Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch! (Workers of the world unite!

— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

Marx, the father of Communism, wrote from his own experience and miseries. A Jewish outcast, three of
Mar’s seven children did not survive to adulthood due to poverty. Marx made a living from journalism
and his books served him solace in times of hardship. He was fully devoted to his family and was
heartbroken when his eldest daughter and wife died that he fell ill and also died shortly after. Only 11
people including his friend and patron Friedrich Engels attended his funeral, with people thinking the
man would never leave a mark in the world. Gone was Marx and his family and so was his philosophy.

But they were mistaken. Marx’s writings posthumously awakened the dampened spirits of his fellow
laborer and the world would never be the same.

Minimum wage pay, working hours, leave benefits, rest periods, security of tenure, collective

bargaining. These are labor rights that have become standard today, but a hundred years earlier,

it took a bloodbath to enforce labor reforms when labor unions, spreading through the masses,

from Russia to Cuba, were unified by Marx’s call.

The Philippine centavo during the American occupation. It was minted, in a capitalist era, with

the image of a blacksmith.

The Communist and Socialist insurgencies inspired by Marx, Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin,

Mao Tse Tung, and Fidel Castro were the populist prFotests to an era of imperialism and the

capitalist Industrial Revolution. With the rise of the factory ethic in the nineteenth century, the

situation of workers, including women and children, was to work for endless hours in unsafe

plants or farms in hand-to-mouth existence. Industries competed for capital with maximum

returns and minimum costs to the employer. Work was unregulated, mechanical, and slavish.

Labor was too cheap that workers could not even afford the very products they produced.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote about this conflict of the upper bourgeoisie and

lower proletariat social classes rooted in capitalist economics. In a capitalist economy, private

ownership is unregulated, which encourages the hoarding and overproduction of goods. The

craftsman has to work like a clog in a machine to keep up with the ever-growing market.

But given the inverse relation of supply and demand, the more the laborer works, the more

harvests, the more yield, the more supply available, the less value for his output which he does

not even own and has no means to own. While his labor alone creates the product and its value,

the capitalist receives the profits. The laborer receives a value less than what he creates. The

goods he creates belong to the employer. Overtime, the worker can no longer identify with his

work. He does not like to work because it becomes a forced activity just to survive that makes
the capitalist richer and more powerful. Work alienates him.

Marx explained that in earlier times, everyone is responsible for producing just what his

family needs — the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter, within the tribal system of

common ownership over natural resources. But as societies formed, people began to specialize in

their skills, engaging in bargains and barters, and gaining control of particular trades and

ownership. A person’s job or skill also began to determine the way one lives, dresses, eats, and

socializes, creating the formation of social classes, along with its discriminations, entitlements,

and opportunities for exploitation.

Once, people valued workers for their craft, vital to the community’s survival, and workers

found personal worth in their labor. But as the bourgeoisie, who were unfamiliar with grunt

work, began to control vital trades through their position of ownership, the worker had been

reduced into a dispensable raw material, a tool for production. Personal worth had been reduced

into an exchange value so that everyone had become nothing but a paid worker. As labor became

specialized, the worker became a mere cog in the system.

This system has been perpetuated through the “superstructures” of established politics, law,

art, literature, and religion. The masses would need to align into groups and take arms to resist

the pervasive powers of these superstructures that maintain the status quo. They have no need of

the elites, since it is their labor that produces goods and services while the bourgeoisie take the

profits. Laborers have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

The rich cannot be expected to easily give up their privileges, especially through the same

legal, religious, and political system. Bargaining will not get the workers so far. It is no use to be

passive and accept one’s fate in docility. An aggressive, radical, and even violent anti-

establishment gathering is needed to shake up the foundations of society and to alter the means

and cycle of production. The ruling class will be displaced to open the space for the masses.

Revolutions are inevitable in this dialectical process of “thesis” and “antithesis” of social classes,

leading to a “synthesis” of a classless society.

Mao Tse Tung, in his Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,

explained: “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing

embroidery. It cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous,

restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one

class overthrows another.”

The perfect society is a return to social ownership (“Socialism”) through nationalization of

economic resources (land, raw materials, factories, industries). Lenin, in The State and

Revolution, wrote that Socialism, which is the conversion of private to public property, is just the first
phase of Communism. In a commun, common ownership would obliterate entitlements and difference
of classes and there would eventually be no need for the State or for laws as the
people imbibe the rule that “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Like Marx, Lenin believed that the proletariat revolution must spread to all nations,

transcending boundaries and nationalities, to finally overthrow the allied colonizers and their

capitalist economies. This dream was realized with the formation of the United Soviet Socialist

Republics.

The Red Revolution

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

— Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller

For Marx, man must reclaim his greatest virtues from the gods and idols of society. It is the

working man who must be dignified, exalted and glorified, and not the man in the palaces or in

the heavens. Religion is the “opium of the people” that prevents him from confronting his

miseries in exchange for an imaginary after-life that he cannot even be sure of. Marx’s influence

has seen the ouster of monarchies and the religious elites, such as the Tsars and the Orthodox

patriarchs of Russia, the Qing dynasty and the Dalai Lama of China, and the Catholic Church in

Cuba and in post-Franco Spain.

