Jean Vannier
A CENTURY'S BALANCE SHEET
Schuldig miissen wir werden, wenn wir wachsen wollen.*
A hundred years ago a London press struck off a slender
green-covered pamphlet of twenty-three pages, which was not even
to be put on sale. Its authors were two young German emigrees,
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; its title,
Manifesto of the Com–
munist Party.
The pamphlet proclaimed a new era, that of the struggle of
the proletariat for communism. The bourgeoisie, so it ran, brings
together the population in large cities, centralizes production, and con–
centrates the wealth. It creates a new class, the industrial proletariat,
whose ranks it incessantly swells. This modem proletariat, having no
property it can call its own, sets in motion means of production that
demand collective work. This social character of production makes
it impossible for the proletariat-unlike other oppressed classes-to
insist on a share of the wealth for each individual member. It cannot
but want communism, the abolition of private property; while in
emancipating itself, it automatically emancipates all society, whose
class divisions it is destined to abolish. From the utopia it was, com–
munism becomes the scientifically predictable goal toward which the
proletarian movement is heading.
In 1925, Leon Trotsky compared this conception of the authors
of the Communist Manifesto to Leverrier's discovery of Neptune,
for from his study of the disturbances on Uranus, the French astron–
omer had deduced the existence of a new planet and determined its
orbit. From their study of the disturbances of bourgeois society,
Marx and Engels had deduced the existence of a new class, the
proletariat, and traced its orbit: a line that pointed to communism.
*
"We must grow in guilt if we are to grow at
all."
(Suderrnann)
288
