The Communist Manifesto is an incredibly angry piece of writing. It is strident, so convinced of its own superiority that there are times when it seems like it has forgotten what it is talking about. This is a disease common to most polemic that lasts longer than a couple of pages. There are times when it is hard to tell if Marx and Engels are tearing down the bourgeoisie or praising it.
“The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.“
All of that could be a paean to the global economy, written by some up-and-coming staffer during the Clinton administration. Though, to be fair, they probably couldn’t write as well.
The historical lens that the Manifesto begins with is how it attempts to establish credibility. It uses a lot of repetition, running through Modern Industry, the bourgeoisie, back to Modern Industry, and then the proletariat, although the Manifesto falls about a little bit when talking about the proletariat. It knows the proletariat does all the things the bourgeoisie does not do. The Manifesto is much more interested in bashing the bourgeois than in supporting the proles, and it shows. Probably because Marx and Engels knew much more about the bourgeoisie, having been part of it their entire lives.
The pattern the first section of the Communist Manifesto puts forward is one of cycles, steadily reducing to one end. The Manifesto thinks that end is the “inevitable” destruction of the bourgeoisie. The Manifesto’s power is in its utter conviction.
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Well, Lenin and Stalin killed the proles or "Kulaks" first. Especially the Ukranians. It's a funny point about socialism and globalization. I wonder how Brzezinski would argue for globalization; I think he (a Clinton staffer) just regarded it as inevitable. But socialism was an international movement at least by design, if not in practice. This is part of how the fascists, some of whom (like Mussolini), began as socialists, parted company from the socialist parties. They weren't that keen on the international aspect of the ideology.
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