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Marxists love this kind heroic imaginary. You can pretty much define
the sect by who gets added to these founders in a Mt. Rushmore-like row.
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The
pamphlet as a literary form and polemical tool owes its
existence to the invention of moveable
type, resultant relative
mass literacy, and the need to cheaply reach and sway
wide audiences. They first came to the forefront during the Protestant
Reformation and Martin Luther, who had much sharper elbows than his plump monk’s body might suggest, was the first master of the form. The slow-moving
behemoth of the Catholic Church at first floundered trying to respond with turgid Latin tomes. But
it got better, or at least some
of its wittier apologists
did and for the next two hundred years ago a pamphlet war stoked bloody
atrocities on all sides across Europe.
The
Enlightenment and the dawn of modernity gave rise to the secular
political and social pamphlets. In England Jonathan Swift and
others raised the form to dazzling rhetorical
heights. But in the New World Thomas Paine’s Common
Sense helped bring one
Empire to its knees and give birth to another. Not long
after a series of pamphlets collectively known as the Federalist Papers penned by James
Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay rallied support for what became the most enduring Constitution in the world.
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In the 19th Century writers and philosophers
of all stripes turned
their attention the industrial revolution, the social injustice and
inequality it fostered,
and the growing rage of the displaced and oppressed. Many
notable figures—nationalists, democrats, socialists, anarchists, and utopians—entered
the fray. But one
pamphlet overshadows all the
rest in the sweep and enduring nature of its influence.
Meet the single
most important pamphlet of all time. Love it or loath it, it cannot be denied.
It couldn’t have been more timely. The
uprisings that would sweep from France across the German states and into much
of the rest of Europe were gathering steam on February 21, 1848
when a tiny faction of radical socialists from across the
continent met in London and published Manifest der
kommunistischen Partei, literally the Manifesto of the Communist
Party.
Now known more simply as the Communist
Manifesto the 18,000 word paper bound pamphlet was authored by German Jewish journalist and intellectual Karl Marx and
his close collaborator Friedrich Engels, a pioneering German-born
sociologist who had made his
mark with the publication three years earlier of The
Condition of the Working Class in England, one of the first systematic studies of working
class life.
The publication was almost instantly notorious. Editions
appeared in French and English by 1850 and were followed by translations
in most European languages. By 1857 an American edition was
published by the utopian and individualist anarchist Stephen Pearl
Andrews.
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The original German edition of the pamphlet that shook the world.
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Exactly how
much each of the two credited authors contributed to the final product is hotly debated
with those who want to raise Marx to
the level of an infallible prophet and messianic figure pumping their hero up while reducing
Engels to almost a mere clerk. What is indisputable
is that in the final draft it is Marx’s vigorous and muscular rhetoric that characterized the document beginning
with its famous preamble:
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All
the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this
spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German
police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried
as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not
hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced
opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers
to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the
face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and
meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the
party itself.
But
we know that it was Engels who was commissioned by the Communist
League, the first international party to adopt that name, in
July of 1847 to draw up a catechism for the new movement.
His first effort became the Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith
containing almost two dozen
questions that helped express his own ideas and those of his comrade
Marx at the time. That was followed in October with a second draft
renamed the less religious Principles of Communism.
Still, it was in the question and
answer format of a catechism. Engels was dissatisfied with that and
suggested a new approach.
He
brought Marx into the project as the primary writer of the final
draft, traveling to Brussels, Belgium where the exiled writer
was publishing a radical newspaper. Marx incorporated much
of Engels’s work but heavily
rephrased it and added his own
insights.
The
controversy over who contributed what
swirled over the life times of both men. After Marx’s death Engels wrote
of what had become known as Marxism:
I cannot deny that both before and during my forty years’
collaboration with Marx I had a certain independent share in laying the
foundations of the theory, but the greater part of its leading basic principles
belongs to Marx....Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without
him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears
his name.
Whoever
was the primary author, the effects of the pamphlet were not long in being felt. It
began to “hit the streets” in Germany by spring. It surely did not
cause the wave of 1848 uprisings, those had been festering and boiling under the surface since the end of the Napoleonic
Wars and the spread of the Industrial
Revolution into previously agrarian societies with urban
centers organized along traditional
craft production. The leaders of the rebellions, as far as
they could be identified,
came from various ideological shades,
including different varieties of socialists, along with democratic rebels
casting themselves in the anti-royalist
traditions of the French
Revolution. Many were young idealists,
including students and sympathetic intellectuals.
