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To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson (1940)

Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was one of mid-twentieth century’s great literary journalists and critics. (In her biography of Somerset Maugham, Selina Hastings describes Wilson as being, in 1945, ‘America’s most influential critic’ p.482)

Friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and many other authors from that generation, he wrote extended essays on the French Symbolist poets, on T.S. Eliot, Proust, James Joyce and the classic Modernists, on Kipling, Charles Dickens, a study of the literature of the Civil War, memoirs of the 1920s and 30s, a book length study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and much, much more.

Edmund Wilson in 1951

His style now seems very old-fashioned, a leisurely, bookish approach which was long ago eclipsed by the new professionalism of academia and the blizzard of literary and sociological theory which erupted in the 1960s.

Most of Wilson’s books are not currently in print, and many passages in this book demonstrate the relaxed, belle-lettreist, impressionist approach – often more in love with the sound of its own rolling prose than with conveying any clear information – which shows why.

Though Marx has always kept our nose so close to the counting-house and the spindle and the steam hammer and the scutching-mill and the clay-pit and the mine, he always carries with him through the caverns and the wastes of the modern industrial world, cold as those abysses of the sea which the mariner of his ballad scorned as godless, the commands of that ‘eternal God’ who equips him with his undeviating standard for judging earthly things. (p.289)

That said, Wilson was an extremely intelligent man, more of a literary-minded journalist than an academic, capable of synthesising vast amounts of information about historical periods, giving it a literary, bookish spin, and making it accessible and compelling.

Some themes or ideas

To The Finland Station is Wilson’s attempt to understand the Marxist tradition, and its place in the America of his day i.e. the angry left-wing American literary world produced by the Great Depression of the 1930s. He began researching and writing the book in the mid-1930s as well-meaning intellectuals all across America turned to socialism and communism to fix what seemed like a badly, and maybe permanently, broken society.

Like many guilty middle-class intellectuals who lived through the Great Depression, Wilson went through a phase of thinking that capitalism was finished, and that this was the big crisis, long-predicted by Marxists, which would finish it off.

He was simultaneously attracted and repelled by the psychological extremism and religious fervour of communism. Even after actually visiting Russia and seeing for himself the poverty, mismanagement and terror as Stalin’s grip tightened, Wilson couldn’t eradicate this feeling. He tried to analyse its roots by going back to the intellectual origins of socialism – then reading everything he could about Marx and Engels – and so on to Lenin and the Russian Revolution. This book is a kind of diary of his autodidactic project.

The myth of the Dialectic As Wilson prepared the book he realised that to understand Marx and his generation you need to understand Hegel – and he couldn’t make head or tail of Hegel, as his chapter on ‘The Myth of the Dialectic’ all too clearly reveals. He ends up comparing Hegel’s Dialectic to the Christian notion of the Trinity (Thesis, Antithesis and Synthesis as a kind of modern version of Father, Son and Holy Ghost) in a way that’s superficially clever, but ultimately wrong. To understand Hegel’s importance for Marx and the German thinkers of that generation you should read:

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones (2016)

More telling is Wilson’s point that Marx invoked his version of Hegelianism to give a mystical, quasi-religious sense of inevitability, a pseudo-scientific rationale, for what was simply, at bottom, the burning sense of moral outrage (i.e. at poverty and injustice) shared by so many of his contemporaries.

Aesthetics in Marx A later chapter dwells at length on Capital Volume One, pointing out that it is an aesthetic as much as an economic or political text, before going on to point out the ultimate inaccuracy of Marx’s Labour theory of Value.

The Labour Theory of Value Marx thought he had invented a new insight, that the value of a product is the value of ‘the labour invested in it’ – and that because the bourgeois owners of factories only paid their workers the bare minimum to allow them to live, they were thus stealing from the workers the surplus value which the workers had invested in the finished products.

This theory appeared to give concrete economic basis for the moral case made by trade unionists, socialists and their allies that capitalists are thieves.

The only flaw is that there are quite a few alternative theories of ‘value’ – for example, as I’ve discovered whenever I’ve tried to sell anything on eBay, the ‘value’ of something is only what anyone is prepared to pay for it. In fact ‘value’ turns out to be one of the most tortuously convoluted ideas in economics, deeply imbricated in all sorts of irrational human drives (what is the ‘value’ of a gift your mother gave you, of your first pushbike, and so on?).

Wilson is onto something when he says that both the idea of the ‘Dialectic of History’ and the ‘Labour Theory of Value’ are fine-sounding myths, elaborate intellectual schemas designed to give some kind of objective underpinning to the widespread sense of socialist anger – but neither of which stand up to close scrutiny.

And although socialism or communism are meant to about the working class, Wilson’s book about Marx and Lenin, like so many others of its ilk, is a surprisingly proletarian-free zone, almost entirely concerned with bourgeois intellectuals and their highfalutin’ theories, with almost no sense of the experience of the crushing work regimes of capitalist industry, which were at the heart of the problem.

I’ve worked in a number of factories and warehouses (a Dorothy Perkins clothes warehouse, a credit card factory, the yoghurt potting section of a massive dairy) as well as serving on petrol pumps in the driving rain and working as a dustman in winter so cold the black binliners froze to my fingers. As in so many of these books about the working classes, there is little or nothing about the actual experience of work. The actual experience of actual specific jobs is nowhere described. Everything is generalisations about ‘History’ and ‘Society’ and ‘the Proletariat’ – which may partly explain why all attempts to put Socialism into action have been so ill-fated.

To The Finland Station

Wilson’s book is more like a series of interesting magazine articles about a sequence of oddball left-wing thinkers, often throwing up interesting insights into them and their times, always readable and informative, but lacking any theoretical or real political thrust. The book is divided into three parts.

Part one – The decline of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition

I was deeply surprised to discover that part one is a detailed survey, not of the pre-Marxist socialist political and economic thinkers – but of the careers of four of France’s great historians and social critics, namely:

Jules Michelet (1798-1874) author of a massive history of the French Revolution
Ernst Renan (1823-1892) expert on Semitic languages and civilizations, philosopher, historian and writer
Hippolyte Taine (1828-1893) critic, historian and proponent of sociological positivism
Anatole France (1844-1924) poet, critic, novelist and the most eminent man of letters of his day i.e. the turn of the century and Edwardian period

Why? What’s this got to do with Lenin or Marx? It is only in the very last paragraph of this section that Wilson explains his intention, which has been to follow ‘the tradition of the bourgeois revolution to its disintegration in Anatole France’ (p.68).

Scanning back through the previous 68 pages I think I can see what he means. Sort of.

The idea is that Michelet came from a poor background, taught himself to read and study, and expressed in his sweeping histories a grand Victorian vision of Man engaged in a Struggle for Liberty and Dignity. He was heavily influenced by the memory of the Great Revolution, which he dedicated his life to writing about. Thus Michelet is taken as a type of the post-revolutionary intellectual who espoused a humanist commitment to ‘the people’. He provides a kind of sheet anchor or litmus test for what a humanist socialist should be.

