Karl Max and The Communist Manifesto

To understand Marx and Engel's "political pamphlet" The Communist Manifesto, one must understand the social relationships and processes associated with feudalism, including both the interdependence of the church and state and the economic interdependence of families. Otherwise it seems incomprehensible that more serfs did not flee the land. Similarly unless one knows of the existence of dress cock (in medieval cities (not discussed in Marx), one cannot comprehend the failure of many urban servants to flee their masters.

I chose these two examples because of an incident in one of my classes: A Kenyan graduate student had not realized the full impact of feudalism as a system of peonage that forced serfs to give a large share of their agricultural produce to the feudal aristocracy, supported extensive landholdings of the church, which also bound serfs to their land, and encouraged familial ties between the aristocracy and the church hierarchy. When this student grasped how severe the oppression of serfs had been, he could not understand why they did not flee. Having little appreciation of the flora available in, say, France, he supposed fleeing serfs could find food and shelter in forests in winter and could freely kill animals without fear of laws against poaching. The Kenyan student accepted the assurance of a French student that one could not easily survive in many European forests. But then the Kenyan faced another problem: He supposed that serfs in one region would gladly take in a fleeing refugee. He did not appreciate the degree of interdependence among serfs—how in traditional European societies an individual could not hope to survive outside of the local collectivity because these traditional societies did not embrace strangers. (This "mechanical solidarity," to use Durkheim's phrase, is captured by the very term outlaw, a person sentenced to be out" side of the protective "law" for a year, a fate that endangered survival.) Lacking this historical back¬ground, the student could not comprehend why Marx discussed the dire exploitation afflicting the early nineteenth-century proletariat as "progress" over medieval oppression. In sum, without the appropriate historical background, the Kenyan found the argument of the Communist Manifesto difficult to grasp.