Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [29]
CHAPTER FIVE
KARL MARX’S COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE
THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO1 was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 on behalf of the Communist League (although the final draft was Marx’s). It set forth the historical and analytical bases for the international communist movement. The first sentence reads, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” But unlike past class struggles, with their gradated class systems, “the modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, … has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.…” Marx and Engels write, “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, 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 [capitalists] and Proletariat [laborers]” (19).
For Marx and Engels, the market system may have destroyed feudalism, but it “left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous ‘cash payment.’ … It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, unveiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (20, 21).
What of economic advancement? Marx and Engels argue it is not advancement at all. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing 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 become 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. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere” (21).
Therefore, the only just course is to eliminate the material wealth of the bourgeoisie. “In this sense the theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom, activity and independence” (36). Yet, in wiping out the bourgeoisie’s property are you not also eliminating that of the laborer? “But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor” (36).
For Marx and Engels, it is crucial