Communist Manifesto "Bourgeois and Proletarians", a Summary of the

This episode is an attempt to make the first part of the Communist Manifesto, the part called “Bourgeois and Proletarians” intelligible for some one knew to socialism. This text is a part of the DSA NPEC “What is Capitalism?” curriculum. 

Written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, this is one of the foundational texts of the socialist movement. The first chapter covers the expansion of capital and the consolidation of the bourgeoisie as a class, as well as their relationship to the proletariat (the working class) and their role in history.

Crucial to Marx and Engels’ understanding of socialism is their appreciation of the power of capitalism, not simply to dominate and exploit, but to create vast amounts of wealth. Prior to capitalism, no society existed that produced enough for every person to not only be fed, clothed and housed, but to enjoy luxuries and meaningful free time. While capitalism is incapable of providing a just distribution of this wealth, it has ushered in an era of unprecedented wealth. Because the working class produces this wealth, it is the unique agent of change that can upend this status quo.

The Manifesto not only shows capitalism to be a historical phase, and not something that has existed forever, but it also points towards the potential, even the inevitability, that something else will replace it.

Elton L.K. will be returning to his personal podcast The Working Class Intelligentsia. In The Working Class Intelligentsia he follows serially the writings and biography of Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and the lessons we can learn today from them. Gramsci is famous for participating in a socialist movement that collapsed under Mussolini’s fascism. Mussolini put a few socialists in prison, including Gramsci. While in prison Gramsci was for some reason allowed to theorize how the Italian revolution failed, and analyze how power worked through Italian history. Season 2 is going to cover the Russian Revolution and the simultaneous socialist movement building in Italy in the year 1917.

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Transcript

Communist Manifesto 

“Bourgeois and Proletarians”

1.1 Introduction

You’re listening to CLASS, an official podcast of the Democratic Socialists of America National Political Education Committee. My name is Elton LK.

This episode is going to be different than usual. The very first four episodes of CLASS covered the DSA NPEC “What is Capitalism?” curriculum. The podcast is intended to be a resource for individuals reading the curriculum, and DSA local chapters facilitating discussions about the curriculum. 

The third episode was on the “Bourgeois and Proletarians” section of The Communist Manifesto. We recognize that The Communist Manifesto is not a simple text to read. It is much more difficult than most of our other texts. I remember the first time I read it. I was maybe nineteen or twenty, hanging out at Barnes and Nobles visiting my mom, killing time while she was at work for the day. It was my first exposure to Marx and socialism, and I understood none of it. I didn’t know what the “bor-gois” (I didn’t know how to pronounce bourgeois) or “proletarians” were. I knew almost nothing about ancient Rome, the Middle Ages or colonialism. I hadn’t been to college yet, just a trade school. Marx and Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto for workers. Their audience in 1848 may have been far more knowledgeable than I was in the year 1999. 

The Communist League was formed in 1847. They were just one of many socialist organizations at the time, some of which were working class, some of which were not. Originally the Communist League was not particularly quote unquote “Marxist.” Even the term “communism” has roots as far back as the French Revolution of 1789. Marx and Engels had strong opinions about how the new organization should be run, and eventually they were asked to write the small organization’s manifesto. 

Engels had written The Principles of Communism, which is a great concise text, but Engels asked Marx for his help to write something with more historical narrative, something that could build a movement. In fact, some argue that Engels did not actually write any part of The Manifesto. His contribution was The Principles, from which the manifesto was inspired.

It goes without saying that today “communism” comes with emotional connotations. Some of those connotations are earned. In the twentieth century many atrocities were executed in the name of Communism. But as the Manifesto’s opening paragraph suggests, even back in 1848 the enemies of the socialist movement intentionally used the word “communism” to incite a reaction from the general population. The harm caused under the banner of Communism justified their enemies’ fears, and allowed them to opportunistically turn the term into something unrecognizable to those who self-identified as communists.

Today when socialists use the term “communism” they are most likely referencing Lenin’s intentional use of the term to distinguish Bolshevik revolutionary Marxism from reformist Marxism, and other forms of socialism. This tends to be what communists in DSA mean. Communists are a minority in DSA. I want to emphasize that even if you are not a communist, there is good content in The Communist Manifesto. You do not have to agree with everything Marx says in order to learn something from him. Engaging with important historical texts is essential for understanding our current material conditions, just as Marx engaged with important historical texts with which he felt complicated feelings. 

