What Marx and Engels Have to Say to Us Today

A close reading of two essential communist works

Literature is, in a general sense, merely a reflection of that struggle. It exists to serve particular class interests. It can promote the current status quo, or it can critique it; it can uphold it or it can fight it. It can promote ideas that reinforce oppression, or it can promote ideas that deconstruct it.

Literature (both fiction and nonfiction) that promotes ideas that oppose and deconstruct oppression we call revolutionary literature. Literature that serves to reinforce oppression we call reactionary literature.

Examples of revolutionary literature would be the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin. Examples of reactionary literature would be works by people such as Mussolini, Hitler and Evola. For more modern examples, we could look to “thinkers’ such as Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker, who shamelessly uphold the status quo.

Literature can also be read as an expression of a particular age’s attitude or spirit, what some may call zeitgeist. So for example, the revolutionary optimism of a work like Engels’ The Conditions of the Working Class in England can be explained by the fact that, at the time, there was a strong labor movement in England and revolution (the revolutions of 1848) were just around the corner.

Connie Willis says that literature is “people who went before us, tapping out messages from the past, from beyond the grave, trying to tell us about life and death.”

Assuming the reader agrees with this statement, let us ask the question, “what do the works of Marx and Engels have to teach us about the past? What do they have to teach us about the present and the (possibly revolutionary) future?” That is the question we will be dealing with in this essay.

The works of Marx and Engels are an important (and I would argue the most important) part of the revolutionary tradition of the working class. All over the world, from America to Vietnam, the work of Marx and Engels has inspired countless people to fight against their oppressors and build a better world. The final lines of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world, unite!” has been the rallying cry of oppressed people all over the globe.

So, let us take a look at some of the most important works of Marx and Engels and carefully read them over to see what we can learn from them. Let us begin with the most famous, the Manifesto of the Communist Party, otherwise known as the Communist Manifesto.

Let us begin with the opening line:

Translated into simple terms, this means that the history of all society, from Ancient Greece to the United States, is a history of economic and social classes in conflict with each other.

“In conflict over what?” I hear you ask. Well the answer to that is simple; power. The conflict is over power, and in particular, who does and does not have the power to determine the course of their lives, who does and does not have the power to control themselves.

The introduction of bourgeois (capitalist) rule did not do away with this struggle; it merely simplified it. Where there were once a manifold of classes and ranks, there are now two general camps into which everyone falls: the bourgeoisie, those who make money by owning property, and the proletariat, those who live and make money by selling their labor power.

As the Communist Manifesto puts it:

According to Marx and Engels, class struggle hasn’t ended, it’s merely changed forms. Our society is still very much a society broken in two, fractured by the divide between workers and owners.

What is to be done about this? What is the solution Marx and Engels put forward? It is exactly the opposite of what liberals advocate for. The liberal wishes to hush up class struggle, to hide it behind a veil of civility. To Marxists, this is unacceptable. The corruption and violence of capitalist society must be brought out into the open; the class struggle must be intensified.

Workers must join together and fight their common oppressor. But what is to be done when the workers seize power? Marx answers that question in The Civil War in France:

Thus, the first order of business after a revolution will be to abolish the police and army and replace them with the mass of the armed people. This will take power out of the hands of the bourgeois state, effectively smashing it, and putting it directly into the hands of the workers.

What, then, do Marx and Engels have to say to us today? Simply put, in class society, all of life is a struggle, a struggle not only between two classes, but between individuals of the different classes, and even individuals of the same classes. It is the task of the socialist revolution to put an end to that struggle and bring about a truly peaceful world in which each individual can fully realize their potential.

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