The 'Communist Manifesto' and the problem of universality

One can say without fear of refutation that the Manifesto has been more consequential in the actual making of the modern word than any other piece of political writing, be it Rousseau's Social Contract, the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, or the French "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen." The first reason is, of course, the power of its political message, which has reverberated throughout the world and determined the destinies of a large cross-section of humanity over the past one hundred fifty years. Then there is the style itself: no call to arms has ever been phrased in a language of such zest, beauty, and purity.

Third, there is the stunning combination of diagnosis and prediction. Marx describes the capitalism of his own times and predicts its trajectories into the indefinite future with such force and accuracy that every subsequent generation, in various parts of the world, has seen in the Manifesto the image of its own times and a premonition of the horrors yet to come. And, fourth, concealed in the direct simplicity of its prose, like the labor of the tailor that disappears into the coat, is the distillation of a multifaceted philosophical understanding that had arisen out of a series of confrontations with the thinkers most influential in the Germany of his time: Hegel, Feuerbach, Proudhon, Stimer, Sismondi, the "True Socialists" and all the rest whom the authors of the Manifesto broadly describe as "would-be universal reformers."

No single essay can ever do justice to all the thematic richness of the Manifesto, precisely because the document condenses themes drawn from a whole range of intellectual and political debates, from the philosophy of history to the fundamental principles of capitalist political economy. For this essay, therefore, I have chosen only one of the themes we find here: Marx's radically new way of approaching the very idea of universality. While this idea is very much under attack these days - from proponents of identity politics, multiculturalism, communitarianism, indigenism, anti-secularism etc. - it is an idea that has been with us for a long time, not only in religious metaphysics and premodern humanisms but also, very intensely, throughout the history of modernity. I shall be asking a rather simple question: what are the conceptions of universality that Marx inherits, grapples with, rebels against, rejects, and then reinvents, radically, by changing their most fundamental premises?

The Idea of Universality

It is really quite astonishing how often words like "universal" and "global" are used in the Manifesto. There are two principal reasons for this: the world in which Marx came of age was marked by a tendency toward increasing globalization of the capitalist mode of production, which was to occupy him for much of the rest of his life; and the intellectual climate of his time and place was marked by various philosophies that took universalism of one kind of another as their starting point. This we cannot discuss at any length here, but a few indicators may be useful.

Generally speaking, the process of secularization in philosophical thought, which is so much a part of the birth of the modern world, was very much a matter of thinking about the category of the "universal" in ways radically different from how it had been thought within the church and in ideologies narrowly defined in religious terms. Vico's famous dictum, that "men can understand only that which they themselves make," was designed as a materialist premise for comprehending the universal history of profane humanity and its institutions in terms not given in the history sanctioned by the universal church and its narrative of the world as God's design. By the time one gets to Hegel, of course, the single institution that signifies the principle of reconciliation and progress in the universal history of Man is the State, which embodies the "world-spirit." The state bureaucracy emerges as the universal class guaranteeing a universalist reconciliation of particular interests in society. Indeed, the Hegelian dialectic was designed, at least in part, to explain how the claims of the universalist church could be reconciled, through the progress of history, with the universalist claims of the secular, rational institutions of the modern nation-state. Between Vico and Hegel, there had also been Kant, who postulated, as the fundamental subject of history, a universal consciousness that was above all particular individuals but also present in each of them.

In the midst of all this, there had of course been the French Revolution, with its "Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen," as well as the Napoleonic invasion of Germany, which gave to the world the founding text of Romantic, culturalist nationalism, namely Fichte's "Addresses to the German Nation." At one level, the "Man" of the Declaration was an abstraction: this "Man" was conceived as a maker of history, but he bore no mark of having himself been made by history, since he was the same always and everywhere, with rights that were eternal and universal. However, this "Man" could actually possess those rights only as a citizen, that is, as a member of a particular nation-state, though it was a nation-state that claimed to be the model for all other such states in the future. History was to be simply the process of universalizing the rights first granted by that state to its own citizens.

