitalist era, with
the image of a blacksmith.
The Communist and Socialist insurgencies inspired by Marx, Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin,
Mao Tse Tung, and Fidel Castro were the populist prFotests to an era of imperialism and the
capitalist Industrial Revolution. With the rise of the factory ethic in the nineteenth century, the
situation of workers, including women and children, was to work for endless hours in unsafe
plants or farms in hand-to-mouth existence. Industries competed for capital with maximum
returns and minimum costs to the employer. Work was unregulated, mechanical, and slavish.
Labor was too cheap that workers could not even afford the very products they produced.
In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote about this conflict of the upper bourgeoisie and
lower proletariat social classes rooted in capitalist economics. In a capitalist economy, private
ownership is unregulated, which encourages the hoarding and overproduction of goods. The
craftsman has to work like a clog in a machine to keep up with the ever-growing market.
But given the inverse relation of supply and demand, the more the laborer works, the more
harvests, the more yield, the more supply available, the less value for his output which he does
not even own and has no means to own. While his labor alone creates the product and its value,
the capitalist receives the profits. The laborer receives a value less than what he creates. The
goods he creates belong to the employer. Overtime, the worker can no longer identify with his
work. He does not like to work because it becomes a forced activity just to survive that makes
the capitalist richer and more powerful. Work alienates him.
Marx explained that in earlier times, everyone is responsible for producing just what his
family needs — the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter, within the tribal system of
common ownership over natural resources. But as societies formed, people began to specialize in
their skills, engaging in bargains and barters, and gaining control of particular trades and
ownership. A person’s job or skill also began to determine the way one lives, dresses, eats, and
socializes, creating the formation of social classes, along with its discriminations, entitlements,
and opportunities for exploitation.
Once, people valued workers for their craft, vital to the community’s survival, and workers
found personal worth in their labor. But as the bourgeoisie, who were unfamiliar with grunt
work, began to control vital trades through their position of ownership, the worker had been
reduced into a dispensable raw material, a tool for production. Personal worth had been reduced
into an exchange value so that everyone had become nothing but a paid worker. As labor became
specialized, the worker became a mere cog in the system.
This system has been perpetuated through the “superstructures” of established politics, law,
art, literature, and religion. The masses would need to align into groups and take arms to resist
the pervasive powers of these superstructures that maintain the status quo. They have no need of
the elites, since it is their labor that produces goods and services while the bourgeoisie take the
profits. Laborers have nothing to lose and everything to gain.
The rich cannot be expected to easily give up their privileges, especially through the same
legal, religious, and political system. Bargaining will not get the workers so far. It is no use to be
passive and accept one’s fate in docility. An aggressive, radical, and even violent antiestablishment gathering is needed to shake up the foundations of society and to alter the means
and cycle of production. The ruling class will be displaced to open the space for the masses.
Revolutions are inevitable in this dialectical process of “thesis” and “antithesis” of social classes,
leading to a “synthesis” of a classless society.
Mao Tse Tung, in his Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,
explained: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing
embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous,
restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one
class overthrows another.”
The perfect society is a return to social ownership (“Socialism”) through nationalization of
economic resources (land, raw materials, factories, industries). Lenin, in The State and
Revolution, wrote that Socialism, which is the conversion of private to public property, is just the first
phase of Communism. In a commun, common ownership would obliterate entitlements and difference of
classes and there would eventually be no need for the State or for laws as the
people imbibe the rule that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
Like Marx, Lenin believed that the proletariat revolution must spread to all nations,
transcending boundaries and nationalities, to finally overthrow the allied colonizers and their
capitalist economies. This dream was realized with the formation of the United Soviet Socialist
Republics.
The Red Revolution
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller
For Marx, man must reclaim his greatest virtues from the gods and idols of society. It is the
working man who must be dignified, exalted and glorified, and not the man in the palaces or in
the heavens. Religion is the “opium of the people” that prevents him from confronting his
miseries in exchange for an imaginary after-life that he cannot even be sure of. Marx’s influence
has seen the ouster of monarchies and the religious elites, such as the Tsars and the Orthodox
patriarchs of Russia, the Qing dynasty and the Dalai Lama of China, and the Catholic Church in
Cuba and in post-Franco Spain.
Unfortunately, the spiraling excesses of Communist revolutions, in its impatient efforts to alter
society through class liquidation, confiscation of property and farmlands, and social
reengineering, produced the greatest recorded massacres, death camps, genocides, and famines
known as the “Red Holocaust.” A combined death toll between 85 and 100 million occurred in
the former Soviet Union under Stalin, in China under Mao, and in Cambodia under the Khmer
Rouge. It is the endorsement of violence and disregard for life and property that made
Communism unappealing to otherwise Socialist sympathizers. Alexis de Tocqueville warned
against the tendency of socialism to be contemptuous of the individual, to make him a cog in the
overbearing machinery of the State.
