Group read: The Communist Manifesto (1848)

This is an out of copyright, relatively short text, so I propose to quote it in this thread in entirety, but in chunks that will allow us to comment on details. I am reading the 19th century English translation by Samuel Moore, in a hard copy published by Verso in 1997 (The Communist manifesto : a modern edition), and also as it appears here:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Manifesto of the Communist Party

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have
entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in
power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism,
against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Two things result from this fact:

I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a
power.

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world,
publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the
Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the
following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish
languages.

I've never heard anyone remark on the fact that the Manifesto opens with irony--a joke ("a spectre is haunting...") This amuses and pleases and reminds me that Marx had a sense of humour (who knows about poor Engels, need yet to learn more about him apart from his historic twin).

Hobsbawm notes here how quickly some of the things became obsolete (e.g. the mentions of Metternich, Guizot...)--the Manifesto was written "in and for a particular moment in history" and also--this is I suppose important for science--in an "early stage of Marxian thought".

I kind of wish a spectre was haunting Europe today.

>2 baswood:

I think there's no shortage of spectres! We ARE in a nightmare! :)

Maybe we can go a bit further today... NOTE, 1: emphases in bold will be mine. In general, the parts I'm bolding will be those that I think resonate the most with the condition of our current society. Please bring up whatever I may be missing.

NOTE, 2: the superscript marks in the text refer to the authors' notes. In order to keep the read streamlined, I won't carry those over with the main text, but please feel free to comment on them if you wish (they should be present in all the editions).

I. Bourgeois and Proletarians*

The history of all hitherto existing society† is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master‡ 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.

In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society
into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians,
knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen,
apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.

The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done
away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,
new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, 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.

Incidentally, this (from >1 LolaWalser:)

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in
power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism,
against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

is also apparently one of those eternally true things. As in 1848, so in 2020.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry when I hear types like Obama and Biden get called "communist" or "socialist"...

I wish I could join, but I have too many commitments right now. I'll be checking in to read the thread, though.

>2 baswood: Oh, there is. Unfortunately it's the specter of neo-fascism though.

>1 LolaWalser: I wonder if the "A spectre is haunting Europe" joke is one of the reasons why Ian Fleming called the baddies S.P.E.C.T.R.E. in his 1961 James Bond novel Thunderball when he wanted to replace the Soviet S.M.E.R.S.H. he'd used in previous novels? Which might seem odd because one of the reasons he changed baddies was so he could include ex-Gestapo members and Nazis in the organisation, but this would fit S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and the far right hiding behind Cold War rhetoric: "Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power?"

/tangent

>1 LolaWalser: In further literary trivia I note that the term translated as "spectre" is "Gespenst" in the original, which is the same term used for a Brocken spectre:

"Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa – das Gespenst des Kommunismus."

A Brocken spectre is a phenomenon in which an individual is pursued by his own "shadow", while the head of the shadow is surrounded by a "glory" or refracted spectrum of light, and was an extremely popular symbol in Romantic literature, much of which was revolutionary in various ways (both form and content).

>4 LolaWalser: "two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat."

Social class, of course, being different to ideological identity (yes, I know this gets covered later), which is why so many people are persuaded to vote ideologically against their own class/caste interests.

>1 LolaWalser: Oh, dear, I'm already in trouble. I don't understand why that is a joke--"a spectre is haunting...". What else could be haunting anything? Does spectre mean something other than "spirit, ghost"?

>11 sallypursell: With the caveat that it's impossible to explain humour....

'I don't understand why that is a joke--"a spectre is haunting...". What else could be haunting anything?'

The Communists are referring to themselves as a potential menace in an exaggerated way for comic effect. Communists also tend to be materialists so the fact the menace they've chosen to pretend to be is supernatural, literally something they don't believe exists, adds a layer of additional humour: spectre... haunting... exorcise. And "the powers of old Europe" are portrayed as thinking of themselves as a "holy alliance" which implies they also think any opposition is unholy.

Does that help?

I seem to have misplaced my copy. So I will be sitting this one out.

Greetings, all!

>10 spiralsheep:

ha, I suppose it's inevitable somebody, if not Fleming, would have put his and Marx's "spectre" together, so, yes, I guess?

Regarding the terms "bourgeoisie" and "proletariat"--yes, it's important to note that here they don't correspond to the most common definitions that might leap to the mind of an average "liberal" (in American parlance) today. But as you say, they will be explained shortly.

>11 sallypursell:, >12 spiralsheep:

I don't understand why that is a joke

The authors are being ironic about the perception of communism as a monstrous danger, specifically "ghostly" because it's (like any idea) invisible and keeps popping up "everywhere"--see the immediately following remark about the ubiquity of practice of calling the enemies communists.

The image is a cartoon, a "nursery tale", hence:

II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world,
publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the
Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

>13 Nicole_VanK:

Aw, too bad. Well, there are plenty of free copies around if you don't object to e-reading. In any case, there is no demand to be reading it in order to comment.

Onto the next segment. A bit of potted social history:

From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these
burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising
bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the
colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce,
to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary
element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolised by closed guilds,
now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system
took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class;
division of labour between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labour
in each single workshop.

Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacturer no longer
sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by
industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.

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.

We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a long course of
development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.

I imagine there isn't much that's difficult to understand there? Seems a standard description to me, unobjectionable in general. Then we go on to consider "the bourgeoisie" more deeply, ideas get meatier:

Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political
advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and
self-governing association in the medieval commune*: here independent urban republic (as in
Italy and Germany); there taxable “third estate” of the monarchy (as in France); afterwards, in the
period of manufacturing proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a
counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, cornerstone of the great monarchies in general, the
bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market,
conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive
of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

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.

The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigour in the Middle
Ages, which reactionaries so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful
indolence. 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.

I remember being confused reading this as a youngling, because the rhetoric seemed to point one way and yet my expectations were of something else--for example, it may sound as if M&E were nostalgic for the good old medieval feudal system, which, clearly, NOT.

Today I get that they meant to drive home the objective impersonality and implacability of the process in which the old values were upended and all human relations commodified. There is no "good" or "bad" about it, because they are describing a historical process that could not have gone otherwise (once given the premise of the development of industry and its captains, i.e. "the bourgeoisie").

Anyway, I highlighted what is to me most striking, the conclusion--which I think is visible today everywhere you look in pro-capitalist media--that the sole good and freedom worth having is Free Trade.

It's so significant I'll copy it again:

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.

>10 spiralsheep: I note that Ian Fleming has the Communist Manifesto in his legacy library.

>7 Nicole_VanK: The SPECTRE of neo-fascism goes without saying.

>16 LolaWalser: Ha yes Free Trade does sound like an unconscionable freedom it even has the word free in it.

The more I look at it, the more important bits I'm finding. Underline everything! This for example:

the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world market,
conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive
of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

The main of which would be the preservation of the capitalist system. All the crises we're witnessing are being responded to with weak, inadequate gestures because "yes, but, Capitalism First." Climate change, loss of biodiversity, ecological catastrophe precipitating exoduses and concomitant misery--bad, but not as bad as to warrant capitalism's guards to change their ideas. Capitalism First--the "bourgeoisie" first, and the rest of us can go hang with the thousands of species going extinct daily.

But I digress. Main point: The "modern, representative" State is the guardian of a specific economic system--the capitalist system.

Observation: Perhaps, Lola, you might number the paragraphs (or get html to do it for you) to facilitate back references.

Am I the only reader who senses that M is rather sentimental about the middle ages? I'm struck by his choice of "idyllic". Does he intend the connotations that I bring to the word? (Of course, it depends what the German is; 'idyllic' was a rather new word in English at the time M was writing.)

Would M, I wonder, classify Bezos and the Tata family of India among the bourgeois or consider them the current aristocracy? It seems to me that the executive of the modern state is more likely a committee to serve them than whatever class M would place me in.

>16 LolaWalser: I get that they meant to drive home the objective impersonality and implacability of the process in which the old values were upended and all human relations commodified

I've been reading ahead a bit so I may be ahead of myself here, but I think this is part of bemoaning the loss of the artisan. He sees the old way of someone producing with their own hands something of value which is under their own control and which they can use or sell and which gives them a sense of self worth being replaced with industrialised production in which the labourer is only a cog in a giant machine and whose value is reduced only to profit for the bosses with no inherent self worth. A loss of agency, perhaps.

>15 LolaWalser:

Despite being a visionary he was also a man of his times so he uses the word "discovery" of America without any comment, rather than words such as invasion, subjugation or genocide. He apparently takes it for granted that America is represented only by the dominant white settler culture. As we read on I'll be thinking about how indigenous populations fit into his schema.

Re the "spectre" and haunting, Derrida associates Marx's with Hamlet's.

"As in Hamlet, the Prince of a rotten State, everything begins by the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition. The anticipation is at once impatient, anxious, and fascinated: this, the thing ("this thing") will end up coming. The revenant is going to come. It won't be long. But how long it is taking. Still more precisely, everything begins in the imminence of a re-apparition, but a reapparition of the specter as apparition for the first time in the play. The spirit of the father is going to come back and will soon say to him "I am thy Fathers Spirit," but here, at the beginning of the play, he comes back, so to speak, for the first time. It is a first, the first time on stage....The experience of the specter, that is how Marx, along with Engels, will have also thought, described, or diagnosed a certain dramaturgy of modern Europe, notably that of its great unifying projects. One would even have to say that he represented it or staged it. In the shadow of a filial memory, Shakespeare will have often inspired this Marxian theatricalization." Jacques Derrida Specters of Marx, pp 2-3

>16 LolaWalser:

Re cash payment/cash nexus and free trade: in my reading Marx is both offering an objective narrative of what the bourgeoisie have wrought and a celebration of what they have wrought. The bourgeoisie have simplified reality, tearing away the veils of religion and tradition, which brings "reality" directly to the consciousness of the proletariat (this text must be read in relation to The German Ideology). The bourgeoisie have reduced the complex network of inherited ideas and beliefs to a single idea, free trade, which can be subject to immanent critique; and they have simplified class relations, from the myriad of feudal statuses to the relation of only two classes, the capitalist class and the working class. >21 John5918: Hence Marx's narrative is sanguine about "settler capitalism" and colonialism in general.

"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."

These are preconditions for the emergence of a world-historical class and its world-historical mission of bringing to an end class struggle, once and for all.

>16 LolaWalser: It lacks nuance as historical analysis but works as political polemic.

'There is no "good" or "bad" about it, because they are describing a historical process that could not have gone otherwise'

From which we are also presumably intended to infer that if the bourgeois revolution was an inevitable process then the proletarian revolution was also supposedly the next inevitable process to follow.

'Free Trade': the freedom to exchange your personal value as decided by the 'free market'... but who makes the market and how can it be defined as free.... It interests me that relatively undefined terms such as 'freedom market' or 'freedom trade' would imply very different things to terms that have been culturally loaded over time, such as 'free market' and 'free trade'.

