SOURCE: Ahmad, Aijaz. “The Communist Manifesto in Its Own Time, And in Ours.” In A World to Win: Essays on the “The Communist Manifesto,” edited by Prakash Karat, pp. 14-47. New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 1999.

[In the following essay, Ahmad looks at the Communist Manifesto as both Marx's first mature work and a transitional text in the development of his philosophy. The critic also examines the Manifesto's conception of the bourgeoisie and the Marxist perspective on the laws of history.]

It is said that the Bible and the Quran are the only two books that have been printed in more editions and disseminated more widely than The Communist Manifesto. This brief and terse text thus has a pre-eminent position in the entire history of secular literature. Some sense of the breadth of its influence can be gauged from the fact that some 544 editions are known to have been published in 35 languages—all of them European languages, one might add—even prior to the Bolshevik Revolution; there must have been during that same period other editions which are not known, and infinitely greater number of editions were to be published, in very many more languages, European and non-European, after the Revolution of 1917. It is worth emphasizing, furthermore, that, unlike the two religious books that are said to have had a wider circulation, the Manifesto is barely one hundred and fifty years old: rather a young text, all things considered. It is much too early to fully assess the influence this young little pamphlet has had in the past and is likely to have in the future.

One can also say without fear of refutation that the Manifesto has been more consequential in the actual making of the modern world than any other piece of political writing, be it Rousseau's Social Contract, the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, or the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen’. The first reason is of course the power of its political message which has reverberated throughout the world and determined the destinies of a large cross-section of humanity over the past one hundred and fifty years. Then there is the style itself: no call to arms has ever been phrased in a language of such zest, beauty and purity. Third, there is the stunning combination of diagnosis and prediction. Marx describes the capitalism of his own times and predicts its trajectories into the indefinite future with such force and accuracy that every subsequent generation, in various parts of the world, has seen in the Manifesto the image of its own times and premonition of the horrors yet to come. And, fourth, concealed in the direct simplicity of its prose, like the labour of the tailor that disappears into the coat,¹ is the distillation of a multifaceted philosophical understanding that had arisen out of a series of confrontations with the thinkers most influential in the Germany of his times: Hegel, Feuerbach, Proudhon, Stirner, Bruno Bauer, Sismondi, the ‘True Socialists’ and the all the rest whom the authors of the Manifesto broadly describe as ‘would-be universal reformers’.²

Much of the richness of the Manifesto is owed to the fact that it is the text of an intellectual and political transition. Marx alone—and then, increasingly, Marx and Engels together—had written so very much before coming to draft the Manifesto that one now quite forgets how very young (not quite thirty years old) he really was. This is the first mature text of a very young man. So, it concludes certain lines of argument Marx had been developing previously—in his first significant text, Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State and “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: An Introduction”; and then in “The Jewish Question”, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (also knows as “Paris Manuscripts”), the famous “Theses on Feuerbach”, and The German Ideology. Of these, Marx published only the Critique and ‘The Jewish Question’ in his own lifetime; the rest were drafted mainly for self-clarification and were then ‘abandoned’—in the famous self-ironical phrase about The German Ideology—‘to the gnawing criticism of mice’. These texts, together with The Holy Family, The Poverty of Philosophy, and a number of minor essays of that time serve both as a prelude to the formulations that are so familiar to us now from the Manifesto, but also as a series of confrontations with the most influential tendencies in the Philosophy, Economics and Political Thought that were central to the intellectual universe within which Marx had first learned to think. They are, in short, oppositional texts, texts in which Marx stutters and stammers, refuses other people's thoughts, tries to think his own thoughts and define his own premises, tries to come out from under the whole weight of that immensely powerful body of thought that has come down to us under the labels of the Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment, Romanticism, Anarchism, utopian socialism, not to speak of the discourse of Rights and the fetishization of the market and the State.

Those earlier texts include passages and entire sections of great originality. However, virtually all of them are written in opposition to some particular writers or tendencies, i.e., Hegel and the others we have mentioned above. This kind of focussed criticism is continued in the latter section of the Manifesto as well, but the memorable first part can be viewed as perhaps the first of Marx's texts that is written entirely in the declarative, in opposition to not this or that thinker, this or that tendency in thought, but in opposition to bourgeois society as a whole. It is a text written at the end of a difficult apprenticeship, so as to scatter the spectres that had haunted European thought until that time and to define a new kind of relationship between political economy, history and philosophy, with the ambition of realizing the aims of philosophy through a double movement. This double movement consisted, on the one hand, of a theory of history which makes concrete the intellectual project of philosophy by explaining the fundamental motion of the material world in its generality—what postmodernism these days dismisses as a ‘modes of production narrative’. But, on the other hand, it also demanded from philosophy that its ethical project be materialized as the praxis of a revolutionary transformation of an ethically intolerable world—what postmodernism now dismisses as ‘the myth of Progress’.

Marx's mature studies of the world economy in general, and of the principles of capitalist economy in particular, belong of course to the period after the composition of the Manifesto. The engagement had begun much earlier, however, as we see in the systematic and constantly improving expositions of the subject in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and The German Ideology which he did not publish in his own lifetime, as well as The Poverty of Philosophy which he did. A principle that had struck him quite early was that the rate and quantum of historical change in the forces and relations of production was much quicker under capitalism, and tended to get even quicker in each successive phase, as compared to antecedent modes of production where changes in the relations of production remained relatively limited and the pace of technological change relatively very slow; not ‘unchanging’ as he sometimes hastily said, but on the whole glacially slow. As a fundamental methodological principle, then, Marx adopted the view that it is impossible to grasp the essence of capitalism if we were to study it as a static reality, or mainly as it quite evidently is at a given time. Rather, the pace of change within this mode of production required that it be studied as a process, whose past had to be understood historically and whose future trajectory could be deduced from its past and present with reasonable degree of accuracy, not in all details but in its overall structure. This explains why the picture that the Manifesto presents of capitalism tells us so little about how capitalism was in his own time, and tells much more of how it had been and how it was likely to unfold.

Even so, within the larger corpus of Marx's work the Manifesto cannot be regarded as a text of some final illumination. As was said above, it is a transitional text, the first mature text of a very young man. It not only transits from earlier texts but also gropes toward those more comprehensive studies that were to follow over the next many years. The range of that corpus is breathtaking. Three preoccupations were paramount in that whole range of work, however. There was, first, the effort to offer the most incisive, most detailed account of the capitalist mode of production as such: the first principles and the first premises for an account of the modern world as a whole, from the standpoint of labour, production and the struggle of classes. The massive Grundrisse, which too Marx drafted only for self-clarification, in 1857-58, and of course the three volumes of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value are the key texts of that historic project. Second, there was extensive engagement with the history and politics of his own time as these unfolded all around him; among numerous such texts, “The Class Struggle in France”, first published as a series of articles in 1850, and “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, composed two years later as yet another series of articles, are the most magisterial. Rarely, if ever, has journalism risen to such heights of analytic and theoretical grandeur. Finally, there are equally numerous writings of Marx as a militant of the labour movement, most famously the “Critique of the Gotha Program” which he drafted almost thirty years after the Manifesto, in the wake of the experience of the Paris Commune and, thanks to that experience, directly concerned, in whatever preliminary fashion, with what a Communist society of the future may in broad outline strive to be. All three preoccupations of later life—the history and political economy of capitalism as a whole; contemporary politics of the ruling classes; the premises of the labour movement—are foreshadowed in the Manifesto itself. If it refines the general statement of the materialist conception of history as it had been defined up to The German Ideology, its thrust toward a theory of the political economy of capitalism would be immeasurably improved by the time Marx came to write Capital. It is on the basis of this whole edifice, with the Manifesto serving as a beam in the middle, that later masters of Marxism, such as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, were to make seminal contribution to the Marxist theory in general as well as to a fuller understanding of their own time, notably on the issue of imperialism and the actual strategy and tactics of the labour movement.

