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FRAGMENTARY NOTES ON
COMMUNIST MENIFESTO

(This is the concluding part of the article. The first part was carried in the June issue of Liberation.)

While the Communist Manifesto does not explicitly discuss the question of proletarian leadership over bourgeois democratic revolution, it contains a lot of hints and insightful comments in this direction. The premise inherent and implicit in the Manifes-to was developed more fully and explicitly in the subsequent writings of Marx and Engels and then so categorically and compre-hensively by Lenin in his celebrated Two Tactics of Social Democ-racy in Democratic Revolution.

Profoundly significant in this context are these two state-ments: (1) "The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part," and (2) "the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy." These two state-ments stress the revolutionary import of capitalism and bourgeois democracy vis-a-vis the medieval age and simultaneously underline the fact that the revolutionary phase of the bourgeoisie is by and large over. This is precisely the point of departure for the thesis of proletarian leadership in democratic revolution.

The Manifesto also notes that the political schooling of the proletariat is often initiated by the bourgeoisie in the interest of its own fight against the remnants of absolute monarchy, the landowners, the non-industrial bourgeois, the petty bourgeoisie; this is the phase of the proletarians fighting the enemies of their enemies. This stands in sharp contrast to the vulgar common sense approach towards united front which identifies the enemy’s enemy as a natural friend. But the Manifesto also qualifies this alliance with its clear insistence on proletarian independence. With regard to Germany, for example, we are told, "In Germany they (the Communists) fight with the bourgeoisie whenever it acts in a revolutionary way, against the absolute monarchy, the feudal squirearchy, and the petty bourgeoisie. But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil into the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoi-sie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political conditions that the bourgeoisie must neces-sarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie itself may immediately begin." Here we have a categorical refutation of the theory of stages and the first indication of the theoretical possibility of the democratic revolution under proletarian leadership growing uninterruptedly into a socialist revolution.

Much has been written against the Manifesto’s characterisation of the peasantry’s resistance against the bourgeoisie as being prompted by a "conservative, nay, reactionary" agenda of rolling back the wheel of history. Citing the success of the Chinese revolution, Taylor has even claimed that in real life peasants, and not workers, make revolutions. Well, Marx did not minimise the importance of peasant resistance - in the case of Poland, for example, the Manifesto clearly stated that here the Communists "support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation." And the history of twentieth century revolutions also clearly shows that if peasants have made revolutions, they have done so under the proletarian leadership of communist parties, deserting, as the Manifesto says, "their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat." Lenin called it imparting consciousness from with-out and except for diehard anarchists, romanticists and theorists of the subaltern school, revolutionary Marxists have always appreciated this crucial aspect of ideology and politics in fulfilling the challenging task of building a communist party within a predominantly peasant population. To borrow a comparison from the industry, the success of the Chinese revolution was a brilliant example of "backward integration", and as we have pointed out, a non-Eurocentric reading of the Manifesto makes it clear that in its remarkable way this little booklet did indeed anticipate such a possibility.

The last three sections of the Manifesto of the Communist Party defining and distinguishing the communists’ position vis-a-vis other working-class parties in particular, and opposition parties in general, contain several basic guidelines and cardinal principles for the communist movement. Some of these principles have already been discussed, here are some additional key points.

1. "In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they (the Communists) always and everywhere represent the inter-ests of the movement as a whole."

2. "The Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement."

3. "In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolu-tionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time."

4. "All previous historical movements were movements of minor-ities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense major-ity, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air." (This last point however appears in the first section itself.)

Here we have a clear glimpse of the basic communist approach towards reform and revolution, the trade union movement and the communist movement, and preservation and assertion of the commun-ists political independence in the arena of wide-ranging united front practice.

There also figures a ten-point programme of revolutionary measures at the end of the second section, "Proletarians and Communists". But as pointed out by Marx and Engels way back in 1872 in their joint preface to the German edition of the Manifes-to, "The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing, and, for that reason, no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today."

