“The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. 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 civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
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 civilisation. 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 civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
…
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), Part I – Bourgeois and Proletarians.
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Great Complainer and The Great Enabler, wrote the Communist Manifesto to promote a working class revolution to overthrow the bourgeois social order and usher in a classless and stateless society based on common ownership of production and property in general. The Manifesto is a statement of ideals and purposes, a program to be implemented, and, most significant for the time, a call to action (“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!”).
Although the Manifesto carries the names of both Marx and Engels, many years later, in 1883, the year of Marx’s death, Engels wrote that the Manifesto was “essentially Marx’s work” and “the basic thought … belongs solely and exclusively to Marx”. This is important because as the work of a single mind the Manifesto offers an insight into Marx’s early intellectual system and moral framework and it reflects the understanding he developed -- better, he was developing -- about the rapidly changing world of his time. It offers an opportunity to see something of the complex nature of this great scholar with his strange, dogmatic, at once repugnant system of ideas yet a vision deeply concerned with and sympathetic of the human condition. That The Great Complainer thought Capitalism was the cause of the miseries of millions certainly was understandable in the circumstances of his times; That Marx thought Socialism was the one true and destined way to overcome the poverty and despair that surrounded him was at once naïve and reflective of an inflexible mind yielding to no alternative point of view; and That he thought that the violent overthrow of the existing order, with the inevitable death and destruction and dictatorial order it would bring in its wake, would somehow inspire people to be generous and charitable toward others is unforgiveable in its misjudgment of human nature. Marx evidently came upon these views early and with little or no input from his frequent collaborator, Engels.
Although Marx is not responsible for the follies and evils committed in his name, he cannot deny the creed and gospel he founded (and evidently founded on his own) directly led to the killing of tens of millions of innocents at the hands of disciples advancing his ideas and his ideals. To that degree he is culpable for mass murder, for he set in motion something more powerful than armies: Ideas that motivate common people to act against common people, and to rationalize the evil they do as historically necessary and in furtherance of some greater good.
The seeds of the later more fully elaborated Marxist Theory of History can be seen in the praise he gives to the Capitalists. In the Marxist Theory of History the transformation of old social systems requires radical and far-reaching changes that can only be brought about when the dominate class of creators, beneficiaries, and defenders of the old system are swept away. The groups that rose under Capitalism to accomplish this task, such as the Capitalist and merchant classes that comprise the bourgeoisie, to Marx’s mind, fulfill the historic purpose of transforming Feudalism from a stagnate and aristocratic society (“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations”) into a dynamic and productive society where employment, education, and the creation of wealth define success (“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones”). It is this historic purpose of the bourgeoisie, eliminating the lords and ladies who prevent the development of the economy while empowering the entrepreneurs who can markedly raise the productive power of society, that Marx praises in this passage.
Needless to say, Marx passionately hated Capitalism and goes on in the Manifesto to condemn the Capitalists strongly. In his view, in the process of fulfilling their role of destroying Feudalism, the Capitalists bring about the very conditions that lead to their own downfall: widening and deepening poverty on the part of the “growing masses” and greater and greater concentrations of wealth among the remaining Capitalists. The correction of Capitalism’s injustices, the Manifesto insists and some people today continue to believe, can only be attained through revolution, a revolution we have repeatedly seen in the past and are likely to see again, for the ideas behind the revolution still circulate in the minds of men.
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