In 1848 a great revolutionary upsurge spread through Europe. These revolutions swept through Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, Ireland and other parts of Europe. By and large, these were democratic revolutions against feudalism, waged by the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie and the working class. In the midst of this wave of revolution, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels joined the underground German Communist League. Marx and Engels were tasked with writing the program of the Communist League, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, a document that would explain the organization's analysis of the situation and its plan for how to move from that situation to revolution and socialism. 

Lenin writes of this period: 

“The revolution of 1848, which broke out first in France and then spread to other West-European countries, brought Marx and Engels back to their native country. Here, in Rhenish Prussia, they took charge of the democratic Neue Rheinische Zeitung published in Cologne. The two friends were the heart and soul of all revolutionary-democratic aspirations in Rhenish Prussia. They fought to the last ditch in defense of freedom and of the interests of the people against the forces of reaction. The latter, as we know, gained the upper hand. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was suppressed. Marx, who during his exile had lost his Prussian citizenship, was deported; Engels took part in the armed popular uprising, fought for liberty in three battles, and after the defeat of the rebels fled, via Switzerland, to London.”

Marx and Engels were not simply theorists, as they are so often portrayed by bourgeois academics. They were revolutionary organizers and fighters, whose theoretical work was driven by the practical needs of the revolutionary movement. Marx’s “Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League” of March 1850 outlines the practical work that accompanied the program put forward in the Manifesto and is important to look at together with it.

The Manifesto of the Communist Party

The Communist Manifesto is one of the clearest and most straightforward expressions of Marxism. As Lenin put it, “This little booklet is worth whole volumes: to this day its spirit inspires and guides the entire organized and fighting proletariat of the civilized world.” It explains the basic ideas of historical materialism and scientific socialism in a way that is accessible and inspiring. It is no wonder that this text has been a guide for revolutionaries the world over ever since, taking root first in Russia with the Bolshevik Revolution. 

In 1872, Marx and Engels wrote a preface to the Manifesto, in which they stressed that “however much that state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever.” They also emphasize that “the practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing.” At the same time, they note that history isn’t static, and that theory must develop along with practice. For this reason, they draw particular attention to the Revolution of 1848 in France and the Paris Commune in 1871, saying, “One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.’” Instead, as Marx explains in his books summing up those struggles, namely The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and The Civil War in France, it must be smashed and replaced by new organs of working class state power. 

The history of class struggle

The first chapter of the Manifesto begins with a declaration of the central principle of historical materialism: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” It explains that this struggle inevitably results in “the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” In the current period, it says, these contending classes are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – the capitalist class that owns the means of production, and the working class that lives by selling its labor power to the capitalists. It outlines the historical development of these two classes, and their trajectory moving forward. 

Marx and Engels explain the contemporary, bourgeois epoch like this: “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 new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” And they emphasize, capitalism’s predatory internal logic reshapes the world in its image. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” 

Here, also, Marx and Engels put forward the basic principle of historical materialism, that social progress is driven by the contradiction in any given historical mode of production between the forces of production and the relations of production. As the Manifesto states, “At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.” 

Marx and Engels explain how, in capitalist society, the relations of production – that is, the class relations of ownership and power – likewise hold back the development of the productive forces, resulting in crises of overproduction:

“The essential conditions for the existence and for the sway of the bourgeois class is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests exclusively on competition between the laborers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the laborers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

Following the sweeping analysis of the first chapter, which gives a picture of the terrain of struggle and the laws of motion driving things, the second chapter explains the aims of the communists: “formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.” 

The Manifesto explains the goal of socialism is to abolish all “class antagonisms and … classes generally.” This is an explanation, in a very concise and sweeping form, of the transition period from capitalism to communism, which Marx elsewhere calls the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

“Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.”

This is the first phase of socialism, the transition from capitalism to communism, where the working class wields state power in order to systematically uproot “the conditions for the existence” of classes. By doing this it abolishes the need for a state as such, as “the organized power of one class for oppressing another,” thus making possible a new stateless and classless world. Marx elaborates on this in his Critique of Gotha Program and Lenin further develops this in The State and Revolution. 

In the third chapter, Marx and Engels distinguish scientific socialism from various forms or reactionary, conservative, and utopian socialist movements. Here, Marx and Engels are dealing with their predecessors and their contemporaries: Moses Hess, Proudhon, Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen. 

Finally, in the last section, they distinguish the Communist League from other parties and revolutionary forces. They explain that “the Communists fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class; but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.” They explain that in different places, they forge alliances with different class forces based on the concrete conditions in which those struggles find themselves. “In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.” 

