Basics, Part 3
Bourgeois
and Proletarians
Bourgeois & Proletarians is the first of the three major parts of
the Communist Manifesto, commissioned by
the Communist League, written in London by Karl Marx, at the age of 29, with
the help of his then 27-year-old friend Frederick Engels, and published in
January, 1848.
Also included is the final page of the Manifesto, called “Position of
the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties.”
Marx and Engels were under pressure from the Communist League to get
this job done quickly. The brief was as difficult as it could be: to produce a
short, emphatic, unambiguous, motivational description of historic processes,
and to announce a credible determination to change the world under the
leadership of the most exploited class of people, the working class, also known
as the proletariat.
Marx and Engels were convinced that the new masters, the capitalists,
also known as burghers, or burgesses, or bourgeoisie, that had grown up in the
towns under feudal rule, were sooner or later going to be overthrown by the
proletariat that the bourgeoisie had brought into existence.
Marx fell behind the agreed deadline, but came through with a
magnificent text just a few weeks before the February, 1848 events
in Paris that brought the proletariat on to the stage of history to
an extent that had not previously been seen in the world.
The timing was great, and the text turned out to be classic to the
extent that every line of it is memorable, especially in this first part. It is
so rich and so compressed as to be saturated with meaning, and hence practically
impossible to summarise. Therefore let us simply quote some of the most
extraordinary sentences, so as to encourage you to read the document, not once
but many times:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles.
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into
two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other -
bourgeoisie and proletariat.
The executive of the modern state is but a committee
for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.
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.
All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real
condition of life and his relations with his kind.
The final words of the Manifesto are as follows:
In short, the Communists everywhere support every
revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of
things.
In all these movements, they bring to the front, as
the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree
of development at the time.
Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and
agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.
WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Communist Manifesto,
Bourgeois and Proletarians, Marx and Engels.
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