If this is how the society, the class struggle and the proletariat now stands: then what do the communists want? The answer of the Communist Manifesto is peculiar: first of all, they allegedly want nothing different than all the other workers' parties! If that were really the case, then they would not need their own party. How necessary they find this, however, and why their agreement in principle with the rest of the labor movement does not go very far, Marx and Engels emphatically clarify when they criticize the leading thinkers of the other socialist movements, more or less widespread at that time, in the 3rd chapter of the Communist Manifesto.
The second assurance is still dubious:
“They [the communists] have no interests separate and apart from those of the proletariat as a whole. They do not set up any sectarian principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the proletarian movement.”
Here the leading theoreticians of communism write a Communist Manifesto, meaning that they have something to communicate to the workers which they should take good head of, and deny at first every real difference between themselves and the addressed masses. They want only one difference to pertain: that communists
“always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole” and actually have the advantage of
“clearly understanding the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement” ahead of the rest of the team. Which is it: one fights more or less without ideas, the other knows where it is headed in the long run – but the main thing is that one does not differ in principle?! If communists are not needed to represent the
“interest of the whole movement”, then there can hardly be talk of a “whole movement” and
their “interest” does not exist at all – except in the heads of the communists: as their
program which they intend to make accessible to the workers. In the meantime, what exists on the side of the fighting workers are evidently only individual interests, which proves that there is still no revolutionary “movement as a whole.” With their construction of an overarching general interest, over which the communists watch as
“practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties,” Marx and Engels also admit, on the one hand, that the labor disputes of that time defended quite different interests than a proletarian revolution in their sense. On the other hand, they deny exactly this difference between their point of view and the goals for which the workers fight when they argue “simply” for the improvement of their conditions as wage laborers. They broadmindedly ignore the competitive point of view of the wage-laborers that they find in the struggles for individual interests and easily state that these act as parts of the big battle for the whole. If they state that only the communists
“clearly understand the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement,” then it is probably correct that the rest of the team pursues
other objectives than the communist revolutionaries. With their doubtful praise of the fighting workers – who have, certainly, no idea, but somehow are already on the right track – they assume a conflict between their program and the will and consciousness of the proletariat, and explain it at the same time as insignificant.
In the 4th chapter of the Communist Manifesto, which gives in detail the
“relations of the communists to the various opposition parties” in various countries, the authors sum up this mistake, one more time, as follows:
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.”
If one must constantly emphasize the “property question” because it is evidently more or less “undeveloped” in the various opposition movements, then one should better note immediately that these movements are concerned with other “basic questions” than the abolition of private property. Then, however, it is also nonsensical to act as if communists only have to remind all members of the opposition all the time, all the same, what they fight for, and only of the fact that for them too, nevertheless – ultimately – it is also about the property question.
How do communists arrive at such well-meaning self-denial? Obviously, at that time Marx and Engels noticed a lot of working class struggles whose immediate aims they did not share, but which they also did not want to criticize. Instead, they welcomed them under the abstraction “class struggle” and presented to the proletariat the reassuring offer that the communists always keep the correct overview about where the fighting proletariat must go and wants to go. Instead of agitation and criticism, they shifted to a kind of
public relations: communists trust that the proletariat is on the right track completely by itself already – vice versa, the proletariat can rely on the communists as a “signpost.” Altogether, this denial of the difference between communists and proles is a hypocrisy – and with just such a sucking up to the addressees, who they still concede have no notion of the aims of the revolution, the authors of the Communist Manifesto believe they can inspire the workers to a revolution!