APPROACHES TO THE MANIFESTO

There are many ways of looking at the Manifesto. Each one of its significant proposition had received detailed, though sometimes less rigorous, treatment in the earlier texts and was to surface again, often in very much more precise and enriched forms, in later writings. The pithy characterization of the state executive as ‘the managing committee of the whole bourgeoisie’, for example, would be understood in a much more nuanced and dialectical fashion if we were to read it in the perspective of the far more detailed treatment of the subject in the earlier Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State and “The Jewish Question” and the later, maturer “The Eighteenth Brumaire”. Similarly, the cryptic comment on the nature of consciousness in Section Two—‘Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life’—can be usefully compared with the sharper formulation of twelve years later, in the ‘Preface’ to The Critique of Political Economy: ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, it is their social existence that determines their consciousness’. Indeed, this had been a constant theme in Marx's writing after he had developed his own critique of Hegel's idealism soon after finishing his university education. But our understanding of these very condensed formulations can be vastly enriched through a reading of The German Ideology where Marx makes the fundamental point that all consciousness is intrinsically class consciousness in the sense that all consciousness is formed within class society, from the moment of birth onward, so that one may have the consciousness of the class into which one is born or one may adopt the consciousness of some other class (e.g., a proletarian internalizing a consciousness propagated by the capitalist system) but there is no such thing as a class-less consciousness. Antonio Gramsci was to make much of this insight, for example, arguing that since one imbibes one's consciousness from different and conflicting segments of society, individual consciousness is necessarily a contradictory and incoherent consciousness which can be made coherent only through great effort of education, reflection and practical interaction with others who are comrades in the same struggle. A reading of this kind, where elements of the thought expressed in the Manifesto are systematically related to the more detailed exposition of those same elements in other, earlier and later texts of Marx, as well as to the thought of later Marxists, is perhaps the most fruitful way of approaching the Manifesto. In itself, individual sentences in the text can mislead as to what Marx thought on the subject.

Or, one can read the Manifesto as a text of its own time. For all its timeless grasp of the fundamental premises of capitalist society, it is also a text very much of its time, i.e. of the working class movement living with a great sense of urgency because all could see that a great revolutionary upheaval was fast approaching in which the proletariat would be necessarily involved, so that the correct political standpoint was a matter not only of the long future but of the very palpable present. And, indeed, the first edition of the Manifesto was published in London weeks before the revolution of 1848 broke out in Paris and spread like wildfire through what today would be known as thirteen different countries in Europe. It was expected, as undoubtedly happened, that the urban proletariat would provide the bulk of the revolutionary mass, and the Manifesto was very much a call for the international class unity and political self-organization and autonomy of the proletariat, across the diverse countries, in a way that the proletariat had not been united in independent action in the previous revolutionary upheavals. Programmatic statements like ‘The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working class parties’ would be opaque to today's reader without grasping that (a) the Communist League was so small an organization that an attempt to convert it into a political party in today's sense would have been futile and sectarian at best; (b) that the various segments of the working class were deeply fragmented along the ideological lines that are dealt with in Section III so that ideological struggle against those other tendencies was perceived as being a precondition for the subsequent formation of the ‘party of the whole’; (c) that most European countries at the time had nothing resembling a constitutional, representative government, so that the unity not only of different sections of the politically active proletariat but also of what in Section IV are described as ‘democratic parties’ was seen as a precondition for a successful revolutionary offensive;³ and (d) that the formulation is directly connected with the central emphasis on the unity of the class as a whole, which was then reflected with the call to arms with which the text concludes: ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’⁴

One could also read the Manifesto, especially Section I, purely from the philosophical point of view. It is well to recall that Marx's original training, and a very rigorous training at that, was in philosophy. He was deeply steeped in the thought of Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, not to speak of scores of lesser philosophers such as Feurbach who had been at the time very influential among German youth, especially in contestation with the thought of Hegel. At every step in his philosophy of history Marx is engaged with various aspect of Hegel's thought. His conception of the proletarian consciousness as the ‘true’ consciousness, for example, is directly in line with the Master-Slave dialectic in Hegel's Phenomenology where Hegel argues that the slave always knows more about himself as well as the Master, hence about society as a whole, because he needs to know not only about himself but also the whole condition of his enslavement, including specially the character and conduct of the master, whereas the master need know nothing about the slave more than that the latter labours for him.

By contrast, Marx's theory of the state as inevitably the instrument of the ruling class is counterpoised directly against Hegel's view of the state as a superior, disinterested mechanism for reconciling antagonisms in civil society—indeed, Marx's theory of the State, which is stated so economically in the Manifesto, arose initially out of his close, critical, passage-by-passage reading of Hegel when he was still a student. One could go even further and argue that it was his rejection of the Hegelian concept of the state as the highest form of social synthesis, and his theoretical discovery that the state exists not as a resolution of social conflicts but as a precise expression of those conflicts, which eventually led him to posit the theory of class struggle itself, i.e., the idea that class conflict is the most fundamental conflict in any society and that no state authority can be neutral in, or suspended above, this conflict. This Marx had first argued philosophically, while settling his accounts with Hegel, well before he set out to prove the thesis empirically, through a careful study of the laws of political economy.

In another direction, his sweeping denunciation of commerce as being a mechanism of conquest and exploitation of the dominated peoples and regions is counterpoised directly against Kant's view of commerce as an instrument of peaceful exchange and friendship among nations. One could offer many more such examples of his engagements with philosophical masters of the past, in a wide range of philosophical discourses from political theory to ontology. The main point here, however, is that just as Marx was to later become a master of political economy essentially by formulating an unassailable critique of political economy, he was already launched, well before drafting the Manifesto, on a critique of philosophy so fundamental and extensive that Balibar, the contemporary French philosopher, has called it an ‘anti-philosophy’.⁵ Marx was determined, in other words, never to become a philosopher in the sense in which German Idealists, for example, were philosophers, even though so much of the language of German Ideology itself is imbued with the language of that idealism. One would want to add that this ‘anti-philosophy’ was possible precisely because of the extent to which he had mastered the philosophical discourse as such. Marx is in fact so deeply conversant with philosophical concepts—theory of consciousness, dialectics, the universal and the particular, and so on—and he uses them so casually that one does not quite feel the weight of philosophical thought that undergirds the lightness and clarity of his prose. I have myself published an essay on his radically new way of employing and re-defining the concept of ‘universality’ in the Manifesto which simply overturns, on this particular subject, the whole legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century European philosophy.⁶

There are so many approaches to the Manifesto that if one were to adopt them all one could go on writing virtually indefinitely. My main concern throughout the present reflection on the text is to demonstrate, mainly by giving examples, how rich and complex and elusive a text this brief pamphlet really is. I have by and large refrained from commenting on the latter sections of the Manifesto, although those too are replete with surprises. A reflection on the varieties of ‘reactionary socialism’, and on ‘utopian socialism’, may at the end in fact bring us closer to some strands in the dominant Indian political discourse, including that of Gandhi who was himself deeply influenced by the utopian movement (though not by the specific utopians Marx discusses) and by conservative, right-wing critiques of capitalism, as in Carlyle or Tolstoy or Ruskin. All that I have set aside, for lack of space. In the rest of this essay, I want to comment only on a few more issue at some length, which too shall bring up some related concerns: In what sense, and to what extent, is the bourgeoisie perceived to be revolutionary? And, what is the Marxist conception of the ‘laws’ of history? In his portrait of globalization as it was to unfold over time, does Marx give us an equally accurate picture of the capitalist economy as well as the attendant political and aesthetic forms? And, what do we learn about the proletariat, then and now?

