The "Manifesto of the Communist Party" 175 Years Later

By Derek Ford

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread

There’s perhaps no better crystallization of the revolutionary origins of Marxism than the 1848 publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (later referred to simply as the Communist Manifesto to please the censors). There’s perhaps no better reason to re-read the text than today, on the 175th anniversary of its publication, on what we now celebrate, thanks to LeftWord Books, as Red Books Day.

The Communist League, a small underground group, tasked Marx and Engels to draft a manifesto that would not only serve as a program of the “party” or political organization but would also potentially intervene in the battles they anticipated coming. As the economic crisis intensified, those clashes did come out into the open, in fact just days after the Manifesto’s publication.

The plan to immediately translate the text into several languages, as indicated in the introduction, went unrealized, and the Manifesto didn’t have an impact on the 1848-49 revolutions (although perhaps it had some influence in Germany). After its initial run in February 1848, it was reprinted a few times by May; but, by then, the initial victories disintegrated. The revolutionary hopes of the bourgeois-democratic struggles were met with fierce counterrevolutionary violence against the workers and the general democratic forces of other exploited classes. Everywhere reaction set in, from France and Prussia (Germany) to Italy and Switzerland, a sequence that pushed developments in communist theory and organizing, affirmed the central tenets of the Manifesto (including the international nature of the class struggle), called for a refined approach to the tactics and strategies of struggle and the national question, and decidedly shifted the center of European revolutionary potential to England. [1]

With the counterrevolution cemented, the League’s leadership suspended its activities, some of which it resumed before officially disbanding in 1852. The text was read by a handful of revolutionaries at the time, most of whom were not in agreement with Marx and Engels, and was written for an even smaller grouping. It wasn’t until the early 1870s that the Manifesto appeared in Europe for widespread distribution. This is partly because of Marx’s prominent role in the First International, beginning in 1864, and his widely acclaimed analysis of the Paris Commune. The main reason, however, was more ironic. The German government put several leaders of the German Social Democratic Party on trial in 1872, and to make their case the prosecution ended up entering the Manifesto into court records. Doing so allowed radical publishers to “evade the censorship laws and embark upon the Manifesto’s republication.” [2] With the Social Democratic Party’s leadership fighting charges of treason, the conditions weren’t favorable to an open call for a communist party to achieve the objectives set out in Marx and Engels’ pamphlet. The new circumstances compelled publishers to change its title to Communist Manifesto. It wasn’t until the Soviet Union’s republication in the early 20th century that the original title came back.

The Manifesto eventually spread across the globe rapidly, from China and Japan to Latin America and the U.S., but only after the specter of communism materialized with the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. With state power, a dedication to worldwide liberation and socialism, concentration on theoretical study, and general education, among other duties, the Soviets translated it into numerous languages and sold it on the cheap. Since the Bolshevik Revolution, every revolutionary movement has adopted the text for its unique conjuncture, in keeping with the overall ethos of the Manifesto’s content.

Any expression of historical materialism–the method and guide of communists–is, it unfortunately needs to be stated, historical. Nothing holds for all time everywhere. Marx and Engels say as much when they close their preface to the 1872 reissue by listing what they wanted to update 25 years later, a list that is quite extensive especially given its brevity. They didn’t edit the text because it had, by then, “become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.” This presents a problem for some readers insofar as it is a very early text, written before Marx’s real study of political economy, and thus one from which the key theoretical developments of Marx are absent. However, in the same preface Marx and Engels also make it clear that “the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever.” [3] Despite any deficiencies in political clarity or theoretical coherence, its precise, energizing, and careful formulations still exert force today.

Like any work, the Manifesto was determined by its particular context of production. The fact that its distribution and reception have only increased over time (and in ways favorable to our class) testifies to its ongoing relevance. It remains a foundational pillar in the development of Marxism—or revolutionary socialism, a mission we continue to realize on the global scale. The Manifesto comes to life whenever the class struggle intensifies or wherever rapid shifts in political consciousness occur, like in the radical transformation we’re undergoing in the U.S., where the fog of anti-communism is lifting—that’s why Red Books Day has, every year, expanded and flourished. Prompted by this opportunity to revisit the text afresh, this short article doesn’t summarize the content as a whole but rather contextualizes some of the Manifesto’s main principles within some of the later works of Marxism and the Marxist movement more generally, providing clarity and correcting some common misinterpretations of the work that oftentimes falsely justify premature dismissals of Marxism, socialism, and communism. [4] In conclusion, I place the key tasks we inherit from the Manifesto and how later developments in the radical Black and communist theory are absolutely pivotal to pursuing this project today in that they help us understand the links between anti-communism and white supremacy and aid our project in uniting all working and oppressed people for the common liberation of the many.

The Pedagogy and Form of the Manifesto

Marx and Engels met in 1842 on Engels’ way to Manchester, reuniting two years later after Engels returned to the city. Both were fellow travelers of the Young Hegelians. Marx edited a radical paper, Rheinische Zeitung, to which Engels contributed an article on political economy. The next few years of their collaboration were remarkably transformative: by 1846 they had decisively broken with the Young Hegelians and initiated their development of historical materialism and the origins of a more mature revolutionary theory, informed as it was by decades of ongoing practical struggle and study. While Marx and Engels broke with their younger Hegelian selves in 1845-46 to articulate the historical-materialist method of communism, the Manifesto links that method with its objective and organizational form.

The pamphlet was penned primarily by Marx in January 1848 in Brussels, although it was a collaborative project. Notwithstanding the debates about to what extent Engels’ initial drafts contributed to the final project—and in particular his “Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith” for the Communist League’s First Congress in 1847—it was Engels’ overall writing, theorizing, and organizing that provided Marx with the requisite knowledge about modern industry and also that helped both formulate the historical materialist method, and it was largely Engels’ interventions that enabled him and Marx to join the League. [5]

Marx and Engels formally joined the Communist League after the spring 1847 conference agreed to the main points they advocated, which were formally adopted at another congress later that year. These points included the principle that members of the League act “in the interest of the Communist Party, the overthrow of the bourgeoisie.” Along with this, they agreed to change the name from the League of the Just—formed in 1837—to the Communist League. In an internal document on the congress, the change of name is granted significance insofar as communists “are not distinguished by wanting justice in general—anyone can claim that for himself—but by our attack on the existing social order and on private property, by wanting community of property, by being Communists.” [6] The Manifesto marked the first real distinction between communists, on the one hand, and utopian socialists (and social democrats), on the other, a distinction hinging on a systematic understanding of the capitalist class struggle, the need to overthrow our class enemy, and the seizure of power.

