I'm trying to classify the means of early Marxist thought on a political plane, as in the result of this survey I took. The x-axis represents decreasing level of economic control, and the y-axis increasing level of social control.
In fact the survey itself only uses one point for classifying each political philosophy, a point which my eager Facebook friends picked at with a great deal of aimless scorn.
I'm trying to make the case that political ideology can be much more succinctly described by two points representing goals and means. Same plane, just plotting a pair of points instead of just one. Early Marxist thought circa Manifesto was one item from my wonky proof-by-examples.
I know the Manifesto was Right Libertarian in goals: Communism is a stateless society without need for economic regulation. Further it was at least Left in economic means, since it implicitly encourages using things like "heavy progressive taxation," state monopolies on land and banking, etc.
As to social means I am somewhat confounded. As you might be able to tell from my results I want to say here that a powerful state economic policy encourages authoritarian social policy but I feel like debating thick libertarianism by predication with a bunch of brainwashed statists ahem righteous capitalist patriots would lead me down a dead-end of talking to a brick wall and eventual social ostracism.
I'm thus looking for clues in the Manifesto as to any explicitly social control advocated by Marx. For example I wouldn't consider his discussion of emancipation of child laborers a social discussion since it is framed as resulting directly from emancipation of laborers generally. I'm just about ready to call the Manifesto middle-of-the-social-road as far as means go, but this quote confounds me:
Is this a sign of the increasingly popular social culture of authoritarian nationalism at that time? I'd really like to know the historical reasons that this item, among so many possible considerations, is present among the 10 planks. Was this just thrown in to compromise with or cater to jingoism?
I would strongly recommend against trying to understand politics along a 2-position axis. It's clumsy enough for trying to understand the modern politics of the United States, but incredibly ineffective at understanding the situation in Europe in 1848: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Revolutions_of_1848_in_Europe_%28pasopt_eng%29.svg
There were a lot of revolutions occurring, some in places that still had kings or dukes or other landowners. Not everywhere on the continent was like Britain or America with strong protections for private property and something like a middle class. Some of those places were filled with serfs or industrial workers that didn't have any savings at all, and lived paycheck to paycheck on potatoes and whatever apartment they could afford from rentiers. In some places the lower class were severely restricted in what they could own or what sorts of property they could even have, including land. A factory worker would be lucky to make the equivalent of 25 to 30 pounds a year, or an annual salary in 2014 of $6,410.00. This is barely enough to cover food, clothes, and shelter, and why so many sent their children to the factories for additional income. Things got worse as you got out to the rural countryside.
It wasn't just a question of slightly altering the balance of capital in the countries having revolutions, it was dividing up the things the rich had so the poor had anything at all. If the rich people were going to fight the revolution, or going to leave the country, you couldn't have a workable nation at all if they were allowed to remove all their property. Instead of being an industrialized central European city, the factories would be emptied of their useful goods and whatever people didn't starve would be forced into a worse position than before the revolution, living on subsistence farming or cottage industries. That plank of the Communist Manifesto was to say, as part of the new rights of the common man, you should have a right to your job through your own blood and sweat and toil, and if you'd learned to be a screwmaker your whole life the person that owned the screwmaking machine or was granted a royal monopoly or whatever couldn't just ruin your skilled labour by removing all the things you'd need to practice it from the country. Rather than social control, it was supposed to be a social freeing of people for the first time to own their means of production (or have them guaranteed by the state) rather than being essentially slaves to the nobles or bourgeois who had determined what they did their whole lives. (Oftentimes the sorts of jobs you could get in and of themselves were restricted, especially for machine tool experts who they didn't want learning everything you needed to privately produce quality rifles for the common man, or things like that.)
Furthermore, capital flight would be devastating to the revolutionary country and it's ability to self-determine it's fate. When wealth leaves in huge amounts, it reduces the value of that places currency, and cripples the purchasing power of the people in that country still holding onto that currency as it gets dumped on exchange markets by the fleeing wealthy in other countries. Without any actual goods or factories to back up their power, the countries would be easy picking for powerful neighbors to conquer and re-impose the former harsh regimes or absolute monarchial controls.
In conclusion, I will note that measures like that were hated by the aristocratic and bourgeois Europeans of the time, but were not seen as especially unjust in free countries fighting for wars of liberty. The United States, one of the freest republics, a few years later would pass similar sorts of Confiscation Acts against the Confederacy in August 1861 and March 1862. Karl Marx and similar thinkers praised Lincoln for his actions and received a diplomatic note of thanks for supporting their similar views in reconstructing injustice against the oppressed lowest classes of society - https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm and after the war President Johnson refused to return confiscated property to the worst offenders and some wealthy businessman whose entire fortunes were owed to others.
tl;dr - don't think of it as a punishment of the little guys who wanted to flee, since they had nothing they couldn't carry off in their own hands. It was a measure aimed at the incredibly high concentration of wealth amongst the 1-2% who spent centuries passing laws guaranteeing their control and forbidding economic mobility.
What Marx means by emigrant here should probably be seen in the light of the role of emigrants during the French Revolution, especially since he lumps emigrants in with "rebels".
There's a lot more to it than just leaving the country. The "émigrés" were people (mostly wealthy nobles) who left the country in large numbers from the beginning of the revolution, in order to fight it from outside by joining forces with other counterrevolutionaries in neighboring countries. This was of course a threat to the survival of the revolution. Confiscating the property of the émigrés was a way to keep their friends and family from sending money to the "cause" from within the country, as well as bolstering the economy, as these people were often among the richest in society.
(Source: Carl-Göran Ekerwald. Frihet, jämlikhet, broderskap, 1988)
It wouldn't have been a very long jump for him to assume that the counterrevolution similar to the one that started in 1789 would have followed on the proletarian revolution he was proposing. I think the reference to emigrants has more to do with anticipating that, rather than having to do with migration in general.
