The Tempest Beyond the Horizon

Disclaimer: The quoted text, and block quotations, are taken, verbatim, from the texts in the “Further Reading” section. However, spelling has been adjusted to reflect contemporary American English.

Workers of the world unite! Almost everyone has heard this phrase at some point. It is a revolutionary call to action at the end of Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, and the final paragraph doesn’t just whisper it.

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Workers of the world, unite!

That declaration is where we will begin. The Communist Manifesto is not presented as a reform tract or an exercise in theory. It boldly declares that its aims can only be achieved through the forcible overthrow of existing civilization in order to make the ruling class tremble. That same text that calls for revolution, like most revolutionary treatises, is sprinkled with emancipatory and liberating language, such as the vision of an association “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development for all.” Between the language of universal emancipation and revolution exists an internal tension, and serves as the structural failure point of every regime that has attempted to implement Marx’s vision. It is at this stage I would like to point out that the end is an issue in and of itself. It aspires for something unobtainable. The worker’s paradise. A utopia. Yet, the flawed nature of man makes earthly utopia an impossibility, no matter how high we aim, or how many mass graves we fill in pursuit of it. It is these repressive mechanisms, which serve as the operating system of this philosophy’s pursuit of utopia that we will examine. This analysis aims to follow both elements, the liberating language and the built-in repression mechanism through a close reading of the text of The Communist Manifesto, and a few other writings. It will also contrast the ideology with the attempts at internal safeguards present in classical liberal thought, particularly John Locke and Baron Montesquieu. This analysis does not argue that the liberal tradition has produced perfect results. Though I hold a conservative worldview, if I were to make the claim that the liberal tradition has not produced a single instance of repression, the historical record would stand in conflict with that claim, whether it be human bondage, revolutionary terror, religious repression ranging from the Inquisition to the Salem and Andover Witch Trials, or any one of a handful of instances in which the nature of man has overridden his own logos. Rather, this analysis aims to serve as a comparison between ideology that attempts to temper man’s most base instincts, versus one that contains no such safeguards.

A close reading of the Manifesto will note that it does not present itself as a treatise of total and permanent domination. The ultimate vision of communist society is the dissolution of class distinctions. Following the rule of the proletariat, and a restructuring of the means of production, “it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class.” In place of the old order, there will stand “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Political power, defined as power organized as one class for the oppression of another, will shed that characteristic once class distinctions have evaporated and production is concentrated in service of human flourishing. The horizon line is as old as time immemorial: the liberation of man. The individual will no longer be subordinate to the requirements of capital or to being defined by a social class.

Later texts reinforce this language. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx distinguishes a lower phase of communist society, dubbed socialism (note: this is the definition of socialism that I have previously established). The socialist society, according to Marx, is distinguished from the higher phase, in which the subordination of the individual to the division of labor has vanished, labor has become the primary want, and the productive forces have increased through the overall development of the individual. The distinguishing feature of the socialist society is the retention of hallmarks of the old order. Once past this transitional phase, only then does the banner read “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Engels, in subsequent writings, supplies the complementary image of the state, in its usual definition, fading away to non-existence. (Note: this suggests Marxism is not a nationalist philosophy, unlike fascism, or certain other philosophies of nationhood. Rather, it suggests Marxism is a community of mankind as a whole.) On its face, the nature of Marxism contains a strikingly powerful claim of liberation, that human beings should strive to transcend themselves as instruments of class or state, and that the end goal is an association ordered by the development of each.

Yet, the same text that theorizes this path to transcendent society begins by reconstituting the human being through an entirely different logic. The Manifesto, unlike philosophical works produced during the Enlightenment, doesn’t start with the individual as a pre-political subject of natural law. Rather, it goes beyond even Hobbes—who has a somewhat more cynical view than, say, Locke—still starts with the premise that the individual is the basic unit of society and contracts himself into sovereignty for his own security. The Manifesto, instead organizes society around the friction between an oppressive ruling class and an oppressed working class. The antagonism is simplified as two “great hostile camps.” Within this framework, the individual appears only as a bearer of social standing. The proletarian is described no different than a carton of eggs or a loaf of bread. Laborers “must sell themselves piecemeal” and are therefore “a commodity, like every other article of commerce,” exposed to the forces that govern the marketplace. Law, morality, religion, and other things considered the pillars of a flourishing society are treated as nothing more than “bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” National character, itself, is stripped away by the uniform conditions of modern industrial society.

This does not serve as a neutral description of society, but rather a reclassification. Once an individual is understood primarily through his relationship with the means of production, the attributes that other philosophical traditions treat as intrinsic, such as dignity independent of social function, natural rights from the point of birth, and individuality that transcends class utility, become secondary or derivative. The Manifesto doesn’t disguise the charge.