>17 baswood: I suspect Ian Fleming was a more sophisticated reader than many of the fans of his novels.

ETA: I note that many James Bond villains were rogue industrialists not political ideologues.

>20 librorumamans:

Ack, I'm afraid what more numbering, especially retroactive, might do to legibility... how about if I just make sure to quote always the post where a segment first appeared? (I'll edit my post above in a sec.) I could link the PDF I'm using in every post, with the page and para#. Maybe that will work.

Re: "sentimentality", I really don't think that's what M&E felt about the Middle Ages, I think they are reflecting sardonically (same as with "spectre") someone else's conventional view, rather than hinting they thought feudalism was great. Note, by the same token, that the rhetoric they employ in describing the workings of the bourgeoisie sounds very complimentary, and is, in a way--all those achievements greater than the cathedrals etc.

Again, I think it's a question of wanting to stress the hugeness of the upheaval wrought, but one should not read into it some sort of sympathy.

On Bezos etc., it will become soon clear what makes the bourgeoisie in M&E's (Marxian/ist) terms (and those examples ARE definitely that--capitalist, bourgeois).

AFAIK, Marx wasn't very interested in the aristocracy at all, it was an obsolete and disappearing class whose members would in modern times get absorbed, wherever possible, in the bourgeois classes, or, calamitously*, sink into the proletariat.

*There are some cases where this transition was made not just voluntarily but enthusiastically. Kropotkin (ex-prince) comes to mind.

>21 John5918:

A loss of agency, perhaps

I get what you are driving at although I'm not sure whether "agency" is the best term... however, it does bring us closer to what (I think) Marx saw as the difference between the work of a medieval artisan (also employed in an "industry") and that of a modern industrial labourer. The former is rooted in a stable social frame and close to his work from start to finish. The second one is increasingly--famous term by now--alienated from his labour.

he was also a man of his times so he uses the word "discovery"

Yes, and that won't be the only instance where the language--and possibly ideas--will strike us as "old timey". M&E go along with the hierarchy of cultures in which some are civilised and other are barbarian. However, I think there is more nuance to be found in their critique of colonialism (and also no trace of biological racism).

>22 theoria:

Hello, hello, hello!!

Derrida makes me feel like a bear of very little brain indeed but I love that you're introducing that stuff--I don't want to underestimate anyone else! There is something striking and I feel spot on with the reference to Shakespeare as Marx deserves to be read as literature too--I mean with reference to his education (classical), his style (the rhetoric employed etc.)

The language of the Manifesto is literary (literary-of-its-time), not a technical jargon.

>23 theoria:

Great post, thank you, yes to all! That resolves the apparent ambiguity of tone vs. what we know M&E stood for (anti-capitalism and for sure anti-feudalism).

>24 spiralsheep:

Just to be clear, I don't think they are saying the bourgeois revolution was precisely inevitable (in the sense of, say, "fated") but that it is obvious that it happened, and then from that certain other things arise, as, included, does the proletariat's response, yes.

OK, next segment. As mentioned above, I will from now on include the link to the PDF every time.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 16, paragraphs 5 through 8:

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 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 connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

"All that is solid..."--just had to bold that, the essence of our evanescence.

In a word--can you say globalisation? Globalisation of neoliberal capitalism that forces everywhere into conforming to its needs--thou shalt buy, buy, buy... or not exist; and there is no way out.

(As for the world literature--and by the same token other cultural products that exist today--isn't it true it too is increasingly homogeneous, with the differences reduced to "local colour"?)

Oh, just noticed--HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KARL MARX!

>27 LolaWalser: Also the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune and other French communes of 1871.

>26 LolaWalser: 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 connexions everywhere.

For me that sums up one of the key characteristics of capitalism. It cannot stand still, it cannot proceed at a comfortable sustainable level - it has to expand. That might have worked when there were still new nations/markets to "discover" and when our inroads into the earth's natural resources were still small enough to be absorbed without any major global impact, but as we are clearly seeing in the 21st century, this expansion is no longer viable. For this reason perhaps more than any other capitalism is doomed.

I'm loving this discussion! Maybe it's because I'm teaching the Brontes right now but the first phrase, "A spectre is haunting Europe," keeps ringing in my head. Marx is writing at a time when Gothic literature was very much in vogue; novels were full of spectres haunting all sorts of folk. From the late 18th century on, mostly women writers used Gothic conventions to show real world horrors & inequities. So, for instance, in a Mary Wollstonecraft novel, the plot may be about escaping the dark, dank dungeon but the person who put the heroine there is her husband who wanted to steal her fortune. Or in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, the mysterious Abbey's secret isn't a murder, ghosts, or secret tunnels but a patriarchal boor. And in Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the woman in the dark mansion with the mysterious past is simply hiding from a rage-filled alcoholic husband.

So, in starting like that, Marx is 1) drawing readers in by parodying a popular fiction form & 2) using Gothic conventions the way women writers were, saying that capitalism is every bit as scary & horrifying as the bloodiest mystery & at the same time as pernicious & common as everyday injustice & inequity. I never thought of it before & it's brilliant & this discussion is brilliant & thank you to everyone taking part, especially to Lola for really dwelling on the opening.

ETA:
And, then, I just realized, when he comes back at the end & says, "Workers of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains," we're back to the gothic! And the Communist Manifesto, if we heed it & unite, is freeing us from the dungeon of capitalism & its gothic excesses of cruelty. Wow! Just like with novels, reading can save us, if we act upon what we've read. God damn!

>30 susanbooks: Mary Shelley's revolutionary gothic novel Frankenstein has been claimed as (1) the re-membered body politic composed of the type of ordinary people whose graves can be robbed with impunity before their bodies have decomposed versus (2) the controlling manufacturer, i.e. (1) the proletariat revolution against (2) the bourgeoisie. Of course Victor Frankenstein could be read as more of a hands-on artisan than a captain of industry, but that's the weakness of metaphor, lol. Either way, the creature certainly haunts its creator.

>31 spiralsheep: I like it! The monster thus becomes a kind of mass-walking-dead proletariat that destroys everything his creator values while having more of a moral compass than Victor ever does. Victor comes from wealth so we can definitely read him as the bourgeoisie whose cruelty renders them truly inhuman.

>28 spiralsheep:

Indeed! (My main street mask shouts "Vive la Commune!" :))

>29 John5918:

For me that sums up one of the key characteristics of capitalism. It cannot stand still, it cannot proceed at a comfortable sustainable level - it has to expand. That might have worked when there were still new nations/markets to "discover" and when our inroads into the earth's natural resources were still small enough to be absorbed without any major global impact, but as we are clearly seeing in the 21st century, this expansion is no longer viable. For this reason perhaps more than any other capitalism is doomed.

Exactly so, although I worry billions of us will be doomed and done away with way before. And I do despise the wannabe "space" capitalists, so shamelessly eager to export their all-destructive greed to the Moon and Mars, even.

>30 susanbooks:

Parody--great word, yes, better than "irony" (although I'm fond of M&E as ironists).

>30 susanbooks:, >31 spiralsheep:, >32 susanbooks:

Very interesting angle with the Gothic imagery, thanks.

Next segment. Incidentally--please don't ever worry about going back if you wish to comment, add, etc. on something above. I'm just trying to keep some rhythm in posting so it doesn't take forever, but the comments are welcome on any part at all times, going back and forth is fine and expected.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 17, paras 1-5:

The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.

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.

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?

We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.

Into their place stepped free competition, accompanied by a social and political constitution adapted in it, and the economic and political sway of the bourgeois class.

More description of the workings of the bourgeoisie, and I highlight something--concentrating property in a few hands--that is currently very much being talked about, as it's a mainspring of the ever-growing inequalities we are witnessing globally and within individual countries (see books by Thomas Piketty, for example).

More emphasis on the bourgeoisie's revolutionising, destabilising nature: in place of static feudal relations of property, the new means of production introduce growing expansion and competition.

By the way, Hobsbawm remarks on the word "idiocy" here and so may we--in German it's Idiotismus, and closer to the Greek origin as something denoting a folding upon itself, an isolated and solipsistic existence. It's not complimentary but it's a reflection on the narrowness of the rural outlook, not calling peasants stupid.

>31 spiralsheep: >32 susanbooks:

The association with gothic literature makes more sense to me than the one with Shakespeare.

At the end of section I: "What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable."

This sounds like the "mass-walking-dead proletariat" except the proletariat are alive and are burying the capitalists. There's another layer of Marx's storytelling, which is that he expects this outcome to be the result of violence. He's not all that bothered by the violence of colonialism insofar as it accentuates the fall of capitalism, which will require violence.

There's another "haunting" in Marx related to alienated labor and the commodity form/commodity fetishism...

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844:
"If then the product of labour is alienation, the production itself must be active alienation, the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. In the estrangement of the object of labor is merely summarized the estrangement, the alienation, in the activity of labour itself." Marx then goes on to explain the conditions of alienation. "... man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal functions -- eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.; and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal. What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal.... The relation of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object exercising power over him."

This alien object exercising power over the worker, transcendent, and otherworldly, is explained as commodity fetishism.

Capital, volume 1:
"It is as clear as noon-day, that man, by his industry, changes the forms of the materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered, by making a table out of it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than 'table-turning' ever was."

"There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism ..."

More "gothic qualities": the human becomes animal (shapeshifting; werewolves, vampyres); the inanimate becomes animated by unseen forces (table-turning, commodities are like wooden puppets come to life); the grotesque. For Freud, the uncanny is something recollected that was once repressed. For Marx, the uncanny is the product of the capitalist mode of production, an exemplar of civilization, which draws out animalistic and animistic behavior and thoughts (estranges "man" from "himself") and populates the world with spectral forces (commodities that take on the qualities of human beings, in particular movement).

>34 LolaWalser: I was in a class with a prof who wasn't particularly pro-Marx, but whose students were (and who were also "ecological-minded"), go through all the passages in Capital or the Grundrisse that began with something like "Subjection of Nature's forces to man" to draw attention to the fact that Marx was no environmentalist. He is a fan of industrialism for the wealth it creates (technological advance = civilization in French perspective) and for fostering the growth of class consciousness among workers.

>34 LolaWalser: idiocy... a reflection on the narrowness of the rural outlook, not calling peasants stupid

Thanks for that clarification. I had been wondering. I live in a region where small-scale subsistence farming is still a significant (albeit decreasing) activity. I would not think of its practitioners as stupid, but it's true that it can foster a narrow outlook. And equally I would say that alienated workers (and bosses) in the mass production lines can also be prone to a different type of narrow outlook.

>22 theoria: >35 theoria: I think your choice of Derrida quote was very good and that he was correct in that passage. I also think that Derrida is a much better thinker than communicator and doesn't always get his point across.

- Is Marx intentionally theatrical in his presentation? Yes. Everyone with a classical education understands that elite rhetoric looks impressive in the Senate but if you want the proletariat on your side then you need to offer them bread and circuses or at least the rhetorical equivalent. Populist politics. Tabloid journalism.

