I finished last week with Marx's great line from the 18th Brumaire that "people make their own history but not in conditions of their own making". So what were the conditions in which he was trying to make his own history?
He was born 19 years after the French revolution. That was, of course, the great seismic event in the development of modernity and the ensuing political tsunami forced its way into every corner of Europe. The Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848, the next great year of European revolution. It hoped that the shifting plate tectonics of socioeconomic change would ignite a German revolution, aid the Chartists in England and bring the growing proletariat onto the European political stage. This was Marx's communist spectre haunting Europe, a spectre before which the old order was supposed to tremble.
The Communist Manifesto is probably the widest read and most influential political document of the modern age, but it is also probably the most misunderstood and misquoted. Famously, the opening section is a song of praise to the modernising tendencies of bourgeois capitalist rule and it is in the manifesto that we find the insights about globalisation and the spread of capitalist modernity around the world, quotes which garner grudging admiration today for their prescience even from Wall Street and the City. The creative destruction that modern capitalist society unleashes, in which "everything that is solid melts into air", is for Marx a precondition for the development of the productive forces to a point where there is an adequate surplus generated for it to be redistributed.
Capitalism had opened the world for business and we begin to see already in 1848 a recognition of the role of imperialism as a means of capital expanding its reach to the Americas, China and East India.
"The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, ie, to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."
This is one area at least where Marx certainly knew what he was talking about. In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Japan's harbours threatening military force if Japan did not open its borders to free trade, and the activities of the East India Company are well known to us. The Opium Wars – a naked move by the British state to control the drug trade – had perhaps also given Marx the idea about religion as the opium of the people.
But in political terms, the main point in the manifesto is that capitalism, apart from the process of the primitive accumulation of wealth through theft and naval power, also by necessity creates a domestic power which is both the source of wealth and also the main danger to it; namely the proletariat. This class is what Mary Shelley was writing about when she conceived of Frankenstein's monster; a gigantic, powerful beast which is the inevitable product of industry, technology and modernity but which has the potential to turn on it and destroy it once it realises the power it possesses and finds its voice.
Chapter one of the manifesto maintains that in the place of the "manifold gradations" of feudal society, bourgeois capitalism has simplified class antagonisms, reducing society down to a basic competition between a bourgeois class – who owned the means of production – and a growing proletariat – who had only their labour power to sell in order to live. The enclosure of the lands, the urbanisation of rural workers and the creation of heavy industry were all absolutely necessary to the extension of capital and yet the same process was to create associations of workers who would combine to defend their own rights.
For Marx, this was not just a political competition but an immanent structural antagonism which would "inevitably lead to the victory of the proletariat" over the bourgeoisie who, in developing the productive forces, had created their own "gravediggers". In chapter two, the manifesto lays out the "despotic inroads on the rights of property" that will need to be made by the proletariat once they take control and indeed many trace the birth of the Gulag to precisely this phrase but I would like to deal with that issue next week when we look at Marx's writings on the Paris Commune and the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat".
It is probably too early to say whether Marx's prediction of the inevitable overthrow of the bourgeoisie is correct, but the power of the combined workers to gain concessions from the state through social reform was something which Marx did not deal with in the manifesto. To give him his due, it did not look that likely anywhere in 1848 and he and Engels did begin to talk of a non-revolutionary road to socialism by the 1880s, but at this point the cry was simple: "Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!" Workers of the world, unite!