Tag: Labor

Revolution in 10 Measures: Communist Manifesto, part 4

workers-uniting-making-a-collective-fist

(For the rest of the series, click here)

It is fascinating reading the Communist Manifesto during a time of nationalist fervor globally. It contrasts strikingly with Marx’s 10 measures of revolution. For although he desires workers to more actively compose themselves as the center of their respective nations, he likewise calls on them to unite with all workers of the world. This is because he sees greater similarity between international workers than between workers and capitalists of a shared nation-state.

So what are Marx’s 10 measures?

10 Measures of Revolution

Paraphrased from Marx, here are his 10 measures of a revolution.

  1. Abolition of land property; rent money goes to public purpose
  2. Heavy income tax
  3. Abolition of inheritance rights
  4. Confiscation of the property of “emigrants” and “rebels”
  5. Central bank with exclusive state monopoly of credit
  6. Centralization of transport and communication under the state
  7. Multiplication of state-run factories; cultivation of wastelands; soil improvement
  8. All must work; establishment of industrial armies
  9. Combination of manufacturing/agriculture industries; population redistribution so city/country more equitably populated
  10. Free education for children; abolition of child factory labor

Why does “abolition” show up so often?

These measures of revolution aren’t ends in themselves. Eventually Marx wishes to see the nation-state fade evaporate alongside class. These are simply the precursors to that end.

Keep in mind that the revolution Marx sought after led to the working class becoming the owners of technology. Neither inventors, nor CEOs. Not board members or shareholders. Not managers. He wanted those that worked the machines to have control over their own lives. Therefore, Marx saw the 10 measures overcoming the capitalist obstacle to worker ownership.

Why the abolition of landed property? Landlords took high rents from workers.

Why the abolition of inheritance rights? Inheritance was one way capital passed from one generation to the next. It was a double slap to workers, because even if a capitalist had amassed great profits off the workers’ backs, a son by luck of birth did even less to earn it; he simply fell out of the right mother and continued to breathe for a few decades.

Why the confiscation of the property of emigrants/rebels? Recall that capitalists were not beholden to one country (and still aren’t). The East India Company had land and capital holdings in London, India, Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Japan. Note, however, that the head of the East India Company was never Indian, Indonesian, Chinese, or Japanese. To establish this particular measure, Marx would have wanted workers from these locales to seize components of the East India Company in their territories. “Rebels” would refer to loyalists to the capitalist order.

The role of the state

If abolition of some roles features strongly, centralization might factor even more.

Note that income tax, centralized banks, centralized transport and communication, and state-run factories all require an initially strong state. You would need a strong state after a revolution, anyway, to fight off counterrevolution. Recall, however, that these are measures of revolution and not its fullest extent.

The full revolution lies in the dissolution of the state as the loss of class character alters former class relations. As Marx understands it, the state is the instrument of one class oppressing another. With this understanding, when the workers seize the means of production, they would all exist on equal footing in relation to property. This is a different class relation (regarding property). Marx sees changes in the means of production altering social relations. This alteration is so severe in the proletarian revolution that the state would eventually dissipate: you cannot oppress an equal. So his logic goes.

How much of the current state relies on exploiting classes (foreign and domestic) to maintain its power? How often are white collar criminals incarcerated with lower class criminals, even though white collar criminals negatively affect far more communities and their environs? What country would board so many American military bases if they had the power to say “No”? Would we honestly harbor any foreign military base on American soil, even our closest allies? This is class exploitation at its finest. And the majority of Americans don’t give it a second thought because of incredibly effective militaristic propaganda.

Terry Eagleton once noted that Marx overesteemed capital in his own time, for it was not as efficient then as Marx claimed it to be. Today, the United States constitutes the most economically and militarily successful capitalist nation in history. Its labor laws favor bosses over workers. The propaganda machine of its military is as effective as the institution is large. To enjoy, really enjoy, the freedoms proclaimed in this nation, one must possess the means to defend them. Else you are at the mercy of those with resources.

Marx notes the necessity of the workers seizing this power in order to liberate the people. It’s understandable why this worries a lot of people. Revolutions aren’t always successful. Even when they are, lots of stuff changes. People die, supply lines have to be secured, the newly formed state has to defend itself within and without. Imagine the loss of civil rights and basic freedoms during wartime. All of those “inalienable” and “god-given” rights come into question; it’s almost as if that rhetoric is meaningless without defense measures in place.

