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with their somewhat Utopian notions of 'community of goods' were set aside and the aims of the League were proclaimed as 'the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the domination of the proletariat, the abolition of the old bourgeois society based on class antagonisms, and the establishment of a new society without classes and without private property'.131 At the end of the congress Marx and Engels were given the task of writing a Manifesto to publicise the doctrines of the League. There are no surviving records of these discussions, but the following vivid description of the impression made by Marx at that time was written much later by Frederick Lessner:
Marx was then still a young man, about 28 years old, but he greatly impressed us all. He was of medium height, broad-shouldered, powerful in build, and vigorous in his movements. His forehead was high and finely shaped, his hair thick and pitch-black, his gaze piercing. His mouth already had the sarcastic curl that his opponents feared so much. Marx was a born leader of the people. His speech was brief, convincing and compelling in its logic. He never said a superfluous word; every sentence contained an idea and every idea was an essential link in the chain of his argument. Marx had nothing of the dreamer about him. The more I realized the difference between the communism of Weitling's time and that of the Communist Manifesto, the more clearly I saw that Marx represented the manhood of socialist thought.132
On his return to Brussels Marx had little time to compose his Manifesto. He immediately began to give a course of lectures on wages to the German Workers' Educational Association.133 Here Marx was chiefly concerned to go beyond the idea of capital as simply composed of raw materials, instruments of production, and so forth. He insisted that it was only in given social conditions that such things constituted capital.
Capital, also, is a social relation of production. It is a bourgeois production relation, a production relation of bourgeois society. Are not the means of subsistence, the instrument of labour, the raw materials of which capital consists, produced and accumulated under given social conditions, in definite social relations? Are they not utilised for new production under given social conditions, in definite social relations? And is it not just this definite social character which turns the products necessary to new production into capital?134
In order for capital to exist there had to be 'a class which possesses nothing but its capacity for labour'.13S Capital and wage-labour were complementary in function and entirely opposed in interest. Although for a time working conditions might improve this only meant that the working class could consider itself 'content with forging for itself the golden chains
1 5 8 K A RL M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y
by which the bourgeoisie drags it in its wake'.136 And Marx went on to issue a categorical statement - to be revised in his later works - that with the increase in productive capacity and machinery wages would fall. In February Marx started writing up these lectures for publication, but was to be interrupted by his expulsion from Belgium.
Marx was also active in the Democratic Association to which, on his return to Brussels, he read the reply from the Fraternal Democrats that declared: 'Your representative, our friend and brother Marx, will tell you with what enthusiasm we welcomed his appearance and the reading of your address. All eyes shone with joy, all voices shouted a welcome and all hands stretched out fraternally to your representative.... We accept with the liveliest feelings of satisfaction the alliance you have offered us.'137 Marx helped to found a new branch in Ghent and was prominent in the meeting to celebrate the New Year where Jenny was complimented on her social capacity. It was on one of these occasions, too, that Jenny Marx refused categorically to be introduced to Mary Burns, Engels's mistress, whom Engels had had the temerity to bring with him. Stefan Born recalled that 'in matters of honour and purity of morals the noble lady was intransigent'.138 He also introduced Bakunin and d'Ester into the Democratic Association. Bakunin, however, would have nothing to do with the League or even with the Workers' Association. In his view Marx was 'spoiling the workers by making logic-choppers of them' and it was 'impossible to breathe freely"39 in the company of Marx and Engels. Nevertheless, Marx managed to get his ideas across to the Democratic Association in a speech on Free Trade he delivered on 9 January (it was along the same lines as one that he would have delivered at the September economic Congress, had he been allowed to speak). He summed up his thesis as follows: 'At the present time the system of protection is conservative, whereas the system of free trade is destructive: it dissolves old nationalities and pushes to the extreme the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat. In a word, the system of commercial freedom hastens the social revolution."'10
Meanwhile Marx had been working on the Manifesto. The London communists had supplied him with a sheaf of material that included at least three separate tentative drafts for the Manifesto. Engels had composed a draft incorporating the views of the first League Congress in June 1847 and this draft was discussed in the various groups in late summer and autumn.141 Moses Hess had proposed an alternative version which Engels ironically described as 'divinely improved'.142 Hess's version does not survive but two 'confessions of faith' that he composed around this time143 show differences from Marx and Engels both in ideas (in that Hess believed in appealing to eternal principles to justify his
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policies) and in tactics (in that Hess considered that the next revolution should be a proletarian one). On behalf of the League's Paris branch Engels produced a third draft of which he wrote to Marx just before they left for London:
Think over the confession of faith a bit. I think it would be better to drop the catechistic form and call the thing a communist manifesto. As a certain amount of history will have to be brought in, I think the present form is unsuitable. I am bringing along what I have done here. It is in simple narrative form, but miserably edited and done in a terrible hurry.144
This draft, entitled 'Principles of Communism', a catechism of twentyfive questions and answers, was drawn on quite extensively by Marx. In places, however, there is a noticeable difference between the optimistic, determinist approach of Engels which stemmed from the Enlightenment and his experiences in industrial England, and the greater emphasis given by Marx to politics in the light of experiences of the French working class.14S Engels said later that it was 'essentially Marx's work"46 and that 'the basic thought... belongs solely and exclusively to Marx'.147 Notwithstanding the appearance of their two names on the title page and the persistent assumption about joint authorship, the actual writing of the Communist Manifesto was done exclusively by Marx.
