Transcription
Hey, Spectre is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. [Music] If we're going to summarize the Communist Manifesto, it's important we briefly cover the context in which the Communist Manifesto was written. In 1847, when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the piece, socialism and communism were not clearly defined concepts. Everyone had their own eclectic ideas about what these terms meant, all trying to address the problems which had been produced by a fully blooming capitalist society, problems we're still dealing with today.
The only thing that was commonly understood by these terms was something beyond the present state of things. And for people in high society at the time, whose wealth and property owed its existence to the present state of things, socialism and communism were vague and threatening concepts, especially communism, which had developed a strong association with the working class emerging at the time, who owned nothing and had no strong ties to the current order.
Now, what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels set out to do in the Communist Manifesto was to properly define what that something beyond the present state of things meant. And they do something very interesting. As opposed to laying out grand principles of eternal truth and universal morality upon which the future society shall be constructed, Marx and Engels point out that to accurately understand what can come next, you need to understand how and why human societies change and understand the material conditions that exist right now.
And although both Marx and Engels use the terms socialism and communism interchangeably to refer to a society beyond capitalism, they adopt the label communism specifically because of its unique association with the working class, who, as we'll come to see, are absolutely key to understanding and achieving a post-capitalist society. The working class is key to understanding what communism is and how to achieve it.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle." This is their theory of how human societies change, known as historical materialism. The history of human societies is propelled by the conflict of material interests between the classes. And this whole first section is dedicated to tracing history using a historical materialist approach. So we have to understand historical materialism if the section is going to make any sense.
Historical materialism starts from the fact that for societies to exist, they need to be able to produce things, the necessities of life like food and shelter. Without production, there is no society. The things we use to produce things, which would include things like tools, land, minerals, machinery, are known as the means of production. How people relate to the means of production gives us their class position and with that, their objective material interests.
A farmer whose relation to the land and tools, his ownership, is going to have an objective material interest in good weather, good crop yields, minimal wear on tools, etc. Now, let's say there's a lord who actually owns the land and tools, and in exchange for allowing the farmers to farm safely on his land, the lord takes a portion of the crop yields. It is in the material interest of the lord to take as much of the yield as possible, while the material interest of the farmers is to keep as much of the yield as possible. Here we have an irreconcilable conflict of material interests between the classes.
Our culture's laws, moralities, ideologies, religions, wars, coups, revolutions, and so on, are all products, in the final analysis, of our society's classes and their struggles to advance their material interests. Struggles between different classes and struggles between different factions of the same class who hold particular material interests that can come into conflict with one another.
The conflict of material interests between the lord and farmers, oppressor and oppressed, has no resolution under the current order. "A fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes." So the oppressing class struggles to hold together this relationship of exploitation for as long as possible, but the struggle can only end in one of two ways: either the oppressed succeeds in overthrowing the oppressors and establishing a new order that advances and enshrines their material interests, or both competing classes are brought to ruin somehow.
Marx and Engels then turn to the transition from feudalism to capitalism using a historical materialist approach. In feudal society, as with previous societies, we have a complicated arrangement of many different classes. But it's from a small class of town dwellers that the modern capitalist class develops from, also known as the bourgeoisie. These town dwellers made their living from commerce and trade, using their modestly accrued wealth to generate more.
They had a keen material interest in developing navigational knowledge, the study of commerce, shipbuilding, bookkeeping, and so on. The discovery of America and foreign conquests opened up new lucrative goods to these town dwellers, spurring an even more intense interest in developing the means of exchange, navigation, communication, and transportation. In the search to yield more wealth from amassed fortunes, these merchants began to take over industry itself, investing in socialized workshops and the development of the instruments of production, out-competing traditional individual artisans due to the superior efficiency of socialized production.
As the instruments of production developed with the development of the bourgeoisie, they began to come into conflict with the existing relations of production in feudal society, basically property laws, and into conflict with the aristocracy, who had a material interest in maintaining these feudal relations of production. For example, a convoluted and arbitrary feudal judicial system, although great for local lords who enjoyed special privileges and control over local laws, hamstrung trade for the bourgeoisie. And a myriad of internal tariffs and borders, although great for local lords, inflated prices for the bourgeoisie.
Not only this, but much of the population were still peasants, and if the bourgeoisie wanted to continue producing cheaper and cheaper commodities, the supply of labor had to be increased, which meant the traditional peasant-lord relationship had to be disrupted. Here we have the productive power of society, society's forces of production, that have been developed to a point where they are now held back and cramped by the relations of production. We have a reactionary class whose interest is to maintain the current order for as long as possible, despite it holding back production, and we have a revolutionary class who has a material interest in fully utilizing the forces of production, a material interest in abolishing the current order and carrying out a revolutionary reconstitution.
