Bernard E. Harcourt | The Communist Manifesto: An Introduction to Marx 6/13

By Bernard E. Harcourt

The Manifesto of 1848 remains the most emblematic text of the revolutionary Marxist tradition: it declares and explains the intentions, and lays down the theoretical foundations in the form of a historical narrative and social analysis that concludes with a political program. The mass movement that, more than any other, set the terms of politics between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries (although without “transforming the world” in the way imagined), organized and developed itself—and as with any great “belief” in history, split and reformed itself—using the vocabulary and essential historical narrative of the Manifesto.

            — Étienne Balibar, The Manifesto Beyond Its Time (2020)

What we know today as “The Communist Manifesto” is a document that was commissioned by the Communist League at its first congress, held in London in June 1847, written by Marx and Engels between November 1847 and January 1848, and printed in London anonymously in German in late February 1848 under the title “Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei” (Manifesto of the Communist Party).[1]

The Manifesto was intended to be the platform and program of the newly formed Communist League—successor to the League of the Just founded a little more than a decade earlier by German émigrés in Paris. Its mission was to set forth the principles and beliefs of the Communist League. In draft form, written by Engels, it was a confession of faith, or a credo, in question-and-answer form. Marx and Engels transformed the draft credo and turned it into a manifesto. When first printed, it was only 23 pages long.

Few documents have had such a world historic impact.

In this seminar Marx 6/13, we read and discuss the Manifesto in conversation with another short pamphlet that both interpreted it and put it into practice: Lenin’s April Theses, which he delivered to Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in April 1917, at the time of his return to Russia right after the February revolution. Lenin argued, on the foundation of the Manifesto, for a passage from “the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.”[2] Lenin’s interpretation of the Manifesto, similarly, had deep historical repercussions.

To study these two works in conversation, we are privileged to have with us three brilliant critical philosophers, Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, who are themselves the authors of another remarkable manifesto, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto, published by Verso in 2019.[3] Cinzia Arruzza joins us from Boston University, where she is the Maria Stata Professor of Classical Greek Studies and Professor of philosophy, and the author of A Wolf in the City. Tyranny and the Tyrant in Plato’s Republic (OUP 2018). Tithi Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History at Purdue University, and the author most recently of Ghostly Past, Capitalist Presence: A Social History of Fear in Colonial Bengal, just published from Duke University Press in 2024. Nancy Fraser is the Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research and a member of the Editorial Committee of New Left Review. Her newest book is Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care and the Planet–and what we can do about it (Verso, 2022).

Their co-authored manifesto, Feminism for the 99%, operates both as a critique of certain strands of Marxism for neglecting social reproduction and the diversity of experiences within the working class, but also builds on Marx’s writings to propose a more comprehensive class struggle that includes movements against gender domination, racial capitalism, and LGBTQ oppression. Their manifesto links our current crises of gender violence, climate change, and racism, and traces them back directly to capitalism. They advocate for an internationalist, eco-socialist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist feminism, rejecting liberal feminism and market-based solutions. Their work together grows out of—and also militates for—the international strikes that women throughout the world engaged in particularly back in 2017 and 2018. Their manifesto emphasizes unity with other anti-capitalist movements for a broad-based global insurgency.

In this introduction, I will provide some background on the three texts that we will be discussing at Marx 6/13, and sketch the outline of an argument that I am beginning to formulate on the broad question of class struggle.

History of the Publication of The Communist Manifesto

The Communist League was officially formed in London on June 1, 1847, as the immediate outgrowth of a workers’ association called the League of the Just. That association had been founded by German émigrés a decade earlier in Paris, in 1836, as a Christian communist association of artisan workers.[4] As a Christian organization, it had a strong religious conviction in neighborly love, which was reflected in its motto, “All men are brothers.” It developed corresponding communities in England, Germany, Sweden and Switzerland, and as of 1846 its leaders (Joseph Moll, Karl Schapper, and Heinrich Bauer) resided in London. Those leaders—who would become the central authority of the Communist League—invited Marx and Engels to join as members of the League of the Just in January 1847 to help shape the vision of the organization.

Marx and Engels had been hoping to give direction to an internationalist workers’ association. They had founded the Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels a year earlier, in 1846, with the aim of forming a revolutionary workers party. Marx and Engels agreed to join the League of the Just believing they could give it direction. At their instigation, the League of the Just took on the name “the Communist League” on June 1, 1847.

Engels participated in the first congress of the newly formed Communist League in London from June 2 to 9, 1847. Marx remained in Brussels. At that first congress, the League replaced its old motto with a new one: “Working Men of All Countries, Unite!” They also discussed a program for the party, what was called the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith.” (Notice the religious tone of the document). The draft, first discovered in 1968 in archives in Hamburg, was written by Engels. It apparently was discussed and approved at the first congress, and so completed by June 9, 1847.

