The Communist Manifesto

In brief

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto on commission for the Communist League, a small association, at first exclusively German and of necessity secret, and it appeared anonymously in London in February 1848 as a pamphlet of twenty-three pages. It then sank for two decades, revived in the 1870s, and in the twentieth century became the founding text of states that ruled a large part of humanity.

It should be read as two things at once. It is a piece of writing of the first rank, whose account of a world remade by markets reads better now than when it was printed. And it is a forecast that failed in its main points and a programme whose heirs killed people in very large numbers. The interesting question is how the two are connected.

The argument

The claim comes at once: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (section I). Engels later had to add a note restricting this to “all written history” (note). In the present age the struggle has simplified. “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps”. The bourgeoisie has created forces it cannot control, “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world”, and it has assembled in its factories the class that will end it. “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.”

Engels gave the core proposition to Marx: that the way a society produces forms the basis “from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch” (preface of 1888). The rest follows at great speed, which is both the book’s power and its fault. The word “inevitable” closes section I, though the section’s opening has allowed that a struggle can end “in the common ruin of the contending classes”.

The shape of the book

A paragraph on the spectre comes first, then four sections of very unequal value. Section I is the narrative and the masterpiece. Section II answers objections in a mocking second person and ends with the ten measures and the promise of an association “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”. Section III, on rival socialisms, is savage and largely dead, as its authors admitted. Section IV is a tactical note, country by country, and ends with the lines everyone knows: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”

Who wrote what

Engels did much of the preparatory drafting. In June 1847 he wrote for the League a Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith as a catechism, and in late October, after a rival text by Moses Hess had been brushed aside, he wrote the longer Principles of Communism, again in questions and answers. In November he wrote to Marx that they had better drop the catechism form and call the thing a Communist Manifesto, because it needed “a certain amount of history”. The congress in London commissioned the pair. Marx went back to Brussels and procrastinated, and in January 1848 the League’s central committee sent an ultimatum demanding the text by 1 February. Only one page of draft survives.

The final prose is Marx’s. In 1883 Engels wrote that the basic thought “belongs solely and exclusively to Marx”, and in the 1888 preface he repeated it in milder terms. He was probably too modest. Harold Laski pointed to how closely the Manifesto’s substance follows the Principles, and the programme of measures has an evident source there. What Marx added is what makes it read: history in place of the catechism, and the rhythm of accusation.

The eulogy of the bourgeoisie

The most surprising pages in the book are the ones in praise of its enemy, and they are its best prose. “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.” It has “accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals”. In under a century it “has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together”. Few of capitalism’s defenders have matched this as advocacy.

The praise is also an indictment, and the skill lies in making them the same sentences. The class has “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest”. It has drowned religious feeling “in the icy water of egotistical calculation”. Marx is half in love with the destruction. There is no nostalgia here, and the same pages speak of rescue from “the idiocy of rural life”, a phrase whose German, Idiotismus, Eric Hobsbawm argued means the narrow isolation of the countryside and not stupidity.

All that is solid

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.” The first clause is the most famous thing in the Manifesto, and a good share of it is Moore’s. The German of 1848 reads Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht. Ständisch is what belongs to the old estates, the ranked orders of feudal society, and stehend what stands or is fixed; verdampfen means to evaporate. Literally, then: everything of the estates and everything standing evaporates. The German is about a social order; the English is close to physics. Moore’s phrase, approved by Engels, lost the reference and gained the world. Marshall Berman’s book of 1982 took its title from it and built a theory of modernity out of the English.

The same is true at the end. The German calls on Proletarier aller Länder, and Moore gives working men. And the first English version, by Helen Macfarlane in 1850, opened with a frightful hobgoblin stalking through Europe.

The ten points

The measures at the end of section II are startling to read now, because several sound like the ordinary furniture of a capitalist state. “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.” A national bank. State involvement in transport. “Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form.” Rich countries have adopted versions of these without communism, often as measures to head it off. A central bank is not quite the “exclusive monopoly” of credit that point five demands.

The others have not become ordinary: “Abolition of property in land”, “Abolition of all right of inheritance”, “Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels”, and “Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies”. The list is introduced with a phrase that should not be skipped, “despotic inroads on the rights of property”. Read in order, the moderate items make the rest look reasonable, and the immoderate ones are what revolutionary governments reached for.

February 1848

The dates flatter the pamphlet. The manuscript went to the printer, as Engels says, “a few weeks before the French revolution of February 24”, and the revolution in Paris had nothing to do with it: the Manifesto was in German, was barely available, and did not reach Paris in quantity until about 20 March. Its influence in 1848 was confined largely to Germany, through Marx’s Cologne newspaper. Nor did its authors follow it. The Demands of the Communist Party in Germany, written in March, ask for limits on inheritance rather than its abolition. Section IV had been confident that the German revolution would be “but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution”. It was crushed instead, and by Engels’s own account the book “seemed thenceforth to be doomed to oblivion” (preface of 1888).