The English Revolution and most famously the French Revolution were such reconstitutions of society by the bourgeoisie seizing political power from the aristocracy to abolish feudal relations and to enshrine capitalist relations of production. What are the capitalist relations of production, anyways? Capitalists are those who privately own and control the means of production. They hire others to work on these means to produce products for a market to make a profit. Workers, also known as the proletariat, do not own the means of production. They work for a wage to live.
Workers generate the value, and the capitalist seeks to take as much of the value as possible, paying the worker as little as possible. The worker seeks to keep as much of the value they generate in seeking higher wages. These are two diametrically opposed material interests in which there is no resolution under capitalism.
Now, the capitalists, as we've seen, have played an incredibly revolutionary role in history. They've socialized production, tying all corners of the world together in a global web of industry and consumption. And they've revolutionized the instruments of production, creating tools and machinery capable of producing far beyond the necessary requirement to sustain society with extreme efficiency through relatively simple operations.
But just as the forces of production were hampered by the feudal relations of production once before, now too the productive forces in capitalist society have developed to a point where they are constricted by the capitalist relations of production. The productive power of society is now being held back by the capitalist order. And I'll show you what I mean by this.
Under capitalism, production is carried out for private profit. As products are produced more and more efficiently, their cost falls and can be sold cheaper to steal buyers from other competing capitalists. Unfortunately, as competing capitalists catch up and manage to sell their products at this cheaper price, the profit rate has fallen, and there is a scramble to lower costs again. Innovation now becomes the enemy of the capitalist in the long run.
To fight back against this tendency of the rate of profit to fall, capitalists can monopolize markets, artificially restricting supply and hiking prices well above their cost, completely putting to waste the productivity of society. They can also monopolize intellectual rights, holding back the general adoption of innovative technology. But none of this really matters when the vast majority of workers don't have the money to buy the products.
Every capitalist seeks to lower labor costs as much as possible, but still wants buyers. Debt and the hyper-exploitation of the global south can help bridge this contradiction, but it's not particularly stable. As productive industries become less and less of an attractive investment due to their slim or turn rights, capitalists increasingly swarm to invest in unproductive financial markets and speculative bubbles. Resources wasted in these financial schemes and bubbles are resources that could have been invested to further technological development.
When the speculative bubbles periodically pop and capitalists no longer see profit to be made, capitalist society falls into economic crisis. In these crises, a great part, not only of the existing products but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. The most vulgar expression of the capitalist relations of production holding back and conflicting with the forces of production.
But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself, it has called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons. All previous classes, out-competed by capitalists and those classes deprived of their means of subsistence, have sunk into the ranks of the working class. This continuously growing propertyless class now constitutes the overwhelming majority of capitalist society.
Having used a historical materialist analysis, we can now understand what communism is. It is in the working class's material interest to abolish private ownership over the means of production, putting an end to the private appropriation of the generated value, and to establish common ownership of these productive instruments and resources such that the surplus value generated by the workers is owned and controlled by the workers. Everyone's relation to the means of production will be equal, and thus everyone's material interests will be the same. A classless society is possible.
This will require the political overthrow of the capitalist class and the establishment of a worker state in which the instruments of production and society's resources are put under the democratic control of the working people, and capitalist resistance is put down. Following the democratization of the economy, the full productive power of society will be utilized and put towards raising the standard of living for all. Workers can be paid proportionately to the labor they contribute. The more one works, the more one's paid.
A necessary portion of the total surplus value generated will be dedicated towards administrative costs, social programs, repair, and most importantly, towards research and development, fostering the further advancement of the forces of production. As the working classes, one by one, settle matters with their national bourgeoisie, the working classes may unite internationally, unifying the productive power of the entire globe.
At a certain point of development, when the forces of production have become so efficient and so ubiquitous, human society may enter a higher phase of communism in which everyone does the work they can and takes what they need. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." A decrepit and feeble state, long with no antagonists to class suppress and no longer having to enforce "to each according to their contribution," can complete its total withering away. But this higher phase of communism is not possible without that initial period of development, the lower phase of communism.
Now, the rest of the manifesto is a bit more historically specific to Marx and Engels' time, so we won't delve anew here. But luckily, we've covered the important bits, namely historical materialism. Although the Communist Manifesto is the most widely known Marxist text, it's not a particularly good place to start if you're looking to get into Marxism. For that, I'd suggest reading Socialism: Scientific and Utopian, as well as Wage Labour and Capital.
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