Is the Communist Manifesto a Promethean text?

The Communist Manifesto is often seen as a locus classicus of Marxist Prometheanism. Its opening sections on the bourgeoisie and its capacity to revolutionize the world – accomplishing “wonders far surpassing the Egyptian pyramids” – are usually understood as a enthusiastic paean to the release of humanity’s productive capacities. It goes without saying that this reading of the text fits well with the customary celebration of the development of the productive forces in later, orthodox Marxism – a celebration resting on trust, central to so-called historical materialism, in the progress of technology as a motor of history. It is, however, possible to detect a certain ambiguity in the manifesto, and a case could be made for exercising some caution before equating the undeniable productivist enthusiasm that colours the section on the bourgeoisie with the trust in productive forces characteristic of orthodox Marxism. Consider, for instance, the following lines from the manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?  

Commentators like to remark that Marx and Engels here unwittingly seem to express admiration for the bourgeoisie. Yet for all their magnificence one wonders if these lines really amount to a celebration of either the bourgeoisie or the productive forces. Isn’t the bourgeoisie rather portrayed as a demoniacal, hellish force, impressive in the same way that Satan is impressive? Marshall Berman (in All That Is Solid Melts into Air) catches this demoniacal side of the manifesto’s portrayal of the bourgeoisie when he compares it to Faust, the prototypical modernist who can only remake the world with the help of Mephisto. The relentless whirl of destruction and creation that capitalism sets in motion would then not so much be a feat to be repeated and emulated by socialism, as a bewitching spectacle of an unfolding catastrophe – something akin to what happens in Goethes’ poem about the sorcerer’s apprentice who is unable to control the powers that he has unleashed (“Die ich rief, die Geister, / Werd’ ich nun nicht los”). Just a few lines below the quoted passage, Marx and Engels in fact explicitly refer to this poem when they write that bourgeois society, which “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.

To be sure, there are other passages in the manifesto that counterbalance the impression that the forces of production are demonical and not to be trusted. It seems quite clear that while Marx and Engels deem the bourgeoisie unable to control these forces rationally, they are quite optimistic about the prospects of mastering these forces rationally in a socialist society. It is significant, however, that only two very brief sentences can be found in the entire manifesto that clearly celebrate the productive forces as something that the proletariat too, after its victory, should promote (they thus write that once the proletariat has become the ruling class, it will “increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible”, specifying on the next page that this involves extending factories, cultivating waste-lands, and improving soil). Furthermore, one should note that even as they make these pronouncements, they never portray the proletariat as compulsively obliged to follow such a course. While “[t]he bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production”, the proletariat may choose to do so freely but unlike the bourgeoisie it is never forced to do so by any heteronomous logic or lawlikeness in society. It is thus only in a very qualified sense that the manifesto can be read as “prometheusian”. In view of its ambiguities, a more reasonable interpretation might instead be that Marx and Engels caution against an uncontrolled release of these forces and call for a society capable of their rational mastery.

With these remarks, my aim is not to deny the enthusiasm or even fascination that colours the manifesto’s portrayal of the bourgeoisie’s transformative powers. But I do question whether this enthusiasm is really based on an embrace of the productive forces per se. Marx and Engels are in fact quite open about the existence of another, quite different source of their glee, namely the fact that the “everlasting uncertainty” and “constant disruption of all social relations” would be so destructive of religious and other traditional beliefs that people would finally be forced to “face with sober senses the real conditions of their lives”. In other words, what appears to be praise of the productive forces may very well be better understood as praise of their disruptive power, of the shock they deal to traditional culture, which awakens the mind and dispels religious and ideological haze.

It was for this reason that Walter Benjamin too would later celebrate modern technology – namely because of the shock effect of modern techniques of reproduction, of photography, and glass architecture, and its power to bring about an “awakening from the nineteenth century”. As the example of Benjamin shows, celebrating technology for its shock effect is not at all the same thing as endorsing its continuous growth or any idea of continuous “progress” resting on the development of the productive forces. On the contrary, that idea of such growth or progress was always anathema to Benjamin. Appreciating the shock effect of technology is thus quite compatible with rejecting productivism or Prometheanism.

The manifesto, then, points in two directions. Apart from the passages that anticipate the glorification of productive capacity typical of later orthodox Marxism, there are also passages that, in my reading, make more sense as a paean to the shock-effect and that emphasize the demonic rather than the beneficial side of technology. Whereas the former passages affirm the domination over nature by means of technology, the latter seem rather to stress the need for a rational mastery, or taming, of technology itself - a mastery that the bourgeoisie is incapable of but which the proletariat might accomplish. In Benjamin’s words, such rational mastery would not be over nature per se, but rather over the relation to nature. Crucially, such mastery is not necessarily productivist or Promethean, but can equally well take the form of abstaining from exploiting nature: rather than increasing our reliance on technological progress, it might try to decrease it. Rather than promoting growth, it might aim for degrowth, or, in other words, for an economy that would be free from the compulsive acceleration and accumulation typical of capitalism.

Goethe'z Zauberlehrling, by Erich Schütz