According to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
(NCMEC), roughly one out of every five girls and one out of every ten
boys will be sexually exploited or abused before they become of age.
Terminology
The
Declaration and Agenda for Action, adopted during the First World
Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children, held in
Stockholm, Sweden, in 1996, formally defines CSEC as:
a fundamental violation of children's rights. It comprises
sexual abuse by the adult and remuneration in cash or kind to the child
or a third person or persons. The child is treated as a sexual object
and as a commercial object. The commercial sexual exploitation of
children constitutes a form of coercion and violence against children, and amounts to forced labour and a contemporary form of slavery.
CSEC is often associated with child trafficking,
which is defined as "the recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harbouring or receipt of a child for the purpose of exploitation," and a
child as any person under the age of 18.
However, not all trafficked children are trafficked for the purposes of
CSEC. Furthermore, the sexual abuse of child trafficking victims at
work may not necessarily constitute CSEC. Likewise, CSEC is also part
of, but distinct from other forms of child abuse and child sexual abuse, including child rape and domestic violence.
Types
Prostitution
Child prostitution is the "use of a child in sexual activities for remuneration."
Prostitution is known as one of the youngest professions. Nearly 80% of
adult prostitutes entered the industry between 11 and 14. Prostituted
children face risks of damage to their physical and mental health, early pregnancy, and sexually transmitted diseases, particularly HIV. They are inadequately protected by the law and may be treated as criminals.
Child sex tourism
Child sex tourism refers to tourism by predators for the purpose of engaging in child prostitution. Sex tourism and sex trafficking generate revenue for countries.
In some countries, with economies that rely on the exploitation of
women and children, the government encourages child sex tourism,
resulting in low fines for engaging in the sex trade. Many travel
agencies offer guides on exotic entertainment, further encouraging men
to travel for sexual purposes.
Pornography
Child pornography
is the "representation, by whatever means, of a child engaged in real
or simulated explicit sexual activities or any representation of the
sexual parts of a child for primarily sexual purposes".
These representations include photographs, books, audiotapes, and
videos that depict children performing sexual acts with other children,
adults, and objects. The children are subjected to exploitation, rape,
pedophilia, and in extreme cases, murder.
Pornography is often used as a gateway into the sex trade industry. Many pimps force children into pornography as a way of conditioning them to believe that what they are doing is acceptable. Pimps may then use the pornography to blackmail the child and extort money from clients.
Fig.1 Child Pornography Points of Production
International
National
Regional
Local
Production format
State-of-art technology in audiovisual equipment, development, and mass reproduction process.
Essentially the same as international.
Private developing studios and labs; lower quality material.
Lowest quality of all the markets; relies on retail level technology
(instant cameras. Photostats). Direct purchase or exchange, mail.
Distribution methods
Mail, courier, direct sale.
Adult bookstores, mail (commercial and Postal Service), direct sale.
Mail (commercial, U.S.), direct purchase or exchange, adult bookstores.
Direct purchase or exchange, mail.
Producers
Syndicated sex rings, entrepreneurs, and freelance photographers.
Organized crime and freelance pornographers.
Primarily freelance pornographers, with some work hired out on contractual basis by local pimps or pedophiles.
Community or neighborhood pedophiles, sex rings, and pimps.
Evasion techniques
Mobile production and development sites, false identities, multiple disguised mailings of merchandise.
Use of middleman to arrange routine purchases, parental release form, and mobile production and developmental sites.
Transient identities and locations of pornographers, rapid turnover in children used as models, and parental release forms.
Victims coerced or blackmailed into silence; offender's mobility and good reputation often insulate from any suspicion.
Status
Still available, with emphasis on use of Third World youths as
models; periodic inroads into traffic by foreign police and U.S. federal
law enforcement agencies; reactive nature of police investigations
precludes permanent abolition of production and distribution.
Extremely resilient, despite harsh federal laws occasional
disruption of the flow of merchandise. Resold in neighboring countries
and exported to Asia, Europe, and Africa.
Extremely difficult to intercept on proactive basis. Pimps and
pornographers use juvenile hustlers and molested children as subjects.
May later emerge in foreign publications. Parental consent binds guilty
parties to secrecy; increasing emphasis on suggestive materials.
Pornography made at the local level is the mainstay of the
pedophilic subculture; typically discovered during police search or
accidentally via postal investigations.
Live streaming sexual abuse
Child victims of live streaming sexual abuse
are forced to perform sex acts in real time in front of a webcam while
watching the paying customers on-screen and following their orders.
This occurs in locations commonly referred to as 'cybersex dens' that
can be homes, hotels, offices, internet cafes, and other businesses. Traffickers advertise children on the internet to obtain purchasers,
and overseas predators often seek out and pay for these illicit
services.
Causes
The
supply and demand for children in the sex trade industry is greatly
influenced by the structure of a country. Kevin Bales says the increase
of children sold into prostitution reflects the industrial
transformation the country has experienced in the last fifty years.
Young girls in Thailand are commonly from northern areas. Because of the
harshness of the land and a family's dependency on a good harvest many
families see their daughters as commodities.
On the macro-level of causes for child sexual exploitation is the
globalization of the consumer market and the influx of new goods and
services that encourage new forms of consumerism.
The amount of money offered to parents for their children is often too
good to refuse because they are living at or below the poverty level.
The children are turned over to the buyer without any knowledge of what
they were sold into.
Other macro-level influences include the expansion of
construction sites and military bases in developing countries. These
installations attract those who wish to sexually exploit children for
large sums of money. The men who participate in the sexual exploitation
of children at these installations are most often from developed
countries and have no regard for the children.
"It has been alleged that military personnel figure at a
disproportionately high rate in the pedophile exchange lists confiscated
by some police departments."
Families who sell their daughters to brothels tend to repeat the
pattern with their younger daughters. The younger daughters, however,
are more willing to go. This is because their older sisters tell them
stories of their extravagant times in the city. The girls admire their
sister's western clothes and money. The younger girls then enter into
prostitution with little notion of what they are getting themselves
into.
Dangers and consequences
Whether
the children be in pornography, brothels, or trafficked they are all at
risk for sexually transmitted infections, physical violence, and
psychological deterioration. Research has shown that "fifty to ninety
percent of children in brothels in Southeast Asia are infected with
HIV.
In many cases when children are brought into the sex trade industry
they are beaten and raped until they are so broken they no longer try to
escape. Physical hazards can also include infertility, cervical cancer, assault, and sometimes murder.
Pregnancy is also a physical risk factor for many children. Much like
if they are found to have HIV or AIDS the girls are thrown out of the
brothels with nowhere to go.
Many of the children "break the conscious link between mind and body"
in order to function in these situations (Bales 221). By doing so, many
children begin to think they are nothing more than "whores" and some
develop suicidal thoughts.
