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# Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

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economics. They were largely drawn, or developed, from the English socialists and socialist literature that Engels encountered at the Hall of Science, but they also reflected his own experiences. In an 1860s letter, he recalled that his stay in Lancashire “forcibly brought to my notice that economic factors, hitherto ignored or at least underestimated by historians, play a decisive role in the development of the modern world.” The letter went on:

I learnt that economic factors were the basic cause of the clash between different classes in society. And I realized that in a highly industrialized country like England the clash of social classes lay at the very root of the rivalry between parties and was of fundamental significance in tracing the course of modern history.23

For a German educated in the Hegelian tradition, which emphasized the power of ideas, recognizing the centrality of material factors represented a major shift. In writing his book, Engels fully embraced it. Sixty or eighty years ago England had been largely agricultural, he wrote. Now it was “a country like no other  … with vast manufacturing cities; with an industry that supplies the world, and produces almost everything by means of the most complex machinery.”24 In 1834, England exported “556,000,000 yards of woven cotton goods, 76,500,000 pounds of cotton yarn.”25 But even as scientific progress and industrialization had given a huge boost to England’s economic development, it had divided its society into two antagonistic groups: the bourgeoisie, which owned the means of production, and the propertyless proletariat. “The history of the proletariat in England begins with the second-half of the last century, with the invention of the steam engine and of machinery for working cotton,”26 Engels stated flatly. In order to survive, the factory worker had no option but to sell his labor. “Left to himself he cannot survive a single day. The bourgeoisie has gained a monopoly of all means of existence in the broadest sense of the word.”27

None of this would have come as news to William Thompson or other early socialists, of course. Like some of them, Engels went on to compare factory work to slavery. The main difference, he said, was that “the worker of today seems to be free because he is not sold once for all, but piecemeal by the day, the week, the year, and because no one owner sells him to another, but he is forced to sell himself in this way instead, being the slave of no particular person, but of the whole property-holding class.”28 To the modern reader, this comparison may well seem overwrought. But Engels was making an important point: in a capitalist system, the element of compulsion in the employer-worker relationship is disguised by a seemingly voluntary market transaction. Engels sought to remove the mask, declaring:

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The proletarian is, therefore, in law and in fact, the slave of the bourgeoisie, which can decree his life or death. It offers him the means of living, but only for an “equivalent” for his work. It even lets him have the appearance of acting from a free choice, of making a contract with free unconstrained consent, as a responsible agent who has attained his majority.

Fine freedom, where the proletarian has no other choice than that of either accepting the conditions which the bourgeoisie offers him, or of starving, of freezing to death, of sleeping naked among the beasts of the forests!29

Engels was a proud class traitor. Describing his book, he wrote in an 1844 letter: “I accuse the English bourgeoisie before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale.”30 But even as he adopted the framework of class conflict and exploitation, he also emphasized another important element of industrial capitalism: competition within each class. Capitalists were forced to compete for profits; workers had to compete for jobs. “Competition is the completest expression of the battle of all against all which rules in modern civil society,” he wrote.31 In theory, he went on, the workers in each trade could join together and demand higher wages. In practice, however, “the power-loom weaver is in competition with the hand-loom weaver” and the “unemployed or ill-paid hand-loom weaver [competes] with him who has work or is better paid, each trying to supplant the other.”

This reference to the jobless was far from incidental. In a chapter on the workings of “competition,” Engels noted the presence, even when the economy wasn’t in a slump, of “an unemployed reserve army of workers”—workers who had lost their jobs, Irish immigrants, beggars, street sweepers, and the like.32 These members of the “surplus” population ensured that “the competition among the workers is constantly greater than the competition to secure workers.”33 Engels described how this constant jostling for jobs held wages at or near subsistence levels. In boom times, when workers were hard to find, employers might bid up wages for a while, but this was a temporary phenomenon. Once the boom ended, employers regained the whip hand, and wages fell back.

