Socialism and Democracy

ISSN: 0885-4300 (Print) 1745-2635 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csad20

What we can still learn from the communist

manifesto: The dance of the dialectic, or how to
study the communist future inside the capitalist
present

Bertell Ollman

To cite this article: Bertell Ollman (1998) What we can still learn from the communist manifesto:
The dance of the dialectic, or how to study the communist future inside the capitalist present,
Socialism and Democracy, 12:1, 1-6, DOI: 10.1080/08854309808428207

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08854309808428207

Published online: 13 Dec 2007.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 141

View related articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csad20
What We Can Still Learn from the
Communist Manifesto:
The Dance of the Dialectic, or How
to Study the Communist Future
Inside the Capitalist Present

Bertell Ollman

The Communist Manifesto presents the world with an

extraordinarily optimistic vision of its possible future but also with
the rudiments of an analysis that claims to catch a glimpse of this
future in the growing achievements as well as the worsening
problems of capitalism. This analysis has given hope and political
direction to millions of suffering humanity and continues to do so.
Even more than its revolutionary politics, it is also this analysis that
makes the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto such a
special event.
Yet, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, a kind
of "future shyness" seems to have afflicted the writings of many
socialists. Marx would not have been pleased, for despite the
absence of any single work on socialism/communism, there are no
writings of his, no matter how small, that do not offer some
information on the post-capitalist future. If Hegel's Owl of Minerva
comes out—and also goes back in—at dusk, Marx's stays around to
herald the new dawn. Giving readers some idea of what they could
expect from a workers' revolution was considered an essential
element, both politically and analytically, in any study of the
existing state of affairs. And nowhere is this more evident than in
the Communist Manifesto.
In the Communist Manifesto, most of what is said about the
future takes the form of corrections to the capitalists' caricatural
notion of communism, a list of political measures that are likely to
2 Socialism and Democracy

be taken immediately after a successful revolution, and a series of

comparisons between communism and other forms of socialism.
But this all belongs to the authors' strategy of exposition. How
Marx and Engels came to acquire such views is suggested in a few
brief remarks about elements of the future that already exist in the
present. The method by which one analyzes these elements to
extract a vision of the future, however, is never adequately set out,
either here or in subsequent works. Yet, this is exactly what we
need to know. In our intensely skeptical age, it is simply not enough
to give people a sense of what socialism would be like. We also
have to propose a way of investigating it that can contribute to the
credibility of what is found.
In the socialist tradition, there are four main approaches that
thinkers have used to inquire into the future. Some have believed
that socialism, at least in most of its essentials, already exists
somewhere, whether in a country or a commune or a cooperative.
What needs to be done is to go there, study it, and try to apply its
lessons back home, whatever the differences in conditions. A
second approach treats socialism as a wish list, an intellectual
construct made of everything one wants to do or have, of all that
one considers good, or healthy, or human. The way to study tine
future here is to look inward. A third approach is to derive
socialism by deduction from some absolute principle, whether
religious or secular: if people only acted according to this idea, it is
said, society would assume the following shape, and so on.
The fourth approach, which is that of Marx and Engels, views
socialism as an unrealized potential within capitalism itself, as a
way of life and being that could evolve out of transformations
already going on in capitalism. Rather than a moral condemnation,
Marx's and Engels' analysis attempts to show that capitalism is
having increasing difficulty in reproducing the conditions necessary
for its own existence (especially as regards the accumulation of
capital and the realization of its product). The continuation of
capitalism is thus becoming impossible, while at the same
time—and through the same developments—conditions are being
created for the new society that will follow. The place to look for
socialism, then, is inside capitalism, in its contradictory relations as
they are developing and would develop further with the change of
ruling class, and in the new interests, goals and priorities that
would come to the fore after a socialist revolution. On a few
occasions, Marx speaks of the future as being "concealed" in the
 Bertell Oilman 3