The call on all to work

If Republicans today ever read Marx (some have heard a quote or two from him, but to most he’s a bogeyman of “leftism”), they might jizz their pants when they see him call on all to work. However, this would be a moment where historicizing the Manifesto would be appropriate. Recall that in Engels’ preface to the Communist Manifesto he remarked that parts of the 10 measures of revolution matched conditions of 1848, not 1888. Part of the power of Marxist analysis lies in its focus on the present instead of the past. For the purpose at hand, work, when it is to secure the survival needs of the populace, is a good thing.

The vast majority of American jobs do not meet this standard. Do we really need life coaches, marketers, car salesmen, 50 brands of watches, new cars every 4 months, 2 major but different smart phone brands that offer nearly identical hardware, or 500 brands of denim jeans? Amber B. gives an even more scathing analysis. There she remarks that the majority of work in the U.S. is only possible by exploiting the resources and manufacturing of the global south.

Humans need food, shelter, water, air, sex, companionship, and a means of self-actualizing. When work exists beyond these needs, merely to occupy 8 hours a day so capitalists don’t feel like they’re paying their workers for nothing (even if a worker might have work that constitutes less than half that time), something is amiss.

As we move toward a post-scarcity world and greater automation, the need for work decreases. The rational thing to do, a la Marx, is for people to work way less hours since they would own the means of production.

Let’s say the world needs 1,000,000 new cars for the next year. After the car makers built that many cars, they could do something else with their time. They wouldn’t just punch a clock. This revolutionary measure would severely alter how society works. Not only would the measures of revolution alter the means of production, but it would alter social relations, too.

Then, as Marx writes elsewhere, humans are freer to reach their full potential. With survival needs met easily by technology, the thought goes that people would be freer to do something creative with their lives. There would be none of this “I don’t have enough time” regarding creative pursuits. People could rest and recreate as need be. This could particularly take place in regions that are already highly industrialized.

Concluding remarks

I think it would be interesting to think up communist aims today. Verso edited a 1956 philosophical porno between Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in “Towards a New Manifesto.” It largely consists of them using big words to pleasure titillate each other. A more useful exercise in updating aims for contemporary workers is the People’s Congress of Resistance’s “Society for the Many: A Vision for Revolution.” Note its similarities with Marx and Engels:

  1. Health, food, shelter, and education for all
  2. Collectivizing of banks, communication, transportation, and energy
  3. Abolition of militarism, colonialism, and imperialism
  4. Abolition of mass incarceration and aggressive policing
  5. Reparations for African-Americans and self-determination for indigenous peoples
  6. Abolition of patriarchal oppression regarding sex, gender, and sexual orientation
  7. Environmental justice

Note its move beyond Marx and Engels’ propositions. They did not have the history of environmental catastrophes to factor in. Now we see the effects human industry can have on the environment: acid rain, undrinkable water, and on a vaster scale, global warming. A huge step in measure seven would be to pump vast amounts of money into nuclear fusion research, a step toward cleaner, nearly unlimited energy.

 

The next entry will cover part 3 of the Manifesto, on the various communist literatures of its day.

Communist Manifesto, part 1: Prolegomena, Preface, and Preamble

Communist ManifestoKarl Marx and Frederick Engels. The Communist Manifesto [1848]. Authorized English Translation. Translated by Samuel Moore. New York: International Publishers Co., Inc., 1948.

 

 

Prolegomena, or Intro stuff

This entry is a (part of a 4-5 part series) review that covers Engels’ 1888 preface to the authorized English translation of the manifesto, as well as the “preamble.” Thus begins my foray into reviewing the major works of Marxism and socialism (way down the road I will probably do this with anarchism).

In this most (in)famous of texts, The Communist Manifesto (CM), Marx and Engels lay out the program for the overthrow of the bourgeois (those who own the means of production) by the working people (proletariat). Its pace is fast, its metaphors strident. I have read the work maybe twice before, but never in so much detail as now. For example, I went so far as to number the paragraphs and summarize each in my own words. My life situation also makes this reading more memorable.

The CM text I review divides into seven sections, but four primary parts. Engels’ preface covers the reception of the CM following the revolutions of 1848. The second section, or preamble, lists communism as a bogeyman that requires definition and subsequent defense. The main argument of the book (and how the work is structured) consists of four parts: “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” “Proletarians and Communists,” “Socialist and Communist Literature,” and “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.” The final section concludes with Engels’ notes.