At a more concrete level, this "Man" was the bourgeois man who everywhere sought a universal right for the individual to own and defend his property. This security of property was "Man's" claim upon the State as its Citizen, as the subject of its Laws. The conflicting claims of universality and particularity were to be reconciled twice oven The universal "Man" was to be reborn as "Citizen" of a particular nation-state that was to guarantee his individual rights. And yet, what was provisionally a particular nation-state that guaranteed individual rights would also represent the very model of universal Reason.

Hegel was to draw much inspiration from this model of a state that claimed to embody, in its own time, the principles of universal history. But Fichte, who preoccupied himself not with the French Revolution but with Napoleonic invasion, drew somewhat different conclusions. Unlike the French nation, which was so new that it was comprised simply of the "citizens" created by the Revolution itself, the German nation in Fichte's reckoning had been there from the beginning of time, or at least since the beginning of the German language in its most primordial form. And the universalist claims of the German nation, as he conceived of it, resided in the fact, first, that it existed across boundaries of municipalities and territorial states, and, second, that its culture was so exemplary that it could teach a few lessons to the conquering French themselves, and, by implication therefore, to the whole world. A universalist role yet again, but with two differences: this role was to be played not by a state but by a nation that was wider than any state, and it was to be played on the stage not of the rights of Man but of an exemplary culture.

I offer these examples not to explicate that complex philosophical history but simply to illustrate some of the conceptions of universality that Marx had inherited. The most striking feature of those conceptions was that they all spoke of an expansive reconciliation. In religious forms of universalism, the oneness of humanity was guaranteed by the shadow of God. For Kant and Hegel, universalist reconciliation was an attribute of Reason and the Absolute. According to the French Declaration, reconciliation was the consequence of those Rights that claimed the equality of all men, universally, not to speak of all citizens, nationally. For Fichte, universalism was embodied in the nation itself, where obvious inequities in the socio-economic domain were to be reconciled in the particular language and exemplary culture of the nation. Hegel, of course, went the farthest in these speculations: in his philosophy, all contradictions were always moving toward higher and higher forms of reconciliation, right up to the Absolute which was incarnated in the state, which was intrinsically universal because it embodied the "word-spirit."

So, that is one point: the conception of universality as straightforward reconciliation. The other thing that is remarkable about the conceptions of universality that I have summarized here is the very categories that are foregrounded here - religion, state, nation, man, citizen, rights, reason. These categories would consequently preoccupy Marx in his debunking - and then his recovery - of the concept of universality, because, as he perceived quite accurately, the concept of universality can be put to coercive purposes as well as to revolutionary ones, depending on the politics of the women and men who take hold of it.

Part of Marx's immense effort at self-education and at thinking anew the philosophical categories he had inherited was an effort not merely to bypass those categories but to go right through them and find himself on the other side. Thus, for example, in his close textual readings of Hegel he had discovered that far from being the ground for reconciliation among particular interests, and thereby representing a general interest, the state was itself representative of some particular interests against others. Then there is the revolutionary step he takes in the German Ideology, where not consciousness, not even praxis as in the "Theses on Feuerbach," but production becomes the premise for philosophical thought, as in life itself.

The whole issue of the relation between the mental and the material thus begins to find a new formulation. Alongside these discoveries is the emerging emphasis on class. Marx arrives at the idea of the primacy of class from two sides: by changing the premise of philosophy from consciousness to production, and by rethinking the issue of the real revolutionary subject as opposed to those posited by Kant or Fichte or Hegel.

This entirely new way of thinking of production and of classes at the dynamic center of the historical process leads not to a narrative of a universal history, as in Hegel, but comprehension of the process through which history becomes universalized: there are, in other words, no "universals," only processes of universalization. The proletariat is then conceived of as a universal class in two quite distinct senses: in the sense that it is universally dispossessed and therefore lacks any particular interest to defend; and in the sense that the negative universality of capitalist exploitation is converted into the positive universality of what Marx would elsewhere call "poetry of the revolution."

