Some schools of Marxists could even argue that capitalism, at least in its imperialist form, far from ‘compel[ling] all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production’, was by its nature perpetuating – or even creating – ‘underdevelopment’ in the so-called Third World. While one-third of the human race lived in economies of the Soviet Communist type, it seemed as though capitalism would never succeed in compelling all nations ‘to become bourgeois themselves’. It would not ‘create a world after its own image’. Again, before the 1960s the Manifesto’s announcement that capitalism brought about the destruction of the family seemed not to have been verified, even in the advanced Western countries where today something like half of all children are born to or brought up by single mothers, and half of all households in big cities consist of single persons.

In short, what might in 1848 have struck an uncommitted reader as revolutionary rhetoric – or, at best, as plausible prediction – can now be read as a concise characterization of capitalism at the end of the twentieth century. Of what other document of the 1840s can this be said?

IV

However, if at the end of the millennium we must be struck by the acuteness of the Manifesto’s vision of the then remote future of a massively globalized capitalism, the failure of another of its forecasts is equally striking. It is now evident that the bourgeoisie has not produced ‘above all … its own gravediggers’ in the proletariat. ‘Its fall and the victory of the proletariat’ have not proved ‘equally inevitable’.The contrast between the two halves of the Manifesto’s analysis in its section on ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’ calls for more explanation after 150 years than it did at the time of its centenary.

The problem lies not in Marx’s and Engels’s vision of a capitalism which necessarily transformed most of the people earning their living in this economy into men and women who depend for their livelihood on hiring themselves out for wages or salaries. It has undoubtedly tended to do so, though today the incomes of some who are technically employees hired for a salary, such as corporation executives, can hardly count as proletarian. Nor does it lie essentially in their belief that most of this working population would consist of a workforce of industrial labour. While Great Britain remained quite exceptional as a country in which wage-paid manual workers formed the absolute majority of the population, the development of industrial production required massive and growing inputs of manual labour for well over a century after the Manifesto. Unquestionably this is no longer the case in modern capital-intensive high-tech production, a development not considered in the Manifesto, though in fact in his more mature economic studies Marx himself envisaged the possible development of an increasingly labourless economy, at least in a post-capitalist era.15 Even in the old industrial economies of capitalism, the percentage of people employed in manufacturing industry remained stable until the 1970s, except for the USA, where the decline set in a little earlier. Indeed, with very few exceptions – such as Britain, Belgium and the USA – in 1970 industrial workers probably formed a larger proportion of the total occupied population in the industrial and industrializing world than ever before.

In any case, the overthrow of capitalism envisaged by the Manifesto relied not on the prior transformation of the majority of the occupied population into proletarians but on the assumption that the situation of the proletariat in the capitalist economy was such that, once organized as a necessarily political class movement, it could take the lead in, and rally round itself, the discontent of other classes, and thus acquire political power as ‘the independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority’.Thus the proletariat would ‘rise to be the leading class of the nation … constitute itself as the nation’.16

Since capitalism has not been overthrown, we are apt to dismiss this prediction. Yet – utterly improbable though it looked in 1848 – the politics of most European capitalist countries were to be transformed by the rise of organized political movements basing themselves on the class-conscious working class, which had barely made its appearance outside Great Britain. Labour and socialist parties emerged in most parts of the ‘developed’ world in the 1880s, becoming mass parties in states with the democratic franchise which they did so much to bring about. During and after World War I, as one branch of ‘proletarian parties’ followed the revolutionary road of the Bolsheviks, another branch became the sustaining pillars of a democratized capitalism. The Bolshevik branch is no longer of much significance in Europe, or parties of this kind have assimilated to social-democracy. Social-Democracy, as understood in the days of Bebel or even Clement Attlee, is fighting a rearguard action. Nevertheless the social-democratic parties of the Second International, sometimes under their original names, are still potentially the parties of government in several European states. Though such governments were less common in the early twenty-first century than they had been in the late twentieth, these parties have shown a unique record of continuity as major political agents over more than a century.

In short, what is wrong is not the Manifesto’s prediction of the central role of the political movements based on the working class (and still sometimes specifically bearing the class name, as in the British, Dutch, Norwegian and Australasian Labour Parties). It is the proposition: ‘Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class’, whose inevitable destiny, implicit in the nature and development of capitalism, is to overthrow the bourgeoisie: ‘Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’

Even in the notoriously ‘hungry forties’, the mechanism which was to ensure this – the inevitable pauperization17 of the labourers – was not totally convincing; unless on the assumption, implausible even then, that capitalism was in its final crisis and about to be immediately overthrown. It was a double mechanism. In addition to the effect of pauperization on the workers’ movement, it proved that the bourgeoisie was ‘unfit to rule because it is incompetent to assure an existence to its slave within his slavery, because it cannot help letting him sink into such a state that it has to feed him, instead of being fed by him’. Far from providing the profit which fuelled the engine of capitalism, labour now drained it away. But – given the enormous economic potential of capitalism so dramatically expounded in the Manifesto itself – why was it inevitable that capitalism could not provide a livelihood, however miserable, for most of its working class or, alternatively, that it could not afford a welfare system? That ‘pauperism [in the strict sense; see Note 17] develops even more rapidly than population and wealth’?18 If capitalism had a long life before it as became obvious very soon after 1848 this did not have to happen, and indeed it did not.

The Manifesto’s vision of the historic development of ‘bourgeois society’, including the working class which it generated, did not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the proletariat would overthrow capitalism and, in so doing, open the way to the development of communism, because vision and conclusion did not derive from the same analysis. The aim of communism, adopted before Marx became ‘Marxist’, was derived not from the analysis of the nature and development of capitalism but from a philosophical – indeed, an eschatological – argument about human nature and destiny. The idea – fundamental for Marx from then on – that the proletariat was a class which could not liberate itself without thereby liberating society as a whole first appears as ‘a philosophical deduction rather than a product of observation’.19 As George Lichtheim put it: ‘the proletariat makes its first appearance in Marx’ writings as the social force needed to realise the aims of German philosophy’ as Marx saw it in 1843–44.20

The ‘positive possibility of German emancipation’, wrote Marx in the Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, lay:

in the formation of a class with radical chains … a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which claims no particular right because the wrong committed against it is not a particular wrong, but wrong as such…. This dissolution of society as a particular class is the proletariat…. The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of the human being. Philosophy is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is its heart. Philosophy cannot realise itself without abolishing the proletariat, and the proletariat cannot be abolished without philosophy being made a reality.21

At this time Marx knew little more about the proletariat than that ‘it is coming into being in Germany only as a result of the rising industrial development’, and this was precisely its potential as a liberating force, since, unlike the poor masses of traditional society, it was the child of ‘a drastic dissolution of society’, and therefore by its existence ‘proclaim[ed] the dissolution of the hitherto existing world order’. He knew even less about labour movements, though he knew a great deal about the history of the French Revolution.