Lesson 17: Principles of Communism - Segment #1

I hold weekly anti-communist meetings for interested parties here in Hendersonville, NC.

Synopsis of Week 17

The Principles of Communism

By Frederick Engels

(1847)

SEGMENT #1

Introduction. Composed in 1847, The Principles of Communism was to be a type of creed for the “League of the Just” (the first incarnation of the Communist League). After the League rejected a draft from Moses Hess (the man credited with converting Engels to communism, and moving Karl Marx to revolutionary dialectical materialism), Engels was instructed to work out his own version, initially to be a “Confession of Faith.”

In November 1847, Engels wrote to Marx, saying, “Think over the Confession of Faith a bit. I believe we had better drop the catechism form and call the thing: Communist Manifesto. As more or less history has got to be related in it, the form it has been in hitherto is quite unsuitable. I am bringing what I have done here with me; it is in simple narrative form, but miserably worded, in fearful haste. ...”

Despite Engels’ objection to his own material, it is bedrock. To know these principles is to understand the longevity of communist theory, which goes on despite the carnage of Marxism and other forms of collectivist ideology. What is it about communism that appeals?

Due to the absolute fact that there are and have ever been only two forms of economic system, capitalism (accumulation of individual wealth and private property) and communism (all labor for the common good), not including any alloys, the inherent flaws of the one are noticeable to the other. Disregarding use of either for the domination of the world, the motivation towards socialism is fueled by the idea that it is more “humane” than capitalism. Naturally, this warrants the question, “Humane to whom?”

We know that in every collectivist society, irrespective of any ultimate goal, it is necessary to steal from one to give to the other. We use the word “steal” in a very narrow context, that is, to take by force and without permission. Collectivist stealing includes through taxation, but also, and more to the point here, by governmental confiscation of private property. It will therefore be important to recognize throughout this analysis for Principles of Communism that every point made in the name of humaneness ends in subversion against ownership of private property.

1. What is Communism? Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

The subversion begins immediately, promising “liberation” of the “proletariat.”

2. What is the proletariat? The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.

Perhaps in Engels’ time, these proletariat were common, living this lack of opportunity. Today, the point is moot. First, the American dream is the rags-to-riches story, undermining the class warfare propaganda that once a poor man, always a poor man. Second, under the principles of credit and time payments, it has become the absolute norm for nearly all workers in Western civilization to have an incarnation of every amenity available (running water, hot water, automobiles, television, computers, cell phones, etc).

3. Proletarians, then, have not always existed? No. There have always been poor and working classes; and the working class have mostly been poor. But there have not always been workers and poor people living under conditions as they are today; in other words, there have not always been proletarians, any more than there has always been free unbridled competitions.

The terminology is concentrated and static, a vagary not deliberately subversive but only archaic. Nevertheless, we find within the past few years a resurgence of the idea that opportunity has escaped the mainframe of labor, despite the fact that such strikers often have better wages and benefits packages than their “luckier” counterparts!

