What became of the communist manifesto?

In 1848, German Jews Karl Marx and Frederick Engels issued a revolutionary pamphlet entitled Manifesto of the Communist Party. It began thus: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains, you have the world to win.”

It has been 167 years since the document was issued. How much of the clarion call has been realised? Before we attempt to answer this, we should dwell on the writings of the most fervent and practical of disciples of Karl Marx. Who else can that be but Comrade Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924), founder of the now defunct United Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), known in short as the Soviet Union.

Lenin, in his book, State and Revolution, elaborated and explained what Marx and Engels had written.

His writings linger on the true meaning of democracy. What exists in capitalist countries he saw as not true democracy. “No,” he wrote; “democracy is not identified with the subordination of the minority to the majority. Democracy is a state recognising the subordination of the minority to the majority. That is an organisation of the systematic use of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the population against another.”

Lenin noted that Marx applied the theory of evolution, best identified with Charles Darwin in biology, to social changes. For there to be true democracy, there must be evolution from capitalism to communism with socialism as the intermediate stage.

During this evolution, the State will also undergo a transition which can be no other than the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. He saw no possible reconciliation between capitalists and proletariats. To attain their emancipation, the proletariats must overthrow the bourgeoisie, conquer political power and establish its own revolutionary dictatorship.

This will result in democracy for the poor and abolish democracy for the rich folks. A dictatorship of the proletariats will produce a series of restrictions of liberty in the case of the oppressors, the exploiters and the capitalists.

“We must crush them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be broken by force. It is clear that where there is suppression, there is also violence, there is no liberty, no democracy.

“While under capitalism we have a State in the proper sense of the word, that is a special machine for the suppression of one class by another, and the majority by the minority only communism renders the state absolutely unnecessary for there is no one to be suppressed, no one in the sense of a class, in the sense of a systematic struggle with a definite sector of the population.”

After the death of Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin took over and blood flowed into rivers. It was a frightful period. Those who loved simple liberties such as  freedom of speech, freedom of association could see no difference between the brutalities of communism in the Soviet Union and Nazism in Germany. Apologists for communism justified those brutalities by saying they were cleansing communism of the bourgeoisies that sooner than later the golden age would come where there would be no suppression in a classless society.

Pundits of communism were so naïve to assume that only wealth and poverty divided people. We know from past and current history that people fight over religious or denominational differences and quarrel over racial differences.

The communists concentrated on the destruction of the entrepreneurial class and assumed that once the proletariats had taken over, the abundance of wealth would continue. It turned out to be different.

Seventy years or so after the Russian Revolution, writers and other dissident members of the Soviet Union were clamouring for the end of communism having achieved, in the words of Winston Churchill, the equality of misery. People in capitalist countries, including the so-called oppressed wage-earners, were enjoying high standards of living, thanks to their efficiency in production of goods and services.

Of the major communist countries, only the People’s Republic of China continues to boast of being communist simply because it had realised earlier that there was something good in bourgeoisie economics which could be adapted to communist use. China opened itself up to capitalist investors and accessed capitalist markets. It prospered.