Opportunities for Social Change
The Communist Manifesto
In 1848, German radicals Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto (Das Kommunistische Manifest), a political pamphlet that outlined a brief history of capitalism, explored its inner workings, and highlighted both the need and opportunity for a better form of society — communism. The widely distributed pamphlet was intended to be a call to action.
For Marx, capitalism wasn’t just a model of industrial production, but an entire social system, meaning that it affected not only the workplace, but also politics, culture, and ideas. It radically transformed the structure of the previous social order, namely, feudalism, and created opportunities for progressive change that had not been present before.
Capitalism was creating vast amounts of societal wealth, revolutionizing the production of goods, and doing away with centuries of superstition, tradition, and social norms - and in ways that were beneficial to society. It was also bringing workers together in large numbers, as well as uniting them in the types of work that they were carrying out. It was dissolving the boundaries between nations, sexes, and religions and organising people into two classes — those who owned capital, and those who sold their labour-power.
On the downside, working conditions were miserable, the types of work people did became dull and monotonous, and access to the wealth being created was limited. Capitalism’s positive potential and its harmful limitations were structural — they reinforced each other. But the possibility of progressive change was present in a way it hadn’t been before — in three key ways.
Industry could produce more goods with less labour input than before.
The first opportunity for change is related to technological transformation. The creation of a global homogenous market fueled competition, which in turn led to huge drives in productivity, knowledge, and technological innovation—the creation of social wealth. Mass workforces, technological advancements, and efficient workplace structures meant that industry could produce more goods with less labour input than before. The possibility of living a better, longer life became more real.
The second opportunity was based on the formation of an international working class. Prior to capitalism, there was no general class of workers. People mostly worked for themselves or as part of small communities, predominantly creating goods for the families or communities to consume, as opposed to trade. Those who worked to trade were members of specialist lifelong guilds. But as capitalism developed and more people started to work in mass production, the guild system broke down, and people began to produce goods for wages, not for products they would directly consume or trade. The structure of work was transformed and opened up possibilities for new types of mutual self-interest and solidarity.
Thirdly, working conditions change—people work longer, doing more grueling and repetitive work, and in poorer conditions, as factory owners attempt to keep overheads down and productivity up. People had been immiserated in feudal societies too, but the connectedness of workers and the staggering amounts of social wealth produced allowed for a better life.
The point of The Communist Manifesto was to inspire this new class of workers to unite together.
For Marx, unhappiness with work, coupled with the possibility of a better life (both materially and ideologically), and this new mutual interconnectedness of previously disparate populations, was not only capitalism’s creation but its potential undoing: that is, if workers organised themselves and took control of wealth production.
The point of Tbe Communist Manifesto was to inspire this new class of workers to unite together, and a generation of workers and intellectuals formed international communist organisations to aid this project.
In the decades that followed the publication of The Communist Manifesto, Marx continued to analyse capitalism and work in service of international communist organisations. In that time, workers became more connected, conditions remained poor, and societal wealth in the forms of goods, services, and technology increased. But a series of failed revolutions across Europe and the growing strength of capitalists and weakening of labour organisations, led Marx to question how the status quo had remained.
He would spend the last decades of his life on his most comprehensive project—Das Kapital — a book that would go far beyond The Communist Manifesto or any of his other works and one that would address the question of capitalism’s dominance. Das Kapital would not be a history or economics textbook, or a fiery polemic to inspire workers, but an intricate mapping of capitalism’s internal logic, one that would not only lay bare the central dynamic at the heart of modern society but also ground an understanding of modern philosophy, culture, knowledge, and social psychology, thus helping to explain capitalism’s ability to both create and endure social turmoil. The book successfully lays the theoretical groundwork for societal transformation.
It’s important that, as activists, we view The Communist Manifesto as more than just a historically situated call to action, but as a contemporary signpost to the transformational opportunities available to us. These opportunities continue to assert themselves because capitalism’s growth dynamics create them. The tension between burgeoning social wealth and restricted access to it, between mass unity and individual fragmentation, between boundless futures and the bounded present—this is still, as it was in the 19th century, the site of struggle and opportunity.