Renan and Taine, in their different ways, moved beyond this humanist revolutionary vision, Renan to produce a debunking theory of Christianity in which Jesus is not at all the son of God but an inspired moral thinker, Taine embracing Science as the great Liberator of human society. Both were disappointed by the failure of the 1848 French Revolution and its ultimate outcome in the repressive Second Empire of Louis-Napoleon.

Anatole France, 20 years younger than Renan and Taine, was a young man during the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune. This turned him completely off revolutionary politics and steered him towards a dandyish appreciation of art and literature. France represents, for Wilson, a disconnection from the political life around him. He continues the trajectory of French intellectuals away from Michelet’s humane engagement.

Anatole France A Corpse

During the 1890s the Symbolist movement in art and literature continued this trajectory, moving the artist even further from ‘the street’, from the deliberately wide-ranging social concerns of a Michelet.

The Paris Dadaists moved even further away from the Michelet ideal, choosing the day of Anatole France’s funeral in 1924 to publish A Corpse, a fierce manifesto excoriating France for representing everything conventional and bourgeois about French culture which they loathed.

And the Dadaists morphed into the Surrealists who proceeded to turn their back completely on politics and the public sphere – turning instead to ‘automatic writing’, to the personal language of dreams, to the writings of people in lunatic asylums.

So Wilson’s point is that between the 1820s and the 1920s the French intellectual bourgeoisie had gone from socialist solidarity with the poor, via sceptical Bible criticism and detached scientific positivism, to dilettantish symbolism, and – in Dada and Surrealism – finally disappeared up its own bum into art school narcissism. It amounts to a complete betrayal of the humanist, socially-conscious tradition.

Now all this may well be true, but:

It would have been good manners of Wilson to have explained that describing all this was his aim at the start of part one, to prepare the reader.
It is odd that, although he takes a literary-critical view of the writings of Michelet, Taine et al, he doesn’t touch on the most famous literary authors of the century – for example, the super-famous novelists Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant and Zola, to name a few.
And this is all very literary – there is next to nothing about the politics or economics of the era (apart from brief mention of the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1870 as they affected his chosen writers). There is no historical, social, economic or political analysis. The whole argument is carried by a commentary on the literary style and worldview of the four authors he’s chosen, with no facts or figures about changing French society, industrialisation, wars, the rise and fall of different political parties, and so on.

So even when you eventually understand what Wilson was trying to do, it still seems a puzzling if not eccentric way to present an overview of bourgeois thought in the 19th century – via a small handful of historians? And why only in France? What happened to Britain or Germany (or Russia or America)?

Having made what he thinks is a useful review of the decline of bourgeois thinking of the 19th century, Wilson moves on to part two, which is a review of the rise of socialist thinking during the 19th century.

Part two – The origins of socialism through to Karl Marx

You might disagree with his strategy, but can’t deny that Wilson writes in a clear, accessible magazine style. The opening chapters of this section present entertaining thumbnail portraits of the theories and lives of some of the notable pre-Marxist radical thinkers of the early 19th century, men like Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen.

Wilson’s account of the large number of utopian communities which were set up across America in the first half of the century is particularly entertaining, especially the many ways they all collapsed and failed.

The Mormons It is striking to come across the Mormons being described as one of the early American utopian communities. They were pretty much the only idealistic community from the era to not only survive but thrive, despite fierce opposition. As Wilson reviews the fate of the various utopian communities set up during the early nineteenth century, it becomes clear that the key to survival was to have a strong second leader to succeed the founding visionary. For example, all the communities which Robert Owen founded failed when he left because they were only held together by his strong charisma (and dictatorial leadership).Hundreds of Fourieresque communities were set up, flourished for a few years, then expired. The Mormons were the exception because when their founder, Joseph Smith, died (he was actually murdered by an angry mob) he was succeeded by an even stronger, better organiser, Brigham Young, who went on to establish their enduring settlement of Utah.

Babeuf François-Noël Babeuf was a French political agitator during the French Revolution of 1789 who vehemently supported the people and the poor, founding a Society of Equals, calling for complete equality. As the bourgeois class which had done very well out of the overthrow of the king and aristocracy consolidated their gains during the period of the Directory (1795-99) Babeuf’s attacks on it for betraying the principles of the revolution became more outspoken and he was eventually arrested, tried and executed for treason. But his idea of complete equality, of everyone living in communes with little or no property, no hierarchy, everyone working, work being allotted equally, everyone eating the same, was to endure as a central thread of 19th century communism and anarchism.

Robert Owen ran a cotton factory in Scotland, and focused in his writings the paradox which plenty of contemporaries observed – that the world had experienced a wave of technological inventions which ought to have made everyone better off – and yet everyone could see the unprecedented scale of misery and poverty which they seemed to have brought about.

Young Karl Marx was just one of many thinkers determined to get to the bottom of this apparent paradox. The difference between Marx and, say, most British thinkers, is that Karl was drilled in the philosophical power of Hegel’s enormous Philosophy of World History.

Marx arrives in chapter five of part two and dominates the next eleven chapters, pages 111 to 339, the core of the book. Wilson gives us a lot of biography. Karl is the cleverest child of his Jewish-convert-to-Christianity father. He rejects advice to become a lawyer, studies Hegel, gets in trouble with the police and starts work as a newspaper editor.

Karl Marx

Friedrich Engels Through this newspaper Karl meets Friedrich Engels, who sends him articles to publish. Two years younger, handsome and full of life, Engels is sent by his father to supervise the family factory in Manchester, north-west England. Here Engels is appalled by the staggering immiseration of the urban proletariat, several families packed to a damp basement room in the hurriedly-built shanty towns surrounding Manchester, enslaved 12 hours a day in the noise and dirt of factories and, whenever there was a depression, immediately thrown out of work, whole families begging on the street, boys turning to theft, the girls to prostitution, in order to survive.

And yet when Engels talked to the factory owners – and he was a man of their class, an owner himself – all they saw was profit margins, capital outlay, money to be made to build big mansions in the countryside. Questioned about the lives of their workers, the owners dismissed them as lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothings. Engels was disgusted by their greed, selfishness and philistinism.

Traipsing the streets of the city, shown into the homes of hundreds of workers, awed by the scale of the misery produced by the technological marvels of the industrial revolution, Engels could see no way to reform this society. The only way to change it would be to smash it completely.

The hypocrisy of classical economists As for contemporary British political and economic writing, it was a con, a sham, a rationalisation and justification of the rapacious capital-owning class. Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the rest of the so-called ‘classical’ economists merely provided long-winded rationalisations of exploitation. Smith said that the free market worked with a kind of ‘hidden hand’, a magic force which united people all over the globe in common enterprises, like the cotton pickers in America who supplied factories in Manchester to manufacture clothes which were then sold in India. Smith predicted that this ‘hidden hand’ of capitalism would, as if by magic, mean that, although everyone in society pursued their own interests, they would ineluctably be brought together by ‘the market’ to work together, to improve the lot of all, to create a balanced and fair society.

Well, Marx, Engels and anyone else with eyes could see that the exact opposite of these predictions had come about. British society circa 1844 was full of outrageous poverty and misery.

Marx meets Engels These were the thoughts Engels brought when he met Marx in Paris in 1844. His ideas and his practical experience electrified the brilliant polymath and provided Marx with the direction and focus he needed. He set about reading all the British political economists with a view to mastering classical economics and to superseding it.

