Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto
More Than Just Bread
Who Creates Wealth, and Who Controls It?
Published in 1848, The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is one of the most influential and controversial political texts of the modern age.
It begins with a powerful claim:
Human history is largely a history of struggles between social classes.
Marx and Engels look across different periods of history and see repeated conflicts between groups with different positions and different forms of power: free people and slaves, nobles and commoners, lords and serfs.
Modern capitalism, they argue, has not ended these conflicts.
It has changed them.
In their view, modern society is increasingly divided between two major classes: the bourgeoisie, who own and control capital and the means of production, and the proletariat, who depend mainly on selling their labour in order to live.
But Marx and Engels do not simply condemn the bourgeoisie.
They recognise that capitalism has produced extraordinary change.
Modern industry has transformed production. Trade has expanded across the world. New markets have developed. Technology, transport and communication have connected societies in ways that were previously impossible.
The bourgeoisie itself, they argue, emerged through a long historical process that transformed the older feudal order.
This is important.
For Marx and Engels, capitalism is not a fixed or eternal system.
It is one stage in a continuing process of historical change.
And this leads to one of the central questions of the Manifesto:
If capitalism replaced an earlier economic order, could capitalism itself eventually be replaced?
Their criticism begins with the relationship between capital and labour.
Workers produce goods and contribute to the creation of wealth. Yet, according to Marx and Engels, they do not control the productive system in which they work.
Capital belongs to those who own the means of production.
The worker, by contrast, must sell labour in order to survive.
Marx and Engels therefore ask us to look beyond individual exchanges and examine the structure of the relationship itself.
Is an economic relationship truly free simply because two people formally agree to it?
Or must we also ask how much real choice each person has?
The Manifesto argues that capital is not simply a personal possession. Production depends on the combined activity of many people. Capital therefore has, in their argument, a fundamentally social character and social power.
This brings the text to its most controversial subject: private property.
Marx and Engels are often understood as calling for the abolition of every form of personal possession.
The text itself makes a more specific argument.
Their target is what they call bourgeois private property: property that functions as capital and allows its owners to control production and benefit from wage labour. They distinguish this from the ordinary personal use of what people need to live.
Their question is therefore not simply:
Should people be allowed to own things?
It is:
What happens when ownership gives some people economic power over the lives and labour of others?
Marx and Engels believe that the interests of workers increasingly cross national boundaries.
Workers in different countries may speak different languages and belong to different nations, but they occupy similar positions within the economic system.
For this reason, the Manifesto treats the struggle of workers as international rather than purely national. The Communists, it says, seek to emphasise the common interests of workers across national divisions.
The political conclusion of the text is radical.
Marx and Engels argue that the proletariat should become conscious of itself as a class, challenge bourgeois political supremacy and ultimately gain political power.
Behind this revolutionary language, however, lie questions that can be considered even without accepting their conclusions.
Who creates economic value?
What is a fair reward for labour?
How much inequality can a society sustain?
At what point does wealth become power over other people?
Does formal freedom mean very much without genuine economic choice?
Can private property protect individual independence while also creating large inequalities in power?
Can economic power become political power?
And can attempts to remove economic domination create new forms of political domination?
That last question is especially important for any modern reading of the Manifesto.
Marx and Engels were writing about the injustices and upheavals of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. Their text presents a diagnosis and a revolutionary programme. Reading it today does not require us to accept either completely.
It asks us instead to examine the questions underneath them.
Who benefits from the way an economy is organised?
Who carries its burdens?
Who has real choices?
Who has power?
And what would a genuinely just relationship between work, property, freedom and human dignity look like?
Perhaps the continuing value of The Communist Manifesto lies partly in its ability to make these questions difficult to ignore.
- George Ph Georgiou is an Alumnus and Ambassador of Agora Dialogue, contributing to its continuing exchange of knowledge, ideas and thoughtful public dialogue.
- Dinos Toumazos is Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Agora Dialogue, an initiative dedicated to sharing knowledge and ideas, promoting engaged citizenship and encouraging responsible leadership.