- Is Marx's rhetorical "Spectre" using the same device as Shakespeare's theatrical "ghost"? Yes. The first time the audience see the ghost/Spectre we're informed that it has already appeared, it already has substance and history and is a force requiring our attention. It's a neat trick, especially if you can persuade your audience to buy into it without too much analysis. Luckily, most people want to believe in the exciting apparition, which is why it's a classic plot device.

- Obviously, where the comparison breaks down is in the detail: Shakespeare's ghost is a king who was murdered, while Marx's Spectre is supposedly going to be doing the murdering of kings... albeit kings of industry. Metaphor is inexact. Which is one reason why elite rhetoric doesn't use nearly as much metaphor as populist entertainment.... >;-)

- So, here we are, in our seats in the audience of history, awaiting the appearance of the Spectre. Is it here yet?

(/are we nearly there yet, mum?)

>34 LolaWalser: >36 theoria: Death is "natural" and I approve of the subjection of this natural force to (hu)man (technology).

Admittedly Marx displays "Idiotismus" about human habitats and ecology and global environment(s) but he didn't have access to appropriate education, much like his idea of "rural" "peasants" (and "barbarian and semi-barbarian countries") who apparently need access to cheaply printed manifestos the internet to bring them up to speed with their more closely networked urbanised cousins, supposedly. Of course China or the Americas for example have proved that rural peasants in feudal-a-like conditions make perfectly useful revolutionaries, but Marx displays Eurocentric "Idiotismus" too. I won't allow ~of his time~ as an excuse but I will allow ~addressing his intended audience~ with populist rhetoric. Mind you, we all know how wrong populism can go....

>35 theoria:

This sounds like the "mass-walking-dead proletariat" except the proletariat are alive and are burying the capitalists.

Er--is this in Marx's imagination, or do you mean now? Regarding the latter, it seems to me that capitalism is burying us all, right this moment, everywhere, with no hope of stopping it.

He's not all that bothered by the violence of colonialism insofar as it accentuates the fall of capitalism, which will require violence.

I'm not sure it's right to say that Marx "wasn't bothered" by violence. He is a humanist whose goal (what he saw as the desirable ideal) was for all human beings to live free and fully human lives, self-actualised, fulfilled, happy. Otherwise why give a damn about the "chained" proletariat at all and pay the price for his radicalism like he did?--he could have easily had the life of a contented bourgeois professor.

As for expecting capitalism not to be removed without violence, surely that's not wrong? However, that was back when the world had revolutionary forces. Currently there are none and capitalism seems poised to disappear simply because it will burn through us and the planet.

>36 theoria:

Marx was no environmentalist.

I think that's debatable. I think a tendency to sustainable existence is inherent to the idea of a contented, full human life, that it goes without saying. So, while Marx saw positives in the industrial development (in the first place as that was a phase preliminary to a workers' society), I don't think we can conclude he'd have been for the reckless exploitation and destruction of the habitats that we're seeing now--after all, that's one of the limitations he sees in capitalist expansion.

I would ask, would Marx be ecologically minded if he could wake up today among us? I have no doubt the answer would be yes.

>37 John5918:

a narrow outlook.

Right--in any sheltered, isolated community, "thinking globally" does not happen of itself.

>38 spiralsheep:

Is Marx intentionally theatrical in his presentation?

I don't know, I think we ought to keep in mind the taste of the time as well. A certain "rich" style, teeming with metaphors, was I think then common even in journalese. I don't see that the style here is particularly "theatrical".

I also don't think Marx is talking down to his audience. The Manifesto was composed on invitation by an organised group of German workers who (this is from Hobsbawm) wanted a policy document. Doesn't sound like a bunch of illiterates who'd go for "tabloids".

It's a neat trick, especially if you can persuade your audience to buy into it without too much analysis.

I feel like the wheels are coming off the car of the conversation about the "spectre". Again, it's just a metaphor, an ironic parody of how the opponents of communism then talked about communism. I don't see who would need "persuading" into what here. That communism was seen as a dangerous ideology by its enemies? Seems legit. That anti-communists frequently, even typically, accused of "communism" anyone and anything they didn't care for? Also seems legit.

M&E ironise about this perception and then go on to say it's high time those dangerous spectral communists spoke for themselves.

>39 spiralsheep:

I won't allow ~of his time~ as an excuse but I will allow ~addressing his intended audience~ with populist rhetoric.

Well, he was both of his time, and as you note, with only such education as he could obtain in his time. I think M&E were quite aware of peasants' uprisings--European ones certainly--but they didn't think of peasants as a revolutionary class. I'm not sure what's "populist" about the idea of more or less civilised or barbarian countries. This idea was taken for granted since the ancient times. But Marx never meant to set anyone against the "barbarians" nor is he expressing some essentialist, supremacist values; to him everyone was on the same path through and toward the same phases of social development, driven by the bourgeois industrial revolution and expansion.

Next segment.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 17, last para; page 18, paras 1 and 2

A similar movement is going on before our own eyes. Modern bourgeois society, with its
relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic
means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the
powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. For many a decade past the
history of industry and commerce is but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces
against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for
the existence of the bourgeois and of its rule. It is enough to mention the commercial crises that
by their periodical return put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time
more threateningly. In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the
previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out
an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity – the epidemic of overproduction. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears
as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of
subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much
civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The
productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the
conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these
conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring
disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The
conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how
does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of
productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough
exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more
destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.

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.

Two things strike me here--the insight that capitalism goes through periodic crises in which each is worse than the preceding. Capitalist system is a highly unstable system that is destructive of both the productive forces (labour) and nature which provides it with raw material.

Secondly, the modern working class (the proletariat, which will be described in more detail still) being of necessity "called into existence" by the capitalist production mode, means that its counteracting, revolutionary nature is equally inevitable.

The proletariat can never agree to a capitalist, bourgeois society, a society that always works toward the workers' destruction.

>40 LolaWalser: 'I don't see that the style here is particularly "theatrical".'

A vote against Derrida from you then. :-)

'I also don't think Marx is talking down to his audience. The Manifesto was composed on invitation by an organised group of German workers who (this is from Hobsbawm) wanted a policy document. Doesn't sound like a bunch of illiterates who'd go for "tabloids".'

I also don't think Marx is "talking down" to his audience and I said no such thing. I do think, as I said before, that his writing demonstrates that he understood populist political rhetoric. I don't think people who read tabloid journalism are "a bunch of illiterates" either linguistically or culturally.

'I feel like the wheels are coming off the car of the conversation about the "spectre".'

Again, I accept your disagreement with Derrida without comment.

'he was both of his time, and as you note, with only such education as he could obtain in his time'

You appear to be making a "he was of his time" argument about Marx. Lol. Rly?

'I'm not sure what's "populist" about the idea of more or less civilised or barbarian countries. This idea was taken for granted since the ancient times.'

Too much to unpack here, such as who is supposedly taking what idea for granted "since ancient times". Fortunately as it doesn't seem to address what I said or what I was responding to I don't feel the need to unpack anything. >;-)

Of course, if I was looking for potential cracks to drive a wedge into then I could probably find some, but I personally find it's usually better not to hammer away at things until they fragment. :-)

Onwards to the next segment....

>41 LolaWalser: like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells

That phrase really strikes me. Capitalism has its own momentum. It's out of control. It's like a large snowball rolling down the hill and getting bigger and bigger, unstoppable until it smashes itself to pieces at the end of its mad dash.

>42 spiralsheep:

OK

>43 John5918:

On that note, I'm currently reading How will capitalism end? by Wolfgang Streeck (Verso, 2016) and the thing I boggle at the most is seeing how people always expected for the whole charade to crash and the scam to end--as Streeck writes, the theories of capitalism from the earliest times, 1800 onward, were "always also theories of crisis".

He lists as people who expected to see capitalism end in their lifetimes not just Marx and Engels, but Ricardo, Mill, Sombart, Keynes, Hilferding, Polany, Schumpeter--a range of thinkers, not all radical or leftist.

And, ironically, the main reason capitalism survived the crises (so far) was thanks to that thing that is such a CRIME when done in a socialist society--state intervention.

But, onward! Next segment: enter THE PROLETARIAT

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 18, paragraphs 3 through 8

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.

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. Hence, the cost of production of a workman is restricted, almost entirely, to the means of subsistence that he requires for maintenance, and for the propagation of his race. But the price of a commodity, and therefore also of labour, is equal to its cost of production. In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increases, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by the increase of the work exacted in a given time or by increased speed of machinery, etc.

Modern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.

The less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labour, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed, the more is the labour of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

No sooner is the exploitation of the labourer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord, the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc.

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, partly because their specialised skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production. Thus the proletariat is recruited from all classes of the population.

So, the labourer, the one who produces capital, is a commodity that is subject to the market forces--competition, demand, scarcity, overproduction--like any other marketable article.

Next, his labour has become mechanized and fragmented and later on, (although Marx seems already to have noted those processes), Taylorised and Ford-ised: the worker is treated like a piece of machinery, his efficiency and productivity computed to some specifics etc.

On the issue of the cost of labour, Hobsbawm notes that Marx later changed this into cost of labour power, in his theory of surplus value. I think I need to read that to understand the relationships here better. Descriptively, I think we can all agree that the hardest jobs, those that entail enormous use of physical energy and/or are utterly monotonous and/or dangerous, are for some reason also the worst paid. I mean, if you could pay any amount of money NOT to have to do some job, what would be the jobs you'd pay the most to avoid? So, why aren't we paying nurses and miners and assorted shit-shovelers millions of dollars?

On the "labour of men being superseded by that of women"--I don't think will get an elaboration in this document, but what I think this means, besides the depreciation of physical labour by machinery, is that because it is taken for granted that women will be (are) paid less than men (and children even less than women), the profit-seeking capitalist will tend to replace wherever possible the costlier labourer with the cheaper one. Which, again, is what happened and, while child labour is presumably forbidden in theory almost everywhere, it's still common to underpay women for the same work a man would do.

Finally, another important insight, which I think may escape us today when we hear the term "proletariat"--anyone, regardless of class of origin, education etc. can be or become "the prole". It's only a question of whether you have to sell yourself/your labour in order to live. If you're doing so, and if being unable to do so would mean hardship or end of life--you're the proletariat.

So there is highly-educated, white collar, even aristocratic proletariat, just as among the bourgeoisie there are children of servants etc.

This is important to note because the so-called "middle class", the liberal nirvana, is eroding faster than the glaciers are melting and, as Emmanuel Todd says, it's filled with fakes--people who are proles but don't know it, refuse to see it.

And if they knew it, if they finally acquired class consciousness, we could start to do something, we proles.

