ACFM - ACFM Microdose: The Communist Manifesto

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

The ACFM gang gather for a midwinter reading of one of the most influential political tracts ever written. Download a version online and follow along as Nadia, Keir and Jem reassess The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm Sign up […]

This is acid, man. Hello, and welcome to this special festive microdose from ACFM, the home of the weird left. I'm Nadia Idol, and I'm joined as usual by Jeremy Gill, Hello. Hello. And Kia Milburn. Hello. And today, listeners, it is time to get cozy, make yourself a spiced hot chocolate and light

those cinnamon and sweet orange candles, embrace all things winter, and join us for a reading of none other than the Communist Manifesto by Frederick Engels and Karl Marx. So guys, do we want to do an intro to this text before we start with the reading? Communist Manifesto is published in 1848. February 1848, and it just precedes a big outbreak of revolutions, 1848 revolutions that sweep across Europe. It's probably written in 1847 then, and just to give you some context, it's written by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. You may have heard of them. At that time, Marx is something like 29 when they're writing this, and Engels is 26 years old.

no, 27 years old, something like that. So they're relatively young. They get commissioned to write the manifesto by the Communist League, which is a pretty small group, I think, primarily had sort of emerged out of the League of the Just, which is a much more sort of conspiratorial sort of group, led by Veitling. And they sort of took it over,

they changed the philosophy a little bit, and then they got commissioned to write the Communist Manifesto. a manifesto, not just of that organisation, but of like a current, I think. You put it that way. Obviously, Marx was late in writing it, and they started writing some committee of the Communist League started writing to Marx, and you've got to get this out. So if you look at the last section, which we'll come to in about four hours' time, it's really brief and quick. And I think he just writes it, you know, off, shit, I better get this finished and writes it really quickly. So it's published in 1848, you know, a few weeks later, the revolutions break out is a huge like repression

that follows that. And in fact, loads of the leaders of the Communist League, who are the ones in Germany anywhere, arrested, and the Communist League sort of dissolves. And then there's sort of like a period of repression, one of those ebbs in the flow of the workers movement, or the nascent workers movement. The old mole revolution, though, is tulling away and bursts out again of the Paris commune in 1871. And so the manifesto finds a new audience in 1871. It's almost too late for the 1848 revolutions, but it's more than in time for the 1870 wave.

I would like to say for listeners who have not read the Communist Manifesto, there will be many, is that actually with notwithstanding the preambles, which are not part of the Penguin Little Black Classics edition, which I got for ATP about 10 years ago or something, it is a short book. So this is only kind of, I've got it, it's kind of, I've got a small A6 size, I think, version in my hand here.

And it's 51 pages. So I read it all in a couple of hours. And it may not be the kind of book that you expect it to be. So I would really encourage you to get a copy and read along with us because I read it again for the first time in maybe 20 years now or something, at least 10 years I haven't read it. And I was quite surprised of various aspects of the writing. And it's very enjoyable to read.

And it's a surprisingly easy text. So I would encourage people to read it as a story, if not as a manifesto. No, no, they should read it as a manifesto and follow its every word. But I would just say that you can just go and download it straight away. Now you'll find it straight away on the internet. Just go and find a version. It'll be close enough to the versions. we're reading we haven't agreed on which version but it'll be close enough that you'd be able to follow along I think and you should do that we recommend it highly okay should we start then yes yes let's start with the famous first line this is the most common translation into English which is also close to the normal translation in French a spectre is haunting Europe the spectre of communism so the passage then goes on to explain that all of the old powers of Europe the

forces of reaction, the Tsar, the Pope, etc., have gathered to try to exorcise this spectre. It's quite an arresting and impactful opening line, isn't it? The impact that it had on me is that I felt like how refreshing to read an opening line of a book that exuded such confidence. Because in that kind of second sentence, by basically saying all the powers of old Europe, it's already kind of casting a set of interests into the past from the get-go. And I think that's just, you know, really impactful for any, and really will have an effect on anyone who reads it, who's thinking of, you know, like, joining this kind of, like, communist wave. So, yeah, it's really great. It's also reminded me of the opening scene of

Jean-Gene's The Balcony, and I didn't make that connection before, and I wondered whether John Genet, I haven't read up on this actually, but whether John Genet is kind of seen of having the state and the army and the church on the balcony as a thing that kind of opposes revolution because it comes directly from that. It probably does. We should just reflect, I mean to say, that this is a manifesto. You know, it's full of like really bold statements. And it's also full of like fairly careful analysis in other places, but like, you know, really huge statements such as the spectra's haunting Europe, the spectre of communism. It's a manifesto, so it's trying to bring about what it says.

It's trying to bring about the thing that it's analysing or it's predicting, if you know, I mean. And that people have written lots of books about this, of course, the concept of hauntology comes from Jacques Derrida's, Spectres of Marx, written in the early 90s, and then picked up by Mark Fisher, etc. And there's this idea in this spectra's haunting Europe of like, what's haunted?

Europe is, it's not something that's, it's something that's sort of like visible, just about visible, but it's like, you know, a potential future is haunting. Well, it's the idea of an imminent possibility, isn't it? What's being evoked is the idea of communism as an imminent possibility. But of course, well, it's imminent and imminent, like, so both inherent to the overall set of social relations in Europe and also maybe about to happen. And that is a sort of tension, of course, that runs through the Communist Manifesto, because as Keir said, it is, it's a performative text like any manifesto, and it's trying to make

something happen. But in the process, it is making a set of claims, and it is basically claiming that Europe is more or less on the brink of communist revolution already, which is a very tendentous claim, and was clearly not true. So, well, I don't know. I mean, a couple of weeks later, it did break out a revolution across. The revolutions that broke out across Europe were not, in 1840s. We're not communist. They were not workers' revolutions. They were liberal bourgeois revolutions against the Ancian regimes of Central Europe. So you could imagine what Marx and Engels felt like when they saw those revolutions break out, though. They thought what we think when somebody writes something in a newspaper about an ACFM topic,

which we've just brought out, we think, we're the trailblazers. But I think it's important to emphasize, like regardless of kind of what happened in the real world, it's like as anyone that is picking up this text, like there is a, a certain level of, you know, as Jeremy said, like saying that this is, this is inherent and possibly inevitable, in a sense, in the way that the language is presented like just in the first few sentences. And I think it has a certain energy to it that actually is quite unique, that kind of confidence, because I believe it. I'm reading it and I think, wow, these guys are writing it in these words. It's got a kind of smugness to it as well, which I quite enjoy

throughout the text. We must mention that there's another translation of the manifesto translated in 1850 by Helen McFarlane, which doesn't say a spectra's haunting Europe. It says, a frightful hobgobling is haunting Europe. And we should now spend two hours trying to work out what hobgoblingology would mean for the pressing context. Listeners, if you want to know a bit more about this thematics of the spectre and haunting

and the genesis of the idea of, ontology, inspectors of Marx, then you could listen to our Christmas episode from a couple of years ago in which I talked about all that stuff. The Spectres Haunting Europe famously comes from the unnumbered kind of opening paragraph. And then we then move on to the first numbered section of the manifesto, which is titled bourgeois and proletarians, and begins with, I think, an equally famous, perhaps even more famous opening line, the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class

struggles. This lays out the basic thesis to some extent of historical materialism in a way which to this day is still its defining concepts I think. So a very sort of powerful idea and

they make the argument polemically in the sentences that follow that you can go back to ancient times, you can look at the history of the Middle Ages and in all of these contexts, you can see the driving dynamic of social change, arguably, being the contestation between different social classes, who would define basically in terms of their role in the overall economy, for resources, power, political status, etc. I wrote to myself in the notes again,

like, I just, on that first sentence, I just wish more people wrote with such clarity. And I was going to make a similar point to you, Jeremy, about, like, the polemic nature of, like, of what follows. And I just didn't expect to enjoy rereading this so much. And I think there's something about the clarity of the presentation of the arguments that I, yeah, I just found really enjoyable. Like whether you end up agreeing with it or not, but it's there, you know, and it has this, yeah, this clarity and energy, which I thought actually is quite unique compared to a lot of things I read these days. It's banger after banger, as they say, contemporary parlance. But if somebody reads this and they've never read a communist manifesto before, you

just come across loads of lines. You thought, oh, that's where that line's from, then. This is where it's from. It's just littered with, like, incredibly famous lines, basically. So the text sort of goes, the structure of the argument is that, like, you know, the motor of history is class struggle, basically. You know, it's the history of all hiver-to existing societies, the history of class struggle.

