Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels published the Manifesto
of the Communist Party in 1848. By no means did Marx and Engels set out to
read the fortune of future capitalist societies, or to develop some high-resolution
photograph of future international political economy amongst states. Nor did they
predict the various incarnations of communism that would arise after their time.
Instead, the manifesto was a commissioned work; its intention was to
communicate the purposes and platform of the Communist League, an international
political party started in 1847 London.
The manifesto’s
investigation of historical and then class struggle included polemicizing
capitalism and the capitalist mode of production. Not surprisingly, the
manifesto remains integral to the comprehension and investigation of a globalizing
economy and roiling world order. The industrial revolution of a Modern West has
since carried capitalism, like the malignant contents of a virus, injected into
the nuclei of different governments its inhuman system, and sought thusly to
possess centralized power everywhere for the benefit of the global hegemon, the
1%, the plutocracy. Saliently so, the United States has made itself a vector
for a super strain of this selfsame, mutating capitalist virus. Now, it enjoys
its last gasps of hegemony, stamping the world with its seal of war and free
trade ad nauseam.
The paradigm persists
amongst many of the 21st century’s living, however, that socialism
will replace capitalist society though the populations that Marx and Engels treated
in their language have changed in makeup. Arguably, another read of the
authors’ words gives life to virtually the same message today, in 2015, which
it did in the 19th century. What is more, today’s targeted
demographic shares much of the proletarian struggles of Marx’s time—however different
the particulars may be. So, indeed, the history of global society still is a “history
of class struggles.” As such, it is paramount to explore some reasons why the
impetuses for publishing the Communist
Manifesto of so many years ago still matter.
Consider what
Marx and Engels say of Modern Europe’s bourgeois society, which arose from a decomposing
feudal society. Bourgeois society had not “done away with class antagonisms”
endogenous to feudalism, but rather, it “established new classes, new
conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” Though
certainly not alone in reinventing this axiomatic condition between rich and
poor, the US stands perhaps head and shoulders above other nations in its efforts
to maintain a global hegemony, especially after World War II. US domination has
heretofore translated as global markets that deify wealth and eschew human
development or welfare, and which also extract anything of worthwhile material
value.
Soon after the
Second World War, America preyed on decolonizing nations via military and
capitalist inroads on the Third World. The US did not want any pushback from
groups that might radicalize during their overthrow of colonialism, thus precluding
the commodification of goods or the extraction of saleable materials. To be
clear, after WWII, American industry had the world to gain; so the US sided
with militarized nationalism in decolonizing states specifically to resist the abolition
of private property there, or manifold other communist proclivities that might
emerge. America spent this system into existence, dubbing the process “modernization,”
or “development.”
Well before the Second World War, however, Marx and
Engels would note the “discovery of America” advanced capitalist industry alongside
a quickly globalizing world of interlacing markets. As a market itself, America
provided fertile ground for the development of commerce, navigation, and
communication. In turn, Marx and Engels claim such development had “reacted on
the extension of industry…” Capital thereby increased “in the same proportion
the bourgeoisie developed,” they wrote, and synchronously “pushed into the
background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.”
Does the US, in 2015, seek to advance capitalist industry
among a seemingly subjugable population of the world’s poor who live pocketed
away in the nation-states of the capitalism-oppressed Third World? For those
who would thunder a resounding and patriotic “no,” well, what then might be an
appropriate apology for the post-WWII American penchant for war and economic
disenfranchisement all around the world? Would the underlying rationale broach
the defense of security? Of freedom? Stable markets? Prosperity? Private
property? One should question just how necessary a system like capitalism truly
is if America need yet sell it from behind loaded guns, or punctuate it with
bullets so as to maintain an equilibrium of acquiescence among weaker states
that it seeks to relegate with free trade agreements.
Marx and Engels write that the political advance of the
bourgeoisie followed from “[e]ach step in the development” of that class. They
write that from the launch of Modern Industry, “and of the world-market,” the
bourgeoisie had “conquered for itself, in the modern representative State,
exclusive political sway.” In 21st century America, estimated
spending on the country’s 2014 midterm political elections reported spending estimates
upwards of $4 billion. There is no reason to believe that spending in upcoming
presidential elections will not also exceed the amounts of previous years. By
asserting in 1848 that the “executive of the modern State is but a committee
for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie,” Marx and Engels
throw down the gauntlet for Americans yet: Does money determine the American democracy?
If so, then who has that money? The moneyed class does.
Just as Marx
and Engels argued from their own European nexus, the American bourgeoisie of
2015 also embraces “that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade,” especially
in lieu of the “numberless indefensible chartered freedoms” that a healthy
democracy requires. On behalf of “exploitation, veiled by religious and
political illusions,” the authors write the bourgeoisie of their time had “substituted
naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” Today, America is at war with
terror the world over, and the popularly misconceived and emotionally charged American
crusade against “fundamentalist Islam” certainly reeks of religious and political
illusion.
Today, the survival
of the American bourgeoisie yet requires that it that it revolutionize
instruments of production, the relationions of production, and society as a
whole. There is yet a need to incessantly expand into markets, to expand markets
for goods, to exploit the world-market, and to give “a cosmopolitan character
to production and consumption in every country,” just as Marx and Engels
observed. National industries face certain destruction with the emergence of
new, private ones, and the “introduction” of such private industries still
contour life and death “for all civilized nations,” and which yet extract “raw
material from the remotest zones” for products that get consumed “in every
quarter of the globe.” New wants continue to replace old ones. Economic
intercourse still constitutes the “universal interdependence of nations.” The
adoption of the capitalist class’ mode of production yet “creates a world after
its own image.”
What Marx and
Engels effectively benchmarked with the Communist
Manifesto was a moment in time when factors that buoyed the dominion of the
oppressors over oppressed reached crystallization in changing Europe.
Nevertheless, so much of the content of their manifesto re-reads and so authentically
resounds with readers today. Not surprisingly, Marx and Engels’ words serve a
timely purpose for millions of Americans that egress out of 2014. There still
exists a grueling battle between the unquestioned sanctity of private property
and that of a human future. Nations and capitalist classes still war to
preserve power where it is concentrated, and thus to amplify the distortion
between wealthy overseers and the wage-slaves their system treats as little
more than oft-rebellious druids of flesh. America largely spearheads that
battle for continued oppression, whether Iraq, Eurasia, or Venezuela. So long
as this history continues into 2015, so, too, will Marx and Engels’ 1848
Communist Manifesto remain essential for consideration.
Mateo Pimentel is an Axis of Logic columnist, living on the US-Mexico border. Read the Biography and additional articles by Axis Columnist Mateo Pimentel.
© Copyright 2015 by AxisofLogic.com
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