Analysis of the Communist Manifesto: Bourgeoisie vs Proletariat
Communist Manifesto
Chapter I: Bourgeois and Proletarians
The text starts by developing the idea that the history of human society is a history of class struggles between oppressor and oppressed classes. Human society today tends to be divided between two antagonistic classes: bourgeoisie and proletariat.
After this, it is a historical review from the last times of feudal society to the “modern bourgeois society,” finding in the economic development the thread that explains the radical political and cultural changes that caused the second to arise from the revolutionary decomposition of the first.
The history of transition from feudal society to modern society is also the story of the rise of the bourgeoisie as a ruling class since its inception in the early cities of the Middle Ages, the creation of communes and independent municipalities, then its character as a third estate under the monarchy, until “large industry and implanted channels open world market conquest (…) political hegemony and create the modern representative state, which, according to the authors, is ‘the management board governing the collective interests of the bourgeois class.'”
Marx and Engels claimed the revolutionary role that the bourgeoisie played: “Wherever it was introduced, it shattered all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic institutions.” By exploiting the world market, the bourgeoisie destroys national barriers to increased production and trade, subordinates or causes the disappearance of the feudal classes, submits the countryside to the city, the “barbaric and semi-barbarous peoples” to “civilized nations” and gives rise to a global movement of the means of production, ownership, and the inhabitants of each country, which, in turn, leads to a process of political centralization and cultural cosmopolitanism. Thus, it creates a single civilized world with its class stamp.
But, “unlike the preceding few classes, which had as a primary condition of life the inviolability of the existing production system, the bourgeoisie cannot exist if not constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, i.e., both the whole system of production, and with it the entire social system.” And in the constant development of the productive forces, Marx and Engels predict that the epoch of the bourgeoisie has a limit in the bourgeois relations of production themselves. Feudal society was breaking down because their relations of production hindered the development of productive forces, which determined that the bourgeoisie, the representative of these new productive forces, eventually had to enter into political struggle against the nobility and seize political power to break these barriers. This conflict between productive forces and relations of production was going to happen: “For several decades, the history of industry and commerce is but the history of modern productive forces rebelling against the existing system of production, against the system of property ownership, home living conditions and political dominance of the bourgeoisie.” The commercial crisis is cited as an example.
Marx and Engels announced that the new revolutionary class that will end with the bourgeois regime to set up new relations of production is the proletariat, “the modern working class can only live to find work and find work only insofar as it feeds to increase the capital.”
The following paragraphs describe the industrial world in which the proletariat lives, the trend of the impoverished middle class to swell their ranks, and the story of their struggle against the conditions of bourgeois production, which has gone from isolated confrontation between workmen and individual bourgeois up to the confrontation of the two classes. It’s the same rapid development of the industry that levels workers’ conditions, unites the proletarians, and presents its class association as the first need to fight for their interests, opposed to those of the bourgeois class.
However, the proletarian revolution has similar objectives to those of the bourgeois revolution: “All the classes that preceded it and conquered the power sought to consolidate the advantages gained by subjecting the entire society to its acquisition system. The working class can only win for other social forces of production by abolishing the purchasing arrangements that are subject, and with it the entire system of ownership of the company. The proletarians have nothing to assure itself, but to destroy all insurers and other private securities. (…) So far, all the social movements had been revolts by a minority or a minority interest. The proletarian movement is the independent movement of the vast majority in the interest of a vast majority. The proletariat, the lowest and most oppressed layer of society, cannot get up, get up, without breaking, shattered from the foundation to the finish, all this building which is the official society.”
The authors conclude this chapter by pointing out the historical death of the bourgeoisie and the victory of the proletariat as “equally inevitable” due to the inability of the bourgeoisie to improve the living conditions of the proletariat, far from it, the constant decay produced by the development of major industry within the bourgeois mode of production.
Chapter II: Workers and Communists
The authors make it clear that the communists have no interests that are distinguished from the general interests of the proletariat. They profess no special principles to those who aspire to model the proletarian movement. “The immediate objective of the Communists is the same as that pursued by other proletarian parties in general: the formation of proletarian class consciousness, the overthrow of the regime of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat to lead the conquest of power.”
What distinguishes the proletarian from the communist is that they “stand forever in each and every one of the national proletariat, the common interests of the entire proletariat, independent of nationality, and that, whatever the stage that moves the historical struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, always keep the interest of the movement as a whole.”
The authors describe the theory of communism beginning summarized in the formula: “Abolition of private property,” but clarified that they do not refer to “the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of the ownership of the bourgeoisie, this modern institution of bourgeois private property, and the ultimate expression of the most complete production system and appropriating products that is based on the antagonism of two kinds, on the exploitation of men by others.”