‘REVOLUTIONARY’ BOURGEOISIE?

Numerous commentators have noted that whereas the Manifesto declares the proletariat to be the revolutionary class of the future (‘grave-diggers’ of the bourgeois order), the great exploits that it narrates are those of the bourgeoisie as it overturns the older order and establishes its dominion over the surface of the entire globe.⁷ Some have even made out that Marx suffers from the progressivist ideology of nineteenth century positivism in which the bourgeoisie is the real hero of modernity and history is the history of constant improvement. While the former point has considerable merit, the latter is simply absurd.

The main principle of narration in the Manifesto is not that of a teleological unfolding of Progress (a unilinear development that always goes in the direction of greater improvement) but that of a contradictory process of both construction and destruction that proceed simultaneously until the point where the process becomes incapable of resolving or even containing the contradictions it has produced: that is the moment of revolutionary rupture, if the proletariat succeeds in making a revolution, or a moment of ‘mutual destruction of contending classes’, as the Manifesto puts it, if no revolutionary resolution is found.⁸ If history was always moving in the direction of progress, there would be no need for revolution as such. We shall come momentarily to how Marx, and then later Marxists have conceived of the progressive role of the bourgeoisie in relation to the antecedent modes of production and their correlative political structures. Suffice it to say here that the authors who associated the capitalist mode of production with what the Manifesto calls ‘a universal war of devastation’ or who wrote the following lines, could hardly be thinking of the role of bourgeoisie as simply and mainly a revolutionary role in the positive sense of that word:

It [capitalism] has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless, indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up the single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. … It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its own paid wage-labourers. … It compels all bourgeois nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization in their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world in its own image.

That ironic phrase, ‘what it calls civilization’, reminds one of a superbly contemptuous phrase that Engels was to use later for the colonizing European bourgeoisie: ‘civilization-mongers’. This is the language of outrage and denunciation, not of unalloyed enthusiasm.

The other point—that the Manifesto treats the proletariat as only an ascendant revolutionary class and tells mainly of the exploits of the bourgeoisie—is certainly correct. This has to do with Marx's punctual method of describing the existing conditions and deducing from them the future directions. It is worth recalling here that even limited trade union rights in the most advanced capitalist country, Britain, were at the time less than a quarter century old; that the first political party which could be viewed as a working class party, namely that of the Chartists, was itself less than a decade old and could hardly be described as ‘revolutionary’; even the successful struggle for an 8-hour day was to come very much in the future, and mass working class parties in Europe itself were not to arise until the 1880s, some forty years after the publication of the Manifesto. The Communist League, whose manifesto Marx was writing, was a small organization of German emigres in London with even smaller branches in some cities of the Continent. The revolutionary role of the proletariat that Marx was visualizing and theorizing for the future was so very much greater than anything that could be associated with that Communist League that even the name of the organization does not appear in the text of what was its own manifesto. The Manifesto does not tell of the revolutionary achievement of the working class for the good reason that in all the revolutions up to that time the proletariat had played a large but a subaltern role, under the flag of the bourgeoisie, and Marx was drafting a call to arms that would put an end to that subaltern position and would for the first time bring the proletariat on to the stage of history as a revolutionary class in its own right. What is important here is not that Marx has no revolutionary exploits of the proletariat to celebrate. What is much more important is the quality of the prediction. If his description of capitalism itself gives us an image of a capitalism not the way it was in 1848 but what it was to become much later, his conception of the revolutionary agent also has that same extraordinary orientation toward the future.

As for the bourgeoisie, it is conceived as a class that has undoubtedly played a revolutionary role in relation to the older regimes of exploitation but, in the same sweep, it is also conceived as class that can no longer extricate itself from the cycle of crises (e.g., ‘the epidemic of overproduction’) and a ‘universal war of devastation’. What, then, has been the revolutionary role?

The Manifesto conceives of the bourgeoisie as a revolutionary class in two radically different senses, drawing alternately on the very different historical experiences of Britain and France. There is, on the one hand, the objectively revolutionary role that has to do mainly with the economic sphere and the social relations necessary for the expanded reproduction of this sphere. Here, Marx draws mainly on the experience of the British capitalist class and focuses on this bourgeoisie's need to constantly revolutionize the forces and relations of production, optimize the pool of the propertyless, maximize the rate of surplus value, generalize the wage relation and ‘the cash nexus’, and carry market relations to the farthest corner of the earth. This is the logic of industrial capitalism per se, and even though only in Britain had such an industrial bourgeoisie fully emerged as the dominant class, Marx had the acumen to see that such was going to be the fate of every other national bourgeoisie which hoped to compete with the more advanced one. Britain was of course to remain in the lead during the rest of his lifetime but other such centres were to soon develop, notably in Germany and the United States even more than France, giving rise to a kind of imperialist rivalry that was qualitatively different from colonial competitions of the mercantilist era.

On the other hand, however, there was also what one might call the subjectively revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie which had to do largely with the political sphere and which had been most marked in the French Revolution and the subsequent revolutionary upheavals in many parts of the Continent, including later upheavals within France itself, right up to 1848. Whereas the modern British state had evolved on the basis of a class compromise between the new bourgeoisie and the old aristocracy, with the latter also transforming itself into a bourgeoisie of the ground-rent, as Engels in particular was to emphasize in his writings on Britain, it was the French Revolution, with its Jacobin and even communistic elements, that had sought to fully destroy the ancien regime as well as the whole social edifice upon which it had rested. The Restoration there had only led to successive revolutionary upheavals, with the aim of erecting a modern, secular, representative state. If the revolutionary role of the British capitalist class in the economic sphere had led to polarization of classes and universalization of ‘the cash nexus’, the political revolutions of the French bourgeoisie had sought to create civic and juridic equality of citizens, the class cleavages notwithstanding. If the British bourgeoisie had done all it could to keep the proletariat out of the political process, not even granting a minimum of trade union rights until the third decade of the nineteenth century, the French bourgeoisie had, in each of its revolutionary surges, sought to organize the unprivileged and the proletarianized masses for active participation in the struggle for civic equality, though it too stringently suppressed aspirations of the working classes to organize themselves in autonomous ‘combinations’ (as these were called at the time). If British political economy had perfected the theory of the free market, the philosophical representatives of the French bourgeoisie had formulated the most extensive thought on social, political, and religious freedoms. And, if British factory production was to set the pattern for later industrializations in the rest of the world, especially in the imperialist core, it was the French theories of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’ which have marked the nature of oppositional political agitations right down to our own day. It is in this specific sense that Marxism appropriates the Enlightenment project but also tries to supersede it by concentrating on removing the class virus, and it is precisely on the issue of the class character of the Republican notion of ‘freedom’ that Marx had criticized the French revolutionary thought the most stringently.

