Communist Manifesto – part 3: Socialist and Communist Literature, and part 4: Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties
The following is the notes/text of a presentation delivered by a Consistent Democrats speaker on 25th October. The recording of the presentation and discussion is here
These two sections conclude the Manifesto. And it has to be said that the overwhelming bulk of the real political substance is in the first two parts. So, we have already looked at the most important parts of the Manifesto.
Part 3, on “Socialist and Communist Literature” is very historically specific. It consists of a series of different types of literature of a variety of different socialist trends at this very early stage of the growth and evolution of the workers movement.
Since these are all trends that the early communist movement had to deal with at the time, these are significant, but it has to be said that they bear only a very limited and superficial resemblance to those which exist today.
And they often involve the reaction of other classes to the developing struggle between the working class and early capitalism.
So, Marx and Engels talk about ‘feudal socialism’, which they characterised thus:
“In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus, the aristocracy took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new masters and whispering in his ears sinister prophesies of coming catastrophe.
“In this way arose feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half lampoon; half an echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.
“The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.”
Well might the masses laugh, because … “What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.”
And not surprisingly “they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases”
Then briefly they mention Clerical Socialism, only to dismiss it thus:
“Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.”
At this very early stage, this sounds a bit strange, as many are familiar with the role of non-conformist religion in the later workers movement, e.g., Methodism in British Labour, etc.
But this is at a very early stage, 1847, and had hardly been seen as yet.
Then there are various kinds of petty bourgeois socialism.
The petit bourgeoisie, in various forms, fluctuates between the workers and the capitalists. But
“The individual members of this class, however, are being constantly hurled down into the proletariat by the action of competition, and, as modern industry develops, they even see the moment approaching when they will completely disappear as an independent section of modern society”
And in countries with a large peasantry, like France, such ideas become very widespread:
“…it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes, should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, not only in France but also in England.”
And Marx and Engels point out its self-defeating nature: “This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production”
And yet:
“In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.”
There is some resemblance to this with petty bourgeois radicalism today, though looking not to a previous mode of production, but to a kinder and more natural form of capitalism.
Though again, the parallels are superficial, as this form of petty bourgeois politics did not endure:
“Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects of self-deception, this form of Socialism ended in a miserable fit of the blues.”
Then there was German, or True socialism
This is the hardest to understand, as it seems like an eccentric and sect-like attempt to impose on German society of the mid-19th Century, the kind of political life that existed in France given that feudalism had already been overthrown. But Germany did not have that economic development, and it appeared like some kind of fantasy:
“German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits (men of letters), eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting, that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance and assumed a purely literary aspect. Thus, to the German philosophers of the Eighteenth Century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of ‘Practical Reason’ in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified, in their eyes, the laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally.”
I must admit, that this does seem a bit like reading Hegel, whose elaborate dialectical logic is all worked out without regard for material reality. Marx was compelled to turn his whole logic on its head. Hegel was a supporter of autocracy, though also admired Napoleon.
“To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.”
“While this ‘True’ Socialism thus served the government as a weapon for fighting the German bourgeoisie, it, at the same time, directly represented a reactionary interest, the interest of German Philistines. In Germany, the petty-bourgeois class, a relic of the sixteenth century, and since then constantly cropping up again under the various forms, is the real social basis of the existing state of things.
To preserve this class is to preserve the existing state of things in Germany. The industrial and political supremacy of the bourgeoisie threatens it with certain destruction — on the one hand, from the concentration of capital; on the other, from the rise of a revolutionary proletariat. ‘True’ Socialism appeared to kill these two birds with one stone. It spread like an epidemic.”
It appeared as a petty bourgeois socialism in a society where the aristocracy was still in power, and it tailed after the reaction, as opposed to in France where the aristocracy had been overthrown. It was a reactionary relic.
“It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every villainous meanness of this model man, it gave a hidden, higher, Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing the “brutally destructive” tendency of Communism, and of proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist and Communist publications that now (1847) circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature.”
Then you have what Marx and Engels called ConservativeorBourgeois socialism.
“A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of bourgeois society.
“To this section belong economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. This form of socialism has, moreover, been worked out into complete systems.”
They mentioned Proudhon and his Philosophy of Poverty.
I suppose you could view this as the ancestor of bourgeois reformism generally. Though they treat it as fatuous:
“It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class”
Then we have Critical Utopian Socialism and Communism. M&E take this more seriously, as a forerunner of a more powerful workers’ movement.
“The first direct attempts of the proletariat to attain its own ends, made in times of universal excitement, when feudal society was being overthrown, necessarily failed, owing to the then undeveloped state of the proletariat, as well as to the absence of the economic conditions for its emancipation, conditions that had yet to be produced, and could be produced by the impending bourgeois epoch alone. The revolutionary literature that accompanied these first movements of the proletariat had necessarily a reactionary character. It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.”
The Socialist and Communist systems, properly so called, those of Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period, described above, of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie.
They noted what was common to all these systems – the attempt to invent a system that can ‘solve’ the class struggle:
“Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat to an organisation of society especially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.”
But this really flows from “The undeveloped state of the class struggle”, and results in a situation where: “Socialists of this kind … consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms”
However, at that point, it could not really be otherwise, because these concepts came into being when:
“… the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.
M&E are not dismissive of the utopians though, because:
“…these Socialist and Communist publications contain also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence, they are full of the most valuable materials for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them — such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the function of the state into a mere superintendence of production — all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping up, and which, in these publications, are recognised in their earliest indistinct and undefined forms only”
And they note the paradox:
“The significance of Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism bears an inverse relation to historical development. In proportion as the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this fantastic standing apart from the contest, these fantastic attacks on it, lose all practical value and all theoretical justification. Therefore, although the originators of these systems were, in many respects, revolutionary, their disciples have, in every case, formed mere reactionary sects. They hold fast by the original views of their masters, in opposition to the progressive historical development of the proletariat.”
Therefore, they underline their nature as a sectarian expression of a movement that has not yet found its feet. And indeed, the utopians fear it doing so:
They, therefore, violently oppose all political action on the part of the working class; such action, according to them, can only result from blind unbelief in the new Gospel.
The Owenites in England, and the Fourierists in France, respectively, oppose the Chartists and the Réformistes.”
From there, we go onto the final section of the Manifesto: Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties, which is very short.
It really reiterates what Marx and Engels said earlier, that the communists fight for immediate demands of the class, but always keep in mind its historic interests:
“The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. In France, the Communists ally with the Social-Democrats against the conservative and radical bourgeoisie, reserving, however, the right to take up a critical position in regard to phases and illusions traditionally handed down from the great Revolution.”
And it goes through how they work with other parties in Switzerland and Poland, as examples.
But Germany was central; the approach of the revolution of 1848 was apparent in 1847
“In Germany, they fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie.
But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat… in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin.
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 … 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.”
And thus, the Manifesto concludes:
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!