One more historical note: The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. This was a revolutionary moment in Europe, in fact, possibly the most in all of European history. The Manifesto was not published in time to have an influence on the revolutions, although that was their intention. The revolutions were democratic and liberal in nature. Note that in the context of political philosophy “liberal” means “bourgeois”. Today we typically associate democracy with liberal bourgeois democracy, but socialism is about fighting for true democracy, democracy where we are free in the workplace and have the economic capacity to invest in what gives us fulfillment without being compelled to sell our labor power. 

Over 50 countries were affected by the revolutionary spirit in the air. Marx and Engels were particularly interested in the revolution in France where the urban working class was playing an important role.

Given the trouble I had as a young person, this episode is intended to provide a leg up for those readers from the working class trying to tackle The Communist Manifesto. We’re just going to be covering the “Bourgeois and Proletarians” section at this point, not the whole thing.

I am providing a summary of the text. It is not an authoritative summary or analysis. It is my own perspective, not that of DSA or NPEC, though I did get some feedback from my comrades. I will be explicit about my personal bias. I have a lot of respect for Marx, but I am deeply skeptical, given what we can learn from history, and given the complexity of today’s global economy, that we can win true democracy through armed revolution. That being said, I have attempted to summarize the text without imparting my opinions. Rather I have described the debates where there are live debates, and recognize obvious failures where history brought about unexpected events.

You may think of this summary as a translation of The Manifesto into everyday English, though I have provided some of my own analysis at times to provide historical context. If you were considering reading The Communist Manifesto, I want to encourage you to think of this as an aid to assist you, not a replacement for doing the hard work yourself. The Communist Manifesto is a rich text. It is a poetic text. While The Manifesto should not be read as the Bible, and like all texts it should be read with a critical eye, it is stunning how much it still offers us today.

But before we get to my summary, let me provide a few notes. NPEC creates DSA political education curriculum not to indoctrinate DSA’s members, but to facilitate thoughtful discussion and analysis of the current conditions of our world. We need this as socialists to develop effective strategy. Read everything with a critical eye. Note that Marx missed a few things. He failed to anticipate the influence fascism would have. He failed to anticipate that the working class would identify so strongly with their national identities. And he failed to predict the dramatic growth of the middle class. He thought the internal logic of capitalism would push the middle class into poverty. He may be right about proletarianization, but the twentieth century saw the rapid growth of the middle class. Marx was right about many things, and he was even partially right about the things he was wrong about, but we must analyze his arguments in terms of what has been learned in the intervening 175 years.

As you may have already noted, although The Manifesto is credited to both Marx and Engels, sometimes, out of convenience, I will just say “Marx.” Last, note that The Communist Manifesto rarely talks about “capitalism” but instead focuses on the “bourgeois epoch.”

And one more thing, before we get started. I became the producer of Class almost two years ago. It has been an incredible opportunity, but after this episode I will be stepping down. I have worked with a lot of great comrades, the podcast team, Casey and Palmer, and everyone on NPEC, especially Daphna and Evan. I am thankful for their support getting me the resources I needed to get this podcast off the ground. I am honored to be a part of the only National DSA podcast of this scale. I believe in what we are doing, and am excited to see where NPEC takes Class in the future!

For anyone that is interested, I will soon begin working on season 2 of my personal project, a podcast called The Working Class Intelligentsia. In The Working Class Intelligentsia I follow serially the writings and biography of Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and the lessons we can learn today from them. Gramsci is famous for participating in a socialist movement that succumbed to Mussolini’s fascism. Mussolini put a few socialists in prison, including Gramsci. While in prison Gramsci was for some reason allowed to theorize how the Italian revolution failed, and analyze how power worked through Italian history. Season 2 is going to cover the Russian Revolution and the simultaneous socialist movement building in Italy in the year 1917.

OK, with all of that out of the way, let’s get to the text.

1.2 The Introduction of the Manifesto

“A specter is haunting Europe-the specter of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this specter.” Even Marx and Engels’ enemies give them props for the literary value of this opening line. It is up there with Dickens’ “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and Rousseau’s “Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.” This is clearly Marx’s genius. This was why Engels asked for Marx’s help.

My understanding is that there is some hyperbole in this line. Marx and Engels make it sound as though all of Europe was out to eradicate Communism from the face of the earth. The truth is that even among socialists the Communist League, the workers’ party for which The Manifesto was written, was a fringe organization. They were too small and disorganized to exert much influence over the workers’ struggle in the revolution in France in 1848. Yet, in spite of this, like today, anyone with a hint of a leftist program was called a “Communist.” Marx and Engels even claim it was used to brand “reactionary adversaries.”

The prevalence of the term “Communist” in their time indicates that the political leaders of Europe believed Communism to be a threat, so Marx said the Communists should begin openly publishing their views. This was the intention of The Manifesto. The Manifesto reflects the collaboration of Communist League members from throughout Europe, and was to be published in English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish. 