Other psychological risk factors include sleep and eating disorders,
gender-disturbed sexual identity, hysteria, and even homicidal rage.
Outside physical and psychological dangers lies fear of the law.
Many girls and women are illegally trafficked across borders. If they
manage to escape from the brothel or pimp, the women and children
quickly come to the attention of the authorities. Because they do not
have proper documentation they are detained by the authorities. If they
are held in local jails, the women and children often suffer further
abuse and exploitation by the police.
While it is impossible to know the true extent of the problem, given its illegal nature, International Labour Organization
(ILO) global child labour figures for the year 2003 estimate that there
are as many as 1.8 million children exploited in prostitution or
pornography worldwide.
The Rapid Assessment survey, developed by the ILO's International Programme for the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) and UNICEF,
relies on interviews and other, mainly qualitative, techniques, to
provide a picture of a specific activity in a limited geographic area.
It is a highly useful tool for collecting information on the worst forms
of child labour, like CSEC, that is difficult to capture with standard
quantitative surveys.
General knowledge offered to a child can decrease the likelihood
of children being exploited into prostitution or pornography. A national
campaign in Thailand provided "9 years of basic education, ...
awareness-raising activities to change attitudes about child
prostitution, and a surveillance system to prevent children from being
coerced into prostitution."
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) estimate that 2 million children are exploited in prostitution or pornography every year.
International agreements
In 1989, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(UNCRC), the first international agreement to recognize the human
rights of children, with freedom from sexual exploitation included as a
basic right.
Notably, Article 34 commits countries to "prohibiting inducement or
coercion of children into unlawful sex acts, prostitution, or
pornography." Currently, all United Nations member states except for the United States are parties to the UNCRC.
In 1996, the First World Congress Against the Commercial
Exploitation of Children adopted the Declaration and Agenda for Action,
which formally reframed child prostitution as CSEC, and committed
participants to develop and enforce national plans of action against
CSEC; a follow-up Second World Congress was held in 2001.Following these conferences, the UN took additional steps to address CSEC. Between 2002 and 2003, the UN adopted the Optional Protocol on the Sale of Children, Child Prostitution, and Child Pornography, which has more detailed commitments on the protection of children, including reporting and monitoring. The vast majority of countries have also ratified this protocol. Also adopted was the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children, which was the first international agreement to formally define human trafficking. Additionally, specialized organizations under the UN (UNICRI, UNODC, ILO, WTO)
have established efforts focused on CSEC, including research, data
collection, reporting, training, and anti-trafficking strategy and
implementation.
The same committee that put the Optional Protocol into action has
put more effort into acquiring more accurate data on child sexual
exploitation. The 2012 Global Report on Trafficking in Persons shows
that with the Protocol in place countries without a child sexual
exploitation offense have nearly halved. At the regional level, criminal
convictions of trafficking offenses have increased.
In 2010, the UN instated a Global Plan of Action against
Trafficking in Persons has been instated. This plan involves
strengthening the abilities of law enforcement to identify victims of
trafficking, enhance investigations of alleged cases, and prosecute and
punish the many corrupt officials who partake in sex trafficking and
tourism.
One of
the many ways to aid in CSEC prevention is through education. The
previously mentioned Protocol requires members to provide preventative
measures against child sexual exploitation; among these preventative
measures is educating the public, especially families, on the dangers of
sex tourism and trafficking. World Vision is one of the leaders in creating these educational opportunities for young girls.
Other efforts involve educating police, medical, and school personnel
on how to identify CSEC victims and respond in a situation involving
CSEC, and educating potential CSEC victims about the tactics recruiters
often use to reach at-risk individuals.
Class conflict, also referred to as class struggle and class warfare, is the political tension and economic antagonism that exists in society consequent to socio-economic competition among the social classes or between rich and poor.
The forms of class conflict include direct violence such as wars for resources and cheap labor, assassinations or revolution;
indirect violence such as deaths from poverty and starvation, illness
and unsafe working conditions; and economic coercion such as the threat
of unemployment or the withdrawal of investment capital; or
ideologically, by way of political literature. Additionally, political
forms of class warfare include: legal and illegal lobbying, and bribery
of legislators.
The social-class conflict can be direct, as in a dispute between labour and management such as an employer's industrial lockout of their employees in effort to weaken the bargaining power of the corresponding trade union; or indirect such as a workers' slowdown of production in protest of unfair labor practices like low wages and poor workplace conditions.
In the political and economic philosophies of Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin,
class struggle is a central tenet and a practical means for effecting
radical social and political changes for the social majority.
Farmer confronting landlord during Mao Zedong's mass purging of landlords
In political science, socialists and Marxists use the term class conflict to define a social class by its relationship to the means of production,
such as factories, agricultural land, and industrial machinery. The
social control of labor and of the production of goods and services, is a
political contest between the social classes.
The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin said that the class struggles of the working class, the peasantry, and the working poor were central to realizing a social revolution to depose and replace the ruling class, and the creation of libertarian socialism.
Marx's theory of history proposes that class conflict is decisive in the history of economic systems organized by hierarchies of social class such as capitalism and feudalism. Marxists refer to its overt manifestations as class war, a struggle whose resolution in favor of the working class is viewed by them as inevitable under the plutocratic capitalism.
Oligarchs versus commoners
Where
societies are socially divided based on status, wealth, or control of
social production and distribution, class structures arise and are thus
coeval with civilization itself. This has been well documented since at
least European classical antiquity such as the Conflict of the Orders and Spartacus, among others.
Thucydides
In his History, Thucydides describes a civil war in the city of Corcyra between the pro-Athens party of the common people and their pro-Corintholigarchic
opposition. Near the climax of the struggle, "the oligarchs in full
rout, fearing that the victorious commons might assault and carry the
arsenal and put them to the sword, fired the houses round the
market-place and the lodging-houses, in order to bar their advance." The historian Tacitus would later recount a similar class conflict in the city of Seleucia,
in which disharmony between the oligarchs and the commoners would
typically lead to each side calling on outside help to defeat the other.
Thucydides believed that "as long as poverty gives men the courage of
necessity, [...] so long will the impulse never be wanting to drive men
into danger."
Aristotle
In his treatise Politics, Aristotle
describes the basic dimensions of class war: "Again, because the rich
are generally few in number, while the poor are many, they appear to be
antagonistic, and as the one or the other prevails they form the
government.". Aristotle also commented that "poverty is the parent of revolution."
However, he did not consider this its only cause. In a society where
property is distributed equally across the community, "the nobles will
be dissatisfied because they think themselves worthy of more than an
equal share of honours; and this is often found to be a cause of
sedition and revolution."
Aristotle thought it wrong for the poor to seize the wealth of the rich
and divide it among themselves, but he also thought it wrong for the
rich to impoverish the multitude.
