The Communist Manifesto of 1848

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels moved decisively from philosophical radicalism to working-class activism in 1845-7. In 1847 they joined the Communist League, a group mainly of young German craft workers, who in that era would travel widely and internationally in their apprentice years.

The League’s committee was in London, but it had members elsewhere in Europe. It was moving away from model-community or military-conspiracy communism, and marked that by renaming itself from League of the Just to Communist League. Its main slogan would also change, from “All Men Are Brothers” to “Workers of the World, Unite!”

Marx and Engels went to a ten-day Communist League congress in London in November-December 1847, and won a commission to write a new manifesto. The result was published in February 1848, only days before revolutions erupted across Europe. It was titled “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, party here meaning “trend of thought”. It was not billed as the special manifesto of the League, but League members distributed it widely in the upheavals of 1848 in Germany.

It was translated into English and gained some currency, though the other translations claimed in the preamble did not get done in 1848 or any time soon after that. It got more translation and distribution in the 1860s and the years of the First and early Second Internationals. By the 1890s it was the standard handbook of Marxists, and has remained so since.

It pulls together ideas outlined in the earlier texts of Marx we have cited as reference points: Theses on Feuerbach, Poverty of Philosophy, On the Question of Free Trade, and Wage Labour and Capital.

Preconditions

It starts with the revolutionary role, not of the working class, but of the bourgeoisie. Socialism, it contends, can become real because capitalist development creates the material preconditions for it, not because this or that group has become more enthusiastic for age-old ideals.

• “What the bourgeoisie… produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers”, namely the wage-working class, a class with greater potential than other classes of poor people such as peasants or small shopkeepers

• The wage-working class becomes a positive force through its struggles (for wages, etc.) - “the real fruit of their battles lies… in the ever-expanding union of the workers” – and through the fusion of political education with the organisation thus generated

• The socialist future is shaped by the material reality of the working class and its struggles, not by speculation on ideal forms

• The Communists seek to transform the labour movement, not to construct “our own” labour movement alongside the existing one. This, I think, is the meaning of the passage which starts “the Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties”. Puzzling, because the Communist League had formed a “separate party”, but Hal Draper in his book on the Manifesto unpicks the quirks of translation from German here.

• Communists seek to change “the social character of the property”, i.e. of the means of production which are at present “bourgeois property”, into “the property of all members of society”, so that it loses its “class character” (i.e. its character of being controlled by and operated to enrich and empower an entrenched minority)

• “United action, of the leading civilised countries at least, is one of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat”. No “socialism in one country”. “The Communists… point out and bring to the fore the common interests of the entire proletariat independently of all nationality”.

• Communism is not a blueprint, but is not just reactive anti-capitalism, either. Anti-capitalism can be conservative or even backward-looking.

• Communism is about “winning the battle of democracy”. To use socialist phrases to craft “anathemas against representative government… bourgeois freedom of the press”, etc., in the midst of a battle to win (or defend) such beginnings, is reactionary.

There’s a lot there. What isn’t? Why don’t we conclude our study of “Marxist reference points” here? Why did Marx and Engels labour for decades on theory after writing the Manifesto?

Marx and Engels indicated at least two things in a preface to an 1872 edition. The list of immediate demands in the Manifesto would be “very differently worded today”. Indeed, Marx largely picked up those demands from others, and he praised the economic section of the French Workers’ Party programme of 1880 as “consist[ing] solely of demands that actually have spontaneously arisen out of the labour movement itself”. Of course that general approach plays out differently today, when we can learn from another 150 years of demands “arising from” workers’ struggles.

Marx and Engels noted that the Paris Commune of 1871, where the workers held power for nine weeks, showed that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes”. The Manifesto was incomplete on the state.

And, in fact, as we shall see, on more. Some examples... It contained some residues of the “German-philosophical” terminology (as Engels later ruefully put it) of Marx’s earlier writings. Marx used Hegel’s favourite word, Aufhebung (which variously means abolition, or preservation, or supersession), in e.g. a passage translated as “abolition of the family”, where he evidently meant something like “supersession of the current form of the family” (as distinct from ordinary usage like “abolition of children’s factory labour”).

Incomplete

The Manifesto was also incomplete on economics. Marx spent much effort on the critiques of “the value-form” and “commodity fetishism” which he would expound in Capital, and which built on but were clearer and deeper than his convoluted critique in The Poverty of Philosophy of Proudhon’s idea of “constituted value”.

The Manifesto seems to claim that the “middle class” will disappear. Draper argues that the seeming is due to mistranslation, and asserts (rightly) “that the alleged ‘disappearance’ theory... is most thoroughly quashed when one looks at Marx’s mature economic writings”.

In the Manifesto, Marx reverted to the idea that capitalism would reduce wages to physical subsistence level, though he had already gone beyond that in Wage Labour and Capital. In Capital he found, as Engels put it, that “the laws governing wages are very complex... by no means iron but... on the contrary, exceedingly elastic”. That is important for all our wages battles, and for understanding the potential of trade-union organisation, its propensity to generate conservative bureaucracies, and the causes and effects of inequalities within the working class (which were probably greater in Marx’s time than they are in ours).

The Manifesto clearly identifies working-class struggle as the agency for socialism, but a great deal more would have to be worked out on that by Marx and Engels and later Marxists. The Communist League largely dissolved into the movement in the upheavals of 1848 – David Riazanov’s Karl Marx and Frederick Engels is lucid on that – and, as we shall see, fell apart as the movement receded.

We’ll see a bit of that further working-out in the next “reference points” in this series, the March Address of 1850 and The 18th Brumaire.

An audiobook of the Manifesto is here. Workers’ Liberty study notes for it are here. The Bolshevik David Riazanov’s classic, giving detailed background and references to other writings by Marx and Engels is here; Hal Draper’s book with bibliographic and translation-difficulties information, here.