It should be noted that not all members of the Communist League believed such a brazen, confrontational approach to politics was strategic. Marx and Engels fought hard among their comrades to have this combative stance reflected in The Manifesto. This concludes the couple paragraph introduction before the section assigned in the NPEC “What is Capitalism?” curriculum “Bourgeois and Proletarians”.

Bourgeois and Proletarians

1.3 Class Struggle in Previous Epochs

The opening sentence of this section of the manifesto, the section assigned by NPEC, once again punches hard: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” The reading does an excellent job of both answering the question “what is capitalism?” while framing historical, political, philosophical and sociological analysis in terms of class struggle.

In other texts Marx and Engels spell out class analysis in greater detail, but in The Communist Manifesto they mention three important epochs: the Roman empire, the Middle Ages and the Bourgeois epoch, also known as capitalism. These epochs span centuries, centuries in which Europe operated under specific modes of production. “Mode of production” is an abstract way of saying that at different times in human history civilizations established laws and norms, and distributed the workload differently in order to produce the goods they needed to perpetuate society. 

In Rome slavery was the foundation of society. Roman slavery was much different than slavery in America. There were slaves in unskilled and skilled labor alike, including bankers, librarians and physicians. Some slaves could earn their freedom. One could become a slave by being a war captive, being born a slave, or getting kidnapped. Slaves were treated as property. 

As Rome splintered and collapsed, travel throughout Europe became more dangerous. Thieves and other groups attacked travelers. Protection in rural areas throughout the former Roman empire rested upon land owners. Land owners became feudal lords. They offered physical protection to the serfs working their land. The serfs functioned as property. The lords had limited power to control the activities of their serfs, but they tended to enforce labor on their land a quarter of the year, and the taxation of a portion of the harvest from the serf’s personal crops. This was the primary mode of production during the Middle Ages, the epoch in which the feudal lords were the ruling class.

Eventually merchants and artisans built up small cities around the lord’s castles. These small cities were known as bergs. These people became known as the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie eventually began collecting taxes from the other city folk to finance protective walls. Artisans established guilds. Guilds enforced monopolies and regulated production levels in their respective crafts in order to protect the interests of their guild members known as guild-masters. Guild-masters operated as gatekeepers, requiring journeymen to work as apprentices for years, then literally journey for three years and one day. Even after their Journeyman years they had to continue working as an employee of a guild-master until accepted into the guild. Their income was lower than those of the guild-masters, and they had less say over the means of production, which is to say “the production process.”

1.4 Bourgeois Epoch

The “modern bourgeois society” (a.k.a. “capitalism”) evolved out of the feudal epoch, the Middle Ages, replacing the lord/serf and guild-master/journeyman antagonisms with a new antagonism: bourgeois and proletarian, the business owners and the workers. 

Class struggle existed back in Rome (and even before that). In the Middle Ages, through various avenues, serfs slowly moved to the cities and became artisans, bankers, doctors, lawyers and shop owners. In the late Middle Ages in port cities shop owners eventually became factory owners. Factories brought the division of labor, economically replacing the inefficient artisans of the guilds. The guilds fought the bourgeoisie off with violence, but the manufacturing bourgeois middle class produced goods at a lower cost, while using workers that required far less training than journeymen. Marx and Engels supported capitalism in its efforts to destroy feudal political and economic control, in part because capitalism brought workers together on the shop floor, rather than dispersing peasants across the countryside. By bringing workers together workers were able to organize and develop class consciousness. 

This new bourgeois mode of production, in which factory owners reinvested their profits back into their means of production, created the drive for new opportunities to make profit, that is, new markets. This drive inspired the discovery of America and the travel from Europe around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, opening up access to markets in Africa, India, China and other parts of Asia. Eventually railways gave the bourgeoisie access via land to resources and markets in these places. With time the bourgeoisie created a world market. 

The bourgeois drive for profit transformed the entire world. The bourgeois manufacturing middle class exploded with growth. They took political power and implemented laws favoring their interests as a class. Some became millionaires. Some went out of business and became proletarians, workers. Aristocrats had to start playing on the bourgeoisie’s terms. The bourgeoisie implemented the modern liberal democratic representative state, shaming the aristocracy for their authoritarian, arbitrary rule.

