On The 80th Anniversary Of The Founding Of The Fourth International-Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution -Leon Trotsky on the 90th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in 1938

Happy, Happy Birthday Karl Marx, On The 200^th Anniversary Of His Birth-Some Thoughts 

A link to NPR’s Christopher Lydon’s Open Source  2018 program on the meaning of Karl Marx in the 21^st century on the 200^th anniversary of his birth:

http://radioopensource.org/marx-at-200/

By Seth Garth

Normally Frank Jackman would be the natural person to do his take on the name, the role, the legacy of one German revolutionary exiled to London after the revolutions of 1848 faded away, Karl Marx, on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1818. And Frank at first fought me a little, said he had grabbed a bunch of Marx’s books and pamphlets like the Communist Manifesto and the abridged Das Capital abetted by his friend and colleague Engels’ The Peasant Wars In Germany and Scientific Socialism. No question heavy lifting, heavy reading which our respective youths would have been read until early in the morning page turners but now would seemingly act as a sedative, a sleep aid, at least for me since Frank said it had made him more alert although agreeing that the works were not “read until early in the morning page turners.” Frank’s argument to me at least for his grabbing the assignment was that he had of the two of us been more influenced by Marx’s works and programs and had actually been a supporter of the old time Trotskyist organization the Socialist Workers Party for a while back in the early 1970s after he got out of the Vietnam blood bath American army and was ready to “storm heaven” (his words) to right the wrongs of this wicked old world (my words grabbed via Sam Lowell take) and as well had been doing leftwing commentary since Hector was a pup (somebody unknown’s expression).

Frank then went chapter and verse at me with what he remembered (both from long ago and the recent re-readings) about how he had all his life, all his early life looking for something, some movement to move him, to move us who grew up with him poor as church mice, maybe poorer to a more just world. Had made me laugh, since on some of the stuff I have been right alongside him, when he mentioned the old Student Union for World Goals which a bunch of us had put together in high school. A grouping with a program that was inundated with all the anti-communist, red scare, Cold War platitudes we could find. We basically were a little to the left of Ike, Grandpa Ike, Dwight D. Eisenhower who was President of the United States (POTUS in twitter-speak) in our youth filled with bauble about the virtues of capitalism, although I think we would have been hard pressed to make that word connection and probably said something like prosperity which we had garnered very little of in the now remembered golden age of the 1950s.     

Then as the thaw came, or as people, young people mostly broke the spell of the red scare Cold War night, after we have sown our oats out in the Summer of Love, 1967 and saw some writing on the wall that we were ‘raw meat” for the draft come college graduation day getting hopped up about Robert Kennedy’s ill-fated, ill-starred bid for the Democratic Party Presidential nomination in 1968. I already mentioned the Army experiences which did both of us in for a while but which frankly drove Frank outside bourgeois politics (he had expected that he would tie his wagon to Robert Kennedy and when that idea fell apart with Kennedy’s assassination offering Hubert H. Humphrey his services against the main villain of the ear Richard M. Nixon in the expectation that he would ride that train out of the draft and/or begin the road to a nice sinecure via Democratic Party politics). I am not sure if he began serious reading on Marx in the Army or not but when he got out in 1971 he certainly was doing the “read until the early morning” routine. I grabbed some of his tidbits, associated with some of the radical circles in Cambridge he started to frequent, went down the line with him in Washington on May Day, 1971 where we both got busted but soon after withdrew a bit from both him and serious leftwing politics. I was crazy, still am, for films, for seeking some kind of career as a film critic and so spent more of my time in the Brattle Theater in Harvard Square than protesting on Boston Common. He can address sometime his own withdrawal from left-wing organizational politics and moving on to journalism, political commentary on his own dime.

That is enough of the political justification for Frank’s fighting me on this assignment. Frank, however, took the unusual step, for him anyway, of mentioning his being pissed off about losing the Marx assignment and mentioned it to site manager Greg Green. The guy who gives out the assignment and who has had more than one person, me included, scratching their heads both in the assignments they have gotten of late or like Frank not have gotten. Whatever Frank laid out for Greg he had both of us come in to his office to discuss the issue. You know as much as you need to about Franks’ “cred.”

