Remember ’48

In 1848—that’s 160 years ago now—the workers of Paris and other European cities rose up against their hunger and oppression and took to the barricades.

The 1848 revolutions inspired the “Communist Manifesto” by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. These two young Germans participated in the street struggles, but they also wrote in stirring words about why political reform wasn’t enough to solve the terrible gap between rich and poor, parasite and producer. They organized workers and laid out a program for social revolution, for the working masses to take over the reins of society and break free not only of the ruling classes—both the old feudal aristocracy and the new moneyed elite—but of all the intermediate strata who worked for those rulers in one capacity or another.

They saw that capitalism, where virtually nothing is untouched by the market and the drive for profit—not water, not love, not even the air we breathe—could only be replaced by demolishing private ownership of the means of production and harnessing the productive forces under workers’ organization and control for the social good.

In the long period since, the capitalist system, then in its youth, has lengthened its life span by transitioning into imperialism and super-exploiting the resources and peoples brought under its domination. It has also harnessed science and technology to utterly transform the world—but always along paths that enhanced the rulers’ own wealth and their power over society.

What would Marx and Engels think if they could see what life is like today? Would they be amazed that, so many years after the workers of Paris tried to make a reality of the slogan “Liberty, equality, brotherhood,” whole continents are still enchained to the global banks and corporations while the rich-poor gap has become a chasm wider than the Grand Canyon?

Marx in particular understood the laws of contradiction. He knew that the further the rubber band is stretched, the greater the tension under the earth’s tectonic plates, the more energy will be released when forces turn into their opposites and things spring back.

In truth, capitalism has not only grown enormously but it has become even more monstrously untenable in this electronic space age. It is a disaster waiting to happen—in many more ways than one.

The premier capitalist country is the United States. It became an empire not just via colonial conquest but through the export of vast amounts of capital extracted from the laboring masses at home—Black, white, Native and Asian. And it is the United States that is now threatening to bring down the whole world capitalist edifice with its unpayable public and private debts in the trillions of dollars, its stupendous disparity between rising (still!) CEO salaries and workers’ sinking earnings, its plunging dollar, its endless wars and hyperinflated military budget.

And let’s not forget the impact that U.S. capitalism in particular has had on degrading the life systems of the planet.

Marxism then and now is not all doom and gloom, however. Quite the contrary. What Marxism shows is that there is a way out, that capitalism “creates its own gravediggers.” That quote might have sounded very harsh when it seemed that the boons of the profit system would go on forever. But today there are more and more people who want to pick up a shovel and start digging.

Indeed, the class that Marx was talking about—the working class—is today also much different than in 1848. First of all, the workers, the people who live by selling their ability to labor, today make up the vast majority in all industrialized countries. In Marx’s day, wage workers were a small minority.

The working class today has the skills to run everything. Workers don’t need bosses or foremen to tell them what to do. As every worker knows, it’s the bosses who know little about production and make a mess of it when they decide to interfere.

The working class today is very international, linked together by the threads of production that are now global. Solidarity of workers across national borders will be key to changing the world. And in countries like the U.S., and increasingly in Europe, the working class at home is becoming more multinational.

Most women now are wage earners, unlike in Marx’s day. They participate directly in the class struggle and, in the U.S., are the main factor in growing the unions again.

The horrendous conditions now falling over the heads of workers in the U.S. and the rest of the capitalist world cannot be tolerated. Hunger amidst oceans of gourmet food? Homelessness amid a condo glut? No money for health care or education when trillions are spent on war?

Let’s get digging.