A Century of Communism

January 12, 1948

It may come as a shock to many people to realize that socialism and Communism as we know them today—the Marxist brand—are now officially a hundred years old. For it was in January 1848 that the manuscript of the Communist Manifesto—by far the most influential single document of the cause—was written by Marx and Engels.

In the century since its publication it has proved its viability as a masterpiece of pamphleteering and propaganda. From its opening sentence: “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism,” to its famous conclusion: “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win, Workers of all lands, unite!”, the Manifesto has a startlingly “modern” ring. Yet it is hard to say whether this contemporaneousness is primarily a tribute to the polemical genius of Marx or a reminder of the intellectual poverty and docility of his epigones. For not only the declared Socialists and Communists, the conscious disciples of Marx, but thousands of people who think of themselves simply as “progressives” and “advanced” original thinkers, and who have never read Marx at first hand, parrot his phrases and have adopted some of his anti-capitalist theories. Many a magazine editor could have saved good money in the last two decades by running excerpts from the Manifesto instead of buying articles which were little more than paraphrases of such excerpts.

It is all here—the “class struggles” and “class antagonisms” (with “classes” never clearly defined); the “need for ever-expanding markets” and for “the conquest of new markets” (which Russian Communists still think is one of the main motives behind the Marshall Plan); the “concentrated ownership in the hands of the few” (“proved” mainly by constant reiteration); the “epidemics of overproduction” (still the most popular theory of crises among our “progressives”); the workers who are “slaves of the bourgeois class”—and all the rest.

There is even the preposterous theory that capital accumulation, the use of machinery, increases “the burden of labor” and “forces wages down almost everywhere.” Does this sound too absurd for present belief? Then listen to its echo in the second annual report just published by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers: “The accumulations of capital over the years have in fact involved deprivations of the rank-and-file worker.” No doubt this explains why in the United States, where the accumulation of capital and the use of machinery have reached their highest levels, wages and economic welfare are notoriously the lowest in the world.

The Manifesto is not only belied by the facts of today but contains inherent theoretical self-contradictions. Though the marginal-utility champions were undermining the classical value theory in Marx’s own lifetime, he never extricated himself from the Ricardian cost-of-production doctrine. And to the end of his life he never reconciled his hysterical incitements to revolution with his fatalistic theory that the victory of the proletariat was “inevitable” anyway.

In the Manifesto Marx frankly demanded “despotic inroads upon the rights of property” and “despotic interference with bourgeois methods of production” by measures which he regarded as necessary to pave the way for revolution. In his list of ten such measures he placed second “a vigorously graduated income tax.” Surely his ghost must gloat as it reads the American and British income-tax schedules of today.

Marx had a genius for destruction. He knew that capitalism could not long survive a system of confiscatory taxes which dry up incentives and the sources of private capital accumulation and investment. Like his disciple Lenin—who declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency—he probably would have seen that the undermining effects of the present “vigorously graduated” income tax are merely being concealed for the moment by the effects of monetary inflation. In the end, he knew, this “despotic inroad upon the rights of property” must do its destructive revolutionary work.