This transition from the aristocratic, feudal epoch to the bourgeois epoch was violent and disruptive. Bourgeois ideology was revolutionary, backed by the masses. There are countless examples of bourgeois revolutionary violence, such as the American Revolution. The bourgeoisie replaced feudal communitarian ties with the “naked self-interest” of the profit motive, religious faith with “egotistical calculations”, inherent value with the exchange value a commodity can get on the market, the relative autonomy available to peasants under feudalism with the authoritarian discipline of the workplace that comes with Free Trade, exploitation that hides religious and political ideology. Marx and Engels even mention that the bourgeois epoch removed the dignity of professional occupations such as doctors, lawyers, priests, poets and scientists, making them wage laborers. Note that Marx and Engels are arguing that professionals are members of the working class. Of course this does not negate the fact that doctors and lawyers have much greater social status than manual laborers, not to mention much higher wages.

But with all of this violence, in many important ways the bourgeois epoch has delivered. It has accomplished more than all prior civilizations. The pyramids of ancient Egypt, Roman aqueducts, and the cathedrals of the Middle Ages are awe inspiring, but they fail to compare to the immense accomplishments of the bourgeoisie. What follows is a list of facts about capitalism. Whether or not these facts are bugs or features of capitalism, according to Marx and Engels, is at times unclear.

1.5 Bourgeois Production

All previous modes of production maintained power by enforcing their mode of production on everyone else. During the Roman epoch, those in political power fought to retain political power, and maintain social order. The same was true during the Middle Ages. But during the bourgeois epoch, while individuals seek to retain political power, and the class seeks to maintain a form of social order, society is built upon a constantly revolutionizing mode of production. Capitalism is always evolving. Disruption is built into the system. The profit motive continues to operate at the center of capitalism, but new markets, new technologies and new financial instruments are constantly changing the centers of power in bourgeois society. This is why we have social upheaval much more frequently than in prior centuries. Unregulated capitalism causes frequent bust and boom cycles. Both unregulated and regulated capitalism force us to adapt to constantly changing social norms. New industries undermine old industries. Internet streaming pressured us to abandon our DVD collections. Socioeconomic trends are leaving multimillion dollar shopping malls built in the 80’s abandoned. New wants cause capitalists to pursue markets in distant lands. Globalization allows people all over the world to eat bananas and wear Levi’s.

All of this has created an international, interdependent economy. While being disruptive and exploitative in many ways, globalization comes with many advantages over all former epochs. Marx and Engels mention in particular that the bourgeois epoch has significantly improved our access to cosmopolitan virtues. Marx and Engels were so taken with the bourgeoisie’s successes that they failed to anticipate the bourgeoisie’s role in fascist nationalism. They saw urban proletarians had more culture than backwards peasants, and thought that meant the bourgeoisie would eradicate “national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness.” They thought, as harmful as the bourgeois is upon indigenous cultures, at least they were able to provide culture and education to the entire globe, creating the conditions for the working class of the world to be able to come together against the bourgeoisie. While this may one day be true, Marx and Engels fail to recognize how dangerous xenophobia and racism would get. They overestimated the ideological draw of class solidarity over nationalism, how effective it was in pitting people of an otherwise common interest against each other. World War I, and the subsequent decades, were a period in which the middle class grew and people of all classes allied with the most wealthy of their own nation states at the cost of the lives of those from what they viewed as enemy nations.

1.6 Centralization of Power

The bourgeois epoch did not invent the city, but cities were rare and small under feudalism, and rarely at the center of the economy. The growth of the city is linked to the growth of the bourgeoisie. 

Later in The Manifesto Marx demands a “gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.” From what I can tell, they are praising the bourgeois epoch for improving the access to culture and education for the urban working class, in contrast to the peasants, but they are assuming that under communism people would be closer to their food source, and be expected to help out on the farm, while still having access to the culture and education which at that time was reserved exclusively for the urban areas.

And just as the bourgeois epoch centralized local power into the cities, it also gave first world imperialist and colonial countries power over third world countries. That is because centralizing the means of production and the ownership of property into the hands of a few is what the bourgeoisie does. The nation state became the ideal means of political organization. One government and one code of laws replaced many loosely connected provinces. I will add that this process was explicitly underway in Italy at the time Marx and Engels wrote this text. In 1815 Italy was divided into 16 kingdoms. By 1871 it became one: Italy. To this day, as I understand it, each kingdom still retains its old identity, but the Risorgimento created out of nothing the Italian identity. Prior to this bourgeois struggle Italians did not think of themselves as Italians.

Bourgeois production existed in its seed form under feudalism, but by the time of The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels claim the epoch was only a little more than 100 years old. They are most likely referencing the timeframe of the Industrial Revolution,which began around 1760. Marx and Engels then call out a number of the achievements of the bourgeois epoch to harness nature through the application of science: the steam engine, the railway, the telegraph and industrial farming, to name a few. The spirit of these technological innovations began under feudalism as part of the feudal mode of production, but over time the feudal laws and relationships got in the way. The bourgeoisie built up enough political power to slowly, and then with increasing pace, replace them with free competition.