As Germans settlers in Britain, with intimate knowledge of such places as Paris and Brussels, Marx and Engels well understood this whole range of bourgeois experience in Europe. Nor did they romanticize the ‘revolutionary’ role of either the British or the French bourgeoisie. If the chapters on primitive accumulation in Capital tell the story of the many swindles out of which the British bourgeoisie was born, and if Engels' Conditions of the Working Class in England details the moral and material degradation of the great majority that was inherent in the ‘revolutionary’ phase of the British capitalist class, Marx's mature work was conceived as a critique of primarily British political economy as an illusory science that merely reflects the phenomenal form of the capitalist mode of production; inter alia, he shows how unfree the so-called ‘free market’ really is, and how freedom of the market itself leads to monopoly. Similarly, in analyses of the British state, they had shown how much the aristocracy had been absorbed in its key institutions, especially the Armed Forces and the colonial governments. As for the French Revolution, Marx had contemptuously written of ‘the self-conceit of the political sphere’ precisely in relation to the French representative state and its juridic equalities, and as early as “The Jewish Question” (1843), well before the Manifesto, he had also shown, through careful analyses of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ and of key clauses of the French Constitution, how juridic equality was based on much more fundamental inequalities and how the right to private property is the most fundamental right guaranteed therein. In their numerous writings, Marx and Engels make quite explicit the distinction between the British and French experiences, showing how neither is capable of completing the revolutions they have set in motion; as the Manifesto puts it, ‘The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to encompass the wealth created by them’.

In the condensed, epic prose of the Manifesto, however, they present these two tales of the respective bourgeoisies as a single story of the structural imperative inherent in the generalization of the capitalist mode of production as such, as if the bourgeoisie that had revolutionized the forces of production was the same that was revolutionizing the political structures. Some writers, including many admirers of this text, have viewed this condensing of the respective experiences into one as a weakness, an over-generalization and an inaccurate characterization of the French bourgeoisie. That is to a certain extent true. The weakness would surely be more significant if we were dealing with a descriptive text that would require distinctions of that kind. Instead, the very method of the Manifesto assumes that each national bourgeoisie shall grow in historical conditions specific to it and that in the process of its own maturation each national bourgeoisie is beset with its own set of anachronisms and its own realties of uneven development. What is of central importance, however, is that no mature system of capitalist production can arise without generalized ‘free’ labour which must then be translated, sooner or later, into juridic equality, all the more so because this formal equality of otherwise unequal citizens is itself a reflection of the capitalist market that organizes commodity exchange in the language of equivalences. Thus, it did not matter, from the historical standpoint of the long-term trend, that production in the Southern United States of Marx's own time was based on unfree, slave labour, despite the Bill of Rights that had bravely, and with no small degree of duplicity, proclaimed that ‘All men are created equal’. What mattered, rather, was that the United States could not emerge as a uniform labour market and an industrialized society without, sooner or later, abolishing slavery and establishing some kind of juridic equality among its citizens. That process spanned over a hundred years or so, from the abolition of slavery during the 1860s to the Civil Rights legislations and movements of the 1950s and 1960s. But the process did occur, even though that newly-won juridic equality rests on top of a whole heap of social and economic inequalities, along lines of race as well as class.

But this question of the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie we could approach from another angle as well. Since the Manifesto, many Marxists have addressed a particular question: when does the bourgeoisie cease to be a revolutionary class? At the most general level, Lenin argued that the decisive turn in Europe came with (a) the completion of the process of forming nation-states in the latter half of the nineteenth century; (b) the emergence of the revolutionary movements of the working class during roughly the same time; and (c) the onset of imperialism which established the supremacy of ‘coupon-clippers’ within Europe and prevented the consolidation of the classes of modern capitalism in the colonies—an onset that Lenin dates also from about the 1880s. Within the colonies, however, the emergent national bourgeoisies could play a constructive role in anti-colonial struggles but the attempt had to be made to organize a leading role for worker-peasant coalitions within the liberation struggles. For Russia itself, Lenin argued that capitalism had produced sufficient concentrations of the proletariat in key areas of class conflict for the struggle for a socialist revolution to begin, and that contradictions of Russian capitalism were such that neither the economic task of further, full-fledged, independent industrialization nor the political task of creating a modern state could be left to the bourgeoisie.

Generally, Marxists have tended to argue that the shift in the role of the bourgeoisie as a ‘revolutionary’ class comes between the aborted revolutions of 1848, immediately after the publication of the Manifesto, and the short-lived Paris Commune of 1871. In other words, the bourgeoisie's fear of the proletarianized masses which was already palpable during the revolutions of 1848 turned, after the Commune, into a full-fledged nightmare of a possible proletarian revolution. Antonio Gramsci, however, makes an arresting point. He argues that the bourgeoisie's fear of the proletariat goes back to the French Revolution itself. It had fully mobilized the proletarianized masses in the course of its own struggle against the ancien regime, but then counterrevolutionary terror came as soon as it became clear that the masses were gathering on a platform of radical equality, with increasing talk of the abolition of property and full democratization of state administration, that threatened the supremacy of the bourgeoisie itself. The masses were of course suppressed. Gramsci argues that the European bourgeoisie learned from that experience so well that in every subsequent revolutionary upheaval the bourgeoisie always compromised with the landowning classes in defence of the rule of property as such. He traces the reactionary character of the bourgeois regimes in nineteenth century Europe, especially in Germany and Italy, to this enduring class compromise on the part of the bourgeoisie. In the case of Italy, with which he was mainly concerned, he argues that the weakness of parliamentary democracy and the rise of fascism were both related to the crisis created by the rise of the most modern capitalist relations arising in one sector of the economy, mostly in Northern Italy, and the most backward and anachronistic structures persisting in the rest of the country, especially in the South. This extreme form of uneven development he traces to the fact that the bourgeoisie never really confronted the landowning classes, even though it played a relatively progressive role in obtaining independence and unity of the Italian nation-state. According to this argument, then, the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie came and went rather quickly.

This sheds interesting light on the role of the bourgeoisie in India. Some sections of it certainly played a progressive role during the struggle for Independence. However, five countervailing factors should also be noted. First, key sectors of the Indian bourgeoisie, such as the house of Tata, remained closer to the colonial authority than to the national movement. Second, even those who drew closer to the national movement, mainly through Gandhi's mediation, such as the Birlas, adopted an attitude of collaborative competition with regard to the colonial authority, while fully anti-colonial positions were more common among sections of the smaller bourgeoisie. Third, the bourgeoisie was always suspicious of mass movements and, during the crucial two years between the end of the Second World War and the moment of Independence, as the revolutionary wave began to rise, the bourgeois leadership was no less keen on a quick settlement than the British themselves, even if it meant partition of the country; better partition than revolution, it effectively said. Fourth, after Independence the bourgeoisie made a far-reaching alliance with the landed classes, old and new, making impossible land reforms that would radically alter the conditions of life for the poor peasants, the rural proletariat, the bonded labourers, the adivasis and the like. It thus preempted the chance of extensive social reforms in the antiquated, traditional society which are simply not possible without radical re-distribution of land and other agricultural resources in the first place. The most advanced forms of capitalist development in some areas has been combined with the most extensive backwardness of social and property relations in much of the country. Much of the social pathology we witness today, giving rise to all manner of fascistoid violences, is ultimately rooted in this fact. Finally, the fear of the proletariat and the peasantry has meant that this bourgeoisie has found it easier to compromise with imperialism than to undertake radical transformation of Indian society, even for its own purposes; they would rather have an extremely restricted home market and an unhealthy, socially backward, illiterate or semi-literate work-force than undertake a social transformation that may slip out of their control. Instead of a ‘revolutionary’ bourgeoisie, we have something of a permanent, pre-emptive counterrevolution, which only goes to show that in a society such as the one we have, even the tasks of a bourgeois revolution cannot be fully carried out except within a socialist transition.

