Hello Students, below you will find selections from
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx. You are responsible for read and scrutinizing the below sections. Specifically you are tasked with analyzing how this piece of literature (which was monumentally influential during the 20th century) reflects the view of reconstructionsim as a method of education. I will also post specific response questions for you to answer for next week's class.
Also, if you are interested in reading more of this text, the entirety of
The Communist Manifesto can be accessed at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61.html
MANIFESTO OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
[From the English edition of 1888, edited by Friedrich Engels]
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.
All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to
exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot,
French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as
Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition
that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism,
against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against
its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact.
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European Powers
to be itself a Power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the
face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their
tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of
Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have
assembled in London, and sketched the following Manifesto, to be
published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and
Danish languages.
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history
of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf,
guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed,
stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an
uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time
ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at
large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a
complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a
manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have
patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages,
feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices,
serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate
gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins
of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It
has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression,
new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our epoch, the
epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive
feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a
whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps,
into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie
and Proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers
of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements
of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up
fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and
Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with
the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in
commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to
industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the
revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid
development.
The feudal system of industry, under which industrial production
was monopolised by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the
growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took
its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the
manufacturing middle class; division of labour between the
different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of
labour in each single workshop.
Meantime the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising.
Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and
machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of
manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of
the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the
leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world-market, for which the
discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an
immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication
by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the
extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce,
navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the
background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the
product of a long course of development, of a series of
revolutions in the modes of production and of exchange.
Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied
by a corresponding political advance of that class. An
oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an
armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune;
here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany),
there taxable "third estate" of the monarchy (as in France),
afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either
the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise
against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great
monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the
establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market,
conquered for itself, in the modern representative State,
exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is
but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole
bourgeoisie.
The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary
part.
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an
end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has
pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to
his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus
between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash
payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of
religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine
sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It
has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of
the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that
single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for
exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked,
shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation
hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has
converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the
man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
III. SOCIALIST AND COMMUNIST LITERATURE
1. REACTIONARY SOCIALISM
A. Feudal Socialism
Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the
aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against
modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830,
and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again
succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political
contest was altogether out of the question. A literary battle
alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature
the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.
In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to
lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate
their indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the
exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took their
revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering
in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.
In this way arose Feudal Socialism: half lamentation, half
lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at
times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the
bourgeoisie to the very heart's core; but always ludicrous in
its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of
modern history.
The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the
proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, so
often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal
coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.
One section of the French Legitimists and "Young England"
exhibited this spectacle.
In pointing out that their mode of exploitation was different to
that of the bourgeoisie, the feudalists forget that they
exploited under circumstances and conditions that were quite
different, and that are now antiquated. In showing that, under
their rule, the modern proletariat never existed, they forget
that the modern bourgeoisie is the necessary offspring of their
own form of society.
For the rest, so little do they conceal the reactionary
character of their criticism that their chief accusation against
the bourgeoisie amounts to this, that under the bourgeois regime
a class is being developed, which is destined to cut up root and
branch the old order of society.
What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it
creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolutionary
proletariat.
In political practice, therefore, they join in all coercive
measures against the working class; and in ordinary life,
despite their high falutin phrases, they stoop to pick up the
golden apples dropped from the tree of industry, and to barter
truth, love, and honour for traffic in wool, beetroot-sugar, and
potato spirits.
As the parson has ever gone hand in hand with the landlord,
so has Clerical Socialism with Feudal Socialism.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist
tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property,
against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the
place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification
of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian
Socialism is but the holy, water with which the priest consecrates
the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental
veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money
relation.
