Date: Wed, 4 Mar 1998 10:17:25 -0700 (MST) From: Martha Gimenez To: psn-seminars@csf.colorado.edu Subject: Some Brief Remarks on the Manifesto (fwd) I am forwarding this on behalf of Kevin Anderson. *********************************************************** Some Brief Remarks on the *Communist Manifesto*, 150 Years Later by Kevin Anderson, Northern Illinois University Instead of a complete paper, what follows are some briefer reflections, more in the form of theses than a unified whole. I hope they can add something to the discussion. 1. As the great and decidedly non-Marxist economist Joseph Schumpeter remarked long ago, the *Manifesto* contains some great praise of capitalist achievements in its opening pages. Two issues would seem to flow from this. One, this is I think part of the dialectical structure of the whole work. In those early pages, Marx (I will refer to Marx as the author, since, as Engels himself noted, Marx wrote by far the bulk of the text, using Engels draft only very sparingly) sketches what capitalism has achieved over the pre-capitalist order with its "military brutality," sloth, and narrow particularism. However, being the magnificent dialectician that he was, Marx follows this by a discussion of the contradictions of capitalism, which, as we know, are basically two: (a)economic crises and depressions, and (b)the revolt of labor at the point of production. The system's very achievements are what cause each of these problems to emerge. In this sense, the structure of the basic argument is not too different from that in Hegel's work, where in the *Phenomenology* for example, Hegel describes a new stage of consciousness as superior to a previous one, but then moves quickly to show the contradictions within the new one, which lead to its collapse, and then the emergence of a still newer stage of consciousness. This is of course related to the notion of a first and a second negation, with the first negation tearing down the old, and the second creating something new. A second issue with regard to Marx's praise of capitalism here in 1848 is that one cannot find any similar praise of capitalism in Marx's *Capital*. This is a complicated issue. To be sure, Marx never denied that capitalism had brought about at least some progressive changes in it wake as it overthrew the old order, however, by the 1860s his emphasis had changed, and the view he presented of capitalism became starker and more critical. 2. I do have a big problem, as do most readers today, with Marx's discussion of Asia in these opening pages. In this regard, Marx continues to praise capitalism, up to and including its highly destructive and exploitative intrusions into India and China. Capitalism, he writes, "batters down all Chinese walls," and "has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones," etc. With regard to India, Marx evidently sees British capitalism as undermining caste, sati, and other extremely oppressive features of traditional Indian society, just as, in Western Europe, capitalism had swept aside the feudal order. But here, his argument lacks the dialectical element of a second negation which would overcome this supposed first negation of traditionalism on the part of British imperialism. Where in his discussion of Western European development the proletariat appears as an internally developed negation of capitalism, he points to no similarly progressive and internally generated negation of British imperialism in India. In this sense, Marx's discussion in the *Manifesto* exhibits Eurocentrism. However, as early as 1853 (and by 1850 with regard to China), Marx begins to nuance this argument. In his 1853 articles for the *New York Tribune*, he does point to the possibility of Indians throwing off British rule altogether, but the main thrust is once again praise of the "progress" brought about by Britain. By 1856-57, however, he and Engels come to violently oppose British imperialism. They attack its 1856 Second Opium War against China and support the 1857 the spring 1857 Sepoy rebellion in India as a national revolution. Curiously, however, those 1853 articles are heavily anthologized but not the 1857 ones. Still later, in the 1870s and 1880s, Marx undergoes yet more changes of outlook. I cannot mention these here in detail, but especially in his 1880s *Ethnological Notebooks* (a new all-English edition of which is being edited by David Smith) and in his writings on the village commune in Russia, he suggests that it may be possible for non-industrialized societies to bypass capitalism altogether, if they link up with the workers of the industrialized lands. 3. It is often said that the *Manifesto* repudiates all forms of nationalism, as exemplified by the famous phrase "the workers have no country," but this has to be read very carefully. As Bertell Ollman suggests in his *Dialectical Investigations*, in reading Marx it is important to note which level of abstraction he is using. Here, I believe, he is writing at a fairly high level of abstraction, referring more to a trend of the future than to present day empirical reality. A bit later, however, in the closing paragraphs of the *Manifesto*, is discussing the concrete program of the communist movement. At this point, he explicitly comes out for the "national emancipation" of Poland, with the qualification that he supports the left-wing nationalists who stand for an "agrarian revolution," the ones who led the Cracow insurrection two years earlier. Thus, like Lenin later, and unlike Luxemburg and many others today who abstractly reject all forms of nationalism as reactionary, Marx here clearly comes out in support of revolutionary forms of nationalism. In this case he is supporting the left-wing nationalism of revolutionary Poland, supported in those days by almost all of the European left (except, interestingly, the Proudhonists). The Poles were up against three of Europe's most reactionary powers, Russia, Austria, and Prussia. This has a broader importance for us today. Can we as Marxists refer to the particular without forcing it too quickly into what Hegel would have called an "abstract universal"? I think we can and must be able to do so if we are to come to terms with all of the multi-dimensional forces of revolt and opposition today, whether based on class, or on nationality, race, gender, or sexual orientation. 4. Finally, the structuralist Louis Althusser and others (he is the most one-sided) point to a "break" in Marx's thought after 1844, when he supposedly gave up the notions of freedom, self-development, and alienation which permeated the *1844 Manuscripts*. But as Raya Dunayevskaya noted some forty years ago in her *Marxism and Freedom*, however, Marx continues to speak of these issues in the *Manifesto* and after. In his description of the downfall of capitalism in section I, the same one in which he also praises capitalism, Marx writes that because of "the extensive use of machinery," factory work "has lost all individual character, and consequently, all interest for the workman," who has become "an appendage of the machine." This is an even deeper concept of alienation, it could be argued, than that elaborated in 1844. Nor does he stop talking about freedom. For example, at the end of section II, he describes the new society as follows: "we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all." I know that Stalinist, Maoist and other authoritarian and ideological forms of Marxism have been allergic to the word "freedom," but Marx certainly was not. Nor should we be. _____________________________________________ Kevin Anderson Department of Sociology Northern Illinois University DeKalb, IL 60115 Tel. 815-753-0365 FAX 815-753-6302 Simplified email address: kanderson@niu.edu ------ Forwarded message ends here ------