Engels’ “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” (June 9, 1847)

Engels drafted the credo in question-and-answer form. It contained important foundations for the Communist Manifesto, including:

  • A crisp definition of the proletariat (as distinct from the working class): Engels’ confession of faith recognizes that there were workers and a working class before the advent of machine industrialization, but argues that previously, worker artisans owned their tools and thus possessed forms of private property; the proletariat, by contrast, begins to exist when the workers no longer have any tools of their own, are forced to work at machines owned by capitalists, and become entirely dependent on capitalist forms of competition. The proletariat differs from earlier middle-class workers, who, although most often poor as well, owned and used their tools and were self-sufficient and independent. Moreover, the proletariat differs from enslaved people because the latter are “sold once and for all” to an enslaver who has an interest in their subsistence, whereas the proletarian workers have to sell themselves “by the day and by the hour,” and can be left to die if there is no need for their labor. As for the serfs, they have the use of land which guarantees them a form of subsistence.
  • A historical sensibility: The draft credo maintains that communism and the community of property could not exist before the advent of industrialization and, thus, before the nineteenth century. It could not come into existence before there was a proletarian class that had no property; by the same token, it could not come into existence before the advent of industrial machinery (the steam engine, the power loom, spinning machines, etc.) that would make it possible for everyone to subsist in society. Communism, Engels wrote, “was not possible for the slaves, the serfs, or the handicraftsmen, but only for the proletarians and hence it belongs of necessity to the 19th century and was not possible in any earlier period.”[5]
  • A simple ambition and simple demand: The confession of faith prefigures the famous formulation of Marx from the Critique of the Gotha Program in 1875 (“from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”) with a simple statement of the aim of communists, namely to transform society so that “every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom.”[6] It also formulates a simple demand, namely the abolition of private property. In response to the question of how communists intend to achieve their ambition, the credo states: “By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community of property.”[7]
  • An openness to revolution: The League of the Just, you will recall, was a Christian association and believed in neighborly love. It did not embrace violence or revolutionary struggle. Engels’ draft confession of faith explicitly opposes conspiracies as counterproductive; and while it certainly does not call for revolution, it recognizes that the proletariat may be led to engage in violence and does not condemn that. It places responsibility for any revolution at the feet of the counterrevolutionary propertied classes. It concludes: “If, in the end, the oppressed proletariat is thus driven into a revolution, then we will defend the cause of the proletariat just as well by our deeds as now by our words.”[8]

There is also an interesting passage about women in the draft credo—which relates to the other manifesto we are studying at this seminar, Feminism for the 99%. Toward the end of the credo, Engels writes:

Question 20: Will not the introduction of community of property be accompanied by the proclamation of the community of women?

Answer: By no means. We will only interfere in the personal relationship between men and women or with the family in general to the extent that the maintenance of the existing institution would disturb the new social order. Besides, we are well aware that the family relationship has been modified in the course of history by the property relationships and by periods of development, and that consequently the ending of private property will also have a most important influence on it.[9]

This passage seems to suggest that women would remain the property of their husbands, which would have been the case under principles of coverture operating at the time. It does not appear to disturb existing legal arrangements and buys into the concept of a personal sphere that is largely autonomous of the political. It intimates that the abolition of private property might modify the family relationship—but only in an unspecified way.

Engels’ “Principles of Communism” (October 1847)

Following discussion of the first draft credo and of a set of governing rules at the first congress of the Communist League, which ended on June 9, 1847, the draft was circulated among the different communities for further discussion, with an eye to approving a platform and program at a second congress.

In late October 1847, Engels began drafting a second version of the credo, which is known today as “the Principles of Communism.” Engels had been directed to draft the revised version by the leaders of the Paris circle of the Communist League after a contentious committee meeting held on October 22, 1847. Engels drafted it, like the first, in the form of a catechism, in question-and-answer form.[10]

The “Principles of Communism” rehearse several of the same questions and answers from the first credo. But it is more than three times longer and far more detailed in parts.

