The Communist Manifesto

Overview

Forty pages, commissioned. The Communist League, a small organisation of German emigrant workers, asked Marx to produce a statement of principles at its congress in London in late 1847. Engels had already drafted two versions in question and answer form, and Marx rewrote the whole thing as continuous prose in January 1848. It was printed in German in London in February. Almost nobody read it at the time. The revolutions that broke out across Europe that spring owed it nothing, and it only became famous after 1871.

The form matters. This is not a treatise, and it does not argue like one. It asserts, narrates, mocks its opponents and ends on an imperative. Marx’s full economic case would take another twenty years and three volumes of Capital. What the pamphlet gives you is the historical picture that case was meant to support, written at speed by a man of twenty-nine.

The later prefaces are worth reading, and good editions include them. Marx and Engels revisited the text repeatedly between 1872 and 1893, conceding that the ten measures in section two were already out of date and that the Paris Commune had taught them the state machinery could not simply be taken over intact.

The argument

The preamble states the occasion: communism is being treated as a menace all over Europe, so the communists will publish their views instead of letting others describe them.

Section one, Bourgeois and Proletarians, is the substantial part. It begins with the claim that all recorded history is class struggle, runs quickly through freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, and then settles on the modern pairing. The bourgeoisie is presented as a revolutionary class: it destroyed feudalism, created the world market, replaced local production with global exchange, stripped every occupation of its dignity and turned all relations into money relations. Marx gives it enormous credit. It has, he says, accomplished wonders greater than the pyramids and the cathedrals.

But the same forces that let it succeed undo it. Production has become social while ownership remains private, so the system lurches into crises in which goods and capacity are destroyed for lack of buyers. Meanwhile it concentrates workers in cities and factories, gives them railways, newspapers and a common condition, and so manufactures its own opposition. The proletariat is the first class with no property to defend and therefore, Marx argues, the first whose victory abolishes class rather than replacing one ruling group with another.

Section two, Proletarians and Communists, answers objections. Communists are not a separate party with interests of their own. They propose to abolish bourgeois property, not personal possessions. The charges that they would destroy the family, the nation and culture are met by arguing that capitalism has already destroyed these for the working class. Then come the ten measures: expropriation of land, a heavy progressive income tax, abolition of inheritance, centralisation of credit and transport in state hands, state factories, an obligation to work, combination of agriculture and industry, and free public education. The section ends with the goal, an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all, and with the prediction that the state will lose its political character as class antagonism disappears.

Section three is a settling of accounts with rivals: reactionary socialism that wants the guilds back, bourgeois socialism that wants reform without conflict, and the utopian schemes of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, whose honesty Marx respects and whose politics he considers useless.

Section four, one page, positions the communists with respect to the existing opposition parties in each country, and closes with the call to unite.

How to read it

Read it at one sitting, out loud if you can. It was written to be read aloud and the rhythm carries the argument.

Read section one twice. That is where the analysis is. Section two is a period document, and the ten measures tell you more about 1848 than about anything Marx believed permanently; the authors said as much in 1872.

Separate the descriptive claims from the predictive ones. The description of how capitalism dissolves traditional life has held up remarkably well. The prediction that workers’ conditions must worsen until revolution becomes inevitable has not, and the interesting question is which parts of the analysis the failure damages.

Notice what is missing. There is no account of how the new society would make decisions, allocate goods or handle disagreement, and no discussion of what happens if the working class does not want the revolution. Later readers filled those gaps in incompatible ways, which is much of the history of the twentieth century.

Questions it raises

• If every ruling class produces its own successor, what would the proletariat produce?
• The pamphlet praises what capitalism has achieved. Does that praise weaken the case against it or strengthen it?
• Is class, defined by a relation to the means of production, still the sharpest way of describing who has power?
• Marx says the workers have no country. Why did national loyalty prove stronger than class loyalty in 1914?
• What is the status of the ten measures once the authors themselves have disowned them?
• Can a document be read as analysis when it was written to cause the thing it predicts?