Although Wilson periodically stops to summarise the development of their thought and give a précis of key works, I was surprised by the extent to which this middle section about Marx was mostly biographical. We learn a lot about the squalid conditions of Marx’s house in Soho, about Engels’s ménage with the Irish working class woman, Mary Burns, and there are entertaining portraits of rival figures like Lassalle and Bakunin.

All this is long on anecdote and very thin on theory or ideas. Wilson tells us a lot more about Lassalle’s love life than the reason why he was an important mid-century socialist leader. I learned much more about Mikhail Bakunin’s family life in Russia than I did about his political theories.

Wilson is at pains to point out on more than one occasion that he has read the entire Marx-Engels correspondence – but makes little more of it than to point out how Engels’s natural good humour struggled to manage Marx’s bitter misanthropy and biting satire.

Friedrich Engels

Swiftian insults Wilson is happier with literary than with economic or political analysis, with comparing Marx to the great Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, than he is trying to explain his roots in either German Hegelianism or economic theory. He repeatedly compares Marx’s misanthropy, outrage and sarcasm to Swift’s – passages which make you realise that bitterly anti-human, savage invective was core to the Marxist project right from the start, flowering in the flaying insults of Lenin and Trotsky, before assuming terrifying dimensions in the show trials and terror rhetoric of Stalinism.

Failures of theory In the last chapter of the section Marx dies, and Wilson is left to conclude that Marx and Engels’s claim to have created a scientific socialism was anything but. Dialectical Materialism only works if you accept the premises of German idealist philosophy. The Theory of Surplus Labour doesn’t stand up to investigation. Their idea that the violence and cruelty needed to bring about a proletarian revolution will differ in quality from the violence and cruelty of bourgeois repression is naive.

There is in Marx an irreducible discrepancy between the good which he proposes for humanity and the ruthlessness and hatred he inculcates as a means of arriving at it. (p.303)

The idea that, once the revolution is accomplished, the state will ‘wither away’ is pitiful. For Wilson, their thought repeatedly betrays:

the crudity of the psychological motivation which underlies the worldview of Marx (p.295)

the inadequacy of the Marxist conception of human nature (p.298)

In a telling passage Wilson shows how happy Marx was when writing about the simple-minded dichotomy between the big, bad exploiting bourgeoisie versus the hard-done-by but noble proletariat in The Communist Manifesto and to some extent in Capital. But when he came to really engage with the notion of ‘class’, Marx quickly found the real world bewilderingly complicated. In the drafts of the uncompleted later volumes of Capital, only one fragment tries to address the complex issue of class and it peters out after just a page and a half.

Marx dropped the class analysis of society at the moment when he was approaching its real difficulties. (p.296)

Larding their books with quotes from British Parliamentary inquiries into the vile iniquities of industrial capitalism was one thing. Whipping up outrage at extreme poverty is one thing. But Marx and Engels’ failure to really engage with the complexity of modern industrial society reflects the shallowness and the superficiality of their view of human nature. Their political philosophy boils down to:

Bourgeois bad
Worker good
Both formed by capitalist society
Overthrow capitalist society, instal communist society, everyone will be good

Why? Because the Dialectic says so, because History says so. Because if you attribute all the vices of human nature to being caused by the ‘capitalist system’, then, by definition, once you have ‘abolished’ the ‘capitalist system’, there will be no human vices.

At which point, despite the hundreds of pages of sophisticated argufying, you have to question validity of the Marxist conception of both the ‘Dialectic’ and of ‘History’ as anything like viable explanations of what we know about human nature.

Marx’s enduring contribution to human understanding was to create a wide-ranging intellectual, economic and cultural framework for the sophisticated analysis of the development and impact of industrial capitalism which can still, in outline, be applied to many societies today.

But the prescriptive part of the theory, the bit which claimed that capitalism would, any day now, give rise inevitably and unstoppably to the overthrow of the capitalist system, well – look around you. Look at the device you’re reading this on – the latest in a long line of consumer goods which have enriched the lives of hundreds of millions of ‘ordinary’ people around the world (the telephone, cheap cars, fridges, washing machines, tumble dryers, microwaves, radios, televisions, record players, portable computers, smart phones) invented and perfected under the entirely capitalist system of America which – despite a century of hopeful prophecies by left-wingers – shows no signs of ceasing to be the richest, most advanced and most powerful nation on earth.

As so many people have pointed out, the Great Revolution did not take place in the most advanced capitalist societies – as both Marx and Engels insisted that it inevitably and unstoppably must. Instead it came as, in effect, a political coup carried out in the most backward, least industrialised, most peasant state in Europe, if indeed it is in Europe at all – Russia.

Part three – Lenin and the Bolsheviks

The final section of 123 pages goes very long on the biography and character of its two main figures, Lenin and Trotsky. (It is strange and eerie that Wilson describes Trotsky throughout in the present tense because, in fact, Trotsky was alive and well, broadcasting and writing articles when Wilson was writing his book. It was only later the same year that To The Finland Station was published – 1940 – that Trotsky was assassinated on Stalin’s orders).

Thus I remember more, from Wilson’s account, about Lenin and Trotsky’s personal lives than about their thought. Lenin’s closeness to his elder brother, Alexander, images of them playing chess in their rural house, the devotion of their mother, the family’s devastation when Alexander was arrested for conspiring with fellow students to assassinate the Tsar, Lenin’s exile in Siberia and then wanderings round Europe – all this comes over very vividly.

I was startled to learn that Lenin lived for a while in Tottenham Court Road, where there was a longstanding centre for communist revolutionaries. Wilson also quotes liberally from the memoirs of Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, about their trials and tribulations.

What comes over is that Lenin was good at lending a sympathetic hearing to working men and women, quick to make friends everywhere he went. Unlike Marx he didn’t bear rancorous grudges. Unlike Marx he didn’t have an extensive library and lard his books with literary references. Lenin was totally focused on the political situation, here and now, on analysing power structures, seizing the day, permanently focused, 24/7 on advancing the revolutionary cause.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin

Hence his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement addresses the practical problems of the communist movement at that specific moment.

I know a reasonable amount about the Russian Revolution itself. What fascinates me are the dog years between the death of Engels in 1895 and the Great War broke out in 1914. These were the years in which the legacy and meaning of Marxism were fought over by a floating band of revolutionaries, and in the meetings of the Second International, right across Europe, with factions splitting and dividing and reuniting, with leading communists bitterly arguing about how to proceed, about whether there would ever be a workers’ revolution and, if so, where.

Wilson brings out the constant temptation to so-called ‘bourgeois reformism’ i.e. abandoning the hope for a revolutionary transformation of capitalist society, and instead forming a democratic party, campaigning for votes and getting into the national parliament (in Britain, France, Germany, wherever).

This was the position of Edward Bernstein in Germany, who pointed out that the Social Democratic Party was having great success being elected and introducing reforms to benefit the working classes, building on the establishment of a welfare state, old age pensions and so on by Bismarck.

Reformists could also point to the way that the middle classes, far from being removed by the war between monopoly capitalists and an evermore impoverished proletariat, were in fact growing in numbers, that the working classes were better off, that all of society was becoming more ‘bourgeois’ (p.382).