The Manifesto boldly and courageously declares that “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.” Many opportunists today, who insist on equivocating on their positions, would do well to remember this important principled stand. “Let the ruling classes tremble,” the Manifesto says. No attempt at liberal respectability will protect them whenever the ruling class inevitably decides to show its teeth. The capitalists know who their enemy is, and so must we. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” 

The Manifesto in practice 

In March of 1850, Marx gave his famous “Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League,” where he explains the practical implications of his theory, from the perspective of the concrete conditions of the revolutionary movement at the time. In this speech, Marx ends with the call for “permanent revolution.” This is a term that has been twisted away from Marx’s intent by the Trotskyites, who only confuse things by using the slogan to name Trotsky’s theory of world-wide-revolution-or-nothing, which Lenin called “absurdly Left.” For the Trotskyites, it is a matter of the workers fighting alone against capitalism, everywhere at once. By “permanent revolution,” Marx and Lenin mean advancing the revolution from the bourgeois democratic to the proletarian socialist stage, while Trotsky, on the other hand, means revolution can only succeed by spreading immediately from one country to all countries, with the working class alone fighting against all non-proletarian classes. 

Marx and Lenin advocated revolution in two stages, uniting with other classes, and establishing and consolidating socialism one country at a time. When Marx talked about permanent revolution in this address, he clearly intended this to mean that the revolutionary upsurge must not halt at the democratic stage, but that the working class must lead it forward into its second, proletarian socialist stage. As Marx puts it, 

“While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible … it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers.”

Indeed, Marx gives us sound and practical advice that resonates today as we work to build a united front against monopoly capitalism. He says, “The relationship of the revolutionary workers’ party to the petty-bourgeois democrats is this: it cooperates with them against the party which they aim to overthrow; it opposes them wherever they wish to secure their own position.” 

But Marx insists on what Mao Zedong would later refer to as “independence and initiative in the united front.” The working class must be independently organized and prepared to resist the reactionary turn of the bourgeois class forces following the bourgeois democratic stage, where they will attempt to consolidate their power at the expense of the working class. Thus, in order to be prepared to carry the revolution forward to its second, proletarian socialist stage, “To be able forcefully and threateningly to oppose this party, whose betrayal of the workers will begin with the very first hour of victory,” Marx says, “the workers must be armed and organized.” Marx also insists that “alongside the new official governments they must simultaneously establish their own revolutionary workers’ governments.” Marx and Engels organized to see this come to fruition, but this was first put into practice with lasting success in the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. 

The Manifesto today

Today we live in the era of imperialism. Since the 1970s imperialism has been in a state of prolonged decline. Its defeat is inevitable, but in the meanwhile, like a cornered and wounded animal, it is fighting fiercely. U.S. imperialism is waging war at home and abroad, and we are seeing powerful mass movements mobilizing against it. Militant resistance is coming from the student encampments and building occupations protesting the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide in Gaza against the Palestinian people. These heroic students are facing tremendous repression with courage, knowing they are on the right side of history. Likewise, people are also organizing to resist border militarization, to oppose police brutality, to protect the environment, to stop attacks on women and LGBTQ people, and workers are unionizing and going on strike. People everywhere are fighting back. But in order to advance in a strategic way, and turn resistance into revolution, we need to build a new, Marxist-Leninist communist party. The lessons of the Manifesto and the “Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League” can help us find our way forward, just as they did for so many workers and oppressed people who came before us.

The importance of the Communist Manifesto, and the “Address,” which explained the practical, revolutionary work that the Manifesto outlined in theory, cannot be overstated. We see in these works, for the first time, a truly revolutionary, working-class program, together with the struggle to carry out that program in practice. These works clearly demonstrate that Marx and Engels were revolutionaries, and studying these works ought to expose every opportunist and revisionist who argues for a reformist, social-democratic, or merely academic reading of Marx. They expose all of those who would say that Marx wasn’t a revolutionary, and that Marxists shouldn’t be either. Marxism lays bare the laws at work in history and shows the way forward, and that way forward is a revolutionary road.

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook

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Today we are launching a new series on Marxist-Leninist theory, focusing on important texts from the principal theorists of Marxism-Leninism: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong. In these short reviews, we will look briefly at the historical context of the text, we will break down the main argument and points, and we will talk about how the text remains relevant and applicable to revolutionaries today. We will begin with Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, by Friedrich Engels.

The pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and Scientific was published in 1890, and is extracted from a larger work on Marxist philosophy by Engels, called Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science, from 1877. That book is a response to the work of Professor Karl Eugen Dühring. Dühring criticized Marxism from an idealist and utopian position, and Engel’s book takes the opportunity to answer Dühring and explain clearly and systematically the philosophical and scientific theories of Marxism.

Paul Lafargue, a leading socialist in France and son-in-law to Karl Marx, requested that the text of Socialism, Utopian and Scientific be published as a small pamphlet. The pamphlet was immediately very popular. Engels writes in the introduction to the 1892 English edition, “I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital, has been so often translated.”

The book begins with an analysis of Utopian Socialism, particularly in France. But first, in his introduction to the English edition, Engels gives us an analysis of the historical development of religious thinking among the English bourgeoisie. Here, Engels writes, “The long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism culminated in three great, decisive battles.” These are the Protestant Reformation, the English Revolution, and the French Revolution. He also notes the enormous impact of the industrial revolution and the social revolutions of 1848. Engels traces the role of idealist and materialist thought through these struggles. He writes that “Thus, if materialism became the creed of the French Revolution, the God-fearing English bourgeois held all the faster to his religion.” He goes on to note, “The more materialism spread from France to neighboring countries, and was reinforced by similar doctrinal currents, notably by German philosophy, the more, in fact, materialism and free thought generally became, on the Continent, the necessary qualifications of a cultivated man, the more stubbornly the English middle-class stuck to its manifold religious creeds.”

Engels’ point here is to contextualize, for his readers among the English working class, the text that follows, which deals with the development of socialist thought in France.

Utopian socialism

Engels begins his analysis of the origins of contemporary socialism, writing,

“Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.”

Engels writes that these philosophers were “extreme revolutionists” who believed that “everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence.” According to them, writes Engels,

“Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.”

But Engels stresses “We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie.” Engels emphasizes an important Marxist point here: that ideology and class are bound up together, that the dominant ideas in society are determined by the dominant class in society. Therefore, “this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice … this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law … bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man; and … the government of reason, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic.” Engels sums this point up, by saying that these bourgeois social philosophers of the 18th century “could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch.”

And yet, returning to the “three great, decisive battles of the Reformation, the English Revolution, and the French Revolution, Engels points out, “in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants’ War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Münzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.“ In this way Engels acknowledges that there are two ideologies in conflict in developing capitalist society: the dominant ideology of the bourgeoisie, liberalism, and the revolutionary ideology of the proletariat, socialism. This latter current of thought gives rise to the “three great Utopians,” Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen.

Engels notes that these founders of utopian socialism were also limited by the conditions in which they found themselves. “The solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undeveloped economic conditions, the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain.” Engels explains this further, saying

“Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason. It was necessary, then, to discover a new and more perfect system of social order and to impose this upon society from without by propaganda, and, wherever it was possible, by the example of model experiments. These new social systems were foredoomed as Utopian; the more completely they were worked out in detail, the more they could not avoid drifting off into pure phantasies.”

These utopians were still working within the idealist framework they had inherited from the bourgeois philosophers who were their immediate predecessors. “To all these, Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power,” writes Engels. “And as an absolute truth is independent of time, space, and of the historical development of man, it is a mere accident when and where it is discovered.”

Dialectics

However well meaning they may have been, the utopian founders of modern socialism were unable to place socialism on a scientific basis. On the one hand, as Engels put it, “To the crude conditions of capitalistic production and the crude class conditions correspond crude theories.” Capitalism in its infancy was based in the workshop handicraft industry, which began in the 16th century and would last through the middle of the 18th century. The period of the development of large-scale mechanized industry had only just begun when the utopians were writing. On the other hand, the utopians lacked the methodology to analyze capitalist development. Engels notes that “the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated” by metaphysics.

What does this mean? What is metaphysics? Engels puts it like this.

“To the metaphysician, things and their mental reflexes, ideas, are isolated, are to be considered one after the other and apart from each other, are objects of investigation fixed, rigid, given once for all. He thinks in absolutely irreconcilable antitheses. … For him, a thing either exists or does not exist; a thing cannot at the same time be itself and something else. Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis, one to the other.”

Engels contrasts this mode of thinking with dialectics, which he says, “comprehends things and their representations, ideas, in their essential connection, concatenation, motion, origin and ending.”

