A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  We have already seen that neither Marx nor Engels were particularly tactful in their efforts, despite their backgrounds, to play leading roles in the struggle for the cause of the oppressed classes. Nevertheless, they succeeded marvellously. They were the ones tasked with writing the manifesto of the communist party. How could that happen?

  This is one of the questions we must bring with us into the next section. But there are others that are even more important: Why a manifesto? Why was this manifesto given the form and content it had?

  A Catechism Becomes a Manifesto

  Marx and Engels had gained a crucial point of support in London. But they had also successfully worked to strengthen their position in Brussels, which, for the time being, was where Marx could be active. The Correspondence Committee was not the only important project. Radical forces had started a newspaper in town: the Deutscher-Brüsseler-Zeitung. However, its founder and early editor, Adelbert von Bornstedt, was neither a follower of theirs nor a friend. Bornstedt was a Prussian officer who left his position early on and set out into the world. After some time in Brazil, he came to Paris, where he moved in the same radical circles as Marx and Engels. Like Marx, he was deported from France and also took refuge in Brussels. Once there, he started his newspaper.

  He gave free rein to a sharp criticism of Engels, but he also allowed both Marx and Engels to submit a contribution in response. Engels defended himself bravely against an attack from Karl Heinzen, a German writer who spent a large part of his life in the United States and who regarded himself as a socialist rather than a communist. Heinzen attacked a sensitive point: he called Engels a turncoat who had recently become communist, while Heinzen himself held fast to his earlier position. Engels responded furiously, but it was Marx who dealt the real death blow to their impudent, self-satisfied opponent. He wrote a long series of articles in a style that had become typical for him as a journalist. He generously scattered fragments of his learning, citing Shakespeare, Goethe and Ariosto (in the Italian) and went to war against Heinzen’s ignorance. Heinzen had declared that he knew nothing of philosophy and that for him, Hegel was ‘indigestible’. Marx objected sternly: ‘Ignorance is generally considered a fault. We are accustomed to regard it as a negative quantity. Let us observe how the magic wand of the philistine as critic converts a minus quantity of intelligence into a plus quantity of morality.’

  Marx saw Heinzen as a narrow-minded moralist who was satisfied with demanding that people of all types should be decent and good, and did not care at all about fundamental questions concerning property or labour.13 Both Marx and Engels became regular contributors to Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, and at the end of the paper’s brief existence – it was shut down in early 1848 – had crucial influence over it. Once again, it had become apparent how Marx (assisted by Engels) could fight his way forward to a central position in a project that at the beginning was not even his.

  Marx also helped create another (though short-lived) arena that was given the name Demokratische Gesellschaft zur Einigung und Verbrüderung aller Völker (Democratic Society for Unity and Brotherhood of All Peoples). He was elected its vice-president on 15 November 1847; the president was a Belgian with a political past. The intent was to unite various groupings into a joint organization of struggle that strove for a democratic society with equal and universal voting rights and a parliament that possessed ultimate power. It was entirely in accordance with Marx’s strategy for countries that, in his opinion, first had to undergo a bourgeois revolution. Here, he could unite his forces with people who stood quite far away from his communism.

  He did not conceal his own opinions, however. In early January 1848, he held a lecture in French on the question of free trade: Discours sur la question du libre-échange. The background was the major struggle in Great Britain over protective duties on grain. These duties were attacked by the ‘Anti-Corn Law League’, a broad liberal association in which the ‘Manchester liberals’ (or Manchester School, as they were known, with Richard Cobden and John Bright at their head) played a leading role. Manchester liberalism was largely similar to the neoliberalism of our time that follows in Milton Friedman’s footsteps. Not only did they preach the blessings of free trade, they also recommended maximum deregulation of the economy. As regards their ideas about free importation of grain, they brought forward the fact that the workers would thereby have cheaper bread to eat as a crucial argument. But Bright and his fellow thinkers were no friends of the workers, Marx pointed out. They had frenetically resisted the law on a ten-hour working day.

  Marx declared that he himself embraced no protective duties, seeing them instead as a necessary stage in the development of a country. Great Britain had now managed to get past that stage, while protectionism was inevitable, for example, for the German states on their path towards industrialization. It was also an economic necessity that cheaper bread would entail lower wages. Economic forces bring wage reductions when the costs of keeping the workers alive fall. The arguments from David Ricardo and other economists reverberate in Marx’s reasoning. But the most interesting thing about his lecture is that he set liberalism and democracy against each other quite clearly. The freedom that the Manchester liberals preached was not the freedom of individuals in relation to other individuals. It entailed only the ‘freedom of Capital to crush the worker’. Democracy entailed something entirely different: the path towards the liberation of all.