This, we now know, was to be the pattern across all the industrialised countries. A large manufacturing working class, frequently embittered and given to strikes and even the occasional general strike, was to endure well into the 1970s – but the general direction of travel was for the middle classes, middle management, for ‘supervisors’ and white collar workers, to grow – something George Orwell remarks on in his novels of the 1930s.

The vision of an ever-more stark confrontation between super-rich capitalists and a vast army of angry proletariat just didn’t happen.

Lenin was having none of this bourgeois reformism. Wilson calls him the watchdog, the heresy hunter of orthodox Marxism. He turns out pamphlets attacking ‘reformism’ and ‘opportunism’. In Russia he attacks the ‘Populists’, the ‘Legal Marxists’, in books like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908) (p.384).

His 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement attacks Bernstein and bourgeois opportunists. What is to be done is that the working classes can never get beyond trade union level of political activity by themselves – they need to be spurred on by a vanguard of committed professional revolutionaries. People like, ahem, Comrade Lenin himself.

The same thinking was behind the creation of the ‘Bolsheviks’. At the Second Congress of the Social Democrats in summer 1903 some delegates brought forward a motion that the party should let concerned and sympathetic liberals join it. Lenin vehemently opposed the idea, insisting that the party must remain a small, committed vanguard of professional revolutionaries. When it came to a vote Lenin’s view won, and his followers became known as the majority, which is all that Bolsheviki means in Russian, as opposed to the Mensheviki, or minority. But over time, the overtones of majority, the masses, the bigger, greater number, would help the Bolsheviks on a psychological and propaganda level in their forthcoming struggles.

Throughout his thought, Lenin also dwells on the special circumstances of Russia, namely that:

a) 999 in a 1,000 of the population are illiterate peasants
b) even educated intellectuals, liberals and socialists, had been demoralised by centuries of Tsarist autocracy, reinforced by the recent decades of anti-socialist repression (all the revolutionaries had been arrested, spent time in prison even – like Trotsky – long periods in solitary confinement, as well as prolonged stays in Siberia)

The vast gulf in Russian society between a handful of super-educated elite on the one hand, and the enormous number of illiterate peasants sprinkled with a smaller number of illiterate proles in the cities, meant that the only practical way (and Lenin was always practical) to run a revolution was with top-down leadership. Lenin writes quite clearly that Russians will require a dictatorship not only to effect the revolutionary transformation of society, but to educate the peasants and workers as to what that actually means for them.

While even close associates in the communist movement such as Bernstein and Kautsky criticised this approach, while many of them wrote accurate predictions that this approach would lead to dictatorship pure and simple, others, like Trotsky, were energised and excited by the psychological vision of a ruthless and cruel dictatorship. The only thing the Russian people understood was force, and so the revolutionaries must use force, relentlessly. Amid the civil war of 1920 Trotsky found time to write a pamphlet, The Defense of Terrorism, refuting Kautsky’s attacks on the Bolshevik government and defending the shooting of military and political enemies.

What this all shows is how difficult it is for liberals and people with moral scruples to stop revolutionaries who eschew and ignore moral constraints, particularly when it comes to revolutionary violence and terror. The most violent faction almost always wins out.

At the Finland Station

In his chapter on Marx’s Capital Wilson had pointed out (rather inevitably, given his belle-lettrist origins) that the book has an aesthetic, as well as political-economic-philosophic aspect – i.e. that Marx had crafted and shaped the subject matter in order to create a psychological effect (namely arousing outrage at the injustices of capitalist exploitation, then channelling this through his pages of economic analysis into the climactic revolutionary call to action).

Wilson’s book is similarly crafted. Having moved back and forth in time between the childhood of Lenin and Trotsky and their actions in the 1920s and 30s, even mentioning Trotsky’s activities in the present day (1940), Wilson goes back in time to conclude the book with a detailed account of Lenin’s train journey.

In April 1917 Lenin and 30 or so supporters were provided with a train by the German Army High Command which took them from exile in Switzerland, across Germany to the Baltic, by ferry boat across to Sweden, and then on another train through Finland, until he finally arrived in St Petersburg in April 1917, into the political turmoil caused by the overthrow of the Tsar and the creation of a very shaky provisional government.

Lenin was welcomed by pompous parliamentarians but it was to the workers and soldiers present that, with typical political insight, he devoted his speeches. He knew that it was in their name and with their help, that his small cadre of professional revolutionaries would seize power and declare the dictatorship of the proletariat. Which is what they finally did in October 1917.

‘All power to the soviets’ would be their catchphrase. Only time would reveal that this meant giving all power to the Bolshevik Party – leading to civil war and famine – and that, a mere 15 years later, it would end with giving all power to Joseph Stalin, one of the greatest mass murderers of all time.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)

This little booklet is worth whole volumes: to this day its spirit inspires and guides the entire organised and fighting proletariat of the civilised world. (Lenin)

The history of the Manifesto reflects the history of the modern working class movement; at present, it is doubtless the most widespread, the most international production of all socialist literature, the common platform acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.
(Preface to the 1888 English edition)

Layout of this blog post:

Historical background
Marx’s uniqueness
Marx’s failure to complete Das Kapital
The background to the Communist Manifesto
The basic idea
Structure
1. Part one – The achievements of the bourgeoisie and why it is digging its own grave
2. Part two
  1. the role of communists vis-a-vis the proletariat
  2. the future of private property
  3. the invalidity of bourgeois ideas of justice, morality etc
  4. how the proletariat will take over power
3. Part three – Description and dismissal of a number of rival socialist or communist movements
My thoughts:
- the Manifesto’s appeal
- its problems
- its legacy
- what we need today

1. Historical perspective

Utopian dreams of overthrowing repressive social structures go back in Europe at least as far as the Middle Ages. In the 17th century the British civil wars of the 1640s not only established a Puritan republic but threw up a variety of utopian schemes for redesigning society. The French Revolution turned into the Terror, then gave way to the military adventurism of Napoleon, but the ideas contained in its Declaration of the Rights of Man – of social and political freedom – haunted Europe for the rest of the nineteenth century.

2. Marx’s uniqueness

What made Marx’s vision of a free, equal and just society different from all its predecessors was that he based it on a massive analysis of the economic and technological underpinnings of society (of the Victorian society he lived in and – he claimed – of all previous human societies, too).

Previous utopians had based their ideas on moral or psychological or religious premises. Marx claimed to have discovered objective scientific laws of history which proved that industrial societies would inevitably move towards a revolution which must usher in a communist society i.e. one where everyone was equal, everyone worked, everyone had a say in what work they did, natural resources were exploited fairly for the benefit of all, in which there would be no more ‘classes’, in which everyone would rejoice in their work and lead fulfilling lives.

Marx thought it was inevitable because all capitalist economies tend towards the formation of monopolies: companies buy other companies, deploy economies of scale and pay, get bigger, buy out other companies – think of American multinationals, Google, Microsoft, Unilever, Monsanto. Meanwhile the workers in these ever-larger concerns get more and more value squeezed out of them, getting poorer while company shareholders get richer. As the workers approach closer and closer to the condition of slaves, the owning bourgeoisie become more and more rich.

