Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Communist Manifesto

Introduction
The Communist Manifesto was born from the minds of two Germans: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The corpus was addressed to all workingmen, by all accounts to Europe more concretely. This work could never be more intelligible than the milieu it has been borne: the Romantic Age of Europe, which is general cultural term, whose main soul is change. There are different aspects and shades under this epoch, from political to art, from philosophy to religion. In the European economy, it was also the age of industrialisation, the capitalization of European societies; while in the social sphere, nationalism is its main spirit. The popular work has "four chapter of decreasing importance", and the first chapter on "Bourgeois and Proletarians" is crucial. In the succeeding chapters, the two authors had expounded on the historical and social realities, which might service as the platform of communism to rise.

Principle Integrated by the Government.
Communism by nature has in its constitution that inherent class struggle before a social change occurs, thereby inversing the social order inhereted from feudalism, through the rise of capitalism. In the contemporary society, taking the historical-material dialecticism of communism, in which world history is brought to existence by the synthesis of two antithetical realities inhereted from the past to the fermenting reality of the present, present governments, like the Philippines, has combined this reality subsuming it within the framework of constitutional democracy by putting it under the control of the laws governing labor and commerce. This alienation is mitigated along the process of protecting the workers' rights in the larger concept of human rights. The idea of inversion of social stratum from landed aristocracy and nobility to upward movement and control of the working class, whereby what is individually owed is common to all, does not remain as an abstract concept by acknowledged and integrated well within the democratic societies. The Free Speech right guarantees the existence of the ideas of communism, though it does not condone the inherent revolutionary nature of radical Critical-Utopian Socialism. The existence of labor unions is one of the manifestation of free market societies to communist critiques.


Principles Not Integrated in Government
The critique of Marx and Engels against bourgeois society is a critique to what they believe as the institutional effects of such a society. Fundamental to this is the form of government that western societies have, and in the course of history, the Philippine society has acquired from the western colonial powers: Constitutional Democracy poses a threat and has to be transcended by a socialist society. The inherent principle itself of class antagonism, which communists have thoroughly defended, does not suit well intrinsically with the kind of democratic society we have. Central to constitutional democracy is the presupposition of private property; individuals have the right to own something out from their own labors. In the language of communism, this does not exist because "no sooner is the exploitation of the laborer by the manufacturer, so far, at an end, that he receives his wages in cash, than he is set upon by the other portions of the bourgeoisie, the landlord , the shopkeeper, the pawnbroker, etc". Then the tautology is inevitable: "the increase of labor is the increase of capital". The virtual existence of bourgeois is the "formation and augmentation of capital". For the integrity of the whole idea of Marx and Engles to survive, it has to find conditions that grounds it to prosper and develop. And, that is to supersede capitalism, because it has failed to satisfy the demands of alienation subjectively and class struggle socially in a materialistic and economic sense.

Concluding Remarks
The nature of the concept of Communism and Socialism may have accentuated and underlined more the social and class struggles in economic terms to the detriment of who man really is in the larger reality of his nature, which he gave a detailed arguments on human emancipation. From this struggle, he posits a change of society, whereby man is emancipated from the fetters that strangulate him in his potentiality. Reading European history and thought and the signs of his time, nothing is perfect abstract idea of alienation truer than the concrete fact of the societies of Industrial Revolution; the abhorrent relationship between labor and capital is an example of a materialistic estrangement that enslaves man. From the terminology of labor in actuality in free markets, it has to be transposed in political language to create a ground of existence for a communistic society to rise, and in the process, a revolution, not just a concept of radical change as espoused by conservative or bourgeois socialism, is necessary to inverse the existent social mode through coercive means and instrumentation. Even Marx had to give space to a dictator to stabilize everything before such society comes. However, the whole grand idea failed to satisfy the word freedom itself. The solution only made the concept of freedom more difficult. Socialist states has not made that realize as perfectly as it has been expounded by its great mind originators. What has succumbed capitalism as its weakness becomes the same evil that hounds communism.