Gradually, Marx begins to think not of labor but of the division of labor, and especially the division between mental and material labor, as being at the heart of modern history, and as the phenomenon that philosophy refuses to recognize. Marx draws many insights from this premise, only one of which we might consider here: the fact that mental labor is given a privileged position as disinterested thought is what makes it possible for state functionaries to represent themselves as mediators among the competing interests that exist within civil society. And this leads to a conception - notably in Hegel - of the bureaucracy as a "universal class."

Later, in the Manifesto, Marx would, of course, describe the "executive of the state" as nothing more than "the managing committee of the whole bourgeoisie." In this proposition, he is partly taking over Hegel's idea of mediation. But while Hegel presented the state as mediating and reconciling all of society's particular interests, Marx recognizes that the state simply mediates among the competing groups and factions within the bourgeoisie, so that it represents the whole bourgeoisie. In the German Ideology, though, Marx was making a related but different point about that same division of labor between the mental and the material: that it has always made it possible for servants of the state to represent themselves to themselves, in a self-mystification, as disinterested servants of the intellect.

If, thanks to class struggle, both civil society and the state are realms of conflicting particular interests, is universality theoretically and historically unthinkable? With this question, we can turn to some specific passages in the Manifesto. The very first sentence in the first section of the Manifesto - "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle" - is fascinating on two counts: first because it suggests a basic principle in the movement of historical time, a principle that applies universally; and second, because the word "hitherto" implies that this does not always have to be the case. History, in other words, does not have to be read as eternity, as it is in the triumphalist accounts of liberal capitalism and the capitalist state, from Hegel to Kojeve to Fukuyama, in their proclamations of the End of History.

From this statement of a general principle of historical motion, the Manifesto moves quickly to a summary of the fundamental tendencies in the growth and eventual globalization of capitalism, and hence of bourgeois society. He says, first of all, that this capitalist universalization has "simplified the class antagonisms" with "two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." Later, in 1888, Engels would specify that the term "proletariat" here means "the class of modern wage-laborers," which is the only way we can understand a passage that comes two pages later:

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.

We thus have not one but two criteria of capitalist universalization: the division between mental and manual labor, and the generality of wage-labor. In the Manifesto, of course, the emphasis is on the concentration of property and the generalization of the wage relation. Elsewhere, in a great many other texts, Marx would continue to draw out the implications of the division between the mental and the material.

It can be argued that in the actual history of the past one hundred and fifty years capitalism has not "simplified" class antagonisms but created a very intricate system of differentiations based on scales of property, salaries, and wages, both nationally and transnationally, while this global class structure is further complicated by the feminization of certain labor regimes as well as racialisms and ethnicizations of various sorts. But if these tendencies are not obviously present in the Manifesto, it does supplement the first form of universalization - the generalization of the wage relation with a second one: that of colonial conquest. This, in the words of the Manifesto, consists of,

the discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape ... the East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and commodities ... [as] modern industry has established the world market.

The Manifesto was of course too condensed a text for Marx to specify the full implications of colonialism - ("This bleeding process with a vengeance," as he was later to call it) - for the colonized. But, in any case, it was thanks to the colonial conquests that the bourgeoisie first emerged as something of a universal class in history. As the Manifesto puts it:

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

This capitalist universalisation leads then to the subordination of national "self-sufficiency" to the global market, and the emergence of a transnational culture and a unified bourgeois civilization:

All old-established national industries are destroyed or are being destroyed ... in place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency we have intercourse in every direction ... and as in material, so in intellectual production ... [this process] compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

That ironic phrase "what it calls civilization" reminds one of a superbly contemptuous phrase Engels was to use a decade later about the cultural claims of European colonizers when he called them "civilization-mongers."