My frame of reference and what amounted to the winning argument was that I had been Peter Paul Markin’s closest friend in high school. Markin, forever known as Scribe for the obvious reason that he always carried a notebook and pen or pencil in his shirt pocket AND always, always had two thousand facts ready to throw at anybody who would listen, mainly girls, which drove more that one of our corner boy crowd to threaten grievous bodily is the real primary source for whatever we knew about Karl Marx before we went crazy later and started to seriously read the stuff. So I knew the details of how Frank, Frankie Riley, Jimmy Jenkins, Si Lannon and maybe a couple of others first heard about the name and ideas of one Karl Marx and who would later act on them a little. This is where I was a little ahead of Frank knowing that Greg, after taking over as site manager when Allan Jackson was purged from that position, was interested much more in “”human interest” stories than the “tiresome” (his words) esoteric left-wing jargon that he knew Frank would meandering into, no, would get in knee deep.     

(For the record some of the other guys who hung around with Scribe and the rest of us like Ricky Rizzo and Dave Whiting, both who would lay their heads down in hellhole Vietnam and wound up on the town monument and Washington black granite, Red Riley and even Frank Jackman when he was hopped up on that Student Union thing almost lynched him when he started talking favorably about Karl Marx and the idea of red revolution in those dead ass red scare Cold War nights. All they wanted to hear about was whatever intelligence Scribe had on some girl they were interested in of which he somehow almost incongruously had been plenty of information about or what his next plan was for the “midnight creep” which I assume needs no further explanation except he planned the capers but no way would Frankie Riley or the rest of us let him lead the expeditions-hell we would still be in jail.)

Others, including Frank Jackman, have now seemingly endlessly gone over the effect Scribe had on them a little later when the turbulent 1960s we all got caught up in, blew a gasket, in the Summer of Love, 1967 as the culmination of what he also had been talking about for years on those lonely forlorn weekend nights when we hung around good guy Tonio’s Pizza Parlor “up the Downs” in the growing up Acre section of North Adamsville. What most of the guys did not know, or did not want to know, was that a little of what Scribe was thinking at the time, was that maybe Karl Marx might be proven to be right, might have been onto something when he spoke about the working classes, us, getting a big jump ahead in the world once things turned upside down. He held those views  pretty closely then, especially when he was practically red-baited into silence by those guys who were even more hung up, as was Scribe in many ways, on the new normal American negative propaganda about Russia, Communism, and Karl Marx. Nobody, this from later Scribe once he flamed red, was born a radical, a revolutionary, and certainly not a Marxist but certain conditions, among them being as poor as church mice, gave a clue to where some people might go. The intellectuals, although Scribe did not call them that, would come to their Marxism more through books and rational thought than as prime victims of the usually one-sided class struggle of the rich against the poor. That was about as far as Scribe would go, wanted to go, because in many ways, although maybe a little less fulsomely, he wanted to go the same bourgeois politics path as Frank in politics.        

Like I say Scribe described to some of us a glimmer, a faux Marxist primer, then in high school, not at all thought out like it would be by him or us later in the late 1960s and early 1970s when we got back respectively from our tours to the “real” world from ‘Nam and knew we had been fucked over by our government. That the “reds” in Vietnam were poor folk, peasants, with whom we had no quarrel. But that was later.

Here is a better example of the glimmer Scribe shined on us back in the day. I remember one night, it had to be one high school night given the teacher and class he was descripting, Scribe had told me that he had had to stay after school one day for Mr. Donovan, the World History teacher and football coach which tells you what he was about, when Scribe had given a surly answer about some question Mr. Donovan had asked. That surliness coming from two sources, one Donovan having members of the class endlessly reading aloud the freaking book boring everybody within a mile of the room and that he really believed he already knew more about history than Donovan and so was personally bored as well. The question had not been about Marxism but something else and during that afternoon detention Donovan had asked him if he was a “Bolshevik.” Scribe recoiled in horror he said knowing that to say yes would get him in some trouble (probably more after school time at least) and for the simple fact that he could not say truthfully whatever teen angst and alienation he was feeling was driven by that kind of understanding of the world-then.         