But it wants to get to our own epoch, and what's different about our own epoch, basically. And so it goes, it says our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie possesses, however, a distinct feature. It has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more split into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. It's a great use of imagery there. It's really, really well written that bit. It's great imagery, but here we come immediately to one of the key problems, actually,

with classical Marxism because I would say this is the element of their theory as set out here from which they don't really depart in their much more sophisticated work in later decades which is just wrong. It's just not how things have actually played out. The idea that the tendency, the inherent tendency of capitalism was towards this simple bifurcation of society into two clearly unrecognizable social groups, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, who would inevitably come into conflict with each other. Now, if you're a sort of political economist

who really wants to prove that this is still true, then you can, by pointing out, for example, that distributions of wealth have just become increasingly unequal over the past 150 years or so, and that, in fact, there are lots of people doing lots of kinds of jobs, like, you know, teachers, for example, who would have been considered sort of bourgeois, or petty bourgeois as the phrase goes in the 19th century who are now clearly in some sense

proletarians like forced to live through selling their labour but any sociologist with any degree of sophistication is going to acknowledge that well that might be true at some very very abstract level but at the level of which anybody actually experiences the social world including the level of which marks and angles are describing things in this book what has actually happened over the past 150 years is that situation has accompanied a great deal of kind of cultural, social, political, institutional differentiation within the classes of people who live only by selling their labour. And if you look at a situation like Britain today where you have this completely confused and complex situation where, as we've talked about on the show loads of times, for example, you have all these retired people who clearly were proletarians for like most of their lives. meaning they lived through selling their labour time to an employer, but they have been able to accumulate sufficient wealth

that now they are living off pensions invested in the stock market and they're living in houses they don't have to pay for, which are ever increasing in value. And so they are, to all intents and purposes, they are sort of capitalists or at least petty bourgeois. But of course they carry with them the historical memory, their own personal biographical memory, of having been working class and what that meant like 20 years ago or 40 years ago.

And that's just one example of the extreme complexification of the social structure and the experience of class in advanced capitalist societies. I think this is interesting because, for example, in the work of someone like Ernest Olu-Clo and Chantan Mouf, this is the point at which they think they have to define themselves not as Marxist but as post-Marxists, because they say the point at which you have to depart from classical Marxism is the point at which you recognise, well, actually, that is the thing that just hasn't happened at all.

So I do think, I would still say, like, I think they would, and most people would, that you can hold on to most of the historical materialist method of analysis, and it's still one of the best frameworks available for understanding what's going on. I would say, in fact, the idea that the idea that all history is a history of class, struggle gives you the conceptual tools with which to understand why the other thing they say, the thing they think is happening isn't what's happened. Because it's because of the very, very complex way in which class struggle has unfolded over the past 150, 180 years. It's because of the outcomes of that, that we arrive at this situation that I've been describing.

But I sort of do follow an estu de close argument on some level. You can't sort of have it both way you can't actually acknowledge the reality and complexity of class struggle and its outcomes and hold on to this idea of the the simplification of the social space. And so I think that is important to acknowledge. Yeah. I mean, the other thing we ought to remember is when it's written, this is in 1847. You know, in 1847, there are probably just a few hundred factories in the world. And capitalist social relations in a purer sort of sense, limited. to a few countries in the world. Do you know what I mean? So it's this incredibly prescient text, this. But it did get some things wrong. It's true. The extent, I mean, I always say this

is the extent of what they got right, given how improbable it would have seemed to many people at the time is extraordinary. So the entire proposition that what's going to happen is the working class is going to sort of organise itself politically into these mass parties and start making all these social and economic demands, that in itself would have seemed totally utopian to people. And that is what happened, for example, in countries like Britain, even where there never was anything we would recognise as a workers' revolution. And I would even say, even on this issue of the general division of society into two clearly competing camps, I would say you can probably say that does, that is more or less what seems to be going on up until the middle

of the 20th century. But then once you're getting to the middle of the 20th century, it's precisely the unforeseen and unforeseeable consequences of the workers' movement internationally, having so much success, but only partial success, that produces the context within which some of these anticipated outcomes are not what's happening. So, I mean, the major reason why class becomes so complicated, especially from the sort of 40s onwards, is because well, the workers have won all these concessions, which mean that what it means to be a worker in a capitalist society just isn't what it meant in the 1840s. And also on a larger scale, the Cold War produces all these completely different outcomes

to anything that anybody could have predicted. So I think that's how you have to look at it. You'd also say that the dynamics that they highlight are probably more active now than they were in the second half of the 20th century. A centralisation of wealth in the hands of their very tiny, tiny handful of oligarchs, etc. And a process of like proletarianization, much more generally,

you can see those, the dynamics that their think are going to lead to this clarification of class are still active, do you know what I mean? They went into temporary abeyance partly because of the result of the workers' movement. But even then, I think there are lines in this, which we'll probably come to later, and I'll hold fire on that, which indicate that some of, you know, there are a couple of, there are different logics going on in this and it's not quite worked out. Before we move on directly from that bit, I think for me it was interesting how he brings in like colonialism, how they bring in colonialism and how it's spoken about. And I was interested

in the fact of the colonisation of, you know, America and talking about East Indian and Chinese markets so early on in the text was how that was fronted. So that's also something that jumped out for me at that section. Yeah, totally. I mean, it's important to acknowledge this, that they do acknowledge these relative historical contingencies. So the European discovery, quote-unquote and colonisation of these other parts of the world and also the general development of industrial technology as well. So they do acknowledge all those as relative contingencies. Exactly what role they play in shaping historical outcomes relative to the role played by class struggle, for example, is one of the great debates within Marxist historiography and social theory to this day

and will never be resolved. But they do, yeah, they totally acknowledge that. But of course, really key point. They, the idea that it's, it's colonialism, is the fundamental sort of predicate for the prerequisite for capitalism as we know it. That is not a new idea. I know you, I do encounter people who think this is a new idea that has been added to the Marxist tradition by decolonising theorists. And I mean, while there's a lot of value in a lot of that work, it's not true that Marxangles aren't aware of it. I mean, for them, it's, it's a more or less a banal given. If anything, they don't talk about it that much in some of their work because it's just a given. But here they make clear that it is a given. In the next few paragraphs,

they sort of go through this. So they're saying that, you know, there are these things that, such as the discovery of the Americas, as they say, and then the colonisation of the Americas and other parts of the world that brings in this wealth which pushes the bourgeoisie or the bourgeois to the fore, you know, amongst a primarily few, society and it sort of traces that through a little bit and you know the development of manufacturing system and then the industrial system etc etc and of course bourgeois for people who don't know the term bourgeois initially just refer is a French word and it just refers to the suburbs of Paris and so the bourgeoisie were the people who lived in the suburbs but what they

mean by it here so economically is they mean capitalists they mean people who make their living through investing in either building up manufacturing concerns or in trade many international national trade and accumulate vast profits from it. That's what they mean by the bourgeoisie. Indeed, like part of the whole story is the story of the bourgeoisie going from being this relatively subordinate social group, saying the late Middle Ages, there's a few cities, there's parts of Italy with a very powerful, mostly they are lauded over by the feudal aristocracy with their armour and their horses and their castles. But gradually, what happens is the wealth and power of the bourgeoisie becomes so great that they're able to really, really,

outmaneuver the aristocracy and displace them as the ruling classes of Europe. And the key factor there, of course, is that there's just so much more trade and industry that becomes possible once you've got access to all these colonial resources. Yeah. And what I like about, you know, I mean, on my edition, we're still on page five here, is that on from kind of illustrating, you know, who are the bourgeoisie and like what role they have to play and cite, you know, I think they come to the section, which starts to illustrate the crudeness of capitalism. And, you there's this fantastic line, which sounds very 21st century, to be honest. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value and then goes on to other things and then does a takedown

of free trade and starts talking about what freedom is. And again, like rereading this after so many years, I was quite surprised about like the strength of how that was illustrated, these ideas of freedom and what happens to personal worth under capitalism again so early in the text. The bit I want to read out is just after that. This is was always one of my favorite bit. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science into its paid wage labourers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family, its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relations to a mere

money relation. What do you think is the implication? What do you guys think is the implication there? because when he starts to bring in family, which I know comes in later, I keep saying he is if it's not both of them, but when they bring in the family, so I'm not entirely sure what the implication there, because there's a takedown of the family later. And so is that a good thing?

