Marx

Communist Manifesto

This is one of the masterpieces of polemical literature. The opening is justly famous, and there is many a quotable passage in it. You can read more about it on the web or in your book. You may ignore the footnotes.

Part I

Here we see a philosophy of history substituting for political philosophy.  History is the history of class struggle.  What history is explained by class struggle?

What classes are there in modern industrial capitalism and what is their relation?

“Class” turns out to be implausible as an explanatory term but somewhat useful as a descriptive term.  The important and still worthwhile theory here is about technological history.  Pay attention to how technology “makes history.”

The Manifesto is also a paean to modern capitalism. Keep track of the praises. Make a list of what the main kinds of bourgeois accomplishments.  How and why were these the accomplishments? (Consult the handout from Thomas Friedman.)

What are “means of production”?  What are “relations of production”?

The latter paragraphs of this part sketch the development of labor. What does technology do to labor?

Why does capitalism automatically organize and promote and educate the working class?

Part II

The issue here is, given the above understanding of history, where is it going?  The struggle for liberation is clarified; it is not only from oppressive circumstances but for …?

Here we have the heady toxin of 20th century liberation movements: a pre-determined, “realistic,” result to be achieved – not a restoration or a “we’ll figure it out as we go along” but an innovation, radically new.

Not the revolutionary language: images, ideals, how to think about events.

The focus is property relations.  Other movements will focus on nationality, race, gender arguing, like Marx does with property, that oppression is a result of misunderstanding the reality of these “basic facts.”  They are either more real (like class struggle) or less real (like private property).

Note what Marx writes about family!

Consider the 10 proposals at the end as a prediction of a “modern” state.  How is the prediction?  Why the divergence from what has in fact happened?

Part IV

Strategy: revolution now or later?  When?