Moreover, he discussed what he considered a middle way between
laxity and cruelty in the treatment of slaves by their masters, averring
that "if not kept in hand, [slaves] are insolent, and think that they
are as good as their masters, and, if harshly treated, they hate and
conspire against them."
Socrates
Socrates was perhaps the first major Greek philosopher to describe class war. In Plato's Republic,
Socrates proposes that "any city, however small, is in fact divided
into two, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich; these are at
war with one another."
Socrates took a poor view of oligarchies, in which members of a small
class of wealthy property owners take positions of power in order to
dominate a large class of impoverished commoners. He used the analogy of
a maritime pilot, who, like a powerholder in a polis, ought to be chosen for his skill, not for the amount of property he owns.
Plutarch
This 6th century Athenian black-figure urn, in the British Museum, depicts the olive harvest. Many farmers, enslaved for debt, would have worked on large estates for their creditors.
Plutarch
recounts how various classical figures took part in class conflict.
Oppressed by their indebtedness to the rich, the mass of Athenians chose
Solon to be the lawgiver to lead them to freedom from their creditors. Hegel believed that Solon's constitution of the Athenian popular assembly created a political sphere that had the effect of balancing the interests of the three main classes of Athens:
The wealthy aristocratic party of the plain
The poorer common party of the mountains
The moderate party of the coast
Participation in Ancient Greek class war could have dangerous consequences. Plutarch noted of King Agis of Sparta
that, "being desirous to raise the people, and to restore the noble and
just form of government, now long fallen into disuse, [he] incurred the
hatred of the rich and powerful, who could not endure to be deprived of
the selfish enjoyment to which they were accustomed."
Patricians versus plebeians
It was similarly difficult for the Romans to maintain peace between the upper class, the patricians, and the lower class, the plebs. French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu notes that this conflict intensified after the overthrow of the Roman monarchy.
In The Spirit of Laws he lists the four main grievances of the plebs, which were rectified in the years following the deposition of King Tarquin:
The patricians had much too easy access to positions of public service.
The plebs had too little power in their assemblies.
Camillus
The Senate had the ability to give a magistrate the power of dictatorship,
meaning he could bypass public law in the pursuit of a prescribed
mandate. Montesquieu explains that the purpose of this institution was
to tilt the balance of power in favour of the patricians. However, in an attempt to resolve a conflict between the patricians and the plebs, the dictator Camillus used his power of dictatorship to coerce the Senate into giving the plebs the right to choose one of the two consuls.
Marius
Tacitus
believed that the increase in Roman power spurred the patricians to
expand their power over more and more cities. This process, he felt,
exacerbated pre-existing class tensions with the plebs, and eventually
culminated in the patrician Sulla's first civil war, with the populistreformerMarius. Marius had taken the step of enlisting capite censi, the very lowest class of citizens, into the army, for the first time allowing non-land owners into the legions.
Tiberius Gracchus
Tiberius Gracchus
Of all the notable figures discussed by Plutarch and Tacitus, agrarian reformerTiberius Gracchus
may have most challenged the upper classes and most championed the
cause of the lower classes. In a speech to the common soldiery, he
decried their lowly conditions:
"The savage beasts," said he, "in Italy, have their
particular dens, they have their places of repose and refuge; but the
men who bear arms, and expose their lives for the safety of their
country, enjoy in the meantime nothing more in it but the air and light;
and having no houses or settlements of their own, are constrained to
wander from place to place with their wives and children."
Following this observation, he remarked that these men "fought indeed
and were slain, but it was to maintain the luxury and the wealth of
other men." Cicero believed that Tiberius Gracchus's reforming efforts saved Rome from tyranny, arguing:
Tiberius Gracchus (says Cicero) caused the free-men to be admitted into the tribes,
not by the force of his eloquence, but by a word, by a gesture; which
had he not effected, the republic, whose drooping head we are at present
scarce able to uphold, would not even exist.
Tiberius Gracchus weakened the power of the Senate by changing the law so that judges were chosen from the ranks of the knights, instead of their social superiors in the senatorial class.
Julius Caesar
Contrary to Shakespeare's depiction of Julius Caesar in the tragedy Julius Caesar, historian Michael Parenti has argued that Caesar was a populist, not a tyrant. In 2003 The New Press published Parenti's The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome.Publisher's Weekly
said "Parenti [...] narrates a provocative history of the late republic
in Rome (100–33 B.C.) to demonstrate that Caesar's death was the
culmination of growing class conflict, economic disparity and political
corruption." Kirkus Reviews
wrote: "Populist historian Parenti... views ancient Rome’s most famous
assassination not as a tyrannicide but as a sanguinary scene in the
never-ending drama of class warfare."
Coriolanus
Coriolanus, Act V, Scene III. Engraved by James Caldwell from a painting by Gavin Hamilton.
The patrician Coriolanus, whose life William Shakespeare would later depict in the tragic play Coriolanus,
fought on the other side of the class war, for the patricians and
against the plebs. When grain arrived to relieve a serious shortage in
the city of Rome, the plebs made it known that they felt it ought to be
divided amongst them as a gift, but Coriolanus stood up in the Senate
against this idea on the grounds that it would empower the plebs at the
expense of the patricians.
This decision would eventually contribute to Coriolanus's undoing when he was impeached following a trial by the tribunes of the plebs.
Montesquieu recounts how Coriolanus castigated the tribunes for trying a
patrician, when in his mind no one but a consul had that right,
although a law had been passed stipulating that all appeals affecting
the life of a citizen had to be brought before the plebs.
In the first scene of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, a crowd of
angry plebs gathers in Rome to denounce Coriolanus as the "chief enemy
to the people" and "a very dog to the commonalty" while the leader of
the mob speaks out against the patricians thusly:
They ne'er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and
their store-houses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support
usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich,
and provide more piercing statutes daily, to chain up and restrain the
poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there's all the love
they bear us.
Landlessness and debt
The Secession of the People to the Mons Sacer, engraving by B. Barloccini, 1849.
[T]he
plebeians of Rome [...] had been oppressed from the earliest times by
the weight of debt and usury; and the husbandman, during the term of his
military service, was obliged to abandon the cultivation of his farm.
The lands of Italy which had been originally divided among the families
of free and indigent proprietors, were insensibly purchased or usurped
by the avarice of the nobles; and in the age which preceded the fall of
the republic, it was computed that only two thousand citizens were
possessed of an independent substance.
Hegel
similarly states that the 'severity of the patricians their creditors,
the debts due to whom they had to discharge by slave-work, drove the
plebs to revolts.' Gibbon also explains how Augustus facilitated this class warfare by pacifying the plebs with actual bread and circuses.