Marx thought this unavoidable tendency in all capitalist systems for the concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, while more and more people join the ranks of the immiserated proletariat, was leading to a society divided ever more sharply into two opposing camps – a shrinking bourgeoisie and a growing proletariat. The size and misery of the proletariat could only be contained by the various lackeys of the system – the police, law courts, the fig leaf of ‘parliamentary democracy’ and all the other phoney frontages of bourgeois society.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses this distinct feature: it has simplified 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.

Eventually, by sheer weight of numbers, it dawns on the proletariat that they have it in their own hands to rise up at ‘the decisive hour’, to overthrow the system, to eliminate the hated bourgeoisie, to seize control of the means of production and distribution, and to usher in the great day of universal freedom. Everything will be owned by ‘the people’ who will all have a say in how things are made and distributed.

3. Marx’s failure to complete Das Kapital

Marx spent thirty years sitting in the British Library getting haemorrhoids in the effort to flesh out his new theory of capitalism, with the aim of making it incontrovertible, unanswerable, irrefutable – a task he found, in the end, impossible.

The publication of volume one of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy in 1867 made Marx the foremost socialist thinker of the age – nobody could match its enormous erudition and its tremendous insights into the actual practical working of the capitalist economy. But despite all those hours in the library, he never completed volumes two or three before he died in 1883. It is important to realise that his life’s work as a scholar and theorist was left incomplete.

4. Background to the Communist Manifesto

Luckily for the general reader, a generation earlier he had produced a pop version of his ideas, in the form of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. The Communist Manifesto has been reprinted countless times over the decades since and became the single most accessible work by Marx,

It was published early in 1848. This was the year which saw political uprisings all across Europe. Young Karl was just 30 and deeply involved in European revolutionary politics. The manifesto was written to explain the programme of a new party, the Communist League. This had been established on June 1, 1847 in London by a merger of ‘The League of the Just’, headed by Karl Schapper and ‘the Communist Correspondence Committee of Brussels’, which was headed by Karl and his close friend and collaborator, Frederick Engels.

(A key characteristic of communist movements throughout the ages is the way they have always been divided into hundreds of groups on the left, which merge, splinter and fight each other like ferrets in a sack to promote their own special and uniquely correct view of the revolution. Left-wing politics has always been highly fissile. Thus a good deal of Marx and Engel’s best works were written not to attack the Bourgeoisie but to attack fellow socialists, Engels’s most influential work – Socialism Scientific and Utopian – was written for just this purpose, to rubbish all other flavours of socialism and communism and assert Marx’s vision as uniquely scientific and objective. The arcane in-fighting of left-wing groups in the 1840s and 50s prefigure the way that 20th century communist dictators like Stalin and Mao ended up putting so many of their own colleagues on trial. Communism is a radically unstable idea which, however, can tolerate no deviations from a very strict party line. The more you ponder this basic fact, the more you realise that it is an almost inevitable recipe for repression.)

5. Summary of the central idea

Less than thirty pages long, the Manifesto of the Communist Party was mostly the work of Karl, as he came up to his thirtieth birthday. The basic idea is simple.

The proposition is this: That in every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which it is built up, and from that alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch;

that consequently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes;

that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class – the proletariat – cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class – the bourgeoisie – without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinction, and class struggles. (from Engels’s preface to the English edition of the Communist Manifesto, 1888)

6. Structure of the Communist Manifesto

Before we proceed, let’s be clear about terminology.

By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labour. By proletariat, the class of modern wage labourers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour power in order to live. (Engles 1888 note to the main text)

The Communist Manifesto is divided into three parts:

1. Bourgeois and Proletarians
2. Proletarians and Communists
3. Socialist and Communist Literature

1. Part one – Bourgeois and Proletarians

Part one is in many ways the most inspirational and enjoyable part, a sustained hymn to the startling achievements of the new Victorian bourgeoisie, to the:

industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

I’m not the first person to point out that although Karl said the bourgeoisie were wicked appropriators of the wealth created by other men, although they had overthrown all previous social relationships, reduced the family to organised prostitution, enslaved millions, and thrown their poisonous tentacles right round the world in search of profit – Karl can’t help being excited and enthused by their astonishing achievements.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.

It has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.

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, canalisation 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?

Impressive stuff, eh? Nonetheless, we need to hate the bourgeoisie. Why?

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. 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, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured 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 labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

Marx says the modern industrial bourgeoisie has introduced a permanent sense of change, of unsettled and ever-speeding novelty into society, due to its need to continually disrupt and revolutionise the means of production, in order to invent new ways to make a profit.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising 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 form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. 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 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 endlessness of bourgeois rapacity has led it to spread its tentacles over the face of the earth, creating empires of exploitation to further its lust for profit.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

But this energy is creating its own nemesis.

The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But 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 modern working class – the proletarians.

Repeatedly, Marx asserts that this pattern – ‘the wheel of history’ – is inevitable and unstoppable.

The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.

The proletariat is the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. Crucially, the proletariat is a class like no other in history because it contains all that is best in the entire history of humanity: its victory will be the victory of humanity.

All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air.

It is an immensely powerful vision, combining a thrilling overview of all human history, with devastatingly accurate insights into the nature of contemporary social and economic change, and an inspirational prophecy of the end of all conflict and the advent of a fair and just golden age.

Part two – Proletarians and Communists

Part two addresses a number of distinct issues, among them the role of the communist party, the future of private property, and the precise nature of the revolution.

The relationship of the communists to the Proletariat A dicey subject because it becomes clear that the Proletariat needed to be wakened from their slumber and roused on to the barricades by thinkers, writers and activists who were, ahem, unfortunately, of bourgeois origin. Karl explains it thus:

Just as, therefore, at an earlier period, a section of the nobility went over to the bourgeoisie, so now a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.

Raised themselves, in other words, to the lofty eminence of agreeing with Karl and Frederick’s theories! Knowing that he’s tackling a slightly embarrassing and touchy problem (if the rise of the Proletariat is so inevitable, why should they need the help of any members of the bourgeoisie?), this section is more programmatic and dogmatic than the more thrillingly rhetorical tone of part one.

In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties. They have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mould the proletarian movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only: 1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.

‘They have the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.’ This claim to a uniquely privileged understanding of History would underpin the idea of a vanguard communist party until, in Lenin’s hands, it formed the basis of a ruthless dictatorship, which, in turn, gave rise to Stalin whose techniques of central control by terror were copied by Mao and numerous other, lesser, communist dictators.

Because it follows from what Marx says that, if the leaders of the Communist party are the only ones gifted with this special understanding of History, then any deviation or dissent from their views must by definition be an attack on the Course of History itself, a kind of blasphemy against the Unstoppable March of the Proletariat, and must be dealt with ruthlessly because it threatens to derail the Forward march of History.

Fortunately, Russia had a lot of empty sub-Arctic territory where anyone who questioned the party’s ‘clear understanding of the line of march’ could be sent for re-education.

But Karl spends less time on this issue than on the fate of private property.

