The Communist Manifesto: Complete with Seven Rarely Published Prefaces [Paperback]

Although of great historical significance, the Manifesto is a poor representation of Marx's mature views,and pre-dates most of his studies of capitalist economics. Anyone relying on this to understand Marxism would be seriously misled. Any decent summary of Marx's thought as a whole would be better. David McLellan's work is pretty good, but most other non-Marxists seem more keen to refute Marx than accurately reflect his ideas - usually with invalid arguments based on a poor understanding of what Marx actually said.

"The Communist Manifesto" by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was originally published in 1848. Today, the Manifesto is considered to be one of the foundational texts of Marxism. Nominally, the Manifesto was the program of a small revolutionary group in Germany, known as the Communist League. In reality, it's not really a "program" in the strict sense of that term, but rather a summary of Marxist theory. It deals with the development of capitalism, the inevitability of socialism, and the differences between Marxism and other forms of socialism current at the time. It's still the best introduction to Marxist thought. It's also much shorter than "Anti-Dühring", "The Poverty of Philosophy", and other important texts by Marx or Engels. Not to mention "Das Kapital"!

What are we to make of "The Communist Manifesto" 160 years later? The present reviewer, while not an uncritical supporter of capitalism, nevertheless believes that history has proven Marxism wrong.

[SOME FAILED PREDICTIONS OF LESSER IMPORTANCE]

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels predict that Western Europe and North America, i.e. the advanced industrialized nations, will turn socialist before the rest of the world. In reality, the opposite happened: Russia was the first nation where a successful socialist revolution was carried out, and that nation was relatively backward. China, Vietnam, Cuba or Cambodia were even more backward. So was Albania. Still, I don't see this objection as particularly important. In his famous correspondence with Vera Zasulich, Marx did predict a revolution in Russia ahead of Western Europe and North America. At the time, Russia was more backward than during the time of Lenin! True, Marx did believe that such a revolution would ultimately fail, unless aided by revolutions in Western Europe. But then, that was Lenin's position as well.

Further, the Manifesto describes a future situation in which the working class is completely impoverished, a small group of capitalists own virtually all of the economy in the form of monopolistic cartels, while the middle strata and the petty bourgeoisie have all but disappeared. Thus, there are essentially only two classes facing each other. The revolution becomes a fact when the great mass of poor workers overthrows the small gang of rich capitalists.

This simple class structure doesn't exist anywhere in the world. True, the working class has become larger at the global level, but so have the middle classes and even the lumpenproletariat. This is the situation in India, China, Brazil and similar nations. In the Western nations, on the other hand, the working class have been shrinking in size. These nations are dominated by a vast middle class. Marx and Engels were right about the monopolistic cartels, but it should be noted that ownership of these cartels is a criss-crossing network of everything from capitalists and state institutions to middle class shareholders. Thus, the class structure both globally and in the West presents a more complicated picture than that imagined by the Manifesto.

These objections, however, aren't very important either. In other contexts, Marx and Engels seem to have recognized the rise of the middle classes. They connected the phenomenon to state interventionism with its vast government bureaucracy, and predicted that *this* situation would make society ripe for a socialist revolution, presumably assuming that the workers would be impoverished anyway. Sounds like China! It also sounds eerily like the situation known in Sweden as "a two-thirds society", in which two thirds of the population are a relatively well off middle class, while one third is excluded from the regular labour market and the welfare systems, hence forming a kind of neo-proletariat. Some have argued that the Western European welfare states will approach this situation, as the welfare systems get progressively more difficult to finance.

[THE CENTRALIZED PLANNED ECONOMY]

Marx and Engels called for socialism based on centralized state planning in the belief that this would foster immense economic growth on a scale never before seen. It's true that Marx and Engels didn't expect relatively backward nations such as Russia or China to develop the productive forces better than capitalism, let alone Albania or Burma. Marxists might therefore argue, that the failure of "really existing socialism" doesn't in and of itself disprove the Marxist scenario. However, there are some examples where roughly similar nations, one capitalist and the other having a command economy, could be compared. West Germany was certainly better off than East Germany, and post-war Austria was better off than Czechoslovakia. There's even an example where a socialist nation originally had a *higher* economic growth than a neighbouring capitalist nation: North Korea vs. South Korea. But North Korean economic growth began stalling around 1974, while South Korea developed into one of the most successful East Asian economies. During the 1990's, South Korea threw away more food than North Korea produced! Thus, it would seem that there is enough empirical evidence for the claim that centralized state planning isn't as efficient as predicted by Marx and Engels.