In bourgeois society, capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality. And the abolition of this stage of things is called by the bourgeois, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois freedom is undoubtedly aimed at.

Despite this being a direct challenge to ‘bourgeois’ objections, the strongest reading of this passage does not treat it as a simple desire to erase persons. Instead, Marx and Engels argue that the individuality celebrated by Western traditions is itself already unfree and parasitic. It is the individuality of the property owner whose freedom rests on the dependence of the laborer, and the freedom of capital, or the free market, rather than the freedom of the individual. In this view, the abolition of individuality is not the destruction of an abstract, pre-political right, but the removal of an exclusionary form of it. The purpose of such is to make way for a fuller, non-parasitic individuality available to the vast majority of man. The text presents the loss of bourgeois individuality as liberating.

Even when this specific interpretation is granted, a residual problem remains. The Manifesto supplies no conception of the human being that survives the reassignment by class. The individual is acknowledged only to the extent that he is either bourgeois (and therefore to be abolished), or proletarian (and therefore to be realized through revolutionary process). There is no moral establishment of the human being that stands prior to, and therefore constrains, the assignment of class potential. There is no Lockean sense of natural right, or Kantian individual as an end themselves. Once man is defined by his relationship to the means of production, the moral barrier that would otherwise restrain action to those assigned to the wrong category is lowered. The person is reduced to potential, whether that be potential for exploitation, or potential for revolutionary transformation. In sum, the individual’s moral status is derived from class position rather than held independent of it.

The implications of the ideology are consistent. Without qualification, the Manifesto states that political power “is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another.” The immediate goal of the communist is the formation of the worker into a class, followed by the conquest of the capital class, or the bourgeoisie. Once obtained, the proletariat “will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class.” These steps begin with “despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.” Immediately, you see an attack on rights, again, without the qualification of property being a ‘bourgeois’ right.

The ten measures proposed for the most advanced countries convert this abstract justification into concrete institutional design. These measures include the abolition of property in land and rents to public purposes, a heavy taxation levy, the abolition of inheritance, the confiscation of property, the centralization of credit via a monopolized national bank, the centralization of services such as communications and transportation, the extension of factories owned by the state, and the collectivization of agriculture. Along with these include the abolition of distinction between town and country, as well as free education in conjunction with industrial production.

A careful reading must grant that these measures are aimed, as written, at relations of production and property forms, rather than at specific individuals. In fact, the text never mentions a program for punishment against individuals—bourgeois or otherwise. Rather, it describes the transformation of the conditions under which capital and labor are to exist. The confiscation of property, the abolition of inheritance, and the centralization of credit are presented as necessary steps in the transformation of society as a whole, not as acts of vengeance.

Yet, the ideology established by Marx and Engels renders that distinction unstable. Since persons have already been defined by their relationship to those forms of property, the attack on relationship becomes, in practical and moral effect, an attack on the categories of persons that embody them.

The landowner and the inheritor are not treated as subjects, holding inherent rights, who happen to hold a certain economic standing. Instead, they are treated as the personification of the very property and capital relations that must be swept away. Once the individual is reduced to class potential, the distinction made between striking at a relationship and striking at the human beings who characterize that relationship blurs to the point that removes any protective force. The text supplies no constraints that would preserve personal liberty independent of the revolutionary apparatus that reorganizes production. There is no enumeration of right, individual or otherwise, that the new ruling class is forbidden to suspend, no institutional barrier, and no residual moral foundation for the person that survives the despotic phase of transition.

The established theory insists that the dictatorship of the proletariat is a transitional phase that will abolish itself once equilibrium is achieved, rather than an end-state. By concentrating power, the central planning of production, and abolishing the existing relationship to property, the working class creates the conditions for a classless society in which political power itself loses what is described as its inherent oppressive nature. This reading justifies the dictatorship as it is the instrument of its own replacement. The free development of each remains the desired goal, while the concentration of power is merely the means to the end.

Even when this claim is evaluated in good faith, the institutional void cannot escape scrutiny. The Manifesto asserts that the dictatorship will abolish the conditions of its own existence once the class antagonisms have evaporated. However, this is left almost exclusively in the abstract. There is no mechanism designed, or theorized, for that matter, that would compel the holders of power to relinquish said power, just as there are no safeguards that would protect individuals against the dictatorship while the process remains in its socialist phase. Political power is defined as the organization of the working class to rule over the old order, without internal division. The measures concentrate property, credit, services, and production in one, homogeneous center without meaningful institutional checks or constitutional barriers that the new ruling class is forbidden to cross, other than the abstract dissolution of class antagonisms. The self-abolishing character of the dictatorship is, therefore, an article of faith rather than fiat. The text provides justification for the concentration of power, alone. It does not contain a safety feature that respects the dignity of the governed.

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