A World to Win

by Sven-Eric Liedman

  On the other hand, both the original and the final Manifesto are equally unambiguous as regards upbringing and education: they will become a common affair. The accusation that communism would destroy eternal values such as freedom and justice is emphatically dismissed. The coming upheaval would cast off ‘certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms’.28 But this statement also lacks clarity, and above all gives rise to a number of questions. Even after the revolution, people will be conscious beings – but what will then fill their consciousness? We are given no information about it.

  Another question is even more pressing: What are the ideas that engage those opposing contemporary society? Where do they get their ideas and ideals from? They are obviously borne by a passion that has its roots in the distant past. Ideas of resistance turned against the reigning power can be traced back for millennia. No one knew that better than Marx himself, whose lifelong ideal was Prometheus, defier of the gods.

  What will remain of this after the revolution? Would Prometheus and the eternal spirit of revolt he stood for lose their urgency? Would Aeschylus, Shakespeare, and Goethe sink into an indifferent past? Would Balzac’s depictions of a cynical social apparatus that bred careerists and losers become only a curiosity?

  In other texts both before and later, Marx made use of Hegel’s key concept of Aufhebung – sublation – which meant that something was both abolished and raised to a higher level. In that case, the best of the inherited culture would certainly lose its earlier, class-based meanings but at the same time be refined and deepened.

  Perhaps Marx had found these thoughts entirely too complicated for a text that was supposed to be read and understood by everyone. But the consequence was that society after the revolution only appeared as a total contrast to the world Marx and Engels were living in. It was otherwise featureless. Everything would be good, yes – but how?

  The unsurpassed depiction in the first chapter of capitalist society is succeeded by a second chapter that produces more questions than answers. Greater clarity only makes an appearance with a ten-point programme on what the communist party wanted to achieve. The list, which modifies but in all essentials agrees with its counterpart in Engels’s ‘Principles’, contains everything from the expropriation of landed property, equal obligation for everyone to work, and the centralization of the transport system in the hands of the state to free public education of all children and strongly progressive taxation. On a few points, the enumeration of the Manifesto diverges from the one Engels stood for. It is perhaps telling that Engels was satisfied with heavy taxation of inheritances, whereas the final version – the one Marx wrote – simply demands that the right of inheritance be abolished. Engels’s idea for a large palace where residence and work would be combined, and industry and agriculture meet, also disappeared.29

  But all these measures, whether in the one version or the other, are simply steps on the road towards a future society – the one only described through a series of negations: it is classless, without exploitation and without the kind of morals born out of the rule of one class over all the others. Medieval philosophy spoke of a via negativa, a road to knowledge that ran through negations. Marx and Engels embarked upon the same road, but in an entirely different area.

  One reason for their reticence on the society of the future is the fear of fancifully depicted utopias that were prevalent at the time, which both Marx and Engels had been attracted to not so long ago. That fear, which at the same time contained a great fascination, found expression in the third chapter of the Manifesto, which deals with various kinds of socialist and communist literature. There was a model here in Engels as well, but in comparison the difference with the final version in the Manifesto is great. Equally as strong as the first chapter, it bears the obvious stamp of Marx’s singular style of writing with its coruscating details.30

  The description begins with the one furthest from the Manifesto’s own standpoint, namely what is here called ‘Feudal Socialism’. In this variant, capitalism is criticized for having broken feudal social bonds and also for having called forth a revolutionary proletariat. There are crucial similarities between this kind of socialism and Christianity, and Marx is not surprised: ‘Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the state? Has it not preached in place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burning of the aristocrat.’31

  ‘Petty-Bourgeois Socialism’ is treated with greater sympathy, even identifying a hero: the Swiss political economist and historian Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi. Sismondi, who was born in 1773 and died in 1842, belonged to a different generation than Marx. He had been influenced by Adam Smith, but objected to the passion of Smith and other economists for constant growth. Humanity, not production, should be at the centre. The current system bred constant crises and created poverty for the many in society. Sismondi’s ideal was, rather, a system in which smallholders and petty bourgeois could live a good, secure, and relatively equal life.32

  In the following section, Marx and Engels drew nearer to themselves, or rather their own development. The subject is ‘German, or “True”, Socialism’. This, the authors said, was the inevitable result when German philosophers and scholars met French socialist and communist literature. France had undergone the bourgeois revolution that the Germans still had before them, which is why the Germans would devote themselves to ‘interests of Human Nature, of Man in general, who belongs to no class, has no reality, who exists only in the misty realm of philosophical fantasy’.33

  The criticism is ruthless. But Marx, with good reason, had to count himself among the Germans who had begun their wanderings towards socialism and communism with ideas about the essence of humanity and its alienation. The chief expression for this entire stigmatized literary genre is and remains the Manuscripts. The world did not yet know about them.

