Summary: The Communist Manifesto

At the time when Marx and Engels were writing this Manifesto, the various communist parties in Europe were beginning to represent a significant political power, which worried the rulers and the Pope: A spectre haunts Europe: the spectre of communism ¹.

Through this work, therefore, it is necessary to set out the origins and aims of this emerging political current.

The starting point of communism is this famous phrase:

The history of every society up to the present day is the history of the class struggle ².

This is a process that secretly determines the historical events taking place in a civilisation, and this is true whatever the time, or place. For example, in Rome, it was the struggle between patricians and plebeians, in the Middle Ages, serfs and lords, and today bourgeois and proletarians.

The bourgeois is defined as one who owns the means of production (factories, machines, etc.) and rents them out to the proletarians. The proletarians are those who do not own these means of production but use them by renting them to the bourgeoisie (more precisely, by paying them back a large part of the value of the commodity).

The class struggle was not abolished with the French revolution of 1789, and the disappearance of feudal privileges, those of the nobles and the clergy over the Third Estate. In fact, the revolution merely brought the bourgeois class to power: It merely substituted new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle for those of the past ³.

Historically, the bourgeois are the descendants of serfs who settled in the towns (bourgs), and slowly grew rich through crafts or trade.

The rise of the bourgeoisie as a class, which came to supplant that of the nobility, stemmed from the opening up of new markets (for example through the discovery of new lands such as America), the development of the means of exchange, and the rise of industry.

The opening up of new markets in fact led to new needs, which meant that the feudal or corporate mode of industry was no longer sufficient. We move on to other modes of exploitation such as factories, but these in turn are no longer sufficient. Then, with the steam engine, large-scale modern industry appeared and filled these needs, leading to the creation of a world market, which prodigiously accelerated the development of trade, navigation and communication routes ⁴.

The bourgeoisie is therefore the result of a series of revolutions in the mode of production and exchange. In its hands political power is no more than a committee charged with 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 stemming from the Middle Ages. It replaced all the feudal values, which had prevailed for centuries, with others:

It drowned the sacred thrills of religious ecstasy, of chivalric enthusiasm [...] in the icy waters of selfish calculation⁷.

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 bourgeois class (development of the means of exchange and transport, etc.) may arouse admiration. It was the first to show what all the genius of human activity is capable of.

Above all, what makes the bourgeoisie revolutionary in itself is that it has made change and perpetual innovation its modus operandi: It cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and therefore the relations of production ⁹. Whereas the feudal nobility, on the contrary, is defined by stability and the absence of evolution (which is why it was able 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