Capitalist economies maintain that labor rights and economic reform can be achieved in a
democratic process without resorting to Communism, such as by passing Anti-Trust laws, Fair
Labor Standards acts, and entering into collective bargaining agreements. After all, the standard
“eight hours a day, five days a week” work week was popularized not by a Communist, but by an
American entrepreneur, Henry Ford, from his successful car industry. Ford made his company
competitive by making cars affordable to the masses and sharing the profits to his workers who
received double the minimum wage.
Further, the class struggle between the rich and the poor is not necessarily true in the presence
of a dominant middle class. When the population is mostly of the middle class, who are both
ruler and ruled, worker and capitalist, the thesis and anti-thesis dichotomy is blurred.
Meanwhile, socialists argue that Capitalism has inherent politico-economic flaws, such as
materialism, exploitation of the workers, private individualism, monopolies, licentious abuse of
freedoms and rights, increasing inequalities in wealth, perpetuation to power, Fascism, religious
propaganda, and lost sense of communalism and nationalism. Capitalism inevitably widens the
gap between rich and poor and eliminates any middle class.
Until the late twentieth century, a power struggle ensued between the allies of Capitalist
Britain and the United States (including its ally, the Philippines) and Communist Russia and
China, in a “Cold War” threat of nuclear annihilation. World views have been divided into the
Socialist “Left,” the free-market “Right,” and the “Middle” welfare-state Capitalists.
Since the American period, the Philippine Commonwealth installed laws against the violent
overthrow of government, with the Communists in mind. Labor laws were passed, amid social
unrest, such as the Employer’s Liability Act in 1908, the Industrial Peace Act in 1953, and the
Labor Code of the Philippines by President Marcos in 1974. The aim of social legislation is
“social justice,” defined in the case of Calalang v. Williams (G.R. No. 47800, December 2, 1940)
as “neither communism, nor despotism, nor atomism nor anarchy, but the humanization of laws
and the equalization of social and economic forces by the State so that justice in its rational and
objectively secular conception may at least be approximated.”
With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist experiment fizzled. China, under Deng
Xiaoping, reformed its economic policies to open its economy and become a rival superpower to
the U.S., by copying the Capitalist recipe and opening itself to free trade. Many elements of the
Left, incensed with the use of violence, have advocated human rights and legitimate political
parties, redefining themselves into “Democrats,” “Liberals,” or simply, “Socialists.” Even as
Communism continues to flout its defense of the rights of the masses, the worst human rights
violations are still happening in Communist regimes like North Korea.
The failure of Marxism in solving tyranny and poverty was largely due to its theory that a state
must be governed only by a single unified party that will do the central planning of economic
activities. A single party is supposedly the proof of a classless society. As it turns out, single
parties breed corruption, absolute dictatorship, and perpetuation of dynasties such as the Castros
in Cuba and the Kims in North Korea. The abolition of private ownership also kills competitive
entrepreneurial drive. A controlled economy has to float an artificial economy that ignores
globalization and market trends.
While Socialism has not won the day, neither did liberal capitalism. After the turn of the
century, the free hand of deregulation has once again brought economic crises, eventually
leading to government bail-out of banks and corporations and forcing the masses to share their
debt burden. The balanced economic formula, it is suggested, is Welfare-State Capitalism. It
favors the provision of basic services and regulation of industries but not complete
control/prohibition, or on the other hand, laissez-faire deregulation.
In the miracle economies of the South East and the Far East (Japan, South Korea),
governments have regulatory incentives to favor social welfare, public interest, conservation, and
positive economic tendencies, without manipulating the market. Worker-Control Capitalism is
also a proposed alternative, where workers, not the State, will partly own the means of production by
obtaining significant shares. Thus, making workers industrial partners in a profit-driven business.
The international community has also learned its lessons from the Cold War. There are now
160 parties to the UN’s International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights
committed to labor rights and Socialist reforms. The UN has a special agency, the International
Labor Organization, which promotes better labor standards.
The Philippine Constitution, unlike the U.S. Constitution, also devotes articles on social
justice, labor rights, agrarian reform, people’s organization, sectoral representation, nationalist
protection, patriotism, social welfare, and regulation of trade. Evidently, it endorses socialist
principles from the leftist delegates of the 1987 Constitutional Commission. Many party-list
groups for migrants, farmers, fisher folk, women, and employees since then have been able to
secure seats in Congress — a long shot and a far cry from the call to arms of the farmer-fighters
Hukbalahaps and the insurgent New People’s Army.
The anti-establishment spirit, ushered by Socialism, spawned the deconstructive critique of
patriarchal culture, Western systems and ideology, and industrialization.