The economist Adam Smith noted that the poor freeman's lack of land provided a major impetus for Roman colonisation, as a way to relieve class tensions at home between the rich and the landless poor. Hegel described the same phenomenon happening in the impetus to Greek colonisation.
It was with bitter sarcasm that Rousseau outlined the class conflict prevailing in his day between masters and their workmen:
You
have need of me, because I am rich and you are poor. We will therefore
come to an agreement. I will permit you to have the honour of serving
me, on condition that you bestow on me the little you have left, in
return for the pains I shall take to command you.
Rousseau argued that the most important task of any government is to
fight in class warfare on the side of workmen against their masters, who
he said engage in exploitation under the pretence of serving society.
Specifically, he believed that governments should actively intervene in
the economy to abolish poverty and prevent the accrual of too much
wealth in the hands of too few men.
Adam Smith
Like Rousseau, the classical liberalAdam Smith
believed that the amassing of property in the hands of a minority
naturally resulted in an disharmonious state of affairs where "the
affluence of the few supposes the indigence of many" and "excites the
indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted
by envy, to invade [the rich man's] possessions."
Concerning wages, he explained the conflicting class interests of masters and workmen, who he said were often compelled to form trade unions for fear of suffering starvation wages, as follows:
What
are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract
usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means
the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as
little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to
raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of labour.
Smith was aware of the main advantage of masters over workmen, in addition to state protection:
The
masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily: and the
law, besides, authorises, or at least does not prohibit, their
combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts
of parliament against combining to lower the price of work, but many
against combining to raise it. In all such disputes, the masters can
hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, or
merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally
live a year or two upon the stocks, which they have already acquired.
Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and
scarce any a year, without employment. In the long run, the workman may
be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity
is not so immediate.
Smith observed that, outside of colonies where land is cheap and
labour expensive, both the masters who subsist by profit and the masters
who subsist by rents will work in tandem to subjugate the class of
workmen, who subsist by wages.
Moreover, he warned against blindly legislating in favour of the class
of masters who subsist by profit, since, as he said, their intention is
to gain as large a share of their respective markets as possible, which
naturally results in monopoly prices or close to them, a situation harmful to the other social classes.
James Madison
In his Federalist No. 10, James Madison
revealed an emphatic concern with the conflict between rich and poor,
commenting that "the most common and durable source of factions has been
the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and
those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in
society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a
like discrimination."
He welcomed class-based factions into political life as a necessary
result of political liberty, stating that the most important task of
government was to manage and adjust for 'the spirit of party'.
John Stuart Mill
Adam Smith was not the only classical liberal political economist concerned with class conflict. In his Considerations on Representative Government, John Stuart Mill observed the complete marginalisation of workmen's voices in Parliament,
rhetorically asking whether its members ever empathise with the
position of workmen, instead of siding entirely with their masters, on
issues such as the right to go on strike. Later in the book, he argues that an important function of truly representative government
is to provide a relatively equal balance of power between workmen and
masters, in order to prevent threats to the good of the whole of
society.
During Mill's discussion of the merits of progressive taxation in his essay Utilitarianism, he notes as an aside the power of the rich as independent of state support:
People
feel obliged to argue that the State does more for the rich than for
the poor, as a justification for its taking more [in taxation] from
them: though this is in reality not true, for the rich would be far
better able to protect themselves, in the absence of law or government,
than the poor, and indeed would probably be successful in converting the
poor into their slaves.
Hegel
In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel
expressed concern that the standard of living of the poor might drop so
far as to make it even easier for the rich to amass even more wealth.
Hegel believed that, especially in a liberal country such as
contemporary England, the poorest will politicise their situation,
channelling their frustrations against the rich:
Against
nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty
immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another.
Capitalist societies
The
typical example of class conflict described is class conflict within
capitalism. This class conflict is seen to occur primarily between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,
and takes the form of conflict over hours of work, value of wages,
division of profits, cost of consumer goods, the culture at work,
control over parliament or bureaucracy, and economic inequality.
The particular implementation of government programs which may seem
purely humanitarian, such as disaster relief, can actually be a form of
class conflict.
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
(1743–1826) led the U.S. as president from 1801 to 1809 and is
considered one of the founding fathers. Regarding the interaction
between social classes, he wrote:
I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians)
which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely
greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European
governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law,
& restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among
the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations
into two classes, wolves & sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a
true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and
keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but
reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to
the public affairs, you & I, & Congress & Assemblies, judges
& governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our
general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience
declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I
can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the
general prey of the rich on the poor.
— Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington - 16 January 1787
Max Weber
Max Weber
(1864–1920) agreed with the fundamental ideas of Karl Marx about the
economy causing class conflict, but claimed that class conflict can also
stem from prestige and power.
Weber argued that classes come from the different property locations.
Different locations can largely affect one's class by their education
and the people they associate with.
He also stated that prestige results in different status groupings.
This prestige is based upon the social status of one's parents. Prestige
is an attributed value and many times cannot be changed. Weber stated
that power differences led to the formation of political parties.
Weber disagreed with Marx about the formation of classes. While Marx
believed that groups are similar due to their economic status, Weber
argued that classes are largely formed by social status. Weber did not believe that communities are formed by economic standing, but by similar social prestige. Weber did recognize that there is a relationship between social status, social prestige and classes.
Twentieth century
In
the U.S., class conflict is often noted in labor/management disputes.
As far back as 1933 representative Edward Hamilton of the Airline Pilot's Association, used the term "class warfare" to describe airline management's opposition at the National Labor Board hearings in October of that year.
Apart from these day-to-day forms of class conflict, during periods of
crisis or revolution class conflict takes on a violent nature and
involves repression, assault, restriction of civil liberties, and
murderous violence such as assassinations or death squads.
Class conflict intensified in the period after the 2007/8 financial crisis, which led to a global wave of anti-austerity protests, including the Greek and Spanish Indignados movements and later the Occupy movement, whose slogan was "We are the 99%", signalling a more expansive class antagonist against the financial elite than that of the classical Marxist proletariat.
The investor, billionaire, and philanthropistWarren Buffett, one of the wealthiest people in the world,
voiced in 2005 and once more in 2006 his view that his class, the "rich
class", is waging class warfare on the rest of society. In 2005 Buffet
said to CNN: "It's class warfare, my class is winning, but they
shouldn't be." In a November 2006 interview in The New York Times,
Buffett stated that "[t]here’s class warfare all right, but it’s my
class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning."
In the speech "The Great American Class War" (2013), the journalist Bill Moyers asserted the existence of social-class conflict between democracy and plutocracy in the U.S. Chris Hedges wrote a column for Truthdig called "Let's Get This Class War Started", which was a play on Pink's song "Let's Get This Party Started."