I think they don't really know what they want to, because their main thing they want to say in all this, is that bourgeois family life is totally hypocritical. They know that it's sort of repressive, that it's repressive towards women, they know it's repressive towards children. They know that basically bourgeois family life just involves people becoming obsessed

with like inheritances and property. Which is that if you look at like the literature, the novels of the period, from the late 18th century, through to the early 20th century, it is something that's really striking. Like it's there in Jane Austen, it's there in Dickens,

it's there in the French writers like Balzac and Hugo. You know, it's this idea, the fact that really like for the bourgeois, for your bourgeois subject, who is often living this quite precarious life, actually, because they've got all this wealth, but like one bad investment or one bankruptcy somewhere down the value chain can really fuck you.

There's this massive, this obsession with like who's going to inherit what, who's got how much income, how much money are you worth, how much can you get your daughter married off for? And that is what they're talking about. I think this speaks to a larger point, though, so I was thinking we have to sort of bring out when reading this, which is the question, well, look, who are they polemicizing again? Who are they having a go at? And for the most part, who they are having a go at is kind of liberals

who really think they've got the world in their hands at this moment in history, because they sort of have who, and who see themselves as like the forefront of historical progress and who are basically allied to the advance of industrialisation. Who they are having a go at is a sort of a sort of progressive liberal who thinks that, well, basically, what's happened over the past 300 years is the Enlightenment. The thing that's been happening is, oh, we've discovered science, we've discovered industry, and we've brought civilization to the dark-skinned peoples, and we've, you know, we've made the deserts bloom, sort of figuratively.

That's what we've been doing. And also we've created this culture of family life, which is incredibly respectable and valuable, because women don't have to go to work. If they're bourgeois women, they don't really do anything apart from tell the servants what to do. and that's all fantastic. And so a big part of what they're trying to do in this book is to say, no, that's not all fantastic, but it's a world of brutal exploitation,

which has wrecked loads of stuff. And they're also, partly, they're also addressing conservatives who themselves are conscious that all this bad stuff is happening, but they want to have a story about why all this bad stuff is happening, which doesn't end up with the proletariat

being empowered and mass democracy happening. So that is what they're speaking to. But what's not necessary for all that polemic is for them to put forward like a proper program. Like, okay, what is it we actually want to happen to women in the socialist society? What is it we actually want to happen to children? So I have that sense as well with reading again, the issue of what exactly is it they want at the level of the family and gender relations? They're not really trying to work out here. Yeah, I mean, I think that architecturally, it's only later, we'll come to it later.

But in terms of like the architecture and the aesthetic of like the language that's used, we're still in the section of the book where they don't say you. And then suddenly it switches over and then there is a you that is being addressed. So we'll come to that when that happens. But that's a really interesting point. Just above that freedom section, that freedom being reduced to free trade, the bourgeoisie historically has played a most revolutionary part. And that sets us up nicely for this huge wave of praise.

actually for the bourgeoisie in a section just above the bit that everybody's waiting for us with bated breath about where we're going to profane a load of stuff. They say bourgeoisie has accomplished wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts or Gothic cathedrals. It's conducted expeditions that put in the shade all forms of exodus of nations and crusades set in a bourgeoisie as this revolutionary class and that sort of sets of this section which is very famous section. The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production and thereby the relations of production and with them the whole relations of society. Let's skip a little ahead a little bit. All fixed, fast frozen relations with their

train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away. All new formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air. All that is holy as profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Once again, this is really big in up the bourgeoisie, I think. And in fact, there's quite a few passages in this, in which the bourgeoisie has really seen as something revolutionising, and I think we should historicise some of this. I don't know. I don't read it necessarily as that. I mean, I read it as like, this is the introduction of the dynamism of the capitalist system. The one bit of text,

you skipped over, I think illustrates like why it's more about the dynamism than like bigging them up, because the bit that's in the middle of that passage that you read here is this constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. And I read that, and I think that, that to me, translates directly to your point here from earlier about how, you know, like these conditions in late capitalism in the 21st century actually speak directly to the conditions back then in a way that is really, really, really interesting. If I was going to historicize it, though, I'd say that like, so this is written just before the revolutions of 1848, I think after that there's a big repression and everywhere the bourgeoisie, sides with reaction in the 1848 revolutions. Those were bourgeois revolutions, and I think, you know, in some ways, in this text, Marx and Engels are quite stages. I think later on in their

development, they become much less stages, but they think that what needs to happen is the proletariat, you know, needs to develop itself, needs to grow in size, etc, and needs to become through political awareness. And that has to take place through some sort of bourgeois revolution, you know, which sweeps away reaction and allows capitalism to develop its productive forces to develop the grave-diggers of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat. After 1848, I think they probably reflect a little bit and think, actually, no, the bourgeoisie seems to erect quite a lot of reactionary nostroms, you know, in order to shore up society, as well as its revolutionising size as long as well as what Deleuze and Guattari would call

it's de-territorializing effect or undermining, you know, profaning everything that's holy and, you know, sweeping away social relations and beliefs and these sorts of things. You know, basically what happens is that they put a new territorialisation there. New territorialisations come along. And in fact, capitalism sort of leans quite heavily onto things such as racism, sexism, you know, these sorts of ossified social relations. there's a double movement, I'd say, to de-territorialising and then re-territorialising that they underestimate in a communist manifesto, and later on I think they change their minds on that.

I'm not sure they even change their mind. I just think it's a polemical text. So, you're not going to put in all the qualifications that you might well recognize as necessary if you're putting forward a systematic theory. But certainly it's the point that's often been made, you know, famously by the American scholar Marshall Berman in his book, that is solid melts into air, that, you know, there is this Promethean heroism about the way they imagine capitalism and the bourgeoisie. They are, the way I always like to put it to say, they are very impressed by capitalism and the bourgeoisie, even though they also hate all their deleterious effects on people. So they're both impressed by them. You can be

impressed and, at the same time, say, yeah, but it also does some really bad stuff. I think there is something related to political strategy there, where they actually are looking for, the progressive elements of the bourgeoisie to be influenced by their ideas to some degree or that the workers movement will form some sort of alliance with the more progressive element of the bourgeoisie in order to fully bring about capitalist social relations in its pure reform that might well change basically between like something like 1848 all the repression and in 1871 then you see which is a Paris commune and then you see you know the working class in the saddle for the first time and you think oh I'll fuck the bourgeoisie then

in the next sort of paragraph actually it's the same paragraph but it's a very long paragraph they sort of talk about how you know in intellectual creation the intellectual creations of individual nations become common property and sort of like national one-sidedness now reminding us becomes more and more impossible because what arises is a world literature etc i mean that's that's another thing that you think well that's not proven true through the 20th century, et cetera, into the 21st. But then you look around, you think, actually, yeah, there is much more of a common culture,

even though it hasn't resulted in the end of nationalism. But there are, you know, there are common corporations around the world, et cetera, et cetera, you know. It's clearly true in a way it wasn't when they were writing, you know, even things like the existence of a world literature. I mean, just the fact that there are loads, you know, you can get translations of books, you know, Chinese novels, which like most people in Britain in the 1840s

wouldn't have even known there was such a thing as it could be such a thing as a Chinese novel. And then the next sort of paragraph goes on it. It's a bit more about that. I love this section. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which that batters down all Chinese walls, which it forces the barbarians,

intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations on pain of extinction to adopt the bourgeois mode of production. It compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their myths. I imagine the Chinese walls there. Is that a reference to the opium wars? There's more than one APM war. And the second one, it was a bit later, and the first one had already started.