The most striking feature of this language of the Manifesto is its astonishing contemporaneity, as it summarizes the process that for some years some of us have been calling "capitalist universalization." This sense of a rapid universalization is coupled with an extraordinary sense of catastrophe: all that was once solid is melting into air in what Marx and Engels call "a universal war of devastation."

In this war of devastation, two simultaneous processes of universalisation and differentiation are worth noting. First,

Differences of age and sex have no longer any distinctive social validity for the working class. All are instruments of labor, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex.

What Marx seems to be saying here is that the universalizing dynamic of proletarianization will necessarily utilize women as "instruments of labor" and that from the standpoint of capital differences of sex and age matter very little. But what he adds immediately is that all are instruments of labor but some are cheaper than others, and the ones whose labor-power is cheaper are thus, by implication, more intensively exploited. In other words, capital can employ women as readily as men, and under certain conditions perhaps more so because their labor is cheaper. In another passage of the Manipsto Marx refers also to the sexual exploitation of all women, including the women of the bourgeois class itself.

The other distinction that is worth foregrounding here pertains to the question of nationality and is contained in several related passages. One runs as follows:

The Communists are (further) reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.

That famous sentence - "The working men have no country" - has been so often misconstrued that we shall have to return to it in a moment. Let me quote another passage, though, which will help clarify the previous one:

The proletarian is without property ... modern industrial labor, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character.

The sentence "the working men have no country" has to be understood in relation to these two universal experiences of the working class: that it has no property, and that the modern industrial process itself obliterates differences between national production systems and imposes similar labor disciplines across national frontiers.

Conversely, Marx's great polemic against Stirner, and against the nationalistic strand in German Idealism more generally, which he formulated well before coming to the Manifesto, would seem to suggest that the worker also has "no country" in another sense: the nation-state does not defend the working class against the predatory designs either of its own national bourgeoisie or of the bourgeoisies of other countries. The worker of the colonies, for example, has "no country" in this double sense: that he is not a citizen of any country - nobody can be "citizen" in a colony - and that he is doubly exploited, by the national bourgeoisie which accumulates part of the surplus value, as well as the imperialist bourgeoisie which accumulates the other part. A universality, in other words, of dispossession and forms of labon This leads to another of the famous passages:

Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own national bourgeoisie.

Now, Marx could not have been calling for this settling of accounts "with its own national bourgeoisie," nor could he exhort the proletariat to "rise to be the leading class of the nation" and to "constitute itself the nation" if he literally meant that workingmen have no country. The whole drift of the argument is that, as Marx literally puts it, the working class is "itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense."

That sentence - "The working men have no country" - is in its own context first of all a retort, aimed at those who reproach communists "with desiring to abolish countries and nationality." And the sentence is also a prelude to the one that immediately follows: "We cannot take from them what they have not got." Only the propertied classes can be said, in the strong sense of the word, to have - indeed, to possess - a country. Second, it is the loss of property in its means of production that has made the working class relatively mobile across countries and nationalities. If the bourgeoisie struts across the globe in search of profits, the working class itself moves in search of work and wages, though under conditions dictated by the bourgeoisie. But, finally, it is the working-class movement that calls upon the dispossessed to become, for the first time in their history, "national," "the leading class of the nation," indeed "the nation" itself.

At this point, there begins what Hegel might have called a negation of the negation. The bourgeoisie has performed a dual task. It has, on the one hand, organized the world politically in a system of highly differentiated nation-states which it uses to impose differentiated labor regimes. On the other hand, in the domain of circulation, of commodities as well as finance, it breaks down all national differences in pursuit of a world market and creates "what it calls civilization" in its own image, in short a capitalist universality.