Engels spells out in twelve numbered bullet points the main measures that would be undertaken to achieve communism, including progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, expropriation and confiscation of property, centralized credit, national workshops, nationalized education and transportation, among others.[11] These measures would be taken up again in the Communist Manifesto.[12] Engels takes up the critique of socialists, dividing them into three categories that resemble the three categories of socialists in Part III of the Communist Manifesto: the reactionary, bourgeois, and democratic socialists.[13] This too will be taken up and developed in the Manifesto. Engels also has a section that effectively becomes the final part of the Manifesto, Part IV, on “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.”[14]

In the “Principles of Communism,” Engels develops a subsistence theory of wages. Like other commodities, whose value is set using a labor theory of value, Engels anchors labor to the costs of producing labor which “consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out.”[15] This produces a race to the bottom for the worker. As Engels writes, “the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.”[16]

Engels makes clear in the “Principles of Communism” that, while industrialization harms the worker artisans, it alone can provide the path forward to a communist future. Industrialization is the condition of possibility for a society where, Engels writes, “every member of society will be in a position to exercise and develop all his powers and faculties in complete freedom.”[17] Certain Marxists today, such as Kohei Saito or more generally degrowth communists, critique readings of Marx that emphasize the “productivism” (and propose a different “late Marx” who offered an eco-socialist path forward); these are the kinds of passages that are at the heart of their critique:

It thus appears that the very qualities of big industry which, in our present-day society, produce misery and crises are those which, in a different form of society, will abolish this misery and these catastrophic depressions.[18]

In addition, in the “Principles of Communism,” Engels refines the discussion of family and women, offering a less defensive and perhaps more offensive argument:

What will be the influence of communist society on the family?

It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.

And here is the answer to the outcry of the highly moral philistines against the “community of women”. Community of women is a condition which belongs entirely to bourgeois society and which today finds its complete expression in prostitution. But prostitution is based on private property and falls with it. Thus, communist society, instead of introducing community of women, in fact abolishes it.[19]

Toward A Manifesto (November 1847 – February 1848)

In a letter to Marx dated November 23-24, 1847, Engels suggests that instead of drafting a catechism, they should present the program of the Communist League in the form of a manifesto. Engels writes:

Give a little thought to the “Confession of Faith.” I think we would do best to abandon the catechetical form and call the thing “Communist Manifesto.” Since a certain amount of history has to be narrated in it, the form hitherto adopted is quite unsuitable. I shall be bringing with me the one from here, which I did [“Principles of Communism”]; it is in simple narrative form, but wretchedly worded, in a tearing hurry.[20]

A week later, the Communist League meets at its second congress (November 29 to December 8, 1847). Engels and Marx are both present and share their vision for a platform. They are assigned the task of drafting the final program in the form of a manifesto of the Communist League.

Marx and Engels begin redrafting the program, this time in the form of a manifesto, immediately after the second congress and into the end of January 1848, when it is sent off to the presses for printing in London at the German Workers’ Educational Society’s print shop. The Manifesto is printed in German in late February 1848—the date is sometimes indicated as February 21, 1848, coincidentally the day before the revolution erupts in Paris. The Manifesto is first published in German in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung in March and July 1848. It would take several years for the English and French translations of the Manifesto to appear in print.[21]

Manifesto of the Communist Party

The Manifesto builds on the two draft credos and develops several key themes.

First, the Manifesto recounts the birth of the proletariat as a class. It historicizes the creation of classes in relation to different economic modes of production.

Second, the Manifesto emphasizes the “productivism” of capitalism. Several passages stress how revolutionary the bourgeoisie has been, and that industrialization has revolutionized European society and made possible the advent of communism.

Third, it embraces a “productivist” horizon. One of the key goals of the proletariat, once it has gained power, is “to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.”[22]

Fourth, it emphasizes the political importance of democracy, as the precondition to social change. It ties the path to communism to universal male suffrage. “The first step in the revolution by the working class,” Marx and Engels write, “is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy.”[23]

Fifth, the Manifesto argues for the centralization of most functions in the state. Once the proletariat governs, Marx and Engels write, one of its first tasks will be “to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.”[24] The political platform includes centralizing all banking, communication, transportation, and education in the hands of the state; and extending the state control of factories and instruments of production.[25]

Sixth, the Manifesto proposes a theory of two-stage revolutions. This is clear from Marx and Engels’ discussion of Germany, where they forecast a bourgeois revolution of a more advanced nature than the revolutions in England or France, followed by a proletarian revolution: “the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.”[26]

The Manifesto also continues earlier themes from the Paris (1844) and Brussels (1845, The German Ideology)manuscripts. Marx and Engels reference the idea of alienation.[27] They allude to the concept of ideology, suggesting that ideas, law, and jurisprudence are superstructural.[28] Borrowing a page from the Brussels manuscripts, they write that “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”[29] Marx and Engels also discuss more explicitly the abolition of the family.[30] They suggest that capitalism has already abolished the family among the proletariat.[31]

In all these ways, the Manifesto represents the culmination not only of Engels’ draft credos, but of all the previous strands of thought in the earlier manuscripts that we studied in the seminar in the fall. Their ultimate vision is formulated as follows—anticipating the formulation in the 1875 critique of the Gotha program: “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”[32]

Lenin, April Theses

Reading the Manifesto through the lens of Lenin’s April Theses allows us to actualize or realize the text. To put it into action. To see how it becomes a form of praxis.