Yeah, the first one was better. That was the real opium war. Can we just recognise the great swipe they have at the idiocy of rural life? apologies once again for all our rural listeners as you tune into the rest is politics we love you all the same they do come later in the text and say that one of the I mean I think this comes in towards the end

that one of the things that they want is to kind of flatten the experience between what city life and rural life is so they actually do come back on that yeah I love that they want to eliminate the difference between city and country They want to turn everything into a suburb. Which is problematic, of course. I say even as the representative suburban on this recording.

We start then to get into the sort of economic analysis to some degree. We've already had economic analysis, but it's had a political flavor, we'd put it that way. And we see, after this effusiveness about the bourgeoisie, we sort of see, you know, they'd start to explain why we need to get rid of them. And they start to talk about how, you know, when the bourgeoisie came to through rows in prominence, you know, the feudal relations that surrounded the bourgeoisie, they start to become fetters on production. They started to limit, fetters on society even, limit what was possible to do in society. And that point at which those fetters become limits is when they have to be burst asunder, and they were burst asunder. And he says there's a similar movement

is going on before our very eyes. A modern bourgeois society with relations of production of exchange and property. A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he had called up by his spells.

Which is fantastic. It opens up this critique of capitalism which is that the bourgeoisie are coming to power politically but they're not in control of things, do you know what I mean? Part of the critique you would aim at capitalism is it's not under the control of the bourgeoisie, of the capitalists. They've conjured up something which is beyond their control, which has got out of control, which in fact is subordinating them.

When I read that, I cannot but think about the current situation with climate change, etc., this huge existential crisis. We basically cannot seem to deal with it, basically. We cannot deal with it because capitalism is this fundamentally and controllable social system. It's something we've summoned up, which we can't then gain control of without killing it, basically, which I think is Marx's point. You know, you have to end capitalism in order to regain control over economic production coordination. I really like that section.

I think it's really evocative of a kind of like mythology, and it's their way of being able to present a series of ideas. While, you know, they're very clearly, like, anti-religion, like, it's evoking these ideas that, like, that makes, like, the argument actually understandable to people. This out-of-control sorcerer is, like, such a good metaphor for exactly what you were saying, Keir. And it really evokes this kind of sense of,

I think, not just out-of-controlness, but, like, what happens when a spell, you know, goes in directions that you could not possibly predict. And I think that comes later again. Like this idea of loss of control, as you said, is very, very interesting. Yeah, I agree with all that. I'd also highlight for listeners what's going on here conceptually in this section, which is to a certain extent yet another version of what it is that drives historical change is introduced.

And this is the idea of the productive forces. It's a point that's been made by various readers and critics over the years that the idea that comes in here is this idea that, well, somehow or other, these things we call the productive forces, which mainly just means technological developments, they develop according to seemingly some sort of endogenous logics and kind of logic of their own, and sometimes existing social relations and political institutions facilitate. that development and then at some point they start to inhibit it and then they have to be changed there has to be some sort of revolutionary overthrow and the argument again made by in a state of clay for example is that well this is not the same as saying that all history is the history of class struggle this is a quite different version of a theory of history which has a somewhat sort of teleological aspect in that there seems to be this sort of direction of travel which is determined by nobody really which just just happens, which is the development of the productive forces. And then it's the endless

unfolding of the productive forces which sometimes smashes existing social relations. And that's a bit different from saying, well, actually, it's class struggle which does that. That's the argument. I think it's a slightly unsimplistic argument in itself. I think you can reconcile those views in quite a complex way. And I think that's partly what Marx does much later in more developed work. And I think also, I think one reason for, for that tension is the fact that it is just quite unclear. It remains unclear to everybody in the world, really. To what extent things like technological change is actually something you can subject to social and political control. And to what extent is something that just sort of happens

and you have to deal with it from whatever point of view. So, but I, so I don't claim to have an answer to it. I'm not, I sort of think the reason it can't be properly resolved in Marx's, his own writing is because it can't actually be resolved on some level. But I think it is worth pointing out there. And also, of course, you could also make the point. And it's a point I made before on this show and others that, well, there is also a version of Marxism, which would say, well, all that stuff about class struggle, like determining everything, that's kind of naive and youthful and optimistic. And actually, what Marx and Engels discover through their historical studies is that the productive forces sort of unfold

according to a certain logic and there's not much you can do about it. And I think it is always a point worth keeping in mind that, well, if you survey the history of the entire 20th and early 21st century, then there's quite a lot of evidence to back that up. There's quite a lot of evidence to back up this idea that really no one is in control.

Things are just developing according to this logic that it does have to do with like where at particular times in history where the technological innovation is going on and where the political conditions make it possible for intensive innovation to go on and that's why all the power is now the power and the sense of modernity and progress is all shifting to China now and that is going to have all kinds of effects on us all but there's nothing we can do about it. I'm not saying I believe that or such a simplistic version of that but that is a version of Marxism which you know

has often been identified for the sake of critiquing it and attacking it as being overly deterministic by critics of Marxism, but which I also think with a certain degree of humility, we have to look at the current world situation and say, well, actually, you can't, you know, it's got something going for it as a way of understanding what's going on. I mean, the ever reading of this, the way that it would be resolved is to say that you have new innovations, and those innovations could take all sorts of forms and they tend to take the form that suits the ruling class, basically, the bourgeoisie. But, you know, the only thing that drives the uptake or the uptake of investment in new technologies such as automation, etc., is class struggle. And so Marx says in Capital somewhere that, you know,

you can trace the history of new technology by tracing the history of strikes, basically. Innovation follows strikes. And so it's like capital is flea. Capital is flea. the insubordination of labour into fixed machinery, into fixed investment, because fixed investment won't revolt, won't fight back. And of course, one of the big science fiction notions of the last sort of like 40 years has been the revolt of the machines, which you just keep seeing over and over. What if the machines actually turn out to look a little bit like labour and revolt against their masters?

I mean, that is the favoured solution taken by most of our key theoretical influence. including the Italian autonomous, including Raymond Williams, including indeed LeClaue move, they all go in the direction of saying, okay, what we're going to do with this seeming contradiction, we're going to say, actually, it's all history is a history of class struggle, and technological change is always subordinated to class struggle in a certain way. And I think that gets you further than any other way in terms of resolving it all. I still have this lingering residual centre. So there is something, as certain science and technology studies, people want to say, for example,

that sometimes there is something quasi-autonomous about all the unintended effect of new technologies, which I can't be fully captured by the assumption that technologies only emerge in the outcome of class struggle. But I would say, I think that is sort of true and it is partially true, and you need to acknowledge that to explain some things, but you can explain like 99% of things by saying that or the technologies that actually get researched and rolled out are the ones which make wage labour cheaper. But we should also think a little bit about China as well and just to go back to the opening sentence of this manifesto is it doesn't have to be explicit class struggle as well.

