FREE ESSAY ON COMMUNIST MANIFESTO: ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR

COMMUNIST MANIFESTO: ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR

In the Gospel of St. Matthew, chapter 27 A-B, the people are given the traditional release
of one prisoner. They have a choice, the just man Jesus Christ and the "notable" prisoner
Barabbas. When asked which prisoner should be released the people responded, "Barabbas."
(convinced by the chief priests and elders.) Pontius Pilate asks what punishment he
should be given. "They all responded: Let him be crucified." Disturbed by the obvious
injustice, Pilate feebly asks, "What evil hath he done?" The people rise in blind,
tumultuous cries, "Let him be crucified!" Again, Pilate appeals to them by washing his
hands before the people and saying, "I am innocent of the blood of this just person." The
impassioned crowd, the tumult rising, calls the accountability upon themselves, "His
blood be on us, and on our children!" 
Bach captures the horrific nature of this event exquisitely in "The St. Matthew Passion."
The chorus explodes into rising human voices, violently one upon the other, in a
terrifying spectacle of mob mentality. The listener is disturbed; the wrongness of it
frightens and saddens him. 
This is an example of a mass human sentiment. It is undeniably immoral and frightening in
its intensity. The people are aroused beyond even what they have been convinced of, to
the point of willfully taking the guilt of innocent blood onto the whole human race. 
What is this phenomena? To a rational individual, the passion of the masses is not only
illogical, but depraved and evil; it is the product of an emotional momentum with nothing
inherent in it to check its behavior. While, undoubtedly, a zealous mass sentiment could
possibly work for a good thing, what is to insure that it will? A mass of humans has no
collective moral conscious; there is no set of laws that it obeys, neither head nor heart
exists to serve as guide. 
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx uses caustic and powerfully persuasive rhetoric to
inflame the mass of the proletariat into revolution. He calls for the abolishment of
government as it is known, to be replaced with the forward movement towards a community
of mass sentiment. According to Marx's economic theory, the present state of capitalism
is inherently unstable; by its own nature it is destined to exhaust itself leaving an
over-simplified society of human beings that have been reduced to the status of things.
The oppressed workers, owners of no property, will collectively revolt and reconstruct
society into communism, where all property in publicly owned. However, after the
immediate revolution, it is the proletariat who become the rulers and it is up to them to
instill communism. The proletariat consists of the majority of the people, an enormous
group of individuals, who, with the blood of recent revolution on their hands, have to
establish a new way of governing society. What is to insure that these united people will
start and maintain a community of communal brotherhood? And why would Marx suppose that
the individual human being would be satisfied with becoming communal or that it is best
for him?
The conflict here is the conflict of man in society. Each man is an autonomous individual
programmed on at least an animal level for his own personal survival, he experiences
distinct emotions and desires, he is given certain facilities and skills different from
other human beings. At the same time, he is a social being, desirous of affection and
recognition from other humans and sympathetic to their experience of life. The two parts
of man sometimes conflict with and other times are augmented by each other.
A man's individual experience is his own; he feels, thinks, desires, and works of his own
accord. It may even be asserted that these activities are even more central to his being
than his social creatureness. Man knows himself best and it may be said that his
inclinations toward being individual are stronger than his inclinations towards society.
Man seeks to protect his individual natural rights to exist as himself. He wants to
become what his desires and abilities dictate that he should.
However, what would a man be without the society his born directly into? Certainly, some
parts of an individual man's personality are determined by the environment in which he
finds himself; he may be able to think, feel, and endeavor all alone, but how does he
think? What makes him choose to endeavor for one thing and not another? At least in part,
these things are determined by the social part of man and what he has learned from the
influence of other human beings. Man uses a cooperative language, he guides his thought
with the histories of former human beings, and in modern society, his food, clothing,
shelter, etc. are, most likely, the products of the work of many people. Perhaps,
indirectly, he is dependent on all people past and present. 
When man determines the way that society is governed, he is obligated to address this
problem. Over the course of history, man has strived to find a way of governing itself
such that both qualities are satisfied. A design is sought of ethical ideals, where each
individual is happy with his relation to society while society at large flourishes
because of the contributions of its constituents. Supposedly, when a promising solution
is formulated, it is stated as a goal and worked toward. 
