World history. A Critical Analysis of The Communist Manifesto - Essay Example

In the ‘Manifesto’, Marx and Engels have made an effort to evaluate the history of human society according to the ‘mode of production and labor’. They argue that modern society is based on the latest mode of production. Meanwhile, they further envisage that, according to the ‘mode of production’, socialism (or communism) is next to Capitalism which is supposed to exploit labor by alienating from the production. In fact, the political dimension of communism is essentially the result of its response to the capitalists’ exploitation.

Marx and Engels argue that the proletariats (or working class people) should unite themselves to accelerate the transition of human society from capitalism to socialism. But though Marx and Engel’s concept of ‘class struggle’ is persuasive enough to explain the changes human society’s activities, these authors have failed to understand that a theory which is, indeed, meant for explaining the economic changes in human society, is not sufficient to bring a radical political change in a country or a society.

At best, a theory, like Marxism, can predict the oncoming changes in a society; but there must be exception. In the preface of “Communist Manifesto”, Engels claims that the text is “essentially Marx's work” and that “the basic thought. belongs solely and exclusively to Marx” (Marx and Engels 23). In fact, Marx’s theory of class-conflict constitutes the premise of the “Manifesto”. Depending on the Class-struggle theory, Marx explores the heart of Capitalism. In the very beginning of “Communist Manifesto”, Marx and Engels claim that human history is basically “the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels 34).

They argue that there are generally two conflicting parties in this struggle. This conflict is determined of the mode of labor, which is, indeed, a relationship between the laborer and the production. In this regard, these authors assert that “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another” (Marx and Engels 43). They further argue that this class war always ends “either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (Marx and Engels 43).

According their claim, capitalism is the penultimate stage, of human society, which itself has resulted from the dissolution of the former feudalist social order through the conflict between the feudal lords and their subjects. Even the struggle between the bourgeois class and the proletariats will dissolve the capitalist society into a classless society where class-conflict will not exist. In the first chapter of the “Manifesto”, Marx and Engels say that in a capitalist society, the bourgeoisies are amorally profit-oriented; they maneuver both social and political institutions in order to exploit the proletariats’ labor and to accumulate wealth, as Marx and Engels note in this regard, “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.

for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation” (Marx and Engels 67). It is evident that Marx and Engels have successfully explored the heart of a society’s economic system and its role in as a determinant sociopolitical power structure in a society. Yet some of Marx and Engels’s claims are quite problematic. They take it for granted that the proletariats are exploited and the bourgeoisies are the exploiting owners of a capitalist soci