>44 LolaWalser: There's a "crisis" of crisis theory, a perpetual crisis in that capitalism is always supposed to end tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. Marx thought the crisis was imminent at the time of the writing of the Manifesto (his The Eighteenth-Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte registers his disappointment, in a deflective form of satire). By the 1960s, Western Marxists began to use the term "late capitalism." I suppose that today were at the stage of "later" or "really late" or "super late" capitalism. Perhaps the switch to "neoliberalism" is an effort to dig out of the crisis theory rut. But whatever we want to call it, the predictions of the final crisis have all failed, which indicates the crisis prediction business is a scam.

Why didn't capitalism end as predicted? One theory is that Marx did not envision the welfare state or the total incorporation of workers into the capitalist system via trade unionism and consumer culture. Another view (mine) is that Marx himself gave an account of why capitalism probably would not end without some sort of cataclysmic intervention from outside the system:

"And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones."

What distinguishes capitalism from feudalism is a characteristic Marx praises about the former: it never stops developing, it never stands still, it doesn't cling to tradition, it melts everything that is solid into air. Insofar as capitalists perpetually destroy the existing productive forces in order to innovate these forces (from hand looms to mechanical looms, from industrialism/Fordism to deindustrialism/post-Fordism, from a production economy to a consumer/service economy, from fossil fuels to "green energy," etc.), the capitalist system is reinvented and never grows stagnant. Despite the predictions of a falling rate of profit or "more destructive crises," the capitalist mode of production has only renewed itself over the course of three centuries, in part by being a system that lets in just enough of its environment to replenish its energy without being overwhelmed/changed by its environment.

>45 theoria:

the crisis prediction business is a scam

Alternatively, people came to their conclusions about capitalism's finiteness in good faith, because we do all agree that we live on a planet with finite resources, yes?

Why didn't capitalism end as predicted? One theory is that Marx did not envision the welfare state

I dislike talking about "predictions" because it makes serious people sound like Madame Zuleika through no fault of their own, when we are the ones setting the level of detail that was supposedly "predicted". So, I don't know whether Marx predicted "the welfare state", but he actually did... shall we say, suggest... something like it, in that (as I quoted somewhere above, in advance of its appearance in the Manifesto) the masters may yet be obliged to "feed the slaves instead of being fed by the slaves." I'd say that's actually quite a prescient hinting at what we may call "welfare society" today--that capitalism will wreak such destruction on labour, the Powers That Be will find themselves obliged to feed them "for nothing". It's not a coincidence that there has been more and more not just talk but actual social experiments with the Universal Basic Income--and this in capitalist countries, not some commie dystopias.

capitalism probably would not end without some sort of cataclysmic intervention from outside the system

Outside the system? So you don't agree that the climate change is due to humanity's industrial impact, from agriculture to the destruction of the rainforests?

Or that capitalism's very nature is "slash-and-burn" and as such unsustainable, since by any logic on a finite world we get to the end of what we can slash and burn? You don't think that the general failure on part of the capitalist countries (China included) to do anything important about the global warming is proof that capitalism's profit-seeking logic is terminally destructive?

Insofar as capitalists perpetually destroy the existing productive forces in order to innovate these forces (from hand looms to mechanical looms, from industrialism/Fordism to deindustrialism/post-Fordism, from a production economy to a consumer/service economy, from fossil fuels to "green energy," etc.), the capitalist system is reinvented and never grows stagnant.

You mention tools under "productive forces" but you don't mention people. For Marx people were "productive forces", first of all (tools and means secondary). Okay, let's skip the victims of the past, so much human trash capitalism has ground through (after all, so did feudalism and slave societies of the past, right)--what happens to people now, when we got so touchy-feely? We are several steps into a robotised society, jobs-for-people have been massively destroyed and reduced--where do the people go?

According to you, "capitalism" will innovate--but is there any sign of it? On the contrary, there are more signs that inequalities are rising everywhere, the gig economy is wreaking havoc on people's health, even longevity. Have you heard about the taxi driver suicides in NYC? Are they just dinosaurs deserving to die out if they won't drive for Uber?

the capitalist mode of production has only renewed itself over the course of three centuries, in part by being a system that lets in just enough of its environment to replenish its energy without being overwhelmed/changed by its environment.

I don't get that about letting in environment or "energy".

Capitalism or "capitalism", has been supported by the state everywhere and every time it got into crisis. It's not even funny, it's grotesque how little capitalism actually relies on the crap its fans rave about--the FREE MARKET! *creamed panties* RED-BLOOD COMPETITION! *multiple orgasming* and all those bollocks.

But when push comes to shove--and we had TWO major recessions in barely a decade!!!--capitalism comes crying to the Feds to bail it, while people go hang.

And this is supposed to be the system's success story?

Happy Victory Day, death to fascism!... again and again and again and again as long and every time it takes.

Next segment. Proletariat has entered the stage; now we consider its workings.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

page 18, paragraph 9; page 19, paras 1 through 3

The proletariat goes through various stages of development. With its birth begins its struggle with the bourgeoisie. At first the contest is carried on by individual labourers, then by the workpeople of a factory, then by the operative of one trade, in one locality, against the individual bourgeois who directly exploits them. They direct their attacks not against the bourgeois conditions of production, but against the instruments of production themselves; they destroy imported wares that compete with their labour, they smash to pieces machinery, they set factories ablaze, they seek to restore by force the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.

At this stage, the labourers still form an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country, and broken up by their mutual competition. If anywhere they unite to form more compact bodies, this is not yet the consequence of their own active union, but of the union of the bourgeoisie, which class, in order to attain its own political ends, is compelled to set the whole proletariat in motion, and is moreover yet, for a time, able to do so. At this stage, therefore, the proletarians do not fight their enemies, but the enemies of their enemies, the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeois. Thus, the whole historical movement is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie; every victory so obtained is a victory for the bourgeoisie.

But with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more. The various interests and conditions of life within the ranks of the proletariat are more and more equalised, in proportion as machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The increasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing, makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon, the workers begin to form combinations (Trades’ Unions) against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages; they found permanent associations in order to make provision beforehand for these occasional revolts. Here and there, the contest breaks out into riots.

Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few years.

At this point it would be fair to wonder "what union?" (of the proletariat) and see it more as wishful thinking than fact. (Although, from Marx's POV, the Socialist Internationale WAS in the making, and he wouldn't live to see its defeat by the WWI.)

But today, is there any sign that the international proletariat is organising? There are SOME attempts and some organisations with the global outlook but no, there is no union of the Chinese factory workers, the IT support in India, the nurses in the US, the cattle drivers in Africa. All these groups may struggle in the same way, but their struggle isn't "centralised".

And the competition between labourers--which suits the bourgeoisie perfectly--has in many fields become even worse, exacerbated by the modern proletariat's "exportability" of work.

The bolded bit is to my mind another uncanny reflection of our own reality. Despite all the cheering for the supposedly triumphant capitalism since the USSR fell, life has become more precarious for us and the new generations, workers' wages have stagnated while the exploiters' profits and wealth have monstrously increased, and--this is no Pravda talking--even in the US there has been a revival of leftist thinking, including the consciousness of the class struggle.

>46 LolaWalser: I was responding to the title of the book How Will Capitalism End, and your reference to various thinkers who believed a crisis would befall capitalism, by offering reasons why it hasn’t collapsed. I think Marx offers a clue as to why it hasn’t collapsed (the mode and, I would add, the relations of production are not frozen, unlike the situation of feudalism). This used to be called “reading against the grain.” In any case, so as not to hijack this thread I’ll bow out now. Enjoy the reading!

Next segment. The nature and functions of various classes (reminder: we're talking mid-19th century's social makeup here).

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 19, paragraphs 5 through 8; page 20, paragraphs 1 through 3

This organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier. It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried.

Altogether collisions between the classes of the old society further, in many ways, the course of development of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie finds itself involved in a constant battle. At first with the aristocracy; later on, with those portions of the bourgeoisie itself, whose interests have become antagonistic to the progress of industry; at all time with the bourgeoisie of foreign countries. In all these battles, it sees itself compelled to appeal to the proletariat, to ask for help, and thus, to drag it into the political arena. The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education, in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie.

Further, as we have already seen, entire sections of the ruling class are, by the advance of industry, precipitated into the proletariat, or are at least threatened in their conditions of existence. These also supply the proletariat with fresh elements of enlightenment and progress. Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character, that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class, the class that holds the future in its hands. 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.

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.

The “dangerous class”, {lumpenproletariat} the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.

Hobsbawm notes that the "lumpenproletariat" comprised "casual labourers and the unemployed", and that they were very many everywhere in Europe. I suppose the condition of "passively rotting" would exclude anyone from the game; otherwise I'm not sure why they would not be more of a fluctuating pool of working class people. Maybe at this stage it's still too early to notice how precarious is any working class existence--M&E write as if for people with one job for life, in one factory.

Noted: the special and unique role of the proletariat as the only truly, fully revolutionary class. But note again that class borders are porous and individuals can shift between them.

The lower middle class are in possession of some means of production and aspire to more. The peasants are self-sufficient (and therefore conservative, even reactionary), at least when they are not dirt-poor, but peasantry in general transferred in huge numbers to the city and the ranks of the proletariat, so, the generalisation is moot.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 20, paragraphs 4 through 8

In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character. Law, morality, religion, are to him so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.

All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property.

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.

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.

We hear more about the nature of the proletariat, and then its revolutionary mission. On the point that "law, morality, religion" mean little to the proletarian, one must understand those as actual, historical shackles used by the bourgeois state to maintain the status quo. There is no question that there could (will) exist a proletarian law, morality, religion, in a proletarian state.

On abolishing the old modes of appropriation and, significantly, insurances of individual property, that would dismantle the trap by which acquired wealth is accumulated and hoarded by individuals (a process that is ongoing and still leads to the inequality we're witnessing now). By the way, as communism is often caricatured as going after personal property, it's worth clarifying that your shoes, books, Pokemon cards, the shirt on your back etc. are safe from nationalisation--it's the means of production and other elements of the "productive forces" that are meant.

On the idea that a chronic low-grade civil war is already present in a bourgeois, i.e. unequal society... well, depends on one's point of view. The idea must be terrifying to many people, but that doesn't mean it's not true. The question is only when and what opens one's eyes to it. Occupy Wall Street? Gilets Jaunes? Funnily enough, I just saw the other day a confirmation of this view from the Nazisoid ranks of the French army. Of course by the opposing side they mean the Arabs in the banlieues and other such unruly rabble. A class war still, however you look at it.

>51 LolaWalser: On the point that "law, morality, religion" mean little to the proletarian, one must understand those as actual, historical shackles used by the bourgeois state to maintain the status quo.

In modern terms this would probably be "systemic injustice" or "systemic privilege", things which are designed by and which benefit the dominant privileged identity group, whether that be an economic class or some other identity group.

>52 John5918:

Pretty much, I guess. Basically, all the institutions of the bourgeois state (as were those of all the unequal societies in the past, too) are invested in preserving the privilege of the ruling class. I don't think this would be difficult to demonstrate on any number of examples...

