This blog post is part of my ongoing “60 Books in 60 Days” encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series. From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin’s page about the books.
The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1818-1883, 1820-1895)
“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground–what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”
A slim book that has had a wide and deep effect: fomenting rebellion against dictatorship and oppression in the modern era, while ultimately inflicting upon the masses that which it sought to obliterate. This excellent edition also includes the prefaces to various foreign editions and “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (sections I and VII)”.
In re-reading The Communist Manifesto, my foremost thought was how directly this little text had affected the lives of millions of people–given them hope, given them an honest living, and given them death and suffering on a grand scale. I kept thinking about Vasily Grossman’s amazing novel Life and Fate, which chronicles the lives of Russians caught up in the battle of Stalingrad, including frequent flashbacks to more peaceful but just as difficult times. Hitler and Stalin are evoked skillfully, without the usual baggage that accompanies such portrayals. Grossman was a Soviet journalist during the siege of Stalingrad, and it shows in the writing–his details, such as flocks of starlings that begin to mimic the sounds of mortar fire, are haunting. His portrayal of communism at its worst is heartbreaking and complete. When during a period of reform, Grossman lobbied for the publication of his novel, he was told it would harm the Soviet Union more severely than Doctor Zhivago and could not possibly be made public for at least 250 years. It was finally published when snuck out on microfiche to the West. By then, Grossman had been dead for almost 20 years. There is, then, the human cost of this little book–both as documented by Grossman and lived by Grossman.
At the same time, it is hard to argue that the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were ever truly communist, having killed off the grand ideas put forth by Marx and Engels with large doses of fascism, despotism, and dictatorship. And the appeal of the text is clear: it offers up a kind of utopian equality for those willing to work hard. It provides concrete details and commonsense discussion to support the struggle to reach that shining, soft-lit future. Indeed, almost everything in the book about capitalism has been proven true, except that Marx and Engels were not seeing the Big Picture (how could they?). They could not imagine a future in which capitalism could actually bring about the death of the planet. Thus, there’s now a kind of antiquated whimsy to a passage like “…not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons.” The focus of the line “forged the weapons that bring death to itself” should be more universal.
That much set forth in this book is not actually achievable by actual human beings simply means that neither Marx nor Engels were Absurdists, nor understood that they were contributing evidence to the Documenters of Absurdism with what amounts to an insane future vision based on a fallacy: the basic goodness of human beings. Had they been pragmatists, perhaps it would have been different. Had they lived in a world of specific detail rather than abstract theory, perhaps it would have been different. Had they recognized that human beings are basically animals, and often trick their brains into thinking they are acting out of logic when actually they are acting out of emotion and instinct…well, then, perhaps things would have been different. (Darwin is still downstream, at least in this series…)
As an exercise in discussing the conflict between different classes of people, The Communist Manifesto is more useful despite its generalities: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on in an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” This statement provides the framework for a discussion that has been ongoing ever since–and one that has led to fascinating permutations of theory and opinion.
However, what it does not do is recognize that although we are in fact types, bound by environment and heredity, we are also individuals. A binary system that automatically infers that one class is no good will eventually require conflict with that class–in this case, eradication or dissolution of that class.
In this way, ironically, The Communist Manifesto is no different than those various religious, usually Christian, tracts that also use a binary system to describe the world and the people in it. (Kempis in The Inner Life, for example, setting up an opposition between nature and grace.) This essential opposition is created by starting from a simplification, a new paradigm: “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” Too simple, too pat. Too easy to manipulate–and here, too, The Communist Manifesto breaks bread with religion, in that arguably no other text other than the Bible has brought such misdirected violence down upon the world.
Despite these generalizations, I am impressed by how well Marx and Engels diagnosed the problems with industrialization and anticipated the problems with modern capitalism (especially this idea of constant consumption and consolidation of means of production), magnified by scale since their own times–and also struck dumb by how that accuracy clashes so violently with a certain naivetÃ© and myopia in their suggestions for treatment. In the communistic future, there will be no property, massive centralization, the evaporation of class distinctions: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association,* in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Yes, and there will be a shining light on a hill, and a white rhino shall ride out from under the mountain, and Frodo will destroy the one ring and all of the hobbits will live happily ever after in the big bad world. It’s audacious, this manifesto. It makes me think of Marx and Engels as idealistic, starry-eyed dreamers who would’ve sat in the back of the theater weeping at sentimental films like Beaches. Gawky kids playing capitalists and communists in the backyard.
All of this said, there’s no victory here, of one system over another, no matter that we live in an era in which we believe capitalism and free markets have triumphed over communism and its ideas.** Pure capitalism is as absurd an idea as pure communism, because it too is an absolute that makes ridiculous generalities about human behavior. No matter what negative can be said about it, The Communist Manifesto offered a window onto a better place for people who were and are still being oppressed by ruling elites. It may not have worked, for a variety of reasons, on the grandest scale, but its influence is still felt in certain countries in South America and elsewhere. A person–that specific of all details–can read this text and internalize ideas that do not have to be enacted on a country-wide scale.
Meanwhile, capitalism, as we now experience it in the United States, provides nothing but the succor of materialism–that swift-fleeting joy in our hearts over purchasing the next new thing, and of being told, in fact, that purchasing that next new thing will not only bring us happiness but also save our country. Although the physical and psychic damage inflicted by this state of affairs is not as systematic or as brutal as the tactics of, for example, the Soviets, it is more insidious, because we do not understand that it is happening to us and cannot recognize the ways in which it is killing us. At the very least, The Communist Manifesto, read in combination with a heavy dose of Grossman, begins to open our eyes.
* An association that is impossible on that grand scale. The only way in which such a system might work would be to break the world into thousands of small, homogenous countries, and even then there would be a hundred ethnic brushfire wars within a week.
** My own preference is for a democratic system informed by both socialism and communism, which understands where people are more likely to perform for the common good and suppress their more selfish impulses. A system, furthermore, that does not tout the glories of the free market and globalization in all cases. A system that promotes both individual and personal responsibility in all things.
Today, The Communist Manifesto serves more as a warning about the dangers of capitalism than as a compelling argument for communism.
Question for Readers
If you had final say on a system of government for your country, what would it look like?
Next up, Arthur Schopenhauer’s uplifting musical On the Suffering of the World…