The Birth of the CommunistManifesto
by Dale Wharton
Still in their twenties, Marx and Engels put years of study and debate into the
Communist Manifesto; it came out in 1848. For decades a dual tumult had wrung Europe.
The youthful authors meant to arouse workers, trace conflicts among social strata, offer
an economic theory of history, focus the image of socialism, urge a fresh order of society.
The French Revolution, mainly a political revolt, broke the power of the feudal
order. No longer could a noble class hinder the growth of capital and the bourgeoisie
(middle classes). In 1789 the latter joined with the needy masses to defeat king, barons,
and clergy. The middle ranks then took the lead in a new social order. They marched to
triumph over lordly sloth, entail, privilege, superstition. France set creeds of the
Enlightenment into its constitutions. The Code Napoleon laid a legal base to uphold
middle-class reign. For the first time in history a bourgeoisie took command, sole rulers
of a great land.
That French bourgeoisie acted as a revolutionary element of society. What was its
origin? The word itself stems from the castle (Burg in German) that became a city with
citizens: Burger, burgess, bourgeois. From serfs--slaves of the Middle Ages--sprang
burghers of early towns. As self-sufficient freemen they worked at trades, crafts allied in
guilds, exchange. By degrees this middle class did thrive and unfold; medieval commerce
spread from the Baltic to the Levant.
Then came the voyages of Columbus and da Gama. A global market—East India,
China, colonies in America--burst open to Europe's eager bourgeoisie. The new markets
gave a mighty surge to foreign trade, to navigation and transport, to industry--to a radical
middle class.
From its native England ranged the second tumult, the Industrial Revolution-applied natural science. It lacked the plain terror of a guillotine but it lopped ancient
means of living with its instruments: flying shuttle 1733, coke oven and cast steel 1735,
sheet iron 1754, spinning jenny 1767, steam engine 1769, power loom 1785....
Modern industry with its costly new hardware demanded entrepreneurs (owners
of private capital), markets for goods made in mass, and a supply of labor to tend
machines driven at first by water, later by steam. Big business early wanted free
competition (free from feudal guild monopoly). Where large-scale industry could replace
manual labor--such as artisans weaving homespun on hand looms--capitalists moved in,
wiping out small manufacture. The first trades and hand-industries to collapse were
textile, book-printing, ceramic, metalware.
Marx was of two minds toward the bourgeoisie, his own social group. On the one
hand it was the dynamo of creation without equal in history. In two centuries the forces it
guided made mountains of goods, filling human needs at home and abroad. Was that not
progress? The wonders of its factory system outdid all preceding generations put
together. It made of the modern state's executive a committee to manage affairs of the
whole middle class. Enrich yourselves! cried a premier of France. On the other hand the
modern capitalist class--bankers, wealthy industrialists, speculators--bore heartache in its
train. Nothing could satisfy its mania for private gain. It abused nature, it used people. It
ignored the homely virtues and the many ties that bound humankind; it left only the link
of cash payment. It reduced a person's worth to exchange value--to price. It sliced jobs
into tiny tasks to do again and again, it split worker away from final output, it degraded
labor into travail. Sweeping wealth into fewer hands, it spread poverty ever wider.
Constant shakeup and retooling of production meant civil society could hardly settle
before the new relations were out-of-date. Overproduction caused economic breakdown
every few years. But the bourgeois epoch--Technology Century (XIX)--called into being
an industrial working class: the proletariat.
Proles formed a wide, deep sector in a nation. Herded into mills, mines, and
slums, they might become aware of their common sorry lot. Here could lie hope to oust
profit-seekers and end social classes.
For the League of the Just, Engels composed a catechism. As he wrote the
Manifesto Marx consulted Engels's second draft, titled "Principles of Communism". In it,
Engels answers, for example, how a slave differs from a member of the proletariat (p
172):
The slave is sold once and for all. The proletarian must sell
himself by the hour or by the day. Each...slave...has his existence
assured... if only because of the interest of the slave owner. Each
... proletarian, the property as it were of the whole bourgeois
class ... has no security of life. ... The slave is [exempt] from
competition; the proletarian is ... prey to all its fluctuations. ...
The slave frees himself by rupturing, of all relations of private
ownership, only one, the relation of slavery and by this act
becomes himself a proletarian; the proletarian can only achieve
emancipation by abolishing private property in its entirety.