Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto¶
Core Argument¶
Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto
This chapter argues that the Communist Manifesto remains the indispensable scientific guide to the present epoch, its core propositions vindicated by the very developments that revisionists claimed had superseded it. The materialist conception of history, the chapter insists, retains its validity as the only meaningful interpretation of the historical process. The opening postulate—that all history is the history of class struggles—has been confirmed by imperialism, which intensifies rather than resolves social contradictions. The Manifesto’s sketch of capitalism, encompassing payment for labour power, surplus value, competition, the concentration of wealth, and the growth of the proletariat, stands fully confirmed. The much-maligned ‘theory of impoverishment’ is no abstraction: US capitalism has transformed millions into paupers. Economic crises, far from being abolished by trusts as reformists once claimed, recur with undiminished force. The state remains a committee for managing bourgeois affairs, and ‘People’s Front’ governments are no exception to this rule.
Every class struggle is a political struggle, and the proletariat must organise as a political party. The chapter is unequivocal: the working class cannot win power within the framework of bourgeois legality; forcible overthrow is necessary. The dictatorship of the proletariat constitutes the only genuine proletarian democracy. The revolution is international by its very nature; the theory of socialism in one country is rejected as false. Under socialism, the state withers away; the growth of state coercion in the USSR demonstrates that it is moving away from socialism, not toward it. The Manifesto’s directive that workers have no fatherland remains the only correct guide.
The chapter levels a devastating polemic against the Third International, which it accuses of deceiving and demoralising the toilers even more wantonly than the Second International. Moscow’s hirelings, it charges, massacre the vanguard of the Spanish proletariat, paving the way for fascism. The protracted crisis of the international revolution—increasingly a crisis of human culture—is reducible in essentials to a crisis of revolutionary leadership. The Fourth International, as heir to the great tradition of the Communist Manifesto, is educating new cadres for old tasks. Theory is generalised reality; an honest attitude to revolutionary theory expresses the urge to reconstruct social reality. The chapter notes with pride that co-thinkers in southern Africa first translated the Manifesto into Afrikaans, illustrating that Marxist thought lives today only under the Fourth International’s banner. To it belongs the future; by the Manifesto’s centennial, the Fourth International will have become the decisive revolutionary force on the planet.