4. How did the proletariat originate? The Proletariat originated in the industrial revolution, which took place in England in the last half of the last (18th) century, and which has since then been repeated in all the civilized countries of the world. This industrial revolution was precipitated by the discovery of the steam engine, various spinning machines, the mechanical loom, and a whole series of other mechanical devices. These machines, which were very expensive and hence could be bought only by big capitalists, altered the whole mode of production and displaced the former workers, because the machines turned out cheaper and better commodities than the workers could produce with their inefficient spinning wheels and handlooms. The machines delivered industry wholly into the hands of the big capitalists and rendered entirely worthless the meagre property of the workers (tools, looms, etc.). The result was that the capitalists soon had everything in their hands and nothing remained to the workers. This marked the introduction of the factory system into the textile industry. Once the impulse to the introduction of machinery and the factory system had been given, this system spread quickly to all other branches of industry, especially cloth- and book-printing, pottery, and the metal industries. Labor was more and more divided among the individual workers so that the worker who previously had done a complete piece of work now did only a part of that piece. This division of labor made it possible to produce things faster and cheaper. It reduced the activity of the individual worker to simple, endlessly repeated mechanical motions which could be performed not only as well but much better by a machine. In this way, all these industries fell, one after another, under the dominance of steam, machinery, and the factory system, just as spinning and weaving had already done. But at the same time, they also fell into the hands of big capitalists, and their workers were deprived of whatever independence remained to them. Gradually, not only genuine manufacture but also handicrafts came within the province of the factory system as big capitalists increasingly displaced the small master craftsmen by setting up huge workshops, which saved many expenses and permitted an elaborate division of labor. This is how it has come about that in civilized countries at the present time nearly all kinds of labor are performed in factories – and, in nearly all branches of work, handicrafts and manufacture have been superseded. This process has, to an ever greater degree, ruined the old middle class, especially the small handicraftsmen; it has entirely transformed the condition of the workers; and two new classes have been created which are gradually swallowing up all the others. These are: (i) The class of big capitalists, who, in all civilized countries, are already in almost exclusive possession of all the means of subsistence and of the instruments (machines, factories) and materials necessary for the production of the means of subsistence. This is the bourgeois class, or the bourgeoisie. (ii) The class of the wholly propertyless, who are obliged to sell their labor to the bourgeoisie in order to get, in exchange, the means of subsistence for their support. This is called the class of proletarians, or the proletariat.

Essentially, the grievance is that, by a combination of ingenuity and accumulated wealth, the capitalist figuratively steals entire industries from a certain populace.

For a recent example, it was common to hear in the 1960’s and 1970’s that the modern supermarket had ruined the mom-and-pop grocery store. True, many such small and inefficient markets were closed due their inability to keep up with the variety and low prices afforded by the conglomerate. However, niche markets soon opened which catered to particular tastes and offbeat products, including that of the “retro” mom-and-pop grocery store! In fact, an entire industry was born from fighting against and rejecting the supermarket. Thus is uncovered the basic fallacy of the “proletarian argument.” It is not a truism that once the corporation takes over, it is all-destructive.

It is as if to say that the invention of Coca-Cola prevented any small competitor. Yet, as we know, not only are there many large and small opponents to Coke, but Pepsi is a major contender, if not many times the victor. This brings us to a secondary error with the proletarian argument. It is false that corporations are invincible. In fact, they are subject to the same, if not worse, market pressures as their smaller counterparts.

The reason the “big capitalist” (in modern parlance, the global corporatist) appears to have an extreme edge is not due to its size, but to its relationship with government. There is, however, a grave distinction to make. It is not that big business controls government, it is that government agrees to collude. For without the collusion, every corporation (or other concern) would be at the whim of the free market, that is, at great risk, and therefore on a level playing field. But with the collusion is protection of that corporation from failure, by a great variety of tax breaks, different (easier) regulations, tariffs, and taxpayer-funded bailouts.

Presently, we see these communist errors played out on the streets. It’s called Occupy Wall Street, a movement mostly dedicated to “exposing” that corporations and banks undermine and destroy the opportunities inherent in capitalist society. Familiar territory, to be sure.

5. Under what conditions does this sale of the labor of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place? Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life. However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the industrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than his minimum. This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big industry has taken possession of all branches of production.

This naïve view of the “minimum wage” is based on the same static views which plague communism in general. First, that men are not mobile. In fact, it is the Industrial Revolution which has enabled such free movement. Second, that upstart companies are unable to woo talented workers from despicable working conditions. Certainly, there are exceptions, but the rule is that to succeed in business one must treat labor fairly, or else watch them disappear to a better workplace.

It is generally when a segment of the population is sequestered (ghettoized) that long-term exploitation is more probable. This is, however, a problem with government and not industry. For government is meant by God to be a means of justice, to keep level the field of opportunity. But when government refuses to outlaw slavery, to police the ghettos with the same treatment as the suburbs, to disallow filthy and unsafe workplaces, there is this created proletariat of which Engels writes.