1.7 Bourgeois Production in the Bourgeois Epoch

As bourgeois production and innovation grew beyond what feudalism could handle, as the Western world transitioned in the bourgeois epoch, they began experiencing regular recessions, recessions in which the bourgeoisie produced beyond from which they could make a profit. Overproduction was inconceivable in all previous epochs. Economic recessions put the hegemonic dominance of the ruling class at risk by causing social unrest. The bourgeoisie’s solution to recessions were and are to 

1. enforced destruction (that is waste) of production forces, like when farmers destroy a crop rather than spending the resources to harvest and ship to sell on an already oversaturated market,
2. find new markets in which to sell overproduced goods, and
3. seek better penetration into existing markets. Get people to buy even more of your product.

It should be noted that the latter two solutions increase the risk of a bigger crisis the next time, with fewer means to mitigate and address them. I think we can see this as a warning that something like the Great Depression was impending. I am not an economist, so someone please let me know if I am misreading this.

Marx and Engels, and pretty much every socialist at the time, make a big to do about capitalism’s inherently unstable foundation. All previous modes of production sought economic stability because it was the best way to ensure their rule. The bourgeoisie used the profit motive, the free market and economic efficiency through the division of labor and scientific innovation as weapons to destabilize and overthrow feudalism. Once they took power they had no choice but to double down. Marx and Engels thought this would be the downfall of the bourgeoisie. It might be, but writing more than 175 years later we must admit capitalism’s continual self-revolutionizing function has frequently replaced individuals from power, but has been surprisingly successful at keeping the bourgeoisie in power. This does not mean we should abandon our goal of replacing the bourgeoisie as the ruling class, but we must admit the task will be harder than Marx and Engels expected. But let us table that for now and return to Marx and Engels.

1.8 The Bourgeoisie Created the Proletariat

Marx and Engels saw hope in the fact that, not only did the bourgeoisie point their own destabilizing weapon at themselves, but they inadvertently brought into existence the class that would wield said weapon. They are of course referring to the proletarians, the modern working class. The working class is a class whose existence depends upon their ability to find employment from the bourgeoisie. They can only find employment from the bourgeoisie as long as they bring in profit for the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie cannot make profits without the workers. Profits are necessary in order for the bourgeoisie to reinvest capital, to build more capital. This is the inherent logic in the bourgeois mode of production. Compassionate members of the bourgeoisie must keep the bottom line in view at all times if they hope to keep their workers employed, and the working class must sell themselves as though they are a commodity like any other commodity, leaving their quality of life vulnerable to the fluctuations of the market. 

This commodification of the worker removes the personal touch of individual workers from their labor. The workers’ labor becomes simple, unskilled and monotonous (which was recognized by Adam Smith, by the way). As the work becomes more rudimentary through process improvement and automation, the workers’ wages decrease. The logic of capitalism is such that the wages of unskilled workers tend to fall as much as possible while still enabling the majority of the working class to keep themselves and their children alive. To keep their factories running the bourgeoisie is dependent upon the next generation of workers. 

1.9 The Experience of the Proletariat

Central to Marxism is the exploitation inherent in class in terms of a class’s relation to the means of production. Typically one class owns the property necessary to produce society’s needs, and the other classes must perform the labor. In many ways capitalism is a major improvement over feudalism, but there are aspects that are worse for workers. Capitalism is more disciplined than feudalism. In the Middle Ages the guild-master oversaw their little workshop. In capitalism the industrial capitalist oversees his or her factory, with its masses of workers, hierarchically disciplined like soldiers, officers and sergeants. The bourgeoisie micromanages their workers to an extent unimaginable to most peasants and journeymen under feudalism. Marx and Engels go so far as to call workers the slaves of the bourgeois class and the bourgeois state, enslaved daily and hourly by the machines and the managers, and the individual bourgeois manufacturers themselves. 

They of course fully recognized that being a member of the working class was far better than being a pre-American civil war slave, or even a slave of the Roman Empire. Being a worker under capitalism means you are free to sell your labor to whoever will hire you, and you are free to starve to death if you do not. They are emphasizing the lack of freedom of the worker in the workplace, especially for unskilled labor. They call the bourgeois relationship over the worker “despotism.” 