The Pedagogy and Conjuncture of the Manifesto

Attending to the Manifesto’s style and pedagogical form is important politically and educationally. By doing so, we prevent or inhibit misreading it ourselves, especially given the dominant and enduring role anti-communism plays in the modern U.S. state. Over the last few years, a multiplicity of differing factors and forces in the U.S. have no doubt radically advanced socialism in the battle of ideas. The popularity and acceptance of—or non-antagonism to—socialism is an incredible, promising, and progressive development. I can definitely divide my own life thus far along the lines of this shift, as it has radically impacted essentially all aspects of it. The waters are open for the word, idea, and even the movement of socialism, but that comes with an unavoidable muddying of those waters. Such conditions are openings for the necessary task of clarifying Marxism, giving definition to socialism, ideologically and organizationally reuniting us with the centuries-long class struggles against oppression and, for a much shorter time, against capitalist exploitation, of which we are a part.

Anti-communism’s role in the U.S. is too expansive to locate in one place; too broad to be reproduced in one form or by way of some other political orientation. Many well-meaning but ultimately insufficient, reformist, or ill-conceived “radical” theories today are premised on a rejection of Marxism and the historical project of socialism and liberation, the twists and turns and the heroism and tragedy of such class struggles. This rejection is reproduced by way of the repetition of incorrect critiques and caricatures, such that when Marx is read it comes through the glasses of an anti-communist orientation. In addition to contextualizing it within some aspects of Marxist theory and the movement, I’ve found that attending to the document’s pedagogical form helps me get what’s happening in these relatively few pages.

The work is, first of all, a manifesto, rather than a fleshed-out and fully developed systematic analysis, a comprehensive program of action, etc. As a specific literary genre, manifestos are “always addressed to the masses, in order to organize them into a revolutionary force.” [7] They are written for the yet-to-be subjects of history with no pretension as to what actual people and groups will occupy that subjecthood or what the outcome of the struggle will be. They are orientations and frameworks, not prescriptions or fixed formulas.

The Manifesto was a specific intervention in a concrete time and in a specific place and moment in history. For the Communist League, the pamphlet served as a preliminary program to organize revolutionaries of different stripes around a set of political aims and objectives—potentially into a party. Because we are part of the legacy it inaugurated, because our primary task is to continue the project to overthrow exploitation and eliminate oppression at the national and global levels, it is a pillar in maintaining our legacy and memory. It can also be a short and accessible introduction to Marxism we can read with others and those new to the struggle.

Manifestos, and this one in particular, embody a specific pedagogical form that utilizes several different tactics, all of which are important to acknowledge. The text is addressed to us: the masses of working and oppressed peoples of the world.

One main tactic employed is the didactical method, which for manifestos must be condensed, a kind of schematic and necessarily reductive account of centuries of history, time, and social formations. The didactic method appears as a quick narrative providing the lay of the land, a portrait that, while not exhaustive, is honestly more in alignment with capital today than in 1848.

For this reason, our enemies cite the Manifesto as evidence of Marxist “stageism”—or the accusation that Marx and communists adhere to a fixed, linear, developmental, and chronological conception of history that runs from lower to higher levels, that goes from the past to the future—that is often clumsily equated with “Eurocentrism.”

Stageism was often present before Marx and Engels severed ties with the Hegelians, a break that required creating an alternative conception of history and temporality, one without any destiny, predetermination, causality, or final conclusion. Thus, when Marx and Engels write about “pre-history” they don’t refer to a past and finished state of a society or the world. They employ it as a conceptual tool used to differentiate capital from previous modes of production, and the same goes with Marx’s later critique of “so-called primitive accumulation.” Differentiating theoretical containers from empirical declarations lets us stay true to the Marxist method and prevents us from reading their concepts—like formal and real subjection—as actual processes happening.

That in the 1840s they broke with the dominant Enlightenment frame of history is quite remarkable, and their response was spelled out most potently in the 1857 “Introduction” to the Grundrisse. Marx criticized bourgeois political economy for following the “rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself” because, in particular, in capitalist societies contradictions are the rule rather than the exception, which means it is a development that is founded on “relations derived from earlier forms” that are still “found within it only in an entirely student form, or even travestied.” [8] Another way to think about it is that Marx acknowledged that the “present” isn’t an interregnum between a “past” and a “future,” but a time, place, and social location where various temporalities and histories play out in complex ways. The principle of unevenness is a primary element of Marxism, and it applies to development, production, struggle, and our sense of time. Capital, not Marx, tries to homogenize and synchronize time by presenting it as abstract and ahistorical, naturalizing capital and its structures. In the 1883 preface to the Russian translation of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels argue that the Russian Revolution, based on communes or the common ownership of land and resources, doesn’t need to go through a “stage” of capitalist development because “the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.” [9]

Another pedagogical tactic is the call-and-response. In the second section, Marx and Engels clarify the relationship between communists and the proletarians and address criticisms directed toward the former. They announce the charges against them and their defense, which sometimes validates the accusation through clarification. For example, the capitalists charge the communists with wanting to abolish private property, but under capitalism the vast majority don’t have any private property; “in one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.” [10] The reader is engaged in a conversation that is still happening today (including through Red Books Day), but with different coordinates.

The third section takes the form of a literature review, a comradely yet critical survey of different strands of socialist thought by which Marx and Engels can differentiate communism. By placing each in their historical context, we learn some of threads woven throughout the long history of the communist project, some of the different eras and forces that articulated the desire for emancipation and equality, and why their historical and material conditions of thought couldn’t set up the foundations for their fuller elaboration.

Another pedagogical tactic deployed is the rallying call to arms. Section four, the last and shortest part of the text, embodies a pedagogy of mobilization, providing immediate tactical decisions that entail engaging with non-communist forces to serve serve the pressing issues of the working and oppressed so that “in the movement of the present, they [the communists] also represent and take care of the future of that movement.” The Manifesto, addressed to us, the masses that make history, closes out by opening up a new horizon: “Let the ruling class tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” [11]

A Clear Call for Global Emancipation and Liberation

Marx and Engels open the Manifesto with a sweeping declaration: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” Struggles between the classes of the slavers and enslaved, lords and serfs, or “in a word, oppressor and oppressed” are generally latent but erupt into visible confrontations that lead to either “a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” [12]

As Marx openly acknowledged, he wasn’t the first to discover or theorize the existence of classes or the class struggle [13]; that the goal of the class struggle was the political supremacy of the proletarians, however, was a main point of contention between various socialist forces, particularly between the utopians and the communists, as the latter insisted that only through open struggle and the achievement of political power could we achieve equality.

The character of the class struggle changes under capitalism, as do its avenues of struggle. The capitalist epoch is distinct insofar as it generally simplifies class antagonisms. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” [14] In this conjuncture of the class struggle, the latter class is revolutionary—or potentially revolutionary.

As a text written for the imminent European crises, its immediate horizon was the workers and militants across Europe. They were writing largely and somewhat schematically about Europe because it was the place, stake, and audience of the battles; but it is clear that the development of European capital wasn’t confined to the continent, that it included the colonization of the Americas and the opening up of the Indian and Chinese markets, as the overall development of production and distribution propelled new developments in communication and transportation, new railways, and created new markets for their commodities and new sources of raw materials and labor, etc. To power such production required new energy sources and inputs, and former ‘middle-class’ independent workers and middle-class operatives of capital were replaced by the modern capitalist class. Each technological revolution within the capitalist revolution cohered a capitalist class that, with its quickly increasing power and reach, captured “the modern representative State,” which “is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” [15] The state, that is, serves as a mechanism for the capitalist class to manage its internal and external contradictions.