I think the Chinese Communist Party leadership, the central council, the central committee, they are haunted by the prospect of workers' revolts basically. And that's driving their investment strategy as much as anything. else? So I would like to pick up on three things from what in my version is page 11. So I think there's three interesting things that happen on this page. So the first thing is, is like this question that's posited. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? And then they go on to explain that. So here there's the introduction of like crises, which I think is important.

because that's carried forward. Also on that page, I believe this to be true, there's the first mention of capital as such, just a little bit further on from then. But also I'd like to query this section where in the middle of both of those things, where they say the weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground

are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. And I wasn't entirely sure what they're talking about there. Do you guys have any idea? what they mean is the industrialisation, the process of industrialisation and the process of creating these populations of proletarians of people who can only live by telling their labour, they are now, that is now going to become the place from which the revolutionary proletariat emerges to overthrow them. I see, yeah, that classic argument. Okay, understood. So there's some discussion of the effects of capitalism on labour, which sort of heart back to Marx's early stuff

early writing around alienation basically. And he says, oh, into the extensive use of machinery into the division of labour, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and consequently all charm for the workmen, he becomes an appendage of the machine. And it is only this, the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack that is required of him. Yeah, that's a good bit, that is, yes.

Yeah, and there's a bit later where he's sort of like, he's building up to this like pauperization thesis is this idea that wages will be driven down to the absolute minimum. I think it's here, is it in this section? Yeah, which is another thing which people say, well, that's not proven true. There hasn't been porporization. That's a section or an argument that basically gets revised in capital. So a little further on in the same section is the first mention of, you know, like women as a group or as a class in this section where they say, the less the skill and exertion of strength implied in manual labor, in other words, the more modern industry becomes developed,

the more is the labor of men superseded by that of women. Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All the instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex. So obviously there are implications there, but this is the first mention of like women as a, you know, either as a sex class or as a group, which they then, I think it was you, Jeremy, that said that they don't actually provide like a solution. But they're clearly trying to like distinguish women as workers and people in a sense, like rather than just like wives. And they do this juxtaposition later by talking about prostitution and also like prostitution within the family, which I think. think it's like quite stark and jumps out and it's quite interesting. But I think it's important to point out that it's on, you know, again, you know, not right at the beginning, but then like this characterization of women and then there's a similar characterization of children that happens later in the text, which is interesting. And I'm not entirely sure what the implications

are there. I spent some time kind of thinking about it, but I think what's implied about their understanding of like the role of women within that is not entirely clear to me is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, well, I think it's, I think you're right, yeah. In retrospect, respect, it's pretty clear where this is going. It is heading towards the international socialist and communist movement, fully embracing the assumption that creating equality for women in society is an integral part of the socialist project. But you're right. This is, I mean, this is this kind of faltering gesture in that direction. Exactly. So it would have been, you know, if they say, you know, women are people, that would have been, you know, very clear in that

sense. But it seems to allude to that, but I'm not entirely sure, you know, like, to what degree, like, their internalised, you know, like sexism or misogyny is like playing out in other spheres of that argument. But it seems to allude towards that. And, you know, we do see that, as you said, like in, in how their politics play out later. On the same page, actually, just after that, they go into this very interesting account of the social dynamics by which they think this polarisation of society is going to take place. They predict the disappearance of the sort of the middle strata of society, the petty bourgeoisie, the small business people, the independent entrepreneurs and professionals. And that goes along, of course, with the prediction

that Keir was talking about, whereby gradually everyone in the proletariat is going to get poorer and poorer, which, of course, as Keir said later on, they clarify that to say, well, they're only going to get poorer, relative to the capitalist class, which is true, has definitely happened, is still happening. But what then becomes problematic and which they really, an issue they really don't resolve even in their very late work is, well, okay, it might be true that people are all getting poor relative to the capitalist class. And it might also be true that the petty bourgeoisie, the small business people, etc., are losing some of their historic autonomy. But if they are getting in return for all that,

and if even workers are getting in return for all that, just unprecedentedly high standards of living by historic standards, then are they really going to care that much about the fact that the capitalist class is getting richer and richer and richer. And if they don't care about that, what is their politics going to be? And again, I mean, a lot of what happens, especially from the mid-20th century onwards, is driven by the fact that actually, It seems like for the most part people don't really care that much

if they're being relatively immiserated or if they're losing their status as independent business people or peasant farmers if what they are getting in return for that is someone to boss around at work in a massive car. So I suppose the answer to that would be that basically capitalism is undermining the conditions upon which that's possible. That would be the sort of pauperisation arguments of updated a little bit.

And there are lines in this as well around you know, how unions struggle can raise wage levels, etc., which show that this pauperization has countertenancies, and that countertendency primarily as worker organisation and political action, etc. I suppose the argument would go, but when workers do improve their lots, etc., etc., you know, basically what happens is that capitalist dynamics reassert itself and they undermine the conditions upon which that abundance, we might say, is created. that we live in this world in which the dynamics of which capital undermining its own preconditions, et cetera, really have come to the fore, you know, not just with climate change,

but also of like, you know, economic stagnation, which global capital seems quite unable to escape from over the last sort of like 20 years, probably more like 20 years now, isn't it? Yeah. Or nearly 20, 15, 20 years, something like that. And so there is this thing of like, well, they basically didn't see capital's adaptability perhaps, right? Its ability to adapt to the workers' movement. But what they got wrong with that was not their ultimate analysis. It's just the timescale upon all which all this would operate on, if you know what I mean. I guess it's worth saying now that that issue, the issue of the timescale

is the big one that kind of hangs over all of their writing for me from this right through to the end of capital. And this was what I thought about it when I first read this material as a teenager and I still think it today, that you read all this and you think this is a very convincing theory of historical change. And it's talking about the shift from feudalism to capitalism, having taken several centuries. And it's also showing that capitalism is the most dynamic social economic system ever and the bourgeoisie is the most successful ruling class ever. So therefore, why on earth do you think it's just like the end of capitalism is like just around the corner, as they occasionally assert? I mean, my reading of that is I would defend this reading very

strongly is they at no point do they have any strong argument for that position and it is clearly wishful thinking on their part that they just do not present an analysis which would convincingly lead you to assume that all of this is going to get resolved really quickly with a proletarian revolution following on from the bourgeois revolution as they write at the end of the book they say is definitely what's going to happen in germany anytime sometime soon it's just doesn't it's just nonsense that they don't have an argument for it future making well it's future making but it's also they just they just don't have an argument for it actually. They never make a good argument. They say, yeah, yeah. They present an argument, which

would seem to imply quite clearly the capitalism is going to be around for a few centuries and is going to have to basically industrialise every part of the planet and every part of the population before socialism becomes truly viable. But then they just stick in at the end, at the end of a paragraph or the end of a book, yeah, yeah, but capitalism is definitely going to end sooner because it is and because no one's going to put up with this shit for much longer obviously surely. So I think that issue of timescale is exactly right. I just think if you just assume that the logical implication of their own analysis of historical change up to the point their writing would be that actually the process which might lead to socialism are going

to take hundreds of years, then it all makes sense. Of course, as various other critics have pointed out, including really right-wing critics, so I wouldn't want to endorse. There's an interesting analogy here, say, with Christian millionarianism. Anyone who goes and reads the Gospels, like with an objective eye, can see that Jesus is telling people that the world is going to end within their own lifetimes. Then it doesn't. And then to some extent, the whole development of Christianity subsequently, partly is about having to deal with this fact that the world did not end. You might say that, you know, Christianity develops into a beautiful edifice on the basis of that, or you might say, well, it was a world.

rubbish. And right-wing critics of Marxism would want to say, and some sort of anarchist critics of Marxism would want to say, look, you know, you're just, Marxism has spent 150 years developing all these justifications and rationalisations for the fact that his millenarian promise was clearly not realised. I don't agree with that at all, but I'm just acknowledging it. I mean, I don't agree with it simply for the simple reason that, I don't think you can look at what's happened in the world in the past 50 years and say there is an available explanatory framework, which is remotely as robust as historical materialism for understanding it. But I think it's important to acknowledge that this tension around the millinerian dimension

of the project is a key theme in critical readings of this text and other texts of Marxism. A very short word in their defense, going back to the 1840s, is, you know, 1840s is so close to like, you know, they're still living in the age of the sort of double revolutions of the American Revolution, the French Revolution. Well, in fact, the Triple Revolution, because the Haitian Revolution as well, this is a period in which revolutions are in the air. And then you see 1848 and then they have 1871, et cetera. In 1917, you know, there have been quite a lot of revolutionary moments. But I do agree that there's a sort of volunteerism or millinarianism, perhaps even, that goes against their more sober economic analysis.

