1848
The Communist Manifesto, which first appeared in German in London in 1848, became, over the next hundred years, one of the most widely read and controversial political documents in the world. Its initial impact was slight, although the year of its publication coincided with a wave of largely unsuccessful uprisings that swept across France, Germany, the Italian states, the Habsburg Empire and elsewhere in Europe, in a wave of revolutionary and nationalist fervour. But on the foundations laid by Marx, later generations would build the Russian Revolution of 1917 and a whole family of different communist ideologies. The struggle between communism and the Western nations (whether democratic or fascist) became one of the defining features of the 20th century.
The Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (The Communist Manifesto) is a brief document of twenty-three pages, divided into an Introduction and four short chapters – a marked contrast with Marx’s other famous work, the massive three-volume Das Kapital (Capital), the first volume of which was published nearly twenty years later. But The Communist Manifesto – it was translated into English in 1850 – contained within it the bones both of Marx’s analysis of the past and his predictions for the future. Communism and the rise of the proletariat, he says, are historically inevitable – but the Manifesto, with its famous closing words, ‘Working men of all countries, unite!’, remains a rallying call for left-wing radicals and revolutionaries. The Communist Manifesto was first published anonymously, but in later editions the name of Friedrich Engels (1820–95), Marx’s collaborator in developing and defining communist thought, appears alongside his on the title page. Engels, however, confirmed later that both the writing of the book and the thought behind it were almost entirely down to Marx.
In The Communist Manifesto, Marx says that different measures will be needed to establish communism in different countries. But he sets out ten basic and immediate demands that he says will generally be necessary in advanced countries.
In the brief Introduction to the Manifesto Marx talks of communism as ‘a spectre … haunting Europe’. The spectre, he claims, was created by governments across Europe, which implicitly acknowledged the power of the communists by accusing opposition groups of being part of a wider communist movement – although the fact that Europe’s revolutions of 1848 were largely nationalistic in character suggests that both the governments and Marx himself may have been exaggerating the communist influence at the time. The point of the Manifesto, Marx says, is to counter the ‘nursery tale of the spectre of communism’ by setting out the beliefs and ambitions of the movement clearly and unambiguously.
Over the next twenty-two pages, he does exactly that. The first chapter sketches out his historical analysis, which suggests that class warfare, the struggle between oppressor and oppressed, has been central to the development of society. The unavoidable conflict in his own time he says, is between the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and those whom they pay to work for them, the proletariat. Writing in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution, which was forcing millions of families off the land and into factories and city slums, he declares that ‘modern industry’ has left workers enslaved by machines, by overseers and by bourgeois manufacturers.
The second chapter, entitled ‘Proletarians and Communists’, seeks to extend support for communism beyond those who would describe themselves as communists. The communists are not opposed to other working-class parties, Marx says, but ‘always and everywhere, represent the interests of the movement as a whole’. He also sets out ten key elements of the manifesto (see opposite). In the third chapter, despite his declaration earlier in the document that communism is not ‘a separate party opposed to other working-class parties’, Marx attempts to demolish all the other socialist theories that were common across Europe at that time. They all, in different ways, propose to reform the system rather than overturn it, he says. The Manifesto ends with the famous call for international unity and with a clear statement of intent: ‘The communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.’
Marx went on to elaborate his theories in far greater depth in his other well-known work, Das Kapital, a detailed and analytical study of the workings of a capitalist economy. The first volume appeared in 1867, and two more volumes appeared posthumously in 1893 and 1894. His other books on economics and philosophy included Theses on Feuerbach (1845), a study of the German materialist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).
The Communist Manifesto, aimed at a wider readership than the other works, was effectively the birth certificate of international communism. Although it had little immediate impact on revolutionary movements, it spread through European socialist groups, with copies of the original German edition being taken back from London to Germany, where the individual state governments were facing revolutions demanding freedom, democracy and the establishment of a unified German state.
Despite the collapse of the German revolutions, the initial printing was sold out within a few months, and several thousand copies were bought within a year. Translations into Swedish (1848), English (1850 and 1888), Russian (1869) and French (1872) followed. Marx’s thinking, set out in the Manifesto, was one of the driving forces behind the Russian Revolution of 1917. In their different ways, such leaders as Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924), Josef Stalin (1878–1953), and, in China, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) claimed to be developing Marx’s thinking, so the immense human suffering that took place under Stalin’s Five Year Plans of the late 1920s and 1930s and Mao’s Great Leap Forward twenty years later can be traced back to The Communist Manifesto.