Unfortunately, the spiraling excesses of Communist revolutions, in its impatient efforts to alter

society through class liquidation, confiscation of property and farmlands, and social

reengineering, produced the greatest recorded massacres, death camps, genocides, and famines

known as the “Red Holocaust.” A combined death toll between 85 and 100 million occurred in

the former Soviet Union under Stalin, in China under Mao, and in Cambodia under the Khmer

Rouge. It is the endorsement of violence and disregard for life and property that made

Communism unappealing to otherwise Socialist sympathizers. Alexis de Tocqueville warned

against the tendency of socialism to be contemptuous of the individual, to make him a cog in the

overbearing machinery of the State.

Capitalist economies maintain that labor rights and economic reform can be achieved in a

democratic process without resorting to Communism, such as by passing Anti-Trust laws, Fair

Labor Standards acts, and entering into collective bargaining agreements. After all, the standard

“eight hours a day, five days a week” work week was popularized not by a Communist, but by an

American entrepreneur, Henry Ford, from his successful car industry. Ford made his company

competitive by making cars affordable to the masses and sharing the profits to his workers who

received double the minimum wage.

Further, the class struggle between the rich and the poor is not necessarily true in the presence
of a dominant middle class. When the population is mostly of the middle class, who are both

ruler and ruled, worker and capitalist, the thesis and anti-thesis dichotomy is blurred.

Meanwhile, socialists argue that Capitalism has inherent politico-economic flaws, such as

materialism, exploitation of the workers, private individualism, monopolies, licentious abuse of

freedoms and rights, increasing inequalities in wealth, perpetuation to power, Fascism, religious

propaganda, and lost sense of communalism and nationalism. Capitalism inevitably widens the

gap between rich and poor and eliminates any middle class.

Until the late twentieth century, a power struggle ensued between the allies of Capitalist

Britain and the United States (including its ally, the Philippines) and Communist Russia and

China, in a “Cold War” threat of nuclear annihilation. World views have been divided into the

Socialist “Left,” the free-market “Right,” and the “Middle” welfare-state Capitalists.

Since the American period, the Philippine Commonwealth installed laws against the violent

overthrow of government, with the Communists in mind. Labor laws were passed, amid social

unrest, such as the Employer’s Liability Act in 1908, the Industrial Peace Act in 1953, and the

Labor Code of the Philippines by President Marcos in 1974. The aim of social legislation is

“social justice,” defined in the case of Calalang v. Williams (G.R. No. 47800, December 2, 1940)

as “neither communism, nor despotism, nor atomism nor anarchy, but the humanization of laws

and the equalization of social and economic forces by the State so that justice in its rational and

objectively secular conception may at least be approximated.”

With the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist experiment fizzled. China, under Deng

Xiaoping, reformed its economic policies to open its economy and become a rival superpower to

the U.S., by copying the Capitalist recipe and opening itself to free trade. Many elements of the

Left, incensed with the use of violence, have advocated human rights and legitimate political

parties, redefining themselves into “Democrats,” “Liberals,” or simply, “Socialists.” Even as

Communism continues to flout its defense of the rights of the masses, the worst human rights

violations are still happening in Communist regimes like North Korea.

The failure of Marxism in solving tyranny and poverty was largely due to its theory that a state

must be governed only by a single unified party that will do the central planning of economic

activities. A single party is supposedly the proof of a classless society. As it turns out, single

parties breed corruption, absolute dictatorship, and perpetuation of dynasties such as the Castros

in Cuba and the Kims in North Korea. The abolition of private ownership also kills competitive

entrepreneurial drive. A controlled economy has to float an artificial economy that ignores

globalization and market trends.

While Socialism has not won the day, neither did liberal capitalism. After the turn of the
century, the free hand of deregulation has once again brought economic crises, eventually

leading to government bail-out of banks and corporations and forcing the masses to share their

debt burden. The balanced economic formula, it is suggested, is Welfare-State Capitalism. It

favors the provision of basic services and regulation of industries but not complete

control/prohibition, or on the other hand, laissez-faire deregulation.

In the miracle economies of the South East and the Far East (Japan, South Korea),

governments have regulatory incentives to favor social welfare, public interest, conservation, and

positive economic tendencies, without manipulating the market. Worker-Control Capitalism is

also a proposed alternative, where workers, not the State, will partly own the means of production by
obtaining significant shares. Thus, making workers industrial partners in a profit-driven business.

The international community has also learned its lessons from the Cold War. There are now

160 parties to the UN’s International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights

committed to labor rights and Socialist reforms. The UN has a special agency, the International

Labor Organization, which promotes better labor standards.

The Philippine Constitution, unlike the U.S. Constitution, also devotes articles on social

justice, labor rights, agrarian reform, people’s organization, sectoral representation, nationalist

protection, patriotism, social welfare, and regulation of trade. Evidently, it endorses socialist

principles from the leftist delegates of the 1987 Constitutional Commission. Many party-list

groups for migrants, farmers, fisher folk, women, and employees since then have been able to

secure seats in Congress — a long shot and a far cry from the call to arms of the farmer-fighters

Hukbalahaps and the insurgent New People’s Army.

The anti-establishment spirit, ushered by Socialism, spawned the deconstructive critique of

patriarchal culture, Western systems and ideology, and industrialization.