The solution is nevertheless not a communist one. The rejection of private and property and wealth accumulation does not remove the fascism of a strong central government, and this thesis is proved by the tyrannies which have followed “peasant uprisings” in Russia, China, Cuba, and so forth.

6. What working classes were there before the industrial revolution? The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes. In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward countries and even in the southern part of the United States. In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there were also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. Gradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers who were even then employed by larger capitalists.

The maddening aspect of this type of screed is that for us it dwells in the distant past. While some may protest, slavery and serfdom have become nearly extinct (except perhaps if viewed from a more effete perch); and the journeyman has again become a respected breed.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) notes eight main forms of forced labor in the world today. The following is a table of such forced labor and the nations in which found:

Type	Definition	Countries
Slavery	A "physical abduction" followed by forced labor.	Congo, Liberia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone and Sudan
Farm and rural debt bondage	Workers see all their wages go to paying for transportation, food and shelter because they've been "locked into debt" by unscrupulous job recruiters and landowners - and they can't leave because of force, threats or the remote location of the worksites.	Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Cote d'Ivoire, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru, Togo
Bonded labor	Another form of debt bondage, it often starts with the worker agreeing to provide labor in exchange for a loan, but quickly develops into bondage as the employer adds more and more "debt" to the bargain.	Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistán, Sri Lanka
People trafficking	Individuals are forced or tricked into going somewhere by someone who will profit from selling them or forcing them to work against their will, most often in sexual trades. Many countries are both "origins" and "destinations" for victims.	Albania, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, China, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, France, Ghana, Haiti, Honduras, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Republic of Korea, Laos, Latvia, Malaysia, Moldova, Myanmar, the Netherlands, Nepal, Nigeria, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, USA, Vietnam, Yugoslavia
Abuse of domestic workers	Maids and other domestic servants are sold to their employers or bonded to them by debts.	Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, France, Haiti, the Middle East
Prison labor	The contracting out of prison labor or forcing of prisoners to work for profit-making enterprises.	Australia, Austria, China, Cote d'Ivoire, France, Germany, New Zealand, Madagascar, Malaysia, USA
Compulsory work	People are required by law to work on public construction projects such as roads and bridges.	Cambodia, the Central African Republic, Kenya, Burma (also known as Myanmar), Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania, Vietnam
Military labor	Civilians are forced to do work for government authorities or the military.	Burma (also known as Myanmar)

As is apparent, except for “prison labor” (a false flag of compassion) and “people trafficking” (not quite a government-sanctioned activity), forced labor is not the worldwide capitalist scourge which communists would have you believe.

7. In what way do proletarians differ from slaves? The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly. The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole. The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries. The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave. The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.

The natural selection of the proletariat for his workload is given a heavy hand, the slave many times, according to Engels, having “a better existence,” the only solution being the abolition of private property.

8. In what way do proletarians differ from serfs? The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor. The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product. The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it. The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.

The difference made between serf and proletarian is not logical. Why should we believe that the tenant-farmer is not subject to competition? Is not the feudal lord able to find the best serf to till the land? Whether serf or proletariat, the inefficient, untalented, or otherwise unproductive worker is (perhaps even must be) laid to the side.

We come thus to a main communist grievance card, which is that the inefficient worker is valued so without good reason. Their solution, of course, is by so-called compassion, making the lesser worker equally valuated to the better worker (by “valuated” is meant per the state, not the employer). Communism is a “participation prize” for having entered the world. It is “humaneness” to the unwanted, a hand up to those cast aside for one reason or another. But though is established this protocol and priority, the communist way is to remove “unfairness” by means of a coercive and strong central government, that is, by the absolute abolition of private property.