The communists want to abolish private property, and Karl’s arguments explaining why include an enormously important idea. He says that the kind of property he wants to abolish is only bourgeois property, the kind built up by expropriating the labour of the slaving proletariat – and that all the philosophy, morality, legal and cultural arguments any of his opponents bring against this proposal are bourgeois ideas of philosophy, law, morality and culture and therefore invalid.

There are two points here, one about property, two about the complete invalidity of all ideas derived from the bourgeois domination of capitalist society, which is much bigger.

First, private property. Karl says communists only want to abolish the private property of the bourgeoisie since it all amounts to theft from the slave proletariat.

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.

What about the property of the non-bourgeoisie? Should they be worried about having it confiscated?

Here Karl resorts to some shifty arguments. He claims that the small peasant and petty artisans needn’t worry about having their property taken away because they have no property anyway. We day by day watch the monster squid bourgeoisie confiscate everyone’s property and so – the small peasant and petty artisan have no property to lose. (The only problem with this line of argument being that, of course they did.) Marx claims that a working definition of the proletariat – which he claims makes up nine-tenths of the population – is that they own nothing except their labour which they sell like slaves to the bourgeoisie.

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.

Therefore, according to Karl, abolishing private property cannot hurt the workers or artisans or peasants because they have no property to ban. Only the bourgeoisie have property and since it is all the result of slave labour and therefore criminal, it is perfectly fair to confiscate it. All property must be confiscated by the revolutionary class, prior to redistribution.

This is a good example of the way Marx’s background in German philosophy blinds him to reality. He is used to dealing with Hegelian concepts which are neat and tidy. You can hear the conceptual tidiness in these ideas: the proletariat, artisans and peasants own nothing; only the bourgeoisie own anything; the bourgeoisie’s possessions are acquired through exploitation; therefore, it can all be confiscated by the new revolutionary communist government with a clear conscience.

Slick and compelling, this rhetoric completely ignores the way that peasants, for example, do own things, from icons and family heirlooms through to the tools of their agricultural work, to scraps of family land and maybe livestock.

It was following pure Marxist ideology which led first Stalin then Mao to force through the collectivisation of agriculture in revolutionary Russia and then China, on the basis that the peasants didn’t – and according to Marx shouldn’t – have any possessions of their own, so it wouldn’t matter. But the peasants did of course own all kinds of things, most importantly patches of land on which they grew food or livestock for themselves. When all of this was confiscated from them, they lost all motivation to work hard to grow just that little bit extra for themselves, and if they were caught anywhere doing so they were punished – with the result that agriculture in both Russia and China collapsed as a result of communist policies of collectivisation, resulting in the starving to death of millions of people.

There is a direct line between the conceptual tidiness of Marx’s writings, the rhetorical sleights of hand with which he makes absolute claims such as the peasants and artisans own no property which completely ignore the complex facts of reality on the ground – and the deaths of millions of poor people a hundred years later.

All bourgeois ideas are invalid, nay, criminal.

Law, morality, religion, are to [the communist] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

This is a massive idea, in its way the most important idea of the book.

We may sort of agree with Karl that the history of all previous societies has been the history of class conflicts. (It’s a dubious claim. Just because all previous societies – in fact all human history- has been pretty violent doesn’t prove the class-based nature of these conflicts. A moment’s reflection suggests that most violence in history has been between factions of ruling classes not between classes as such, or prompted by invasions by other groups. Could it just be that humans are violent by nature?)

We may give more agreement to Karl’s idea that the capital-owning class of Karl’s generation had built up huge amounts of money which they needed to constantly invest in new ventures in order to keep the system running.

We may agree that this ‘capitalist’ system had reached out from the cities into the countryside to make production more efficient, and stretched its tentacles right around the world in search of new raw materials and new markets to sell to – and that this process is the basis of imperialism, a process which was visibly gathering speed throughout Karl’s lifetime.

But we cross a very important line if we go on to agree that all the values expressed in a capitalist system are fake and invalid – are only fig leaves behind which the revolting bourgeoisie can do its work of exploitation.

But don’t wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.

Yes, it’s clear that many laws in many societies are passed to bolster the ruling classes. It’s arguable that legal systems of many countries exist mainly or solely to protect the property and persons of the rich.

But to go one step further and to say that the very ideas of justice, law and morality are bourgeois prejudices which need to be abolished – that is a big line to cross, but it is a central element of Karl’s theory.

This section is devoted to proving that all bourgeois ideas of property, of freedom, of law and justice and of culture, are merely the contingent, transient notions thrown up to protect this particular form of economic production, the capitalist phase, and will, like the comparable notions of all previous ruling classes, eventually be overthrown by the coming communist revolution, this time forever.

The selfish misconception that induces you [the bourgeois apologist] to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.

Cross that line – invalidate all those ideas of truth, justice or morality, in fact condemn them for their association with the criminal bourgeoisie – and you are left with no other source of values, ideas or morality except the proletariat whose guides are, of course, in practice, the ruling the communist party, which all experience has shown ends up being ruled by one super-powerful dictator.

The abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

Marxist philosophers have spent 170 years devising ever-subtler refinements on the notion that ideas are produced by the social structures of the societies they originate in, and that all ideas are to some extent implicated or compromised by the power structures of that society, and so the palpable unfairness of Western capitalist society undermines its own ideas of justice, freedom etc.

All bourgeois ideas of truth, justice, law, morality and so on are merely tools and fig leafs for the ongoing exploitation of the proletariat.

But far from the scholarly seminar rooms of France and America where this kind of thing is debated, over in communist Russia and China, this principle allowed all so-called bourgeois notions of ‘fair’ trials, of the process of law, of freedom of speech or of the press and so on – all checks on absolute power – to be swept away in their entirety and replaced by revolutionary freedom, revolutionary justice and revolutionary morality.

Thus, by a grim logic, this ‘revolutionary justice’ tended to boil right down to the dictates of the highly centralised communist party which, in practice, boiled down to the whims and dictates of the man at the top. He issued ‘quotas’ of counter-revolutionaries or kulaks or saboteurs or spies or capitalist running dogs etc who needed to be eliminated and zealous functionaries rounded up suspects and eliminated them, without trials, without evidence, without any help or defence, without any of those discredited ‘bourgeois’ restraints on absolute lethal power.

By ‘individual’ you [opponents of communism] mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Chinese counter-revolutionaries about to be swept out of the way and made impossible

The revolution So how will this perfect world actually in practice come about? How did Karl propose that we get from 1840s Britain, France and Germany to the classless utopia of the future?

Again I’m not the first person to point out that Karl left the nuts and bolts of this extremely important issue extremely vague and unclear, nor to point out that the later revolutions (in Russia or China) didn’t correspond at all with his prophecies. Here’s how Marx describes the transition.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

So the proletariat are meant to ‘win the battle of democracy’ – does he mean in elections? What does he mean? The proletariat will use the power thus acquired to wrest control of capital ‘by degree’ from the bourgeoisie. There may be some ‘despotic inroads’ in the rights of property.

It all sounds like a peaceful if rather coercive process. There’s no mention of guns and street battles and firing squads, of prolonged civil war, famine and emergency measures.

Instead, having won ‘the battle for democracy’, the successful proletariat will then implement its ten-point plan:

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

And then:

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.

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.