But let's move on, because we haven't got much time and we have so many bangers to get through. Basically, the next part is all about, you know, they're trying to sort of like talk about why the proletariat is the sort of like revolutionary class, etc. They dismiss the lump and proletariat, the dangerous class, the social scum. It's a funny, either translation or use of words here, I couldn't figure it out this sentence. This bit where it says, of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolution. class. It's a very strange phraseology. Yeah, well, I think this is one of the sections that carries the traces of their Hageelianism. So they develop their theory of history initially

from a reading of Hegel. And Hegel, the great early 19th century German philosopher, his whole thing is to have this entire theory of history, according to which there's this back and forth movement, things go in one direction, things go in another direction, and then something emerges out of both of them and then you get on to the next stage of history. And their initial move was to, and the thing is what he even means by history is really that human culture

as registered in philosophy and maybe in art. And that's kind of understandable because at the time in Hegel is writing, most of what we actually knew about the past, especially the distant past, was the text that had survived, the poetry, the philosophy, what have you. And then when I'm not,

of the things that's going on in the first half of the 19th centuries, the development of economic theory, the development of historiography, the development of archaeology, means that people have a much clearer sense of the changing ways in which societies have been organised and the changing material economic conditions. And Marks and Engel's initial move, the formulation of historical materialism was, as they put it, to Stan Hegel on his head, to say, right, actually, you know, we are still interested in this unfolding process of historical change, but we think the historical change happens through class struggle, basically. But from that point of view, you've still got to be able to say at any one moment in history,

like, well, who is really the agent of history at this moment? Who is really going to change everything? Like, who are the bits of society that just belong to the previous moment, really? And so, yeah, so they're really compelled to say, well, it's the proletariat, it's the people who can only exist by something in their labour, because only they are the people who have a total interest in the complete abolition of all class relations because every other social class it just might have an interest in the changing the present order of things but it's only going to change it in such a way that someone else is going to be still on the bottom but the proletariat because they're on the bottom because they have nothing to lose but their change and nothing to

sell by their labour they are the ones who are going to overthrow all of class society and in the process they're sort of going to resolve the entire historical process they're sort of going to end history by doing that. It's all that metaphysical baggage from Hegel, actually, where you want to have a total theory of history, you want to be able to point at any moment in history and say who is the hero of the story. And you also want to say that your hero of the story is the one that's going to end the whole story. There's two, I think, really important points that are made at the end of this section. So this is the bourgeois and proletarians. And I think there's a really important point that's made in this section where it was a comparison of what,

happens to the modern labourer. And this bit at the end reads, it makes this comparison. The serf in the period of serfdom raised himself to membership in the commune, just as the petty bourgeois under the yoke of feudal absolutism managed to develop into a bourgeois. The modern labourer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sink deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. And I think that's fundamental to the argument that they're trying to make, and they kind of illustrate it in that way, which I think is interesting. Yeah, although the next line is about pauperization, which is also something which we said, they go back on later on, basically. This process of pauperization is just one dynamic,

which is counted by ever countertenancies. Sure, but I do enjoy the way they're making the argument, regardless of whether I'm agreeing with it or not, I think there's an illustrative sense there, which really kind of brings home, like, what they're trying to say. And then there's the last paragraph of this section, which goes. The essential conditions for the existence for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital. The condition for capital is wage labour. Wage labour rests exclusively on competition between labourers.

The advance of industry whose involuntary promoters, the bourgeoisie involuntary promoters, right in it, replaces the isolation of the labourers due to competition by the revolutionary combination due to association. The development of modern industry therefore cuts from under its feet the very foundations on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces above all are its own grave diggers. Its fall and their victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable. We could have another two hours on that last word in that paragraph. I don't know if we want to.

Okay, so now we are moving on to the second section, proletarians and communists. So again, this section, proletarians and communists, has this really good, clear start where there's this question that's posited. In what relation do the communists stand to the proletarians as a whole? And then they go on to explain that. I think what's interesting in this section is there's both a kind of statement of internationalism that comes quite early on and also about kind of like the holistic approach to their politics which is presented, just right in the beginning there. Do you guys have anything you want to say about that bit? No, I mean, I'd skip down to the seventh paragraph in this section where it says

the immediate aim of communists is the same as all the other proletarian parties. the formation of the proletariat into a class overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat. And it's the formation of the proletariat into a class, which is the interesting bit that. It's not something that pre-exists, you know what I mean? It's something that obviously can be brought about partly by political action from that paragraph. Yeah. And then after that, I think they, like, both in terms of like the quality of the writing and the tone, they start to kind of ramp up what, you know,

reads as a bit of like, you know, a confident bro aesthetic, which I kind of like quite enjoy because, you know, slightly later we'll get to this, they start slagging people off in quite this kind of like playful way. But I think what's interesting about this section is kind of the, the kind of strong argument that's brought forward about private property. And, you know, that's not been brought in as like a section itself, in the earlier bit, but in this part, it's all about, you know, in this sense,

the theory of the communists may be summed up in a single sentence, abolition of private property. Like that statement is made, and then they go on to explain that. And then we get this section I find particularly interesting in the writing because you start to get the exclamation marks, which you don't have before. You know, hard won, self-acquired, self-earned property exclamation mark. And there's like a little bit of sarcasm after that. And then for the first time in the text, we start to say, hear you, which harks back to what Jeremy

was introducing earlier, this idea of like who are the people that this text is addressing. And we start to see the you being used in this way, which is interesting because there's a different flavor, I think there's a kind of turn in the way the language is being used in this section, Which, yeah, I think says something about their age, but also about, like, the confidence of, like, what is being presented, which I find really enjoyable to read. Yes, and the polemic is very strong there. And the you they are talking to is clearly the bourgeois liberal, rather more than anyone else, I think, as who they're addressing in this very hostile way. it's interesting they're really at pains in the first couple of pages of this section to the first few pages of this section to clarify what they mean by the abolition of properties

and to clarify they they don't mean that they're going to take away your personal property what they mean is they're not going to let they're not going to let land and factories be owned privately although they don't i would say they don't really spell that out as clearly as they we all do later on in their careers, but that's really what they mean. But then this polemic where they start addressing with exclamation marks and the second person address, the bourgeois who they're kind of attacking is very powerful. And that's a really important section, I think. I mean, just before that, they say, in bourgeois society, the past dominates the present. In communist society, the present dominates the past. In bourgeois society,

capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this state of things is called by the bourgeois abolition of individuality and freedom. And rightly so, the abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at. So they're introducing this very important set of claims that the bourgeoisie and bourgeois liberals, they use this language of freedom and individuality to justify their position, but actually they're justifying a social system which gives all power to capital, maybe to those who own it, but maybe just a capital as an impersonal force, which dominates the lives even of the bourgeois. And whereas they say,

Marx and Engels say, what we are in favour of is a social change which would actually give more freedom, more individuality to most actual human beings. So it's very very, very important. important. It's a great piece and I'm really happy that you read that bit out because it's definitely one of my favourite bits and after that they go on to say by freedom is meant under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. And this part of the text starts to read a bit more like a speech in some way compared to I think the earlier chapter and it really has that quality to it and then we get more used like you said the second person And further on, you are horrified that are intending to do away with private property,

etc, etc, etc. And yet, you can see it starts to have this fervour built into it, which I think is, yeah, it's really great. And then it starts to get funny on the next few pages I find. You must therefore confess that by individual, you mean no other person than the bourgeois than the middle class owner of property. This person must indeed be swept out of the way and made impossible. The personal life is dead. I read that as Get in the Sea. That's the 1800s version of like, yeah, getting the sea. I like it.