It might be helpful to analyze this through the lens of J.L. Austin and his writings on the performativity of words. The words of the Manifesto are not performative in the same way as are the words of a judge imposing a sentence or marrying people. They do not have a direct or enforceable effect. They do not, through the speech act itself, unite the workers or act out a proletarian revolution. But by the same token, they are not merely constative: they do not merely represent a philosophical exercise that describes reality or responds to truth conditions. They are not simply true or false.

The force of the Manifesto, in effect, plays an intermediary role between performative and constative: It interpellates people. Instead of creating a new legal or political relation, it moves people to action. It speaks to people in such a forceful way that they act in response. In this sense, it represents a rich illustration of the idea of interpellation that Louis Althusser deployed in his notes for “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” where, as you will recall, Althusser uses the example of the police officer calling out “hey, you there.” I would argue that the Manifesto is a far more compelling illustration of this idea of interpellation.

The Manifesto interpellates readers—one of whom was Lenin. Lenin’s April Theses were infused with and inspired by the ideas of the Manifesto. The Manifesto permeates the April Theses and the actions that Lenin would take in the period following the revolution of February 1917. For instance, Lenin’s entire argument and actions were shaped by the belief that the bourgeois revolution of February 1917 was, in the words of Marx and Engels from the Manifesto, “but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.”[33] What Lenin proposed in his second thesis was entirely grounded on the Manifesto’s theory of the two stages of revolution—bourgeois, then proletariat: “The specific feature of the present situation in Russia is that the country is passing from the first stage of the revolution—which, owing to the insufficient class-consciousness and organisation of the proletariat, placed power in the hands of the bourgeoisie—to its second stage, which must place power in the hands of the proletariat and the poorest sections of the peasants.”[34]

Similarly, Lenin’s call to confiscate all landed estates (thesis 6) is permeated by the Manifesto’s demand for the “abolition of property in land” and the abolition of private property.[35] Lenin’s call to nationalize banking and put all banks under the control of the Soviets (thesis 7); and Lenin’s call to change the name of the party to the Communist Party (note 3), again, are infused with the Manifesto. Lenin also shares with Marx and Engels—at least, in their “Demands” in the context of Germany—the idea of arming the people. The fourth demand that Marx and Engels called for is “Universal arming of the people. In future the armies shall be simultaneously labour armies…”[36] Similarly, Lenin calls for the abolition of the army and for “the standing army to be replaced by the arming of the whole people.”[37]

The April Theses are, in the end, a form of praxis infused with the Manifesto. They are a written expression of a political strategy and practice. Lenin emphasizes, in his introductory notes, that “I read them twice very slowly: first at a meeting of Bolsheviks and then at a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.”[38] He emphasizes that praxis dimension of interpellation, even the fact that he read them “very slowly.” The reading itself was a political practice.

Rereading the Manifesto through the lens of Lenin’s April Theses allows us to see it come alive. Let me just add, one fascinating element in the April Theses is Lenin’s call to abolish the police. That is something that I do not hear in the Manifesto, which continues to disparage the lumpenproletariat. It also contradicts the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” which goes out of its way to exclude those convicted of crimes from the suffrage.

Feminism for the 99% | A Manifesto

Feminism for the 99% is self-consciously written in the tradition of Marx and Engels. It explicitly references the Communist Manifesto in its subtitle (“A Manifesto”) and utilizes the form of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach in the body of the text, which is written in the form of eleven theses. There are multiple references to Marx and Engels at the substantive level, and the authors discuss in a postface the daunting task of writing a manifesto in the shadow of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto.[39]

But it is important to recognize that Feminism for the 99% operates both as a critique of Marx and of certain Marxisms on the one hand, and as a prolongation or extension of Marx on the other.

The critique works at two levels. There is, first, a critique of the incompleteness of Marx’s own discussion of exploitation in Capital. This is the critique, shared by certain socialist feminists, that the analysis of commodities and surplus-labor in Capital focused too much on production and did not address adequately social reproduction (all of the work associated with the social reproduction of the workers, including actual reproduction, support of the family, and all of the care work that goes with reproducing labor).

There is a second critique of certain Marxisms, insofar as certain Marxists have treated the working class as an “undifferentiated, homogenous entity.”[40] This is a critique of the failure to understand the diversity of exploited persons and recognize the internal differences within the working class.

