Chapter Summary: The Communist Manifesto By Karl Marx

There are the rich and there are the ones who are not rich: the ones who are in control, and the ones who are subjugated. According to Karl Marx, the “history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” The clashes and conflicts between these people have shaped all of history. Capitalism, the bourgeois v proletarian interest, has set up a situation in which free trade is the only freedom that we have and that freedom, in other regards, are not as important. In the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto, “in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade.” There is a class out there that are all about free trade in the markets, yet, they have hesitation about people having other sorts of freedoms such as the freedom to marry who they please, the freedom to do the drugs that they want, or the freedom to have firearms. The capitalist perspective of free trade having primacy overlaps the interests of individuals. The capitalist continued production ends up resulting in us wanting and needing things that we did not even know existed before. In chapter one, “[i]n place of the old wants, satisfied by the production
of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.” When we have globalization, we develop desires and wants for things that before would not have been an option: this creation of increasing want. You can live in northern United States or in Canada, and you can develop a want and a desire to eat oranges. Before globalization, however, you would not even have the option to have had an orange because they do not grow up there. But now, we do have this desire. In chapter one, the “cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate.” With increasing globalization, nations that have not been modernized according to Western expectation, they have to do what Western nations and what the capitalist machine wants in order to keep up, otherwise they fall behind. The proletariat population, being subjugated because they are having to use their labor to earn money, they are not able to earn money off of products necessarily. The things that they once maybe would have gotten great satisfaction from laboring over now, they have to mass-produce. In chapter one, “[m]odern Industry has converted the little workshop of the patriarchal master into the great factory of the industrial capitalist. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.” The person who is working at McDonald’s, the classic sort of proletariat type of individual, is enslaved by the machines that they have to work with and create, they are enslaved by the products, they are enslaved the Overlook or their manager who is telling them what to do all the time. More than anything, they are enslaved by McDonald’s. They are in serfdom to this corporate interest with somebody else is getting rich off of their labor. Since the bourgeoisie must elicit the proletariat for acceptance, the bourgeoisie are actually arming the proletariat so they will eventually be able to rise up in revolution and beat them. Increased communication is the engine that will fuel this. In chapter one, this “union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different localities in contact with one another”. Marx would have thought that the internet is a great thing for organizing individuals to rise against the leaders. In the Arab Spring, individuals would use things like Twitter and text messages to communicate with each other to try and rebel against the government. Historically, Minorities are perceived as subjugated people in modern context.
However, Marx sees the idea of movement of minorities to serve minorities being a royal family. In chapter one, “[a]ll previous historical movements were movements of minorities or in the interest of minorities”. This small amount of people or kingdom or dictator, a minority group of people who are trying to control things and take things over, over the majority. Marx proposes that the proletarian movement is the “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority”. Marx is in favor of the majority rule when the proletariat is in control. When anyone who does not own a corporation, anyone who is not like a wealthy business owner, this is the majority that should have
power. Marx suggests that armed revolution is the only way. In chapter one, “[i]n depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation”. This idea of overthrowing the power and using violence to do it. At the end of chapter one, “[w]hat the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers”. Those in control, the haves and have-nots, about globalization, about nature of communication, the advancing of technology. “Working men of all countries, unite”. Marx suggests we need to unite against those people who are do not work and are in power. Revolution, change, and democracy, unifying individuals, to bring human beings together for a greater good might not suggest the greatest route to do that, but it does have logical observations.