Historian Steve Fraser, author of The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power,
asserted in 2014 that class conflict is an inevitability if current
political and economic conditions continue, noting that "people are
increasingly fed up [...] their voices are not being heard. And I think
that can only go on for so long without there being more and more
outbreaks of what used to be called class struggle, class warfare."
Arab Spring
Often seen as part of the same "movement of squares" as the Indignado and Occupy movements, the Arab Spring
was a wave of social protests starting in 2011. Numerous factors have
culminated in the Arab Spring, including rejection of dictatorship or absolute monarchy, human rights violations, government corruption (demonstrated by Wikileaks diplomatic cables), economic decline, unemployment, extreme poverty, and a number of demographic structural factors, such as a large percentage of educated but dissatisfied youth within the population. but class conflict is also a key factor. The catalysts for the revolts in all Northern African and Persian Gulf countries
have been the concentration of wealth in the hands of autocrats in
power for decades, insufficient transparency of its redistribution,
corruption, and especially the refusal of the youth to accept the status
quo.
Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a German born philosopher who lived the majority of his adult life in London, England. In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx argued that a class is formed when its members achieve class consciousness and solidarity. This largely happens when the members of a class become aware of their exploitation
and the conflict with another class. A class will then realize their
shared interests and a common identity. According to Marx, a class will
then take action against those that are exploiting the lower classes.
What Marx points out is that members of each of the two main
classes have interests in common. These class or collective interests
are in conflict with those of the other class as a whole. This in turn
leads to conflict between individual members of different classes.
Marxist analysis of society identifies two main social groups:
Labour (the proletariat or workers) includes anyone who earns their livelihood by selling their labor power
and being paid a wage or salary for their labor time. They have little
choice but to work for capital, since they typically have no independent
way to survive.
Capital (the bourgeoisie or capitalists) includes anyone who gets their income not from labor as much as from the surplus value they appropriate from the workers who create wealth. The income of the capitalists, therefore, is based on their exploitation of the workers (proletariat).
Not all class struggle is violent or necessarily radical, as with
strikes and lockouts. Class antagonism may instead be expressed as low
worker morale, minor sabotage and pilferage, and individual workers'
abuse of petty authority and hoarding of information. It may also be
expressed on a larger scale by support for socialist or populist
parties. On the employers' side, the use of union busting legal firms
and the lobbying for anti-union laws are forms of class struggle.
Not all class struggle is a threat to capitalism, or even to the
authority of an individual capitalist. A narrow struggle for higher
wages by a small sector of the working-class, what is often called
"economism", hardly threatens the status quo. In fact, by applying the
craft-union tactics of excluding other workers from skilled trades, an
economistic struggle may even weaken the working class as a whole by
dividing it. Class struggle becomes more important in the historical
process as it becomes more general, as industries are organized rather
than crafts, as workers' class consciousness rises, and as they
self-organize away from political parties. Marx referred to this as the
progress of the proletariat from being a class "in itself", a position
in the social structure, to being one "for itself", an active and
conscious force that could change the world.
Marx largely focuses on the capital industrialist society as the source of social stratification, which ultimately results in class conflict.
He states that capitalism creates a division between classes which can
largely be seen in manufacturing factories. The proletariat, is
separated from the bourgeoisie because production becomes a social
enterprise. Contributing to their separation is the technology that is
in factories. Technology de-skills and alienates workers as they are no
longer viewed as having a specialized skill. Another effect of technology is a homogenous workforce
that can be easily replaceable. Marx believed that this class conflict
would result in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and that the private
property would be communally owned. The mode of production would remain, but communal ownership would eliminate class conflict.
Even after a revolution, the two classes would struggle, but
eventually the struggle would recede and the classes dissolve. As class
boundaries broke down, the state apparatus would wither away. According
to Marx, the main task of any state apparatus is to uphold the power of
the ruling class; but without any classes there would be no need for a
state. That would lead to the classless, stateless communist society.
However, many Marxist argue that unlike in capitalism the Soviet elites did not own the means of production, or generated surplus value
for their personal wealth like in capitalism as the generated profit
from the economy was equally distributed into Soviet society. Even some Trotskyist like Ernest Mandel criticized the concept of a new ruling class as an oxymoron,
saying: "The hypothesis of the bureaucracy’s being a new ruling class
leads to the conclusion that, for the first time in history, we are
confronted with a 'ruling class' which does not exist as a class before
it actually rules."
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, in What is Property?
(1840) states that "certain classes do not relish investigation into
the pretended titles to property, and its fabulous and perhaps
scandalous history."
While Proudhon saw the solution as the lower classes forming an
alternative, solidarity economy centered on cooperatives and
self-managed workplaces, which would slowly undermine and replace
capitalist class society, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin,
while influenced by Proudhon, insisted that a massive class struggle by
the working class, peasantry and poor was essential to the creation of libertarian socialism. This would require a final showdown in the form of a social revolution.
One of the earliest analyses of the development of class as the
development of conflicts between emergent classes is available in Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid. In this work, Kropotkin analyzes the disposal of goods after death in pre-class or hunter-gatherer societies, and how inheritance produces early class divisions and conflict.
Fascists
have often opposed 'horizontal' class struggle in favour of vertical
national struggle and instead have attempted to appeal to the working
class while promising to preserve the existing social classes and have
proposed an alternative concept known as class collaboration.
Well, there’s always a class war
going on. The United States, to an unusual extent, is a business-run
society, more so than others. The business classes are very
class-conscious—they’re constantly fighting a bitter class war to
improve their power and diminish opposition. Occasionally this is
recognized... The enormous benefits given to the very wealthy, the
privileges for the very wealthy here, are way beyond those of other
comparable societies and are part of the ongoing class war. Take a look
at CEO salaries....
— Noam Chomsky, OCCUPY: Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity, Second Edition (November 5, 2013)
Rightwing libertarianism
Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer argued that class struggle came from factions that managed to gain control of the State power. The ruling class are the groups that seize the power of the State to carry out their political agenda, the ruled are then taxed and regulated by the State for the benefit of the Ruling classes. Through taxation, State power, subsidies, Tax codes,
laws, and privileges the State creates class conflict by giving
preferential treatment to some at the expense of others by force. In
the free market, by contrast, exchanges are not carried out by force but by the Non-aggression principle of cooperation in a Win-win scenario.
Jobless black workers in the heat of the Philadelphia summer, 1973
Some historical tendencies of Orthodox Marxism rejectracism, sexism, etc. as struggles that essentially distract from class struggle, the real conflict.
These divisions within the class prevent the purported antagonists from
acting in their common class interest. However, many Marxist
internationalists and anti-colonial revolutionaries believe that sex, race and class are bound up together. Within Marxist scholarship there is an ongoing debate about these topics.