The authors date their own book

The later prefaces are among the most honest things in the literature of Marxism. In 1872 the two authors say that “no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II”, which “would, in many respects, be very differently worded to-day”. The Paris Commune had shown “that ‘the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery’”. Section III is out of date, section IV “antiquated”, and “the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter”.

In 1882, for a Russian edition, they entertain a thought that the original forbids: that Russian common land, if revolution there signals one in the West, “may serve as the starting point for a communist development”. The sequence in which capitalism must first ripen is opened at the point where history would later break it. Engels’s preface of 1888 explains that in 1847 “we could not have called it a Socialist Manifesto”, because socialism then meant middle-class schemes, and says the book was by now acknowledged by “millions of workingmen from Siberia to California”. Its authors treated it as dated, which is more than many of their followers did.

Right and wrong

On globalisation the Manifesto is right and early. “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe.” It foresaw raw material “drawn from the remotest zones”, products “consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe”, and cheap prices as “the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls”. In 1848 most of this was tendency. Our World in Data’s long series put world trade never above 10% of output before 1800 and show trade growing faster than output since. Its grasp of crisis, as a feature of the system and not an accident, also holds up.

On wages it is wrong, in a way that should be stated exactly. “The modern laborer, on the contrary, instead of rising with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper”. For the decades in which it was written this had real support. The economic historian Robert Allen’s “Engels’ pause” describes British real wages stagnating from about 1790 to 1840 while output per head grew, though others dispute the data. After that the claim fails. Allen’s figures for 1840 to 1900 have output per worker up 90 per cent and real wages up 123 per cent, and the share of humanity in extreme poverty fell, on one long series used by Our World in Data, from 79 per cent in 1820 to 9 per cent in 2018. The system had raised the wages of its workers, partly through the unions and laws the book itself saw being won. George Boyer’s description of it as a period piece of the hungry 1840s is just. Inequality, insecurity and the power of capital are separate questions, and on those the book still has force.

On class and revolution it is mostly wrong. Eduard Bernstein pointed out that the middle classes were not disappearing and society was not splitting into two camps. The workers of the most advanced countries did not make the revolution. The revolutions made in Marx’s name came in Russia and China, largely peasant societies, the case the book had least considered. Seymour Lipset’s verdict that history refuted the premise is hard to resist for the advanced industrial countries.

The twentieth century

A defence that says none of this was in the text is not good enough, and neither is a charge that the text ordered it. Marx and Engels did not plan the Gulag. The Bolsheviks did, however, make labour a compulsory duty, as point eight had proposed, and in the civil war they created labour armies, Red Army units set to logging and transport under military command, under the slogan that who does not work shall not eat. Soviet famine in 1932 and 1933 killed around 3.5 to 5 million in Ukraine alone, and the famine of China’s Great Leap Forward killed tens of millions. Those events have many causes beyond a pamphlet of 1848, though the parties responsible printed it in enormous numbers.

The fair charge concerns an absence. The Manifesto tells its readers that once classes disappear, “the public power will lose its political character”, and political power is defined as “merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another”. That is the whole of its theory of government. It has no account of who holds the state between the “despotic inroads” and that happy day, or how to remove them, or what protects a person who disagrees, since “bourgeois freedom” has already been laughed out of the room. In a book so alert to how classes dress up their interest as truth, the failure to ask how a party might do so is the fatal gap. The promise of “the free development of each” remains the most attractive sentence in the book. Nothing in it says how you would get there, and those who tried by these means did not.

Readers and critics

Its revival came from an accident of law: in 1872 a treason trial of German socialists read it into the court record, so it could be printed legally. It then spread with the socialist parties, though the mass parties mostly left it to theorists and sects.

How to read it

Know what the free texts are. Samuel Moore, a lawyer who also translated much of Capital, made the standard English version of 1888, “revised” by himself and Engels, who added the notes. This page links Project Gutenberg’s #31193, a New York reprint of 1908, because it alone has the 1888 preface and the notes and names Moore. Its spelling is American, it carries publisher’s advertisements at the end, and it has gaps: set against the text at the Marxists Internet Archive, it drops a clause on “the ever-expanding union of the workers”. Gutenberg’s #61 keeps British spelling but has no preface or notes and has its own faults, including “societies” in the first sentence, “the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy”, and a lost clause in “It has agglomerated production”. Neither is clean.
Read the Marxists Internet Archive for a fuller copy. Its text and prefaces are free. Among print editions, Hobsbawm’s Verso introduction of 1998 is the one to start with. Terrell Carver’s fresh translation of the 1848 first edition, in the Cambridge Companion, is the way to read it without Moore.
Read Sections I and II first, slowly, then the prefaces.