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Engels also provided a short but acute explanation of business cycles, which were a regular feature of early industrial capitalism. During the early stages of an upswing, he pointed out, the prices of goods tend to rise, which encourages manufacturers to churn out more of them in anticipation of further hikes. As production rises, “speculation forces prices still higher, by inspiring others to purchase.”34 Then comes the frenzied peak, when “daring speculators working with fictitious capital  … hurl themselves into this universal, disorderly race for profits, multiply the disorder and haste by their unbridled passion.”35 Eventually the inevitable happens. Prices fall, “the market is disordered, credit shaken, one house after another stops payments, bankruptcy follows bankruptcy, and the discovery is made that three times more goods are on hand or under way than can be consumed.”36 This is the crisis stage of the cycle. Production slumps, workers are thrown out of jobs, and there is great hardship until the glut of goods is eliminated, prices stabilize, and the cycle starts over. “So it goes on perpetually— prosperity, crisis, prosperity, crisis, and this perennial round in which English industry moves is … usually completed once in five or six years.”37

On the face of things, Engels’s account of economic ups and downs— today we would call it a “model”—seemed to imply that capitalism could go on forever, endlessly repeating itself. He didn’t accept this conclusion, however. In his final chapter, he argued that the system had an underlying weakness that would eventually prove fatal: rising inequality and class conflict. If Britain retained its “monopoly of manufactures,” he wrote, the “proletariat would increase in geometrical proportion, in consequence of the progressive ruin of the lower middle class and the giant strides with which capital is concentrating itself in the hands of the few.”38 Eventually the proletariat would “embrace the whole nation with the exception of a few millionaires. But in this development, there comes a stage at which the proletariat perceives how easily the existing power may be overthrown, and then follows a revolution.”39

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Engels even provided a provisional timetable for this narrative. Based on a five- or six-year economic cycle, the next slump was due in 1846 or 1847. The political pressures produced by this downturn would lead to the enactment of the People’s Charter, he predicted, but the real reckoning wouldn’t come until the recession after that—the one due to begin in 1852 or 1853. By then, “the English people will have had enough of being plundered by the capitalists and left to starve when the capitalists no longer require their services  … The war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged.”40

★ ★ ★

In the summer of 1844, Engels left Manchester and returned home to Germany. He traveled there via Paris, where he met up with Marx, who had moved to the French capital the previous year after the Prussian authorities suppressed Rheinische Zeitung. Marx was now associated with another radical journal, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which he and another German émigré had founded. Despite the frostiness of their initial meeting in Cologne, Engels and Marx had much to discuss. From England, Engels had sent Marx an essay of his that expanded on some of the arguments he had made in his book.41 Titled “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy,” it began with a discussion of Adam Smith’s effort to overthrow the restrictive practices of mercantilism, which Engels described as historically necessary “so that the true consequences of private property could come to light  … so that the struggle of our time could become a universal human struggle.”42 As industrialization proceeded, larger manufacturers and merchants tended to swallow up their smaller competitors. This “law of the centralisation of private property” meant that the “middle classes must increasingly disappear until the world is divided into millionaires and paupers.”43

The essay impressed Marx, who agreed to publish it in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. (In later years, he would describe it as “a brilliant sketch” and quote from it repeatedly.)44 The two Germans met at Café de la Régence, near the Palais-Royale. According to legend, they talked and drank for ten days straight. Certainly, they had many common points of reference. Like Engels, Marx came from a prosperous family. He was born in Trier on May 5, 1818. His father, Heinrich, was a Jewish lawyer who had converted to Christianity and changed his name from Herschel. His mother, Henriette, hailed from a family of Dutch Jewish merchants. After Marx finished high school, he attended the University of Bonn for a year, then transferred to the University of Berlin, where, like Engels years after him, he associated with the Young Hegelians and drank heavily. But Marx was a much more serious student than Engels. At his father’s behest, he studied law, but his real passion was philosophy. He devoured the works of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose 1841 Essence of Christianity described the Christian conception of God as an illusion. After completing his undergraduate studies, he wrote a doctoral thesis on the ancient Greek thinkers Democritus and Epicurus.