This doesn't mean that all state intervention or planning is "wrong". Quite the contrary. The New Deal and the U.S. War Production Board during World War II were efficient enough. Another example could be China, a nation that combines market relations with state ownership of banks and major industries, thereby avoiding the finance crisis. West Germany, Austria and South Korea were, of course, mixed economies rather than strictly neo-liberal ones. Still, a mixed or dirigiste economy isn't the same thing as the command economy of really existing socialism.

[SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY]

Marx and Engels believed that a planned economy was compatible with a massive extension of democracy, a kind of workers' democracy organized along the lines of the Paris Commune.

Working class insurrections are often organized in a way that could be styled "workers' democracy". Ironically, many modern examples come from workers' protests or uprisings against Communist regimes. The workers' councils in Hungary 1956 or the strike committees and independent labour unions in Poland 1980-81 come to mind. Of course, workers' democracy also flourishes during insurrectionary protests against capitalism or non-Communist dictatorship: the Paris Commune 1871, the Russian soviets 1905 and 1917, Iraqi Kurdistan in 1991, etc.

But are there any examples of really existing socialist nations with workers' democracy? None I can think of. Soviet Russia fairly quickly developed into a one-party state. It was certainly a single-party state by 1921, when the Bolshevik Party also prohibited internal factions. All other socialist nations were de facto one-party states already from the start. A centralized planned economy seems to be incompatible with both parliamentary democracy and workers' democracy. Detailed planning presupposes a network of powerful government agencies at the top, manned by government officials, i.e. bureaucrats. The workers can hardly control such a system. Lenin wanted the Bolshevik Party to control the bureaucracy, but since the party was itself becoming bureaucratic and fusing with the state apparatus it was supposed to control, this couldn't stop bureaucratization either. No really existing socialist nation has managed to solve this problem. Some point to Sandinista Nicaragua, which was indeed a democracy (despite the rabid slanders of Reagan and the loony right). But please note that Nicaragua had a mixed economy, not a planned one! In other words, Nicaragua wasn't "really existing socialist" to begin with. A dirigiste economy is compatible with parliamentary or presidential democray (South Korea is an example), but "really existing socialism" doesn't seem to be.

It's difficult to see how *this* problem could be solved if an advanced Western nation would become socialist. A super-WPA regulating the entire American economy would hardly be run by free elections to some kind of soviets. It might even be less democratic than the Soviet Union or China, perhaps due to more efficient technology (including surveillance technology). Indeed, there is a certain naivety in Marx and Engels on this point. Did they really believe that one can first strengthen the state by giving it complete control over the economy (essentially over everything) and then expect the state to peacefully "die away" when World History so orders? Did they really believe that a state looking like the Paris Commune could run a centralized national economy?

[THE REVOLUTIONARY CLASS]

Marx and Engels further believed that the working class is a revolutionary class, indeed *the* revolutionary class. Nobody denies that the working class could be pragmatically revolutionary, least of all people like Gallifet, Noske or Andropov, charged with crushing working class rebellions. The slaves of antiquity or the peasants of the Late Middle Ages were also "revolutionary" in this broad sense. But is the proletariat revolutionary in the more specific Marxist sense? History belies this idea. This is one of the main objections that could be mustered against Marxism, since the whole point of Marxist philosophy is the belief in the revolutionary potential of this particular class.

In Western Europe, the working class has been integrated into the system by reformist labour unions, Social Democratic parties and welfare states. While it's true that this situation might change in the future, as the welfare state deteriorates, it shows that it's possible to buy off the working class in the metropolitan nations. Read more ›

The Communist Manifesto can be quite shocking to the modern reader who is conditioned to believe in a certain philosophy. But just as all rational persons are willing to listen to an alternative religious or moral viewpoint (because they pose no danger to the false consciousness of the listener), so should all reasonable persons listen to the words of Marx and Engels. They do not because they perceive Communism as a threat, a perception enhanced by the corruption of the Soviet Union. Remember this: It is power that corrupts, not Communism. Read this pamphlet. Know your rights. Know Freedom.