ARE THERE ‘LAWS’ OF CAPITALISM?

Schematically speaking, we could say that the Manifesto, and the science of Marxism of which this is a document of very great importance, is built around two kinds of principles or ‘laws’. One set consists of ‘laws’ pertaining to the very motion of the capitalist mode of production which are fundamental and immutable throughout the whole history of this mode, without which capitalism would cease to be capitalism as such. Three such laws can be summarized here, simply to illustrate a part of this theoretical core, or what Marx might have called the ‘rational kernel’ of this theory.

There is, first, the proposition that throughout its history, capitalism drives toward greater and greater polarization between the fundamental classes. This does not mean that no intermediate classes or strata are present at any given time; indeed, with the increasing complexity of administration, management and technical expertise required for expanded reproduction of capital, such intermediate strata arise all along the axis of this class polarization. What the law means, rather, is that the means of production for the expanded reproduction of capital tend to get concentrated at one end of the class polarization, while the increasingly more numerous majority gets proletarianized (i.e., loses control over these means of production) and is forced to sell its labour-power, whether in the ‘organized’ or the ‘unorganized’ sector, and whether on the full-time, permanent basis or as casual and temporary labourers. ‘Repression’ or ‘poverty’ are punctual features of this class relation, but what defines it as specifically ‘capitalist’ is the category of ‘exploitation’, i.e., expanded reproduction and accumulation of capital by one class that appropriates the labour-power of the other class. It is in relation to this polarization of classes that the concept of class struggle is derived, and the main point is that all classes, especially the two polar classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, participate in this struggle. We tend to think of class struggle only in relation to the proletariat, as revolutionary struggle. Marx's point is that the possessing class itself wages a brutal and permanent struggle in defence of its own class interests, through violence and threats of violence, through exploitations both extensive and intensive, by maintaining a permanent army of the unemployed, and through thousand other means in the social, political, economic, ideological and cultural arenas. Class struggle has, in other words, not one side but two.

Second, there is the iron ‘law’ of increasing globalization of the capitalist mode of production, first extensively by bringing more and more territories and populations under its dominion, and then intensively by constantly imposing newer and newer labour regimes and processes of production, which are first invented at the core of the system and then get enforced in its peripheries as and when the need arises. This globalizing tendency was there well before the Industrial Revolution came about and is an ongoing process today, in myriad forms. No pre-capitalist mode had this constant expansion as an inherent law of its own reproduction; capitalism does. The feudal lords of Britain had neither the design nor the capacity to extend their feudal mode into the rest of the world; the British bourgeoisie was increasingly embroiled in perfecting precisely such designs and capacities. Today, when some celebrated theorists in the advanced capitalist countries are talking of ‘late capitalism’, ‘post-imperialist capitalism’, even a ‘postmodern’ and ‘cybernetic’ capitalism in which production is said to have been replaced by information technologies, the basic fact is that, according to the calculations of the World Bank, the number of workers in the ‘modern’ (i.e. fully capitalist) sector has doubled during the thirty years between 1965 and 1995, the very years when capitalism is said to have abolished historic forms of labour (a book was recently published in the United States, by eminent labour theorists in the postmodern Left, simply called Post-Work).

The third such law that we can cite as a permanent feature of capitalism is the class nature of the state, i.e., that no capitalist society can exist and reproduce itself without a state that is the state of the bourgeoisie as a whole. Now, on the Left at least, we take this for granted. On Marx's part, this was a revolutionary discovery. For the political theory that he had inherited, from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and right up to Hegel, the normal and desirable state was one that stood above all classes and fractions of civil society, mediating their disputes and itself embodying the General Will. It is in this sense that Hegel had described the bureaucracy as ‘a universal class’; in other words, a class that represented not the interest of a particular class but a universal interest, of the whole society. It is directly in response to Hegel's description of the bureaucracy as the universal class that Marx was to say so emphatically that only the proletariat is potentially a universal class, since as an object of universal exploitation it has no particular interests to defend, and that the proletariat can actually become such a ‘universal class’ through a revolutionary re-structuring of society into one where ‘the free development of each is the precondition for the free development of all’—free, above all, from exploitation. This definition of ‘freedom’—as a freedom, first of all, from exploitation—was also a new one. Through a dense and brilliant analysis of some founding texts of the French Revolution—‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ as well as some key clauses of the Republican Constitution—Marx had shown in “The Jewish Question” that the fundamental freedom granted by the Declaration is the right to private property, that the fundamental right granted was the right to defend one's property against encroachment by others, and that the core of legal government were laws pertaining to right and freedom of property. This, he argued, was certainly an advance over the arbitrary powers of the monarchical state, but, in a dialectical move, freedom from exploitation was now posited as the true freedom that could only be guaranteed through abolition of capitalism as such, as against the illusory and class-based freedom of private property as guaranteed by documents of the bourgeois revolution. The main point, in any case, was that a state that guaranteed the right to private property, hence the system of exploitation, could not possibly represent, either in theory or in practice, the General Will. Such a state had to be a class state, and that class society could not be abolished without simultaneously abolishing the class state.

Such are some of the fundamental ‘laws’ of motion under capitalism, and without some strict conception of such laws Marxism ceases to be a coherent theory. This does not mean that such laws function in exactly the same way in all places and all times. It does mean, though, that capitalism cannot exist without the operation of such laws. However, most of what passes for ‘laws of history’ or ‘laws of nature’ and even ‘laws of political economy’ are in fact what we might call laws of tendency, i.e., the view that since capitalism is on the whole an intelligible structure a correct understanding of the existing structure can reasonably predict that, all else being equal, certain phenomena would tend to take particular directions and particular forms. For example, Marx speaks in the Manifesto of the inherent tendency of capitalism toward periodic crises, and he speaks specifically of ‘the epidemic of overproduction’. In later, more mature studies of political economy, he was to closely demonstrate that the inherent tendency in the average rate of capitalist profit was toward decline, thanks to competitions of various sorts, crises of overproduction, etc. These are obviously laws of tendency that gives to capitalism a peculiarly unstable character. However, the rate of profit does not always fall, not in every period, not in every branch of production, not in all phases of the class struggle, not in every national space of investment. The bourgeoisie is always trying to maintain at least a constant, if not rising, rate of profit. Much of the drive behind imperialist expansion and exploitation of more and more regions and peoples of the world is precisely to stabilize and push up these rates in the core countries; and the bourgeoisie wages an unremitting class struggle against workers everywhere to simultaneously raise the productivity of labour, depress the wage rate and yet expand the market for its products—by raising, for example, the level of consumer debt, by extending to them a purchasing power beyond their earned incomes, so that the capitalists can sell their products while also collecting interest on the generalized debt. We have, in other words, not a teleological unfolding of an iron law but the contradictory structure of tendencies and counter-tendencies.

Broadly speaking, the guiding principle here is that, as Engels was to put it, ‘men make their own history but they make it in circumstances given to them’. History is, in other words, a dynamic and ever changing mix of intentions and constraints. The choices people make and the outcomes they produce are deeply constrained by the ‘circumstances given to them’. However, they could not make ‘their own history’ if intentions did not matter and if tendencies inherent in the system could not be reversed. Indeed, revolution is a moment where intentions—the subjective factor; the collective human agency—would confront the constraints and transform them in radically new directions.