The one major clarification added in this preface particularly "in view of the practical experience gained, first in the Febru-ary Revolution, and then, still more, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months," was the following: "the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes." The point was already made in some detail in The Civil War in France which was written as an address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association and later on further expounded by Lenin in his The State and Revolution written seventy years after the Manifesto on the eve of the Great October Revolution. The Manifesto was succinct in its characterisation of the modern state — "The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." It had also placed the goal of "over-throw of the bourgeois supremacy (and) conquest of political power by the proletariat" squarely on the proletarian agenda, calling upon the victorious proletariat to "use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible." But it took the epoch-making experience of the Paris Commune to indicate the necessity of effecting a radical rupture between the bourgeois state and the proletarian state.

Section III of the Manifesto containing a critical review of contemporary socialist and communist literature was also termed "deficient in relation to the present time" by Marx and Engels in their 1872 preface. Engels elaborated on this theme in consider-able detail in his subsequent Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. But the sharp critique of the various non-proletarian schools of socialism very clearly brings out their basic class roots and ideological essence, and provides further insight into the phi-losophy and ideology of communism or proletarian socialism in contrast to its non-proletarian rivals and counterparts. Let us try and relate the essential positions of these non-proletarian schools of socialism to our own Indian experience.

1. Reactionary Socialism

a) Feudal Socialism: "Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. ... In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy were obliged to lose sight, apparently, of their own interests, and to formulate their in-dictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. ... In this way arose feudal Socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future ... What they upbraid the bourgeoisie with is not so much that it creates a proletariat, as that it creates a revolu-tionary proletariat. ... Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat."

b) Petty-bourgeois Socialism: "In countries like France, where the peasants constitute far more than half of the population, it was natural that writers who sided with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, should use, in their criticism of the bourgeois regime, the standard of the peasant and petty bourgeois, and from the standpoint of these intermediate classes should take up the cudgels for the working class. Thus arose petty-bourgeois Social-ism."

Are we also not quite familiar with the numerous Hindu (Swa-deshi?), Gandhian (remember the BJP’s "Gandhian Socialism" of the 1980s), Lohiaite and various other romantic revivalist equival-ents of these two varieties of socialism in India?

2. Conservative, or Bourgeois, Socialism

"A part of the bourgeoisie is desirous of redressing social grievances, in order to secure the continued existence of bour-geois society. To this section belong economists, philanthro-pists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the pre-vention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind. ... Bourgeois Social-ism attains adequate expression, when, and only when, it becomes a mere figure of speech. ... It is summed up in the phrase: the bourgeois is a bourgeois — for the benefit of the working class."

With all its rhetorical brilliance, which in its heyday suc-cessfully intoxicated large sections of Indian communists, the Nehruvian model of "socialistic pattern of society" based on a mixed economy did ultimately boil down to this. And today, with the main ruling class parties having abandoned this vision, it has fallen primarily on the shoulders of reformers of every imaginable kind operating within the framework of NGOs to carry forward the mantle of bourgeois socialism in India.

3. Critical-Utopian Socialism

"The Socialist and Communist systems properly so called, those of St. Simon, Fourier, Owen and others, spring into existence in the early undeveloped period ... of the struggle between prole-tariat and bourgeoisie ... The founders of these systems see, indeed, the class antagonisms, as well as the action of the decomposing elements in the prevailing form of society. But the proletariat, as yet in its infancy, offers to them the spectacle of a class without any historical initiative or any independent political movement. ...

"Historical action is to yield to their personal inventive action, historically created conditions of emancipation to fan-tastic ones, and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the proletariat to an organisation of society specially contrived by these inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans.

"In the formation of their plans they are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them. ...

"Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolu-tionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavour, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel."

In India can we not find the echo of this critical-utopian school not only in the "constructive" attempts of the various neo-Gandhian groups but, ironically enough, also in much of what goes on in the name of armed struggle by certain radical groups? Critical-utopian socialism has basically preserved itself all over the world in the form of anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism.

Even after 150 years of its publication, the Communist Mani-festo stands out for its amazing gaze over every aspect of modern life and perhaps more crucially into the future. The critical combination of the objective (historically created and developing material conditions of life) and the subjective (crucial role of the active human element, of conscious and organised proletarian intervention), of the economic and the superstructural - from the production and exchange of goods and services to the production and spread of ideas, from education, art and culture to family, marriage and gender - has provided it with a lively sharpness and sparkling brilliance unparalleled in the history of political literature.