What this history teacher confrontation did do was get Scribe looking again, and this tells as much about him as any other anecdote, at his dog-eared copy of Karl Marx’s (and his co-thinker and financial “angel” Friedrich Engels) classic statement of his views The Communist Manifesto to confirm whether he was a “Marxist,” “Communist,” whatever and he came away from that re-reading knowing that he was not one of those guys, a red. That was the kind of guy Scribe was when he was confronted with something he didn’t understand. The rest of us would have said “fuck it” and let it go at that or have challenged old Donovan with a spurious “yeah, what about it.” Maybe some silly remark like “better red than dead” or “my mommy is a commie,” expressions making the rounds in that dead air time.

So this little sketch really is a “human interest” story and not all that much about Marx in any political sense and that is also why I think that Greg bought my argument over Frank’s. Whatever Marx, Marxism, hell, just general radical non-parliamentary socialism held for the 19^th devotees (and bloodthirsty enemies too) extending into the greater part of the 20^th century fell down, went to ground, with the demise of the Soviet Union back in 1991-92, and whatever intellectual curiosity Marx and Marxism held fell down too so other than as an exotic utopian scheme today there is no reason to go chapter and verse on the details of what Marx was programmatically projecting.

To finish up on this sketch though I should like to mention the way Scribe, which again will tell something about the mad monk when he was in his flower, got his copy of the Manifesto back when he was fourteen or fifteen. He had heard for some source, maybe some “beat” over in Harvard Square when he used to go there after a particularly bad day in the mother wars, it was a cool document or something, who knows with Scribe was kind of strange. He couldn’t find the book in either the school or town libraries for the simple fact that neither had the document nor did when he inquired they want to have it in circulation. Yeah it was that kind of time. A friendly young librarian suggested that he try the Government Printing Office which might have a copy if somebody in Congress (like the red-baiter par excellence Senator Joseph McCarthy) or some governmental agency had ordered it printed for whatever reason as part of an investigation or just to put it in the record for some reason. He got the address in Washington and the GPO sent back a brochure with their publications for sale. And there it was. He ordered a copy and a few weeks alter it came in the mail. Here’s the funnier part, funnier that the government providing copies on the cheap (or maybe free I forget what he said on that point) of such a notorious document the document had been placed on the publication list because it was part of the record for the raucous House Un-American Activities Committee meeting in San Francisco in 1960 when they were practically run out of town by protestors as the Cold War began to thaw in certain places. Of course that was a recollection by Scribe later when we were deep into the Summer of Love out in that very town and he had asked some older people what that protest was all about.

Yeah, Scribe was a piece of work and he would eventually drag some of us along with him in his good days like the Summer of Love and later after Vietnam time running around with radical students in Cambridge when checking out Mark and Marxism was all the rage. Like I said old Marx has had his up and downs, has taken his beatings but some things Scribe said he said and which we later read about like the poor getting a better shake because they provided the value provided by their cheap labor were spot on. Worse, in a way when I looked, re-read, for this assignment some of the stuff reads like it could have been written today. How about that.             

*********

The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Revolution -Leon Trotsky on the 90th Anniversary of the Communist Manifesto in 1938

Click on title to link to the Karl Marx Internet Archive's copy of "The Communist Manifesto".

The publication of the Communist League's Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in 1848, a document that has played a central role in world history since then, if not always happily. On March 12, 2007 I posted (reposted on March 12, 2008)a review of this document that I wrote in 2006 and proudly stand by today. Additionally, here I post Leon Trotsky’s article on the 90th Anniversary of the Manifesto in 1938 from the Trotsky Internet Archive. What unites the two pieces is the thought that we both share that the Manifesto read for Trotsky and reads for me today like it could have been written about conditions in either of these periods. Forward.

NINETY YEARS OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO-Preface to Communist Manifesto by Leon Trotsky

Written: October 30,1937

First Published: In Afrikaans in South Africa for the first edition of the The Communist Manifesto in that language. First published in English the February 1938 edition The New International, New York; This version from Fourth International, New York, Volume IV, 10, October 1948, Pages 28-31;

Translated: Fourth International

Transcription/HTML Markup: David Waiters

Copyleft: Leon Trotsky Internet Archive (www.marxists.org) 2003. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the
GNU Free Documentation License

It is hard to believe that the centennial of the Manifesto of the Communist Party is only ten years away! This pamphlet, displaying greater genius than any other in world literature, astounds us even today by its freshness. Its most important sections appear to have been written yesterday. Assuredly, the young authors (Marx was twenty-nine, Engels twenty-seven) were able to look further into the future than anyone before them, and perhaps than anyone since them.

