The communist manifesto

The communist manifesto was written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Its aim was to bring the proletariats of all nations together in order to overthrow the bourgeois and create a completely class-less and equal society not ruled by money:

A spectre is haunting Europe- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power?

Two things result from this fact.

1.      Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power

2.       It is high time that communists should openly, in the face of the world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.

To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London, and sketched the following manifesto, to be published.

Bourgeois and Proletarians

The history of all existing societies is essentially only a history made up of class struggles. Modern Bourgeois Society has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society. The manufacturing system has replaced corporate guilds, the industrial middle class by giant industry and machinery. The state is now a committee for managing affairs of the bourgeoisie. The division of labour and cash has made physician, lawyer, priest, poet and scientist into wage labourers. Even family, is reduced to mere money relations. The country has been subjected to enormous cities. Commercial crises, even over-production, break out.

There is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry. The bourgeoisie have forged weapons that bring death to itself. Proletarians must sell themselves as a commodity; they have been made an appendage of the machine, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. The workers begin to form unions, riots break out. Occasionally, the workers are victorious, but their real success is in making themselves into a proletarian revolutionary class.

Proletarians and Communists

Communists have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. Just as the French revolution abolished feudal property, Communism may be summed up: Abolition of private property, heavy progressive taxes, abolition of inheritance, and centralisation in the state of all: banking, communication and transport, factories and instruments of production. Equal liability of all to labour, establishment of industrial armies, free education and abolition of child labour.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

Working men of all countries unite!

In my opinion this work is the manifesto of a party that challenged the existence of capitalist social relations and their underlying class base. It intended to move an entire class to revolutionary action against capitalism. This manifesto was Karl Marx’s solution to the tension created through the class systems in capitalist society. It was an idea that he believed would inevitably happen anyway and this manifesto had the intention to make people aware of how the world could be a better place. In reality it just does not work.

Although the ideas in this sound like a more equal way to run society, aiming towards communism essentially means war against capitalism, and ultimately a system which does not work. This can be seen all over Eastern Europe. When it was forced upon certain countries it ultimately led to a dictatorship in which the working class citizens were exploited. For example Joseph Stalin, who used the problems with communism (lack of money and social unrest)as a means to support his own agenda for making the soviet union strong and rich (for those in power), essentially enslaved his citizens by either imprisoning them or even executing them as they had no say in how the country was run and no influence on the government whatsoever. The government were entirely in control.

Marx and Engels ability to demonise Capitalism into something which has imprisoned society and caused large amounts of conflict is very convincing; however this manifesto is not the solution to the tensions in our societies.

Overall, Communism is a political thought based on sharing of efforts and sharing of resources. Although today, no self-sustaining country has used the ideal communist policy and had it work. As long as the advantages of capitalism remain to be the dominant economic system in the world, citizens and countries will choose it over communism because it is known to work. There seems to be no room for this political ideology in this age as consumerism and private entrepreneurship are seen as the way forward.

Week 1 Rousseau and Romanticism

In this lecture we talked about Rousseau as well as the romanticist movement in general. This is what I was able to understand from the lecture.

Rousseau believed in going back to the basics of human living, basically getting rid of all of our cities, technologies and comfortable living we are used to nowadays and going back to being 'natural man'. He considered natural man to be righteous and virtuous. He idealised  the primitive people or the noble savage (tribes which had yet to evolve and expand into democracy or any kind of organised society). Hunters and gatherers where innocent and beautiful because they were natural and un-corrupted by the temptations of our society like alcohol and constrains of work. 

Romanticism is the period of time which is known to be the reaction against the enlightenment era. It was the belief that emotions where the key to living opposed to greed and success. civilization had corrupted us and the state left us alienated. Rousseau stated:

'"man is born free, but everywhere is in chains"

People nowadays are trapped in the competition of self-esteem.

Rousseau wrote up something known as the 'social contract'. This was a contract in which he thought we should live. Within this contract he admitted that there was no way back to living naturally, he wrote;

"find a form of association, which defends and protects with all the common force, the person and the goods of each associate and by means of which each one while uniting with all obeys only himself and remains as free as before."

His beliefs were similar to that of Machiavelli's. With this social contract came rousseau's 'general will' theories.

He believed that since we all contribute to the shaping of this general will, when we obey its laws we do no more than obey ourselves. "For it be driven by appetite alone is slavery and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom". This general will can be seen to hold dangers however as this could potentially turn into a new kind of dictatorship, or the tyranny of law. Anyone who refuses to obey the general will, will "be forced to be free". For example 'the storming of the Bastille' in the French revolution where the middle class had formed a national guard and destroyed the prison which was a symbol of royal authority  in the centre of France. 