Next segment--quite short, end of the first part.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 20, paragraph 9; page 21, paragraph 1

Hitherto, every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes. But in order to oppress a class, certain conditions must be assured to it under which it can, at least, continue its slavish existence. The serf, in the period of serfdom, raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois, under the yoke of the feudal absolutism, managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the process of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. He becomes a pauper, and pauperism develops more rapidly than population and wealth. And here it becomes evident, that the bourgeoisie is unfit any longer to be the ruling class in society, and to impose its conditions of existence upon society as an over-riding law. It is unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him. Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society.

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.

First emphasised bit is another observation that strikes me as current: that the modern proletariat is sinking "below the conditions of existence". Capitalist societies have not only not provided equally, they are providing the proletariat with less and less sustenance while exacting ever more labour.

This paragraph is also where M&E, as I suggested at the start, do "predict", or recognise the necessity of what we call "the welfare state"--where the bourgeoisie, incompetent (and unwilling) to "assure an existence to its slave within his slavery" ends up "feed(ing) him, instead of being fed by him".

Labour competing with labour and the logic of profit drives ever-decreasing worker compensation to the point where labour can't feed itself and the masters must feed them (minimal requirement for existence) lest the whole house of cards collapses. Enter "welfare".

The existence of welfare doesn't change the nature of a bourgeois society i.e. the fact of a capitalist system. It's a wholly self-interested measure that keeps around a class of destitute people because these are essential to the total exploitation any capitalist system tends to. (In a situation where there is no other choice to help the massive numbers of those in the direst condition, no one of any sort of leftist persuasion is against welfare--I'm just pointing out that welfare, contrary to the tripe one hears on the right, not only isn't "communist", it's eminently in the service of capitalist status quo).

See also Bezos and his obscene profits in the pandemic year--ALONG with his underpaying of taxes WHILE his workers had to apply for government aid. But that's how you get to be a trillionaire: it costs billions of people to make one.

That's how you get to be pharaoh, that's how you get the pyramids filled with gold: masses of people must suffer so that a few get to that much wealth. There is no other path to wealth like that of the billionaires but through people's suffering.

The condition for capital is wage-labour, and the condition for the ever-increasing wealth of the few is the ever-decreasing well-being of the many.

Beginning the second part.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 22; page 23, paragraphs 1 through 3

II. Proletarians and Communists

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.

The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer.

They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. The abolition of existing property relations is not at all a distinctive feature of communism.

All property relations in the past have continually been subject to historical change consequent upon the change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, abolished feudal property in favour of bourgeois property.

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.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?

But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist, is to have not only a purely personal, but a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members, nay, in the last resort, only by the united action of all members of society, can it be set in motion.

Capital is therefore not only personal; it is a social power. When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class character.

It's interesting that, according to M&E's vision, the Communists are not opposed to other working-class parties but rather represent a sort of working-class avant-garde, universal (international) in outlook.

M&E insist they are deriving insight from actual ongoing historical process and not, like so many past reformers and utopians, following some (personal) "dream" of a better society.

They point out that past revolutions have upset property relations, and that what distinguishes the Communists is the aim of abolishing bourgeois property, and nationalising capital.

Next segment.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 23; page 24, paragraph 1

Let us now take wage-labour.

The average price of wage-labour is the minimum wage, i.e., that quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely requisite to keep the labourer in bare existence as a labourer. What, therefore, the wage-labourer appropriates by means of his labour, merely suffices to prolong and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal appropriation of the products of labour, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus wherewith to command the labour of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable character of this appropriation, under which the labourer lives merely to increase capital, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour. In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the labourer.

In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And 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.

By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying.

But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our bourgeois about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the bourgeois conditions of production, and of the bourgeoisie itself.

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.

In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital, from that moment, you say, individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you 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.

So true and so devastating it deserves to be said twice:

In bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

We saw yet another proof of this recently when the US Supreme Court extended rights to corporations, deeming them "Persons". But that's just one incarnation of the bourgeois, capitalist spirit, the spirit of total dehumanisation. It may not be the end; there's nothing inherent to the bourgeois logic to stop its exhaustion of the human until the end of everything. Capitalism has no ethics and no morals; it's a machine for turning human energy into profit for the ruling class and nothing else.

The language of the bourgeois is a false, polluted, biased language, the language in which "democracy" can yet mean a land of slaves and "freedom" is gauged not by human well-being but by the capacity of capital to travel. Freedom for money, not people. Freedom for the 1%, not most of us. "Individuality", and even "personhood", for the ruling class, not the proletariat.

Abolishing the bourgeois will restore freedom to the people, individuality to the people, personhood to the people.

Next segment.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 24, paragraphs 2 through 6

Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic mode of producing and appropriating intellectual products. Just as, to the bourgeois, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine. 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.

The selfish misconception that induces you 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. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.

Since LT is now the only site where I participate to any degree in contact with internet strangers, I frequently forget how "specialised" and homogeneous it is. It's a bubble--a predominantly white, middle-class, American centre-right to faintly-liberal bubble. And when I remember that, I wonder how do we, can we, envisage and project a completely different consciousness from that bubble.

From what I noticed, most people who make any effort to read about people in a position drastically different to theirs can go no further than to think some mix of "but for the grace of god..." and "they'd give anything to have what I have, of course".

I mean, this white-middle-class-conservative/liberal atmosphere and pertaining opinions and voting patterns and whatnot are taken for some obvious and obviously right state of things--but...

What if you were an illiterate slum dweller? Or just a poor person, one of the vast majority on the planet that lives on a dollar a day or under. Right, probably you wouldn't be cataloguing limited editions and paranormal romance on LT. Nevertheless, that "you", that person, those people, exist. In fact, there are very many more of them than of "us".

So, really, it's their class consciousness and their values that ought to be the "obvious" ones, it's their experiences that are the norm, and also the standard we should be looking to change, to improve.

Anyway, pointing again that here by property is not meant personal property but such that can and does lead to "subjugat(ion) (of) the labour of others by means of such appropriations."

>56 LolaWalser:

Thanks, Lola, for your bolded parts of the text, and thanks for your comments in this post.

>56 LolaWalser: What if you were an illiterate slum dweller? Or just a poor person, one of the vast majority on the planet that lives on a dollar a day or under. Right, probably you wouldn't be cataloguing limited editions and paranormal romance on LT. Nevertheless, that "you", that person, those people, exist. In fact, there are very many more of them than of "us".

I've been following along this thread, mostly just trying to absorb things. My facility with economic theory is all but nonexistent. I struggle to translate the theory into what it looks like in the concrete.

But I do think I understand the importance of having a sense of agency, of the ability to make choices and exercise some control over your own destiny. Something you can't do easily if you are poor, or sick, or exploited. Which is why a statement like "Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations." makes a kind of visceral sense to me.

In that vein, I decided I would be best off learning about communism by learning from communists. So as I read through Lola's comments and discussions, I am also in parallel reading a book called Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones -- a study of a woman I had never heard of (and why not, given the breadth and impact of her work and influence?) whose whole life was dedicated to the...manifestation, I guess, of communist principles in confronting the multifaceted oppressions she faced as a Black woman in the United States, born in Trinidad, a radical thinker, a feminist, and ultimately a prisoner and an exile since she was eventually jailed, and then deported.

The book is slow going and academic, but the woman at its center clearly burns through:

A pioneer in the fight for the organization of working class women, our Party was the first to demonstrate to white women and to the working class that the triply-oppressed status of Negro women is a barometer of the status of all women, and that the fight for the full, economic, political and social equality of the Negro woman is in the vital self-interest of white workers, in the vital interest of the fight to realize equality for all women.

https://viewpointmag.com/2015/02/21/we-seek-full-equality-for-women/

>58 southernbooklady: Thanks for posting about that book. I have it but haven't cracked its spine yet. You've encouraged me to move it towards the front of my reading stack.

>57 John5918:

I only hope the bolding isn't too misleading, it's just what I notice, but I trust anyone interested has access to the text without such intrusive annotations by other people.

In that particular segment, the bolded bit beginning with "Your very ideas..." expresses what is possibly the most famous bit of Marxist philosophy, the insight that the economic, material base conditions the superstructure--politics, morality, culture, education etc.

Brecht vulgarised it in The threepenny opera as "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral"--first comes the eating, then morals.

In that register I could repeat: what we people with full stomachs think about the proper ordering of society is neither here nor there to those with empty stomachs. Revolutions aiming to redistribute a bit of our wealth look different to the haves and have-nots.

>58 southernbooklady:

Yes, thanks from me too for that. I have a small but growing list of similar books since I began wondering how 20th century socialism, so despised by western liberals, was seen in other parts of the world. What a fascinating figure... (I don't suppose there have been many women in the central committees of any Communist parties.) I'll have to get that.

Next segment. (But, again, don't take these bits as ends of comments and discussion--it's just to keep the copying within reasonable time frame.)

We continue with the list things that would be revolutionised in a Communist society--above, it was production and property relations, the material basis; now come the implications for other social relations and the superstructure, the family, women, education etc.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 24, page 25, paragraphs 1 through 6

Abolition {Aufhebung} of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.

The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention direct or indirect, of society, by means of schools, &c.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

But you Communists would introduce community of women, screams the bourgeoisie in chorus.

The bourgeois sees his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women.

He has not even a suspicion that the real point aimed at is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial.

Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.

Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.

Again a reminder that we need to understand the text in its historical context--the way education was conducted then, who had access to it etc.; or, regarding women, their complete lack of political freedoms, where they were not even regarded as persons constitutionally etc.

Granted that there isn't much here to go on to extrapolate a whole theory of how M&E saw women and their role, I think the main is still clear--whereas to the bourgeois the woman is property (so blatantly that he can't imagine any role for her even under Communism other than that of property, this time "communal"), and nothing but an instrument of production, to the Communist she is neither property nor some exploitable article--ergo, she is regarded as the same as the man, with the same rights accruing to her as to him.

I believe M&E wrote much more on women elsewhere and that that basic statement holds (even if we can't expect them to have developed a feminism worthy of the 21st century's sensibilities in every detail).

>61 LolaWalser: Again a reminder that we need to understand the text in its historical context--the way education was conducted then, who had access to it etc.; or, regarding women, their complete lack of political freedoms, where they were not even regarded as persons constitutionally etc..

The year before Marx and Engels published this, England improved the labor laws to limit women and children under 18 to a ten-hour workday and a 58 hour workweek. That was an improvement over the law of four years prior, where the workday limit for children was 12 hours, but not quite as good as the original well-meaning (I use phrase with heavy irony) Factory act of 1833, which specified that children under the age of 13 should only work 9 hours days, and could not work in textile factories until they were nine.

In our current era, we have a very sentimental concept of "family" that seems willfully blind to just how unapologetically opportunistic and exploitive familial relationships can be.

