150 years on the best seller list
The Communist Manifesto
By Sara Flounders
What is happening in East Asia? What does it
mean for working and poor people in the United States?
News broadcasts show thousands of frantic people stripping
the shelves bare in Indonesia, buying every item in sight as
their country's currency becomes more worthless by the hour.
Ten million Indonesian workers are expected to be laid off-2
million over the next month.
Millions of workers in Thailand, Malaysia, south Korea and
the Philippines are already receiving layoff notices.
Wages are so low in all these countries that millions can
barely feed their families working 60 hours a week.
Experts haven't a clue
How could it be that this crash took by surprise every
politician, banker, corporate executive, and many thousands of
financial analysts, portfolio managers and mutual fund
investors in East Asia, the United States and Western
Europe?
Computers provide instant information. Millions of dollars
can be moved in a wink. International financial institutions
can calculate the production of every computer disk and pair of
jeans.
So how can such booming economies collapse overnight?
How is it that none of the financial wizards noticed the
corruption, patronage, speculation and easy loans now cited as
the causes of this widening crash? Why can't the extravagantly
paid experts control or stop the havoc that is destroying the
livelihoods and savings of millions of people?
Why 'Communist Manifesto' became a best seller
Things have changed enormously in the last 150 years.
Nevertheless, the best explanation for the roots of the crisis
now whirling through Asia and spreading tremors on Wall Street
was written a century and a half ago.
It can be found in an all-time best seller that has been
translated into hundreds of languages and printed in thousands
of editions. Yet few Wall Street investors would admit to
having read it.
Now is the time to read "The Communist Manifesto" by Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels.
Time and again, this ringing exposé and condemnation
of capitalism has proven more accurate than the best capitalist
financial experts' explanations.
The Manifesto, written on the eve of a great revolutionary
upsurge in Europe in 1848, showed how these wild economic
crises are endemic to capitalist society. The capitalist owners
cannot control the vast productive forces they bring into
motion.
Capitalism is inherently unstable. Its tendency to expand
production vastly exceeds what can be sold at a profit. For the
first time in history, the capitalist mode of production
created scarcity and poverty not because of too little being
produced-but too much.
Marx unlocked the secret of capitalist profit. In simple
terms, it is the difference between the value of what workers
produce and what they are paid.
Capitalism is based on ruthless competition among a
relatively small number of owners of the productive forces.
They can survive only by constantly expanding and capturing new
markets, producing goods at cheaper and cheaper prices, and
driving down workers' wages.
This competition sends the capitalists over the whole globe.
Their drive to create new markets, introduce new technology and
find cheaper labor uproots all older cultures and
societies.
Sweatshops then-and now
"The Communist Manifesto" described a capitalist system then
in its infancy. It was a world of sweatshops, child labor,
illiteracy, grinding poverty and insecurity for the hundreds of
thousands of new workers packed into emerging industrial
centers like Manchester, London, Paris, New York and
Chicago.
Social Security, welfare, unemployment insurance, medical
benefits, safety standards and public schools did not exist.
Workers had absolutely no right to unionize or strike for
better conditions. The Manifesto became a ringing call for the
newly emerging working class to grasp its potential power and
organize.
At the time "The Communist Manifesto" was written, more than
95 percent of the world's people still lived in small hunting
and gathering societies, were peasants tilling tiny plots, or
were artisans turning out just a few products for local
trade.
Marx and Engels explained just how ruthless the new class of
exploiters would be in revolutionizing production and changing
social relations. Capitalism means the "uninterrupted
disturbance of social conditions, uncertainty and agitation,"
they wrote.
The layers of small peasants, landholders and artisans would
increasingly be destroyed as their skill and crafts were made
obsolete with the relentless introduction of new technology.
All these layers of the old society would be pushed into the
working class in increasing numbers.
Today, as Marx and Engels predicted, this new class
structure has spread over the whole world. Almost everywhere,
society is divided into a small class of capitalists and a
large class of wage workers who can survive only by trying to
sell their labor to the capitalist bosses.
This change is most dramatic in the developing world. The
biggest cities with millions of workers hardly earning enough
for survival are in the developing world.
Millions of workers-many of them former peasants and
artisans-have crowded into cities like Sao Paulo, Brazil;
Cairo, Egypt; Bangkok, Thailand; Seoul, south Korea; Calcutta
and Bombay, India; and Mexico City. Desperate for work, they
often lack even the meanest roof over their heads.
The capitalist class's power is far greater and more
concentrated than it was 150 years ago. But the way it plans to
get out of the latest cycle of overproduction is the same as in
Marx and Engels' day: on the workers' backs.
Shut down production. Lay off millions of workers. Drive
down wages still further. Absorb the weaker capitalist
competitors.
Isn't this the plan of the International Monetary Fund and
the big banks today for Asia?
This drive for superprofits is recreating the sweatshops of
the 19th century-not only in the oppressed countries, but also
in the imperialist centers themselves.
Not just analysis, but a revolutionary message
Even if every bankrupt capitalist in East Asia and every
corporate head and IMF director read "The Communist Manifesto,"
they couldn't behave any differently.
Every capitalist, in order to survive, has to maximize
profits, no matter the risk.
When it was possible to make super profits in Asia, that's
where the investment money flowed, regardless of the risks.
When the inevitable crash comes, only the strongest survive-and
they do so by pulling the working class down even further.
So who can benefit from reading "The Communist Manifesto"?
The workers.
This small booklet for the first time provided a scientific
explanation of how workers, through collective organization,
could win a bigger share of what they produce and resist the
capitalist tendency to continually drive down wages.
Even more important is the Manifesto's revolutionary
message: Only the working class can solve the crisis of
capitalism that so eludes the most brilliant market
experts.
The workers, who produce all society's goods, can throw off
the small group of reckless expropriators and reorganize
society on a planned, rational basis.
It carries no corporate advertising. It has been banned and
burned in many countries. It has been denounced by the
rich.
But "The Communist Manifesto" was nevertheless at the top of
the best sellers list worldwide for 150 years.
Now it is likely to become very popular again among a new
generation of workers.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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