within a radical tradition. His originality lies in the fact that he was radical and at the same time determined to gather the largest number of people possible in support of the cause he had in mind.
Very often human beings have been radical and have not made a sufficient mental effort to unite all those who could potentially support them. On other occasions they have endeavored to unite large numbers of people without being radical. Martí was radical and at the same time promoted a policy aimed at overcoming the Machiavellian principle of divide and conquer, replacing it with the postulate unite to win.
At this point we touch on an essential matter within the Cuban intellectual tradition: the role of culture and ethics in society. On the philosophical plane, Martí pointed out ideas that could lead to a crucible of principles of major political significance, practice and teaching: the balance of the world / the still uncertain balance in the world,7 the utility of virtue8 and the culture of making politics.
Faced with the demagogy and evil intent of those who govern the United States — those who have spoken of an “axis of evil” that includes Cuba — we could reply that it is necessary to strive toward an axis of good that consists of culture, ethics, law and political solidarity. With that framework and in the context of the Cuban Revolution, we have read and assimilated these documents that have transcended their historical times to become a vast source of wisdom, without which it would be impossible to understand our historical times and the future of the 21st century.
Armando Hart
September 2004
1. Friedrich Engels, “Chapter IX: Barbarism and Civilization,” The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/ch09.htm.
2. Fidel Castro, Granma (Cuba), January 5, 2004.
3. Haydée and Abel Santamaría both participated, along with Fidel Castro, in the July 26, 1953, assault on Fulgencio Batista’s Moncada army garrison. Abel Santamaría was brutally tortured and killed in the days after the attack. Haydée Santamaría was imprisoned along with other survivors.
4. José Martí, “The Memorial Meeting in Honor of Karl Marx,” José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 1998), p43.
5. José Martí, “Comentario al libro de Rafael de Castro Palomino,” Obras Completas, (Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1993), p110.
6. José Martí, “Carta a Fermín Valdés Domínguez,” Obras Completas, p168.
7. José Martí, “Manifesto of Montecristi,” José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, p185.
8. José Martí, “Ismaelillo,” Obras Completas.
KARL MARX & FRIEDRICH ENGELS
In 1847 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were asked by the newly formed League of Communists to write a manifesto outlining its aims and policies. After a series of drafts, the Manifesto of the Communist Party (known since 1872 as The Communist Manifesto) was published in February 1848. This first edition was published in German and printed in London. Prior to 1871, the year of the Paris Commune, there were only two limited editions available in Swedish and English. However, the publication of a new German edition sparked a wave of massive circulation of The Communist Manifesto over the decades that followed. Several prefaces were subsequently written by Marx and Engels.
A SPECTRE IS HAUNTING EUROPE — the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
1. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
2. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
To this end, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.
I. BOURGEOIS AND PROLETARIANS1
The history of all hitherto existing society2 is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master3 and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
In the earlier epochs of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various orders, a manifold gradation of social rank. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, subordinate gradations.
The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat.
From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed.
The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of division of labor in each single workshop.
Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even manufacture no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, modern industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.
Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is