In other words, metaphysics sees things as absolute, eternal, fixed, and isolated, while dialectics sees things as always in motion, developing in relation to one-another, as the result of conflict and struggle. This dialectical methodology finds its philosophical expression in the system of the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel. Engels explains, “In this system – and herein is its great merit – for the first time the whole world, natural, historical, intellectual, is represented as a process – i.e., as in constant motion, change, transformation, development; and the attempt is made to trace out the internal connection that makes a continuous whole of all this movement and development.”

This was a huge step forward, but Hegel still wasn’t able to separate his dialectical method from his fundamentally idealist worldview. He still understood historical development as being driven by ideas, and ultimately, by God. It was Marx, by understanding that historical change and social transformation are driven by material processes, namely by class struggle, who put dialectics on a materialist basis. As Engels put it, “Hegel has freed history from metaphysics — he made it dialectic; but his conception of history was essentially idealistic. But now idealism was driven from its last refuge, the philosophy of history; now a materialistic treatment of history was propounded, and a method found of explaining man's ‘knowing’ by his ‘being’, instead of, as heretofore, his ‘being’ by his ‘knowing’.”

Until this point, the utopians sought to theorize socialist society in an idealist and metaphysical way. They didn’t understand the laws of motion of capitalist society, nor did they understand the historic mission of the proletariat to bring class society, exploitation and oppression, to an end. As a result, none of their theories or experiments could bear fruit.

Marx, on the other hand, was able to demonstrate, as Engels notes,

“…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and of the exploitation of the worker that occurs under it; that even if the capitalist buys the labor power of his laborer at its full value as a commodity on the market, he yet extracts more value from it than he paid for; and that in the ultimate analysis, this surplus-value forms those sums of value from which are heaped up constantly increasing masses of capital in the hands of the possessing classes. The genesis of capitalist production and the production of capital were both explained.”

“These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science.”

Historical materialism

The section “Historical Materialism” brings us to the culmination of Engels’s pamphlet. Here he explains the scientific conclusions drawn by applying dialectical materialism to the study of historical development. Engels gives the following general sketch of what historical materialism means:

“The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view, the final causes of all social changes and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men's brains, not in men's better insights into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange.”

Engels explains the core terms used by historical materialism to understand this process: namely, the mode of production, and within that, the forces and relations of production. The mode of production is the way that society organizes the production and distribution of human wants and needs. The forces of production are the tools, factories, farms, and techniques of labor used in that production. And the relations of production are the concrete relationships of ownership and power that govern who does the work and reaps the profits of that work, the class relations of society.

Engels then gives us a sweeping overview of historical materialism. He explains how the division of labor under capitalism gives to the productive forces a social character, carried out by the working class as a whole, while ownership of the means of production and the accumulation of wealth remains private, hoarded by the capitalists. He explains how this fundamental contradiction inherent in capitalism drives the entire system towards crisis. And he explains that the proletariat has an historic mission to abolish “all class distinction and class antagonisms.” He explains that the state arises from class antagonism, and that by abolishing class antagonism, the state “dies out of itself,” or, as Lenin would later put it, “withers away.”

Engels writes, “Anarchy in social production is replaced by systematic, definite organization,” and “The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face-to-face with man as laws of Nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him.” Truly, this is what scientific socialism, that is, Marxism-Leninism, gives to us: an understanding of the laws that govern social development, so that we can use those laws to abolish exploitation and oppression once and for all. Thus, Engels concludes that “To accomplish this act of universal emancipation is the historical mission of the modern proletariat.”

Socialism, Utopian and Scientific today

Anyone interested in social change should read this important pamphlet by Engels. Today, we see all around us various “socialists” who fail to understand the need for dialectical and historical materialism, and so are unable to make their ideas bear fruit. Like the utopians then, today we have various currents of progressive liberals, anarchists, and social democrats, all with their own condemnations of capitalism’s ills, and their own pie-in-the-sky solutions. Like the utopians, they don’t understand the laws of motion that govern social transformation, and they don’t understand that the working class, the proletariat, has a historic mission that only it can achieve. But unlike the utopians, today we have Marxism. We have the theory of dialectical and historical materialism, so we can approach the problems of revolution in a scientific way.

Our job before us today is a big one. We need to bring proletarian ideology home to the workers’ movement, to fuse Marxism with the working-class movement so that workers can get a clear picture of the methods of their exploitation, and the means by which to overcome it. And we need to build a revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist party that can carry out this historic mission to overthrow all existing social relations and build a new, socialist society. Studying this pamphlet by Engels is important to give us the theoretical weapons we need to carry out these tasks.

J. Sykes is the author of the book “The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism”. The book can be purchased by visiting tinyurl.com/revsciMLbook

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