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In other circumstances, Marx would probably have become a philosophy professor. The Young Hegelians’ criticisms of the church and the state had prompted a government clampdown on universities, which blocked his path. In 1842 Marx moved to Cologne, where he began editing at Rheinische Zeitung. By the time he met up with Engels in Paris, he had married Jenny von Westphalen, a German woman four years his senior whose father was a civil servant and minor member of the Prussian nobility. He had also broken with some of the Young Hegelians over what he had come to perceive as their excessive focus on anticlericalism. In addition, he had developed a strong interest in political economy, which had prompted him to study Adam Smith, James Mill, and Jean-Baptiste Say, as well as some of the French and English socialists. In a set of notebooks that he kept between April and August 1844, he started to develop his own economic analysis, beginning from what he called “a contemporary fact of political economy”: the alienation and immiseration of workers.45 Bourgeois economists, in purporting to analyze how a competitive economy worked, had assumed what needed to be interrogated, Marx wrote: “Political economy starts with the fact of private property, it does not explain it to us.” Never short of intellectual confidence, he said his analysis would go deeper, seeking to “understand the essential connection of private property, selfishness, the separation of labor, capital and landed property, of exchange and competition, of the value and degradation of man, of monopoly and competition, etc.”46

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Marx couldn’t know it, but this intellectual project would go through many iterations and take up most of the rest of his life. In his notebook, which would be published nearly a century later as Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he focused on how carrying out wage labor affected workers. Building on the Hegelian notion of alienation, in which human consciousness fails to understand its own true nature, he identified several ways in which the industrial system robbed people of their individuality and humanity. Factory workers, unlike farmers and artisans, had no control over the production process, so the goods they helped to produce meant nothing to them. (“The worker relates to the product of its labor as an alien object.”) Also, their regimented working environment ran contrary to nature and violated their “species-being.” Finally, the monolithic nature of the factory system isolated them from other people. In all these forms of alienation, Marx said, the central issue was that the worker had no control over his or her environment, and thus “sinks to the level of a commodity and becomes indeed the most wretched of commodities.” The only enduring answer to this problem, he argued, was “the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man.”47

This apparent call for the abolition of property seemed to echo Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an anarcho-socialist French philosopher whose 1840 book What Is Property? contained the famous slogan “Property is theft!” Marx had studied the older French socialists, including Fourier, and he knew Proudhon personally: he claimed to have explained German idealism to him.48 But even as he repeated Proudhon’s call to transcend private property, he rejected the Frenchman’s preferred alternative: worker cooperatives in which capital would be communally owned but workers would still work for wages. Marx dismissed this idea as “crude communism.” Precisely what variant Marx favored, he didn’t make clear; arguably, he never would. Nonetheless, he described communism in the abstract as “the true resolution of the struggle between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individuals and species. It is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution.”49

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After their meeting at Café de la Régence, Engels and Marx were on the same wavelength. “Our complete agreement in all theoretical fields became evident and our joint work dates from that time,” Engels would later recall.50 After returning to his family home in Barmen, where he completed The Condition of the Working Class in England, he delivered a series of public speeches that attracted the attention of the Prussian authorities, who were monitoring democratic activists and other potential subversives. “Friedrich Engels of Barmen is a quite reliable man, but he has a son who is a rabid communist and wanders about as a man of letters,” a police report noted.51 The Prussian government also kept close tabs on German exiles in Paris. At its instigation in early 1845, the French authorities expelled a number of journalists associated with the radical German-language newspaper Vorwärts. One of those targeted was Marx, who moved to Brussels.52

After Engels had finished editing his book, he, too, moved to the Belgian capital. It was there that his writing partnership with Marx got going in earnest. So did the pair’s political machinations. “The Germans … especially Marx, are plotting their usual mischief here,” Michael Bakunin, the anarchist-leaning Russian socialist, who had also turned up in the Belgian capital, noted in a letter to an associate. “Vanity, malice, squabbles, theoretical intolerance and practical cowardice  … The single word bourgeois has become an epithet which they repeat ad nauseam, though they themselves are ingrained bourgeois from head to foot.”53

