Communist Manifesto: A History

Pre-History: The world that formed The Manifesto was a world in the process of, to use Karl Polanyi’s term, a great transformation. The American and French revolutions had shown once and for all that the old absolutist orders were anachronisms that had somehow forgotten to die; the industrial revolution had thoroughly transformed the basic modes of capitalist production and with them, the history of the future world. The industrial revolution in turn transformed society: in 1770, the year Wordsworth was born, London’s population was still somewhat less than 1 million people, but a year after Wordsworth died in 1851, Britain had an urban majority and London a population of around 3 million. The visibility of these demographic transformations are reflected by the publication of Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 and the start of modern census taking at the turn of the century. Similarly the landscape was becoming similarly deformed, Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’ date to the opening decade of the 19th century. However, the fact that Blake found the factories so remarkable shows how little developed industrialism was; the mills would lose their chthonic terror in the wisps of a mid-century miasmic fog.

It was in these new industrial hell-holes that socialist ideas were born: the first major Saint-Simonian journal was L’Industrie, while Robert Owen spent a spell as a Manchester mill manager. Proudhon made careful use of the new science of political economy in order to advocate his anarchism. Their motivations were in differing degrees compassion and self-righteous moral horror at the sight of the collapse of social values that accompanied these rapid demographic changes.

Meanwhile, the true socialist impetus came from the gradual development of the working class and the growing consciousness that something needed to be done. It was mainly the artisanal sectors that were interested in theoretical lucidity for their programmes which were coming more and more to be called ‘communism’; the members of Communist League which commissioned The Manifesto were mainly tailors and woodworkers. To trace the intellectual development of The Manifesto, however, we must also look to German philosophy. Hegel, born like Wordsworth in 1770, was the undisputed giant of German philosophy. The relative sophistication of German philosophy compared to its French or British alternatives at the time is probably a product of the weakness of the German bourgeoisie, forced to conduct a purely intellectual revolt. Thus, for the most part, the young Hegelians levelled their criticisms at organised religion and other kosher topics. Marx held these young Hegelians and their idealism in some disdain (see for instance the biting early texts, The Holy Family and The German Ideology). However, possibly via Feuerbach (it depends on the Marxist you ask: Terry Eagleton would say yes, Lukàcs no), Marx developed a materialist conception of history and the Hegelian dialectic which was central to the political program put forth in The Manifesto.

Important as the academic heritages are, the real reason for the birth of communism, however, was the birth of a new class. To use EP Thompson’s term, the working class was ‘made’ in Britain between 1780 and, say, 1830 in the first revolts where the proletariat expressed a certain measure of class consciousness.

The notorious maturity of the English working class – mature because older; and older as England was the first industrial country – meant that the Chartist revolt could be as large and as non-violent as it was. This was a change of world-historical importance and has naturally been the focus of much study. In the rest of Europe the development of the working classes, and certainly of working class consciousness, lagged somewhat behind Britain. The fact that there had been so many reasons for the development of the Communist Manifesto, both social and intellectual, led some critics to accuse Marx and Engels of unoriginality. This is a meaningless accusation in so far that if we are to say that ideas have a sound basis in social situations, we are merely parroting a Marxist point. However in terms of theoretical rigour, sheer style and insight which is original in that it revealed itself to no others, Marx (and to a lesser extent Engles) is unsurpassed by any thinker of his age. It was the Communist Manifesto which was to first bring the attention of the world to Marxist doors. Within weeks of the Manifesto’s publication the Spectre that had been haunting Europe exploded in an inferno of social revolt, the fires of which spread throughout the whole of Europe. The working classes of Europe had been inflamed. Pre-Soviet Influence

Following the outbreak of the 1848 revolutions, The Communist Manifesto probably had a small but real impact, amongst the variously divergent German socialist parties, there only being a German language edition. However, by 1851 Engels could write that “The first act of the revolutionary drama on the continent of Europe has closed” and the continent of Europe settled down to two incontinent decades of economic growth. Unsurprisingly, The Manifesto made little headway in this period, with no successful translations. This was alleviated a little by the foundation of the First International, the founding of the two German workers’ parties which were to become the SPD and Marx’s newfound notoriety as an eloquent and powerful defender of the Paris Commune in 1871.

The first big break for The Manifesto came with the trial of August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, the founders of the SPD, as well as the lesser-known Adolf Hepner, a socialist journalist, for treason in 1872. These three had been put on trial for objecting to the Franco-Prussian War and during the proceedings the prosecution read out the entire text of The Manifesto. This was a rather remarkable event, because it led to the first large-print run of The Manifesto, published legally only because it was part of court-proceedings. The 1872 preface to the text is generally compiled with the text and explains briefly which elements of the text are no longer relevant.

Following the start of the ‘Great Depression’ in the mid-1870s and the subsequent growth of the various European workers parties, The Manifesto’s influence spread. This, it must be said, was little aided by the publication of the first Volume of Capital in 1867: it was almost certainly very little understood or even read by the majority of the literate workers, so never mind the workers in general. However in countries such as England, where the workers’ parties were still of little threat, the text itself was met with universal admiration by those qualified to know and its general influence may have diffused down to the lower ranks of the new Labour Party via its leaders. This was not to last; Lloyd George, having studied economics at Oxford, could boast at never having read a line of Capital, but then, Lloyd George had been forced to institute the outlines of a welfare-state system and so feelings towards Marx were probably running a little higher.

Despite this very real growth in spread and reach, The Manifesto’s impact before WWI was fairly limited. Despite the appearance of the new mass workers parties – by 1912 the SPD was the biggest party in Germany with a million members on the eve of the war – there were somewhere in the region of 100 to 150 thousand copies of The Manifesto printed in Germany between 1848 and 1918. It also seems apparent that the working class had not absorbed many of the ideas in The Manifesto. Classics of working-class literature such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist show just how limited the initial reach of Marxist ideas were amongst the working classes, and even in intellectual radical sectors of the working class, Darwinism was a more ubiquitous intellectual preoccupation than anti-capitalism. Socialism, however, had become a recognised force and the name of Marx was also famous. I will not write about the spread and growth nor the decline and fall of Marxism in the short twentieth century other than the very general remark that it cannot be understood without a careful look at the state of the USSR and other countries around the world. However, it must be mentioned that nothing did so much to make Marx an intrinsic part of our collective culture as the initial existence in the 20th century of the Soviet Union. Marxism became the hegemonic expression of revolutionary left-wing discontent because of the Soviet Union’s economic and political successes. Similarly, the decline came with the growing realisation of its economic and political failures. Moral concern was of next to no importance on either side.