What is known as the legacy of Rousseau today can be understood by three factors; Firstly his decleration of the rights of man, secondly men are born and remain free and equal in rights and thirdly that law is the expression of general will for every citizen. Rousseaus ideas where eventually understood and attempted through the 'tennis court oath'. This 'utopia' however led to massacres as nobody knew who was in charge and various mobs in Paris where given weapons. These massacres can be known as 'The Terror'. in 1792 it looked as if Paris was going to be attacked by the Parisians, this meant that the citizens of Paris were given arms in order to defend themselves. In 1793 the king was executed using the revolutionary device known as the guillotine. Ultimately this led to the government deliberately using violence against its own citizens in a reign of terror. After this a committee of public safety or a 'vendee' was formed. 

Mary Wollstonecraft started to appear in this romanticist period as well. She can be considered to be the first every feminist. She believed that the education given to women was superficial and promoted an obsession with appearance.Therefore if you educated women properly they would obviously achieve a lot more in society than just being beautiful and pretty. She believed that men and women should be equal. They should be asexual being until two people fall in love, but until then they should not assume a gendered identity. Mary wollstonecraft did not believe in rousseaus hatred of sophistication and focused more on equality between the sexes.

  

Seminar Paper: Bertrand Russell - Chapters 20 and 21 – Kant and Hegel

 Bertrand Russell in chapters 20 and 21 of his book ‘History of Western Philosophy’ wrote about two German philosophers Kant and Hegel.

    Kant (1724-1804) was a romanticist, philosopher and geographical scientist. His two influences were Rousseau and Hume. His ‘critique of pure reason’ was his most important treatise. This essentially explained how knowledge exists before experience confirms.

    He claims to of solved the problem of how synthetic judgements are a priori possible. He explains this by saying that the outer world causes only the matter of sensation. Our own mental apparatus orders this into space and time and supplies the concepts by means of which we understand experience. Things in themselves which are the causes of our sensations are unknowable. From what I understand from this nothing can be perceived as remotely real, but simply adaptations of how our a priori knowledge combines with our synthetic knowledge in order to help us understand what is around us but not fully understand what is around us, it is simply our perception of it. Therefore space and time are subjective and are only part of our apparatus of perception. Essentially forms of our intuition. His philosophy is a cross between rationalism and empiricism.

    He also set about to prove that god doesn’t exist countering the three methods of proof which prove his existence. However he still believes in god for his own reasons which Russell never explains.

    Bertrand Russell seems to accept Kant’s theories as important, even though he does not agree with them. He says in the opening, ‘Immanuel Kant is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers. I cannot myself agree with this estimate, but it would be foolish not to recognize his great importance.’ Ultimately Kant was important because he was the beginning of socialist theory which ultimately led, through Hegel to Karl Marx who is one of the key philosophers in introducing communism and socialism by writing ‘the communist manifesto’.

    Hegel (1770 – 1831) as I said above was the stepping stone in between Kant and Karl Marx (apart from Spengler) therefore his importance is evident for Socialism and communism. It is an idea to note that this book History of western philosophy was written in 1946, a year after the end of the Second World War therefore as Bertrand Russell; A British philosopher writing about German Idealism there is ultimately going to be an element of bias against these kinds of philosophers. This is highlighted when he starts quoting Hegel’s idea of freedom.

   “The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute truth as the unlimited self determination of freedom – that freedom which has its own absolute form itself as its purport”. Bertrand Russell follows this quotation with a very clear attack on his beliefs; ‘this is a very superfine brand of freedom. It does not mean you will be able to keep out of a concentration camp. It does not imply democracy, or a free press, or any of the usual liberal watchwords, which Hegel rejects with contempt.’

    The key thing to look at in Hegels philosophy is his idea that ‘the absolute idea is pure thought thinking about pure thought’ and that ‘ultimate reality is timeless, time is merely an illusion generated by our inability to see the whole. However there is no evidence in which he can call on in order to ascertain this as true in any kind of way. It sounds like spiritual ramblings which are pulled out of thin air. Bertrand Russell comments on this; ‘It required, If it was to be made plausible, some distortion of the facts and considerable ignorance. Hegel, like Marx and Spengler possessed both these qualifications’.

    In conclusion, Kant and Hegel where the building blocks Karl Marx used in order to write his communist manifesto. Without these ideas Karl Marx may not have had enough information in order to create a developed philosophical view which later turned into socialism and communism.

How does David Hume relate to Kant?

What role did Kant play in aiding Hegel in his beliefs?

 Is there any relationship between this early socialism and Hitler’s national socialist party?