The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, translated by Samuel Moore
Writing a manifesto cannot be too difficult, because in the nineteenth and early-to-mid twentieth centuries, it’s all everyone seemed to do. They put them out in newspapers and pamphlets, had them translated into foreign tongues as and when they could. Many of the participants in the manifesto game were done in this cloying, overblown, impossible way — or laden with factional minutiae of little interest to anyone not already in the party or in the know.
This book, as Friedrich Engels acknowledges in his introduction to the 1888 edition, became a historical document within the lifetime of one of its authors. It would, Engels writes, be wrong to change even those things in it which require a little emendation, save adding context. (I very much enjoyed his additional notes.) The manifesto was written not for the moment but for the ages. In that, of course, Karl Marx and Engels succeeded beyond their greatest expectations.
I want to discuss the book first as a piece of writing. Why does it work more than, say the manifesto of the Italian futurists, which has similarly all-encompassing claims about the nature of man and society, and similar rhetoric — rhetoric that might strike people in the second quarter of the twenty-first century as overblown?
In part, the book succeeds because of the skill with which it lures in readers. We have initial statements of claims which are broad and definitive. It’s real knowledge you are given — knowledge that is enthralling, delightful. It is only in the third section, for instance, that the various socialist and communist heresies get listed and somewhat tediously despatched one after another by the verdict of History and Science.
The book begins with several large and pointed claims. That all of human history has been the struggle between classes. That the condition of modernity — with all its factories, search for markets, its ‘over-production’ (one wonders can there be such a thing?) — is one of destruction and rapine. Possibly this has all been revolutionary change, and possibly the destruction of all that was solid and real and serious. The illusions that made the old life possible. The lies that mankind by and large believed — necessary to pretend that the feudal way was good and noble and right, and that it guaranteed salvation in a non-existent hereafter.
There are moments — possibly more than someone who has not read the book since they were very young might remember — where the internecine questions get a little too thick and the score-settling becomes a little too tedious. I don’t need to be told more than once that the Owenites are utopians and implied fools and allies of the status quo. (Of petty bourgeois socialism, ‘In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian.’) I believe I got it the first time.
This book succeeded, however, not only in forming the seed corn which eventually grew into the malformed government of many of the world’s inhabitants, and creating several states which still to this day exist. It also won, quite definitely, the manifesto game: the game of world attention; the game of who gets listened to and taught and revered and turned into coins and statues long after death.
It is not nothing, also, to have directed and ultimately derived an entire rhetorical style, one still very much in evidence everywhere. No one can read a newspaper or a tweet or a British government publication without hearing the echoes of ‘Hitherto every form of society has been based, as we have already seen, on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.’ It is what everyone has to believe or claim to believe to remain employed.
But what — to move on from style for a moment — I must get from this reading is the fear of speed. Speed of change. Extent of dislocation. To see men crammed into factories, as if such a thing never happened in previous society. It would have been disturbing. To think that this was, not a stage of history but the future, the inevitable and permanent future of all of man, may have been dismaying. Thus history must have a shape and this must be possible to defeat. History must have a science and this must not be its final call.
And everyone in every age is susceptible to the lying siren song that the increase in production, the opening of new markets, the generation of more economic activity, was all well and good in its day, but now it is moving too fast — powered by steam, powering new machines — and it is world-destroying, accelerationist, evil: something no one could ever get used to, never accept, never love.
‘In proportion, therefore, as the repulsiveness of the work increases, the wage decreases. Nay, more, in proportion as the use of machinery and division of labour increase, in the same proportion the burden of toil also increases, whether by prolongation of the working hours, by increase of the work exacted in a given time, or by increased speed of the machinery, etc.,’ Marx and Engels write.
The authors of this could not imagine a society where meaningless HR ‘email jobs’ provide a universal basic income for stupid and malicious people.
But how could they have imagined it? The future is always impossible to foresee.
Novelty is always feared and never trusted. And for Marx and Engels, what now might seem to us a process — industrialisation — which was distant and quaint and transient meant the vicious creation of ‘new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.’
These little dislocations are frightful. They remind us that not all change is for the best and yet change must happen. Things change as we get older and become less and less equipped to understand them. The world leaves us all behind in the end. It is a natural human impulse to fear this. But the fear is often and perhaps always a mistaken one. The future has no need of us. Yet it will always and unvaryingly arrive — with or without us, dead or alive.