Others emerged from the ranks
of the evolving working class itself. Communists
represented only a tiny sliver of
active leadership—their organization was too new, too weak
to do much more than be swept up in
an irresistible tide of history.
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A Berlin street battle in the Revolution of 1848. Guess how many insurrectionists read the Manifesto.
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Did the appearance of the Manifesto inspire
the rebels? To some extent.
But most were too engaged in making a
revolution to spend much time reading about one.
But Marx’s somewhat bombastic claims in
the introduction to the pamphlet led authorities to believe that there was indeed a “Spectre of Communism
haunting Europe.” The rebellions peaked and then faltered for lack
of clear programs and ability to
build sustained organizations while the forces of reaction
rallied and counter attacked with overwhelming military power. By mid-1849 most of the
uprisings were crushed and a continent-wide
repression was under way. The Manifesto was generally suppressed, although surreptitious
copies continued to be circulated, often at great risk. Identifiable Communists were arrested
and sometimes executed—but so were leaders and activists of all ideological stripes. Thousands
were forced into exile.
Marx and his wife Anna were among them.
They had to flee Brussels to
join Engels in London, where he resumed work as a journalist,
dedicated himself to study of the
revolutionary movements and why they failed, and to assuming more formal leadership
in the Communist movement.
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Karl and Anna Marx had to flee from exile in Brussels for exile in London
with comrade Engels. Note Anna is wearing a cross. Curious.
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In 1850 the Prussian master spy Wilhelm
Stieber broke into Marx’s London home and made off with the Communist League’s membership records
setting off a wave of arrests across Germany and France. After the Cologne
Communist Trial of 1852 the League was forced to dissolve. There after Communism existed as a current in socialism
and Marx worked to get national socialist and labor parties, as
well as trade unions, to adopt his analysis.
The Manifesto was now a document for an organization that had
evaporated. The very stuff of ephemera, at best of interest to historians, antiquarians,
and haunters of dusty archives. But instead, it not only remained
in print, it spread and continued to be issued in new
languages. It was passed hand-to-hand, often clandestinely,
among the scattered survivors of the ’48 upheaval.
Marx and Engels issued editions with new introductions every few years
in which they both explained themselves and sometimes modified views expressed in the original text.
Some local Communist grouping were established, but a generation of radicals influenced
by it became militants in the trade union movement, emerging Social
Democratic Parties, and labor parties. They were among the Communards
who rose up in Paris after the Franco-Prussian War and
were eventually crushed by the French National Guard.
The document shaped the thinking of many
socialists and some anarchists who were not explicitly Communist.
Members of all these organizations—except for avowed
anarchists and anarcho-syndicalist unions—met in Paris in 1889 to
form the Socialist International, better known as the Second
International at which Marx and Marxism
were dominant. Of course, by this time Marx had moderated
some of the insurrectionist views of the Manifesto and advocated
parliamentary and electoral activity through the Social
Democratic parties modeled on
that of Germany. Still, despite the modified doctrine, the Manifesto
remained a revered document.
In the 20th Century Lenin would resurrect
the Manifesto as a primary document to differentiate his Bolsheviks
from reformist Russian Social Democrats and as a rallying point
for his insurrectionist 1917 October
Revolution.
Today Lenin’s once monolithic international
Communist movement has shattered into scores if not hundreds
of often warring sects, all claiming to be the legitimate
heirs to Marx and Engel’s vision. Where Communists are entrenched
in state power, in practice
a kind of tightly controlled state
capitalism as in China and Vietnam belie the original egalitarian
and mass democratic vision.
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Pamphlets on lit tables. Still trying to be the next Marx...
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Ideologues of all stripes still issue manifestos and publish pamphlets
hoping to catch lighting in a bottle and spark the next world-shaking movement. But for the most
part the pamphlets lay unread on literature tables and are rejected
by those on the street to whom they are eagerly offered.
Today the new
generation of prophets and propagandists peddle their wares on
the Internet increasingly in social media. Which makes
their work even more ephemeral than Marx’s flimsy paper pamphlet.