As early as their joint preface to the edition of 1872, Marx and Engels declared that despite the fact that certain secondary passages in the Manifesto were antiquated, they felt that they no longer had any right to alter the original text inasmuch as the Manifesto had already become a historical document, during the intervening period of twenty-five years. Sixty-five additional years have elapsed since that time. Isolated passages in the Manifesto have receded still further into the past. We shall try to establish succinctly in this preface both those ideas in the Manifesto which retain their full force today and those which require important alteration or amplification.

1. The materialist conception of history, discovered by Marx only a short while before and applied with consummate skill in the Manifesto, has completely withstood the test of events and the blows of hostile criticism. It constitutes today one of the most precious instruments of human thought. All other interpretations of the historical process have lost all scientific meaning. We can state with certainty that it is impossible in our time to be not only a revolutionary militant but even a literate observer in politics without assimilating the materialist interpretation of history.

2. The first chapter of the Manifesto opens with the following Ninety Years of the Communist Manifesto words: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." This postulate, the most important conclusion drawn from the materialist interpretation of history, immediately became an issue in the class struggle. Especially venomous attacks were directed by reactionary hypocrites, liberal doctrinaires, and idealistic democrats against the theory which substituted the struggle of material interests for "common welfare," "national unity/' and "eternal moral truths" as the driving force of history. They were later joined by recruits from the ranks of the labor movement itself, by the so-called revisionists, i.e., the proponents of reviewing ("revising") Marxism in the spirit of class collaboration and class conciliation. Finally, hi our own time, the same path has been followed in practice by the contemptible epigones of the Communist International (the "Stalinists"): the policy of the so-called People's Front flows wholly from the denial of the laws of the class struggle. Meanwhile, it is precisely the epoch of imperialism, bringing all social contradictions to the point of highest tension, which gives to the Communist Manifesto its supreme theoretical triumph.

3. The anatomy of capitalism, as a specific stage in the economic development of society, was given by Marx in its finished form in Capital (1867). But even in the Communist Manifesto the main lines of the future analysis are firmly sketched: the payment for labor power as equivalent to the cost of its reproduction; the appropriation of surplus value by the capitalists; competition as the basic law of social relations; the ruination of intermediate classes, i.e., the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry; the concentration of wealth in the hands of an ever-diminishing number of property owners, at the one pole, and the numerical growth of the proletariat, at the other; the preparation of the material and political
preconditions for the socialist regime.

4. The proposition in the Manifesto concerning the tendency of capitalism to lower the living standards of the workers, and even to transform them into paupers, had been subjected to a heavy barrage. Parsons, professors, ministers, journalists, Social Democratic theoreticians, and trade union leaders came to the front against the so-called "theory of impoverishment." They invariably discovered signs of growing prosperity among the toilers, palming off the labor aristocracy as the proletariat, or taking a fleeting tendency as permanent. Meanwhile, even the development of the mightiest capitalism in the world, namely, U.S. capitalism, has transformed millions of workers into paupers who are maintained at the expense of federal, municipal, or private charity.

5. As against the Manifesto, which depicted commercial and industrial crises as a series of ever more extensive catastrophes, the revisionists vowed that the national and international development of trusts would assure control over the market, and lead gradually to the abolition of crises. The close of the last century and the beginning of the present one were in reality marked by a development of capitalism so tempestuous as to make crises seem only "accidental" stoppages. But this epoch has gone beyond return. In the last analysis, truth proved to be on Marx's side in this question as well,

6. "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." This succinct formula, which the leaders of the Social Democracy looked upon as a journalistic paradox, contains in fact the only scientific theory of the state. The democracy fashioned by the bourgeoisie is not, as both Bernstein and Kautsky thought, an empty sack which one can undisturbedly fill with any kind of class content. Bourgeois democracy can serve only the bourgeoisie. A government of the "People's Front," whether headed by Blum or Chautemps, Caballero or Negrin, is only "a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie," Whenever this "committee" manages affairs poorly, the bourgeoisie dismisses it with a boot.

