Few political pamphlets have travelled as far, or lasted as long, as The Communist Manifesto. Published in London in February 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it is a short work that can be read in a single sitting, yet it became the founding text of a movement that shaped politics, economics, trade unions, revolutions and wars for the next 175 years. Its power does not come from length or from detailed policy. It comes from a clear story about how society had changed, who had gained from that change, who had paid for it, and what the people who paid for it might do next. Marx and Engels wanted readers to see modern industry not as a natural or permanent order, but as a recent historical development with a beginning and, in their view, an end. Once readers accepted that society had been transformed before, they could imagine it being transformed again.
A spectre is haunting Europe
The Manifesto opens with one of the most famous sentences in political writing: a spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism. Marx and Engels were pointing to a paradox their first readers would have recognised at once. Conservative governments, liberal newspapers, churches and rival socialists all spoke about communism, often with alarm, yet few had read a clear statement of what communists actually proposed. The authors present their pamphlet as an answer to that confusion, a public declaration of aims and principles by the Communist League, the small international organisation that commissioned the work. Europe in 1848 was a continent of monarchies, empires, restricted voting rights and censorship, on the edge of revolutions that broke out in France, the German states, Italy and the Habsburg lands in the months after publication. The authors did not claim to have caused those upheavals, but argued that political crises expressed deeper changes in how goods were produced and who controlled production.
Bourgeoisie and proletariat
The first section of the Manifesto, on bourgeois and proletarians, gives the book its central pair of characters. The bourgeoisie, in Marx and Engels’s use of the term, are the owners of the means of production, the factories, mills, mines, railways and trading firms that made industrial society run. The proletariat are the wage workers who own little beyond their capacity to work and who must sell that capacity in order to live. The authors argue that the bourgeoisie had played a revolutionary part in history by breaking up feudal ties, guild restrictions and local markets and by creating a world market, large-scale industry and modern cities. They praise that energy, even as they insist that it came at a human cost and created new forms of insecurity. As production grows, they say, work becomes more routine, wages are pressed down, and workers are brought together in factories and towns where they can compare conditions and organise. Whether or not a reader accepts the prediction that follows, the framing has proved durable, turning a familiar gap between owners and workers into a theory of history with a direction and a possible ending.
The ten-point program
The second section, on proletarians and communists, is where the argument becomes practical. Having distinguished communists from other socialists and reformers, Marx and Engels set out ten measures as first steps in a revolution in several advanced countries, with the warning that they would look different in different places. The measures include the abolition of property in land, a heavy progressive income tax, the abolition of inheritance, the centralisation of credit and transport in the hands of the state, the extension of state-owned factories, an obligation for all to work, the combination of agriculture and manufacturing, and free public education for children. Read today, the list is best treated as a historical document. Some proposals, such as progressive taxation and free public schooling, later became common in democratic states that were not communist at all. Others remained far more radical. Its value lies in what it reveals about priorities: land, credit, communication, education and work itself were, for the authors, the levers through which a society could be remade.
Listening to the audiobook
The audiobook that accompanies this chapter lets the listener hear the structure of that argument as a whole, rather than in quotations lifted from it. The recording follows the Manifesto through its four sections, from the history of class struggle in the first section, through the statement of principles and the ten measures in the second, to the critical survey of other socialist literature in the third and the discussion of communist tactics in the fourth. Hearing the sections in order makes the movement of the argument clear, because the pamphlet is not a collection of slogans but a chain in which each part depends on the one before it. Listening also brings out the tone often lost in short extracts. The Manifesto is urgent and polemical, but it is also a work of history and economics, and its authors spend as much time describing the rise of the bourgeoisie as they do attacking it. For a book written to be read aloud, discussed in meetings and carried in a pocket, the recording returns it to that setting.
Why a short pamphlet endured
The Manifesto endured because its central claim, that economic change drives political change and that workers have interests in common across national borders, could be adapted to very different places and times. In the decades after 1848, trade unions, socialist parties and labour movements took up its language even when they disagreed with its call for revolution. In the twentieth century, revolutions and states in Russia, China and elsewhere claimed its authority, often in ways Marx and Engels could not have foreseen and that their later interpreters disputed fiercely. Its influence cannot be measured only by governments that called themselves Marxist. It can also be seen in labour law, in the history of political parties, in economics and in the vocabulary of class, exploitation and solidarity that entered ordinary language. That long afterlife explains why the pamphlet is still contested, and why its closing appeal, workers of the world, unite, remains a rallying cry for some and a warning for others.
In it we find Marx and Engel’s rehearsal of the idea that Capital has stolen away the work of the artisan and peasant by building up factories to produce goods cheaply. The efficiency of Capital depends, then, on the wage laborers who staff the factories and how little they will accept in order to have work. This concentrates power and money in a Bourgeois class that profits from the disunity of workers (Proletarians), who only receive a subsistence wage. (Cont’d below)…- – – — READ along by clicking the Captions/Transcript button (CC).- Listen to the entire book for free! Chapters & timestamps Section I: Bourgeois and Proletarians – 00:00:00 Section II: Proletarians and Communists – 00:36:00 “Abolition of the Family” “The 10 Pillars of Communism” 1) Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2) A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3) Abolition of all right of inheritance. 4) Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5) Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6) Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7) Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8) Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9) Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country. 10) Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c. Section III: Socialist & Communist Literature – 00:59:14 Section IV: Position of the Communists in Relation to the Various Existing Opposition Parties – 01:23:54 – – – -(Cont’d) If workers unite in a class struggle against the bourgeois, using riot and strikes as weapons, they will eventually overthrow the bourgeois and replace them as a ruling class. Communists further believe in and lay out a system of reforms to transform into a classless, stateless society, thus distinguishing themselves from various flavors of Socialism, which would be content to have workers remain the ruling class after the revolution. The Manifesto caused a huge amount of discussion for its support for a forcible overthrow of the existing politics and society. (Summary by Mark F. Smith)