The Communist Manifesto has four sections. The first section gives a history of society as class society since the Middle Ages and ends with a prophecy of the victory of the proletariat over the present ruling class, the bourgeoisie. The second section describes the position of communists within the proletarian class, rejects bourgeois objections to communism and then characterises the communist revolution, the measures to be taken by the victorious proletariat and the nature of the future communist society. The third section contains an extended criticism of other types of socialism - reactionary, bourgeois and Utopian. The final section contains a short description of communist tactics towards other opposition parties and finishes with an appeal for proletarian unity.
The opening words typify Marx's approach to history:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary
reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.148
i6o K A R L M A R X : A B I O G R A P H Y
' T he present age' he continued, in a passage that summarised conclusions reached in the first part of The German Ideology, was unique in that class antagonisms had been so simplified that there were now two hostile camps facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat. T h e bourgeoisie, from its origins in feudal society, helped by the discovery of America, the development of a world market and modern industry, had everywhere imposed the domination of its class and its ideas. In a wellknown phrase that fitted contemporary France more than any other country, Marx described the modern state as merely 'a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie'.149 Historically, the bourgeoisie had been a most revolutionary class: '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'.150 But this progress had to continue: the bourgeoisie could not exist without constantly revolutionising the means of production. And just as the bourgeoisie had caused the downfall of feudal society, so now they were preparing their own downfall 'like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether
world whom he has called up by his |
spells'.151 For the bourgeoisie had |
not only forged the weapons of their |
destruction: they had also created |
in the proletariat the men who were |
to wield those weapons. |
Marx then described the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. Workers had become mere appendages of machines. To the extent that
the use of machinery and |
division of labour increased, so the wages of the |
|||
workers |
got |
less |
in spite |
of the longer hours they worked. T h e lower- |
middle |
class |
was |
forced down into the proletariat: |
|
The lower strata of the middle-class - the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants - all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which Modern Industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, pardy because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.152
T h e proletariat itself went through several stages: at first their principal aim had been to restore to the working man the status he had lost since the Middle Ages; with increase of numbers they began to form trade unions; finally the class struggle became a political struggle. As the struggle neared its decisive hour, a process of dissolution set in within the ruling class, and a small section (of bourgeois ideologists in particular) went over to the proletariat. No other class in society could fulfil the
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revolutionary role of the proletariat: the lower-middle class were in fact reactionary in that they tried to roll back the wheel of history; and the 'dangerous class, the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lower layers of society',153 was ripe for bribery by reactionary intrigue. Marx summed up this section with the words:
The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their 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, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.154
Obviously Marx was here projecting into the future tendencies he saw at work in the present. In Germany at that time the proletariat in fact
comprised less |
than 5 per cent of the population, and even in England |
the rule of the |
bourgeoisie was far from being 'universal'. |
In the second section Marx raised the question of the relationship of the communists to the proletariat as a whole. T h e communists were not opposed to other working-class parties; their interests were those of the proletariat as a whole. Two factors distinguished them from other working-class groups: they were international, and they understood the significance of the proletarian movement. Communist ideas were not invented or discovered: they merely expressed actual relations springing from an existing class struggle and could be summed up in a single sentence: abolition of private property.
Marx then dealt with objections.
T h e first objection was that communists desired to abolish 'the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man's own labour'.155
His reply was that the property of the petty artisan and small farmer was being abolished anyway by the power of capital; the proletariat did not have any property; and capital, being a collective product and the result of the united action of all members of society, should be owned collectively. Private property was bourgeois property and all arguments against its abolition were bourgeois arguments.
Similarly, in reply to a second criticism he argued that the abolition of the family meant the abolition of the bourgeois family - whose counterpart was the practical absence of family life among proletarians, and public prostitution.
To meet a third objection Marx maintained that the real point about the so-called 'community of women' was to do away with the status of