Marxist Rhetorical Strategy in the Communist Manifesto

As a genre of literature, political manifestos have a unique set of goals. Foremost, they take ideas previously confined to the head of the author or a small circle of intellectuals and introduce them to a larger audience. This is not mere popularisation but imbuing otherwise abstract ideas with the practical purchase to animate readers.

As Karl Marx once said, “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” Political manifestos, then, are a genre of literature that succeed only when their influence leaps beyond the page.

By this criterion, the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels stands unequalled. Though I no doubt feel this way in part because it had this effect on me, it would be difficult to find a reactionary who would deny this. Indeed, the bourgeois press makes no effort to conceal its fear of ‘the spectre of Communism.’ The Communist Manifesto has had too much influence, guided too much history, for its enemies to safely disregard it; it must be contained, by condemning the whole book or burying it under platitudes that blunt its revolutionary thrust.

Contrary to claims by liberal commentators, the description of capitalism they find so praiseworthy in this book cannot, even in principle, be separated from his proposed solution. The latter is entailed by the details of the former, so only by reducing the former to banalities can the latter be written out. Therefore, these commentators halfheartedly praise Marx as the moral conscience of an era of capitalism without one, ignoring earlier figures like Robert Owen and Charles Fourier who beat Marx to decrying capitalism by decades.

The Communist Manifesto is notable for what liberal commentators deny, what conservative commentators have the common decency to acknowledge and rightfully fear. Though Marx was not the first socialist author to denounce capitalist society as unfit for human life, the first to suggest that revolutionary action will be required to abolish it, or to imagine a future beyond its confines, he was the first whose propositions on each account were logically entailed by his propositions to the others.

It was Marx who weaved socialism into a mature wissenschaft, a science. No greater insult to Marx’s legacy can be managed than the attempt by sympathetic commentators to make individual insights from the Manifesto palatable, neglecting the logical structure uniting Marx’s theory and therefore making nonsense of the whole thing.

That is not to say the science presented by the Manifesto was fully formed. Far from it, the ideas were the product of a lengthy gestation period in which Marx and Engels incrementally developed and refined their thought, a process that would continue long after the Manifesto’s initial publication. When it was republished with a new preface in

1872, Marx and Engels noted several minor ways in which their thinking had matured in the 24 years before initial publication and republication, but concede that, “the Manifesto has become a historical document which we have no longer any right to alter.”

Why return to a historical document the authors of which admitted had become dated even within their own lifetimes? Partly, it is because its publication was, as the Italian Marxist Antonio Labriola said, “our first unquestioned entrance in history.” Even if it does not represent the point at which Marxism was “finished,” it does mark the point at which Marxism arrived. For that alone it will remain of interest to those curious about the history of Marxism. But historical curiosity is not why most read the Manifesto today, nor is it why ACR has felt compelled to publish yet another edition of it.

The Manifesto remains compelling not because of what it can teach us about the past, but for what it allows us to see in the future. More than any other writing in the Marxist canon, it operationalizes Marxist theory. If praxis, the unification of theory and action, can only be achieved in the activity of organized radicals, the Manifesto nevertheless uniquely readies theory for instrumentalization. Though one can disagree with the practical ramifications of Marxist theory suggested by the Manifesto, it is impossible to deny that it demonstrates that Marxist theory has practical ramifications.

More remarkable is how the Manifesto achieves this. Many expect it to be a rousing call to action, which it is, but are surprised to find it also contains much theory too. The first chapter, Bourgeoisie and Proletarians, is concerned with the rise of capitalism, a process that was ongoing when it was written. Many commentators are taken with this chapter, if not bowled over by its effusive praise for capitalism, contained in statements like “the bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”

Far from contradicting Marx’s anti-capitalist radicalism, such statements contain its essence. For Marx, capitalism was not an arbitrary evil, a disease for which humanity needed a cure. It was a step forward in humankind’s social evolution, a step just as worth taking as will be the next towards communism. Marx’s praise for capitalism is therefore contextual; capitalism is praiseworthy insofar as it swept aside the old, staid feudal order and is, however unconsciously, paving the way for the coming communist one.

If such qualified praise for capitalism from the system’s most famous critic strikes us as curious, contemporaneous readers found it shocking. As detailed in the Manifesto’s third chapter, the socialists of Marx’s day were largely feudal nostalgics who longed for simpler times before the rise of capitalist industry. Though Marx was not without sympathy for this sentiment, he could not share it. As he argued, and as subsequent history has shown, there is no way out of capitalism but through it. The fight against capitalism must take the reality of capitalist social relations as its point of departure.

This notion, that capitalism serves as the basis for its own destruction, has produced no small number of misunderstandings, most pervasive of which is the idea that Marx was an “economic determinist.” Interpreted this way, Marxism is an authoritarian philosophy that reduces individuals to mere bearers of automatic processes. But, properly understood, this notion serves as the basis for Marxism’s most democratic contribution to socialist thought, that “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”

That is not to deny that Marxism asserts history is, in part, determined by economic factors; but, far from raising this to an absolute historical law, Marxism contends that it is a unique feature of capitalist society that the dawning communist epoch will overcome. This leads to the fascinating dialectical dynamic at the heart of Marxism, the deterministic character of revolutionary beginnings and the necessity for revolutions to develop into something more. The Communist Manifesto is brilliant for the way it embodies the dynamic Marx’s other writings only theorize about.

We are accustomed to think of freedom negatively, to conceive of it as the absence of determination. Understood this way, one must conclude that gravity is an imposition robbing us of the freedom to float in space! Marxism argues that freedom ought to be thought of differently, not as the absence of determination but as mastery over that which determines us. In other words, ‘freedom’ from gravity is not the absence of gravity, but mastery of the physics of flight. As Engels puts it in his classic Anti-Duhring, “freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.”

