The Communist Manifesto--Todd Chretien

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Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.socialistworker.org/2008-1/666/666_06_Manifesto.shtml

Many famous people have agreed with this [socialism] as a hope or a wish or a dream--Jesus, Buddha, Mohammad, Moses, Spartacus, Ghandi and Martin Luther King to name a few.

However, Marx and Engels make a very specific case about how to make this vision of a different kind of world concrete:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf... in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.

So once primitive communism is replaced by the haves and have-nots, two things happen: The rich fight like hell to get richer, while the poor resist their exploitation to the best of their ability.

Human history is about our capacity as a species to innovate, and then about the fight over who will benefit from our collective efforts--everyone equally or a domineering minority.

The rich usually manage to keep control because they can pay other people to carry arms to enforce their will, and they have the leisure time to dedicate to politics. But any given ruling class always has to watch out for a challenge from two sources: either foreign competitors abroad and newly emerging wealthy classes at home, or the solidarity of the lower classes banding together to try to upend the status quo.

It is very common in history for one ruling class to be replaced by another: the Greeks beat the Persians, the Romans beat the Germans, the Chinese beat the Vietnamese, the Moguls beat the Hindus, the Aztecs beat the Tepanecs. More recently, European and American imperialism has seized control of most parts of the world. Many mainstream historians choose their favorite conquering nation, and then write history based on defending that conquest.

Marx and Engels certainly recognized that this happened, but they were interested in a different fight: namely, could the oppressed people in any given country work together to get rid of their rulers and get back to running society cooperatively, like primitive communism, but with better technology? And if they could, was it possible to spread that revolution internationally?

Their affirmative answer is as radical today as it was back then. Contrary to myth, the Communist Manifesto never said that socialism was inevitable. In fact, Marx and Engels pointed out that the "common ruin of the contending classes" was very common in history and a real danger.

Today, we have to ask ourselves what will happen to the planet if we cannot successfully challenge the power of the imperialists and the corporations. Every year, 6 million children die from malnourishment and lack of cheap medicines. Wars are killing millions more, and, sooner or later, some president or premier will decide that nuclear warfare is "reasonable." Global warming endangers thousands of species, and the drinking water and farmland upon which hundreds of millions of people rely.

The disasters that modern capitalism has in store for us make the collapse of Rome look like a picnic. But socialism, a society based on democratic planning of the economy in order to eradicate poverty and oppression, is not a pipe dream. It is one of our possible futures.

Of course, Marx and Engels--and countless millions of working-class socialist activists--fought and died without achieving their goals. And today, they seem even farther away.

Marx and Engels would be the last people to tell you that simply reading the Communist Manifesto would change the world. But it just might change you.

How about that bet?