According to Michel Foucault, in the 19th century, the essentialist notion of the "race" was incorporated by racists, biologists, and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "biological race" which was then integrated into "state racism". On the other hand, Foucault claims that when Marxists
developed their concept of "class struggle", they were partly inspired
by the older, non-biological notions of the "race" and the "race
struggle". Quoting a non-existent 1882 letter from Marx to Friedrich
Engels during a lecture, Foucault erroneously claimed Marx wrote: "You
know very well where we found our idea of class struggle; we found it in
the work of the French historians who talked about the race struggle." For Foucault, the theme of social war provides the overriding principle that connects class and race struggle.
Moses Hess, an important theoretician and labor Zionist of the early socialist movement, in his "Epilogue" to "Rome and Jerusalem"
argued that "the race struggle is primary, the class struggle
secondary. [...] With the cessation of race antagonism, the class
struggle will also come to a standstill. The equalization of all classes
of society will necessarily follow the emancipation of all the races, for it will ultimately become a scientific question of social economics."
W. E. B. Du Bois theorized that the intersectional paradigms of race, class, and nation might explain certain aspects of black political economy. Patricia Hill Collins
writes: "Du Bois saw race, class, and nation not primarily as personal
identity categories but as social hierarchies that shaped
African-American access to status, poverty, and power."
In modern times, emerging schools of thought in the U.S. and other countries hold the opposite to be true.
They argue that the race struggle is less important, because the
primary struggle is that of class since labor of all races face the same
problems and injustices.
The Communist Manifesto, originally the Manifesto of the Communist Party (German: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), is an 1848 pamphlet by German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Commissioned by the Communist League and originally published in London just as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt, the Manifesto was later recognised as one of the world's most influential political documents. It presents an analytical approach to the class struggle (historical and then-present) and the conflicts of capitalism and the capitalist mode of production, rather than a prediction of communism's potential future forms.
The Communist Manifesto summarises Marx and Engels'
theories concerning the nature of society and politics, namely that in
their own words "[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles". It also briefly features their ideas for
how the capitalist society of the time would eventually be replaced by socialism. In the last paragraph of the Manifesto,
the authors call for a "forcible overthrow of all existing social
conditions", which served as a call for communist revolutions around the
world.
The Communist Manifesto is divided into a preamble and four
sections, the last of these a short conclusion. The introduction begins:
"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." Pointing out that parties everywhere—including
those in government and those in the opposition—have flung the "branding
reproach of communism" at each other, the authors infer from this that
the powers-that-be acknowledge communism to be a power in itself.
Subsequently, the introduction exhorts Communists to openly publish
their views and aims, to "meet this nursery tale of the spectre of
communism with a manifesto of the party itself".
The first section of the Manifesto, "Bourgeois and Proletarians", elucidates the materialist conception of history, that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". Societies have always taken the form of an oppressed majority exploited under the yoke of an oppressive minority. In capitalism, the industrial working class, or proletariat, engage in class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the bourgeoisie. As before, this struggle will end in a revolution that restructures society, or the "common ruin of the contending classes". The bourgeoisie, through the "constant revolutionising of production [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions" have emerged as the supreme class in society, displacing all the old powers of feudalism. The bourgeoisie constantly exploits the proletariat for its labour power,
creating profit for themselves and accumulating capital. However, in
doing so the bourgeoisie serves as "its own grave-diggers"; the
proletariat inevitably will become conscious of their own potential and
rise to power through revolution, overthrowing the bourgeoisie.
"Proletarians and Communists", the second section, starts by
stating the relationship of conscious communists to the rest of the
working class. The communists' party will not oppose other working-class
parties, but unlike them, it will express the general will
and defend the common interests of the world's proletariat as a whole,
independent of all nationalities. The section goes on to defend
communism from various objections, including claims that it advocates
communal prostitution or disincentivises people from working. The
section ends by outlining a set of short-term demands—among them a progressive income tax; abolition of inheritances and private property; abolition of child labour; free public education;
nationalisation of the means of transport and communication;
centralisation of credit via a national bank; expansion of publicly
owned land, etc.—the implementation of which would result in the
precursor to a stateless and classless society.
The third section, "Socialist and Communist Literature",
distinguishes communism from other socialist doctrines prevalent at the
time—these being broadly categorised as Reactionary Socialism;
Conservative or Bourgeois Socialism; and Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism. While the degree of reproach toward rival perspectives varies, all are dismissed for advocating reformism and failing to recognise the pre-eminent revolutionary role of the working class.
"Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Opposition Parties", the concluding section of the Manifesto,
briefly discusses the communist position on struggles in specific
countries in the mid-nineteenth century such as France, Switzerland,
Poland and Germany, this last being "on the eve of a bourgeois
revolution" and predicts that a world revolution will soon follow. It ends by declaring an alliance with the democratic socialists, boldly supporting other communist revolutions and calling for united international proletarian action—"Working Men of All Countries, Unite!".
Writing
Only surviving page from the first draft of the Manifesto, handwritten by Karl Marx
In spring 1847, Marx and Engels joined the League of the Just,
who were quickly convinced by the duo's ideas of "critical communism".
At its First Congress in 2–9 June, the League tasked Engels with
drafting a "profession of faith", but such a document was later deemed
inappropriate for an open, non-confrontational organisation. Engels
nevertheless wrote the "Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith",
detailing the League's programme. A few months later, in October, Engels
arrived at the League's Paris branch to find that Moses Hess
had written an inadequate manifesto for the group, now called the
League of Communists. In Hess's absence, Engels severely criticised this
manifesto, and convinced the rest of the League to entrust him with
drafting a new one. This became the draft Principles of Communism, described as "less of a credo and more of an exam paper".
On 23 November, just before the Communist League's Second
Congress (29 November – 8 December 1847), Engels wrote to Marx,
expressing his desire to eschew the catechism format in favour of the manifesto, because he felt it "must contain some history." On the 28th, Marx and Engels met at Ostend in Belgium, and a few days later, gathered at the Soho,
London headquarters of the German Workers' Education Association to
attend the Congress. Over the next ten days, intense debate raged
between League functionaries; Marx eventually dominated the others and,
overcoming "stiff and prolonged opposition", in Harold Laski's
words, secured a majority for his programme. The League thus
unanimously adopted a far more combative resolution than that at the
First Congress in June. Marx (especially) and Engels were subsequently
commissioned to draw up a manifesto for the League.
Upon returning to Brussels, Marx engaged in "ceaseless procrastination", according to his biographer Francis Wheen. Working only intermittently on the Manifesto, he spent much of his time delivering lectures on political economy at the German Workers' Education Association, writing articles for the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, and giving a long speech on free trade.
