Communism has bad press following the failures of the Soviet Union, China, etc.  It's seen as a dull grey world, with no variety in the shops,  controlled by faceless, heartless apparatchiks – freedom of thought and expression is not allowed. At one time (the 1930s - WW1, The Great Depression, fascism in Spain destroyed faith in capitalism)  is was fashionable to be a communist or fellow traveller, but nowadays it is definitely not fashionable.

Personally, I draw these insights from the Manifesto, which help me understand the world today:

It's far better to live in our bourgeois democracy than to live under the rule of the fascist Saddam or the religious fundamentalism of the Taliban.

Marx was very clear about the historical progressiveness of capitalism, a point also made by Marcus with this quote:

The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors", and has left no other nexus between people than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment". It has drowned out the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom -- Free Trade.

2) The melting, dynamic vision of capitalism and progress 

 The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his, real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm

To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts. We might even say that to be fully modern is to be anti-modern: from Marx’s and Dostoevsky’s time to our own, it has been impossible to grasp and embrace the modern world’s potentialities without loathing and fighting against some of its most palpable realities. No wonder then that, as the great modernist and anti-modernist Keirkegaard said, the deepest modern seriousness must express itself through irony. Modern irony animates so many great works of art and thought over the past century; at the same time, it infuses millions of ordinary people’s lives. This book aims to bring these works and these lives together, to restore the spiritual wealth of modernist culture to the modern man and woman in the street, to show how, for all of us, modernism is realism. (13-14)

The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them.

The real communist critique of capitalism is that capitalism social relations – boss / worker relations – holds back the rapid development of productive forces.

For example,  the dominance of Microsoft holds back the rapid development of either superior or potentially superior software development such as the Linux operating system, which has been developed out of a gift culture. We seem to have very significant groups of open source software developers today who practise communist principles – from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs – without even realising or connecting to the source.

There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises.

This led to a flurry of design activity in the open source / creative commons community, who renamed themselves "creative commonists" and developed a series of red flags and logos in response to the gibe:

One Gates critic has even adapted the words of The Internationale as an anthem for the freedom of information movement:

The Free Culture Internationale

Lyrics by Andrew Mike (2005)

To the tune of "The Internationale" by Pierre Degaytre, 1888

Arise, you independent artists!
Arise, fair users great and small!
Those evil cartels and their jurists
Have, through their exploits, chained you all!

But we have thought up a new system,
To make it fairer through and through;
Right now, they say, "We'll never miss them,"
But one day soon, they'll say "We do!"

So Bill Gates calls us commies,
But he can't stand the sight
Of information freedom,
Reform of copyright!

So we go on creating,
Joyous and full of mirth,
For our great newborn copyleft
Shall shine upon the earth!

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

I just read Marcus' piece  at Harry's Place and feel I have  to take issue with what he refers to as "Marx’s bizarre ideas about the family".   

As far as I can see, the  beautiful maxim "All that is solid melts into air"  applies to the family just as much as to everything else. 

Quoting Marcus's comments about the family in full:

"On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based?"  *he   asks:

 

"On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among proletarians, and in public prostitution."

 

The Industrial Revolution was initially very hard on many working class families. 16 hour shifts, non existent job security, and the exploitation of child labour were hardly conducive to family life. But I think Marx got it wrong about the family “withering away”. It’s possible to argue in fact that the family is one of the few human institutions which has survived the various arrangements of human society “above” the family. Antiquity, Feudalism, Capitalism, Actually Existing Socialism - each had different attitudes to the family but in each social system the family managed to survive. Sometimes it prospered, sometimes it seemed to be unravelling but it never actually got replaced by anything that socialised the next generation in quite such an efficient way.

 

Equally confused, I think, were *Marx’s  thoughts on marriage:

 

"Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized system of free love. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of free love springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private."

 

No doubt *Marx could point out dozens of examples of sexual hypocrisy in the contemporary bourgeois marriage but I wonder if the following passage owes more to experience than to sober sociological analysis:

 

"Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives." (Ah, those were the days!)

 

The twin institutions of family and marriage - while not a happy experience for everyone and not without their own structural problems - have survived far better than the youthful *Marx might have imagined. Calls for their destruction are heard pretty infrequently these days. The family is periodically “attacked” or “assisted” (depending on your worldview) by institutions of the State, but both made it into the Twenty First Century looking less moth eaten than this section of the Communist Manifesto. I expect both will also outlive the next stage of human development, whatever form it takes.

by Marcus  (Harry's Place)

 

My comments:

Years ago I read  Woman on the Edge of Time ( Marge Piercy) and The Dispossessed (Ursula Le Guin)  both of which were good imagination  joggers.  I'm not sure how these two books have stood the test of time  - I remember preferring The Dispossessed to Woman on the Edge ...  because the society depicted in the former novel was less of a utopia . Anyway... I think it's important that we start thinking about (and discussing) the future.  Defending capitalism against the 'forces of darkness' (and the pseudo left) is one task  - but it's time we also showed some independence and initiative within the united front... 

______________________

* The CM was written jointly by Karl Marx and  Frederick  Engels.  I think history has been very unfair to  Frederick, he deserves  a lot more acknowledgement.  

keza 

I've posted the following comment at Harry's Place -  go here to read the full thread

Some of the posts here show that a common misconception is that Marxism is some sort of formula, rather than a flexible bunch of analytical tools / ways of thinking about the world

Marx and Engels spoke about how their contemporary Darwin used their philosophical method and Marx sent Darwin a copy of Capital, which remained unopened

The key tool here would be historical and dialectical materialism - this tends to be reinvented, for example, a lot of scientists use both a materialist world view and also dialectics crops up all over the place as an analytical tool - it seems to be written into nature in a fundamental way

But Marxism focuses on politics and economics rather than science, technology, philosophy or psychology - although the latter group can get by without it I don't see how the former group can

I would argue for example that the great commentaries that Christopher Hitchens regularly comes up with are due in part to his Marxist training, the fact that he really does get it.

Marxism is successful and alive and well at that level even though the efforts to build it in one country have not succeeded - it's best to view it as an infant - I'd argue that those who actually read and think about the Manifesto have a much better chance of understanding todays world than those who don't.