I will take a moment to speak to a modern reader. Some of us have no problem adopting this vocabulary today. Things were different when The Communist Manifesto was written, though we must recognize Marx and Engels were comfortable utilizing hyperbole and other rhetorical tools. In the twenty-first century some of us have more adversarial relationships with our bosses than others, and feel comfortable using terms like “slavery” and “despotism.” Some do not. Many people are friends with their bosses. Your boss may be a good person, but the inherent logic of the bourgeois mode of production, of capitalism, the imperative to put profit before people, and the ownership of the majority of society’s productive property in the hands of the few, creates a society in which the bourgeoisie has an incredible amount of control over both our daily activities and how our world’s resources are utilized and distributed. 

Marx and Engels call out the bourgeoisie’s propaganda that attempts to justify their despotism. We are just coming out of the neoliberal era, an era where this propaganda was at its zenith. All forms of capitalist and imperialist tyranny were, and still are being justified in the name of democracy and economic prosperity. Marx and Engels argued bourgeois propaganda was losing its effectiveness, and was becoming recognized as petty, hateful and embittering. There have always been those who saw through bourgeois propaganda, but the larger working class is growing in its skepticism of the bourgeoisie’s benevolence.

Let me pause again for a moment. I am sure Marx and Engels were onto something - the workers were becoming disillusioned with the bourgeoisie’s propaganda - but obviously the workers of the nineteenth century did not unite to overthrow the bourgeois era, at least not in the United States. Workers are cynical today, but many of them are also hopeless. We believe there is no alternative. Also, the middle class has grown dramatically in Europe and in the US since Marx and Engels’ text was written. The middle class includes union workers such as fire fighters that negotiated strong contracts and good pay, but far more often it is small business owners (what Marx called the petite bourgeoisie), managers that have worked their way up the corporate ladder, and professionals with college degrees. Much of our culture war today is rooted in the ideological battles between the petite bourgeoisie versus the managers and professionals, especially professionals in the media and the universities. Both small business owners and professionals are being squeezed economically by the large bourgeoisie into proletarianization. Behind the ideological grandstanding of the Republicans and the Democrats is a growing number of people aspiring to remain or move up into the middle class, and a dwindling number of middle class jobs. The middle class’s quality of life is heavily based on the maintenance of the bourgeois system, but there are internal disagreements about how the bourgeois system should function. Some workers often side with the reactionaries, largely made up of the petite bourgeoisie, because the workers (not to mention the petite bourgeoisie) resent the condescension they experience from the educated professionals and corporate managers. I have tried to concisely explain why Marx and Engels’ accounts of working class skepticism has not resulted in the overcoming of capitalism +175 years later. 

Let us return back to The Communist Manifesto. One of the primary themes in Marx’s critique of capitalism is the idea that while some commodities are more valuable than other commodities, they are all commodities, and can all be exchanged with each other. The same is true of labor power. According to Marxist Feminist Silvia Federici in her book Caliban and the Witch, in the Middle Ages men and women had different roles in society, but both more or less were equally important, and the sexual division of labor was less pronounced than on the capitalist farm. (25) 

The elders in the Middle Ages received respect for their age. Under capitalism, especially as technology reduces the required skill level of labor, labor is distinguished by one's speed and strength. Because of their strength men tend to earn more than women, and when one’s health deteriorates to the point of being no longer useful to the bourgeoisie, they lose their ability to earn a wage. Marx and Engels do not mean to romanticize the Middle Ages. They mean to show how capitalism just disregards culture. The logic of capital creates a new culture subservient to the commodification of everything.

And after commodifying the labor power of the workers, the workers then must give their wages back to the bourgeoisie and the petite bourgeoisie: the debt collectors, their landlords, the shopkeepers, etc.

1.10 Proletarianization

But speaking of the shopkeepers, Marx uses the moment to mention the concept of proletarianization. Proletarianization is another economic concept in Marx and Engels that has not manifested explicitly as they described. They claim the lower strata of the middle class sink gradually into the proletariat. By lower strata they call out the tradespeople, shopkeepers, retired tradesmen, handicraftsmen and the peasants. They argue this happens because the lower strata of the middle class does not have the capital to compete against the big capitalists, and it has skills that are made irrelevant due to the continual revolutionizing of capitalism to undermine existing methods of production, what we call market disruption. 