Building on those two critiques, Feminism for the 99% proposes an updated and more comprehensive vision of class struggle, placing class struggle in the context of other related struggles against gender oppression, domestic violence, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and discrimination against LGBTQ and disabled persons. It characterizes our current form of capitalism as: (1) globalizing, (2) financializing, and (3) neoliberal.[41] It offers a diagnosis of the contemporary crises of capitalism, including not only gender oppression, but also the threat of global climate change, the regulation and constraint of sexuality, racism, colonialism, imperialism, and ethno-nationalism. It argues that these crises, which all trace back to capitalism, are linked together and reinforce each other: “The truth is,” they write, “that racism, imperialism, and ethnonationalism are essential buttresses of generalized misogyny and the control over all women’s bodies.”[42]

In the face of these challenges, the manifesto embraces the idea of class struggles in an enlarged and updated manner. “Feminism for the 99% embraces class struggle and the fight against institutional racism. It centers the concerns of working-class women of all stripes: whether racialized, migrant, or white; cis, trans or gender non-conforming; housewives or sex workers; paid by the hour, the week, the month or not at all; unemployed or precarious; young or old.”[43]

In terms of their strategy and demands, the authors distinguish themselves from several other feminist approaches. The first is liberal feminism that is pro-capitalist. Another is the market-based approach of offering micro-loans to poor women in the Global South, which they refer to as the “femocrats” approach. They argue that this simply increases “women’s dependence on their creditors.”[44] They also oppose carceral feminism and the turn to criminalization and punishment that is often advocated to address gender violence.

What they argue for is an internationalist, eco-socialist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist approach that links arms with the other movements for the 99%. They oppose the simplistic opposition between identity politics and class politics, and they conclude by calling for a broad-based global anti-capitalist insurgency: “Rejecting the zero-sum framework capitalism constructs for us, feminism for the 99 percent aims to unite existing and future movements into a broad-based global insurgency. Armed with a vision that is at once feminist, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist, we pledge to play a major role in shaping our future.”[45]

The main thrust is to join ranks with those fighting against racism and global warming, fighting for labor and migrant rights, for disability and LGBTQ+ rights. They eschew the idea of being a separatist movement. They propose instead “to join with every movement that fights for the 99%, whether by struggling for environmental justice, free high-quality education, generous public services, low-cost housing, labor rights, free, universal health care, or a world without racism or war. It is only by allying with such movements that we gain the power and vision to dismantle the social relations and the institutions that oppress us.”[46] Elsewhere in the manifesto, the authors reiterate the importance of this: “feminism for the 99 percent must join forces with other anticapitalist movements across the globe—with environmentalists, anti-racist, anti-imperialist and LGBTQ+ movements and labor unions. We must ally, above all, with left-wing, anticapitalist currents of those movements that also champion the 99 percent.”[47]

The manifesto is an outgrowth of the three authors’ collaborative work on the transnational feminist strikes of 2017 and 2018—especially the 2017 women’s strike in the United States—which they view as a new form of political action and a new kind of politics.[48] The book is intended to be a “course correction” to reorient feminist struggles.[49] It ends by embracing a certain vision of universalism, in its words, “to fight against capitalism’s weaponization of our differences.”[50] This may be a topic for further discussion at the seminar.

I will turn now to some reflections on these texts.

Rethinking the Proletariat

The Communist Manifesto was a radical revolutionary call to industrialized workers, to the proletariat. It had a historical specificity. It was tied to the historical emergence of the proletarian workers. On its account, the proletariat had not existed before industrialization. There were working classes before, such as enslaved persons and serfs, but they were not the proletariat. Marx and Engels make this clear throughout the different versions of the credo, including the Manifesto itself: The proletariat only began to exist with the advent of industrialized machinery that displaced independent tradesmen and craftsmen.

The concept of the proletariat, then, depended on the historical transformation of a certain class of artisan workers and craftsmen, who were themselves middle class, into precarious workers entirely dependent on capitalists and capitalist competition. It rested on a sharp contrast between those two modes of existence: autonomous middle-class artisans with their own tools and equipment and a livelihood versus pure manual labor dependent on the needs, equipment, and capital of the industrialists. The self-consciousness of being a proletarian worker depended on having had a prior self-consciousness of being an independent artisan with some dignity—it rested on a form of alienation from a prior way of life. That prior way of life involved mostly white, relatively entitled men (and some women) who had experienced forms of self-reliance and dignity because of their trades, and subsequently experience a loss of dignity when they were stripped of their self-sufficiency and turned into dependent, supplicant, slave-like labor. As Marx and Engels write, “The lower strata of the middle class—the small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the proletariat, partly because their diminutive capital does not suffice for the scale on which modern industry is carried on, and is swamped in the competition with the large capitalists, partly because their specialized skill is rendered worthless by new methods of production.”[51]

Marx and Engels write of “the vanished status of the workman of the Middle Ages.”[52] They were identifying a particular, historically-situated experience of downward social mobility. This explains why they distinguished, from the proletariat, the seperate condition of the lumpenproletariat and of what they called the “peasants”—a term that is jarring today, so I will us “rural populations.”