Marx and Engels survey the revolutionary role played by the bourgeoisie in the struggle against feudalism in Europe, although this is sometimes more sarcastic than serious. The capitalist class overthrew feudal rule, abolishing small-scale patriarchal relations that could be explained away by the Church and replaced them with “naked self-interest” and “substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” for previous labor relations clouded in personal relations and ideological mysticism or immediate dependency. [16] While capital cannot hide its exploitation, it can provide cover for it through abstract legal notions like equality and freedom.

Capital’s growing power also catalyzed the extent of crises of overproduction “because there is too much civilization, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.” [17] The capitalist’s only solution to their own crises is to lay the foundations for more intensive and protracted ones. Because of the competitive laws of capitalism, the bourgeoisie always looks upon the current productive and social relations as transitory and in need of constant change:

Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away… All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. [18]

Capitalism is dynamic; in order to expand—which is its modus operandi—it has to continually reinvest in changes to technologies, transportation, and communication, overcoming the isolation of feudal life and concentrating large numbers of workers in cities and factories, facilitating communication, and organizing. In 1848, this was still a minor and ascendant tendency, although today it is fully realized. The League couldn’t send a pamphlet across the globe in a manner of seconds.

The incessant revolutions in the forces, means, and relations of production “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe,” a phenomenon bourgeois commentators only realized about 130 years later. As capital nestles everywhere, it brings “under the feet of industry the national ground… All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones.” [19]

Capital is a colonizing world power, and Marx and Engels recognized this as a contradictory and also forthcoming development:

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with 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 midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. [20]

This is not a welcoming reception but a warning signal, because “civilization” for Marx and Engels is British or European civilization, one founded on colonialism and slavery, theft and dispossession. The reference to the Chinese Wall is, similarly, not literal in terms of the actual wall nor how capital breaches it, as capital deploys both the “free market” and the coercive and repressive military power that backs that market up.

Marx and Engels certainly appreciate how the generation of productive forces provides the material basis for providing for all of the world, although they were referring to Western Europe in the text. The elimination of scarcity as an inescapable reality and the means to provide not only the basic necessities for the present but additional wants and even stocks of goods for the future is a historic accomplishment. They also celebrated the mixing of lives and cultures owed to urbanization and the dominance of the city over the country, as it “rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.” [21] The English translation “idiocy” refers to a lack of communication and brevity of social relations, rather than any “intelligence” status. In fact, the increasing comingling of people in cities and countrysides produced a broader and more sophisticated intellectual arena for all.

Moreover, Marx and Engels are responding to the utopian socialists’ critique of bourgeois society by demonstrating the structural reasons for the suffering of such “advanced civilizations” to which the utopians attributed the ills of society. The utopian socialists’ intentions were good but their understanding was guided by morality and their methods were limited to the construction of communes that would, by reason and rational argumentation, win the ruling class over to their side.

Capital’s Production of Our World

The accumulation of capital is the accumulation not only of production and property but of political power, producing a “national” being or a state entity by which the oppressed must conquer—and have conquered—to acquire political supremacy.

In this way, the Manifesto’s assertion that capital “creates a world after its own image” continues to explain much of our global situation today. [22] This is not because capital reproduces itself everywhere and in the same manner, but rather because capital is an inherently uneven system. Consider the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation that creates “accumulation of wealth at one pole” and “accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery,” and so on, at the other pole. [23] The accumulation of capital is simultaneously “increasing concentration of the means of production, and of the command over labour” and the “repulsion of many individual capitals one from another.” This, in turn, is offset by the centralization of capital, whereby many smaller capitals are combined into larger capitals. [24] The limit here is, of course, capital’s, insofar as capital can’t accept the complete centralization into a single entity.

The state is key to this and other processes of capital accumulation, which is evident with an example Marx gives of the productive capacity of capital’s centralization: “The world would still be without railways” so long as their production was in the hands of a large number of smaller capitalists, but centralization “accomplished this in the twinkling of an eye.” [25] Railways are forms of immobile and fixed capital, which “assigns it a peculiar role in the economy of nations.” Fixed capital is national capital because it “cannot be sent abroad, cannot circulate as commodities in the world-market.” [26] In order for capital to circulate, it must also be fixed in space; in order for capital to accumulate in one place, it must diminish somewhere else. Hence, the important economic function of war: it literally destroys capital to allow for renewed accumulation.

Marx and Engels articulate some of their knowledge at the time on the dynamics of capital, which never map onto history. The reason the world isn’t a complete image of capital is, additionally, due to the historic resistance of working and oppressed peoples who have achieved political supremacy, although in a different manner than the Manifesto and, later, Marx and Engels, held.

Proletarianization

About halfway through the first section, after discussing the developments of capital, Marx and Engels switch to how the bourgeoisie produced the class who can abolish it and class society: the proletarian class, one continually changing and faced with the task of political consciousness and organization. As capital increases, so too do the ranks of the proletariat, as even smaller independent capitalists can’t compete with modern industry while any unique skills are rendered redundant by technological transformations.

Returning to the opening lines, where they assert that class struggle is the motive force of history, and that capitalism increasingly polarizes society into two antagonistic classes or camps, can better clarify some of the central but often overlooked or misunderstood elements of this formulation.

The first is that the splitting up into two classes is a process rather than a finalized or even finalizable state. In other words, proletarians aren’t produced once and for all; capitalism divides society into two antagonistic groupings. The second is that they refer to both as classes and “camps.” Despite the absence of a fully worked-out definition of classes in the text or in Marx’s work overall, they perhaps called them camps to account for their non-exclusionary character. Indeed, what is remarkably notable in the opening lines are the reduction of various class struggles to that between the oppressor and the oppressed. Even as they acknowledge several classes, some of which include more complicated hierarchies and layers or levels, they recognize a continuity that is more than a repetition of the same and, perhaps, by equating the capitalist class struggle with the struggle between the oppressor and oppressed.

No more do special places in the social division of labor exist—they mention priests and lawyers, scientists and doctors—as a revered and privileged position; they too are reduced to proletarians. [27] Today, 175 years on, my colleagues at DePauw University, facing yet another invented “crisis” and another round of cuts and layoffs, realize that we are workers, not “professors” or “teachers.” Such surprise is explained by the withering away of any material basis for middle-class status and the increasing deskilling of our labor-power. Engels’ similarly accounted for any awe in his 1845 work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, where he recounts how capitalist development in colonial Britain deprived even workers of the illusion they could attain a decent standard of living, thereby collecting “together those vast masses of working men who now fill the whole British Empire.” [28]

The technological dynamism propelled by the need to increase the social productivity of labor through machinery, similarly, swells the ranks of the unemployed and “dangerous classes” and make all proletarians’ “livelihood[s] more and more precarious.” [29] Again, 175 years ago Marx and Engels located precarity as a primary condition we, as workers, are forced to grapple with—well before the “gig economy.”

