Comments
on the Analysis of the Bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto
“It
compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production” – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto
Chambi Chachage
The
Communist Manifesto provides an analysis of the emergence of the bourgeoisie
and its consequent society. It explicitly presents this history, or rather
historicization, as having both a universal and a particular applicability.
Hence, as a historian who is researching the origins of capitalism and the
making of the bourgeoisie in the African country of Tanzania, this text is of
particular theoretical and methodological interest.
Building
on the Marxian historicism that boldly postulates that the history of the then
existing societies had been that of class struggles, the text – issued in 1848
– argues that the myriads of classes that existed prior to the dissolution of
feudalism in Europe were giving way to two major antagonist classes:
bourgeoisie and proletariat. This then increasingly dichotomization, they
explain, was driven by “the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal
society.” It is European expedition and colonization of – as well as trading
with – other areas of the world, they elaborate, that provided the
unprecedented market, technological, industrial impulse to this element. As a
result the bourgeoisie rose as a group capable of running this new industrial
society thus pushing “into the background every class handed down from the
Middle Ages”.
It
is a straightforward account of what led to the great divergence between what
the text refers to as the bourgeoisie society, in reference to Europe, and barbaric
nations, in reference to countries that had not (yet) experienced the
Industrial Revolution. One can thus simply use its explanatory framework to
argue that the bourgeoisie in Africa, Asia and elsewhere were simply made by
the bourgeoisie in Europe. After all the authors thus categorically states: “The
bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created
enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with
the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the
idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns,
so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the
civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the
West.”
By
thus ascribing too much power – in fact omnipotence by claiming that “it creates
a world after its own image” – to the European bourgeoisie, the authors thus
dismiss the historical agency of people of various classes in the ‘non-western’
world. Indeed the European bourgeoisie “subjected the country to the rule of
the towns…. created enormous cities…greatly increased the urban population as
compared with the rural” but so did the people, whether bourgeois or not, in
China, India, Ghana and Turkey.
Without
throwing the Communist Manifesto baby with the bathwater of Marxian historicity
my challenge, then, is to provide an account of the historical emergence of the
bourgeoisie in Africa that may have not necessarily been a byproduct let alone
a product of the European bourgeoisie. For sure slavery, colonialism and racism
played their major parts in the consolidation of capitalism and the bourgeoisie
in and among Africans. But that is not the whole story. To complete it is
indeed the work of history.