Marx and Engels effectively excluded these other groups from the analysis of the proletariat. In the Manifesto, they suggest that the lumpenproletariat have been better prepared, from their conditions of life, “for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.”[53] In their “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” written a couple of months later in March 1848, they specifically excluded from the franchise persons convicted of crimes. As for the rural populations, at this time in 1848, Marx and Engels did not view them as a revolutionary force or as a class that would bring about revolution. At best, they could be allies.

In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels characterize the rural populations as reactionary—as trying to roll back history to promote their old interests and to prevent their own extinction. Their standpoint is conservative. It is only when they pay heed to their future interests—realizing that they too will sink into the proletariat—that they might become revolutionary.[54] The “small peasants,” and for that matter the “petty bourgeoisie” as well, had aligned interests with the proletariat, according to Marx and Engels. It was in their interest to have a communist revolution, but they were not the driving force. You hear this well in the “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” again written in March 1848. Those demands include the abolition of all feudal obligations and the elimination of landowners and of the propertied class. It provides for all rural mortgages to be taken over by the state and paid to the state. The goal is to get rid of landowners and feudal lords entirely, and to create instead a state that will oversee banking, credit, mortgages, etc. So the rural workers will effectively become small landowners or borrowers.

But what is plain is that the rural population and the petty bourgeois—at least at this time, and we will need to keep an eye on this in the next texts on the French revolution of 1848, Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon—are fellow travelers, potential allies, who have convergent interests and might support a socialist revolution. As Marx and Engels write in the “Demands”: “It is to the interest of the German proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie and the small peasants to support these demands with all possible energy. Only by the realisation of these demands will the millions in Germany, who have hitherto been exploited by a handful of persons and whom the exploiters would like to keep in further subjection, win the rights and attain to that power to which they are entitled as the producers of all wealth.”[55]

The Absence of a Proletariat Today

What is clear is that Marx and Engels were writing about the condition of industrial workers in Western Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, not the wretched of the earth, colonized populations, or the rural masses in the twentieth. There is a historical and geographical specificity to the proletariat.

As a result, rereading the Manifesto today is somewhat jarring. We live in very different social conditions now. People have been de-skilled: they no longer have a trade or craft that they have “lost.” They are rarely taught a skill to begin with. Factory work, where it persists in the West, has become a livelihood. Plus, with unionization in Western Europe and strong syndicates like the CGT and CFDT in a country like France, there start to be vested interests in being a unionized factory worker. To add on that, people live in a service and gig-economy in the industrialized West. Precarious workers depend on their own property as service tools: an automobile for the Uber driver or your artcraft on Etsy. Many service workers have become independent contractors, autonomous, at the mercy of the market. In addition, the original moment of downward social mobility is not a common experience. There is, today, little self-consciousness of becoming proletarianized or of belonging to a proletarian class because there is no prior self-consciousness of having been or having the possibility of being an independent tradesman. If all one knows and expects is the possibility of being a precarious worker, if that is the only option, then one does not experience it as downward social mobility.

Some of these changes may explain why those who fit previously in the category of the proletariat—i.e. the working class in industrialized Western societies, like the USA or France—are turning increasingly to the extreme right, such as Donald Trump’s MAGA and Le Pen’s Rassemblement national. It is perhaps because they feel threatened (rightly or wrongly) by what they perceive as “outsiders” who tend to be newer immigrants and persons of color from the Global South, for instance from Latin America in the USA, or from North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa in France, and who are perceived as threatening (or made to be perceived as threatening by populist leaders) as threats to their livelihood (supposedly taking their jobs), to their safety (witness the recent waves of moral panic), and to their identity (language and culture).

As a result, Marx’s analysis needs to be updated. The central question, then, is whether we should still focus on class struggles—even enlarged notions of class struggle that include gender, race, ethnicity.[56] Let me turn, in conclusion, to that question.