7. "Every class struggle is a political struggle." "The organization of the proletariat as a class [is ] consequently its organization into a political party." Trade unionists, on the one hand, and anarcho-syndicalists, on the other, have long shied away—and even now try to shy away—from the understanding of these historical laws. "Pure" trade unionism has now been dealt a crushing blow in its chief refuge: the United States. Anarcho-syndicalism has suffered an irreparable defeat in its last stronghold—Spain. Here too the Manifesto proved correct,

8. The proletariat cannot conquer power within the legal framework established by the bourgeoisie. "Communists openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions." Reformism sought to explain this postulate of the Manifesto on the grounds of the immaturity of the movement at that time, and the inadequate development of democracy. The fate of Italian, German, and a great number of other "democracies" proves that "immaturity" is the distinguishing trait of the ideas of the reformists themselves.

9. For the socialist transformation of society, the working class must concentrate in its hands such power as can smash each and every political obstacle barring the road to the new system. "The proletariat organized as the ruling class"—this is the dictatorship. At the same time it is the only true proletarian democracy. Its scope and depth depend upon concrete historical conditions. The greater the number of states that take the path of the socialist revolution, the freer and more flexible forms will the dictatorship assume, the broader and more deepgoing will be workers' democracy,

10. The international development of capitalism has predetermined the international character of the proletarian revolution. "United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat." The subsequent development of capitalism has so closely knit all sections of our planet, both "civilized" and "uncivilized," that the problem of the socialist revolution has completely and decisively assumed a world character. The Soviet bureaucracy attempted to liquidate the Manifesto with respect to this fundamental question. The Bonapartist degeneration of the Soviet state is an overwhelming illustration of the falseness of the theory of socialism in one country.

11. "When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character." In other words: the state withers away. Society remains, freed from the straitjacket. This is nothing else but socialism. The converse theorem: the monstrous growth of state coercion in the USSR is eloquent testimony that society is moving away from socialism.

12. "The workingmen have no fatherland." These words of the Manifesto have more than once been evaluated by philistines as an agitational quip. As a matter of fact they provided the proletariat with the sole conceivable directive in the question of the capitalist "fatherland." The violation of this directive by the Second International brought about not only four years of devastation in Europe, but the present stagnation of world culture. In view of the impending new war, for which the betrayal of the Third International has paved the way, the Manifesto remains even now the most reliable counselor on the question of the capitalist "fatherland,"
Thus, we see that the joint and rather brief production of two Young authors continues to give irreplaceable directives upon the most important and burning questions of the struggle for emancipation. What other book could even distantly be compared with the Communist Manifesto1? But this does not imply that after ninety years of unprecedented development of productive forces and vast social struggles, the Manifesto needs neither corrections nor additions. Revolutionary thought has nothing in common with idol-worship. Programs and prognoses are tested and corrected in the light of experience, which is the supreme criterion of human reason. The Manifesto, too, requires corrections and additions. However, as is evidenced by historical experience itself, these corrections and additions can be successfully made only by proceeding in accord with the method lodged in the foundation of the Manifesto itself. We shall try to indicate this in several most important instances.

1. Marx taught that no social system departs from the arena of history before exhausting its creative potentialities. The Manifesto excoriates capitalism for retarding the development of the productive forces. During that period, however, as well as in the following decades, this retardation was only relative in nature. Had it been possible in the second half of the nineteenth century to organize economy on socialist beginnings, its tempos of growth would have been immeasurably greater. But this theoretically irrefutable postulate does not invalidate the fact that the productive forces kept expanding on a world scale right up to the world war. Only in the last twenty years, despite the most modern conquests of science and technology, has the epoch of out-and-out stagnation and even decline of world economy begun. Mankind is beginning to expend its accumulated capital, while the next war threatens to destroy the very foundations of civilization for many years to come. The authors of the Manifesto thought that capitalism would be scrapped long prior to the time when from a relatively reactionary regime it would turn into an absolutely reactionary regime. This transformation took final shape only before the eyes of the present generation, and changed our epoch into the epoch of wars, revolutions, and fascism.