★ ★ ★

Fleeing domestic repression, German leftists had scattered across western Europe. Marx and Engels got the idea of creating an umbrella organization to unite them. During a study trip to London and Manchester in 1845, they met with members of an underground group called the League of the Just, which had been expelled from France after participating in the 1839 Blanquist rising. The London-based comrades, who had set up an organization called the German Workers Educational Association, welcomed the idea of coordinating with revolutionary groups in other countries. After Marx and Engels returned to Brussels, they established a Communist Correspondence Committee to facilitate this endeavor. During a visit to London in June 1847, they persuaded the London group to change its name to the Communist League.54 As a small group of exiles, this fledgling organization didn’t represent much of a threat to anyone, but Marx and Engels believed it merited a manifesto. At another meeting, in November 1847, they put forward a statement of “Principles of Communism,” which Engels had drafted. Structured like a newspaper explainer, it consisted of twenty-five questions and answers. The first question was “What is Communism?” The answer was “Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.”55

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The members of the Communist League differed on how to bring about this liberation. Wilhelm Weitling, a charismatic tailor who had a small but devoted following, was calling for an immediate uprising that would employ an army of ex-convicts to seize power and establish a new society based on common ownership of property. Engels and Marx shared the same ultimate goal as Weitling, which (in Engels’s words) was to “institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole—that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.”56

This was the first, and perhaps clearest, statement that Marx and Engels produced about the nature of a future communist society. In 1847, however, they believed that communism wouldn’t be feasible until capitalism had developed sufficiently to provide the material basis for a more equitable system. “In all probability,” Engels wrote in his Q&A, “the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.” That meant different countries would proceed at their own paces depending on their level of development: “slowest and will meet most obstacles in Germany, most rapidly and with the fewest difficulties in England.” In predominantly rural Germany, the first goal was to “establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.” A democratic government could then introduce progressive taxation, inheritance taxes, a national education program for all children, and the “gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.”57

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Some members of the Communist League didn’t like this gradualist approach. Nonetheless, in November 1847 the league approved Engels’s statement of principles and agreed to change its title to The Communist Manifesto. The comrades also authorized Engels and Marx to draw up a version for publication. Marx took on the task of writing a final draft. In characteristic fashion, he had trouble finishing on time. After an urgent appeal from the league’s executive, he completed the job in January 1848. A month later the twenty-three-page Manifesto was printed in London, although only in German. From its famous opening—“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism”58—to its ringing sign-off —“WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”—it was all that a political call to arms should be: direct, impassioned, and substantive.

★ ★ ★

The heart of the Manifesto is contained in its first section, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” which begins: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”59 In tracing how the “bourgeois mode of production”—the term Marx and Engels used for industrial capitalism— emerged from feudalism, the opening passages emphasize the impact of European colonialism, which “gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.”60 As the market grew for goods of all kinds, the feudal workshop economy, with its closed labor guilds, couldn’t keep up, and small-scale manufacturing took its place. But this system couldn’t keep up, either: “Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of the manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.”61

Here, writ large, is the materialist theory of history that Engels had embraced in Manchester. Grand economic forces drive societal evolution, and the bourgeoisie is their latest embodiment, speeding up the historical clock and sweeping all before it. The Manifesto goes on:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations  … and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.62

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And further:

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society  … Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.63

This was language to fire up the members of the Communist League. But even as the Manifesto highlights the ungodly nature of the bourgeois epoch, it also acknowledges its unprecedented productivity. After noting that it “has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals,”64 the pamphlet lists some more of its achievements: “Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railroads, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?”65

★ ★ ★

In his earlier Q&A, Engels had emphasized the global nature of the bourgeois epoch and suggested that the communist revolution would also have to be a worldwide phenomenon. The Manifesto takes up this theme of globalization, expanding upon its economic basis:

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