A bit later on as well, they sort of like historicise that, and 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, historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production, this misconception you share with every ruling class

that has preceded you which is, yeah, they all thought that and you're going to get in the bin just as like the rest of them. Yeah, also, let's be really clear what's going on here. I mean, I put a big star next to this bit in my book. The selfish misconception induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason

the social forms springing from your present mode of production forms of property. The whole point there is that The ruling class claim that the way they live and the way they think is the only way anybody ever could or should live and think, but actually it's historically specific. And of course, this is the critique of what Mark would call capitalist realism. And I'm sorry, I know it's tedious, but I always feel the need these days to point out to people that the idea that capitalist culture and ideology works to naturalize capitalist social relations was not an idea that Mark invented. It's right here. It's here in a communist manifesto. They're in some kind of medieval peasant revolt-type writings

from the 15th century as well. It's not like there's one original point for that idea, but it's being set out here very clearly. The next couple of pages I have literally written, lull, next to so many parts of it. And that's where they kind of, like, there's this bit about the abolition of the family, exclamation mark, and then education, exclamation mark. And then, like, women, and I think, yeah, this goes back to what we were saying earlier. I think the clearest of those three that they say something that, you know, you can see where the policy outcome is or what the action is on education. I think what they're actually saying about what the proposal for the family and, like, what they really think about the position of women is not clear from this text, I would say.

But there's desist sections where it says, but you communists would introduce the community of women, screams the bourgeoisie. in chorus, and a bit later it says, the communists have no need to introduce community of women. It has existed almost from time immemorial. That is a pretty clear statement that, you know, the sexism of bourgeois society is, you know, entirely historical and not trans-historical. Therefore, women are people, I think, they're saying.

I still think that's an extrapolation. I'm not entirely sure they're saying women are people. I'd quite like them to be saying women are people. We see that, and as we said, like the actions of history following that, but as we know, there's always been like incredible sexism within the left. So I'm not entirely sure to what extent they actually understand that. And on the next page, they have another classic banger of a line. Well, it's translated here, the working men have no country. It's often translated, the workers have no country.

That's what I always say. The working men have no country. We cannot take from what they have not got. They're basically arguing that nationalism, it doesn't make any sense from the point of view of working class interests. And they are confidently predicting on this page that nationalism will disappear as an element of working class ideology. I look forward to that. Also, on the bottom of that page, from my text, the thesis I was just talking about being stated again even more clearly, what else does the history of ideas prove than that intellectual production changes in character in proportion as material production is changed. The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.

So basically, the generally circulated ideas and assumptions, even about things like aesthetics, perhaps, at a given moment in history, largely reflect the balance of class forces and the interests of the ruling class. Then the next bit I think was quite interesting is they start to move into perhaps a little bit of strategy. says, we have seen that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise a proletariat to the position of ruling class to win the battle of democracy. The first mention of democracy, isn't it? I'm not entirely sure, but I don't think, yeah, democracy is not like high on the list of terms that they use. No, well, at the time of their writing, of course, like nowhere, apart from the United States,

doesn't have a property qualification for voting, and most people can't vote, and women can't vote anywhere. You know, you can see from the point of view that what they're writing now, the issue of political democracy is a bit of a so-h-o. And then the next paragraph reads in my version, The proletariat will use its political supremacy to rest by degree all capital from the bourgeoisie to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. if the proletariat organized as a ruling class, and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.

We probably would want to qualify that a little bit now. But in 1848, I'll let them off. And then, of course, this section ends with, I think, quite it's interesting, like, not a very strong introductory sentence going, nevertheless, in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable. Yeah, it'd be sort of generally applicable. It's not strong, is it? It's not, it's compared to, you know, the rest of the text, which has so many strong opening sentences to a section, this one is kind of like. Like, we're about to introduce, you know, here is our policy program, and it's kind of, it's a very, very wishy-washy way to introduce it, which I thought was interesting. And then there is this list of like the 10 things, which is like, these are the things.

I think the wishy-washiness of that introduction to the policy program, I think is one of the key points in the entire Marxian corpus where you can defend them from what has been one of the strongest charges makes against them of like determinism or millinarianism or sort of proto-talitarianism. in thinking because they marks and angles themselves were always resistant to laying out a really clear blueprint for what the communist society would supposedly look like because their whole argument was look at a communist society is going to be one in which the working class the majority of the population are determining the direction of economic and social development in their own interests and they and that that is how you should judge whether it's good or not not you shouldn't be judging whether it's good or not according to whether it matches some policy. agenda set out now or set out somewhere else or set out five years from now. I think that's

really powerful and important thinking. But having made that important intervention in their defence, I think let's hear the policies. One, abolition of property and land and application of rent of land to public purposes. Two, heavy progressive income tax. Three, abolition of all rights of inheritance. Four, confiscation of the property of immigrants and rebels. Five, centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, National Bank. Six, centralisation of the means of communication and transport with the hands of the state. Bring back, British Rail. Seven, extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state.

A, equal liability of all to labour, establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. Nine, combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries. Gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country. 10, free education for all children in public schools, abolition of children's factory labour. That number four, confiscation of the property of all immigrants and rebels. I mean, they are assuming that under revolutionary conditions, the bourgeois will be trying to get their money and resources out of the country

as fast as possible, and you're going to have to stop them. Well, they were right there. They're doing it anyway. Yeah, they were right. Yeah. That ship, my communist friends, has sailed. Has sailed. Nationalised the ports.

start what do we think about this about like this this arriving at this point in the text like the you know the top 10 policies like what do we what do we think of this as like a choice of presentation well but it remains a classic program of like socialism or even just left social democracy it's highly i think it's really interesting there's so much of it seems still relevant and it's also it's not even put in the terms that people probably expect it's not put, and it's not put in the terms that would later be implemented by, for example, the Russian revolution. Like, it doesn't say all industry has to be taken into public ownership. It says publicly owned industry, nationalised industry, should be extended. So it looks more like, it's

really, it's closer to a sort of Benite program, actually, than into the kind of program that we would come to associate with fully revolutionary communist regimes in the 20th century, which is kind of interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I agree. I don't think it's that, it's that radical by, you know, communist standards, really, or by, you know, applied communist standards. But it's radical for the, for the world that we live in. Well, also, this is a really interesting to think, because most, literally most of this is stuff that are now popular policies, even with people who consider themselves relatively moderate. But not all of it, and maybe some of the ones that wouldn't be popular represent key kind of fault lines. But like most people in Britain, think you should have a heavy progressive graduated income tax. They don't think you should abolish all right of inheritance. That is a key thing, actually. They don't think that. And that

is a perpetual problem, actually, for the socialist project. On one hand, these are very moderate things, you know, these are not things that people would associate with being radical, but to be able to enact some of this is just, you know, in lieu of what we were saying about like runaway capitalism or whatever would just be quite difficult. Like there's lots of stuff about are lots of writing about demands, etc. And the status of demands and what they're there to do and all that sort of stuff. Lots of it goes back to this

10 point program of demands. A demand would be something which makes sense in the current society, but points, if implemented, would fundamentally disrupt and disorganize a society. So they, I mean, transitional demands or whatever you might want to put them.

We would say, if we read this, we shouldn't say, oh, this is what they thought communism would look like. it's more, if we managed to implement some of these, they would fundamentally unwind capitalist society and strengthen the working class, et cetera, and then we'd be in a situation in which we could work out how the world should work.

