Consider a common view of human nature: that humans
are greedy, and have very little regard for
how this impacts others.
That humans are competitive.
That survival of the fittest doesn't just mean adaptation
to a given environment, as it does in Darwin, but
rather means that some people are better than others.
Are entitled to more than others.
And that they should take what they are entitled to
by any means necessary.
Such a view of human nature is often used to justify
capitalism, but Marx and Engels ask us to consider
whether things might be the other way around.
What if the idea that humans are greedy and competitive
is actually a product of the capitalist structure
under which we live, rather than that quote, unquote,
nature leading to capitalism?
This is one of many examples of the way that Marx offers
a bottom- up approach.
The idea that material conditions provide the
possibility for our ways of thinking, rather than our
ways of thinking leading to material conditions.
And Marx and Engels articulate this on page 172, among other
places, where they say "the selfish misconception that
induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature
and of reason the social forms springing from your
present mode of production and form of property,"
this is a misconception of the ruling class.
Ideologies often justify existing features of the
status quo rather than actually reflecting things
as they are in nature.
And so Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto
want to ask us to imagine whether things might
be different from this.
Let's say a few things about the argument in this text.
The first is the division between two classes,
the bourgeoisie and the proletarians, which we've
already been talking about in our reading of Marx as
the division between the capitalists and the workers.
So the bourgeoisie is the class of modern capitalists
who own the means of production and they are the
employers of wage labor.
The proletariat is the class of wage laborers.
These people sell their labor power, their ability
to do work, in order to live because they don't control
the means of production.
So they have to sell their labor power to other
people because they don't have the means to create
objects using their own labor power themselves.
Marx and Engels describe, starting on page 163, how
capitalism emerges out of
feudalism, but comes to constitute its
own economic system.
So what are some of the features of capitalism
at the time that Marx and Engels are writing?
Well, first they say that there's been a
simplification of class antagonisms rather than a
number of competing classes.
There are now just two, right?
There's been this increasing division.
There's the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the
proletariat on the other hand.
Another feature of modern capitalism in Marx and Engels'
time is that industry has established a world market.
So think about the fact that Marx and Engels
are writing during the Industrial Revolution, when
there has been a huge new focus on mass production
of goods through factories, there's a bigger import
export trade than before.
And so the increasing globalization of trading
goods in a capitalist context is something that they also
associate with the economic system at their time.
Another feature is that the bourgeoisie has finally
taken over the state.
So there's not a distinction between the owners of
the means of production and those governing.
Rather, the bourgeoisie has overtaken the state either
by installing members of its own within governance
and/ or by basically owning those who govern by
manipulating and controlling them in various manners.
The interest of the bourgeoisie come to be the
interest that the state is focused on, really.
Additionally, traditional class hierarchies have
been ruined, as have the relations between humans.
Marx and Engels say on page 161 that now humans
only relate to each other in terms of self-interest:
essentially, cash.
What can we get out of each other?
This has turned personal worth into exchange value, right?
Exchange value allows us to judge goods
relative to one another.
Right?
How much is this vase worth compared to this other vase?
We start to treat people like that.
Are you worth more than this other person?
In addition, under capitalism, the bourgeoisie starts to
exploit the world globally.
Think about colonialism, for instance.
And the differences in culture and character between
different countries or nations dissolve, giving way to a
quote universal civilized and capitalist type of society.
The progressive view of history becomes this idea that
all people have to be alike in order to count as civilized.
All nations are compelled to adopt the bourgeois
capitalist mode of production.
Finally, capitalism in Marx and Engels' time also
emphasizes centralization.
The separation between the city and the country becomes
stronger, with the city growing to have increasingly
centralized power.
And politics also becomes increasingly
centralized as well.
Actually, I said finally, but one additional
feature of capitalism!
Marx and Engels say that the exploitative nature of
capitalism was originally veiled by political and
religious illusions, but now doesn't even
need to hide behind it.
Bare exploitation comes to be socially accepted.
It's just the way things are.
Humans are competitive.
They're greedy.
If you're exploited, well, maybe you can eventually
become the exploiter.
Wouldn't that be great!
In this text, Marx and Engels describe a gradual process
that they're witnessing within capitalism that
they think will lead to capitalism's overthrow.
And I'm not going to have space here to go through
all of those stages,
although I look forward to speaking with you about them.
But what I want to say here is something about the very
broad strokes of what will be, in Marx and Engels'
view, a communist revolution.
The first is the formation of the proletariat
into an actual class.
There's this weird paradox whereby even though capitalism
separates people into a class of capitalists and a
class of proletarians, the proletarians lack what Marx
calls class consciousness.
They're not aware of the fact that they are all mutually
exploited by the same system.
And in order to overthrow the exploitative system, they have
to band together by realizing that their bonds, their
chains, are mutually shared.
The second is the overthrow of bourgeois supremacy,
sometimes known as seizing
the means of production.
After the proletariat has constituted a class with
class consciousness, Marx and Engels think that they
need to take over bourgeois supremacy by, say, taking
over the means of production.
The capitalist may own the means of production, but
they actually don't know how to work them in the
way that the laborers do.
Right?
It's the laborers who have the material, practical knowledge
to create all of the things that the capitalists own.
And so actually the proletarians need to recognize
not only their shared chains, their shared exploitation,
but also their shared power.
Once they do that, Marx and Engels think it will be pretty
easy for them to overthrow the capitalists because of
this additional power, and also because of sheer numbers.
There are more proletarians than there are capitalists.
Third, what will happen after the overthrow of bourgeois
supremacy, Marx and Engels argue, will be the conquest of
proletarian political power.
They'll go from overthrowing the economic system to
actually overtaking the political structure, which is
infected, according to Marx and Engels, by bourgeois
interests and manipulations.
This will be the communist revolution.
However, it's not all pretty after this.
Marx and Engels are actually pretty pessimistic about
the early stages of the communist revolution.
They say will look like despotism.
And it will look like despotism because in inverting
the ruling system, where the capitalists are on top and
the proletarians are on the bottom, we're still going
to have a class hierarchy.
Suddenly the proletarians will be on top and the capitalists
will be on the bottom.
The proletarians will take all capital, all
accumulated wealth from the bourgeoisie, centralize all
instruments of production into the state, right?
So further the capitalist project of centralization
and increase the total number of productive forces.
In doing so, you can see that the initial phases of
proletarian rule are actually pretty similar to capitalism.
It's just a difference of who's in power, right?
There's still accumulation of wealth.
There's still centralization.
And there's still an increase in productive forces.
So in a way, the initial phase of proletarian rule is
like an amplified version of capitalism, but eventually
the proletarian rule of political power Marx and
Engels say will drop away.
And there will be an association of free
subjects who will no longer even need the
centralization in the state.
That will be a chance for humans to realize their full
expression of human nature as productive creators, because
they won't be productively creating for the purpose
of accumulating wealth or surviving, but rather because
they enjoy it, and because they enjoy each other, and
they enjoy experiencing the full range of human life.
I look forward to talking with you about the list
of objections to communism that Marx and Engels lay out
on pages 170-175, and then sort of debunk-- I'm curious
what you think about that.
For now, I want to close by just asking, returning
to this sort of theme of the course overall: what
do Marx and Engels trust?
Well, they trust the material forces of history that are
leading to greater freedom.
There's still a logic or reason here, right?,
that is driving history.
In that sense, they trust very similar forces to hegel.
There's still a teleology to history, but for them, unlike
for Hegel, the trust should be placed in material conditions
themselves rather than in the increasing actualization of
spirit in material conditions.