UMass Boston History 112: Essay #3

It is easy to see why the Communist Manifesto has had a broad appeal to the proletariat of various nations in various eras, as much as its platform has been reviled by other nations in various eras. While history proves Marx and Engels to be prophetic in some aspects and untenable in others, I find myself disagreeing with most of their ideas, while supporting a few of their policies as they pertained to reform in the era of the Industrial Revolution.

To start, I found the introduction regarding the political fear-mongering over the influence of Communism among other political parties to be extremely prophetic in terms of what was to come in the twentieth century, in as much as they were describing their own era’s disposition towards Communism. Reactions in the United States to Communism stemming from the Cold War were histrionic and excessive as the Conservative ideologies ostracized and bludgeoned members of society and government officials of the Liberal ideologies suspected of Communist sympathies. As Marx and Engels aptly state in reference to their own era, the demagoguery in the United States was one of fear by the established powers of the “specter of Communism” as posed by the Soviet Union, which was anticipated to corrupt the democratic sensibilities of the American people.

The root of my overall disagreement with the policies advocated by Marx and Engels is Marx’s departure from Hagel’s Dialectic Principle with the “mode of production” being the primary force in a given society, whose opposing forces develop with technological innovations that break with the economic structural convention. The premise that human beings can function best as a society when organized strictly by imperatives of material production presents a dim and negative outlook of the capabilities of mankind. At its core, this premise seeks to discourage man’s profound ability to reinvent himself with new ideas, and attain a higher understanding of himself and the world around him. It would seem that according to Marx and Engels, man’s optimal consciousness was that of a bee in a hive.

While Marx and Engel focus on property relations using the French Revolution as an example (where feudal property becomes bourgeois property), I believe they do their audience a disservice in ignoring the ideas and intentions that drove the French Revolution. Instead, they merely reduce it to being about a transfer of property from one group to another group. While I suppose this method supports Marx’s intention to override the notion that opposing ideas are a major force in history, it appears cynical and intellectually dishonest for him to deny any virtues of the French Revolution with respect to the empowerment of its own proletariat. His focus on that of property seems to encourage an inherently secular and material-based value system, which can also be supported in his inclusion of the Pope among the “holy alliance” that would “exorcise” the specter of Communism. Indeed, the very language he uses sarcastically derides the influence of the Church. Being a Jew myself, I wonder if Marx had a bone to pick with Christianity as a societal influence.

While one may disagree with Marx and Engels at the crux of their ideology, at least one policy of the Communist Manifesto addresses a grim reality resulting from the Industrial Revolution: policy number ten calls for “Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form.” This policy goes further than the initial English child labor reforms, which merely abolished child labor up until the age of nine, capped the labor of children under eighteen to nine hours per day and excluded children from mine labor. While I am also agreeable with the same policy’s call for “Free education for all children in public schools,” I find the conclusion to that policy calling for the “Combination of education with industrial production….” to be merely an ideological prop as opposed to actual reform. This suggests to me that Marx and Engel sought to indoctrinate children with the hive mentality as a part of their free public education.

I find the balance of the policies advocated by Marx and Engels to be ideologically oriented as opposed to actual reforms by-and-large. They are geared towards equalizing wealth, abolishing private property, monopolizing finance, production and agriculture in the hands of the state and blending agriculture with manufacturing industries for purposes of no distinction between urban and rural peoples. The remaining policy, which could appear to be either ideological or reform-minded, is that of number six: “Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.” One could argue it to be ideological on the grounds that the State would seek a monopoly of communication and transport means to empower the State itself. The argument for reform would be that the State might be in the position to ensure the optimal and non-arbitrary delivery of communication and transport services as opposed to being left to the whims of capitalism.

The appeal of the Communist Manifesto to the proletariat of whom Marx and Engels speak was immense. The fact that many impoverished factory workers resided in dismal accommodations while being exposed to the luxuries of city-living out of their economic reach was fertile ground for Marx and Engels to plant their ideological seed. The fact that many former farmers were forced to abandon agriculture to become replaceable cogs in replaceable machines, often being exposed to hazardous and grueling conditions affecting the dynamics of their formerly tight-knit family units was fertile ground for Marx and Engels to plant their ideological seed. The political climate entrenched with free-market captains of industry who fought government intervention on the workers’ behalves, could only have made the conquest of the so-called bourgeois that much more appealing to the so-called proletariat.

Marx and Engels’ notion that upon taking its place as the newly-ruling class, the proletariats would dissolve the class system after removing class antagonisms and ultimately abolish its own supremacy as a class has been proved to be untenable by modern incarnations of Communism in practice. China, continuously attempting to purge itself of so-called class antagonisms has found its ruling class of Communists constantly in conflict with its populace (e.g. – the Tienanmen Square Massacre) in a manner that suggests the ruling class is unlikely to ever abolish its own supremacy. The same could be said of the former Soviet Union, whose ruling class’s supremacy has outlasted their Communist system of government.

Prophetic, idealistic, occasionally reform-oriented and ultimately untenable, the Communist Manifesto is a revolutionary document whose ideology wields considerable power in the world today.