Andrew's Wiki
Communist Manifesto

Introductory Materials

• ”...first to chart the staggering transformation in less than a century by the emergence of a world market and the unleashing of unparalleled productive powers of modern industry.”
• “unflinchingly modernist vision in which capitalism was not simply identified with destabilization and exploitation but also with liberating power, the power to release people from backwardness and tradition-bound dependence”
• Ernst Bloch on Marx: he’s the first forward-looking philosopher, the philosophy of anticipation, rather than the backwards looking folks, especially Hegel but also Freud

Philosophical Background

• Censorship and “secret societies” fill this history
• Socialism just one variety of the whole host of debates swirling around religion, politics, and philosophy in Europe at the time
  • Not from people talking about industry per se, but a group of folks arguing about Hegel in terms of republicanism
  • Originally not even about politics, but about what should come to replace religion and Christianity
  • In a world where a benevolent God won’t help you, where can we turn? “Scientific humanism,” they offer.
• Of course, we never remember this complex context
  • Marx and Engels hid the initially religious conversation
    • Marx changed Engels’ portrait of “Christian world order” declining and falling into a purely socioeconomic process
  • Most of the intellectual background behind Marx and Engels has been obscured
    • Cabet (Etienne Cabet, active 1830s, admirer of Robert Owen, “peaceful change” and communities with enlightened bourgeois)
    • Owen (Robert Owen, active , maker of utopian communities; influenced League of the Just to become atheist)
    • Blanc (Louis Blanc, Organization of Labour (1840), characterized labor in ways we are familiar with through Marx: falling wages, antifamily; advocated overthrow)
    • Proudhon (JP Proudhon, What Is Property? (1840), about abolishing property and making non-state “associations;” property is inconsistent with liberty; we need revolution to make changes)
    • Lammenais (Felicite de Lammenais, 1830s, published books that mixed Christianity and socialism, a “moral transformation” with universal suffrage and end of monopolies)
    • Weitling (William Weitling, Mankind as it is and as it ought to be (1839), the League of the Just’s—which later became Communist League—study of how to reach community of goods; follower of Lammenais, who made it into a violent revolutionary movement to get this “Christian community of goods;” critiqued the money system; new system of “family associations” influenced by Fourier; his ideas eventually rejected as too military and fast; later ditched because of his association with Christianity)
    • Fourier (Charles Fourier, French socialist thinker, died 1837 so older than many of these folks; phalansteries with two-hour work periods and variety both of work types and of your mate; 1620 people community in which your various passions could have free expression)
    • Hess (Moses Hess, “communist humanism,” God is actually just the sum of mainkind, turned Hegel into a forward-looking, futurist, activist creed; “On the Essence of Money,” unpublished but culled from by Marx, made Marx think about economic life, said that current institutions don’t define individuals from actual individuals, but rely on some kind of theorization outside of man, and in our society this external measuring-stick is money: “money is the alienated wealth of Man” so you exchange freedom for getting your needs taken care of)
    • Schapper (London leader of the League; communism needs to encourage free self-development; equal opportunity, not necessarily equal consumption)
    • Saint-Simon (“in the future, government of men will be replaced by an administration of things”
    • Feuerbach (Ludwig Feuerbach; humanist critique of Hegel and Christianity; Marx said he made a “real science” because he based it on relationship of man to man; man is sensuous, not just abstract; we need to turn Hegel on his head and invert it; Christianity abstracts the spirit of Man and embodies it in God or Christ, which is alienation, just like Hegel abstracts the spirit of Man and makes it absolute—just as alienated; if you return to your own human essence, it’s only through a mediated fashion if you’re following Christianity or Hegel)
    • Bauer (Bruno Bauer, intellectual leader of Young Hegelians; the formulator and proponent of critique)
    • Cieszkowski (praxis: unity of knowledge and action; let’s move from philosophy to action)
    • Carlyle (individualism breaks all social ties)

Relationship to Hegel

• Philosophy of Right
  • Property is the beginning of individualism (“mine” creates “me”)
  • Communism therefore bad
• Reason is a historical product
  • Thus, you have a narrative of development of man throughout history
  • Marx’s development of man through work and through communism, getting to the place where Man only confronts Man, works similarly through history
• “Spirit” of a people
  • Kant said that reason is disembodied, completely abstract
  • Hegel said that it’s conditioned by the conditions of a particular people
    • Reason is culturally conditioned
  • “Absolute” means the spirit behind everything (everything is an organic whole, a part of the absolute spirit)
    • Alt definition: “self-moving embodiment of reason”
  • History is the story people people unifying themselves with absolute spirit
• Religion and philosophy only differ in form
• Young Hegelians (incl. Marx and Engels)
  • Hegel minus tolerance of religion, plus translation of abstract absolutes into praxis by the people
    • Made people believe that you could be “theoretically free without being politically free”
  • The King didn’t like Hegel, so being a Young Hegelian was radical
  • bohemian and “shocking” schoolteachers, journalists, academics, etc
  • Two events cause Young Hegelians to come into being
    • David Strauss’ Life of Jesus critically examined (1835)
    • Gospels were not about a real Jesus, but a sedimentation of layers of mythologizing
    • Imprisonment of Archbishop of Canterbury for allowing “mixed” marriages
  • University lecturer, Arnold Ruge, loses his job over protesting against the government’s “reactionary romantic Catholicism” that’s against the rational state
    • His followers form the Young Hegelians: republicans hostile to religion and the state
  • Critique
    • Ruge: the “historical process is the relating of the theory to the historical experiences of the spirit; this relationship is critique.”
    • Marx: philosophy is “the critique that measure the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the idea”
      • Criticism reveals the true will of the people
  • Disagree with Hegel’s idea that religion and philosophy are the same
  • Bruno Bauer
    • Intellectual leader of Young Hegelians
    • Even more critical of Bible than Strauss: Jesus was a completely fictitious character used as a heuristic to teach Christianity