Following this, he even spent a week (17–26 January 1848) in Ghent to
establish a branch of the Democratic Association there. Subsequently,
having not heard from Marx for nearly two months, the Central Committee
of the Communist League sent him an ultimatum on 24 or 26 January,
demanding he submit the completed manuscript by 1 February. This
imposition spurred Marx on, who struggled to work without a deadline,
and he seems to have rushed to finish the job in time. For evidence of
this, historian Eric Hobsbawm points to the absence of rough drafts, only one page of which survives.
In all, the Manifesto was written over 6–7 weeks. Although
Engels is credited as co-writer, the final draft was penned exclusively
by Marx. From the 26 January letter, Laski infers that even the
Communist League considered Marx to be the sole draftsman and that he
was merely their agent, imminently replaceable. Further, Engels himself
wrote in 1883: "The basic thought running through the Manifesto
[...] belongs solely and exclusively to Marx". Although Laski does not
disagree, he suggests that Engels underplays his own contribution with
characteristic modesty and points out the "close resemblance between its
substance and that of the [Principles of Communism]". Laski argues that while writing the Manifesto,
Marx drew from the "joint stock of ideas" he developed with Engels "a
kind of intellectual bank account upon which either could draw freely".
In late February 1848, the Manifesto was anonymously published by the Workers' Educational Association (Kommunistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein) at Bishopsgate in the City of London. Written in German, the 23-page pamphlet was titled Manifest der kommunistischen Partei and had a dark-green cover. It was reprinted three times and serialised in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, a newspaper for German émigrés. On 4 March, one day after the serialisation in the Zeitung began, Marx was expelled by Belgian police. Two weeks later, around 20 March, a thousand copies of the Manifesto
reached Paris, and from there to Germany in early April. In April–May
the text was corrected for printing and punctuation mistakes; Marx and
Engels would use this 30-page version as the basis for future editions
of the Manifesto.
Although the Manifesto's
prelude announced that it was "to be published in the English, French,
German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages", the initial printings
were only in German. Polish and Danish translations soon followed the
German original in London, and by the end of 1848, a Swedish translation
was published with a new title—The Voice of Communism: Declaration of the Communist Party. In June–November 1850 the Manifesto of the Communist Party was published in English for the first time when George Julian Harney serialised Helen Macfarlane's translation in his Chartist magazine The Red Republican. Her version begins: "A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism".
For her translation, the Lancashire-based Macfarlane probably consulted
Engels, who had abandoned his own English translation half way.
Harney's introduction revealed the Manifesto's hitherto-anonymous authors' identities for the first time.
Soon after the Manifesto was published, Paris erupted in revolution to overthrow King Louis Philippe. The Manifesto played no role in this; a French translation was not published in Paris until just before the working-class June Days Uprising was crushed. Its influence in the Europe-wide Revolutions of 1848 was restricted to Germany, where the Cologne-based Communist League and its newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, edited by Marx, played an important role. Within a year of its establishment, in May 1849, the Zeitung
was suppressed; Marx was expelled from Germany and had to seek lifelong
refuge in London. In 1851, members of the Communist League's central
board were arrested by the Prussian police. At their trial in Cologne
18 months later in late 1852 they were sentenced to 3–6 years'
imprisonment. For Engels, the revolution was "forced into the background
by the reaction that began with the defeat of the Paris workers in June
1848, and was finally excommunicated 'by law' in the conviction of the
Cologne Communists in November 1852".
After the defeat of the 1848 revolutions the Manifesto fell into obscurity, where it remained throughout the 1850s and 1860s. Hobsbawm says that by November 1850 the Manifesto
"had become sufficiently scarce for Marx to think it worth reprinting
section III [...] in the last issue of his [short-lived] London
magazine". Over the next two decades only a few new editions were
published; these include an (unauthorised and occasionally inaccurate)
1869 Russian translation by Mikhail Bakunin in Geneva and an 1866 edition in Berlin—the first time the Manifesto
was published in Germany. According to Hobsbawm: "By the middle 1860s
virtually nothing that Marx had written in the past was any longer in
print". However, John Cowell-Stepney did publish an abridged version in the Social Economist in August/September 1869, in time for the Basle Congress.
Rise, 1872–1917
In the early 1870s, the Manifesto and its authors experienced a
revival in fortunes. Hobsbawm identifies three reasons for this. The
first is the leadership role Marx played in the International Workingmen's Association
(aka the First International). Secondly, Marx also came into much
prominence among socialists—and equal notoriety among the
authorities—for his support of the Paris Commune of 1871, elucidated in The Civil War in France. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly in the popularisation of the Manifesto, was the treason trial of German Social Democratic Party (SPD) leaders. During the trial prosecutors read the Manifesto
out loud as evidence; this meant that the pamphlet could legally be
published in Germany. Thus in 1872 Marx and Engels rushed out a new
German-language edition, writing a preface that identified that several
portions that became outdated in the quarter century since its original
publication. This edition was also the first time the title was
shortened to The Communist Manifesto (Das Kommunistische Manifest), and it became the bedrock the authors based future editions upon. Between 1871 and 1873, the Manifesto
was published in over nine editions in six languages; on December 30,
1871 it was published in the United States for the first time in Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly of New York City. However, by the mid 1870s the Communist Manifesto remained Marx and Engels' only work to be even moderately well-known.
Over the next forty years, as social-democratic parties rose across Europe and parts of the world, so did the publication of the Manifesto
alongside them, in hundreds of editions in thirty languages. Marx and
Engels wrote a new preface for the 1882 Russian edition, translated by Georgi Plekhanov in Geneva. In it they wondered if Russia could directly become a communist society,
or if she would become capitalist first like other European countries.
After Marx's death in 1883, Engels alone provided the prefaces for five
editions between 1888 and 1893. Among these is the 1888 English edition,
translated by Samuel Moore
and approved by Engels, who also provided notes throughout the text. It
has been the standard English-language edition ever since.
The principal region of its influence, in terms of editions
published, was in the "central belt of Europe", from Russia in the east
to France in the west. In comparison, the pamphlet had little impact on
politics in southwest and southeast Europe, and moderate presence in the
north. Outside Europe, Chinese and Japanese translations were
published, as were Spanish editions in Latin America. This uneven
geographical spread in the Manifesto's
popularity reflected the development of socialist movements in a
particular region as well as the popularity of Marxist variety of
socialism there. There was not always a strong correlation between a
social-democratic party's strength and the Manifesto's popularity in that country. For instance, the German SPD printed only a few thousand copies of the Communist Manifesto every year, but a few hundred thousand copies of the Erfurt Programme. Further, the mass-based social-democratic parties of the Second International did not require their rank and file to be well-versed in theory; Marxist works such as the Manifesto or Das Kapital
were read primarily by party theoreticians. On the other hand, small,
dedicated militant parties and Marxist sects in the West took pride in
knowing the theory; Hobsbawm says: "This was the milieu in which 'the
clearness of a comrade could be gauged invariably from the number of
earmarks on his Manifesto'".
