After the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when thinkers like John Locke spoke of the "natural rights of mankind," ordinary people around the world began realizing that they too had the right to be encompassed by a political and economic framework premised on equality, dignity, freedom, and justice. The organizational form that made these possible, it was then thought, was political democracy. However, with the on-going development of capitalism that politically institutionalized the so-called "right to private property," ordinary people realized by the 19th century that political democracy without economic democracy was simply continued slavery. Marxism was born, and the Communist Manifesto soon appeared. Marx understood that "formal, political democracy" was "a great step forward," but that human beings could never be free, equal or fulfilled until we have "substantive, economic and social democracy" [10].
Latin American Liberation Theology, in the documents produced at its great Bishop's Conferences beginning in 1968 in Medellin, Columbia, understood that unrestrained capitalism is immoral and that socialism is implicit in the Christian scriptures. These conferences combined the biblical prophetic and gospel visions of justice and compassion for the poor with a Marxist analysis of why the poor are poor. Dom Helder Camara of Brazil famously captured this well when he declared: "When I give food to the poor they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
2. Elements of Human Liberation in the Communist Manifesto
The Communist Manifesto asserts that "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles." There is a certain very real truth to this vast generalization. Throughout history the few have always dominated the many, using a variety of ideological justifications for their roles as slave owners, or members of a religious hierarchy, or as the wealthy and successful who deserve corresponding political power (e.g., the Citizens United decision of the U.S. Supreme Court), or because they have secret knowledge of the threats to our security and require undemocratic powers to keep us safe (Homeland Security and the Pentagon). Marx and Engels assume a broad historical perspective that includes progressive civilizational development. Even though Wolin goes back to the ancient Greeks in his account of democracy, very little of this powerful progressive view of human history is found in Democracy Incorporated or in the work of Hedges.
The Manisfesto continues: "All previous historical movements were the movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority". In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality." In this visionary statement, Marx and Engels show their understanding that the struggle is about what Marx termed our "species being," our common humanity.
It is not about dividing the world into some 193 so-called "sovereign" nation-states and then trying to establish a social democracy in each one, step by step. They understood that capitalism was globalized, even in the 19th century, and that human liberation must be globalized. Today, with the global reach of the Empire, no social democratic movement on Earth has much chance of lasting success because currency manipulations, banker machinations, transnational corporate forces, and superpower subversion will destroy these attempts in whatever countries they are undertaken. Naomi Klein, for example, chronicles this process of subversion in Chile, led by the U.S., after democratic socialist Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970 [11]. When I was in Venezuela this March, we heard much about the subversion of the democratically elected socialist government that the U.S. was conducting from nearby Columbia.
Democratic socialism means the realization of moral maturity for humankind. It means the understanding that human freedom, equality, justice, and peace must be established for humankind as a whole. We are all brothers and sisters; we are all one. It will mean the growing of humankind to a mature understanding of our common humanity, our common need for peace, freedom, equality and a sustainable environment. The U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights already expresses something of this maturity, but it intimates in Article 28 that we need a new world system that really actualizes this understanding: "Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized."
Global capitalism intertwined with the system of so-called sovereign nation-states violates this right for a decent international order at every turn. Growing to moral maturity simultaneously requires structural transformation of our fractured and immature institutions: global capitalism intertwined with the system of militarized sovereign nation-states. The people that dominate us at the heads of global capitalism and militarized nation-states, by and large, are not the grown-ups. They are primarily morally bankrupt sociopaths.
The Manifesto declares: "You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths." What could be truer than this? I have been travelling internationally since 1992, much of this as President of the World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA). Everywhere on Earth I see vast poverty interspersed with pockets of unimaginable wealth. Everywhere I see people in desperation: living without basic necessities of food, housing, education or healthcare, and living with a degraded and degrading environment. Four centuries of capitalism, deeply linked with European and North American imperialism, has been an unmitigated disaster for the people of Earth. And with global climate collapse, it is getting even worse.
What the world needs, of course, is not some blanket threat to "do away with private property" but to examine the legal nature and limits on property, and on "corporate personhood." Who could possibly have the power and authority to do this except a World Parliament representing the sovereignty of the people of Earth? The world needs an economic system that allows for universal human flourishing within a sustainable environment. Again, notice that the perspective of Marx and Engels was planetary, focusing on our common humanity and our common need for conditions that allow people everywhere to flourish in equality, freedom, justice, and peace. Where and when did socialists go wrong? Where and when did socialists begin to think that they had to primarily operate within absolute territorial fragments of humanity called sovereign nation-states?
The Manifesto continues: "We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy. The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State." Marx and Engels understand that the battle is about democracy, that you cannot have real political democracy without substantial economic democracy. Otherwise, worldwide economic slavery is inevitable. Democracy means that political and economic arrangements are designed for the welfare of the vast majority, not the 1%. No power on Earth could accomplish this transformation except a World Parliament.
Yet here the Manifesto introduces something that perhaps violates its own principle: it appears to introduce the possibility of a dictatorship of the proletariat, violating the fundamental ethical principle that the moral ends do not justify contradictory means. If the ends are democracy, freedom, equality, and peace, then the means must utilize these same values. Violent revolution, like dictatorship of the revolutionary elite, remains an extremely problematic concept. Even the dimwit ideologues in the Pentagon and State Department should have realized this by now: you cannot impose "democracy" on some nation after first destroying their cities and killing them. Similarly, we cannot create a liberated world system through violence and/or dictatorship. Nevertheless, the Manifesto is correct that global democracy is the goal, not fragmented nation-state democracy (a contradiction in terms) but global actualization of our human potential for cooperatively establishing justice, equality, freedom, and peace.
The Manifesto ends with these famous words: "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all." In some versions, it added: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!" Before the internet and international airborne travel, Marx and Engels understood that it had to be all or none. And they understood that we are all dependent upon one another for the possibility of "free development."
The false ideology that capitalism spews forth about "freedom" (that it consists of "self-made" capitalists who are somehow more fit for power because they have exploited others to become wealthy) is as barbaric as it is childish. Ayn Rand's famous books promoting capitalism represent the outpourings of a childish moral midget. Whatever qualities or knowledge or skills any of us have derive from the history of civilization and a complex combination of innumerable social factors. True human freedom emerges from communities of trust and cooperation. The "free development of each is indeed the condition of the free development of all."
3. A New Manifesto for Human Liberation: The Earth Constitution
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