present, and he considers it his task to criticize capitalism in a way

that brings this future into view. But what forms does this potential
for socialism take inside capitalism? And how exactly does Marx
study them?
In brief: most of the evidence for the possibility of
socialism/communism is right in front of us, and can be seen by
everyone. It lies in conditions that don't seem to have anything
particularly socialist about them, such as our developed industries,
enormous material wealth, high levels of science, occupational
skills, organizational structures, education, and culture; and also in
conditions that already have a socialist edge to them, such as
political democracy, workers' and consumers' cooperatives,
nationalized enterprises, public education, socialized medicine, etc.
Evidence for socialism can also be found in some of capitalism's
worst problems, such as unemployment and growing inequality.
For Marxists, it dear that it is the capitalist context in which all these
conditions are embedded that keeps them from contributing to a
truly humane existence. Imagining a socialist context, Marxists have
no difficulty in looking at our enormous wealth and ability to
produce more and seeing an end to poverty and material want, or
looking at rising unemployment and seeing the possibility of
everyone working fewer hours and enjoying more free time, or
looking at our limited and malfunctioning political democracy and
seeing everyone democratically running all of society, and so on.
Unfortunately, most others who encounter the same evidence don't
see this potential, not even in the parts that have a socialist edge to
them. And it is important to recognize why they can't.
The crux of the problem most people have in seeing evidence
for the socialist future in the present is that they cannot abstract the
relevant conditions from their capitalist context, and therefore can't
imagine how they might function in another sodal context. For
them, capitalism's forms and their content have been fused into one
finished and, as far as essentials are concerned, static unit. Both
interconnection and change receive scant attention on this view.
How something appears and functions now is taken for what it
really is, what it only is, and what it could only be. An alternative
view that has gained some popularity recently treats all futures as
equally possible, which is but another way of denying that the
present has anything spedfic to tell us about the future.
Marx, in contrast, examines present conditions in a way that
brings out their interconnections and puts them into motion. He
4 Socialism and Democracy

historicizes capitalism. Its current qualities become moments in the

evolution of a system, the most accessible parts of a story that
begins with the origins of these qualities and ends with where they
seem to be heading. The dialectical method by which Marx studies
the socialist/communist future inside the capitalist present consists
of four main steps:
1) He looks for mutually dependent relations between the most
distinctive features of the capitalist present, whose core revolves
around the production of commodities, the accumulation of capital,
the realization of value, and the class struggle between workers and
capitalists.
2) He tries to find the necessary pre-conditions of just these
relations in the past, treating them as the start of a process that led
to the present.
3) He then projects these interrelated processes, reformulated as
contradictions, from the past, through the present, and into the
future. These projections move from the immediate future, to the
probable resolution of these contradictions in an intermediate
future, and on to the type of society that is likely to follow in the
more distant future.
4) Marx then reverses himself and uses the socialist and
communist stages of the future at which he has arrived as vantage
points for reexamining the present, now viewed as the necessary
pre-conditions for such a future. This last, though little understood,
is the indispensable means by which Marx provides the finishing
touches to his analysis of capitalism.*
Building on what he learns from going through one series of
steps, Marx begins the dance—the dance of the dialectic—all over
again, since the work of reconstructing our real past and imagining
the probable future is never finished. The key to the entire
procedure lies in being able to conceive of capitalism in terms of so
many intersecting and overlapping contradictions arising out of the
past and arching towards the future. Once this is achieved, the rest
is a matter of scholarly persistence, and of developing the skills that
come from repeated practice.

* For a fuller account of these four steps, see my "Why Dialectics? Why Now?,"
Science and Society, Fall, 1998, esp. pp. 345-354.
 Bertell Oilman 5

Before concluding, it needs to be stressed that the projections of

the future obtained through the use of the method outlined here are
only highly probable, and even then the pace and exact forms
through which such change occurs—subject as they are to the
vagaries of the class struggle, and also to acddent—cannot be
known beforehand. Marx, himself, recognizes "barbarism" and the
collapse of civilization as other possible outcomes of capitalist
development, though he thought them very unlikely and gave
much less attention to these possibilities than we need to at this
time.
To avoid possible misunderstandings, I also want to add that
the use of contradiction to project existing potential is not the only
means Marx and Engels use to uncover the socialist/communist
future inside the capitalist present, but simply the main one. Also,
this approach to finding the future is not to be confused with
Marx's strategies for presenting what he found, which always take
the capabilities of his readers into account. Nor am I maintaining
that this is how Marx himself became a communist. That is a
complex story in which Hegel's dialectic and Marx's unique
appropriation of it are but part. Once Marx constructed the chief
elements of what came to be called "Marxism," however, projecting
capitalism's main contradictions forward became his preferred
approach for studying the future, providing that future with just
the degree of clarity and necessity it needed for him to work with it.
It is also the best way that we today can learn about the possibility
of socialism in our future, and contribute—should we wish—to the
struggle, begun in the Communist Manifesto, over bringing such a
society into being.
 6 Socialism and Democracy

Appendix: ^ U U B Of

Step 1: Analyze
(a) One step to the left,
(b) Followed by two steps to the right,
(c) Then one to the left.
(a) start here -
_% •** ~~~ ( ; end here'

go here (b) (b) gohen

Step 2: Historicize ...

One step backward.

%£? c
Qflt

m% go here

Step 3: Visionize ~% go here

Two steps forward.

f t ^ t h e

"T
start here
A*

Step 4: And Oraanize!

* * start here t-oo/t*
One step backward. <Z fi 'Off,
Finish with a jump 1 *
(we're now on a "higher level"),
and repeat steps to 'deepen* analysis. 1
•go here
i
Text and Choreography by Bertell Oilman Layout by Fran Mo ran