I'm teaching Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (I think I said that above; sorry for the repetition) & we just went over some stuff on divorce laws in 19th c England. Divorce as we know it -- live separately, women have their own money, get to see their kids -- wasn't available to any but the extremely wealthy & connected until the 1850s and not really until the 1870s. One argument against wider & more generous divorce laws was that if women could get divorced & have the rights mentioned above, why would any stay married? This argument was offered, in all seriousness, over & over, decade after decade by parliament members, social commentators, etc. No wonder Marx saw the family as a problem.

>62 southernbooklady:, >63 susanbooks:

Right, so, there's the shocking disparity in how "family" was seen by the bourgeois depending on whether it was his own or a proletarian family. That period's sentimental projections about what a family is or ought to be that we gather from the literature, the media etc. all come from the ruling class, about and for the ruling class, and they don't extend to the proletarians and their children, who are treated as if of another species.

On the inability of the proletarians to emulate the ruling class in their family relations and sensibilities, the material circumstances that damage and destroy the proletarians' chance at a family "idyll", I thought first again of Martha Gellhorn's reports on the working poor from the 1930s... I can't recommend them highly enough. (I read them in a collection The View From the Ground.)

And again the remark that what is being done away here is a specific form of the thing--the complementary bourgeois/proletarian family predicated on capitalist exploitation and property relations--not necessarily the "thing" in itself. Communists did, would, could have families.

Next segment.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 25, page 26, paragraphs 1 through 4

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

National differences and antagonism between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster. United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat.

In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another will also be put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

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.

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.

When the ancient world was in its last throes, the ancient religions were overcome by Christianity. When Christian ideas succumbed in the 18th century to rationalist ideas, feudal society fought its death battle with the then revolutionary bourgeoisie. The ideas of religious liberty and freedom of conscience merely gave expression to the sway of free competition within the domain of knowledge.

“Undoubtedly,” it will be said, “religious, moral, philosophical, and juridical ideas have been modified in the course of historical development. But religion, morality, philosophy, political science, and law, constantly survived this change.”

“There are, besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.”

What does this accusation reduce itself to? The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs.

But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

First, on the general thrust of this segment--it's the clearest expression yet of the idea that with the disappearance of the classes and the class antagonism, such things like religion and morality would undergo a radical change, not just, as in previous epochs, an "adaptation". Here I feel I should note I have some doubts about translating German "aufheben" and derived terms as "to abolish"--not that it's not an acceptable translation, but that it may not be the best in every instance it occurs. There are many places where I think I would have preferred to translate it in the sense of upheaval, uprising, revolutionising. But, given the age and import of the text I'm sure this was noted in the past--will look into it--besides, I bet M&E were asked about the Manifesto and what they meant often enough in the ensuing decades.

I'd also note that "abolishing morality" may entail vastly different state of things to someone in 1848 and us today. From their vantage point, wouldn't it be true that we have indeed "abolished morality" (and without Communism too)? Just think about everything we do, can do, that would have been not just "frowned upon" but downright illegal, punishable etc. when not simply unthinkable. The last witch-burning in Europe took place a mere few years before the French revolution...

So, I suppose the question hinges on the definition of "morality" here, but I wouldn't expect it to mean every code of conduct, ethics in general.

The predictions M&E make here about the disappearance of national antagonisms hinge on the supposed victory of the proletariat, which as we know, hasn't happened. (Possibly there is no time left for it to happen.)

As much as I regret it, it seems to me that we are in a period of triumphant fascisms--well, "triumphant" in a very limited sense, as fascism only can be, but nevertheless, currently prevalent in opinion and policy.

On the "eternal truths" of Freedom, Justice etc. note again this is a bourgeois criticism being voiced, and just as before with "family" and wife, property etc., the words here reflect bourgeois values, only projected as "eternal", and in no way universal. "The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."

But there is also an important philosophical point to be made here--the revolution is open-ended. Hobsbawm says that Marx didn't think the proletarian victory was inevitable--only that the struggle was.

No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.

I think we can, and indeed MUST, read this as applying to M&E too. They couldn't have known everything about every detail of a proletarian society, this radically new place. (Or we'd really be in Madame Zuleika's embroidered tent.) And they don't pretend to.

Reminds me also of what Chomsky once said in an interview, about being questioned how would this or that thing function, be like in a new society (and Chomsky isn't a Marxist, AFAIK he describes himself as an anarchist)--don't know, don't care, it's to be figured out when we get there, and why should I be the one doing the figuring, I'm a hundred years old.

"The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class."

Here M&E anticipate Nietzsche. I'm not well-versed enough in philosophy to know if this was a commonplace before Marx & Engels or if they were the first to say it. I don't remember Nietzsche crediting M&E. Maybe it had become a commonplace since The Manifesto? Or he just stole it? Or their studies of history led to similar conclusions? Anyone know?

>66 susanbooks:

No idea, do you have a specific Nietzsche reference in mind?

Hoping someone more helpful shows up...

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 26, page 27--end of Part (Chapter) II

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But let us have done with the bourgeois objections to Communism.

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.

These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.

Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. 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.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. 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.
10. 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.

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.

This is the most radical plan conceived so far for instituting justice, or, in a vernacular, for giving everyone the same chance at life, for treating every human being as equal to another.

On the ten points presented here, try this experiment--ask why the opposite should be?

Why should there be private ownership of land? Who decided something like this, for example, is good and right: Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population?

Why shouldn't there be a "heavy progressive or graduated" tax in a situation of unequal incomes, when some people earn ludicrously more than they need (or indeed whole villages, even countries, would minimally need)?

Why should inheritance exist? As Thomas Piketty has shown, this is the main mechanism that hoards wealth in the hands of the few, the driver of inequalities that are growing ever greater.

Why shouldn't property that, worked by many is a means of production, be confiscated and nationalised to serve the many and not the individual?

Why shouldn't banking credit support everyone's interest, and not that of small plutocratic oligarchies and individuals?

Why shouldn't communication and transport, the lifelines of existence, be overseen in everyone's interest, and not that of small plutocratic oligarchies and individuals?

Why shouldn't we cultivate and manufacture in concert with everyone's needs and not merely in the profit interest of the few?

Why shouldn't everyone be liable to work?

Why does a difference between town and country exist? Why shouldn't a better conglomeration, partaking of the best features of either, take their place?

On the point of free education of children in public schools, even the capitalist countries got there... more or less. But why shouldn't ALL education be free, everywhere? It's only in the interest of all society and every member that people be capacitated, given skills and knowledge that enable them to live and work productively and happily.

Finally, that last phrase:

the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

necessitates going back to that "the ruling ideas are those of the ruling class" and what I said earlier about whose consciousness ought to dominate our vision of the world, who is the norm, who is the "representative human"...

Once you realise how caught up we are, how blind to rare privilege, how practically ALL of humanity is actually outside this blinkered vision of liberal/fascist "freedom" (remember that "freedom" does not mean the same thing to the slavemaster and the slave; that "democracy" never meant the same to those it freed and those it oppressed; that "justice", "equality" etc. NEVER had unique meanings for all, the rich and the poor, men and women, black and white), you realise how preposterous, obscene, how false it is to imagine any one of us can develop "free" without ALL of us having a chance at such development.

A society is no better off than is the condition of its poorest, weakest, most vulnerable member. A society has no more freedom, no more justice, no more equality, and no more well-being, than is extended to its poorest, weakest, most vulnerable member.

>68 LolaWalser: The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie

Makes me think immediately of post-apartheid South Africa. The majority formerly disadvantaged population gained "political supremacy", but they failed "to wrest all capital from the bourgeoisie". Economic power still rests largely in the hands of the same people it always did, with a few extra who have bought into that system.

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax... Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State... Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour...

These were introduced in some European mixed economies such as the UK, and were very successful until they were gradually eroded by the rightwards political swing around the time of Margaret Thatcher. Transport is now heading back towards state control after the obvious flaws in the privatisation of British railways. Heavy taxation is still a feature of some Scandinavian countries, where it seems it is accepted and welcomed by much of the population because of the first class services which the state is able to supply.

>67 LolaWalser: I can't remember which book of Nietzsche's most clearly articulates his idea about the cultural construction of supposedly simple, clear principles of "good," "evil," "justice," etc. It would be from his mid-career, I'd think. Anyway, like M&E, Nietzsche said that such ideas aren't constants but are instead reflective of the ideology of the ruling classes; what is strategically good & just for them becomes just plain "good" & "just" for the rest of society.

Freud said he never read Nietzsche bc if he had people would claim he'd stolen most of his ideas from Nietzsche (they did anyway). I wonder if Nietzsche felt that way about Marx. I don't know, this just intrigues me.

>70 susanbooks:

It is intriguing. I suppose philosophical relativism could be said to predate/foreshadow both, but it would be fun to know if Nietzsche read Marx (I just looked, nothing in his remaining library). It's odd, while Marx strikes me as super-modern, Nietzsche is such a crusty old reactionary it's always a jolt to realise, no, he was practically 20th c.

>69 John5918:

Makes me think immediately of post-apartheid South Africa.

It's depressing but apparently inevitable that such a transformation cannot be achieved without bloodshed. And as in every revolution before, there is the question of external forces and the pressures they bring.

We get to the third part (chapter), on socialist and communist literature. Like the next and last one, it deals with such contemporary concerns and references that, Hobsbawm says, Marx & Engels called it obsolete in 1872. Nevertheless, while the actors, parties etc. mentioned may have vanished, and the language itself, concepts of Marxist analysis, changed between the dates, it has a historical interest and helps to paint the context for the Manifesto.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 28, page 29, first paragraph

III. Socialist and Communist Literature

1. Reactionary Socialism

A. Feudal Socialism

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation4, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.*

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.

One section of the French Legitimists and “Young England” exhibited this spectacle.

In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite different and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their own form of society.

For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary character of their criticism that their chief accusation against the bourgeois amounts to this, that under the bourgeois régime a class is being developed which is destined to cut up root and branch the old order of society.

What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat as that it creates a revolutionary proletariat.

In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive measures against the working class; and in ordinary life, despite their high-falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter truth, love, and honour, for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and potato spirits.†

As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord, so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.

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.

The first of three "reactionary socialisms" discussed is "feudal socialism", that of the combined forces of the aristocracy and the Church. Given their desire to return to the ancient order, it's clear that what they are championing is not really a "socialism" at all, that term seems to be used simply as an anti-bourgeois signifier.

And there's the opposition between Christianity, specifically, and Communism--for some people, a question of ideology, for others, of practice.

Wow, again, this really echoes Nietzsche. This time, though, I can name the books: The Genealogy of Morals & the next few after that.

>73 susanbooks:

Cool, that'll be something to compare. Of course, anti-clericalism has a very long history...

Next segment.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 29, paragraphs 2 through 7

B. Petty-Bourgeois Socialism

The feudal aristocracy was not the only class that was ruined by the bourgeoisie, not the only class whose conditions of existence pined and perished in the atmosphere of modern bourgeois society. The medieval burgesses and the small peasant proprietors were the precursors of the modern bourgeoisie. In those countries which are but little developed, industrially and commercially, these two classes still vegetate side by side with the rising bourgeoisie.

