Manifesto. Karl Marx

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ antagonisms and the exploitation of human labor have become increasingly threatening to humanity’s future on earth. It may be demonstrated that wherever bourgeois power has existed, it has continued to transform the relations of production into an alienating factor that makes individual freedom a simple commercial asset. It has substituted the numerous structured freedoms with inhuman and soulless market freedoms. Put simply, instead of exploitation clouded by political or religious illusions, bourgeois power has continued to establish open, direct and brutal exploitation.

      Doctors, legal experts, priests, poets and scientists have, over the past 150 years, become its paid servants. It has continued to wipe away the emotions and feelings that in the past have characterized social relationships, reducing them to simple financial relations. Likewise, it will be understood that the bourgeoisie cannot exist unless it is to transform unceasingly the instruments and relations of production and, consequently, social relations in general. It has continued to eliminate all that is simple and timeless, all that is sacred it has made profane, and human beings have been compelled to analyze the nature of their real social relations.

      Study The Communist Manifesto as though it were a valuable historical document giving the background necessary to gain insights into and better confront the realities of the present and the future. Compare it with what has happened in the past 150 years and the reader will see that essential truths in the text have been confirmed and exemplified in increasingly dramatic ways by life itself.

      Let us see: If this study has been carried out in an unbiased fashion, it will reveal that the course of social and political events confirms that to the present day, the history of society continues to be a struggle between oppressor and oppressed, engaged in eternal confrontation, sometimes veiled, but otherwise direct and open. There is a crucial warning here for all human beings inhabiting the earth and particularly for those involved in making decisions: these struggles have always ended with the victory of one or other of the belligerent classes, with the revolutionary transformation of the entire society or with the collapse of the classes involved in the confrontation. This idea torments us and is the key question in the world of the 21st century.

      In short, The Communist Manifesto invites us to reflect on the truths it sets out. With this in mind, those who have read this famous document should read it once again. If you have not yet done so, read it for the first time. You will always find it a useful guide to understanding the historic drama of exploited peoples and as a lesson in the struggle for human and social emancipation.

      We can say today, paraphrasing Engels, that The Communist Manifesto is one of the greatest documents ever written in support of the poor of the earth in favor of their struggle for liberation. We could begin to discuss his ideas using the profoundly ethical thinking of José Martí, when he said, in relation to Karl Marx: “He deserves to be honored for declaring himself on the side of the weak.”⁴

      Let’s move on to comment on Rosa Luxemburg’s text. From an intellectual point of view and particularly within the terrain of social sciences, history and philosophy, she is one of the most outstanding women in the world and among the elevated intellectuals of the human race. With her assassination on January 15, 1919, the right wing demonstrated its powerful class instinct and proved that it was more aware of the caliber and significance of unswerving revolutionaries than many who proclaimed themselves as such.

      Rosa fought equally against reformism as she did against dogmatism, meaning that she made enemies among dogmatists and reformists. As it was both sides that imposed themselves on the evolution of socialist ideas in the 20th century, the illustrious adopted daughter of the Germany of Marx and Engels was smothered under the tapestry of false interpretations of these founding fathers’ work.

      Much was lost to the world revolutionary movement with the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and the marginalization of her luminous ideas. Until now we have been arguing the importance of the subjective factor in history, in a progressive sense. The dramatic reality of contemporary times has shown that this same factor also impacts negatively as a painful historical lesson. In relation to Rosa Luxemburg’s ideas, we have a sound judgment to make in this respect.

      In this text Rosa criticizes reformist statements from a dialectical perspective and in terms that are logically rigorous. She points out how positions originating from these statements exacerbated contradictions between the rich and the poor and led to the need for a social revolution. The 100 years that have passed since she wrote this text demonstrate that reformism, far from succeeding, helped to universalize anarchy, wars, brutal conflicts, and even to expand terrorism throughout the globe, creating the particularly grave situation we currently face in the world.

      The basic argument put forward by reformists in the times of Marx, Engels and Lenin and, consequently, in Rosa Luxemburg’s era, stated that capitalism could cushion and even overcome class differences with measures such as the following:

       - Improvements in the situation of the working class

       - Extension and broadening of credit

       - Development of the key means of transport

       - Concentration of the trusts that accentuated the tendency toward the socialization of the means of production

      For reformists, these processes would blunt the class contradictions that would lead to social upheaval and, therefore, to a revolution against capitalism. The position set out by Rosa Luxemburg was that these processes could slow down or delay and, as a consequence, lengthen the workers’ struggle, but that in the end social chaos was inevitable.

      How are the weaknesses of these reformist theses manifested? If capitalists were people without petty ambitions and were educated, or at least had common sense, the ideal situation would naturally be a process of reforms. Yet this doctrine fails because, as Martí said: “All men are sleeping dragons. It is necessary to rein in the dragon. Man is an admirable dragon: he has been given his own reins.” The key then is in the triumph of common sense, intelligence and culture. We Cubans know this because of our ethical, juridical, social and political traditions of universal value.

      What is certain is that the failure of reformists is due not to the possible logical value of their statements, but to the objective fact that the petty and short-term interests of the owners of wealth prevail over more elemental truths than logic. Moreover, these essential truths that, as I say, are rooted in common sense, will lead them to consistently apply reformist ideas; but the [reformist] process will not take place because evil, mediocrity and petty interests rule in the minds of the principal owners of wealth.⁵ All social systems have disappeared on account of this mixture of stupidity, mediocrity and evil.

      In another of her works known as the Junius Pamphlet, Rosa Luxemburg formulates a political slogan and historical choice that faces humanity: socialism or barbarism. More than 80 years after her death, history has dramatically proven her to be correct.

      Today’s dilemma is that, for the time being, barbarism has imposed itself. It can only be substituted, from our perspective, by a line of march that, in the final analysis, leads to socialism.

      Today we live in a world that is described as globalized; I say globalized because of what the Spanish writer Ramón Fernández Durán called the explosion of disorder. A revolutionary process must take into account objective and economic factors, but it must also consider the cultural and moral questions involved. The basic error of 20th century Marxist interpretation, after Lenin, was precisely in neglecting this key element in political practice.

      Finally, we will deal with the well-known text by Ernesto Che Guevara. An analysis of this allows us to explore Che’s central idea: the role of subjectivity and, therefore, of culture in socialism and the education of the new human being.

      Socialism СКАЧАТЬ