This also requires a moment of analysis. If what Marx and Engels argued was the whole picture, the middle class would have disappeared by now. Instead, the middle class exploded in the twentieth century for at least two reasons, but probably many more: 1. Many militant workers organized unions and demanded better pay, better working conditions and more political power. 2. Capitalists recognized they needed managers and engineers on their side to figure out how to mitigate the risk of a socialist revolution by creating class harmony. This necessitated the bourgeoisie financing the creation of a middle class. This strategy was implemented one compromise at a time, but resulted in reversing capitalism’s proletarianization trend. But since Reagan’s presidency we can see the tendency towards proletarianization has returned. The middle class is shrinking. People with college degrees cannot afford to buy houses. The cost of college continues to rise. Wages have stagnated since the early 70’s. The availability of credit complicates the picture, but there are still indications that what we call the middle class is shrinking. Since the neoliberal era things have been moving in the direction predicted by Marx and Engels.

1.11 Working Class Consciousness

Class consciousness is a central concept to Marx. He never clarified exactly how he defined “class” in detail, but he did say in Capital, volume 3 a class is defined by its source of income. The aristocracy earn their income through rents collected from their land. The bourgeoisie bring in their income by owning capital. The working class earn their income by selling their labor power.

During the French Revolution in 1789 the bourgeoisie thought of themselves as “the people.” They did not necessarily intend to take political power, but they did have enough class consciousness to demand an equal voice as the aristocracy and the church in the governance of France. 

A class comes into existence as a contingent accident of history. In the French Revolution the working class supported the revolution because they saw themselves as a part of the people. Over the subsequent decades the workers began to recognize the interests of the bourgeoisie were distinct from their interests. This growing consciousness of the working class as a class with its own interests began germinating throughout Europe in the nineteenth century. 

In The Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels describe the various stages of development of the proletariat, which is another way of saying the growing class consciousness of the working class. At first the workers struggled with their bosses. Eventually workers united together against their bosses, then together as trade unions against their collective bosses, the bourgeoisie. The process grew in fits and starts. The Luddites attacked the instruments of production, rather than the bourgeoisie itself. Workers fought against imported goods produced in counties with lower standards of living. Some sought to restore the dignity of work of the guild-masters of the Middle Ages. When workers came together it was a direct consequence of the bourgeoisie, not their own class consciousness. The workers fought against their enemy’s enemy, which are the classes from the feudal era (monarchy, landowners, non-industrial bourgeoisie), inadvertently winning victories for the bourgeoisie. The working class lacked long-term strategy. Their victories went nowhere. 

With the further development of industry and means of communication the proletariat increased in numbers and organization, and began to feel it’s power as a class, as “the many.” Even as the working class developed consciousness of itself as a class, and even as it established its own working class parties throughout Europe, it was continually thwarted by internal divisions and competition between the workers. Even so, as it struggled internally it won legislative victories by “taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself.” (481) Marx and Engels provide the example of England’s 10 hour workday. 

As the working class fought the bourgeoisie for political power, the bourgeoisie was attacked from both sides. Although in decline, the aristocracy continued to fight the bourgeoisie for power. At the time of The Communist Manifesto the bourgeoisie was arming workers to aid them in the fight against the aristocracy, but the workers were free to use these weapons against the bourgeoisie. Obviously this section is less relevant today as the aristocracy is not a real threat to the bourgeoisie anymore. We can learn, though, that just as the elements of the aristocracy joined the side of the bourgeoisie, so too proletarianization may cause members of the bourgeoisie to join the workers’ struggle.

Grounded on the concept of proletarianization Marx and Engels argued the working class is the only “really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.” 

This is the big one. Allow me another moment to provide some context. Obviously the concept of communist revolution is the most controversial aspect of Marx, among both socialists and non-socialists alike. Within DSA this can be a divisive topic. There are different kinds of socialists. Some DSA members do not identify as Marxists, but even among Marxists many reject armed revolution as a viable path to democracy. Marx and Engels took a stand on this point. They believed the bourgeoisie would never allow the working class to take power through reforms. Some Marxists believe armed revolution is a necessary doctrine to hold in order to call yourself a Marxist. Whatever you think about this, you shouldn’t believe something merely because Marx and Engels did. You should think for yourself and arrive at opinions because you are convinced by sound arguments. I hope to have an episode of CLASS exploring this debate, though remember that even among comrades who disagree on this topic there is much work to be done on which we can agree.

Marx argues the proletariat is the only revolutionary class because all other classes have interests willing to compromise with the bourgeoisie. And more importantly, due to the process of proletarianization, Marx and Engels believe the aristocrats, peasants and the small business owners (and any other classes) will be economically forced into the bourgeoisie and working classes. Marx and Engels observed in their time the small manufacturer, shopkeeper, artisan and farmer will eventually be unable to compete, will go out of business, and be forced to sell their labor to survive. In the meantime their struggle against the bourgeoisie actually pushes them towards reactionary politics, rather than solidarity with the working class. Reactionary politics nostalgically seek to return to a time before, when things were better, before they feared falling down into the working class. As mentioned above, proletarianization is happening today, but has not happened in exactly the way Marx and Engels predicted, so when we read this text 175 years later we must analyze it with nuance. 

