Summary: The Communist Manifesto

At the time Marx and Engels were writing this Manifesto, various communist parties across Europe were emerging as significant political forces, unsettling rulers and the Pope alike: A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism.¹.

Through this work, Marx and Engels sought to define the origins and aims of this burgeoning political movement.

The foundation of communism is encapsulated in this famous phrase:

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles ².

This process underlies the historical events shaping a civilisation, across all times and places. For instance, in ancient Rome, it was the conflict between patricians and plebeians; in the Middle Ages, between serfs and lords; and today, between the bourgeoisie and proletarians.

The bourgeoisie are those who own the means of production—factories, machines, and so on—and employ the proletarians to work them. The proletarians, in turn, do not own these means of production but operate them, while a significant portion of the value they produce flows back to the bourgeoisie.

The class struggle was not abolished by the French Revolution of 1789 or by the dismantling of feudal privileges—the privileges of the nobility and clergy over the Third Estate. Rather, the revolution merely brought the bourgeoisie to power: It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones ³.

Historically, the bourgeoisie were the descendants of serfs who took root in towns (from the French bourgs) and gradually accumulated wealth through crafts or trade.

The rise of the bourgeoisie as a class, which eventually supplanted the nobility, was driven by the opening up of new markets through the discovery of the Americas, the development of systems of exchange, and the growth of industry.

This expansion created demands that the feudal or guild-based modes of industry could no longer satisfy. This transition led to the adoption of new modes of production, such as factories, which themselves eventually became inadequate. With the advent of the steam engine, large-scale modern industry emerged to meet these demands, resulting in the creation of a world market that dramatically accelerated the development of trade, navigation, and communications ⁴.

The bourgeoisie is therefore the product of a series of revolutions in the modes of production and exchange. In their hands, political power is reduced to a committee for managing the common affairs of the entire bourgeois class ⁵.

It would be wrong to oppose revolutionaries and the bourgeoisie. In fact, the bourgeoisie has played an eminently revolutionary role ⁶ in history by overthrowing feudal power that originated in the Middle Ages. It replaced all the feudal values that had prevailed for centuries with new ones:

It drowned the sacred thrills of religious ecstasy, of chivalric enthusiasm [...] in the icy waters of selfish calculation ⁷.

Even freedom has taken on a new meaning: From the countless liberties so dearly won [...], it has substituted the single, ruthless freedom of commerce ⁸.

The many achievements of the bourgeoisie—such as the development of the means of exchange and transport—are undeniably impressive. It was the first to demonstrate the full potential of human ingenuity.

Above all, what makes the bourgeoisie essentially revolutionary is its embrace of change and perpetual innovation as its modus operandi: It cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and therefore the relations of production.⁹ The feudal nobility, by contrast, was defined by stability and resistance to change — qualities that had allowed it to endure throughout the Middle Ages.

¹ Manifeste du parti communiste, Librio, Paris, 2002, trad. L. Lafargue, p.1
² p.26
³ p.27
⁴ p.28
⁵ p.29
⁶ ibid.
⁷ ibid.
⁸ ibid.
⁹ p.30