GLOBALIZATION, ECONOMY, AND CULTURE

This distinction between laws that are fundamental to the structure as a whole and laws that are only laws of tendency can be grasped if we look at the way the Manifesto speaks of (a) the process of globalization strictly in terms of the expansion of capital on the one hand, and (b) on the other, the probable consequences it attempts to foresee in diverse other areas, such as on the issue of ‘national specificity’ or on the issue of a ‘world literature’ arising in the distant future out of the dissolution of national literatures.

It is really quite extraordinary how frequently words like ‘global’ and ‘universal’ appear in the brief first part of the Manifesto. A very considerable conquest of the globe had been happening since at least the early part of the sixteenth century, driven largely by very powerful merchants' capital. The colonization of the Americas, the extermination of the bulk of their populations, the mass enslavement of Africans (thirty million slaves shipped out of Africa, with half of them dying before reaching the American and Caribbean shores), the network of trading and military posts all along the coasts of Africa and Asia, the virtually complete colonization of India itself—all this, and much more, had happened by the time the Manifesto was drafted. Indeed, the process had been much accelerated after the Industrial Revolution (it was actually Engels who was to call it that). Between 1770 and 1848, the British alone acquired Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, in addition to most of India, while France took chunks of North Africa.

How different was Marx's view of all that can be gauged from the fact that Hegel, the philosopher whom Marx admired as well as fought against the most, had seen in this wave of colonization a necessary and welcome solution, one almost ordained by nature itself, for the surplus population of Europe. Marx's great achievement was that he saw this process as part of what the Manifesto calls a ‘universal war of devastation’, connected it all with the inherent nature of capitalism, and then tried to make this perception a key element in the consciousness of the European working class itself. It needs to be said, however, that the colonialism of his day was nothing like the imperialism about which Lenin was to write some seventy years later and the beginning of which Lenin himself was to date around the 1880s, i.e., not in the days of Marx's youth but in the very last years of his life. And, during the seventy years since Lenin wrote his famous pamphlet, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, some of the basic features of imperialism have again changed more radically than they did during the previous seventy years.

The astonishing fact is that when Marx writes specifically of the economic and technological expansion of capitalism on a global scale, and of the deep penetration of capitalist logic into regions very remote from Europe, today's reader tends to think not of the capitalism and colonialism of Marx's time but the capitalism and imperialism of our own time—despite all the historic shifts that have taken place and that have transformed the processes of globalization in very fundamental ways. He asserts that ‘modern industry has established the world market’, that ‘the bourgeoisie … must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere’, and that ‘in place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations everywhere’—at a time when most of Europe itself, let alone the rest of the world, did not have industrial economies. Even France was then an overwhelmingly rural society and Germany, which was to emerge by the end of the nineteenth century as one of three most industrialized societies alongside Britain and France, was at that time not even a unified nation-state. Similarly, Marx speaks here of capitalism's drive to unify the globe through a ‘revolution’ in transport—at a time when steamboats and railways were a bare novelty. The first steamboat had sailed from the Americas to Europe in 1819, and as late as 1840 railways in England itself covered merely 843 miles of track. Yet the vivid metaphors of speed and compression that Marx employs in speaking of the world having been transformed into a single entity through industry, technology, the global chase of commodities and the ‘cash nexus’, conjures up in the reader's mind today's world of jet travel, international TV channels, globalized patterns of fashions and fast foods, and the computerized network of stock exchanges across the globe where billions of dollars can be moved around in seconds. In rapid, sharp strokes necessary for so brief a text, Marx condenses description and prediction in a single sweep. He sees what is there already, and he grasps the long-range dynamics at work behind and beyond what he actually sees, so that if one sentence of the Manifesto gives us the capitalism of 1848 the very next one gives us an image of what was yet to be, in the indefinite future, right up to our own and beyond. What is of key importance here is the firmness and accuracy with which Marx was able to perceive the future development of capitalism by grasping its inexorable operative laws.

But there is also a structure of secondary formulations—also regarding ‘globalization’—essentially deductive and speculative in nature, about the likely consequences of this capitalist logic as it was expected to unfold in diverse areas of national formations, the arts, etc. Several of those formulations had to do with the kind of world European expansion into the rest of the world was to make. Here, in areas that are at some distance from economy as such, and which are areas essentially of political and cultural forms, two kinds of problems arise. The first, and in the long run less significant historically and theoretically, is the uncritical use of some inherited categories which was at best unpleasant, e.g., the description of capitalist Europe and precapitalist China as ‘civilized and ‘barbarian’ respectively. The second kind of problem pertains to the kind of expectation which subsequent history has proved to be wrong, especially in relation to the colonized countries. As colonialism fully matured and at length gave us what Lenin was to designate as ‘imperialism’, which is still very much with us, national differences, far from disappearing, in fact became more recalcitrant and more hierarchically structured. Nationalism itself was to have a history very different from what we can deduce from the Manifesto. Some of the correctives came in the later writings of Marx and Engels themselves, other and even more substantive ones came from a later generation of Marxists, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in particular.

When Marx drafted the Manifesto he had studied great many things, but there is very little evidence that he had really studied the whole complexity of the colonial enterprise. It was only later, after the revolutions of 1848 had been defeated and he settled down to a life-long exile in London the next year, that he undertook any systematic study of colonialism, especially after Engels persuaded him to undertake the writing of some journalistic pieces for the New York Herald Tribune regularly, mainly in order to make a little money. This study then meant that both Marx and Engels started paying much greater attention to the actual events of colonial history as it unfolded over the next three or four decades, and this they did to the extent that it was possible to grasp those events from accounts in the British press. As I have argued at some length elsewhere, it was in those later years that Marx became much more thoroughly disillusioned with the ‘progressive’ results that he had expected of colonialism earlier, in his youth, and that both he and Engels began affirming the right of resistance on the part of the colonized peoples.⁹

With all the benefits of hindsight one hundred and fifty years later, one can make four points with some degree of certainty. One is that Marx and Engels themselves were to understand the phenomenon of colonialism much better in later years than they did at the time of writing the Manifesto; in 1847-48, they fully understood the key role of colonialism in the global expansion of the capitalist mode but not that, far from unifying the globe politically, colonialism would divide and sub-divide the world into numerous entities large and small, so that ‘national specificity’ would on the whole rather increase than decline.¹⁰ Second, even though they understood colonialism much better in later years, the structure itself was to alter very drastically and a wholly more complex and in some ways quite different theoretical apparatus would then be required, which was to be the focus of attention for a later generation of Marxists, Lenin most particularly, but also Bukharin, Luxemburg, Hilferding, and some of the Austro-Marxists such as Otto Bauer, who were to make very seminal contribution to theories of colonialism as well as nationalism. Third, if the political consequences could not be gauged with precision, less still was it possible to do so with respect to the cultural consequences; far from there arising a ‘world literature’ in any meaningful sense, as the Manifesto had envisioned, the cultural consequences of colonialism were such that the literatures of the colonized people were to remain regional and/or national, while in the global marketplace of capitalism they were always subordinated to the literatures of the advanced metropoles. Finally, Marx's own discovery that the rate and quantum of change under capitalism is greater than under any previous mode, and that this rate of change increases in every succeeding phase, also means that the world has by now changed so very much since the time not only of Marx but also of Lenin or even Gramsci that an immense new theoretical labour is required to understand the world as we now have it.