The Problem Perhaps Is No Longer Class Struggle, but the Taste for Domination

For the longest time, I thought that Marx and Engels were basically right. I didn’t have to fully subscribe to their philosophy of history, which seemed too eschatological for my taste. I didn’t need to call myself a Marxist, far too identifying for my taste. I didn’t need to agree with everything or be part of a party, being perhaps more Nietzschean than Leninist.

But for a long time, it seemed to me that our history was that of a constant struggle between a dominant class and a dominated class. Marx and Engels, in their day, spoke of a simple formulation of class antagonisms in the Manifesto. Society, they wrote, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other – Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.”[57] Now, this language already sounded dated by the late 1970s. It wasn’t adequate back then. By the 1980s already, the term bourgeoisie was not working. It did not adequately capture the members of the upper financial echelons, the CEOs on Wall Street, the Hamptons, the country club life, in short, what we would today call the 1% or the 0.1%. As for the proletariat, by the turn of the 1980s, it was no longer clear what this term meant, or whether it was even appropriate. It was a placeholder for the poor, the dominated, that other class, the marginalized, some workers, not all, and of course the damned of the earth. Already in 1960, Fanon had confronted the idea of the proletariat with the “damned,” a whole other class.

But whatever the case, whether I used a more contemporary postcolonial language or more refined terms, I still subscribed to the idea of a constant confrontation between two social classes, at least in the 1980s. The feminist, gay, queer, and trans* revolutions, Black Studies in the US, abolitionism – all these social and intellectual movements transformed the idea of class struggles. But I always managed to fit them roughly into a certain binary, between the dominant and the dominated, between the unjust and the just. Whether it was historically dominated women versus dominant men, or African-Americans versus Whites; whether it was historically dominated queer people versus historically dominant straight people, and so on. I was always in the grip of a certain binary class struggle between dominant and dominated. Of course, intersectionality showed cuts, further fragmentation, and important distinctions. Afro-pessimism and anti-blackness theories showed internal hierarchies that are elided if we view the world simply through the prism of white supremacy. To invert the prism and look at the world through anti-blackness showed a lot more hierarchy within groups who were non-white, as did Subaltern Studies.

These differentiations were complex, always complex. But all the same, I always had the impression that the important divide was between those who dominate and those who are dominated.

My many years editing the work of Michel Foucault, Théories et institutions pénales, La Société punitive, Surveiller et punir, had convinced me of course that power relations were not as simple as a struggle between two classes. Foucault made a compelling argument that we needed to reject a reductionist model of class struggle. As he argued in La société punitive, the formula that a particular class has power is a strategically valid formula, but it cannot be used for historical analysis. The schema of power as appropriation was too simple. The schema of power localized in a state apparatus as well. Power subordinated to a mode of production: too simple too.[58] The schema of ideology, too simple as well. Yes, power relations were more complicated. We had to think of them through the matrix of civil war. And as far as this civil war was concerned, Foucault did not reduce the model of conflict to two opposing camps. Although this is often what we think of in the context of civil war, for example in the context of the American Civil War. Foucault did not give many illustrations of how he thought about civil war. In my case, I tend to think of the Spanish civil war, where the republicans and communists, influenced by the Soviet Union, took on the P.O.U.M, the anarchists and Trotskyists, where there were internal wars within the camps.

And yet, it always seemed to me that, roughly speaking, in fine, there were always the dominant and the dominated—whether you define them differently, as proletarian, transgender, queer, colonized—at the end of the day, there was always a struggle between those who dominated and those who were dominated.

Today, I am no longer convinced. Perhaps the real problem, today, or perhaps in history as well, is quite different. The fundamental social struggle is not between those who dominate and those who are dominated, but rather between those who have an appetite to dominate, a taste for domination, a desire or will to dominate, and those who have an aspiration, a desire for non-dominance, those who seek forms of cooperation.

The former, those who seek to dominate or to be dominated, are content living in a world of domination. But they are not limited to the dominant class. In every class, in every group, they can be found, even among the enslaved. Even among, for Marx, the plebeians, among the serfs. Among the oppressed. It is perhaps for this reason that in the American antebellum South, for example, some enslaved people became overseers and drivers, and they supervised and disciplined other enslaved people. It is perhaps why there were kapos in concentration camps. Or people of immigrant origin who oppose immigration.

The taste for domination is not limited to the dominant, and likewise, the appetite or taste for solidarity is not limited to the dominated. So, we need to rethink the struggles at the heart of our society.

