20221027 - 14:52
The irony of reading Marx’s communist manifesto and writing this review at my lunchbreak working at a call-center is palpable. Yet reading that call-to-arms “Workers unite!” will forever resonate with me.
Many of the ideological views expressed by Marx (and Engels) seems to me to be so obvious and self-explaining, yet there are few opinions and political views as controversial, and there was a good reason I felt like I had to hide the book from my colleagues. The goal was something as natural as freedom from society, the idea that society should work for the people and not the other way around.
“In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.”
We find the same objections today, almost 200 years later, which were just as absurd back then. The Bourgeois proclaim that capital, material goods, are earned, and that socialism in every which way is nothing but brutish, barbaric, theft. As if everything they owned were owned by some natural right, as if the phone they used, the bed they slept in, the car they rode and the clothes they wore hadn’t been manifactured and enabled to exist by a dizzying amount of people and organizations, almost the entire world in some way or other! All we have we owe to society, and to feel justified in claiming otherwise is undoubtedly a huge privilege.
“We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily. Or do you mean modern bourgeois private property? But does wage labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital”.
My edition of this book had an introduction by Martin Malia, which I will further on quote as M.M. > “In Marx himself, however, it is quite clear that ‘human emancipation’ requires the absolute ‘negation’ of private property, profit, and the market. Only once the victorious proletariat had implemented such full noncapitalism would society be liberated from both class inequality and state coercion. Only then would the world at last function ‘rationally’, like one immense factory, and human labor would produce not capital, but the flowering of the species’ hitherto alienated creative potential.” - M.M
This is, I feel, the main point, the core ideological idea on which everything else rests. Capitalism is extremely effective at what it does, producing capital. There is no argument there. Yet I wonder, when did we decide that capital was the be-all and end-all of human progress? Certainly I must have missed the notice. Growing up, talking with my peers and everyone around me, at some point happiness stopped being a consideration and became nothing more than a footnote. It feels feels like people don’t even take the time to ponder on what makes them happy, and definitely not making sacrifices in order to increase their well-being. Instead, capitalist production, or the individual respective, consumption, is maximized. The sole purpose of labour is increasing capital, not substance. Whether that substance be happiness or ‘the flowering of the species’ alienated creative potential’. And so we find, in Capitalism rather than Communism, “market-stalinism”, the focus on the measure of substance rather than substance itself. Grades over knowledge, time spent at the desk over accomplished work, every which way we look there is only measurements and actions fitted to improve those measurements. Goodhart’s law, “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”, sums up the problem with capitalism and capital in one sentence.
I am amazed by the insights into the continous development of capitalism which Marx possessed, far from becoming outdated the Manifesto has done nothing but increase in relevance. Marx saw already in the 1850s the monstrosity which capitalism was becoming, always requiring development and an increase of production in other to not collapse of its own weight.
“Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. […] It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by ther periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threatingly. In these crisis a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. […] And how do the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough explotation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.”
There is this common idea that capitalism works great, with a few exceptions. Those exceptions of course being economic crises. If we look back just a few years, take the measly 20 in which I have been alive, there’s already been the dot-com bubble, the 2008 housing crisis and the still ongoing epidemic-crisis. These are not extraordinary examples of an otherwise stable society, and such a statement is based in nothing but illusion. There has not been a single person born under capitalist rule which have lived in a economically stable period, which is ironic considering that the big selling point of capitalism is precisely stability. It’s why we accept all the abuse and suffering, go to work and sacrifice most of our life to capitalist production.
Whenever capitalism is brought up I have a tendency to go on and on forever, so I will leave it at this. The Communist Manifesto is as relevant as ever and masterly diagnoses the ideological problems found in capitalism. It does, however, have its own set of problems which I will, biased as I am, leave out of this review. Nevertheless, Marxism will stay as an amazing structural foundation on which social thought, critique and theory is built. I leave you with a haunting quote and a reminder of the illusion which all stability in reality is.
“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones becomes antiquated before they can ossify. 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.”