This discrepancy between the stunning prescience of Marx's summation of the fundamental structure in the strictly economic sphere, and the much less assured a touch in foreseeing the coming changes in some of the political and cultural spheres, can perhaps be looked at from another angle as well. Several years after drafting the Manifesto, in a famous formulation in his ‘Preface’ to A Critique of Political Economy of 1859, Marx was to write:

… a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of their conflict and fight it out.

What is striking about this distinction is that only ‘the transformation of the economic conditions of production’ are said to be available for being ‘determined with precision’, in a scientific manner. The ‘consciousness’ of that fundamental conflict is said to belong elsewhere—in ‘the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic’ forms—which evidently cannot be ‘determined’ with equal ‘precision’ even though—or, more likely, because—that is where people actually ‘fight it out’, so that, presumably, those forms are less the outcome of objective structural laws and much more ‘determined’ by the very way human subjects ‘fight it out’ in collective struggles that take not only ‘legal, political’ forms but also ‘religious, aesthetic, or philosophic’ forms. According to this principle, then, it is only logical that Marx could foresee with far greater precision much of the course that the globalization of the capitalist mode of economic production was to take but could not predict with anything like that degree of precision what ‘political’ or ‘aesthetic’ forms were to ensue.

PROLETARIAT, THE ‘UNIVERSAL CLASS’

Marx conceptualized the proletariat as a ‘universal class’ at a time when no country in Asia or Africa could be considered as having something resembling a modern proletariat. In the larger American countries, like the U.S. and Brazil, there were many more slaves than proletarians. Russia was steeped in serfdom; certainly the whole of Eastern and Southern Europe, and much of the rest as well, was predominantly agrarian. The term ‘universal class’ was used, I believe, in two senses. The first was in part a philosophical proposition: since what all proletarians have in common is an experience of exploitation and a location in processes of production that were collective as well as impersonal, they had an inherent (within the class, a universal) interest in a revolution against the system of exploitation as such; and since the system of exploitation could not be abolished piecemeal, nor could it be abolished without abolishing both capital and ‘wage-slavery’ at the same time, along with all the political, social and ideological superstructures that arose on the premise of that exploitation, the proletariat could not emancipate itself without abolishing the system as a whole, emancipating society as a whole; it was the class par excellance of universal emancipation.

That was the first sense and, as pointed out earlier, it was initially a philosophical proposition posited in opposition to Hegel's description of the bureaucracy as a ‘universal class’. But there was also the other sense that since capital had an inherent drive toward globalization, i.e., toward establishing its dominion in all corners of the earth, it was destined to constantly increase the number of proletarians around the globe so that, eventually, the proletariat would come to be comprised of the great majority of humanity, spread universally in all parts of the world: a world proletariat, in other words, over and above all national bounds. Universal in scale as well! This was also projected as a process of greater class polarization (‘simplification of the class structure’, as the Manifesto calls it) as well as absolute immiseration of the majority.

This is what has now come to pass, for the first time in history: not in Marx's time, not in Lenin's time, but in ours.

I have mentioned earlier that according to World Bank calculations the number of proletarians doubled in the course of the thirty years between 1965 and 1995. This number in now said to stand at roughly two and a half billion (i.e., two thousand five hundred million) of whom 120 million are said to be currently unemployed, roughly one billion are said to subsist on less than a dollar a day, and many unknown millions are said to have stopped looking for work. Needless to add that the overwhelming majority of this immiserated bulk lives in the poorer continents of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. For China alone, the World Bank calculates that there is, besides the employed and semi-employed proletariat, already a ‘floating population’ of 80 million who have ceased to be peasants and are not yet part of the ‘modern’ sector and that over a hundred more million peasants will leave the Chinese countryside over the next decade or so to look for work in the cities. Similar processes are at work in other countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America as well. The same statistics also suggest that no more than 12 to 15 per cent of labouring activity is now left on the surface of this earth which is not in one way or another, directly or remotely, connected with the world market; well over 80 per cent now produces for this integrated market—a novel ‘universalization’ in its own terms. As regards increasing immiseration, the May 1998 issue of Monthly Review published the following statistical table about shifts of wealth from the poor and the middling to the rich over a short span between 1965 and 1990:

shares of world income, per cent

	1965	1990
Poorest 20 per cent	2.3	1.4
Second 20 per cent	2.9	1.8
Third 20 per cent	4.2	2.1
Fourth 20 per cent	21.2	11.3
Richest 20 per cent	69.5	83.4

The long and short of it is that for 80 per cent of the people around the globe share of wealth was cut by half in the course of barely 25 years, or over roughly a single generation, while the share of the lower 40٪ at the later point dropped to just over 3 per cent of the total. What is also significant is that the share of the second highest 20 per cent—presumably, the so-called ‘middle class’ or even perhaps ‘upper middle class’—also saw its share in total wealth cut by almost half. So much for the expansion or the financial security of this ‘middle class’! For the average share to be cut so drastically, at least a good number must have fallen into the category of ‘low income’ or even ‘poor’ and great many more must have seen their standards of living decline sharply and perhaps their levels of indebtedness rising proportionately. What is striking in any case is the absolute polarization: roughly 3 per cent of the income for 40 per cent of the people and 83 per cent of the wealth for the top 20 per cent.

Thus, increasing polarization, immiseration, proletarianization and primitive accumulation are ongoing processes in our own time. In the imperialist centres of the world which have experienced the highest concentration of accumulated capital, and where the processes of proletarianization and primitive accumulation were completed earlier, the emphasis has shifted more toward intensive exploitation and accumulation of relative surplus value, based on more advanced technologies. In formations of backward capital, the intensity of labour rather than of capital is still very substantially at the heart of ‘globalization’; for China, which has had spectacular though now declining success in expanding its exports, something like three-fourths of all exports are now labour-intensive whereas less than forty percent were labour-intensive a decade ago when the volume of exports was much more limited. The great increase in exports is owed, in other words, not so much to any technological ‘modernization’ of the process of production but to the more methodical, more intensified exploitation of labour.

Simply in terms of the global spread, the proletariat is now infinitely more ‘universal’ than ever before, which then means that, in objective terms, the imperative for workers of the world to unite is greater than ever before. This universal proletarianization does not come without its own problems, however. As David Harvey puts it:

The workforce is now far more geographically dispersed, culturally heterogeneous, ethnically and religiously diverse, racially stratified, and linguistically fragmented. … Differentials (both geographical and social) in wages and social provision within the global working class are likewise greater than they have ever been.¹¹

Problems of this kind, as regards stratification within the working class, which compound the difficulty of obtaining working class unity, are then further compounded by several other factors such as increasing proportion of casual and temporary work as against more secure full-time employment; increasing weight of the ‘unorganized’ sector relative to the ‘organized’ one; great mobility and transience of the labour force, as well as the greater mobility of capital itself, and so on.

In sum, then, capital has more than completed what was once conceived as its historic mission: it has created a single world market and it has taken the process of proletarianization deep into the farthest nook and corner of this earth. Obtaining working class unity, starting at the point of habitation and production and spiralling up to national levels and across the nation-states, shall be the more exacting task for militants of a socialism yet to come. When the Manifesto reminds us that ‘every class struggle is in essence a political struggle’ it calls upon us to recognize that same distinction which I tried to clarify a bit earlier with the help of Marx's formulation in his ‘Preface’ to A Critique of Political Economy of 1859. Let me repeat that formulation for greater emphasis:

… a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of their conflict and fight it out.