2. The error of Marx and Engels in regard to the historical dates flowed, on the one hand, from an underestimation of future possibilities latent in capitalism, and, on the other, an overestimation of the revolutionary maturity of the proletariat. The revolution of 1848 did not turn into a socialist revolution as the Manifesto had calculated, but opened up to Germany the possibility of a vast future capitalist ascension. The Paris Commune proved that the proletariat, without having a tempered revolutionary party at its head, cannot wrest power from the bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the prolonged period of capitalist prosperity that ensued brought about not the education of the revolutionary vanguard, but rather the bourgeois degeneration of the labor aristocracy, which became in turn the chief brake on the proletarian revolution, In the nature of things, the authors of the Manifesto could not possibly have foreseen this "dialectic."

3. For the Manifesto, capitalism was—the kingdom of free competition. While referring to the growing concentration of capital, the Manifesto did not draw the necessary conclusion in regard to monopoly, which has become the dominant capitalist form in our epoch and the most important precondition for socialist economy. Only afterwards, in Capital, did Marx establish the tendency toward the transformation of free competition into monopoly. It was Lenin who gave a scientific characterization of monopoly capitalism in his Imperialism.

4. Basing themselves on the example of "industrial revolution" in England, the authors of the Manifesto pictured far too unilaterally the process of liquidation of the intermediate classes, as a wholesale proletarianization of crafts, petty trades, and peasantry. In point of fact, the elemental forces of competition have far from completed this simultaneously progressive and barbarous work. Capitalism has ruined the petty bourgeoisie at a much faster rate than it has proletarianized it. Furthermore, the bourgeois state has long directed its conscious policy toward the artificial maintenance of petty-bourgeois strata. At the opposite pole, the growth of technology and the rationalization of largescale industry engenders chronic unemployment and obstructs the proletarianization of the petty bourgeoisie. Concurrently, the development of capitalism has accelerated in the extreme the growth of legions of technicians, administrators, commercial employees, in short, the so-called "new middle class." In consequence, the intermediate classes, to whose disappearance the Manifesto so categorically refers, comprise even in a country as highly industrialized as Germany about half of the population. However, the artificial preservation of antiquated petty-bourgeois strata in no way mitigates the social contradictions, but, on the contrary, invests them with a special malignancy, and together with the permanent army of the unemployed constitutes the most malevolent expression of the decay of capitalism.

5. Calculated for a revolutionary epoch the Manifesto contains (end of Chapter II) ten demands, corresponding to the period of direct transition from capitalism to socialism. In their preface of 1872, Marx and Engels declared these demands to be in part antiquated, and, in any case, only of secondary importance. The reformists seized upon this evaluation to interpret it in the sense that transitional revolutionary demands had forever ceded their place to the Social Democratic "minimum program," which, as is well known, does not transcend the limits of bourgeois democracy. As a matter of fact, the authors of the Manifesto indicated quite precisely the main correction of their transitional program, namely, 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the readymade state machinery and wield it for its own purposes." In other words, the correction was directed against the fetishism of bourgeois democracy. Marx later counterposed to the capitalist state, the state of the type of the Commune. This "type" subsequently assumed the much more graphic shape of Soviets. There cannot be a revolutionary program today without Soviets and without workers' control. As for the rest, the ten demands of the Manifesto, which appeared "archaic" in an epoch of peaceful parliamentary activity, have today regained completelytheir true significance. The Social Democratic "minimum program," on the other hand, has become hopelessly antiquated.

6. Basing its expectation that "the German bourgeois revolution ... will be but a prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution," the Manifesto cites the much more advanced conditions of European civilization as compared with what existed in England in the seventeenth century and in France in the eighteenth century, and the far greater development of the proletariat. The error in this prognosis was not only in the date. The revolution of 1848 revealed within a few months that precisely under more advanced conditions, none of the bourgeois classes is capable of bringing the revolution to its termination: the big and middle bourgeoisie is far too closely linked with the landowners, and fettered by the fear of the masses; the petty bourgeoisie is far too divided and in its top leadership far too dependent on the big bourgeoisie. As evidenced by the entire subsequent course of development in Europe and Asia, the bourgeois revolution, taken by itself, can no more in general be consummated. A complete purge of feudal rubbish from society is conceivable only on the condition that the proletariat, freed from the influence of bourgeois parties, can take its stand at the head of the peasantry and establish its revolutionary dictatorship. By this token, the bourgeois revolution becomes interlaced with the first stage of the socialist revolution, subsequently to dissolve in the latter, The national revolution therewith becomes a link of the world revolution. The transformation of the economic foundation and of all social relations assumes a permanent (uninterrupted) character.