Oppressor and Oppressed

In the first section, the discussion of the proletarian class comes immediately after Marx and Engels mention how capital tries to solve its contradictions through “the conquest of new markets.” This demonstrates that, even this early on, communists centered the colonial question, even if it wasn’t refined at this time. As Lucia Pradella, among others, has forcefully demonstrated, Marx gave increasing attention and weight to the anti-colonial revolutions happening in the mid-late 19th century. Colonization, for Marx, was not a ‘North-South’ or ‘East-West’ issue; it was, and is, an issue of domination and exploitation.

Neither Marx nor Engels only attended to Europe, nor did they abstract Britain or Europe away as self-enclosed entities. In the Grundrisse, for example, Marx addresses the concentration of labor-power into collective labor, which explains “the violent rounding-up of the people in Egypt, Etruria, India etc. for forced construction and compulsory public works.” [30] Over time, Pradella shows, they extended their position on national liberation and class struggle—both struggles between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie—to other colonial territories, including China and India. During the Taiping Revolution, “Marx changed his previous unidirectional view of international revolution, tracing a relation between proletarian struggle in the metropolis and anti-colonial movements in the colonies.” He welcomed the revolution and the detrimental impacts it would have on British colonialism, the same reason for which he supported—and “was probably the first major European intellectual and political activist to support the national liberation struggle in India.” [31] In a direct rebuttal to allegations of Eurocentrism and a privileging of the ‘working-class’ as the revolutionary subject, Marx argued that the anti-colonial rebellions would come before and would ignite the socialist revolutions in the colonizing countries. [32]

One could argue that the equation of the class struggle with the struggle between the oppressor and oppressed anticipated their forthcoming incorporation of the colonial question and the centrality of national liberation, something featured in the Manifesto itself.

The closing section of the pamphlet addresses how communists in different nations relate to other opposition parties. “In Poland,” they write, communists “support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation.” [33] Just a few lines up from the closing clarion call for “working men of all countries, unite!” we read that, wherever they are, communists “support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” [34] Certainly, they didn’t have a fully fleshed out theory of national liberation and socialism, although later on they did. [35]

Same Objectives, Different Conjuncture: Anti-Racism and the Socialist Struggle

Marx and Engels open the Manifesto not with a preordained future but an indeterminate future that will be produced through struggle: if the proletarians don’t overthrow the bourgeoisie there is “the common ruin of the contending classes.” [36] These options are translated in various ways (e.g., barbarism or socialism; humanity or capitalism), but they are still the base options available to us today. The central question, then, is how do we ensure the victory of our class?

The Manifesto offers no prescriptions and, indeed, the League lacked the depth and breadth of experience from which to draw on to even reflect on their previous organizational forms. Yet it is clear that the proletarians can’t fight it out alone or even on the scale of the workplace, industry, community, or state.

Capitalism, as a system of oppression, requires a collective and organized revolutionary struggle to overthrow it by foreclosing any individualistic or particularistic forms of resistance. As capital grows, so too does its class enemy: “a class of labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital.” [37] Independent artisans, shop-owners, peasants, and small producers are thrown into this lot through the production of machinery, which ultimately incorporates the workers’ skill and knowledge into a form of fixed capital. However we rebel and develop, we have to recognize that “every class struggle is a political struggle,” and whenever we fight the bosses and oppressors we’re engaged in the class struggle and in a political project. [38]

The key task, then as now, is to organize the working and oppressed peoples “into a class, and consequently into a political party” that, “organized as the ruling class” will implement a program for the oppressed. [39] This task is, to be sure, complex, sensitive, and contingent on time, place, and society. In the U.S., no communist party or communist movement can unite working and oppressed people into a class unless it represents the diverse characteristics of our class and fights tooth-and-nail for the national and racial liberation projects against white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and the emancipation of all oppressed identities.

By doing so, we confront head-on the ties between anti-communism and white supremacy that Gerald Horne makes clear. Racism to this day is linked with the emancipation of the formerly enslaved because Reconstruction–even after its counterrevolutionary overthrow—was “one of the largest uncompensated expropriations” until, that is, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. As such, Horne asserts that “African Americans are living reminders of lost fortunes,” and so “the reaction to socialism–which has also involved expropriations of property—is difficult to separate from race and racism.” [40] For this reason, the primary obstacles to overcome are the long and ongoing legacies of racial slavery and white chauvinism. If we don’t understand their links with what Charisse Burden-Stelly calls “modern U.S. racial capitalism,” we can neither understand contemporary capitalism nor overthrow the capitalists class. [41]

The Communist Manifesto announced the need for the proletariat to win political supremacy and rule over their former oppressors without, however, saying how to pursue this task or what role the state played in it. It was precisely “the defeats of the revolutions in 1848 that allowed Marx to go beyond the Manifesto’s general formula and sum up that experience with greater clarity” rather than “an abstract formula.” [42] Marx and Engels admit as much in the 1872 Manifesto preface, as the Paris Commune made it clear that workers can’t use the existing state for our project but must smash that state and construct a new one in our interest. We can’t rely on the contemporary U.S. state, founded and maintained as it is by white supremacy, capitalist exploitation, imperialist plunder to provide either the avenue to socialism or the apparatus by which to achieve it.

Let’s read the Manifesto of the Communist Party today, and tomorrow, for our history, present, and our future common and universal emancipation and freedom.

Endnotes

[1] One of Marx’s main disputes with other members of the League was his assertion that, because the German bourgeoisie was so inactive and powerless, that country could undergo a bourgeois and subsequent proletarian revolution in 1848 (a “permanent revolution”).

[2] Jones, Gareth Stedman. “Introduction.” p. 17.

[3] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. pp. 198, 197.

[4] For more background and context, see The Peoples Forum. “History of The Communist Manifesto with Brian Becker.” Available here.

[5] Ireland, David. The Communist Manifesto in the Revolutionary Politics of 1848. pp. 37-68.

[6] Wolff, Wilhelm, and Schapper, Karl. “A Circular of the First Congress of the Communist League to the League Members. June 9,1847.” pp. 599, 595.

[7] Althusser, Louis. Machiavelli and Us. p. 17.

[8] Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. pp. 105, 106.

[9] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 196.

[10] Ibid., p. 237.

[11] Ibid., p. 258.

[12] Ibid., p. 219.

[13] Marx, Karl. “Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer.” pp. 2-65.

[14] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 220.

[15] Ibid., p. 221.

[16] Ibid., p. 223.

[17] Ibid., p. 226.

[18] Ibid., p. 222.

[19] Ibid., p. 223.

[20] Ibid., p. 225.

[21] Ibid., p. 224.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Marx, Karl. Capital (Vol. 1). p. 604.

[24] Ibid., pp. 586, 575.

[25] Ibid., p. 588.

[26] Marx, Karl. Capital (Vol. 3). p. 162.

[27] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 228.

[28] Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. p. 30.