  According to the records that have been preserved, the lecture was met with enthusiasm from the large number of attendees. It was also published as a pamphlet, which was translated into several languages, including German, and enjoyed a certain degree of success.14 But it was also one of the democratic association’s last shows of force. The wave of unrest that swept over Europe in 1848 overshadowed their activities. It was dissolved the following year, by which time Marx had left Brussels.

  Marx’s most important task at that time was undoubtedly writing the programme for the Communist League. A few attempts had already been made in that direction when Marx was called in to the work. Engels had written a draft of around twenty pages on his own: ‘The Principles of Communism’. But there would be no final version without Marx’s contributions. It was precisely for the sake of this matter that he received the urgent request to come to London in person. Everyone was agreed that he was the one who had to complete the project. Engels also thought so, and there is nothing to indicate that Marx himself held any other opinion.

  But Engels’s draft would form the basis for the final text. It had the form of a traditional catechism, with questions and responses like ‘What is communism?’ and ‘Will it be possible to bring about the abolition of private property by peaceful methods?’ The programmes of many radical groups had looked like this for a great many decades. As late as 1884, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg could write A Small Catechism for the Underclass. The Swedish historian of ideas Adrian Velicu has shown how secular catechisms flooded the market during the French Revolution.15 The form had obvious advantages: it was clear and simple, and it was well known to generations of women and men who had been primed with various Christian catechisms. For Engels, with his strict religious upbringing, it was certainly a particular delight to use it for purposes other than Christian edification.

  At the same time, the long series of questions and responses sounded both stiff and repetitive. Engels himself realized these limitations. In a letter to Marx, in which he enclosed his draft, he proposed that the final version should not be a catechism, but that the thing (das Ding) should be called a manifesto instead. The reason he gave was that historical development needed to be taken up, and it would be difficult to keep to such a rigid form. Nor was he satisfied with what he himself had achieved. The result was ‘quite unsuitable’, he said bitterly.16

  It is entirely too harsh a judgement. As always, Engels had written a clear and lucid text that flowed elegantly and naturally. On the other hand, it is not at all on the level of the final Manifesto. Compa
ring Engels’s ‘Principles’ with the final text, both in form and content, is of some interest.

  There was actually also another reason to speak of a ‘manifesto’ – a reason Marx and Engels themselves gave in the preface to a new German edition published in 1872. The Communist League had been a secret organization, but it would now no longer be so. It was time to manifest – to make clear what the organization stood for.17

  Linguistically speaking, the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (Manifesto of the Communist Party) bears the stamp of Marx in all essentials. Engels was also prepared to ascribe the fundamental ideas to Marx – they belonged ‘solely and exclusively to Marx’, he wrote in the preface to the 1883 German edition.18 This is certainly an exaggeration. On the other hand, the wording is not Engels’s. The only person who could have influenced this is Jenny Marx. This is at least what her biographer Ulrich Teusch wants to have us believe; a few lines in the only preserved manuscript are unmistakably written in her handwriting.19

  But it is still without a doubt Karl who was responsible for most of the wording. What is most striking is the impact of the incomparable art of his writing in the small introductory preface and in the first section, ‘Bourgeois and Proletarians’. Marx reaches stylistic heights there that Engels never even came close to, where neither the complicated diversity of the textual references nor the gravity of the precision of terms weighed down what he wrote. We have already encountered his lines about the opium of the masses and what a lack of money does to a person; other such pearls await us in coming chapters.

  The best pages in the Manifesto are unsurpassed in their kind; rarely, if ever, has anyone written so brilliantly on societal issues. The very first sentence has attained iconic status: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’ (The background is the panicked alarm of the contemporary European regimes at communist conspiracies; dangerous secret societies were suspected in every nook and cranny.) The memorable sentences follow in quick succession. Despite their being quoted ad nauseam and having served as fodder for countless book titles, they have never lost their radiance. Like all classical texts, they have also preserved their topicality. It is still possible to recognize our own time in the most well-known paragraph:

  The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors’, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom – Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

  Or stop a moment before the sentence ‘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.’ We still live in this world.20

  But this also says that the promises for the future that the Manifesto contains never came true. Russia’s October Revolution never came close to what Marx pointed out in advance, and its results now belong entirely to the past. The Chinese analogue was at least equally as far from the prototype of 1848, and the more than sixty-year dictatorship there has been alloyed with an equally implacable capitalism. In today’s China, Marx’s words about the solid melting into air and the holy being profaned are just as applicable as they are in most refined capitalist countries.

