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.