The Preface: The Communist League and Growing Working-Class Movement

What is now available online for free, and has been read and used by many revolutionaries since its publication, was once the agenda of a secret group called the “Communist League.” They quickly translated it from German into the major languages of Europe. However, Engels remarks on the vulnerability of the group. After the 1848 Paris revolt, and its subsequent repression, many of the League were imprisoned, until they quickly dissolved the group of their own volition.

It is common now to see the left a splintered mess: egoists, anarchists, communists, social democrats, democratic socialists, Maoists, Marxist-Leninists, Marxists, Luxemburgests, situationists, and habitual circle-jerkers. Apparently this sectarianism was present in the 1850s, too, for Engels refers to Marx’s grating success of uniting followers of Proudhon, LaSalle, and English unionists into the International Workingmen’s Association (First International).

Engels claims that the emerging working-class movement followed the translation of the CM into various languages. Though he admits the words “socialism” and “communism” could be used roughly interchangeably by 1888, they definitely could not be used synonymously in 1848. Then, socialists were those who wished to improve the welfare of people without challenging capital; communists were working class people who wanted the benefits that derived from owning capital themselves (more on Marx’s definition of “capital” in upcoming posts). Or to quote Engels: “Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of a total social change, called itself Communist” (5).

Engels is rather self-effacing when it comes to the origins of the manifesto. He attributes the nucleus of the work to Marx (though he would say they came to similar conclusions independently): social organization being invariably linked to economic production, class struggle, and proletarian emancipation from the bourgeoisie.

I find Engels’s historicizing remarks in the concluding paragraphs of his preface quite striking. He (and Marx for that matter) did not take their words as sacred scripture to be taken without criticism. For example, one of the most famous passages occurs at the end of part two, a ten-point program of sorts (from which The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would pen its own ten-point program). Engels states that some of these aims simply don’t match the historical conditions of 1888 and so remain an artifact of 1848. He also remarks that the socialist literature reviewed in part three only goes up to 1848 and that some of the parties mentioned in part four no longer existed.

That is Engels’ preface. Now to the preamble.

Preamble: “A specter is haunting Europe–the specter of Communism.”

The Communist League saw their mere existence as a threat so severe as to elicit a unified response from parties as diverse as pope, emperors, financiers, and police-spies. The writers took this to mean that they were a power, but one which deserved a hearing of its aims and demands. It was internationalist from its beginnings. In other words, there’s was not a nationalist situation, but a union of members from England, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Internationalism would play a huge part in communist revolutions globally.

Concluding Thoughts

Is the CM mere antiquities, a literary piece for hobbyists? One could use it that way, I suppose, but to do so would forfeit the document’s power. Even if one does not agree with all of Marx and Engels’ assertions, they should at least give one pause. What does it mean if people are grouped into antagonistic classes? What would it mean for working people to unite as a class, overthrow bourgeois hegemony, and obtain political power (the aims of the Communist League on p. 22)? Do the revolutions of Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, and the various Bolivarian revolutions speak to the truth or falsehood of this document? Or how do those revolutions compare to the ideas Marx and Engels put forth?

My life situation makes this reading more poignant this time. I had written toward the end of last year a massive reading goal of 22 non-fiction works and 10 fiction works. Surely with school being done I would have nothing to do. It turned out that working 40+ hours a week in manual labor plus 10+ hours a week in commute time make for a tired and ragged Monte. It’s hard enough being a parent who is present and getting chores done; what little time I have is devoted to reading for this blog, and I don’t exactly feel great about my efforts.

I don’t know how the miners of yesteryear worked 12-16 hour days by candlelight and still made time to organize for better conditions. They are inspiring. They inspire while I feel the pressure of student debt, tired muscles, anxiety and desperation to use my mental skill, little time for my wife and children, and even less time to just read. So is the working class life. We work just to survive, while those who own capital make money off the labor of those who work. This is no a c’est la vie, or “it is what it is” statement; such is the outlook of those who share precarious conditions (like trying to find affordable healthcare), but through some obfuscation see this way of things as natural, unalterable, divinely-inspired, deserved. Recognize the power of your own activity. The way things are are not the way things have to be. Far from it.