1 - ‘The Hungry Forties’: The Socio-economic Context of the Communist Manifesto

Summary

THE INEVITABILITY OF REVOLUTION

Communism has come and gone. From its invocations of class war to its practice of bureaucratic dictatorship it has left a deeply unappealing image. Of course, twentieth-century communism and nineteenth-century Marxism are not the same thing. Their relationship has been a matter of intense and continuing debate. Whatever view one takes, there is no doubt that the communism of this century has thrown a dark shadow over the Marxism of the previous one.

To understand the Communist Manifesto (and indeed all the other writings of Marx and Engels) we must try to remove the accretions of a later age and get back to the period from which it emerged, for it is the product of a time with assumptions that now seem strange and often implausible. Perhaps what most needs explaining is that which is hardest to condone. The call to class war and revolution is probably now as implausible and unappealing as anything in the Marxist canon. In the Manifesto Marx and Engels traced the long historical process that was to culminate in the communist revolution:

In outlining phases in the development of the proletariat in the most general terms, we traced the more or less hidden civil war within existing society, up to the point where it breaks out into open revolution, and the proletariat establishes its rule through the forcible overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

At the end of a century in which too much blood has been spilt for political causes, such an insistence on violence and class war is, in many respects, deeply unattractive. We can, if we so wish, attribute it to the youthful romanticism of the authors. What I here wish to suggest is, first, that the case for revolution has an intellectual argument behind it; and, second, that this key aspect of the Manifesto forms a characteristic part of the intellectual milieu of its time and was made plausible by the existing social conditions.