Marx also argues the lumpenproletariat, what he calls the “dangerous class” in quotes, the social scum, the criminal underground of Gotham City, cannot be relied upon to work in solidarity with the working class either. Their material conditions prepare them to be bribed by the reactionaries. 

The rest of part one “Bourgeois and Proletarians” of The Communist Manifesto emphasizes the widening gap between the bourgeoisie and the working class, the proletarians. They describe the working class as “without property” and with family relations that no longer reflect bourgeois values. They claim the workers no longer identify with their nationality, morality or religion. They feel like these concepts are “bourgeois prejudices” that merely serve bourgeois interests. While there may be something to these audacious claims, I assume Marx and Engels were fully aware they were far from fully realized truths. Workers rarely owned property, their families suffered greatly from tragic economic conditions, and often a variety of economic and social factors resulted in a patchwork quilt of morality, but religion and nationality proved ready at hand when World War I arrived sixty six years later. Most likely Marx and Engels wrote these statements into The Manifesto hoping they could manifest them. 

It is worth mentioning that DSA aspires to be an international working class organization, but it is not anti-religion, nor anti-morality. Religion and morality have served the interests of the elite throughout history, but that does not mean they are the problem. In fact, DSA has a Religion and Socialism Working Group.

The widening gap between the bourgeoisie and the working class visible at the time of The Manifesto was contested under neoliberalism. The breaking down of neoliberal ideology over the last decade has brought the gap to our attention. Hollywood is releasing a flood of films of which the gap is in the premise: Joker, Knives Out, Snowpiercer, Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, The Menu, Saltburn, The Fall of the House of Usher, Dumb Money, Bodies Bodies Bodies, and even Wonka, to name a few.

Marx and Engels emphasize the gap because they finish this section of The Manifesto with another argument for revolution. The goal of socialism is the establishment of the working class as the ruling class. All previous ruling classes transformed the mode of production to their mode of production. The aristocrats implemented feudalism. The bourgeoisie implemented capitalism. In order for the working class to implement a socialist mode of production they would need to, as Marx and Engels argue, abolish the previous mode of appropriation. Destroy all individual property. Note that by “individual property” they are talking about individual capital, what you think of when you say “commercial property.” They are not talking about your Kenny Loggins records, as Bhaskar Sunkara argues with tongue-in-cheek in the ABC’s of Socialism. But whatever Marx thought, DSA members hold many conflicting positions on this topic as well. This is open to debate.

The working class revolution differs from all previous revolutions in that it will be the first to put the majority of the people in power, rather than a minority. The majority ruling class will look out for the interests of the majority of the people. The twentieth century failed to fulfill this vision, but DSA seeks to critically analyze socialist history and our current conditions in order to develop a new vision for the future. The DSA website says 

Capitalism is a system designed by the owning class to exploit the rest of us for their own profit. We must replace it with democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society. We believe there are many avenues that feed into the democratic road to socialism. Our vision pushes further than historic social democracy and leaves behind authoritarian visions of socialism in the dustbin of history. https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/ 

This struggle is first a national struggle. While socialism is an international movement, national bourgeois governments are a reality, and must be addressed in the path to socialism. 

Marx and Engels close with the claim that all societies have been based on the antagonism between the oppressing and oppressed classes, and the working class is being dragged into poverty rather than prosperity. The bourgeoisie is not fit to be the ruling class. Society’s existence is unsustainable under its leadership. Although the details have changed, this is still true today. Climate change alone is enough on which to make this argument, not to mention the economic instability and growing xenophobia we see today. The bourgeoisie created the working class, the complex international economy, and our unprecedented consumption of carbon. The internal logic of capital cannot do otherwise. To quote Marx and Engels, we can argue “[w]hat the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers.”

The last line of part one, while inspirational, is almost certainly not true: “[The bourgeoisie’s] fall and the victory of the workers are equally inevitable.” Much has been written about the fact that Stalin justified his atrocities in the name of inevitability. We must take moral responsibility for our socialist dreams. Equally today, in the twenty-first century, we have no certainty that the working class will successfully replace the bourgeois epoch. If we do not organize the bourgeoisie may trigger an ecological meltdown from which recovery is almost unimaginable. Rather than rely upon inevitability, we must organize and theorize what freedom and democracy we want to replace the bourgeois epoch, and how to get there.

Thank you for sticking with me to the end. And thank you in particular to Yash Khaleque for his feedback.