This is in contraindication to true charity, which is performed from free individual choice (whether or not such choice is made by spiritual or biblical pressures). Naturally so, for communism does not recognize such metaphysical inspirations or the religion which organizes these urges and commandments (yes) into positive actions.

Communism views religion as an arm of capitalist society, but this ideology is only a smokescreen. In fact, it is the underlying righteousness which communism must eradicate, for it is not faith but law, specifically God’s Law (Torah), which is feared. In order to function, communism, unlike capitalism, must have no countervailing authority. Therefore, the destruction of private property is at its core a strike at the Ten Commandments (“Thou Shalt Not Steal... thy neighbor’s property”), which itself is the most resplendent segment of Torah.

Thus, we understand again Marx’s determination to destroy Judaism (which is identified by its strict adherence to God’s Law), and furthermore Proudhon’s anti-Semitic call for the removal of all Jews from France, whether by eviction or destruction.

9. In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen? In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywhere in the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at most temporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can often achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not yet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition But as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishes fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or entering the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now more often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., the more or less communist movement.

In this section of the draft, the craftsman is made to feel either guilty or exploited, giving no recourse to the pursuit of happiness.

The goal of communism is to organize as many disgruntled working class as possible, this for no other reason than to wield the necessary power to seize control of the government and the superstructure of society (means of production, the churches, the family, etc).

10. In what way do proletarians differ from manufacturing workers? The manufacturing worker of the 16th to the 18th centuries still had, with but few exception, an instrument of production in his own possession – his loom, the family spinning wheel, a little plot of land which he cultivated in his spare time. The proletarian has none of these things. The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation. The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.

There is here the homely truth that many who aspire are not prepared for it.

The “heirloom” was literally a loom, and served to qualify the “manufacturing worker” to a better class than the unskilled or unequipped. That the Industrial Revolution diminished the loom business is not indicative of rapaciousness, but of fair competition. For if the hand loom carried such weight in society, the automated loom could not supplant it. Even so, the loss of such craftsmanship almost always engenders its revival, a response to the “commercialism” of mass production.

In a modern example, it might be assumed that the drum machine and synthesizer makes obsolete the human drummer, saxophonist, trumpeter, and so forth. Not so! For there are not only niche industries dedicated to the “warmth” of analog recordings and performances, but there also has been a backlash against computerized and other digital music, another cottage industry.

It is this ingenuity of capitalist thought (the dream of financial independence, or some other abstract economic freedom), coupled with the rising tide of available cash (actually, a consequence of Keynesian central banking), which makes communist economics an unpalatable alternative to the wondrous quality of rugged individualism.

11. What were the immediate consequences of the industrial revolution and of the division of society into bourgeoisie and proletariat? First, the lower and lower prices of industrial products brought about by machine labor totally destroyed, in all countries of the world, the old system of manufacture or industry based upon hand labor. In this way, all semi-barbarian countries, which had hitherto been more or less strangers to historical development, and whose industry had been based on manufacture, were violently forced out of their isolation. They bought the cheaper commodities of the English and allowed their own manufacturing workers to be ruined. Countries which had known no progress for thousands of years – for example, India – were thoroughly revolutionized, and even China is now on the way to a revolution. We have come to the point where a new machine invented in England deprives millions of Chinese workers of their livelihood within a year’s time. In this way, big industry has brought all the people of the Earth into contact with each other, has merged all local markets into one world market, has spread civilization and progress everywhere and has thus ensured that whatever happens in civilized countries will have repercussions in all other countries. It follows that if the workers in England or France now liberate themselves, this must set off revolution in all other countries – revolutions which, sooner or later, must accomplish the liberation of their respective working class.

In and of itself, this description of a movable capitalist economy is correct. Nevertheless, it was never the cause of any revolution, only a reason later given to further establish communism as both viable and prominent.