[29] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 229.

[30] Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. p. 528.

[31] Pradella, Lucia. Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy. pp. 120, 122.

[32] Marx, Karl. “Revolution in China and Europe.” p. 93.

[33] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 257.

[34] Ibid., 258.

[35] La Riva, Gloria. “Lenin and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination.”

[36] Marx, Karl, and Engels, Friedrich. The Communist Manifesto. p. 219.

[37] Ibid., p. 227.

[38] Ibid., p. 230.

[39] Ibid., p. 230, 242.

[40] Horne, Gerald. “White Supremacy and Anti-Communism.” pp. 282-283.

[41] Burden-Stelly, Charisse. “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism Some Theoretical Insights.”

[42] Becker, Brian. “How the Ideas of ‘The State and Revolution’ Changed History.” p. 11.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. Machiavelli and Us. Trans. F. Matheron. Verso, 2000.

Becker, Brian. “How the Ideas of ‘The State and Revolution’ Changed History.” In B. Becker (Ed.), Revolution Manifesto: Understanding Marx and Lenin’s Theory of Revolution. Liberation Media, 2015.

Burden-Stelly, Charisse. “Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism Some Theoretical Insights.” Monthly Review, Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 8-20.

Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England. Oxford University Press, 2009.

​​Horne, Gerald. “White Supremacy and Anticommunism.” Science & Society, Vol. 62, No. 2, 1998, pp. 282-283.

Ireland, David. The Communist Manifesto in the Revolutionary Politics of 1848: A Critical Evaluation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.

Jones, Gareth Stedman. “Introduction.” In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Books, 1967.

La Riva, Gloria. “Lenin and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination.” In J. Cutter (Ed.), Storming the Gates: How the Russian Revolution Changed the World. Liberation Media, 2017.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): The Process of Capitalist Production. Trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling. International Publishers, 1967.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 2): The Process of Circulation of Capital. International Publishers, 1967.

Marx, Karl. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft). Trans. M. Nicolaus. Penguin Books, 1993.

Marx, Karl. “Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works (Vol. 39): Letters 1852-1855, Lawrence & Wisehart, 2010.

Marx, Karl. “Revolution in China and Europe.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works (Vol. 12): Marx and Engels 1853-1854. Lawrence & Wisehart, 2010.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1967).

Pradella, Lucia. Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings. Routledge, 2015.

Wolff, Wilhelm, and Schapper, Karl. “A Circular of the First Congress of the Communist League to the League Members. June 9,1847.” In Marx-Engels Collected Works (Vol. 6): Marx and Engels: 1845-1848. Lawrence & Wishart, 2010.

Revolution in the Twenty-First Century: A Reconsideration of Marxism

By Chris Wright

In the age of COVID-19, it’s even more obvious than it’s been for at least ten or twenty years that capitalism is entering a long, drawn-out period of unprecedented global crisis. The Great Depression and World War II will likely, in retrospect, seem rather minor—and temporally condensed—compared to the many decades of ecological, economic, social, and political crises humanity is embarking on now. In fact, it’s probable that we’re in the early stages of the protracted collapse of a civilization, which is to say of a particular set of economic relations underpinning certain social, political, and cultural relations. One can predict that the mass popular resistance, worldwide, engendered by cascading crises will gradually transform a decrepit ancien régime, although in what direction it is too early to tell. But left-wing resistance is already spreading and even gaining the glimmers of momentum in certain regions of the world, including—despite the ending of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign—the reactionary United States. Over decades, the international left will grow in strength, even as the right, in all likelihood, does as well.

Activism of various practical and ideological orientations is increasingly in a state of ferment—and yet, compared to the scale it will surely attain in a couple of decades, it is still in its infancy. In the U.S., for example, “democratic socialism” has many adherents, notably in the DSA and in the circles around Jacobin magazine. There are also organizations, and networks of organizations, that consciously repudiate the “reformism” of social democracy, such as the Marxist Center, which disavows the strategy of electing progressive Democratic politicians as abject “class collaboration.” Actually, many democratic socialists would agree that it’s necessary, sooner or later, to construct a workers’ party, that the Democratic Party is ineluctably and permanently fused with the capitalist class. But the Marxist Center rejects the very idea of prioritizing electoral work, emphasizing instead “base-building” and other modes of non-electoral activism.

Meanwhile, there are activists in the solidarity economy, who are convinced it’s necessary to plant the institutional seeds of the new world in the fertile soil of the old, as the old slowly decays and collapses. These activists take their inspiration from the recognition, as Rudolf Rocker put it in his classic Anarcho-Syndicalism, that “every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men; they cannot themselves create these germs or generate new worlds out of nothing.” The Libertarian Socialist Caucus of the DSA is one group that identifies with this type of thinking, but there are many others, including the Democracy Collaborative, the Democracy at Work Institute (also this one), Shareable, and more broadly the New Economy Coalition. Cooperation Jackson has had some success building a solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi.

The numbers and varieties of activists struggling to build a new society are uncountable, from Leninists to anarchists to left-liberals and organizers not committed to ideological labels. Amidst all this ferment, however, one thing seems lacking: a compelling theoretical framework to explain how corporate capitalism can possibly give way to an economically democratic, ecologically sustainable society. How, precisely, is that supposed to happen? Which strategies are better and which worse for achieving this end—an end that may well, indeed, seem utopian, given the miserable state of the world? What role, for instance, does the venerable tradition of Marxism play in understanding how we might realize our goals? Marx, after all, had a conception of revolution, which he bequeathed to subsequent generations. Should it be embraced, rejected, or modified?

Where, in short, can we look for some strategic and theoretical guidance?

In this article I’ll address these questions, drawing on some of the arguments in my book Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States (specifically chapters 4 and 6).[1] As I’ve argued elsewhere, historical materialism is an essential tool to understand society and how a transition to some sort of post-capitalism may occur. Social relations are grounded in production relations, and so to make a revolution it is production relations that have to be transformed. But the way to do so isn’t the way proposed by Marx in the Communist Manifesto, or by Engels and Lenin and innumerable other Marxists later: that, to quote Engels’ Anti-Dühring, “The proletariat seizes state power, and then transforms the means of production into state property.” Or, as the Manifesto states, “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.”

Instead, the revolution has to be a gradual and partially “unconscious” process, as social contradictions are tortuously resolved “dialectically,” not through a unitary political will that seizes the state (every state!) and then consciously, semi-omnisciently reconstructs the economy from the top down, magically transforming authoritarian relations into democratic ones through the exercise of state bureaucracy. In retrospect, this idea that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” will plan and direct the social revolution, and that the latter will, in effect, happen after the political revolution, seems incredibly idealistic, unrealistic, and thus un-Marxist.

I can’t rehearse here all the arguments in my book, but I’ve sketched some of them in this article. In the following I’ll briefly restate a few of the main points, after which I’ll argue that on the basis of my revision of Marxism we can see there is value in all the varieties of activism leftists are currently pursuing. No school of thought has a monopoly on the truth, and all have limitations. Leftists must tolerate disagreements and work together—must even work with left-liberals—because a worldwide transition between modes of production takes an inordinately long time and takes place on many different levels.

