The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels

Review, notes, and reflections on The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

I: Bourgeois and Proletarians

• History is best interpreted as a history of class struggles. A Hegelian dialectic understanding of history as a continuous battle between oppressor and oppressed.
• The dialectic either concludes in revolution - which in turn creates a new dialectic - or in mutual ruin.
• The capitalist era’s distinct historical feature is its simplification of class antagonisms from that of multiple parties and stra towards a single binary opposition between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
• The bourgeoisie itself is formed by a history of revolutions. It is far from conservative in this respect. In fact, the bourgeoisie “historically has played a most revolutionary part”.
• The bourgeoisie have pulled back the ‘veil’ of mysticism in a religious and political sense and have instead replaced direct ‘exploitation’
  • Precedence of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation and phenomenological analysis - how is Marx moving out of modernity and towards a postmodern conception of surfaces as consisting of the same content as the depth residing below? How has capitalism fueled the development of the postmodern condition, even as early as the 19th century?
• The bourgeoisie exist upon continuous revolutionizing - constant expansion, development, advancement, colonialization of resources and technology - both physical and intellectual.
  • Digital colonialism
• The bourgeoisie continuously aggregates and centers matter, and in doing so creates the very conditions of its opposition. The titular question - how does the bourgeoisie interact in relation to the opposition its existence creates?
  • For Marx, it appears that this opposition accumulates to become so powerful that it cannot be overcome; the proletariat overcome the bourgeoisie and the ‘end of history’ - history as a history of class struggles - commences.
  • For later Marxists like Althusser, the question is more complex. The bourgeoisie distribute material and education, but how powerful really is this under the overarching sphere of ideological state apparatuses?
  • Raymond Williams and the concept of incorporation, derived from cultural materialism: how does resistance become incorporated into the broader infrastructure of capital through neutralization via acknowledgement?