In order to transform the class struggle that is forever going on in ‘material transformation of the economic conditions of production’ into a properly ‘political struggle’, all the ‘ideological forms in which men become conscious of their conflict and fight it out’—legal, political, religious, aesthetic, or philosophic forms—need to be addressed together. Otherwise, those issue of subjective consciousness and objective stratification which divide the working classes of the world cannot be addressed. The more diverse the populations that get proletarianized, the more diverse will have to be the forms that are designed to bring about that unity. For, as the scope of proletarianization has escalated rapidly, every ‘political struggle’ has become accordingly more complex, encompassing a greater variety of ‘forms’ (‘religious, aesthetic’ etc.). For, one bitter lesson we have learned in the course of this process is that the fact of immiseration itself does not produce a consciousness of class unity. For that, the domain of consciousness has to be addressed in the very forms in which it experiences the world, and those forms are social and ideological in nature.

Notes

1. The vivid phrase, ‘labour of the tailor that disappears into the coat’, is from Louis Althusser who coined it in an entirely different context.

2. The Communist Manifesto has always been published as the joint product of Marx and Engels. That is not entirely inaccurate. In the present essay, however, I refer punctually to Marx as the author of this text. This calls for some explanation. The simplest reason is a matter of stylistic convenience; it is easier to refer to one author than constantly refer to both of them. There is also the question of historical accuracy in the strict sense, on two counts. First, we know that the final draft was prepared by Marx alone, at a time when Engels was not available for consultation and the Communist League was threatening punitive action against ‘Citizen Marx’ for the delay; the responsibility was his and was perceived to be as such. Second, any comparison between the text of the Manifesto with the two earlier texts, ‘Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith’ and ‘Principles of Communism’, which Engels had produced only a few months earlier, would show how very sweeping were Marx's departures from those preparatory materials. Quite aside from the radical revision of substance, virtually every sentence in the key first Part, ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’, bears the inimitable signature of Marx's style, demonstrating, as was usual in his writing, that Marx was one of the great stylists in the history of nineteenth century prose. Engels' contribution to this text was substantive but more indirect, in the sense that the materialist conception of history which the text so pithily summarizes was developed by both of them together, notably in The German Ideology. Earlier versions of this conception are also to be found in such texts as The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts which belong to Marx alone, and in The Holy Family which began as a 15-page pamphlet by Engels and which Marx then expanded into a whole book. As Engels himself always recognized, Marx was the senior partner in what they humourously called their ‘joint firm’.

3. It is in this perspective that ‘to win the battle of democracy’ is seen as ‘the first step in the revolution’ for establishing ‘the political supremacy of the working class’. Elsewhere, ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would itself be described as ‘democracy carried to its fullest’ and as the right of the majority to act in the interest of the majority. Since the majority is necessarily proletarianized under capitalism, and since democracy is conceived of as rule of the majority, Marx sometimes uses words ‘proletarian’ and ‘democratic’ to mean the same thing, and the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ was initially designed to convey the same nuance. All of that is at least very confusing for today's reader but makes perfect sense when the standpoint is understood.

4. As indicated partially in the previous note, the terminology of the Manifesto can pose many problems for the unwitting reader. In his famous commentary on the Manifesto, Ryazanoff points out that in the foreword to the original German edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels tells us that he makes use of words like worker, proletarian, working class, non-possessing class, and proletariat to refer to the one and the same phenomenon. Some of that generalized sense of the word ‘proletariat’ is there in the Manifesto as well; much of what got called the ‘Paris proletariat’ then was comprised of the more pauperized craftsmen, struggling shopkeepers, and a variety of proletarianized urban clusters living as often by wit as by wage but overwhelmingly outside modern factory production. A further example refers to the much maligned formulation regarding ‘the idiocy of rural life’. Hobsbawm points out that the original German word ‘idiotismus’ is much closer to the Greek ‘idiotes’ which has the meaning not of ‘stupidity’ or ‘soft-headedness’ but of ‘narrow horizon’ or ‘isolation from wider society’ and, more interestingly, ‘a person concerned only with his own private affairs and not with those of the wider community’. The import of Marx's use of the word ‘idiot’ is thus closer to ‘isolated’ in one sense and ‘individualist’ in another. This, then, is connected with the crucial Marxist distinction between the individual character of peasant production and the collective character of the production of the industrial proletariat. There are numerous other misunderstandings of this kind, pertaining to our text, which are unfortunately much too common.

5. Etienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, London 1995; French original, 1993.

6. Aijaz Ahmad, ‘The Communist Manifesto and the Problem of Universality’, Monthly Review, June 1998.

7. The most stimulating statement of this problem can be found in Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The Communist Manifesto After 150 Years’, in Monthly Review, May 1998; reprinted in the new edition of the Manifesto issued from the Monthly Review Press, 1998. In the following couple of paragraphs I have drawn upon but also partly departed from that very fine-grained analysis.

8. Rosa Luxemburg was to summarize these alternative possibilities in a pithy phrase when she said that capitalism does not necessarily lead to socialism, so that the choice facing humankind was ‘socialism or barbarism’. Looked at from the vantage-point of today, Marx's own phrase ‘mutual destruction of contending classes’ is more apt than might appear to those who are unduly impressed by the achieving side of capitalist domination today. Examples are myriad, but we shall confine ourselves to only one. A fundamental contradiction that is inherent in the profit-driven capitalist mode is the destruction—first rather slow, and then increasingly more massive destruction—of a kind of environment that is necessary for sustaining human life, so that we now have an ecologically unsafe planet to the extent that survival of the human species into the coming some centuries cannot be confidently predicted, affecting all the ‘contending classes’ equally.

9. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London 1992; Delhi 1994; pp. 228-29. Two passages, from Marx and Engels respectively, should clarify this point. The first, from Marx, occurs in a letter written rather late in life (to Danielson, in 1881):

   In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, are in store for the British government. What the British take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless for the Hindoos, pensions for the military and civil servicemen, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc., etc.,—what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India,—speaking only of the value of the commodities that Indians have to gratuitously and annually send over to England—it amounts to more than the total sum of the income of the 60 million of agricultural and industrial laborers of India. This is a bleeding process with a vengeance.

   [Italics in the original]

   And, well before Marx referred to colonialism as a ‘bleeding process with a vengeance’, Engels had this to say about what we today call ‘national liberation’:

   There is evidently a different spirit among the Chinese now. … The mass of people take an active, nay, a fanatical part in the struggle against the foreigners. They poison the bread of the European community at Hongkong by wholesale, and with the coolest meditation. … The very coolies emigrating to foreign countries rise in mutiny, and as if by concert, on board every emigrant ship, fight for its possession. … Civilization mongers who throw hot shell on a defenseless city and add rape to murder, may call the system cowardly, barbarous, atrocious; but what matter it to the Chinese if it be but successful? … We had better recognize that this is a war pro aris et focis, a popular war for the maintenance of Chinese nationality.

   (‘Persia and China’, 1857)

10. In the imperialist core this ‘national specificity’ is of course declining at the current, far more mature stage, as indicated for example in the ongoing European integration. Such was not to be the case in the rest of the globe, however, and even in Europe this is a very recent and still very, very uneven process.

11. David Harvey, ‘The Geography of Class Power’, The Socialist Register 1998, Merlin Press (in UK) and Monthly Press (in USA), 1998.