Then, in a polemic with imaginary partners, the authors respond to “the criticisms of the bourgeoisie against communism” regarding the abolition of property, work, family, nationality, individuality, etc. The answer to every objection makes it clear that what is sought is to abolish the bourgeois form that all these institutions take. In each case, the authors show how topical these accusations against communism, when they are not directly slander, are more or less veiled defenses of the interests of the bourgeois class by passing them through the whole society.
Later, the authors, not “beginning to analyze the allegations made against communism from the standpoint of religious-philosophical and ideological in general,” say the basis of the ideas of each era is in “conditions of life, social relationships, social existence of man,” denying the existence of “eternal truths,” concluding “The prevailing ideas at a time have always been the ideas of the ruling class.”
Since the completion of this chapter, Marx and Engels return to the point of the conquest of political power by the proletariat as a first step of the workers’ revolution. They point to the task of the proletariat as a ruling class built to centralize the means of production “in the hands of the State, i.e., the proletariat organized as a ruling class” (in the foreword to the German edition of 1872, after the experience of the Paris Commune, the authors say that “the working class cannot simply take possession of the block state machine, putting it up for your own purposes,” so that this identity between the state and the proletariat organized as a ruling class is incorrect.)
The authors then outline a general program of expropriation, tax policies, legal measures, and reorganization of the economy and education to be implemented by the proletariat as a ruling class. Finally, they nuance that while the proletariat is in struggle against the bourgeoisie, it is forced to the conquest of political power, once “class differences have disappeared and all production is concentrated in the hands of society, the hegemony of the proletarian class policy will become unnecessary,” and the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms will be replaced by a partnership in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”
Chapter III: Socialist and Communist Literature
Among the nebulous socialist proposals of the era, the authors of the Manifesto highlight several trends that fall into three categories: reactionary socialism, bourgeois or conservative socialism, and critical-utopian socialism and communism.
Reactionary Socialism
By reactionary socialism, Marx and Engels understood those variants of socialism, claiming to represent workers’ interests, that represented the interests of pre-capitalist classes.
In feudal socialism, it was sections of the aristocracy removed from power by the bourgeoisie, with which the clergy converged in some sectors.
The petty-bourgeois socialism includes sectors of the middle class, doomed to swell the proletariat, who criticize the bourgeois regime from the interests of small traders and farmers. They point to Sismondi as their chief representative. Its merits lie in the correct criticism of the bourgeois mode of production and its anti-social consequences. But as for his positive proposals, they do not go beyond a return to the old means of production and exchange, with the lifestyle associated with them.
Finally, German socialism or “true socialism” comes from the importation into Germany of French Socialist and Communist literature. But as social conditions in Germany were far more feudal than the French, this resulted in a purely literary assimilation of socialism in the context of a reactionary philosophical consciousness. “And so, where the original developed a critique of money, they put: ‘expropriation of the human being,’ which criticized the bourgeois state: ‘Abolition of the rule of the general and abstract,’ and so forth.” This socialism came in handy for the small whip of both the German bourgeoisie and the proletarian communism bourgeois liberalism, and thus became a weapon of the feudal aristocratic reaction.
Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism
This ideology comes from the awareness of the bourgeoisie to the suffering of the proletariat and an attempt to alleviate these injustices to preserve the bourgeois social order.
“They are on this side economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, those seeking to improve the situation of the working class, organizers of charity events, animal protection societies, the campaigners against alcoholism, preachers and social reformers of all stripes.”
Socialism and Communism Critical-Utopian
In this socialism are the doctrines and systems characteristics of the first shock of the proletariat as a class against the bourgeois regime. These doctrines make a fairly accurate critique of the bourgeois world and profess “a universal asceticism and a clumsy and vague egalitarianism” or design models of utopian future societies.
Chapter IV: Position of the Communists to the other opposition parties
In this brief final chapter, which already in the prologue of 1872 the authors point out is out of date due to the disappearance of many of the “opposition parties” mentioned here and the economic and political changes that have occurred since its publication, Marx and Engels made a sketch of tactics to be followed by the Communists in the political context of several countries in Europe where it is not possible to carry out its goal directly, placing part of the biggest games against the most progressive and reactionary, without losing their programmatic and organizational independence.
“In short, the Communists everywhere support, as shown, how revolutionary movements arise against the prevailing political and social regime.”
This chapter, and the manifesto, complete with the following harangue:
“The Communists do not have to keep hidden their ideas and intentions. They openly declare that their goals can be achieved only by the forcible overthrow of all the existing social order. Tremble, if you will, the ruling classes, at the prospect of a communist revolution. The proletarians, with it, have nothing to lose but their chains. They have, however, a whole world to gain.”