  Proudhon, once the object of Marx’s admiration, was dismissed under the heading of ‘Conservative, or Bourgeois Socialism’. Once again, it was his book on the philosophy of poverty that was being pilloried. Proudhon’s dream, Marx says, was a bourgeoisie without the proletariat. It is a crushing judgement, but not a fair one. Proudhon’s ideal society was a society in which no one lived in misery or was subjected to oppression.34

  More positive is the description of ‘Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism’. Of all the sections in the chapter, this is the one that likely had the greatest influence. It was through this section that the term ‘utopian socialism’ became a natural component of the political vocabulary. Saint-Simon, Owen, and Fourier have been branded with this term. They were utopians. They built castles in the air.

  The reader who has only this idea about them will certainly be surprised that the picture being painted here has such praise. The early socialist and communist systems certainly belonged to a time when the proletariat was still in an immature stage of its development. The path to liberation lay in the darkness. Fourier and the others were not prepared to pursue any politics – least of all anything revolutionary – but were inspired instead to various experiments with miniature societies that were doomed to fail.

  But this kind of socialism or communism was not only utopian. It was critical as well. The word critical has a central place in Marx’s vocabulary, as it had during his entire Young Hegelian period, and in other respects in the entire tradition from Kant. Being critical did not mean simply being negative. Someone developing criticism in Marx’s meaning illuminates an object or a phenomenon so that its anatomy and method of functioning are exposed. Critical analysis thereby opens the path for a programme of action.

  The Manifesto says that authors in the tradition of Saint-Simon and Fourier ‘attack every principle of existing society’ and that they thereby ‘are full of the most valuable materials f
or the enlightenment of the working class’. What they say about the future society, on the other hand, is to be regarded as pure utopianism – for example that the antithesis between town and country is to be abolished, that the institution of the family is to be dissolved, and that the state alone will administer production.35

  There is much to say about this brief text. As regards the elements pointed out as purely utopian, their counterparts can be glimpsed in several texts by both Marx and Engels – in fact, even in other parts of the Manifesto (at least concerning marriage). The utopianism in them must be attributed to the lack of concrete ideas about how all these new things would be realized. The authors of the Manifesto pointed out in particular that the critical utopians had had no idea of the crucial significance of the class struggle.

  It is also worth noting that the nuanced assessment of the critical utopians had no counterpart in Engels’s ‘Principles’. It was Marx’s point of view that found expression in these pages. Only he could also write a sentence like this: ‘They still dream of experimental realisation of their social Utopias, of founding isolated “phalanstères”, of establishing “Home Colonies”, of setting up “Little Icaria” – duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem This lingering dream turned the followers of Fourier and the others into reactionaries who turned their backs on the rapid development of recent years, instead dreaming of the time when their teachers lived and worked.

  These crushing formulations appear all the more acerbic knowing that the 1840s saw an unprecedented number of small-scale social experiments. Many people, particularly in France, dreamed of realizing Étienne Cabet’s ideal society of Icaria. Phalanstères sprang up in many quarters, especially in the New World. Owen’s ideal society, New Lanark, still stood in Scotland and inspired many. The second- and third-generation followers of ‘the Critical-Utopian Socialists and Communists’ were real competitors of the communist movement that Marx and Engels were part of constructing.

  These movements are the subject of the very last pages of the Manifesto. The authors mention developments in a series of different countries. The account is quite succinct, and the main attention is directed towards Germany because ‘that country [was] on the eve of a bourgeois revolution’. That revolution is particularly significant because it would take place at a higher level of development than the analogous upheavals in seventeenth-century England and eighteenth-century France. The proletariat had already managed to go farther than the workers in both of the other times and places.

  There and everywhere, the communists wanted to make common cause with other democratic forces. But they did not conceal their goal: a society that could only be created ‘by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions’. The proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains. They had ‘a world to win’. That is why they had to unite, wherever on earth they were located.36

  The Time of Revolts

  The Manifesto was published in late February 1848. Its triumphal march did not begin immediately. Quite the opposite – the pamphlet long remained largely unnoticed. Only decades later did it become an important introduction, not only to Marx’s view of society and political programmes but also to socialism and communism in general.

  But a series of translations of the pamphlet were published during its first few years. Marx and Engels spoke proudly of them in the preface to the new German edition, published in 1872. The enumeration concluded with information about a Danish translation.37 But that was a mistake – the translation was Swedish and done by Pär Götrek, an eccentric bookseller who early on introduced socialist and communist ideas to Sweden. It is possible that he had help from a few journeymen with experiences from the rebellious metropolises of the Continent. The translation had the placid title Kommunismens röst (The Voice of Communism), and it replaced the militant ‘Working men of all countries…’ in the original with the somewhat more stylish but still deeply controversial motto ‘Folks röst är Guds röst’ (The voice of the people is the voice of God). These words had tradition on their side, at least; ultimately, they go back to Hesiod, the oldest named Greek poet, who in his Works and Days asserted that even the speech of common people is divine in its way.38