By sweeping away the exploitative conditions which created it as a class, the proletariat will sweep away all exploitative relations and end all class antagonisms, forever. Society will become:

an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Again, you can see the beautiful clarity of the concepts underlying this view of the world, history and social change. It is like a set of equations on a blackboard; everything balances and works out perfectly.

The amazing thing is that anyone, anywhere, took such a naive view of human nature, as to think this was remotely possible.

Part three

Part three of the Communist manifesto is the least interesting. It consists of dismissals of everyone else’s visions of socialism and communism, in each case Karl explaining why they fall short of the purity, clarity and accuracy of his own views, and/or how they are merely the fig leaves of reactionary forces.

One by one he demolishes:

Reactionary Socialism
- Feudal Socialism (aristocrats encouraging the proletariat against the rising bourgeoisie, with a secret agenda of protecting their aristocratic privileges)
- Clerical Socialism (much rhetoric from priests about ‘brotherly love’, which in reality serves to support the existing regime)
- Petty-Bourgeois Socialism (a version which accurately critiques the ills of modern capitalism but in the name of nostalgia for old ways of production and social relations i.e. backward looking)
- German or ‘True’ Socialism (when imported into backward Germany, French revolutionary slogans were converted into grandiose philosophical phrases which were taken up by petty-bourgeois philistines who opposed actual social change)
Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism (a section of the bourgeoisie understands social grievances and wants to do everything necessary to redress them – short of actually changing society)
Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism (dating from an early era of industrialisation, various philanthropists judged the proletariat helpless victims and mapped out utopian communities for them to live in. As the proletariat has grown in power, these utopian socialists have grown fearful or resentful of it, criticised it and clung on to their (now reactionary) ideals – thinkers in this area include Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen)

As mentioned above, fierce criticism of all other socialist/communist thinkers or movements is an intrinsic part of Marxist thought right from the beginning, and would bear fruit in the twentieth century in a rich rhetoric of vituperation and, of course, the arrest and murder of millions of ‘right deviationists’, ‘capitalist lackeys’ and so on.

7. My thoughts

Basic appeal

Like Christianity before it, Karl’s scientific communism provides:

a complete analysis of present society
a complete theory of human nature
a complete theory of human history (in terms of class conflicts) all leading up to the present moment
the promise of an end to all sorrows and suffering in the imminent arrival of a Perfect Society
and a complete theory of who you are, where you fit into the story and how you,too, can be saved

And it’s all going to have a happy ending. Karl says so. Science says so. The revolution is at hand. Any minute the workers will rise up and overthrow the hated bourgeoisie. This time next year we’ll be living in paradise.

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilisation and with a much more developed proletariat than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.

The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. (1882 preface)

Millions of half-literate working men and women living in appalling conditions, working seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, were offered a vision that change would not only come, but was inevitable – not only in Karl’s Europe, but 70 years later, across continental Russia, 100 years later in China, and then across the newly independent nations of Africa and South America.

There’s no denying that Marx’s shrewd social and economic analysis, combined with his utopian rhetoric, have offered the hope of change and a better life to hundreds of millions of people.

Intellectual appeal

It’s such a powerful system partly because Karl combines mastery of three distinct fields:

philosophy
economics
politics

For the really well-educated, for the philosophically super-literate, Karl adapted the German philosopher Hegel’s idea of the dialectic to produce a vision of the motor of history. All previous philosophers considered human nature and society essentially static. Sure, stuff happened, but nothing that particularly changed human nature, so a 19th century philosopher could ponder essentially the same questions about human nature, reality and knowledge as Plato had done 2,000 years earlier.

Karl tore this static vision up and said humans are changed by the societies they live in, they are shaped and formed by their society. And every society is based on its technological and economic basis.

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

It hadn’t been clear to previous ages, but as Karl and his contemporaries watched the bourgeoisie inventing steam engines and trains and telegraphs and factory production, they simultaneously watched them taking power in parliaments across Europe (for example, in the revolution of 1830 in France which brought to power the bourgeois king Louis Phillippe or in the changes wrought by the Great Reform Act in Britain in 1832, and so on) and saw that the two were related.

It was clear as never before that political power is based on economic power. And economic power is based on control of new technology. That society changes as its technological and economic base changes. And what people think is changed by these changes in society.

When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

Ideas are socially determined. New technology = new economic arrangements = new classes (bourgeoisie overthrows landed aristocracy) = new ways of thinking.

Human nature is not fixed and static as philosophers in their book-lined studies had always thought (because, after all, it suited them very nicely to think that). Human nature is malleable and dynamic.

Thus 2,000 years of static philosophy are overthrown by Marx’s new dynamic philosophy based on the first, truly scientific understanding of economics.

And both together underpin the new politics outlined above i.e. the inevitability of a communist revolution led by the proletariat.

Like Christianity, Marxism is a belief system so vast and complex that you can enter it at any level – as an illiterate coal miner or a PhD student – and find you are surrounded by powerfully thought-through answers to almost any question you can ask about contemporary society, answers which are all the more impressive because they pull in evidence and arguments from such a wide range of the human sciences.

Problems

The biggest problem with Karl’s scientific communism was, of course, that it turned out to be wrong.

According to him, History was a kind of unstoppable conveyor belt and the most advanced capitalist countries would be the first to topple off the end into communist revolution, those being Britain, Germany and America.

But – despite plenty of social strife, none of these countries in the end had the communist revolution Karl said was inevitable. Instead, the big communist revolution took place in Russia, the most economically backward country in Europe, and then passed on to China, the most economically backward country in Asia.

The fundamental idea of communist inevitability – capitalism at its most advanced must evolved into communism – was categorically disproved.

Walter Laqueur, in his book on the Weimar Republic, says that some left-wing intellectuals as early as the 1920s were wondering if communism would turn out not to be a revolutionary force at all, but to be a centralised social system which would force industrialisation onto backward countries in a way their tottering aristocratic governments couldn’t. That it would turn out to be a form of compulsory industrialisation which would do capitalism’s job for it.

And that now appears to have been the case. Russia passed through a long period of forced industrialisation under a repressive communist regime, and has eventually emerged as a capitalist country. Reverted to being a capitalist country. China is doing the same.

In the Communist Manifesto Karl numbers among the bourgeoisie’s many crimes the way it drags all sectors of a nation into industrial production under a strong, centralised government.

The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.

But this is precisely what China and Russia did during their communist years.

Meanwhile, the most advanced capitalist country in the world, America, went from strength to strength, successfully managing periods of great economic distress (the Depression of the 1930s) to emerge as the world’s leading economic power after World War Two, offering what most of the global population considered to be an unbelievably luxurious and free way of life, and most definitely not becoming a communist state.

Marx’s compellingly scientific vision of the inevitable unfolding of history turned out to be just about as wrong as it was possible to be.

Legacy

If Karl’s idea of scientific inevitability looks broken beyond repair; if his entire notion that the dictatorship of the proletariat would give rise to a classless society looks laughable, since we know it just gave rise to dictatorship, pure and simple – nonetheless, much of his analysis of the social effects of capitalism linger on to this day in the social sciences.

Chief among these I would select: the idea that capitalism must constantly seek the new, new technologies which disrupt old structures, create huge new markets and needs (the internet, mobile phones, laptops, tablets and so on).