It was written obviously with the expectation and eager antic-ipation of a continental proletarian revolution, but it did not leave any room to empty euphoria and what Lenin so brilliantly exposed and rejected in his What Is To Be Done? as the doctrine of spontaneity and passivity. Instead, with its emphasis on the historical perspective of rise and development of classes and class antagonisms, it stresses the conscious role of communists in organising the proletariat "into a class, and consequently into a political party." And it does repeatedly talk of the difficulties and setbacks encountered in this process: "Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers." Again, "This organisa-tion of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competi-tion between the workers themselves. But it ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier."

The notion of class struggle in the Manifesto is thus by no means linear. The Manifesto does not discuss what constitutes a revolutionary crisis, but it clearly demarcates the normal phase and rhythm of class struggle from its "decisive hour". "In de-picting the most general phases of the development of the prole-tariat", says the Manifesto, "we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat."

The failure of the 1848 revolutions and the subsequent onset of a long period of lull and reaction did not therefore come as a rude shock to the authors of the Communist Manifesto. Marx’s celebrated comparison between bourgeois and proletarian revolu-tions which appears in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte written in the spring of 1852 seems to follow as a natural tail-piece or postscript to the Manifesto:

"Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilli-ants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit; but they are short-lived, soon they have attained their zenith, and a long crapulent de-pression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimi-late the results of its storm-and-stress period. On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltrinesses of their first attempts, seem to throw down their adversary only in order that he may draw new strength from the earth and rise again, more gigantic, before them, recoil ever and anon from the indefinite prodigiousness of their own aims, until a situation has been created which makes all turning back impossible, and the conditions themselves cry out;

Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

This is the spirit and strength of the Communist Manifesto.

Bourgeois historians, economists and ideologues are always busy trying to "historicise" (exorcising the "spectre" into history) the Manifesto. They do this both when they seek to lampoon it - as Taylor tried to do in the early 1960s and many have tried to render him more profound since then - for the failures of its predictions and "prophecies", and also when they laud it - as exponents of the current imperialist drive for globalisation are doing quite often these days - for its generous portrayal of the revolutionary role of capitalism and for "certi-fying" that "the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production..."

In the last paragraph of his long derisive introduction to the Manifesto, Taylor writes with his characteristic air of arrogant disdain, "What strikes a historian ... is how deeply The Commun-ist Manifesto is rooted in the circumstances of its time. It generalizes from the economic crisis of 1847 and from the coming revolutions of 1848. It reflects, with a sharpness all its own, what many men were thinking in a more confused way during the eighteen forties." In other words, the Manifesto is an excellent archival material, a clear portrait of the confusion created by the confusing conditions of that period which has of course been indisputably resolved by the subsequent march of (capitalist) history!

Taylor could not be more mistaken. The Manifesto’s resilience lies precisely in its amazing ability to transcend the limits of its own time and space of production and live up brilliantly to the principle it itself laid down for all future generations of communists: representing and taking care of the future of the movement in its present. Its strength emanates not from any so-called religion-like doctrine of inevitability and invincibility of proletarian revolutions, but from its ability to illuminate the motion and direction of history. Marx and Engels were no practitioners of the art of crystal-gazing, but the fact that unmistakably stands out through all the failures of the so-called "prophecies" made in the Manifesto is that the indications it made for the future have been matched by progressively closer and better approximations. For the proponents of world capitalism, the continued "Spectre of the Communist Manifesto" springs preci-sely from the fact that the Manifesto is far from exhausted, the realm of possibilities into which it leads us remains as threa-teningly open and attainable, if not more, as ever.

True, the Manifesto is a product of history. But it is not archival history as archaeologists or official record-keepers understand it, but live history which propels, and is in turn propelled forward by, class struggle whether raging as veiled civil war or breaking into open revolution. It is not history which comes to a grinding halt with capitalism which has become a victim of morbid and paranoid schizophrenia, suffering alternate-ly endless bouts of elation and depression, but history that grows with it and supersedes or transcends it to march on inexor-ably beyond capitalism. To the end of pre-history and real begin-ning of human history, as Marxism calls it.

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