For revolutionary parties in backward countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa, $ clear understanding of the organic connection between the democratic revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat—and thereby, the international socialist revolution—is a life-and-death question.

7. While depicting how capitalism draws into its vortex backward and barbarous countries, the Manifesto contains no reference to the struggle of colonial and semicolonial countries for independence. To the extent mat Marx and Engels considered the social revolution "in the leading civilized countries at least," to be a matter of the next few years, the colonial question was resolved automatically for them, not in consequence of an independent movement of oppressed nationalities but in consequence of the victory of the proletariat in the metropolitan centers of capitalism. The questions of revolutionary strategy in colonial and semicolonial countries are therefore not touched upon at all by the Manifesto. Yet these questions demand an independent solution. For example, it is quite self-evident that while the "national fatherland" has become the most baneful historical brake in advanced capitalist countries, it still remains a relatively progressive factor in backward countries compelled to struggle for an independent existence.
"The Communists," declares the Manifesto, "everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things." The movement of the colored races against their imperialist oppressors is one of the most important and powerful movements against the existing order and therefore calls for the complete, unconditional, and unlimited support on the part of the proletariat of the white race. The credit for developing revolutionary strategy for oppressed nationalities belongs primarily to Lenin.

8. The most antiquated section of the Manifesto—with respect not to method but to material—is the criticism of "socialist" literature for the first part of the nineteenth century (Chapter III) and the definition of the position of the Communists in relation to various opposition parties (Chapter IV). The movements and parties listed in the Manifesto were so drastically swept away either by the revolution of 1848 or by the ensuing counterrevolution that one must look up even their names in a historical dictionary. However, in this section, too, the Manifesto is perhaps closer to us now than it was to the previous generation. In the epoch of the flowering of the Second International, when Marxism seemed to exert an undivided sway, the ideas of pre-Marxist socialism could have been considered as having receded decisively into the past. Things are otherwise today. The decomposition of the Social Democracy and the Communist International at every step engenders monstrous ideological relapses. Senile thought seems to have become infantile. In search of all-saving formulas the prophets in the epoch of decline discover anew doctrines long since buried by scientific socialism.

As touches the question of opposition parties, it is in this domain that the elapsed decades have introduced the most deepgoing changes, not only in the sense that the old parties have long been brushed aside by new ones, but also in the sense that the very character of parties and their mutual relations have radically changed in the conditions of the imperialist epoch. The Manifesto must therefore be amplified with the most important documents of the first four congresses of the Communist International, the essential literature of Bolshevism, and the decisions of the conferences of the Fourth International.

We have already remarked above that according to Marx no social order departs from the scene without first exhausting the potentialities latent in it. However, even an antiquated social order does not cede its place to a new order without resistance. A change in social regimes presupposes the harshest form of the class struggle, i.e., revolution, If the proletariat, for one reason or another, proves incapable of overthrowing with an audacious blow the outlived bourgeois order, then finance capital in the struggle to maintain its unstable rule can do nothing but turn the petty bourgeoisie ruined and demoralized by it into the pogrom army of fascism. The bourgeois degeneration of the Social Democracy and the fascist degeneration of the petty bourgeoisie are interlinked as cause and effect.

At the present time, the Third International far more wantonly than the Second performs in all countries the work of deceiving and demoralizing the toilers. By massacring the vanguard of the Spanish proletariat, the unbridled hirelings of Moscow not only pave the way for fascism but execute a goodly share of its labors. The protracted crisis of the international revolution, which is turning more and more into a crisis of human culture, is reducible in its essentials to the crisis of revolutionary leadership.

As the heir to the great tradition, of which the Manifesto of the Communist Party forms the most precious link, the Fourth International is educating new cadres for the solution of old tasks. Theory is generalized reality. In an honest attitude to revolutionary theory is expressed the impassioned urge to reconstruct the social reality. That in the southern part of the Dark Continent our cothinkers were the first to translate the Manifesto into the Afrikaans language is another graphic illustration of the fact that Marxist thought lives today only under the banner of the Fourth International. To it belongs the future. When the centennial of the Communist Manifesto is celebrated, the Fourth International will have become the decisive revolutionary force on our planet.