We have a precise configuration, then: bourgeois nation together with the universality of the market, which has arisen out of the negation of all precapitalist forms. The theoretical universalism of bourgeois philosophy in its revolutionary phase has in practice been negated by the division of the world into nation-states; by imperialism which divides humanity between the imperialist and the imperialized; by the racialisms that have accompanied capitalist slavery; by the whole development of world capitalism as a system of unequal and combined development; by the atomization and fragmentation of" social humanity" which runs alongside the universality of the market and serves as its very basis.

What, then, will negate this negation? The currently fashionable postmodern discourse has its own answer: it leaves the market fully intact while debunking the nation-state and seeking to dissolve it even further into little communities and competitive narcissisms, which sometimes gets called "multiculturalism." In other words, postmodernism seeks an even deeper universalization of the market, while seeking to decompose "social humanity" even further, to the point where only the monadic individual remains, with no dream but that of, in Jean-Francois Lyotard's words, "the enjoyment of goods and services." Or, to put it somewhat differently: the postmodern utopia takes the form of a complementary relationship between universalization of the market and individualization of commodity fetishism. This, of course, has been the dream of capitalism since its very inception.

In the Manifesto, however, the negation of "social humanity" by the universal market and commodity fetishism can itself be negated in only one way: the struggle of "social humanity" must take the form of "settling matters with one's own national bourgeoisie," while, simultaneously, the working class constitutes itself both as "the nation" and as a class of universal emancipation, a class that cannot emancipate itself without emancipating the whole of society, indeed the whole of humanity.

These formulations go, I think, to the heart of the matter. Marxism is today often accused of neglecting all kinds of "difference," of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, culture, and so on. But it is not Marxism that recognizes no gender differences. These differences are at once abolished by capitalism, by turning women as much as men into instruments of production. These differences are also maintained through cross-class sexual exploitation, not to speak of the differential wage rate, in which women are paid less than men for the same work, or the direct appropriation of women's labor in the domestic economy. Similarly, it is not communism that sets out to abolish nationality. It is abolished by capitalism itself, through imperialism, through circulation of finance and commodities, through the objectivity of the labor process itself, while nation-states are maintained simply as mechanisms for the management of various units of the world capitalist economy in the context of globally uneven and unequal development. Finally, the bourgeoisie is already a universal class, transnational in its operations and with a culture that also tends to be globally uniform.

Is it really possible to overturn this capitalist universality through the narcissism of little differences, as postmodernism proposes, or must there be an alternative universality which itself arises out of concrete material processes - the same processes that have produced bourgeois universality?

The reason that so much of contemporary thought fights constantly against Marx, either by rejecting his thought or by trying to assimilate it, and yet fails to go beyond Marx, is that he so radically changed the terms of the debate. Instead of the Idealist search for the human essence, he posited the social constitution of the human subject simply as an ensemble of social relations. "Universality" itself can be conceived, he suggests, not as a horizontal aggregation of individuals but as an intricate set of social relationships which in the modern world tend to be increasingly globalized.

Against Kant, he suggested that the word of liberal capitalism is based not on Reason but on Interest, and that commerce, which Kant posited as a harbinger of international peace, was a weapon of global subjugation. Against the Enlightenment notion of the teleology of progress, he posited the idea of the persistence of class straggle and, in the words of the Manifesto, a "universal war of devastation." Against the idea of Humanity-in-general, or the idea of Universality as being inherent in human Reason, Marx posits universalization as an ongoing and contradictory historical process and not an ontological given.

And, above all, he speaks of competing projects of universality, the outcome of which will be determined not philosophically, in advance of the event, but practically and historically. For the philosophy that Marx sought to overturn, universalism was already accomplished, in thought, in Reason, in the coming of the modern state. For the Manifesto universality is a horizon, an event yet to come. This extraordinary orientation toward the future is what has made it possible for generations of militants to see in the Manifesto their present as well as their praxis.

Aijaz Ahmad is senior fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and author of In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992). This paper was written for the May 1998 international conference, "Le Manifeste communiste, 150 ans apres."

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