Maleficent birthday

Speaking of anniversaries, February 21 is the anniversary of the publication, in 1848, of The Communist Manifesto, a book that brought nothing but evil and ruin into the world—a book that brought about, in the twentieth century, the political murder of 100 million unarmed civilians.

In the introduction, Marx and Engels in bold terms of menace declare war against the existing order:

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.,

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?[7]

The beginning of the main text lays out the defining theme of leftism, that human society at its core is formed, not by cooperation, like-mindedness, and a shared love of the good, but by class division and oppression, and that the goal of politics is to end oppression by achieving, through revolution, the reign of perfect equality:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

To attain the reign of equality, the root of oppression and inhumanity, which is private property, particularly in the form of the relation between employer and employee, entrepreneur and worker—must be eliminated.

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It … has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” … for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation….

The essential condition for the existence and rule of the bourgeois class is the accumulation of wealth in private hands, the formation and increase of capital; the essential condition of capital is wage-labor. Wage-labor rests entirely on the competition among the workers.

In their conclusion Marx and Engels call for the violent destruction of the social order of all nations:

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

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!

Let us not forgot that the left, now dominant throughout the Western world, still assiduously seek the same ultimate end that Marx and Engels sought 162 years ago, except that they do so not by revolution, but by gradual, non-violent, and, preferably (I’m thinking here of the Evan Bayh, phony center types), “non-partisan” means.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 21, 2010 10:21 PM | Send