Hal Draper and The Adventures of The Communist Manifesto.

a.

Much of the argument on the opening words of section I in theCommunist Manifesto has been dealt with in the essay on war and historical materialism in this volume, in section d. of the second essay inExperience and Historical Materialism and inA Critique of Mau: Mute Compulsionand Other Essays.198 But given the stature of Draper as an authority on Marx, his specific argument must be criticised in detail.

On p. 210, Hal Draper comments on the words in theManifesto that,

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master 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 at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.199

The relevant part of Draper’s comment runs as follows, turning on “the common ruin of the contending classes”:

[.....]. Above all, this passage shows how mythical is the view that Marx believed in some sort of metaphysical “inevitability of socialism,” according to which socialist victory is as fatefully predestined as, say, the salvation of Calvinist saints: a myth mostly based on a reading of Par. 60. On the contrary, society is faced with the alternatives later tagged “socialism or barbarism” – either a revolution that remakes society or the collapse of the old order to a lower level. Engels later repeated the alternative inAnti-Dühring (end of Pt. II, Chap. 2): the productive forces out of control, “are driving the whole of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution.” Or (Pt. III, Chap. 2): the proletariat has to accomplish its revolution “under penalty of its own des