Reception

• Written as the constitution for the Communist League, HQ London, in order to reunite the League, which had become a bunch of philosophical factions
• Engels wrote first and second drafts in 1847
• Marx wrote the final draft in January 1848 in Brussels (banned from Paris)
• 1848: Appears amid multiple European revolutions
• 1850: First English translation (Helen Mc Farlane?)
• 1850-70: Virtually ignored
• 1872: Reprinted as evidence against alleged traitors Liebknecht and Bebel, Social-Democratic leaders
• after 1872: Translations and editions multiply
  • As people begin attributing revolts to Marx, and as Capital is published (1867), he is “established overnight as the great revolutionary architect of ‘scientific socialism’”
• 1870-1914: Regarded as important, but contextually out of date, irrelevant
  • Understood not as a specific political intervention, but as part of the “gargantuan theory” of historical materialism (or, dialectical materialism)
  • 1872 “Preface” by Marx and Engels: “has become a historical document we have no longer any right to alter”
  • 1870s: people start calling themselves “Marxists”
• 1914-7: Revs up the Bolsheviks

Main Points

• “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism”
  • Contemporary thinkers had agreed about this “haunting”
  • Indeed, it was a common trope
• World History
  • Engels: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history.”
  • A history of class struggle under various forms and guises, changing as the modes of production change
  • Transformation from one exploitative regime to another will stop with the overthrow of the bourgeoisie
  • World communism will be the end of this historical development
  • Will happen without any help from philosophers, naturally
    • Early on, Marx thought that philosophy would “light the spark” for the proletariat, but he changed his mind
  • “Materialist conception of history:” it’s not about history of ideas, but social classes clashing and of modes of production
• Bourgeoisie
  • They had a lot of great things going for them
  • Achievements greater than the Pyramids already
  • But they have created their own gravediggers
    • They created the proletariat, which will rise against them
    • The modern forces of production will revolt against modern conditions of production
• Goals
  • “an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all”
• Critique of Mediation
  • It is the critique of “alienation” that comes up in so many forms
  • Mediation as political phenomenon: mediation is made up to get from the individual will to the general will
    • Social law theories’ concept of the “self” is just another concept to mediate man’s relationship to man
  • Examples of mediating structures: religion, bureaucracy, corporations, representation
  • We need to eliminate mediation (this is the most basic critique of Hegel)
• Property
  • Property makes individual petty concerns above general interest
    • In this way, current constitutions separate man from man
  • The modern state is really just about securing property after all
• Money
  • Money is a God that keeps away all other Gods
  • Money = “estranged essence of Man’s work and Man’s existence”
  • Turns world citizens into feuding, self-interested atoms
  • Current ideas of citizenship really just protect egotistical man, not truly republican or democratic

Communism

• 1840s: term used in France to describe the radical republicans who came out of the woodwork after the 1830 July Revolution
  • Without equality, you cannot have a true republic
  • Like the Jacobins in the 1789 Revolution
  • Seize goods and land, give back to the people
  • Etienne Cabet: communism as a “peaceful alternative” to the idea of the egalitarian republic
• Difference between communism and socialism
  • Communism: political, antiproperty
  • Socialism: apolitical, harmony
• Difference between Fr and Ger communism
  • France: attached to republican roots (politically active)
  • Germany: more attached to the “social question,” not political
    • Initially, just a “drawing room game” for students (before 1848)
• Why a “spectre” in 1848?
  • Communists associated with the mobile, criminal underclass
• 1860s-70s, went underground, not as communism but as “Social-Democrats”
• For Marx
  • Combination of German philosophical tradition and French political action
  • First, he relied upon “critique” only as salvation, but he got impatient: Germany wasn’t moving towards republicanism, and he left for Paris in 1843
    • These are bourgeois monarchies in Germany and France
    • Supported “negation of private property” to restore Man’s relationship with Man (the social relationship) **

Abundance, Scarcity

• 6: Robert Owens’ folks talked about freeing society from scarcity in positive terms

Key Moments

• 1843: German monarchy closes down all oppositional publications, including Marx’s newspaper
  • Convinced him that the State could not lead to rational progress
  • “weapon of critique cannot replace the critique of weapons”