Proletarians
and Communists
We only need one text for one
discussion per week, but the Communist University always gives alternatives,
which can also be used for supplementary reading. Yesterday we took the first
part of the Communist Manifesto. Here is the
second part, called Proletarians and
Communists.
As with the first part of
this highly-concentrated piece of writing, the simplest way to present it is
with selected quotes. Here are some:
The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to
the other working-class parties.
They have no interests
separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole.
They do not set up any
sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian
movement.
The Communists are
distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only:
(1) In the national struggles
of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the
front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all
nationality.
(2) In the various stages of
development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has
to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the
movement as a whole.
The text then deals with
property, and with marriage, in similar terms to “The Origin of the
Family, Private Property and The State”, which was written 35 years
later. One of the remarkable things about the “Manifesto” is that it summarises
ideas which had not yet been published and knocked into shape by controversy,
yet it did so very accurately, and the Manifesto still stands tall today. On
ideas, and on the struggle of ideas, it says, among other things:
The ruling ideas of each age
have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.
When people speak of the ideas
that revolutionize society, they do but express that fact that within the old
society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution
of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of
existence.
The history of all past
society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms, antagonisms that
assumed different forms at different epochs.
But whatever form they may
have taken, one fact is common to all past ages, viz., the exploitation of one
part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of
past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within
certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except
with the total disappearance of class antagonisms.
The communist revolution is
the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its
development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.
Finally, the Manifesto arrives, at the end of the second part, at the
following tremendous vision of communism as the purest possible kind of human freedom:
Political power, properly so
called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If
the proletariat… by means of a revolution, makes itself the ruling class, and,
as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will,
along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence
of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished
its own supremacy as a class.
In
place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we
shall have an association in which the free development of each is the
condition for the free development of all.
Please download and read
the text via the following link:
Further reading:
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