What happened to the communist manifesto?
In 1848, there was a spate of revolts in Europe. In that year, two German Jews Karl Marx and Frederick Engels issued a pamphlet entitled Communist Manifesto, which started thus: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose, but your chains.”
The reference to chains was reminiscent of Jean Jacques Rousseus opening statement in The Social Contract. Man is born free and everywhere is in chains.
The Communist Manifesto pamphlet dwelt on the conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. The writers defined what the terms mean. By bourgeoisie, we mean the class of modern capitalism, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By proletariats, the class of modern wage labour, who having no means of production of their own is reduced to selling their labour power to live.
The pamphlet then says that the history of hitherto existing society was the history of class struggles.
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild master and journey man, in a word oppressor and oppressed.
The present situation is said to have simplified conflict since there are only two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. The bourgeoisie are exploiting the proletarians who are being urged to unite to overthrow their oppressors then set up first a dictatorship of the proletariats before establishing a democracy.
The scenario narrated by Marx and Engels was accurate only where the history of Western Europe was concerned. In Africa, the proletarians were not in significant numbers. In most cases, Africans owned hectares of land sufficient only for subsistence agriculture. Businesspersons who employed thousands of people arrived with the advent of colonial rule. Conflicts which existed were a mixture of racism, the invader and the victim. Among Africans, there were ethnic conflicts: can we classify the genocide in Rwanda?
Boko Harama in Northern Nigeria and the Al Shabab in Somalia are manifestation of class conflict.
The manifesto proposed the following measures to be undertaken in the establishment of communism;
- Abolishment of property in land. That means all land would belong to the State. Would Malawians and other Africans allow this?
- A heavy progressive tax on income tax. Even non-communist countries are already implementing this.
- Abolishment of the right of inheritance. This would give no advantage to children of rich people. The bond between parents and children would be weakened.
- Confiscation of the property of emigrants and rebels.
- Equal liability of all to labour for the State.
- Free education in public schools. This may have been a revolutionary idea.
In short, there would be no more business tycoons. All enterprise would be operated by the State. Since there would only be one class, the proletariats society would in fact be classless; there would be no class conflict, a utopia.
Critics said communism would encourage laziness with its slogan of everyone according to ability to everyone according to need. Some critics said communism would destroy family life and the basics of bourgeoisie morality.
Marx and Engels response was strident. “Our bourgeoisie not content with having wives and daughter or proletariats at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives”.
Evidently, the communists manifesto was a vile and hateful document. At the end of the 1914-18 war, Lenin led a revolution in Russia, which led to the creation of the Soviet Union. During Joseph Stalin reign, there were programmes, but also five-year development plans, which turned the Soviet Union into a manufacturer of weapons of mass destruction and sender of rockets to the moon.
Seventy years later, the Soviet Union and its satellites gave up communism. Capitalist countries had grown more prosperous while communist ones had economically stagnated.
Communism proved effective at distributing wealth, but not good at creating it. Communists had overrated the spirit of altruism and underrated individualism, which is accompanied by self-interest. People work hardest at tasks where rewards correspond with efforts. If the lazy and industrious are paid equally, the industrious begin to slacken, production suffers, shortage of essentials, people queue for the little that is available. This was the common scenario in communist countries.
In the People’s Republic of China, as soon as Mao Zedong died, his successor Deng made a memorable statement. “It does not matter if the cat is white or black so long as it catches the mice.” China started embracing some of the market reforms and prospered. n