The Russian Revolution, for example, reacted to the long-term tyranny of Czarist Russia, which itself was, by Engels’ own admission, a serf state, not an industrial capitalist nation. The Second French Revolution (1848), for another, bubbled from collusion between government and business, not the effects from capitalism per se.

Some may say this is misleading, that separating capitalism from collusion is an impossibility. But though we recognize the influence of money in political systems, we nonetheless reject the accumulation of wealth as the root of evil. Instead, the evil we see in every instance is rejection of Torah, that is, of law and order, which neglect causes all corruption.

Second, wherever big industries displaced manufacture, the bourgeoisie developed in wealth and power to the utmost and made itself the first class of the country. The result was that wherever this happened, the bourgeoisie took political power into its own hands and displaced the hitherto ruling classes, the aristocracy, the guildmasters, and their representative, the absolute monarchy. The bourgeoisie annihilated the power of the aristocracy, the nobility, by abolishing the entailment of estates – in other words, by making landed property subject to purchase and sale, and by doing away with the special privileges of the nobility. It destroyed the power of the guildmasters by abolishing guilds and handicraft privileges. In their place, it put competition – that is, a state of society in which everyone has the right to enter into any branch of industry, the only obstacle being a lack of the necessary capital. The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society. Free competition is necessary for the establishment of big industry, because it is the only condition of society in which big industry can make its way. Having destroyed the social power of the nobility and the guildmasters, the bourgeois also destroyed their political power. Having raised itself to the actual position of first class in society, it proclaims itself to be also the dominant political class. This it does through the introduction of the representative system which rests on bourgeois equality before the law and the recognition of free competition, and in European countries takes the form of constitutional monarchy. In these constitutional monarchies, only those who possess a certain capital are voters – that is to say, only members of the bourgeoisie. These bourgeois voters choose the deputies, and these bourgeois deputies, by using their right to refuse to vote taxes, choose a bourgeois government.

This common complaint from the communist has thrust, but is incomplete. For where there has been common grievance, amendments to such constitutions have equalized the right to vote, and to such an extent that mob rule nearly transpires. The vox populi can then be manipulated for the subversion of the system itself, the superstructure to be subsumed. In America 2012, we see this destruction of the capitalist system as a distinct goal of a very powerful populist movement.

Third, everywhere the proletariat develops in step with the bourgeoisie. In proportion, as the bourgeoisie grows in wealth, the proletariat grows in numbers. For, since the proletarians can be employed only by capital, and since capital extends only through employing labor, it follows that the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital. Simultaneously, this process draws members of the bourgeoisie and proletarians together into the great cities where industry can be carried on most profitably, and by thus throwing great masses in one spot it gives to the proletarians a consciousness of their own strength. Moreover, the further this process advances, the more new labor-saving machines are invented, the greater is the pressure exercised by big industry on wages, which, as we have seen, sink to their minimum and therewith render the condition of the proletariat increasingly unbearable. The growing dissatisfaction of the proletariat thus joins with its rising power to prepare a proletarian social revolution.

Though we may think them destructive, the advents of the credit system, the public union, and a number of technological achievements have made possible many thousands of new careers and entrepreneurial ventures. In turn, wealth has been shoveled in disproportion to all manner of financial markets, performing the duty of creating more millionaires who spend their profits for a plethora of products and services, upturning again the communist idea that “non-productive” profiteering is an economic drain. Thus, Engels is incorrect when he states that “the growth of the proletariat proceeds at precisely the same pace as the growth of capital.”

Engels’ “dissatisfaction” of the proletarian is not formed in an economic or even social vacuum, but is “helped” by Marx’s version of Hegelianism, the dialectical materialism which extenuates itself as “revolution.” The duty and goal of communism is to sow these seeds of dissent.

Our key to survival is to always know and recall that communist dissent does not end with improvement to our capitalist economic/social order, but in destruction of it, to be replaced first by a nebulous “dictatorship of the proletariat” (which we have never seen), then a stateless and classless society (a fairy tale).

END OF SEGMENT #1