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 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 idea of job insecurity. Circumstances have fluctuated wildly over the past 170 years, but we are again living in a gig economy, a minimum wage economy, where many people are being paid the minimum required, with as little job security as necessary, by employers determined to screw as much value out of them as possible.

In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed – a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.

And the central idea of alienation, that people feel alienated from their work, as if they’re making or producing something for others’ benefit, that they no longer in fact ‘make’ anything, just contribute paper, reports, powerpoints or spreadsheets to a huge system which seems to generate vast wealth for the owners of multinational companies or big government departments, but brings no sense of closure or achievement to the people sitting in front of crappy computers all day.

Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him.

Though so much has changed, many of Karl’s descriptions of the nature of work in a capitalist system, and the alienation it engenders, remain eerily accurate.

We need…

Someone to update Marx. Since the collapse of Soviet communism in 1990 the left in the West has been rudderless. Tony Blair thought he could square the circle of being left-wing within a neo-liberal capitalist system with his idea of ‘the Third Way’, which boiled down to public-private initiatives and setting targets in all aspects of government. Bill Clinton did something similar. Both ended up being patsies to international business.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, released from the threat of serious socialist or trade union resistance, big businesses in all Western nations have zoomed ahead with massive pay rises for executives, accompanied by zero hours and gig economy contracts for workers, and the stagnation of pay among the middle management. Lots of people are really pissed off.

A Marxist critique helps explain why and how this is happening in terms of capital accumulation, the way companies constantly seek to casualise labour, and the way capital buys political parties and laws which further its interests.

It also explains why, without a plausible left-wing alternative, the disgruntled populations of the industrialised nations will be tempted to turn to populist, nationalist leaders, who encourage xenophobia, conservative values, protectionist economic policies, but will ultimately fail because they don’t understand the real economic trends underpinning the crisis. Donald Trump.

So insights derived from Marx’s economic and social theories can still help us to understand the present moment. The problem is that the central plank of his theory – the notion that an ever-growing industrial proletariat will become so numerous that it simply must overthrow its oppressors – is no long remotely credible.

Marx has left us the intellectual tools to understand why we are so unhappy, but with no idea how to solve the problem.

Which explains why you read so many newspaper and magazine articles lamenting the end of meritocracy, the rise in job insecurity, the way our children will be the first ones to have a worse quality of life than their parents, the ruin of the environment, and the growth in wealth among the super-rich – you read in papers and hear on the radio the same thing year in, year out — but nobody has a clue what to do about it.

Communism in Russia

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future @ Tate Modern (January 2018) Russian conceptual artists depict the miserable squalor of life under communism
Red Star over Russia @ Tate Modern (January 2018) The explosion of avant-garde art after the Russian Revolution which is slowly strangled by Stalin’s rise to power
Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 @ the Royal Academy (March 2017)

Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum (2012) – how Russia imposed communist regimes on Eastern Europe after the war
Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite (2011) The Russians try to export communism to Afghanistan
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010) includes chapters on the great famine in Ukraine caused by Stalin’s policy of forced collectivisation
Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008) How the Polish army stopped the red Army from conquering Poland
The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis (2005)
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957) Love story set amid the brutal violence of the Russian revolution
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940) Koestler’s fictional account of a Moscow show trial based on friends of his who were tried in Stalin’s Russia
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (1926)
Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel (1926) Horrifyingly violent vignettes from Babel’s time with the Red Army fighting against the Whites

Communism in China

China’s War with Japan 1937–1945 by Rana Mitter (2013) Mainly about Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists but also describes the rising fortunes of the Chinese Communist Party
China: A history by John Keay (2008) includes chapters about the mass murders commanded by Mao

Communism in Vietnam

Embers of War by Frederik Logevall (2012) A brilliant account of the rise of the Vietnamese communist party and its long struggle against the French imperialists
The Vietnam War by Mitchell Hall (2000) How the Americans lost Vietnam to the communists

Communism in Germany

The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016) includes chapters on the abortive communist uprisings in German cities after the Great War
The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1918-33 ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (2015) Essays about Weimar art which make extensive use of Marxist cultural theorists such as Walter Benjamin, György Lukács and Siegfried Kracauer
Bauhaus by Frank Whitford (1984) Includes an account of the communist members of the Bauhaus
The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short by John Willett (1984) A visual history of the German avant-garde, often communist, of the 1920s
The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917-33 by John Willett (1978) Willett a big fan of Brecht, Piscator and other socially committed artists
Weimar: A Cultural History 1918-1933 by Walter Laqueur (1974) includes a detailed chapter on the communist intelligentsia of the 1920s
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946) Grosz was a communist party member in the 1920s. His autobiography includes an account of a trip to Soviet Russia in 1923 where he met Lenin and was put off communism by the atmosphere of menace

Communism in Poland

The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953) A devastating indictment of the initial appeal and then appalling consequences of communism in Poland: ‘Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups…’

Communism in France

The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951) Camus’s comprehensive rejection of communism as necessarily and inevitably tyrannical
Dirty Hands by Jean-Paul Sartre (1948) Vicious in-fighting among communists in a fictional East European country
The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune (1870-71) of Paris by Alistair Horne (1965) details the rise and fall of the Paris Commune

Communism in Spain

The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006) Comprehensive account of the Spanish civil war with much detail on how the Stalin-backed communist party put more energy into eliminating its opponents on the left than fighting the fascists, with the result that Franco won
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell’s eye witness account of how the Stalin-backed communist party turned on its left-wing allies, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, only just escaping arrest, interrogation and probable execution himself

Communism in England

Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945) Orwell’s fable about the failure of the Russian Revolution
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (1949) Orwell’s vision of bombed-out England of the future under a totalitarian socialist regime, Ingsoc

Books & Boots

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The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)

1. Historical perspective

2. Marx’s uniqueness

3. Marx’s failure to complete Das Kapital

4. Background to the Communist Manifesto

5. Summary of the central idea

6. Structure of the Communist Manifesto

1. Part one – Bourgeois and Proletarians

Part two – Proletarians and Communists

Part three

7. My thoughts

Basic appeal

Intellectual appeal

Problems

Legacy

We need…

Related links

Communism in Russia

Communism in China

Communism in Vietnam

Communism in Germany

Communism in Poland

Communism in France

Communism in Spain

Communism in England

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To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson (1940)

Some themes or ideas

To The Finland Station

Part one – The decline of the bourgeois revolutionary tradition

Part two – The origins of socialism through to Karl Marx

Part three – Lenin and the Bolsheviks

At the Finland Station

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Marx and Engels

Communism in Russia

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The Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)

1. Historical perspective

2. Marx’s uniqueness

3. Marx’s failure to complete Das Kapital

4. Background to the Communist Manifesto

5. Summary of the central idea

6. Structure of the Communist Manifesto

1. Part one – Bourgeois and Proletarians

Part two – Proletarians and Communists

Part three

7. My thoughts

Basic appeal

Intellectual appeal

Problems

Legacy

We need…

Related links

Communism in Russia

Communism in China

Communism in Vietnam

Communism in Germany

Communism in Poland

Communism in France

Communism in Spain

Communism in England

Share this:

Like this:

Follow

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