A hundred and fifty years ago, a young writer sent his German collaborator an urgent note suggesting a last-minute literary about-face. They were sons of the middle class turned radical agitators — among the first of those dropouts from affluence who would become a stock character type of modern times. A tiny group of fellow dissidents had deputized the two to outline its philosophy and they were up against a deadline but having trouble finding the proper format. For a while, they toyed with setting out the Communist League’s position as a series of questions and answers, in the style of a religious tract. But Frederick Engels feared such a convoluted approach would turn off readers.
“Think over the confession of faith a bit,” he wrote to Karl Marx. “I believe we had better drop the catechism form and call the thing: Communist Manifesto.”
Thus was born the slim pamphlet — 23 pages as a politically sympathetic London printer set it into type in January 1848 — that would become one of the best sellers of all time. Marx was then 29, Engels a few years younger, and both would write a lot more. Yet “The Communist Manifesto” would remain their big book, destined to be reprinted in thousands of editions and translated from Marx’s German into hundreds of languages — in all probability, into more languages than any other book save for the Bible. It would also provide the ideological blueprint for the two great upheavals of the 20th Century: the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949.
Even eight years after the demise of communism in the former Soviet bloc nations, the “Manifesto” still finds a readership. Should the Pope visit a school in Cuba this week, he’d likely find the product of Marx and Engels’ collaboration on a reading list, just as it is in universities in the U.S., the ultimate bastion of that capitalism so decried in the “Manifesto.” Nine American publishers keep editions of the book in print, one of which sells upwards of 30,000 copies a year.
That longevity is all the more remarkable as the “Manifesto” dismally failed to redeem its offer of providing a road map to a more equitable society. Asked what would be the hallmarks of the Utopia of Marx’s forecast, Lenin once replied: “Electricity and justice.” By that standard, the Soviet Union, with its Siberian gulags and backward economy, was a disaster. Mao Tse-tung’s successors may call themselves communists, but, in reality, they’ve abandoned Marx’s famous formula for the way work and reward ought to be assigned: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” A more appropriate motto for China, where American-style consumerism now reigns, would be: “To each according to his greed.”
Yet myriad readers have taken little notice of its shortcomings, spellbound instead by the heart-thumping promise offered in the “Manifesto’s” penultimate paragraph:
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
For the downtrodden and oppressed, those two short sentences have served as a perennial psychological lifesaver. Even those who subsequently became bitter opponents of communism can still recall the glimmer of hope they once found in those words. The novelist Arthur Koestler was born into an Austro-Hungarian family whose fortune went down the drain during the rampant inflation that followed World War I, an experience as mysterious as it was terrifying — until he picked up a copy of the “Manifesto.”
“Every page of Marx,” Koestler recalled in a memoir of his flirtation with communism, “brought a new revelation, and an intellectual delight which I had only experienced once before, at my first contact with Freud.”
Three-quarters of a century later, the weekly paper of the tiny and aging American Communist Party, the People’s World, included the tale of a man experiencing that same delicious thrill. Responding to a fundraising appeal, an unemployed factory worker in Alabama wrote to the newspaper that, until he recently discovered Marxism, he had been bewildered by the suffering his family had to endure, scraping along on food stamps and his wife’s part-time job. Enclosed was a contribution of $15.
Yet for all the solace his words brought others, the “Manifesto” didn’t do much for Marx’s pocketbook or his career. He and Engels had rushed to complete their pamphlet because, in early 1848, Europe was patently on the brink of revolution. Copies of the “Manifesto” began to be distributed just before the French King Louis Philippe was chased from his throne in February. By mid-year, uprisings in several other countries seemed to confirm Marx and Engels’ forecast that socialism was just around the corner.
One by one, though, the revolutions were suppressed and Marx, who was editing a radical German newspaper, was arrested for sedition. Not one to mince words, he used the opportunity to explain his journalistic philosophy to a court in Cologne.
“The first duty of the press,” Marx said, “is now to undermine all the supports of the present political state.”
Not only did the solidly bourgeois jury acquit him, it sent one of its members to thank Marx for an interesting and instructive lecture. Nonetheless, Marx became a marked man and had to go into exile in the slums of London. The “Manifesto” was virtually forgotten, and Marx barely survived by writing free-lance articles for the New York Tribune. Engels, who had a family business to fall back on, helped out, making occasional gifts of cash to Marx — whom he acknowledged as the senior partner of their intellectual enterprises. But the Marx family lived in miserable circumstances, as was noted by a Prussian spy who wormed his way into Marx’s confidence.
“There is not one clean or decent piece of furniture in either room, everything is broken,” the agent reported to his superiors. “Manuscripts, books and newspapers lie beside the children’s toys, bits and pieces from his wife’s sewing basket, cups with broken rims, dirty spoons, knives, forks, lamps and an ink pot, tumblers, pipes, tobacco ash . . .”
Then in the 1870s, a new generation discovered the “Manifesto,” with its message that the suffering of the lower classes was bound to end. Earlier reformers had preached the desirability of socialism, but Marx took it a step further, teaching that history was on the side of the underdog. He wrote of a built-in logic to the flow of events, dictated by economics, that had toppled the old aristocracy from power as commerce replaced agriculture as the modern world’s source of wealth. So, too, the bourgeoisie would get its comeuppance in favor of the workers who keep the factories humming.
In short, Marx assured the meek that they would inherit the Earth. True to his original design, what he had produced in the “Manifesto” was essentially a religious document — whose power had to be acknowledged even by preachers of older faiths, which could offer only the consolation that the inequalities of this life would be made up in the kingdom of heaven.
“What makes the `Manifesto’ so piercingly effective,” noted Henry Chambre, a French Jesuit, “is that it is a challenge to the world, a refusal to conform to established custom, capitalist or not.”
By the time of his death in 1883, Marx had become the acknowledged intellectual leader of the Left, and the “Manifesto” was on its way to its present status as a classic, shelved in French and Italian bookshops next to masterpieces of literature by Shakespeare, Moliere and Dante. Twentieth Century scholars with no sympathy for Marx’s politics nonetheless acknowledge the debt of contemporary thought to him.
“The true father of modern economic history, and, indeed, of modern sociology, in so far as any one man may claim that title, is Karl Marx,” wrote the distinguished philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, himself a refugee from Bolshevik Russia.
Marx himself never allowed his belated celebrity to interfere with his routine of spending hours a day at the British Museum poring over texts from a half-dozen disciplines. Indeed, in later life he tended to retreat from politics into a pure life of the mind. Having been unable to hector Marx into completing his multivolume study, “Das Kapital,” Engels had to edit the manuscripts after his death. Marx had kept putting off the job, saying he was too busy teaching himself, of all things, Turkish.
In such devotion to study lies the ultimate irony of Marx’s life. For in addition to the bourgeoisie, Marx had declared war on intellectuals, like his old university professors, and their pride in ideas. To Marx, economics alone makes the world go round. Accordingly even the noblest of conceptions are transitory, destined to vanish with the class that sponsored them. Yet Marx was proved wrong on that point by the very longevity of his “Manifesto.”
“It set out to refute the proposition that ideas decisively determine the course of history, but the very extent of its own influence on human affairs has weakened the force of its thesis,” noted Berlin, “and in consequence remains the most powerful among the intellectual forces which are today permanently transforming the ways in which men act and think.”
