Tuesday, March 28, 2017

Is the Manifesto of the Communist Party still relevant today in our society?


It appears to me that, despite the drastically different situation today from when this text was written (communication and social media, the two world wars, the collapse of the Communist bloc), the evolution of capital still results in the concentration of wealth and thus power in the hands of minorities, whether it be whole countries (the North/West division) and even within those countries (We talk often about the 1% in the US for example). We also see a surge in tender offers by government to privatize public institutions. 
The neo-bourgeoisie today is composed of capital owners and the very instable character of this class is still very relevant and this instability is the result of the fluctuations of the markets. Every day on Wall Street, for example, stock prices change and as a result people go bankrupt while others become millionaires.

However, the notion of a homogenous class of proletariat “that will drive the revolution” does not seem to me to be equally prophetic. This, I believe, is the direct result of the absence of a consciousness of belonging to the same class. Marx’s economy is a manufacturing economy where the role of each worker is a small subdivision of the production process. Modern economies, however, have shifted toward services, in which I believe, a perfect division of labor is impossible and an estrangement of the Gattungswessen is unlikely to happen, mainly because these jobs require a constant intellectual activity. The intertwinement of the service/ manufacturing sectors breaks this idea of union and solidarity among all the workers because it is not very evident that a person working in health and an engineer would find common ground on ways in which they are exploited by capital owners. These factions within the proletariat are also deepened by the multitude of industry-specific unions.

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