In countries where modern civilisation has become fully developed, a new class of petty bourgeois has been formed, fluctuating between proletariat and bourgeoisie, and ever renewing itself as a supplementary part of bourgeois society. 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, to be replaced in manufactures, agriculture and commerce, by overlookers, bailiffs and shopmen.

In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois régime, 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.

This school of Socialism dissected with great acuteness the contradictions in the conditions of modern production. It laid bare the hypocritical apologies of economists. It proved, incontrovertibly, the disastrous effects of machinery and division of labour; the concentration of capital and land in a few hands; overproduction and crises; it pointed out the inevitable ruin of the petty bourgeois and peasant, the misery of the proletariat, the anarchy in production, the crying inequalities in the distribution of wealth, the industrial war of extermination between nations, the dissolution of old moral bonds, of the old family relations, of the old nationalities.

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.

Its last words are: corporate guilds for manufacture; patriarchal relations in agriculture. 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.

"Petty bourgeois" enters the scene. In the 20th century this class will prove an important source of fascist support--one might even see here a prefiguration of Nazism: a critique of modernity combined with a desire to return to old property relations, within a patriarchal, nationalist framework.

Sorry to perseverate, but it's more than anti-clericalism. M&E & Nietzsche & eventually Foucault point out that seemingly constant, solid ideas like "good," "evil," "justice," "beauty," aren't constant Platonic ideals but are instead culture-bound concepts defined by what benefits the ruling classes at any particular time in history.

This realization justifies revolution. If, for generations, people have been told it's evil to disobey their rulers, how freeing to find out evil is just another word for "inconvenient for the ruling classes" instead of meaning "damned for all eternity." Nietzsche got in trouble for just this one idea bc it completely undermines the rationale for European social & legal frameworks. I'm surprised people didn't make more of M&E saying it (or at least they haven't to my knowledge). I'll stop now!

ETA: It's just strange to me that Nietzsche got in trouble for a radical, new idea that M&E had already stated decades before. Again, anyone up on the history of philosophy, I'd love to hear from you! Now I'll stop!

>75 susanbooks:

Please do go on!--this is supposed to draw comment. :)

Yeah, it would be cool to hear more on this. By the time Nietzsche started writing M&E were fairly (in)famous and had gone on to publish tons more, so I would find it odd if, say, he had not at least heard of them and their ideas, or had some inkling about that strain of radicalism in the culture. I just get the sense he was utterly uninterested in the politics du jour and least of all cared for social justice--his stance is one of wanting to go back to aristocratic Greece (the German mania ever since Hölderlin), and damn the slaves. Sooo, I sort of imagine Marx would be anathema to him.

In my view, he does preach a revolution, but it's a right-wing one (and Foucault via Heidegger seems to fit more there than on the left, or at least flirt with it), for the select few who'll get to rule over the beastly masses.

Just my impression, based on not-very expansive reading (as with Heidegger, I keep telling myself I have to make a proper effort one of these days, but I hate them so much... :))

On the anti-clericalism, I think there is a difference in that Nietzsche really hated Christianity with a passion, whereas M&E simply note its time has passed, other social revolutionary forces are on the scene. Christianity was revolutionary under the Roman Empire but as soon as it became "the establishment", it became part of the problem.

Reading this morning Hadas Thier's A people's guide to capitalism : an introduction to Marxist economics (2020, Haymarket Books), I came across a quotation that reminded me of the remarks above about Marx's stance on environment... Thier writes that the deleterious effects of industrial agriculture, such as mineral depletion, became evident very fast and that "Marx was profoundly disturbed by this development, and considered it a breach in the natural relationship of humans to the earth." Then she quotes from Capital:

All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility... Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original source of all wealth--the soil and the worker.

I think some could argue that it's not ONLY capitalist production that depletes the soil, if I recall, say, Jared Diamond's arguments correctly--and if they are correct--according to him, even non-capitalist pre-industrialist societies can exert a catastrophic influence on the environment.

But the main point I'm making here is that these remarks indicate further that Marx's "approval" of the bourgeois revolution and industrial development shouldn't be interpreted as enthusiasm for the exploitation of the environment to the max.

Next segment, about the last of the three "reactionary socialisms".

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 29, page 30, page 31

C. German or “True” Socialism

The Socialist and Communist literature of France, a literature that originated under the pressure of a bourgeoisie in power, and that was the expressions of the struggle against this power, was introduced into Germany at a time when the bourgeoisie, in that country, had just begun its contest with feudal absolutism.

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.

The work of the German literati consisted solely in bringing the new French ideas into harmony with their ancient philosophical conscience, or rather, in annexing the French ideas without deserting their own philosophic point of view.

This annexation took place in the same way in which a foreign language is appropriated, namely, by translation.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with the profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote “Alienation of Humanity”, and beneath the French criticism of the bourgeois state they wrote “Dethronement of the Category of the General”, and so forth.

The introduction of these philosophical phrases at the back of the French historical criticisms, they dubbed “Philosophy of Action”, “True Socialism”, “German Science of Socialism”, “Philosophical Foundation of Socialism”, and so on.

The French Socialist and Communist literature was thus completely emasculated. And, since it ceased in the hands of the German to express the struggle of one class with the other, he felt conscious of having overcome “French one-sidedness” and of representing, not true requirements, but the requirements of Truth; not the interests of the proletariat, but the interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy.

This German socialism, which took its schoolboy task so seriously and solemnly, and extolled its poor stock-in-trade in such a mountebank fashion, meanwhile gradually lost its pedantic innocence.

The fight of the Germans, and especially of the Prussian bourgeoisie, against feudal aristocracy and absolute monarchy, in other words, the liberal movement, became more earnest.

By this, the long-wished for opportunity was offered to “True” Socialism of confronting the political movement with the Socialist demands, of hurling the traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois legislation, bourgeois liberty and equality, and of preaching to the masses that they had nothing to gain, and everything to lose, by this bourgeois movement. German Socialism forgot, in the nick of time, that the French criticism, whose silly echo it was, presupposed the existence of modern bourgeois society, with its corresponding economic conditions of existence, and the political constitution adapted thereto, the very things those attainment was the object of the pending struggle in Germany.

To the absolute governments, with their following of parsons, professors, country squires, and officials, it served as a welcome scarecrow against the threatening bourgeoisie.

It was a sweet finish, after the bitter pills of flogging and bullets, with which these same governments, just at that time, dosed the German working-class risings.

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.

The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their sorry “eternal truths”, all skin and bone, served to wonderfully increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public.

And on its part German Socialism recognised, more and more, its own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-bourgeois Philistine.

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.*

This is anchored in the contemporary scene and hard to make sense of without familiarity with it, so I'll just note that Engels later comments that the tendency was "swept away by the revolutions of 1848".

The main thrust of the criticism is against the idea that anyone but the revolutionary proletariat can effect a socialist or communist transformation of society.

Totally a side line : I live within easy strolling distance from the place where the 1st international met in 1872 (the building itself has long been demolished).

We'll Meet Again

:)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 31, page 32

2. Conservative or Bourgeois 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. We may cite Proudhon’s Philosophie de la Misère as an example of this form.

The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modern social conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society, minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie naturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into various more or less complete systems. In requiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, and thereby to march straightway into the social New Jerusalem, it but requires in reality, that the proletariat should remain within the bounds of existing society, but should cast away all its hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.

A second, and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to depreciate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations, could be of any advantage to them. By changes in the material conditions of existence, this form of Socialism, however, by no means understands abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, an abolition that can be affected only by a revolution, but administrative reforms, based on the continued existence of these relations; reforms, therefore, that in no respect affect the relations between capital and labour, but, at the best, lessen the cost, and simplify the administrative work, of bourgeois government.

Bourgeois Socialism attains adequate expression when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech.

Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Prison Reform: for the benefit of the working class. This is the last word and the only seriously meant word of bourgeois socialism.

It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois – for the benefit of the working class.

Love me that Marxian snark...

This disposes of the notions still held, by the current "benevolent" liberals, that capitalism must be preserved but could be "reformed" or "humanised" or some such. It's all bollocks. Every little victory for the workers in the form of even a tiny bit more humane treatment, a tiny bit higher wage, a tiny bit of security or benefit, was historically every time paid in workers' lives and blood and tears. And to this day, this "reforming" trend is not only barely in theoretical evidence; for at least half a century now things have been getting WORSE for the workers.

The richest country on earth haggles about the extra pennies it would or wouldn't pay its burger flippers. But no wonder. THAT'S how you get to be the richest country on earth--squeeze the burger flippers until they squeak, to every last drop.

Its trillionaires are trillionaires for the benefit of the working class.

Preach it, Lola!

>82 susanbooks:

Almost done... :)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 32,

3. Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism

We do not here refer to that literature which, in every great modern revolution, has always given voice to the demands of the proletariat, such as the writings of Babeuf and others.

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 (see Section I. Bourgeois and Proletarians).

The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement.

Since the development of class antagonism keeps even pace with the development of industry, the economic situation, as they find it, does not as yet offer to them the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat. They therefore search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions.

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.

The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel.

Such fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time 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.

But 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 more 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. These proposals, therefore, are of a purely Utopian character.

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. They, therefore, endeavour, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres”, of establishing “Home Colonies”, or setting up a “Little Icaria”* – duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem – and to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees, they sink into the category of the reactionary or conservative Socialists depicted above, differing from these only by more systematic pedantry, and by their fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.

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.

I find this enormously interesting. It explains what sets Marxian communism apart from its contemporaries who envisaged as an end-goal a similar society, but it also, I think, still speaks to our current situation.

The "utopian" socialists and communists, like Marxian communists, wished for an egalitarian society. The differences arise in multiple points, beginning with; the utopians were "early" and did not grasp the significance and the role of the developing proletariat--did not grasp, that is, history at work.

Instead, their starting point was somebody's personal vision of a just society, a "dream", that was then to be executed in a personal project. Which I guess might work for a God, but is impossible for humans. This type of effort may succeed in creating an enclave, but, as we have seen historically, they are never more than small isolated communities and don't seem to spread nor last very long.

Another difference is the paternalistic attitude toward the proletariat as a passively "suffering" class, that others have to save (as soon as everyone can be persuaded to be nice), while Marxian communism recognises it as the only truly revolutionary force, i.e. the sole actor capable of freeing society.

Of course this is a very general analysis and as M&E note, there were some revolutionary utopians, even more usefully critical ones, and this literature is of interest to the communists of the day.

As for the resonances to our time, there are many, this first bit I bolded for instance (and again that snark...:)):

They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?

and the remarks on how they reject the idea of revolution and hold a fanatical and superstitious belief in the miraculous effects of their social science.

And so we conclude:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf

Page 34

IV. Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties

Section II has made clear the relations of the Communists to the existing working-class parties, such as the Chartists in England and the Agrarian Reformers in America.

