The Communist Manifesto: Cash Payment

In 1848, two young Germans, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, wrote a short pamphlet for a small workers’ group in London.It became one of the most widely read political texts in history, and it begins with a ghost.

“A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of Communism.The history of all society so far is the history of class struggles: free man and slave, lord and serf, master and apprentice, oppressor and oppressed.In our time, society is splitting into two great camps facing each other: the bourgeoisie, who own the factories and the capital, and the proletariat, who own nothing but their labour.

The bourgeoisie has torn apart the old ties that bound people to their ‘natural superiors.’It has left no other link between people than naked self-interest and cold ‘cash payment.’It has turned the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet and the scientist into its paid wage workers, and reduced the family to a mere money relation.

Yet it has also achieved wonders far greater than the Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals.It cannot exist without constantly changing the tools of production, so everything old is swept away.All that is solid melts into air.”

Even Marx’s fiercest critics admit that this picture of a restless, money-driven world still sounds strangely modern.