I’ll also offer some criticisms of each of the three broad “schools of thought” I mentioned above, namely the Jacobin social democratic one, the more self-consciously far-left one that rejects every hint of “reformism,” and the anarchistic one that places its faith in things like cooperatives, community land trusts, mutual aid, “libertarian municipalism,” all sorts of decentralized participatory democracy. At the end I’ll briefly consider the overwhelming challenge of ecological collapse, which is so urgent it would seem to render absurd, or utterly defeatist, my insistence that “the revolution” will take at least a hundred years to wend its way across the globe and unseat all the old social relations.

Correcting Marx

Karl Marx was a genius, but even geniuses are products of their environment and are fallible. We can hardly expect Marx to have gotten absolutely everything right. He couldn’t foresee the welfare state or Keynesian stimulation of demand, which is to say he got the timeline for revolution wrong. One might even say he mistook the birth pangs of industrial capitalism for its death throes: a global transition to socialism never could have happened in the nineteenth century, nor even in the twentieth, which was the era of “monopoly capitalism,” state capitalism, entrenched imperialism, the mature capitalist nation-state. It wasn’t even until the last thirty years that capitalist relations of production fully conquered vast swathes of the world, including the so-called Communist bloc and much of the Global South. And Marx argued, at least in the Manifesto, that capitalist globalization was a prerequisite to socialism (or communism).

All of which is to say that only now are we finally entering the era when socialist revolution is possible. The earlier victories, in 1917, 1949, 1959, and so on, did not achieve socialism—workers’ democratic control of the economy—and, in the long run, could not have. They occurred in a predominantly capitalist world—capitalism was in the ascendancy—and were constrained by the limits of that world, the restricted range of possibilities. Which is doubtless why all those popular victories ended up in one or another form of oppressive statism (or else were soon crushed by imperialist powers).

If Marx was wrong about the timeline, he was also wrong about his abstract conceptualization of how the socialist revolution would transpire. As he put it in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production… From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.” The notion of fettering, despite its criticism by exponents of Analytical Marxism, is useful, but not in the form it’s presented here. For to say that relations of production fetter productive forces (or, more precisely, fetter their socially rational use and development) is not to say very much. How much fettering is required for a revolution to happen? Surely capitalism has placed substantial fetters on the productive forces for a long time—and yet here we all are, still stuck in this old, fettered world.

To salvage Marx’s intuition, and in fact to make it quite useful, it’s necessary to tweak his formulation. Rather than some sort of “absolute” fettering of productive forces by capitalist relations, there is a relative fettering—relative to an emergent mode of production, a more democratic and socialized mode, that is producing and distributing resources more equitably and rationally than the capitalist.

A parallel (albeit an imperfect one) is the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Feudal relations certainly obstructed economic growth, but it wasn’t until a “competing” economy—of commercial, financial, agrarian, and finally industrial capitalism—had made great progress in Western Europe that the classical epoch of revolution between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries burst onto the scene. Relative to capitalism, feudalism was hopelessly stagnant, and therefore, once capitalism had reached a certain level of development, doomed.

Crucially, the bourgeoisie’s conquest of political power wasn’t possible until capitalist economic relations had already, over centuries, spread across much of Europe. There had to be a material foundation for the capitalist class’s ultimate political victories: without economic power—the accumulation of material resources through institutions they controlled—capitalists could never have achieved political power. That is to say, much of the enormously protracted social revolution occurred before the final “seizure of the state.”

If historical materialism is right, as it surely is, the same paradigm must apply to the transition from capitalism to socialism. The working class can never complete its conquest of the state until it commands considerable economic power—not only the power to go on strike and shut down the economy but actual command over resources, resources sufficient to compete with the ruling class. The power to strike, while an important tool, is not enough. Nor are mere numbers, however many millions, enough, as history has shown. The working class needs its own institutional bases from which to wage a very prolonged struggle, and these institutions have to be directly involved in the production and accumulation of resources. Only after some such “alternative economy,” or socialized economy, has emerged throughout much of the world alongside the rotting capitalist economy will the popular classes be in a position to finally complete their takeover of states. For they will have the resources to politically defeat the—by then—weak, attenuated remnants of the capitalist class.

Marx, in short, was wrong to think there would be a radical disanalogy between the transition to capitalism and the transition to socialism. Doubtless the latter process (if it happens) will take far less time than the earlier did, and will be significantly different in many other respects. But social revolutions on the scale we’re discussing—between vastly different modes of production—are always very gradual, never a product of a single great moment (or several moments) of historical “rupture” but rather of many decades of continual ruptures.[2] Why? Simply because ruling classes are incredibly tenacious, they have incredible powers of repression, and it requires colossal material resources to defeat them—especially in the age of globalized capitalism.

Building a new mode of production

What we must do, then, is to laboriously construct new relations of production as the old capitalist relations fall victim to their contradictions. But how is this to be done? At this early date, it is, admittedly, hard to imagine how it can be accomplished. Famously, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

But two things are clear. First, a significant amount of grassroots initiative is necessary. The long transition will not take place only on one plane, the plane of the state; there will be a tumult of creative energy on sub-state levels, as there was during Europe’s transition into capitalism. (Of course, in the latter case it was typically to establish predatory and exploitative relations, not democratic or communal ones, but the point holds.) The many forms of such energy can hardly be anticipated, but they will certainly involve practices that have come to be called the “solidarity economy,” including the formation of cooperatives of all types, public banks, municipal enterprises, participatory budgeting, mutual aid networks, and so on. In a capitalist context it is inconceivable that states will respond to crisis by dramatically improving the circumstances of entire populations; as a result, large numbers of people will be compelled to build new institutions to survive and to share and accumulate resources. Again, this process, which will occur all over the world and to some degree will be organized and coordinated internationally, will play out over generations, not just two or three decades.

In the long run, moreover, this solidarity economy will not prove to be some sort of innocuous, apolitical, compatible-with-capitalism development; it will foster anti-capitalist ways of thinking and acting, anti-capitalist institutions, and anti-capitalist resistance. It will facilitate the accumulation of resources among organizations committed to cooperative, democratic, socialized production and distribution, a rebuilding of “the commons,” a democratization of the state. It will amount to an entire sphere of what has been called “dual power” opposed to a still-capitalist state, a working-class base of power to complement the power of workers and unions to strike.

The second point is that, contrary to anarchism, it will be necessary to use the state to help construct a new mode of production. Governments are instruments of massive social power and they cannot simply be ignored or overthrown in a general strike. However unpleasant or morally odious it may be to participate in hierarchical structures of political power, it has to be a part of any strategy to combat the ruling class.

Activists and organizations will pressure the state at all levels, from municipal to national, to increase funding for the solidarity economy. In fact, they already are, and have had success in many countries and municipalities, including in the U.S. The election of more socialists to office will encourage these trends and ensure greater successes. Pressure will also build to fund larger worker cooperatives, to convert corporations to worker-owned businesses, and to nationalize sectors of the economy. And sooner or later, many states will start to give in.