Were capitalism a natural necessity, then freedom from it would consist in knowledge of it, but this is not what Marxism concludes. Capitalism is not an intrinsic feature of human nature and so is not an immutable feature of human societies. Though capitalism does have an inner logic which can be understood, and this knowledge can better prepare one to act in capitalist society, capitalism is ultimately the product of something deeper, the logic of historical change. The logic of capitalism is a subset of this deeper logic, so knowledge of the former is necessary but insufficient for knowledge of the latter.

The Marxist theory of historical change is summed up by the famous thirteen words which open the Manifesto’s second chapter: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”¹ This notion, associated so strongly with Marx’s name today, was not his discovery. As he said in an 1852 letter to the American Marxist Joseph Weydemeyer, “long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic economy of the classes.” Marx was only the first not to shy from acknowledging that the only logical conclusion of such a process is the abolition of classes, communism.

Classes cannot help but conflict because conflict is itself part of what they are. Classes exist only in relation to other classes, and relations between classes are bound to cause conflict because, were two classes to have identical interests, they would cease to be distinct. While previous epochs have had various propertied classes, each vying to have their interests promoted by the political powers that be, capitalism simplified things greatly by, in the main, reducing the classes to two: the working class and capitalist class, or proletariat and bourgeoisie respectively.

Crucially, the capitalist class is the only propertied class in mature capitalist societies, and it should be noted that it is specifically class property that Marx refers to whenever he speaks of “property” in general. Class property is property that empowers its owners to participate in the social division of labour differently from those who do not own it. For instance, while both serfs and lords owned land in feudal society, only the feudal lord owned land worked by others; the serf’s land was always worked by the serf and his family.

The proletariat is unique in that it is a class defined by its lack of property. Slaves also lacked property but were regarded as property. Proletarians, however, are free citizens of society. Nevertheless, one must own something to participate in society, and what the proletariat has is its capacity to work. It sells this capacity to the capitalist class in the form of wage-labour, and it is the purchase of this labour that marks the capitalist class as unique. Self-employed small business owners are regarded as a hybrid class, since they own the property to enable them to purchase the labour power of others but do not yet have the ability to do so (or have, for whatever reason, opted not to).

If this discussion has gotten abstract, it only highlights the brilliance of the Manifesto in embodying these ideas while it expresses them. It discusses these ideas only insofar as Marx found them useful in furthering his main theme of working-class self-activity and revolution, a choice itself reflective of the ideas. After all, Marx is not attempting to communicate abstract theories of historical change to his readers, but to ready them to participate in the process; that he considers some knowledge of these theories necessary for that purpose, however, is telling.

More telling is the conspicuous absence from the Manifesto of any detailed discussion of what communist society might look like, a theme which almost exclusively occupied previous socialist writers (and, indeed, has occupied the writings of subsequent non-Marxist socialists). Instead, Marx focuses on how capitalist society works, the changes it has brought about, and how those changes might be exploited by the working-class for its purposes. It is not the place for philosophers to theorize about what a future society might look like, hoping to persuade others to realize it in practice; determining the shape the future will take is a profoundly collective, democratic responsibility.

These two features of the Manifesto are deeply intertwined. Working-class revolutionaries must understand how historical change occurs precisely because it is the working-class who must be responsible for it.² Marx did not decry political leadership, as some anarchists do today, but the line between the political leadership and the rank-and-file must be narrowed. If communism is ever to be “an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” such associations must be developed in the revolutionary process itself. Freedom, after all, cannot be decreed from above.

This is the feature of the Manifesto that has allowed it to retain its power two centuries after it was published. Countless manifestos have been written since the publication of the Communist Manifesto, but their influence has been so marginal the Communist Manifesto is often referred to simply as the Manifesto, even by its enemies. It has achieved a level of ubiquity normally reserved, ironically, for brands like Coca-Cola and Kleenex.

Where other manifestos attempt to rile their readers up and rally them behind a cause, the Manifesto succeeds because it goes further. It attempts not only to persuade readers of a set of ideas, but to invite them to participate in a story.

The story is the class struggle now playing out between the capitalist and proletarian classes, and it is a story that will carry on with or without the reader. The Manifesto did not seek to conjure a movement from thin air by sheer persuasive power, but to engage with a process it regarded as independent, the class struggle, and encourage its proletarian participants to pursue this to its logical conclusion, the abolition of class. It is a call for the presumably proletarian reader to play a noble, even heroic role in the tale it describes and which the reader, through their own experiences, knows to be ongoing.

In an era defined by rising fascism and looming climate catastrophe, it is tempting to think so old a text can have little to say worth hearing, but sales spike at the outbreak of every new wave of mass discontent for a reason. Despite not foreseeing our present moment, the Communist Manifesto speaks to it in a way little else does. Many books attempt to propose ideal solutions to the world’s problems, but the Manifesto alone recognizes the only way out is a “self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.” Only we have the power to save ourselves; we have only to recognize it.

1. Engels added an important qualification in an 1885 footnote, clarifying that this statement applied only to “all written history,” an addendum necessitated by the findings of pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 book Ancient Society. According to Morgan, pre-civilizational communities had been without class, and so without class-struggle. This finding, therefore, modified the Marxist theory only to strengthen it.

2 This is the essence of Marx’s famous but enigmatic 11th thesis on Feuerbach, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.” Strictly speaking, this thesis is nonsense, as the most famous philosopher of all, Plato, detailed his ideal society in The Republic and advocated for its realization. For Marx, however, this still amounts to interpretation, because it is an ideal that arose from contemplation. Marx was not the first to advocate social change as such, but to see it as a greater historical process in which one could only play a part, not override.

Marxist Rhetorical Strategy in the Communist Manifesto