Ubiquity, 1917–present
Following the 1917 Bolshevik takeover of Russia, Marx and Engels' classics like The Communist Manifesto were distributed far and wide.
Therefore the widespread dissemination of Marx and Engels' works
became an important policy objective; backed by a sovereign state, the
CPSU had relatively inexhaustible resources for this purpose. Works by
Marx, Engels, and Lenin were published on a very large scale, and cheap
editions of their works were available in several languages across the
world. These publications were either shorter writings or they were
compendia such as the various editions of Marx and Engels' Selected Works, or their Collected Works. This affected the destiny of the Manifesto in several ways. Firstly, in terms of circulation; in 1932 the American and British Communist Parties
printed several hundred thousand copies of a cheap edition for
"probably the largest mass edition ever issued in English". Secondly the
work entered political-science syllabuses in universities, which would
only expand after the Second World War. For its centenary in 1948, its
publication was no longer the exclusive domain of Marxists and
academicians; general publishers too printed the Manifesto in
large numbers. "In short, it was no longer only a classic Marxist
document", Hobsbawm noted, "it had become a political classic tout
court".
Even after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in the 1990s, the Communist Manifesto
remains ubiquitous; Hobsbawm says that "In states without censorship,
almost certainly anyone within reach of a good bookshop, and certainly
anyone within reach of a good library, not to mention the internet, can
have access to it". The 150th anniversary once again brought a deluge of
attention in the press and the academia, as well as new editions of the
book fronted by introductions to the text by academics. One of these, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition by Verso, was touted by a critic in the London Review of Books
as being a "stylish red-ribboned edition of the work. It is designed as
a sweet keepsake, an exquisite collector's item. In Manhattan, a
prominent Fifth Avenue
store put copies of this choice new edition in the hands of shop-window
mannequins, displayed in come-hither poses and fashionable décolletage".
Legacy
"With the clarity and brilliance of genius, this work outlines a new
world-conception, consistent materialism, which also embraces the realm
of social life; dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound
doctrine of development; the theory of the class struggle and of the
world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat—the creator of a
new, communist society."
A number of late-20th- and 21st-century writers have commented on the Communist Manifesto's continuing relevance. In a special issue of the Socialist Register commemorating the Manifesto's 150th anniversary, Peter Osborne argued that it was "the single most influential text written in the nineteenth century".
Academic John Raines in 2002 noted: "In our day this Capitalist
Revolution has reached the farthest corners of the earth. The tool of
money has produced the miracle of the new global market and the
ubiquitous shopping mall. Read The Communist Manifesto, written more than one hundred and fifty years ago, and you will discover that Marx foresaw it all". In 2003, English Marxist Chris Harman
stated: "There is still a compulsive quality to its prose as it
provides insight after insight into the society in which we live, where
it comes from and where it's going to. It is still able to explain, as
mainstream economists and sociologists cannot, today's world of
recurrent wars and repeated economic crisis, of hunger for hundreds of
millions on the one hand and 'overproduction' on the other. There are passages that could have come from the most recent writings on globalisation". Alex Callinicos, editor of International Socialism, stated in 2010: "This is indeed a manifesto for the 21st century". Writing in The London Evening Standard , Andrew Neather cited Verso Books' 2012 re-edition of The Communist Manifesto with an introduction by Eric Hobsbawm as part of a resurgence of left-wing-themed ideas which includes the publication of Owen Jones' best-selling Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class and Jason Barker's documentary Marx Reloaded.
In contrast, critics such as revisionist Marxist and reformist socialist Eduard Bernstein distinguished between "immature" early Marxism—as exemplified by The Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels in their youth—that he opposed for its violent Blanquist tendencies and later "mature" Marxism that he supported.
This latter form refers to Marx in his later life acknowledging that
socialism could be achieved through peaceful means through legislative
reform in democratic societies. Bernstein declared that the massive and homogeneous working-class claimed in the Communist Manifesto
did not exist, and that contrary to claims of a proletarian majority
emerging, the middle-class was growing under capitalism and not
disappearing as Marx had claimed. Bernstein noted that the working-class
was not homogeneous but heterogeneous, with divisions and factions
within it, including socialist and non-socialist trade unions. Marx
himself, later in his life, acknowledged that the middle-class was not
disappearing in his work Theories of Surplus Value (1863). The obscurity of the later work means that Marx's acknowledgement of this error is not well known. George Boyer described the Manifesto as "very much a period piece, a document of what was called the 'hungry' 1840s".
Many have drawn attention to the passage in the Manifesto that
seems to sneer at the stupidity of the rustic: "The bourgeoisie [...]
draws all nations [...] into civilisation[.] [...] It has created
enormous cities [...] and thus rescued a considerable part of the
population from the idiocy [sic] of rural life". However, as Eric Hobsbawm noted:
[W]hile
there is no doubt that Marx at this time shared the usual townsman's
contempt for, as well as ignorance of, the peasant milieu, the actual
and analytically more interesting German phrase ("dem Idiotismus des
Landlebens entrissen") referred not to "stupidity" but to "the narrow
horizons", or "the isolation from the wider society" in which people in
the countryside lived. It echoed the original meaning of the Greek term idiotes
from which the current meaning of "idiot" or "idiocy" is derived,
namely "a person concerned only with his own private affairs and not
with those of the wider community". In the course of the decades since
the 1840s, and in movements whose members, unlike Marx, were not
classically educated, the original sense was lost and was misread.
Influences
Marx and Engels' political influences
were wide-ranging, reacting to and taking inspiration from German
idealist philosophy, French socialism, and English and Scottish
political economy. The Communist Manifesto also takes influence from literature. In Jacques Derrida’s work, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, he uses William Shakespeare’s Hamlet
to frame a discussion of the history of the International, showing in
the process the influence that Shakespeare's work had on Marx and
Engels’ writing.
In his essay, "Big Leagues: Specters of Milton and Republican
International Justice between Shakespeare and Marx", Christopher N.
Warren makes the case that English poet John Milton also had a substantial influence on Marx and Engels' work.
Historians of 19th-century reading habits have confirmed that Marx and
Engels would have read these authors and it is known that Marx loved
Shakespeare in particular. Milton, Warren argues, also shows a notable influence on The Communist Manifesto,
saying: "Looking back on Milton’s era, Marx saw a historical dialectic
founded on inspiration in which freedom of the press, republicanism, and
revolution were closely joined". Milton’s republicanism,
Warren continues, served as "a useful, if unlikely, bridge" as Marx and
Engels sought to forge a revolutionary international coalition.
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