READ AND DISCUSS:

The ‘lazy worker’?

1. How would you use the Manifesto’s words to turn the tables on someone arguing that the working-class are lazy and the capitalists earn their billions by their own hard work?

Destroying ‘law and culture’?

Again, the Manifesto stresses that there is nothing ‘eternal’ and everlasting about the laws and culture of capitalist society. Just as in previous class societies, they reflect the outlook and needs of the ruling class – but classes rise and fall, as will the capitalist class.

2. In what way does the Manifesto argue that capitalist society limits the development of the working class by limiting its education to mere ‘training’ – and for what?

Education and the family

Again, the Manifesto answers the “claptrap” of the capitalist politicians and journalists who accuse socialists of wanting to undermine ‘education’ and the ‘family. On the contrary, socialism will allow human relationships and education to both be ‘rescued’ from the damage inflicted on them by the requirements of capitalism.

Engels, and later socialists, wrote about these aspects of class society in much more detail. Here is an extract from the Socialist Party’s ‘Introduction to Marxism ¹⁵’ series, discussing ‘How can women’s oppression be ended?’:

“Capitalist ideology, especially in the mid to late 19th century … actively promoted the idea of the ‘natural’ family comprised of a male breadwinner and economically dependent wife and children. This reflected the ‘bourgeois’ family of the ruling class, in which an economically inactive wife was considered a sign of increasing wealth and prestige, and the principal role of the woman was to give birth to children and manage the household, as well as repress her own needs in order to tend to those of her husband. …

But there was also a material interest for the ruling class in promoting what has become known as the traditional nuclear family. Working-class women were responsible for rearing the next generation of workers, who would then go on to make profits for the bosses by working in the factories and mills. Also, they looked after the needs of their own generation of workers and took care of the members of society that the capitalists considered ‘unproductive’ – i.e. those who could not be exploited in the creation of profits because they were sick, disabled, elderly or unemployed. All of that caring work carried out by women was unpaid, because it was done in the home and was part of their ‘natural’ role.

The patriarchal family has also played an important social role for the capitalist class. Based on hierarchy, with the male head of household economically responsible for other family members, and with authority and control over them, it has been a useful socialising and disciplining tool, including for replicating traditional gender roles”.

3. Families, of various kinds, can meet people’s needs for love and support, but, reading the section above, why does the capitalist class promote the ‘traditional nuclear family’?

Abolishing nationalities?

Hostility towards workers of other nations is promoted by the capitalist class for their own interests – to ‘divide-and-rule’ the workers of the world, and, not least in this time of rising militarisation and global tensions, to promote war and conflict.

In reality, as the Manifesto puts it, workers “have no country” - in the sense that nation states exist for the interests of the capitalist class of each nation, whereas the interests of the working class are to overthrow those capitalists and their global system. That, as Marx and Engels put it, requires “united action, of the leading countries at least”.

4. At the present time, right-wing populists are whipping up narrow nationalist prejudices across the globe. However, the Manifesto argues that the ‘world market’ – with its global communications, exchange of ideas, people, even foods and music etc. – can undermine ‘national differences and antagonisms’. Were Marx and Engels right?