Rosa Pietroiusti 21/2/13 5.

The Communist Manifesto was published in London in February 1848, the same month street uprisings began in Paris and quickly spread to Berlin, Vienna and elsewhere. The timing was not entirely coincidental. Though the Manifesto played no part in inspiring the revolutions of 1848-9, the social and economic forces it describes are very relevant to understanding how those revolutions were born. To what extent do you agree? In their manifesto, Marx and Engels unsparingly outline the newly developed system of production and the relationship of oppressed and oppressor present between the working Proletariat and the capitalist, factory-owning Bourgeoisie. Because of its acute social analysis, the Communist Manifesto is very relevant in order to understand the outbreak of the 1848-9 revolutions throughout Europe and the conditions that sparked such widespread unrest. Marx and Engels first of all recognize that the development of the Modern Industry is not limited to the economic development of a single nation, but that the dramatic social changes that industrialization entails are (to some extent) the same in all European nations. The Manifesto describes a social system (hierarchy of bourgeoisie over proletariat: it has simplified the class antagonisms [] into two great classes p 220) that is a product of the new economic forces (industry, division of labour, urbanization) and that, because of the globalized nature of capitalism heeds no national boundaries (The East Indian and Chinese markets gave to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development. 220 the need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. 222). This aspect of the manifesto is very important in order to understand how outbreaks of revolution might have exploded in contemporaneity in different nations of Europe, because of similar sources of dissatisfaction amongst the working classes. Furthermore, the injustices of the classist economic system that Marx criticized, were aggravated by the agricultural and economic crisis of the 1840s. Peasants, unable to make a living in the countryside, migrated to the cities in order to find work as wage-earners, while the urban working class (already a commodity of the industrial system that it served) deeply felt the repercussions of the economic crisis (a conjuncture of the agricultural crises and overproduction) in the cities, suffering from diminished wages or unemployement. In early 1848 popular revolutions broke out in the streets of Paris, Palermo, Berlin and Vienna proving that popular discontent extended well beyond politics or national boundaries, and had its roots in the very condition of the lower classes, and the urban proletariat in particular. Although the initial force of the 1848 urban uprisings might have been their popular nature, many of these revolutions had no positive effects for the lower classes. In France, the Paris uprisings of February 1848 produced a Provisional Government that finally, through democratic election (wide suffrage), led to a conservative Constituent Assembly and government, headed by Louis Napoleon (elected in December). Furthemore, the Frankfurt Parliament that was born (May) as a result of the widespread revolts throughout the German confederation, and was proportionally elected, was predominantly middle class and conservative. The conservative backlash of many of the 1848 revolutions also proves Marxs idea that bourgeois power increases with the development of the capitalist system and cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. (222) This system is therefore able to benefit from any surface-changes in the political or economic relations of a country, and (according to Marx) will continue to oppress the proletariat until unless the very foundations of bourgeois power are abolished (what the bourgeoisie therefore produces is above all its own grave-diggers 233).