Why? One possible state response to crisis, after all, is fascism. And fascism of some form or other is indeed being pursued by many countries right now, from Brazil to Hungary to India to the U.S. But there’s a problem with fascism: by its murderous and ultra-nationalistic nature, it can be neither permanent nor continuously enforced worldwide. Even just in the United States, the governmental structure is too vast and federated, there are too many thousands of relatively independent political jurisdictions, for a fascist regime to be consolidated in every region of the country. Fascism is only a temporary and partial solution for the ruling class. It doesn’t last.

The other solution, which doubtless will always be accompanied by repression, is to grant concessions to the masses. Here, it’s necessary to observe that the state isn’t monolithically an instrument of capital. While capital dominates it, it is a terrain of struggle, “contestations,” “negotiations,” of different groups—classes, class subgroups, interest groups, even individual entities—advocating for their interests. Marxists from Engels, Kautsky, and Lenin to Miliband and Poulantzas to more recent writers have felled forests writing about the nature of the capitalist state, but for the purposes of revolutionary strategy all you need is some critical common sense (as Noam Chomsky, dismissive of self-indulgent “theorizing,” likes to point out). It is possible for popular movements to exert such pressure on the state that they slowly change its character, thereby helping to change the character of capitalist society.

In particular, popular organizations and activists can take advantage of splits within the ruling class to push agendas that benefit the populace. The political scientist Thomas Ferguson, among others, has shown how the New Deal, including the epoch-making Wagner Act and Social Security Act, was made possible by just such divisions in the ranks of business. On a grander scale, Western Europe’s long transition from feudalism to capitalism was accompanied by divisions within the ruling class, between more forward-thinking and more hidebound elements. (As is well known, a number of landed aristocrats and clergymen even supported the French Revolution, at least in its early phases.) Marx was therefore wrong to imply that it’s the working class vs. the capitalist class, monolithically. This totally Manichean thinking suggested that the only way to make a revolution is for the proletariat to overthrow the ruling class in one blow, so to speak, to smash a united reactionary opposition that, moreover, is in complete control of the state (so the state has to be seized all at once).

On the contrary, we can expect the past to repeat itself: as crises intensify and popular resistance escalates, liberal factions of the ruling class will split off from the more reactionary elements in order to grant concessions. In our epoch of growing social fragmentation, environmental crisis, and an increasingly dysfunctional nation-state, many of these concessions will have the character not of resurrecting the centralized welfare state but of encouraging phenomena that seem rather “interstitial” and less challenging to capitalist power than full-fledged social democracy is. But, however innocent it might seem to support new “decentralized” solutions to problems of unemployment, housing, consumption, and general economic dysfunction, in the long run, as I’ve said, these sorts of reforms will facilitate the rise of a more democratic and socialized political economy within the shell of the decadent capitalist one.

At the same time, to tackle the immense crises of ecological destruction and economic dysfunction, more dramatic and visible state interventions will be necessary. They may involve nationalizations of the fossil fuel industry, enforced changes to the polluting practices of many industries, partial reintroductions of social-democratic policies, pro-worker reforms of the sort that Bernie Sanders’ campaign categorized under “workplace democracy,” etc. Pure, unending repression will simply not be sustainable. These more “centralized,” “statist” reforms, just like the promotion of the solidarity economy, will in the long run only add to the momentum for continued change, because the political, economic, and ecological context will remain that of severe worldwide crisis.

Much of the ruling class will of course oppose and undermine progressive policies—especially of the more statist variety—every step of the way, thus deepening the crisis and doing its own part to accelerate the momentum for change. But by the time it becomes clear to even the liberal sectors of the business class that its reforms are undermining the long-term viability and hegemony of capitalism, it will be too late. They won’t be able to turn back the clock: there will be too many worker-owned businesses, too many public banks, too many state-subsidized networks of mutual aid, altogether too many reforms to the old type of neoliberal capitalism (reforms that will have been granted, as always, for the sake of maintaining social order). The slow-moving revolution will feed on itself and will prove unstoppable, however much the more reactionary states try to clamp down, murder dissidents, prohibit protests, and bust unions. Besides, as Marx predicted, the revolutionary project will be facilitated by the thinning of the ranks of the capitalist elite due to repeated economic collapses and the consequent destruction of wealth.

Just as the European absolutist state of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries was compelled to empower—for the sake of accumulating wealth—the capitalist classes that created the conditions of its demise, so the late-capitalist state will be compelled, for the purposes of internal order, to acquiesce in the construction of non-capitalist institutions that correct some of the “market failures” of the capitalist mode of production. The capitalist state will, of necessity, be a participant in its own demise. Its highly reluctant sponsorship of new practices of production, distribution, and social life as a whole—many of them “interstitial” at first—will be undertaken on the belief that it’s the lesser of two evils, the greater evil being the complete dissolution of capitalist power resulting from the dissolution of society.

It is impossible to predict this long process in detail, or to say how and when the working class’s gradual takeover of the state (through socialist representatives and the construction of new institutions on local and eventually national levels) will be consummated. Nor can we predict what the nation-state itself will look like then, what political forms it will have, how many of its powers will have devolved to municipal and regional levels and how many will have been lost to supra-national bodies of world governance. Needless to say, it is also hopeless to speculate on the future of the market, or whether various kinds of economic planning will, after generations, mostly take the place of the market.

As for “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” this entity, like the previous “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie,” won’t exist until the end of the long process of transformation. Marxists, victims of impatience as well as the statist precedents of twentieth-century “Communist” countries, have traditionally gotten the order wrong, forgetting the lesson of Marxism itself that the state is a function of existing social relations and can’t simply be taken over by workers in the context of a still-wholly-capitalist economy. Nor is it at all “dialectical” to think that a group of workers’ representatives can will a new economy into existence, overcoming the authoritarian, bureaucratic, inefficient, exploitative institutional legacies of capitalism by a few acts of statist will. Historical materialism makes clear the state isn’t so radically socially creative![3]

Instead, the contrast that will appear between the stagnant, “fettering” old forms of capitalism and the more rational and democratic forms of the emergent economy is what will guarantee, in the end, the victory of the latter.

An ecumenical activism

In a necessarily speculative and highly abstract way I’ve tried to sketch the logic of how a new economy might emerge from the wreckage of capitalism, and how activists with an eye toward the distant future might orient their thinking. It should be evident from what I’ve said that there isn’t only one way to make a revolution; rather, in a time of world-historic crisis, simply fighting to humanize society will generate anti-capitalist momentum. And there are many ways to make society more humane.

Consider the social democratic path, the path of electing socialists and pressuring government to expand “welfare state” measures. Far-leftists often deride this approach as merely reformist; in the U.S., it’s also common to dismiss the idea of electing progressive Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because supposedly the Democratic Party is hopelessly capitalist and corrupt. It can’t be moved left, and it will certainly never be a socialist party.

