170th Anniversary: Lessons from The Communist Manifesto

In late 1847, a secret European propaganda society, the Communist League, requested Karl Marx and Frederick Engels to write up a statement of purpose for the organization. In February 1848, the document appeared. It was called the Communist Manifesto (click here for a copy, available in 80 languages).
This work outlines the new world conception, consistent materialism, which also embraces the realm of social life, dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development, the theory of the class struggle and of the world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat—the creator of a new, communist society.
— V.I. Lenin, Karl Marx (1913)
In time, the Manifesto became the most revered document among revolutionaries everywhere. After 170 years, we in the Progressive Labor Party still take these words seriously:
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.”
The ruling classes understood the significance of Marxist ideas. We are still grasping its historic importance.
In 1895, Lenin wrote in Frederick Engels:
The services rendered by Marx and Engels to the working class may be expressed in a few words thus: they taught the working class to know itself and be conscious of itself, and they substituted science for dreams.
All those who wish to develop as revolutionaries should understand the Communist Manifesto and look at the similarities and differences between the early communists and the PLP. Its main points are these:
(l) Communists should openly “publish their views (and) their aims’’ to the world. Marx and Engels believed, as do we, that being bold and explicit about communist ideas is the only way to build a movement for communism.
(2) “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’’ It has been the struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed that ultimately leads to the destruction of the oppressors and the progression of history.
(3) However, capitalism has a uniqueness to it not found before: “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified 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.”
(4) Capitalism has another distinct feature: “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 …for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
(5) But with this more explicit form of exploitation were planted the “seeds of destruction” of the bourgeoisie—the working class: “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e. capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modem working class, developed—a class of laborers, who live only so long as they find work, and who work only so long as their labor increases capital.”
(6) Finally, the aim of communists—the issue which separates revolutionaries from pretenders—is “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat”—the dictatorship of the working class.
As it was only the opening gun for a movement in its infancy, the Manifesto had a few major omissions. Marx and Engels more or less knew the sort of world they wanted—a world led by workers—but hadn’t the slightest idea how to achieve it. This knowledge was to come later, helped out by the brave workers of Paris in 1871 who used mass violence to set up the Paris Commune.
Marx and Engels were very vague on the role of ideology or the hold of bourgeois ideas on the working class. We have since learned that the role of communists is to demolish the bosses’ ideas among workers and students and to develop communist ideas in order to create the revolutionary army that will destroy capitalism. To do that, we need one united party all over the world. Join PLP and turn the words of the Communist Manifesto into actuality.