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.

In Switzerland, they support the Radicals, without losing sight of the fact that this party consists of antagonistic elements, partly of Democratic Socialists, in the French sense, partly of radical bourgeois.

In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846.

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 the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and 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 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.

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!

That last thrilling call in the original goes "Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!", which can easily be rendered with a gender-neutral "proletarians" or, as I believe later became the norm, just "workers".

This section reminds us once again how much the Manifesto was a document of the moment, for the moment, the workers' revolution so close, you felt its fiery breath on your cheek. But 1848 disappointed. The bourgeoisie entrenched its power, republics went imperial, and empires went global.

Another cycle of revolt building followed, then another, and another... the only thing that is constant is the class struggle.

Proletarians, unite! You have a world to gain.

Pakistani Marxists singing Internationale in Urdu

A few questions for everyone and anyone, and whichever you may fancy addressing

1. If this is the first time you've read The Communist Manifesto, was it as you expected, or did it surprise you in some way? How? If you've read it before, have your impressions, judgements, ideas on it changed in some way? How?

2. Did it speak to some of your current concerns?

3. Did you find its vast and enduring influence/fascination/popularity understandable?

4. What sort of context and regarding which parts or notions would you say is the most necessary to understand its ideas?

Other suggestions for questions welcome, as are all comments.

It is the first time I've read it, I am pretty sure. I might have had excerpts in some class or other, but this is the first full read-through for me.

I found it interesting, although I struggle a bit with the abstract language of economics and politics. And I would get sidetracked thinking about whether or not communism would bring any sanity to an economy where so much is digital, where "nonfungible tokens" are suddenly worth $$60K a piece and yet people are competing in a gig economy to drive people around or do people's grocery shopping or sit in call centers answering helplines for hours for non-livable wages.

But ultimately it seems to me that communism has two goals: an equitable distribution of wealth, and a shift to a society that does not value "wealth" in itself, but a community where everyone is equally valued by everyone else.

The shift in wealth distribution is of interest to me especially right now because one of the things I have been looking at in my anti-racist reading and study is the idea of reparations. Specifically the proposal that the United States should pay reparations to its Black citizens for the crimes committed against them for the whole of the country's history.

I generally come down on the side of being for reparations, in a vague sort of way. But I've set myself the task of forming a more well-considered position. And one of the things I realized, following along with this thread, is that I had been thinking of reparations as some kind of transaction -- some magic calculation of what the country owed each and every one of its Black citizens. As if it could just write each person a check to solve the problem of system racism in this country,

Instead, I've begun thinking about reparations as a redistribution of wealth, and I find that much easier to conceptualize and more to the point, much easier to address pragmatically. There is some controversy here at the moment because something like $5 billion in the administration's current economic stimulus package is earmarked for Black farmers. (White farmers are naturally complaining). But that makes a huge amount of sense to me, because it directly addresses over a century's worth of concerted (and appallingly successful) effort by white people to take land from Blacks.

>86 southernbooklady:

an equitable distribution of wealth, and a shift to a society that does not value "wealth" in itself, but a community where everyone is equally valued by everyone else.

On the first point, it was interesting to me that M&E wrote of progressive taxation of income, which would seem to point logically to a system of graded salaries, and therefore some notion of differing merit. Following that train of thought further, it would seem to imply differences in personal wealth didn't bother them per se, but rather the scale of those differences, and the function they were put to--for example, in harnessing for profit other people to subsistence-level or under wage-labour.

in Looking backward, Edward Bellamy imagined a communistic society in 2000 (he was writing in 1887) in which every single adult received the same salary from the state regardless of the work they were doing. This is not how M&E seem to have pictured their redistribution of wealth.

On the second point, it sounds a little utopian when expressed as dependent on subjective will, but I actually know of a way to get there and that is simply to enable that attitude (and work to disable those attitudes hostile to it).

Don't provide sewers and indoor toilets and people will be flinging shit out of the window. Provide sewers and indoor toilets and the former behaviour will become unthinkable.

How do we get to a society where everyone is valued equally? Value everyone equally: give them housing, food, care, education as a basic right accruing to them. Once that is inbuilt into the system, people will be valuing everyone equally because the opposite will become unthinkable.

I like the comparison with the traffic rules, because that's one of the few universals that exhibit currently this type of development.

We all obey traffic rules in the same way. Why is this? Because we are so concerned with the fines, because we're brainwashed robots...? No; because it's in our own interest. There's virtually no one who would campaign for the abolition of traffic regulation. It's the sort of thing that if it hadn't been invented, would end up being invented over and over.

The same ought to happen to the idea that all people are to be valued equally. The only reason it hasn't conquered yet is that so far in history we have never been free of examples of servitude, slavery, and exploitation of the other.

Injustice makes injustice possible; cruelty makes cruelty imaginable; the myriad spectacles of humiliation of the other that we absorb daily are what keep us from valuing everyone equally.

Sorry, got carried away... on reparations, that sounds like what Sanders was saying: reparations through structural changes. I don't see why not do both, but I'm afraid that would in practice mean that neither would get done.

>86 southernbooklady:, >87 LolaWalser: reparations through structural changes

That type of thinking informs a lot of the discussions on post-colonial reparations. Germany has just this week officially recognised its genocide of the Herero and Nama people in what is now Namibia, more than a century after the event, and is offering USD 1.34 billion "for spending on infrastructure, healthcare and training programmes benefiting the impacted communities" (Germany officially recognises colonial-era Namibia genocide), a paltry sum but at least a step in the right direction. In South Africa, reparations was the part of the truth and reconciliation process which didn't happen, a major omission, but again much of the talk was of improving the standard of living of the formerly disadvantaged community rather than individual cash hand-outs.

Value everyone equally: give them housing, food, care, education as a basic right accruing to them. Once that is inbuilt into the system, people will be valuing everyone equally because the opposite will become unthinkable

In the Global South I would say that the basic rights of housing, food, care, education, plus water, health and security, are seen as being more urgent than the "higher level" rights of free speech, etc, which are the priority in the Global North where the ruling/dominant classes already have the basic rights (even though large under-classes don't).

>87 LolaWalser: We all obey traffic rules in the same way. Why is this? Because we are so concerned with the fines, because we're brainwashed robots...? No; because it's in our own interest. There's virtually no one who would campaign for the abolition of traffic regulation. It's the sort of thing that if it hadn't been invented, would end up being invented over and over.

It does seem like a no-brainer, doesn't it? A very rational approach to social wealth and health. Yet people will plant their flag in a position that is demonstrably against their own interest again and again. Witness, anti-vaxxers. Their opposition to vaccines is largely emotional, not rational. Especially in the middle of a pandemic.

That seems like a flaw in most political and economic systems -- they are predicated on the assumption people behave rationally and predictably, but people frequently behave irrationally and unpredictably. And are thus easily manipulated and exploited.

>89 southernbooklady:

All true, but there are things that can be done to foster rational behaviour regardless of what individuals are like. You make voting and vaccination obligatory like stopping at the red light is obligatory e basta.

The anti-vaxxing debacle is due to the feeblemindedness of the American (it did start in America) idea of liberty. It's why the KKK and the neo-Nazis can march in New York although they can't in Berlin. I have had Americans tell me many times this is proof that the US is "more free" (or just plain "free", whereas the Europeans are all enslaved to the state); no, it's just dumber. Because that is how you nurture the snake which will bite you.

Anti-vaxxers were allowed to bullshit blindly until suddenly the numbers are scary.

Speaking of which, did you see that QAnon has polled as having support similar to that of major religions now (in the US)?

>88 John5918:

Yes, although it ought to be possible to agitate for the essentials while supporting human rights. Misogyny and homophobia aren't filling anyone's stomachs either.

>90 LolaWalser: You make voting and vaccination obligatory like stopping at the red light is obligatory e basta.

I wish.

>85 LolaWalser: I read it before, but that was ages ago (my copy is from the 1970s). Yes, it's still valid in many ways - but I also find it dated (too much focused on white male experience). I'm not really blaming Marx / Engels for that, just like anybody else they were products of their time.

So, yes, still very interesting. A 'founding fathers' document. But we need to to move beyond it too.

I admit, I was always closer to Syndicalism than to Marxism. (But that's another discussion anyway, and I also think we need to move beyond that 19th century infighting).

>92 Nicole_VanK:

It's interesting, though, that regardless of any limits posed by their identity, Marxian Communism and Marxism spread globally. In practice, I mean, their being white men obviously wasn't seen as an obstacle to embracing their ideas. I hasten to add that I don't see this as enigmatic--the whole point of their ideology was an unprecedented promise of universal freedom and valuation of every human being the same as any other.

I suppose that is why Pakistani Marxists (linked above) still exist, why women marxists exist etc.

Speaking of the universal, I've been following the attacks on "universalism" for the last few years (particularly in France) and I think it's important to distinguish between the idea and its various (mis)interpretations (and misapplications).

As I see it, the problem with the French revolution (or the American one) wasn't thinking that some basic universal values exist, but that those values had not been extended to everyone.

3-minute video, first published in January and again today

Noam Chomsky on the Future of Marxism & Anarchism - Economic Update with Richard Wolff

Thank you for guiding us through this, Lola. I've never read the entire thing & you made everything clear with your commentary & digestible with your breaking it up into pieces. This was wonderful.

I'd love to do this with another text.

>95 susanbooks:

I just did the bare minimum; thank you for joining!

If you have ideas for other reads, please go ahead, why not? I'm getting hit by a busy cycle myself and it's difficult to pledge full concentration, but I ought to be able to follow from the sidelines.

By the way, for anyone interested in Marxist thought and outlook, especially from a beginner's POV, I can do no better than recommend Richard Wolff's site (Democracy at work), linked above (>94 LolaWalser:), for many questions addressed. Wolff takes questions from the comments too--not sure whether it's a perk for members--in any case, chances are you'll find something of interest in the posted videos.

>92 Nicole_VanK:

Yes, it's still valid in many ways - but I also find it dated (too much focused on white male experience).

Nicole, I thought of your remark a lot as I was reading Bini Adamczak's Kommunismus: kleine Geschichte, wie es endlich anders wird (Communism for kids). I think you might be interested in how she represents a communism not-by-white-men (and certainly not "for-white-men"), and it's taken for granted already in form. For example, writing in German she adopts the female versions/endings of words throughout, when it's not just "people" (Menschen).
She also explicitly writes how the ancient rigid structures of roles and binarism are obsolete, and her drawings are both non-gender specific and female- and trans-empowering. I'm not saying this very well but I hope you get the idea--or maybe I should just link...

The drawing on the cover of my book:



By the way, the book, in German, is available free on soundcloud:

https://soundcloud.com/kpoe_bildungsverein/was-war-das

sort of off-topic, but my hometown just elected a Black woman socialist for Mayor:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/23/politics/india-walton-buffalo-mayor-primary/index...

Excellent, I had read she was ahead, so glad it held! Congrats!