Marx denies this is true in any case. For how are such utopias of human existence
determined as right, and how do they develop? Marx claims that the people who dream of
such societies are merely that, dreamers. They have only the degree of power that people
who agree with them afford to them. These utopias are 'fantasies' and are born of a wish
for their already established society to be the 'best', "For how can people, when once
they understand their system, fail to see in it the best possible plane of the best
possible state of society?" (CMp.35) While Marx thinks these people are useful for
education, (because they "attack every principle of existing society"(CMp.36)) they are
not effective for real, lasting, reform and merely delay the societies evolution into
communism. Eventually these forms of social thought and action, if developed under
capitalism, degenerate into conservative socialism...a force that seeks to address only
the symptoms and not the cause of societal ills.
For Marx, asking the question of how to satisfy human nature is irrelevant. To try to
find a system of government that is "best" is not reasonable because, according to Marx,
there is no "best", nor any "human nature." History follows its own course set into
motion at some point along the way. And along the way mans conscious nature changes,
"Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conceptions,
in one word mans consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his
existence, in his social relations and in his social life?"(CMp.24)
While the individual part of man, his animal need for survival, the fact that he thinks
and feels, may be static; the communal part, what he thinks and feels, can change. Marx
makes examples of the changing face of society over history. At one point man considered
feudalism to be natural, that he had 'natural superiors.' Man once believed in the divine
right of kings, in the subjugation of the Church. Over time these forms of government
were destroyed and replaced, along with the belief that was the way society should be. 
In a footnote to Section I, Engles claims that it has been proven that primitive
societies were more cooperative in nature than competitive. Thus, at least at one time,
mans nature was not so strongly slanted towards his individual side. Naturally, it is
possible that the things people believe under capitalism are also changeable. At some
point, before recorded history, the development of society was set into the course it is
on now; the reasons are not important for the fact remains: each epoch of history is born
from ruins of the previous and while 'ideas, views, and conceptions' change, they change
according to one rule only: class antagonism.
Marx declares this with confidence, "The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles." (CMp.3) In all societies, he finds, as the only constant,
the existence of the social relationship of the oppressor and the oppressed. In earlier
forms of society, there were many gradations between those who benefitted most from the
social structure and those who suffered because of it. However, with the epoch of
bourgeois society, a tremendous change is occurring: everything is being simplified. Marx
claims that society is breaking up into "two great hostile camps, into two great classes
directly facing each other: Bourgeois and Proletariat." (Cmp3)
Along with the development of the two classes, capitalism is destroying all other
relations of society. As capitalism grows it gains power and political sway, thus law and
government become synonymous with the bourgeois. In order to exist as capitalism it must
expand into new territory; new transportation and communication routes drag all societies
into civilization under capitalism: nationality dissolves. All formerly baseless
relations dissolve as well, 
"It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties . . .And has left remaining no
other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment'. .
.It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless
indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom-- Free
Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has
substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." (Cmp5)
The illusions that once enabled man to live, even a happy life, while being exploited are
shattered; it is now clear that exploitation exists, "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 conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." (Cmp6) 
In Adam Smith's, "The Wealth of Nations," wealth is never exhausted, thus capitalism can
continue indefinitely playing itself out. Wealth constantly begets itself, becoming more
and more efficient, producing better products, saving time and energy, and generating
more and more wealth. Smith claims the result of this economic system, combined with good
government, will be "universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the
people." Marx contends that this is not the result; that because the system demands that
the wages of worker are calculated not by the value of the product he produces, but by
the minimum the worker needs and the relation of workers needed and workers available
competing for jobs, "the quantum of the means of subsistence which is absolutely
requisite to keep the laborer in bare existence as a laborer."(Cmp19) 
As the feudal relations of property became too small to support growing bourgeois, the
bourgeois will be overtaken by the same forces, the ever growing productive forces become
too big and powerful for the small bourgeois. The bourgeois are forced to further and
further expanding markets and harsher exploitation in order to continue to exist. Because
developments of technology increase, the cost of production decreases, and as the work
continues to get more and more machine like and repulsive, the cost of production comes
ever closer to simple subsistence. Pauperism grows rapidly. Soon it becomes clear that
the oppressor cannot even "ensure the existence of his slave within his slavery, because
it cannot help letting him sink into such a state, that it has to feed him, instead of
being fed by him." (CMp15) 
Capitalism kills itself. It is, by definition, the "formation and augmentation of
capital" and the "condition for capital is wage labor. Wage labor rests exclusively on
competition between the laborers." (Cmp15) Thus, not only does the system lead to the
death of its own slaves, but it also leads to the rise of communism. The workers, who
once were in competition with each other, band together and revolt, taking over and
establishing, necessarily, a communist regime. 
