Manifesto of the Communist Party

A number of you may have read bits, pieces or all of The Manifesto in previous classes or in high school. There’s simply too much in even these few excerpts to go into in depth so I’ll limit what I’m going to provide some context and then review to a few notes about the difference between this text and what Manza and Sauder wrote about Marx in their Introduction and then some notes on a few key points in the text.

First, while theoretically informed, the Manifesto is a political rather than an academic tract. This means that a great deal of the text is under-developed and under-defended shorthand that necessarily presents a simplified and more determinist account than the more complete and complex accounts Marx provides elsewhere. It also means that the argument published was written along with and for a particular highly politicized audience of folks we’d, today, call activists. Second, the Manifesto was written 12 years before Marx started preparing notes for writing Capital and almost twenty years before the first version of Volume 1 of Capital was published… it is an early piece of work.

In terms of the relationship between the Introduction and the Manifesto, there is one key point to be made. Manza and Sauder present Marx as if he believed that all societies contained two classes – one dominant and one oppressed. I don’t believe this argument can be supported by reading the Manifesto and I’d like you to see if you can find some of the things in the text that I might think undermine M & S’s argument. Similarly, they argue that Marx believed that the key to all historical change was economic in nature… again, I’d like you to find places where something else is laid out. M & S imply that Marx believed that capitalism was exclusively comprised to two classes, capital and labor, and I think you can once again find passages where this is shown to be hooey. Lastly, M & S suggest that Marx had no conception of how the state might be able ameliorate the worst abuses of labor under capitalism, another thing that I find doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

I’d like us to be able to discuss that material on page 69, starting with “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part” and ending, most of the way down the second column of text with “his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”

You should also note the ways he addresses colonialism, urbanization, intellectual property, technological imperatives, globalization and – perhaps most importantly – the importance of economic crises. I want us to be able to talk about the ways The Manifesto also repeats and reflects material in the Wage-Labour and Capital reading.

It is also REALLY important – particularly in light of M & S’ misrepresentation of Marx – to see the ways that Marx addresses both the ways that capitalism simplifies class relations at the same time that it makes them more complex by generating ever-more diversified industrial divisions of labor AND makes them more contested internally – as well as between the two – as workers must compete with each other more and more as capitalism grows, spreads and goes through crisis-driven restructuring.

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Wage-Labor and Capital – Karl Marx

Marx is, in this section, providing a cursory review of his analysis of the relationship between workers and capital. Marx goes to significant pains to point out that what laborers sell capitalists is – in the eyes of the capitalist – a commodity pretty much like any other. If a laborer sold their labor, according to Marx, they would be selling themselves. In fact, what capital buys is the capacity to work, not the work, and that capacity is called labor-power. While seemingly arcane, this is important.

The capitalist pays the laborer not according to the value the laborer contributes to the production process but according to the cost of bringing the laborer back the next day at the same level of skill and productivity. Commodities – in the aggregrate – are bought and sold at their value, not a penny more or a penny less. And the value of labor-power is the cost of the commodities necessary to reproduce labor – you can see, here, why Marx acknowledges the necessary cost of having a family (producing new workers) and the higher costs of reproducing higher skilled, more sophisticated or professional-managerial laborers (and their families) relative to that of deskilled industrial workers.

You can see, here – if you believe, as Marx indicates in the Manifesto, that the State is the executive of the capitalist class as a whole – why low gasoline, fuel oil, home appliance, clothing and food prices are so important… they all mutually reinforce each other in holding wages down… even if they generate costly and irrational foreign, industrial, consumer and agricultural policies. You might also see how cutting costs in these fields is often as technologically-driven as industrial production… how work relations, between capital, management and labor, are largely driven by technological imperatives.

Here, capital is defined as not so much financial investments, industrial machinery or any other thing, but as the network of things and people bound up in these kinds of relationships. The technologically-driven imperatives of these relationships means not only the perpetual pursuit of ever-greater profit from ever wider areas tied to serving ever more nichified needs but also that living labor, people, serve the interests and must follow the patterns of accumulated labor, machines, rather than the other way around.

It is important, as well, that workers must not only sell their labor-power to a capitalist in order to have money to live but that they must buy (or rent) the necessities of life from other capitalists with that money… it is for this reason that laborers – as individuals and as a class – belong not to individual capitalists but to the capitalist class in toto.

The key, of course, is that the laborer is only paid in wages equal to the value of regularly returning her to work in the same condition as when she started the job. The problem is that, given the richness of nature and the hypercompetitive overproduction of consumer goods, it is possible – in fact it is necessary – for workers to work more hours each day than the number of hours necessary for them to contribute the value of the housing, transportation and consumer goods necessary for their reproduction (and that of their families).

In this way, capital needs labor to exist and laborers need jobs to exist and both need the commodities the laborers produce to sell successfully in the marketplace in order to do well. Two things occur here. The first is that a disproportionate share of profits always goes to the capitalist – the rich get richer and the poor get richer but the rich get richer far faster than the poor – and success means expanding production, hiring more workers, which means a need for more workers, which means a larger population of workers and people more generally.

This is fine and dandy until competition generates a saturated market and prices collapse… and all capitalists either intensify production – to squeeze a greater disproportionate share out of their workers, cut wages, fire workers and/or close plants. The first further depresses prices by intensifying overproduction – especially if it is done widely. The latter, throw folks out of work, which on the one hand means that there is greater competition between workers for jobs and on the other hand means that those without work – and those competing to work for lower wages (which is what happens when there are more folks than jobs) have to buy less… which can generate ever-widening circles of both overproduction and unemployment across sector after sector of the downwardly spiraling economy.

The only solution is technological innovation – produce even more, more efficiently, with (usually) far fewer workers. On this one hand, this increases the industrial division of labor and produces new opportunities for profits and employment. On the other hand, this works great for the early adopters but, as Marx points out, pretty soon thereafter competitive pressures drive everyone else – who has survived – to catch up and the crisis cycle begins again. Is it any wonder Marx sees capitalism as contradictory, crisis ridden and in need of revolutionary change?

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