We'd probably put them in that sort of sense. And in that sort of sense, it is quite remarkable how many of these are still sort of really, really applicable. So there's just one thing that I want to pick up on because I think this is, it's just interesting that at the end of number 10, there's two et cetera's. And I was like, who puts et cetera, in policy. It's just a weird choice to be like, oh yeah, education and industrial production

combining those two means industrial policy, which is actually like a really heavy policy proposal actually. So to put, et cetera, et cetera, on the end of it is just like quite a bizarre thing. So because that can be interpreted in a hundred different ways. So I just wanted to point that out. Well, we've definitely got to do the bit after the policy program now, because this is like the classic prediction of what is going to happen under conditions that they're describing, what will the transition from mere socialism to communism look like? And they write, when in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. So basically what they think

is going to happen is eventually, after you've started to implement this centralised socialist communist communist program eventually what will happen is all economic activity will come under the egotes of the state eventually and the state will be an expression a kind of democratic expression of the will of the whole population and sooner or later you will arrive at a situation in which you don't even really need politics anymore because the system will just produce everything for the good of everybody and everyone will be happy and finally what will happen is that in place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms

who you shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. There's a great deal written and thought about the question of whether, well do they actually think that this is actually going to happen one day or is this just kind of

utopian ideal towards which one might aspire which should sort of regulate your activity, a regulatory ideal as the Kantians like to say, which will organise all your political activity, but which you know perfectly well you'll never actually going to arrive at, or is it actually a kind of proto-totalitarian, horrible idea, which is going to lead communist regimes in the 20th century to carry out all kinds of murderous crimes in the

name either of the utopia they claim to be on the point of building, or in the name of defending the utopia, they even claim to have built. I'm just going to say, to put it crudely, Marx angles could not possibly have been intelligent enough to produce this and to have been so stupid that they actually thought you would actually one day arrive at this completely perfect society. But maybe they did. Maybe they really did think that. I don't think they think there's any elimination of politics, it would be the elimination of politics and of tension. But they say it's the elimination of class politics, basically, which is different. So you'd have, you know, then you'd have this other association based on other principles such as a free development of

all, being conditioned for the free development of each, being a free development of all. What they're saying is that, like, there'd be, politics would look incredibly different, basically, once you've got rid of this huge inequalities between people. Shall we move on to the next section on socialist and communist literature? I think we should skip over a lot of this, as it takes aim at lots of tendencies that have completely and utterly disappeared into the dustbin of history. Yeah. I mean, really, unless you're doing a PhD on early 19th century socialism, you don't need to read this bit. And I feel like it's important to say to people, you might well get to this bit and suddenly you feel like you don't know what they're talking about. The reason is they are talking about a bunch of stuff that nobody has cared about almost since the time they wrote it. it is interesting though to see to again note the kind of change of tone because this is the section where it just gets a bit of like it becomes like the bro takedown section as I've written in my note yeah shit posting they're shit posting exactly they're shit posting and it loses a bit of its like it's effervescent revolutionary chat quality I mean there is a bit of takedown that happens earlier with like the sarcasm but this bit of

just gets a bit like dry and yeah, that shitposty are right. So yeah, other than to note that, you know, on what I've got as page 39, they talk about, you know, utopian. They use the word utopian as a pejorative, which I think is like, you know, important to note. But apart from that, there's not really much I want to say about this entire section, section three. We should just say that March would have been one hell of a poster and he would, if social media had been around, he wouldn't have finished the first volume of capital. There's no doubt about it. Now, it's often said, like, Lenin would have just stayed off Twitter altogether. He'd have been too busy getting on with things. Whereas Marx would just have one of those people who lived on Twitter. There's just no question.

So there are little bits about, like, why they're rejecting a utopian socialist and what they have in mind of people like Fourier and Owen, etc. People who build these big plans of how society should work, et cetera. Fantastic pictures of future society. But they're not developing it out of the, working class movement or the class struggle, the dynamics of class struggle at the time, and they don't have an agent, basically. So we'd sort of say something like that, but I skip really, really quickly. I don't know if I have you to have seen the film The Young Marks, which is basically about the period just before writing the Communist Manifesto and then ends with the writing of the Communist Manifesto. And one of the big scenes in that is that

is Marx and Engels take over the League of the Just and replace this idea of the slogan would be like something like mankind unites something like that and they replace it with the workers of the world unite basically to sort of say, you know, there is class antagonism. You have to move through that. Well, I think if this final section is divided into two subsections and it's the first subsection that is sort of unreadable if you're not an expert on early 19th century socialist debates,

the second section on conservative or bourgeois socialism is more interesting and it has more contemporary relevance. And actually, the critique of what they call bourgeois socialism I think remains entirely applicable to a certain kind of centre-left politics, which is really prevalent still to date, sort of the technocratic politics of a third way, because they are taking issue with forms of socialism, which, as they rightly say, they appeal to members of the bourgeoisie or people from privileged groups who don't really want to give up their privileges. and they claim that what they can do is sort of administer a set of reforms to society which won't cost anybody anything, which won't result in significant losses for anybody. And they can just do that in everybody's interests. And Marx and Engels' argument is no, you can't do that because sooner or later, you're going to come up against fierce resistance from capitalists to defending their interests

who won't want these reforms. And then you're either going to have to give them what they want, or you're going to have to really take the side of the working, pass against them. And it's absolutely 100% applicable to the current British government, which is in name a Labour government, but it's a Labour government made up of people who have

deliberately expelled from the party anybody they thought might push them to engage in any form of confrontation with capital and its interests because they don't want to do that, because they only want to administer reforms precisely to the extent that they are entirely panicable to capital

in their interests. So it's still, it's totally relevant, actually. It's totally relevant, And in a way, actually, it's more relevant today than it's been for decades. Because Tony Blair, when people asked him, are you even a socialist? He would just say, no, not in any economic sense. I'm not. But Stama says, I am a socialist. But this is his politics.

So the critique of bourgeois socialism is actually more relevant right now. Binet Eilin has been in some ways. Can we just say that Rachel Ries plans for public-private partnerships with Black Rock are the most impoverished of all castles in the air, as Marx would put it, and put a full stop under that. Let's just get right to the end now, really try and move through this. So the last section, Section 4 is the position of communists in relation to various existing opposition parties. So the communist fight for the attainment of the immediate aims for the enforcement of the momentary interest of the working class. But in the movement of

the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement. Then it's all about, you know, in France, the communist ally with the social democrats against the conservatives, blah-de-blah. They go from quite a few countries saying which ones they should, who the communists should align with, the sort of progressive bourgeoisie, basically. And I think they'll revise that prescription a little bit later, well, about three months later, once the bourgeoisie betray the working class and turn to reaction. So, in short, the communists everywhere support every revolutionary, movement against the existing social and political order of things. They bring to the front

as a leading question in each movement the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries. The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can only be attained by the forcible overthrow of all exist in social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at the communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries unite. Is that the translation that you have? Because that is not the ending that I have. The ending that I

have is that working men of all countries unite, which is obviously what jars with me, because it's just such a shame. I hope it was really working people, but I don't think it is. but it's definitely a banger of a section because it's only, you know, it's very short and it kind of has this kind of build-up which is kind of nice relief after the whole, you know, like

communist literature section and then ends with, you know, these capital letters and an exclamation mark, which is everything you want. But there it is, yes, some of the most famous lines in the history of politics, workers of all countries unite

famously, you know, you know, in the 1870s you get this revival of the socialist movement, the building up of the workers movement, you know, they get new unionism in the 1890s, late 1880s, 1890s, you get the building of the huge, the German Social Democratic Party, etc. The huge building of this international, etc. The second international, which all breaks down when the First World War is announced and all of those socialist parties, vote for war credits for their party, et cetera, et cetera. And then at the end of the Second World War you have a big revolutionary wave, a revolution in Russia, etc, etc. One of the things that are communist governments or socialist, actually existing socialist governments do, is they pump out thousands, hundreds and thousands of copies of the Communist Manifesto. And it becomes one of the most read books in the history of humankind. So that's it, listeners. our reading of the Communist Manifesto, and all that's left for this year is to thank our

incredible production team Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens, without whom this podcast would not be possible. And to thank you, our listeners, for continuing to support ACFM, wishing you a restful and joyful festive season full of love and connection. See you next year. Too far out.