It is hard to like Marx. His ideas led to 90 million murders, give or take. Whole countries suffered famines and poverty for decades because ideologues thought that the workers’ paradise was one more murder away.
Marx was also a total jerk. His family lived in poverty in a crummy London apartment because he refused to get a job. He mooched incessantly off his friend Friedrich Engels. He spent his wife’s inheritance. He probably slept with his housekeeper and knocked her up.
Still, however detestable he might be, no philosopher has been more important. And despite what you likely believe if you have not read him, few are as relevant today.
The Communist Manifesto
A spectre is haunting Europe. It is the spectre of communism. We communists are everywhere. It is now time to tell you what we think.
I: Bourgeois and Proletarians
Real history is the history of class struggles.
Real history is the story of the rich screwing the poor and the poor fighting back.
Now history is simple. It is two classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The bourgeoisie are screwing us. We are fighting back.
Modern industry is based on spreading trade and ‘development’ through the world. Modern industry has trampled every class other than its own. Now instead of peasants serving kings, politicians serve corporate executives.
The bourgeoisie has ruined the beauty and diversity of human life. We relate to each other as prices, nothing more. We no longer have saints; now we have drive through absolutions. We do not have warriors; we have ticketed wrestling events. There is only one god to worship: the dollar.
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly inventing new means of production. When they do this, they change all the old relations that people had to one another. This constant change, this constant uncertainty, this is what makes our age unique. All the ancient, holy, varied relations disappear. New ones disappear, too, before they can become beautiful traditions.
Because capitalists need constant profit and growth, they now spread throughout the world. Capitalism must spread, forever, like cancer.
This spread turns old civilizations into ‘modern’ civilizations. Old industries are destroyed. Instead of feeding the people who grow it, rice is shipped wherever it gets the highest profits. All raw materials, which once supported local communities and local industries, are shipped to wherever they bring the most profits. Instead of old wants, we all have the new wants. These new wants pull food from the mouths of peasants half-way around the world.
Intellectual products are no different. Bollywood is more Hollywood than Bombay. Our ‘culture’ spreads, destroying the old and beautiful.
We crush old cultures with cheap prices. Even barbarians love Wal-Mart. The capitalists here make capitalists there. The whole world is remade in our image.
Cities swell with slums. The peasants in the slums slave on our sneakers. They are desperate for our work once freed from the idiocy of rural life. The countryside is dependent on the city. The Third World is dependent on the First. The East is dependent on the West.
It cannot last. Capitalism is a monster. It is a Frankenstein. Once unleashed, it cannot be controlled, and it threatens us. It brings crises, each worse than the last. The crises are an epidemic that once would have been absurd: overproduction. We create too much stuff. The glut means that the factories, the productive forces, must be destroyed. There is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. Profit is threatened, so the bourgeoisie drives up profits by destroying capital. They throw workers, already desperate, onto the street. They spread, farther and deeper, into markets that had not been exploited or markets that could be exploited more.
And in doing so, they dig their own graves. The bourgeoisie pave the way for ever worse crises.
As capital develops, the proletariat is diminished. They sell their labour as best they can. Their jobs become idiotic, monotonous, and vile. Their lives are a commodity, to be bought like any other commodity. The worse their lives become, the more profit the bourgeoisie makes.
Work has lost its beauty. Men are now merely part of the machines they work. As the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Workshops become factories. Workers are organized like soldiers. They are slaves, both to their masters and their machines.
When competition drives wages down far enough, and when machines replace strength and skill, everyone can work. All people become labourers. Women and children are pressed into service. Women and children will work for the least money of all.
The middle class, who used to own shops and small trades are forced out of business. Home Hardware becomes Home Depot. The lower-middle class becomes proletariat. Wages drop more.
As the proletariat class grows, it becomes stronger. The bourgeoisie must repress it. Men compete with men for work. Men compete with women. Women compete with children. The proletariat fight over jobs like dogs fight over scraps. They must. Unions are formed. Unions are crushed. Now and then, workers are victorious… but only for a time.
The bourgeoisie fights itself too. National industries are set against other nations. The bourgeoisie begs for the help of the proletariat. In doing so, it gives the proletariat strength. It gives them the weapons they will use. The bourgeoisie produces nothing but its own grave-diggers. The victory of the proletariats is inevitable.
II: Proletarians and Communists
Our theory is simple: Get rid of private property.
We do not mean the property of the workers. No, there is no need to take the property of the peasant, the artisan, or the proletariat. It has already been taken. Modern industry took it.
We want the property of the bourgeoisie. If you are bourgeoisie, you think you have earned it. Nonsense. You stole it. Are you afraid? You should be.
Communists are feared because they want to do away with countries and nationality. The workers have no country. We cannot take what they do not have. There are no national antagonisms now. There is only one: that between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
The proletariat will wrestle, bit by bit, the instruments of production from the hands of the capitalists. Certainly, at first, this will mean that we will seize factories. But that period will be short. In short order, we will beat the capitalists at their own game. We will undermine them from within.
This is what we want. This is how we will win:
- Abolition of land ownership.
- A heavy progressive income tax.
- Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
- Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
- A single national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
- State-owned transportation and communication industries.
- State-owned factories.
- Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
- A more even distribution of population over the nation. An abolition of the distinction between city and countryside.
- Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
When we win, the free development of each will lead to the free development of all.