  The first English translation appeared in 1850. It was done by Helen Macfarlane, a Scottish Chartist, journalist, and philosopher, and was published in four parts in George Julian Harney’s newspaper Red Republican. Macfarlane had a splendid knowledge of German philosophy, especially as regards Hegel. Marx esteemed her highly and was indignant when she was treated poorly by Harney. She was ‘the only collaborator on his insignificant little rag who really has any ideas. On his rag, a rara avis.’ Macfarlane’s translation is lively and imaginative. In her version, the famous first line runs: ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.’39

  But in the year 1848, it was rather quiet regarding the Manifesto. Nor did Marx have time to reflect particularly much on the pamphlet that had just come out into print. It so happened that revolution – the revolution he had just written of in advance – broke out in Paris as the Manifesto was leaving the printing presses. The events in Paris came as no great surprise. The year 1847 had been a difficult one in Europe, with crises in all major branches of industry and financial troubles. The convulsions actually began in Italy, but there it was a question of liberation from foreign powers. In Sicily they wanted to get rid of the Spanish, and in Lombardy the Austrians.

  Nonetheless it was Paris that everyone expected to revolt; it was the capital of the European revolutionaries. It had been clear for some time that something was brewing. Oppositional forces had arranged a long series of mass meetings masqueraded as banquets; dissatisfaction with the current regime, with Louis Philippe – the ‘Pear King’ – at its head, was great and well articulated.

  When the government forbid a banquet planned for 21 February, unrest grew rapidly; barricades were raised and street battles were fought, and after only a few days – on the 24th – Guizot, the head of government, gave the battle up for lost. The king fled across the Channel to Great Britain. Alphonse de Lamartine, a Romantic poet and also an experienced diplomat and dedicated liberal, proclaimed the Second Republic the day after. The provisional government now formed was made up of a motley collection of men from right to left, united only by certain ideals about freedoms and rights – something that found expression in a number of important reforms, for example the introduction of freedom of the press and abolition of slavery in the colonies.40

  Marx, of course, was full of enthusiasm for the revolution. He wrote a congratulatory letter to Paris on behalf of the democratic association, at the same time asking permission to travel to the new France.41 A few days later, on 1 March 1848, he had the pleasure of receiving a letter from Ferdinand Flocon, one of the members in the new provisional government, welcoming him to Paris. It was a great turn of events, and Jenny Marx was even more delighted, if that can be imagined. Much later, in her grand but incomplete memoirs from 1865, ‘Short Sketch of an Eventful Life’, she could depict this feeling of triumph: ‘Paris again lay open to us. And where else could we recover our spirits than under the rising sun of the new revolution? We had to go there, simply had to!’ Dorthin, hiess es, dorthin, as it was in the original German, sounds even more jubilant.42

  But Brussels would not let either Jenny or Karl go without harassment. Its leaders feared Belgium would also see its own 1848. The same wave of changes that brought Louis Philippe to power in France in 1830 had made Belgium independent and Léopold I its king. Would Belgian rebels now create a republic like the French one, thereby destroying the right-wing bourgeois regime? Faced with such prospects, Karl Marx – with his rapidly growing revolutionary network – was a dangerous figure. To top it all off, he had received a part of the inheritance from his father and, according to him, he had immediately donated the money to the movement he himself was now leading. So he was thrown into prison, and the same fate befell Jenny. Jenny depict
ed the familiar course of events: Late one evening, two men broke into the Marx family’s residence and took Karl away. Jenny sought help among her acquaintances but was also arrested and thrown into a dark cell among beggars and prostitutes. The next morning, she was interrogated for two hours before she was released. Karl was also released on the promise to leave the country within twenty-four hours.

  Karl described what he himself, Jenny, and others had to endure while the memory of the events was still fresh. He had been treated roughly; even worse, his friend Wilhelm Wolff had taken a fist to the eye, was spat on in the face, kicked, and severely humiliated. In an article in the Parisian newspaper La Réforme, Marx was particularly indignant over what Jenny had to endure. Her only crime, he explained, consisted of the fact that ‘although belonging to the Prussian aristocracy, she shares the democratic opinions of her husband’.43

  In Paris, however, the family’s happiness was short-lived. The French example inspired Germans to place demands on their government. A wave of rebellions had begun on 27 February with the ‘Mannheim Popular Assembly’ (die Mannheimer Volksversammlung) where the crucial March Demands were set. Their gist was freedom of the press and the establishment of a popular army instead of the career army that was completely controlled by the kings and princes of the various states. An all-German parliament was also called to begin functioning immediately. The demands were quickly accepted in state after state, but the traditional rulers were not willing to give up their positions of power; the inevitable result was a revolution. Almost immediately it was called the ‘March Revolution’, and it naturally roused great hopes among the many German exiles in Paris and other cities. A large group wanted to take immediate action in the spirit of Wilhelm Weitling, in the hopes of stirring the masses to a mighty popular rebellion. Marx, like Engels, adopted a completely negative attitude towards this type of spontaneous, half-military action. His conviction that the German states still had to undergo a bourgeois revolution first, expressed so starkly in the Manifesto, was not shaken by these dramatic events.