This is not a question that can be easily resolved with a theory of ideology, nor of false consciousness. Those who have a taste for domination, but find themselves in a precarious or dominated position, are not simply fooled by an ideology. Nor do they simply have a false conscience. It is not necessarily the case that they are going against their true interests. The problem here is that we tend to define interests far too narrowly. We do not take sufficient account of affects, emotions, identity, and forms of recognition. Today, for example, an automobile worker in Michigan may be pro-Trump for reasons of perceived patriotism, masculinity, “America First,” for example, whether or not it helps him in his material conditions. Deleuze and Guattari said it well in Anti-Oedipus in their discussion of Wilhelm Reich: the Nazi regime didn’t impose itself on the German masses, they wanted it and desired it, they preferred those forms of domination. So, it is not possible to say, simply, that those who have an appetite for domination, but are in fact dominated today, have a false consciousness. There may be myriad affective reasons that draw people to forms of domination.

Authoritarian figures are not just elected or put in power by the dominant class—by the 1%. They are given power by a far greater percentage of the population that leans towards a society of domination.

If this is correct, then we need to rethink class struggles—and imagine ways to convince people of the value and attraction of solidarity. We need to nurture the taste for cooperation.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, February 1848, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf.

[2] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution [a.k.a. The April Theses],” April 7, 1917 in Pravda No. 26, available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm#bkV24P024F02.

[3] Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2019).

[4] Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction” in The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (New York: Verso, 2012), p. 3; Notes to the “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, February 1848, online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, at p. 36.

[5] Engels, “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,” at p. 39 (question 13).

[6] Engels, “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,” at p. 37 (question 2).

[7] Engels, “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,” at p. 37 (question 3).

[8] Engels, “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,” at p. 39 (question 14).

[9] Engels, “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith,” at p. 40 (question 20).

[10] Notes to the “Principles of Communism,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, February 1848, online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, at p. 41.

[11] Engels, “Principles of Communism,” at p. 49-50 (question 18).

[12] Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 30-31.

[13] Compare Engels, “Principles of Communism,” at p. 52-53 (question 24); with Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 32-42.

[14] Compare Engels, “Principles of Communism,” at p. 53-54 (question 25); with Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, p. 43-44.

[15] Engels, “Principles of Communism,” at p. 43 (question 5).

[16] Engels, “Principles of Communism,” at p. 43 (question 5).

[17] Engels, “Principles of Communism,” at p. 47 (question 13).

[18] Engels, “Principles of Communism,” at p. 47 (question 13).

[19] Engels, “Principles of Communism,” at p. 52 (question 21).

[20] Friedrich Engels, “Letter from Engels to Marx, 24 November 1847,” in MECW Volume 38, p. 146, online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, at p. 15.

[21] Editorial Introduction to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, February 1848, online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, at p. 2.

[22] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 30.

[23] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 30.

[24] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 30.

[25] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 30. Note also the centrality of the state in the “Demands.” Marx and Engels are demanding a centralized state that controls banking, mortgaged property, education, national workshops, transport, railways, canals, steamships, roads, the posts, etc. The road to communism goes through a powerful state. Notice also that Marx and Engels are demanding national workshops for Germany. That is fascinating, given that Marx will object to Louis Blanc’s proposals for national workshops in France.

[26] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 44.

[27] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 16.

[28] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 26.

[29] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 29.

[30] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 27.

[31] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 26.

[32] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 31.

[33] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 44.

[34] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution [a.k.a. The April Theses],” Pravda, No. 26, April 7, 1917, trans. Isaacs Bernard, available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm#bkV24P024F03.

[35] Lenin, “April Theses,” thesis 6; Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, at p. 30 and 23.

[36] Marx and Engels, “Demands,” at p. 56.

[37] Lenin, “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution,” thesis 5 and note 1.

[38] Lenin, “April Theses,” [Introduction].

[39] Cinzia Arruzza, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser, Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (New York: Verso, 2019), at p. 59. It is interesting to note that Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser dedicate their manifesto to the Combahee River Collective; for more on the Combahee River Collective, we had a 13/13 seminar with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the Collective at Revolution 4/13.

[40] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 83.

[41] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 16.

[42] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 45.

[43] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 15-16.

[44] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 30.

[45] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 57.

[46] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 15.

[47] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 54.

[48] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 62.

[49] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 73.

[50] Arruzza, Bhattacharya, and Fraser, Feminism for the 99%, at p. 85.

[51] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 17.

[52] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 17.

[53] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 20.

[54] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. 19.

[55] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Demands of the Communist Party in Germany,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, February 1848, online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, at p. 57.

[56] An ancillary question, which I will leave aside, is whether we should retain the term “Marxism.” Given that we need to reject the productivism, the glorification of industrialization, and the Eurocentrism, as well as the patriarchy and insufficient attention to colonialism, it is unclear…

[57] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, at p. __.

[58] See generally Foucault, La Société punitive, pp. 232-36.