  But with this, we are already well into the content of the Manifesto. Let us stay here. It is striking that the Manifesto, with its just over thirty pages of text, contains so much more than Engels’s ‘Principles’ does in seventeen. This is due in part to the fact that the Manifesto discards the catechism’s responses to questions such as ‘In what way does the proletarian differ from the slave? From the serf?’ and so on, which take up a lot of space. Tellingly enough, Engels provided no answer to a question that he nonetheless asked regarding the difference between the proletarian and the craftsman; the question may simply have been too sensitive, considering that craftsmen made up the majority of the text’s immediate recipients.

  Such matters were settled in the Manifesto with a few terse formulations. The question of the relationship of the craftsman to the industrial worker is given a response in one sentence, which also provides information on a range of other societal classes. It speaks of ‘the lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the artisan, the peasant’, all of which are now on the path to sinking down into the proletariat because their capital is too little to cope with the competition from modern industry.21

  The Manifesto portrays contemporary society as an enormous centrifuge. From its violent movements, some are pushed upward, becoming members of the ruling class: the capitalists – or, in another word, the bourgeoisie. Many more are on the way down, more quickly or more slowly; farmers, craftsmen, merchants – all are gradually proletarianized. They seek to preserve their position in vain; they become reactionary.

  The implacable path downwards that most are compelled to take is widely shared. Nor are the well educated spared. Once they were surrounded by respect, but now the bourgeoisie has ‘converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers’.22

  The phrase ‘wage labourer’ rouses wonder: are the doctors and the others becoming proletarians? Are all wage labourers simply workers – the doctor and the dean, the lawyer and the novelist? The reader finds no answer. This is not that strange. The Manifesto depicts ongoing development but is always hurrying on ahead in the direction of what awaits in a nearer or more remote future. The perspective in time is undetermined. The tense is at once the present and the future.

  The same thing thereby also applies to the revolution that stands in focus further on in the Manifesto. It seems that the bourgeoisie’s fateful hour could strike tomorrow, but the text can equally readily be interpreted so that the great upheaval will only take place in a more far-off future when society has been transformed even more radically. The workers join together in this process, and they struggle to keep their wages up. Here and there, it leads to riots. ‘Now and then the workers are victorious, but only for a time.’ In the long run, their situation continuously worsens.

  The authors of the Manifesto are still adherents of ‘the iron law of wages’. There is nothing strange about this; the doctrine was entirely predominant at the time, especially among economists. Only later would Marx – and following him, Engels – abandon it.23

  The important thing about the workers joining together is instead that their combined forces increase, the more people are pushed down into proletarian impoverishment from development. Even their intellectual capacity is improved when people who previously found themselves higher up on the class ladder are forced to tumble down. The fact that a small part of the ruling class joins the revolutionary workers is also an advantage (and Engels must be counted among this minority).

  But the working class not only grows – it is also feminized. This fact, about which Marx only gave intimations in a few figures without notes in the Manifesto, is given a few lines of attention here. It says that men’s labour ‘is superseded’ by women’s because labour through machinery no longer requires great bodily strength. Gender and age have become inessential in general, and women and children cost less (though it is unclear why women do). ‘All are instruments of labour.’24

  The second chapter of the Manifesto, ‘Proletarians and Communists’, is shorter than the first one and contains a number of interesting points. It observes, for example, that communism does not abolish property in general, only ‘bourgeois property’ – ownership of the m
eans of production such as machinery, purchased labour, and so on. But, on the other hand, this property tends to push out all others to become the only kind. The distinction between Eigentum and Aneignung that Marx made in other texts does not appear here; perhaps it was regarded as far too subtle for a party programme. In any case, the point is that capital is not a personal, but a ‘social power’. The capitalists do not appear as concrete individuals but as bearers of the impersonal power that both supports and permeates the society where capitalism reigns.25

  In the Manifesto’s day, communists were accused of their battle against private property also being a battle against the family. Of course, the authors responded, the bourgeois family must be abolished. Only among the bourgeoisie was it fully developed. The proletarians were forced to break up their families, and prostitution was rampant in contemporary society.26

  Engels’s ‘Principles’ are much more illustrative on that point. Engels said that the relation between the sexes would become completely private and would only be the business of those it immediately concerned. Women would no longer be dependent on men, nor would children be dependent on their parents. The accusation that communists would bring women to be owned in common is levelled against bourgeois society, in which prostitution was flourishing.27

  The reason for the Manifesto’s more evasive statements can only be the subject of speculation. We know that Engels and Marx had different views on marriage in the age in which they lived. Is that why the answers are so vague in the text Marx was responsible for? Perhaps so. But we know nothing for certain.