READ AND DISCUSS:

Revolutionising production

The Manifesto explains how capitalism had rapidly transformed the world.

1. The Manifesto says that the landed aristocracy of feudalism had benefited from things staying exactly as they were. How had the capitalist class, in their search for a profitable edge over their competitors, behaved differently?

2. The Manifesto lists some of the many significant new advances that capitalism had already achieved by 1848. What might you add to the list today?

“As long as the individual manufacturer or merchant sells a manufactured or purchased commodity with the usual coveted profit, he is satisfied and does not concern himself with what afterwards becomes of the commodity and its purchasers. The same thing applies to the natural effects of the same actions. What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very profitable coffee trees - what cared they that the heavy tropical rain afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only with the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the often remote effects of actions to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character. ¹⁸ ”

3. In listing these advances - like the ‘clearing of whole continents for cultivation’ - some critics of Marx and Engels suggest they ignored the damage capitalism was doing to the planet. Reading the quote above, why is that criticism unfounded?

Creating a global market

Marx and Engels explained that it’s not enough for capitalists to produce goods, they also need a profitable market in which to sell them. That’s why capitalism created a constantly expanding world market with nations relying on products and raw materials from other parts of the globe to meet local needs.

4. What does the Manifesto say the dominant capitalist nations used as their “heavy artillery” to force capitalism onto every other part of the globe?

A revolution in ideas as well

Marx and Engels explain how the old unchanging superstitions of the Middle Ages were being thrown up in the air by a capitalist world where people’s ideas were constantly being challenged – and changed. Global trade also brought about a global exchange of ideas, art and literature as well.

5. Marx and Engels explained that the dominant ideas in a society flow from their economic base, so capitalist ideology and culture was spread internationally above all. But can such a global exchange help to spread socialist ideas too?

Creating nation states

The Manifesto explains how one of the tasks of capitalist development was to create nation states, providing a unified national market and centralised government to represent the interests of that nation’s capitalists. Powerful imperialist nations like Britain and France had developed in this way. But, over 175 years later, many ‘national questions’ over agreed borders and national rights remain unresolved by capitalism.

Soon after the Manifesto was written, Marx and Engels then witnessed the treacherous role played by the German bourgeois in the 1848 revolution. They recognised that in other, more belatedly developing nations, the capitalists and the middle-class ‘petty bourgeois’ could not be relied upon to carry through the struggle against the feudal past Instead, the working-class would have to rely on its own organisation and take power itself. History has shown that this includes winning the struggle to gain genuine national liberation against the domination of the world’s imperialist powers.

This is what they said to the Communist League in March 1850: “While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible … it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers ¹⁹ ”.

6. Leon Trotsky later developed these ideas into the theory of ‘Permanent Revolution’. What were Marx and Engels saying when they first used this phrase in 1850?