But there is a jump here. Why and for what do they revolt? What is to ensure that they
are ideologically communist? Marx claims that the nature of the work is defeating; the
worker is separated from his product and his work is meaningless to him except that it
allows him to survive. He becomes a poverty stricken machine.
"It is true that labor produces marvels for the rich, but it produces privation for the
worker. It produces palaces, but hovels for the worker. It produces beauty, but deformity
for the worker. It replaces labor with machines, but it casts some of the workers back in
barbarous forms of labor and turns others into machines. It produces intelligence, but it
produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker."
Already a commodity in the eyes of society, how does he see himself? He has no property,
no savings for when he cannot labor, his wife and children are reduced to mere wage
earners, he no longer puts faith in religion, national character, law, morality, etc.
Because he sees them as bourgeois interests. What is left for him besides his animal
pleasures? Could this not be defeating? Where does his new found strength come from and
why is it essentially communal? 
Marx answers that this development is necessary one. As capitalism grows, the proletariat
grows. The middle class, the petty bourgeois is gradually subsumed into the proletariat;
some of the bourgeois, taken over by other bourgeois or coming to the realization of
history become part of the proletariat and, "the proletariat not only increase in number;
it becomes concentrated is greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels its strength
more. The various interests and conditions become more equalized. . .Thereupon the
workers begin to form combinations against the bourgeois." (Cmp11-12) The union continues
to expand and the power increases. Soon, bourgeois competition between its own members
leads the bourgeois to educate the workers. Because they have been stripped of
nationality, the proletariat must see itself as a nation. A nation collectively united
against bourgeois interests. 
The defining interest of the bourgeois is the voracious accumulation of private property.
Property, under exploitive society is "based on the antagonism of capitol and wage labor.
. .To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal but a social status in
production."(CMp19) "Capitol is a collective product. . .When, therefore, capitol is
converted into common property. . .It looses its class character." (19) thus the product
loses its power to subjugate laborers and further class antagonisms no longer exist. The
proletariat in power, therefore must recognize this and will establish product as common
property. 
But questions still remain. Marx claims that the idea of property under capitalism is
wrong because it is only in existence for a tenth of the population; law, morality,
family, culture, nationality, etc. Dissolve for the proletariat. But what of them? Have
we shown that they are all forms of oppression? Are they meaningless simply because they
were abused? Are they to be abandoned because they were stolen from the majority at one
time? When a new consciousness arises what form does it take? What art does it produce?
It seems that all that is left is an economic machine. Be it a smooth and good one, it is
still merely economics. A man can now contribute happily to society, but what does
society go toward? What guides it? And what will shape the individual? What laws does he
obey? What beauty does he seek? What does he believe in? 
How would such a society react to the release of the prisoner in Matthew? It seems they
would still be incensed as the first crowd, perhaps even more so as community is so
glorified. 
In Bach's work, following the insurrection of the chorus of "Crucify him!" are some of
the loveliest pieces of music ever written. The tenderest of arias, they are the lone
voices of individuals, expressing heartbreak. The listener hears the human being and is
comforted. A community can provide protection, inclusion, and perhaps even freedom from
loneliness, but when the community is grievously wrong, where will we find those lone
voices of right?
Bibliography
Marx, Karl and Fredrich Engles, The Communist Manifesto Oxford World Classics 1992 60pp.