According to Regeneration Magazine, for instance, a voice of the Marxist Center network, “Reformism accepts as a given the necessity of class collaboration, and attempts to spin class compromise as a necessary good. One of the more popular strategic proposals of the reformist camp is the promotion of candidates for elected office running in a capitalist party; a clear instance of encouraging class collaboration.”

There are a number of possible responses to such objections. One might observe that if the left insists on absolute purity and refuses to work with anyone who can be seen as somehow “compromised,” it’s doomed to irrelevance—or, worse, it ends up fracturing the forces of opposition and thus benefits the reactionaries. It is a commonplace of historiography on fascism that the refusal of Communist parties in the early 1930s to cooperate with socialists and social democrats only empowered the Nazis and other such elements—which is why the Stalinist line changed in 1934, when the period of the Popular Front began. Then, in the U.S., began Communist efforts to build the Democrat-supported CIO (among other instances of “collaboration” with Democrats), which was highly beneficial to the working class. Leftists, more than anyone else, should be willing and able to learn from history.

Or one might state the truism that social democracy helps people, and so if you care about helping people, you shouldn’t be opposed to social democracy. It may be true that the Democratic Party is irredeemably corrupt and capitalist, but the more left-wing policymakers we have, the better. Democrats have moved to the left in the past, e.g. during the New Deal and the Great Society, and they may be able to move to the left in the future. One of the goals of socialists should be to fracture the ruling class, to provoke splits that provide opportunities for socialist organizing and policymaking.

At the same time, the strategy of electing left-wing Democrats or “reformists” should be complemented by an effort to build a working-class party, not only for the sake of having such a party but also to put pressure on the mainstream “left.” Anyway, the broader point is just that the state is an essential terrain of struggle, and all ways of getting leftists elected have to be pursued.

Personally, I’m skeptical that full-fledged social democracy, including an expansion of it compared to its traditional form, is possible any longer, least of all on an international or global scale. Thus, I don’t have much hope for a realization of the Jacobin vision, that societies can pass straight into socialism by resurrecting and continuously broadening and deepening social democracy. Surely Marxism teaches us that we can’t resuscitate previous social formations after they have passed from the scene, particularly not institutional forms that have succumbed (or are in the process of succumbing) to the atomizing, disintegrating logic of capital. The expansive welfare state was appropriate to an age of industrial unionism and limited mobility of capital. Given the monumental crises that will afflict civilization in the near future, the social stability and coherence required to sustain genuine social democracy will not exist.

But that doesn’t mean limited social-democratic victories aren’t still possible. They certainly are. And in the long run, they may facilitate the emergence of new democratic, cooperative, ecologically viable modes of production, insofar as they empower the left. Even something like a Green New Deal, or at least a partial realization of it, isn’t out of the question.

On the other hand, while mass politics is necessary, that doesn’t mean we should completely reject non-electoral “movementism.” As I’ve argued, the project of building a new society doesn’t happen only on the level of the state; it also involves other types of popular organizing and mobilizing, including in the solidarity economy. The latter will likely, indeed, be a necessity for people’s survival in the coming era of state incapacity to deal with catastrophe.

Not all types of anarchist activism are fruitful or even truly leftist, but the anarchist intuition to organize at the grassroots and create horizontal networks of popular power is sound. Even in the ultra-left contempt for reformism there is the sound intuition that reforms are not enough, and we must always press forward towards greater radicalism and revolution.

An ecological apocalypse?

An obvious objection to the conception and timeframe of revolution I’ve proposed is that it disregards the distinct possibility that civilization will have disappeared a hundred years from now if we don’t take decisive action immediately. For one thing, nuclear war remains a dire threat. But even more ominously, capitalism is turbocharged to destroy the natural bases of human life.

There’s no need to run through the litany of crimes capitalism is committing against nature. Humanity is obviously teetering on the edge of a precipice, peering down into a black hole below. Our most urgent task is to, at the very least, take a few steps back from the precipice.

The unfortunate fact, however, is that global capitalism will not be overcome within the next few decades. It isn’t “defeatist” to say this; it’s realistic. The inveterate over-optimism of many leftists, even in the face of a dismal history, is quite remarkable. Transitions between modes of production aren’t accomplished in a couple of decades: they take generations, and involve many setbacks, then further victories, then more defeats, etc. The long march of reactionaries to their current power in the U.S. took fifty years, and they existed in a sympathetic political economy and had enormous resources. It’s hard to believe socialists will be able to revolutionize the West and even the entire world in less time.

Fortunately, it is possible to combat ecological collapse even in the framework of capitalism. One way to do so, which, sadly, is deeply unpopular on the left, is for governments to subsidize the massive expansion of nuclear power, a very clean and effective source of energy despite the conventional wisdom. The rollout of renewable energy is important too, despite its many costs. Meanwhile, it is far from hopeless to try to force governments to impose burdensome regulations and taxes on polluting industries or even, ideally, to shut down the fossil fuel industry altogether. Capitalism itself is indeed, ultimately, the culprit, but reforms can have a major effect, at the very least buying us some time.

Climate change and other environmental disasters may, nevertheless, prove to be the undoing of civilization, in which case the social logic of a post-capitalist revolution that I’ve outlined here won’t have time to unfold. Nothing certain can be said at this point—except that the left has to stop squabbling and get its act together. And it has to be prepared for things to get worse before they get better. As Marx understood, that’s how systemic change tends to work: the worse things get—the more unstable the system becomes—the more people organize to demand change, and in the end the likelier it is that such change will happen.

The old apothegm “socialism or barbarism” has to be updated: it’s now socialism or apocalypse.

But the strategic lesson of the “purifications” I’ve suggested of Marxist theory remains: the path to socialism is not doctrinaire, not sectarian, not wedded to a single narrow ideological strain; it is catholic, inclusive, open-ended—both “reformist” and non-reformist, statist and non-statist, Marxist and anarchist, Democrat-cooperating and -non-cooperating. Loath as we might be to admit it, it is even important that we support lesser-evil voting, for instance electing Biden rather than Trump. Not only does it change people’s lives to have a centrist instead of a fascist in power; it also gives the left more room to operate, to influence policy, to advocate “radical reforms” that help lay the groundwork for new economic relations.

It’s time for creative and flexible thinking. The urgency of our situation demands it.

Notes

[1] Being an outgrowth of my Master’s thesis, the book over-emphasizes worker cooperatives. It does, however, answer the usual Marxist objections to cooperatives as a component of social revolution.

[2] If someone will counterpose here the example of Russia, which didn’t require “many decades” to go from capitalism and late-feudalism to a “Stalinist mode of production,” I’d reply that the latter was in fact like a kind of state capitalism, and therefore wasn’t so very different after all from the authoritarian, exploitative, surplus-extracting, capital-accumulating economy that dominated in the West.

[3] This is why I claim in the above-linked book that my “revisions” of Marxism are really purifications of it, eliminations of mistakes that finally make the properly understood Marxist conception of revolution consistent with the premises of historical materialism.