SOURCE: Randall, Francis B. “Introduction: Marx the Romantic.” In The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, translated by Samuel Moore, edited by Joseph Katz, pp. 8-41. New York: Washington Square Press, 1964.

[In the following excerpt, originally written in 1963, Randall explores the Romantic influences on both Marx and The Communist Manifesto, with special focus on Marx's experience and a close reading of the first two chapters of the Manifesto.]

Early in 1848 there were no communist states in the world and no revolutionary governments of any sort. There was no Communist party in our sense and no revolutionary organizations or even trade unions of any size. A few countries of northwest Europe and a few areas of the United States were industrializing rapidly, but there was no city in the world—even London—much bigger than two million people, and no state—even Great Britain—in which a majority of the people did not live in the country and farm for a living. Every country in the world—except the Americas and Switzerland—was a monarchy of some sort, and in most of them the king, emperor, tsar, or sultan ruled absolutely and without any formal check. Even in free America there were millions of slaves, and even in free Great Britain most men were too poor to qualify for the vote. No woman in the civilized world—save possibly Queen Victoria—was fully and legally free from control by father, husband, or some other man. Every country was what we would now call “backward,” and way over ninety per cent of the world's population lived in what we would call horrible and unendurable poverty—1848 was very long ago.

Into this now vanished world Karl Marx was born in 1818, in the western German city of Treves (Trier), which still boasts of the finest Roman ruins in northern Europe. Treves then belonged to Prussia, the second most powerful of the many independent German states, and the most efficient reactionary police tyranny in Europe. Marx always detested the Prussian regime. He renounced his Prussian citizenship while still in his twenties, and spent most of his life in exile, wanted by the Prussian police.

The Marxes were a Jewish family; both father and mother had come from families of rabbis. But Marx's father, educated in the anti-religious atmosphere of the late eighteenth-century Enlightenment, gave up Judaism and the Jewish community, and became a lawyer and a Prussian official. Eventually, when Karl Marx was six, his father had himself and his whole family baptized as Lutherans not because he admired Luther or believed in Jesus, but to save his career in what was officially Lutheran Prussia, although Treves itself was a Catholic city.

An enormous amount of nonsense has been written about Marx because he was born into a Jewish family. He was never taught much about Judaism or Jewish life, and he was proud of his ignorance. He was often twitted and sneered at in his youth for being Jewish, but he never suffered much when he was young or later from the prevailing anti-Semitism, either in his career, or, so far as we can tell, in his psyche. He had few Jewish friends. He wrote a fair amount about the Jews of Europe, always regarding Judaism as a stupid superstition, and the Jews as a community caught in the vise of capitalism from which only the revolution could free them. He adopted from his Christian neighbors the habit of calling ideas and people he did not like “dirty-Jewish” whether they were Jewish or not, and when he really hated someone (for instance, Ferdinand Lassalle, a man of Jewish origin who became the greatest German socialist and trade union leader in the 1860's), Marx would call him a “dirty Jew of Negro blood.” Marx was not really a Jew. Hitler thought that communism was one vast Jewish plot, citing as proof the “fact” that Marx was Jewish. But Hitler was crazy, and other anti-Communists would do well to avoid this mode of thought.

Other kinds of nonsense are written by people who know that Marx, in spite of his family background, was not really Jewish. One often reads that Marx was cut off from European society by being Jewish, and from Jewish society by no longer being Jewish, and that he was able to fathom the future socialist society because he was thus alienated from his own. One often reads that Marx had the moral indignation of a Hebrew prophet because of his Jewish background, that he was concerned with human happiness in this world rather than in the next because of his Jewish background, and that he was given to fierce self-righteousness, absolute dogmatism, and violent abusiveness because of his Jewish background. People who believe such things are usually at a loss to explain why most denouncers of the evils of early industrialism were of Christian origin, as were most socialists, and why most Christian intellectuals of the day also expressed themselves in strong terms. Marx was far outdone in alienation, in wrathful denunciation, and in dogmatic abusiveness by such sons of Christian noblemen as Mikhail Bakunin and Vladimir Lenin. Marx's Jewish background is not the key to Marx.

Marx's father wanted his son to become a lawyer like himself, and sent him through the best schools in Treves, and then, in 1835, to study law at the University of Bonn. The University was something of a country club, and young Marx joined the other students in drinking, brawling, scarring each other in dueling games, piling up debts, and joining “subversive” (i.e., politically liberal) clubs. Old Marx in disgust transferred his son to the University of Berlin, which had a justified reputation for a more intellectual faculty and student body—much as an American father, a generation ago, might have transferred his son from Princeton or Williams to Columbia. By and large, it worked. Young Marx stayed at Berlin until 1841, studying law and philosophy, and he became as heavy an intellectual as any father could have wished. In one respect it did not work. Young Marx became increasingly and incurably subversive, but his father died in 1838 before he became fully aware of his son's political bent.

The intellectual world in which Marx formed his mind was one of the most complicated of any in the history of humanity. Marx belonged to the third generation of the great Romantic current in European thought and culture. Romanticism, like the other important abstract nouns in the history of culture, is not a term to be defined but a field to be explored. To most Americans today, the word “romantic” implies sentimental love stories and swashbuckling adventure tales of the Hollywood type. There were plenty of those in the Romantic age, but the term is used by historians in many broader senses. A grim realistic novel by Balzac was just as Romantic in its way as a romance by Sir Walter Scott. There were Romantic plays and poems as well as stories, Romantic painting and sculpture, Romantic architecture and music—all familiar enough. But there were also Romantic politics, Romantic history, Romantic religion, Romantic philosophy, and Romantic science—in fact, every human activity could be conducted Romantically.

It is difficult to find anything common to all the aspects of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European (and American) culture that historians call Romantic. A great deal of Romanticism involved the cultivation of human emotions, especially love, but also exalted joy and profound melancholy, youthful protest, delight in struggle, artistic sensibility, and many more. On public questions, a Romantic might pursue a liberal or radical course inspired by the French Revolution, or he might react conservatively against it. In either case, he would probably be much concerned with his people or nation, its characteristics, its history, its folklore and folk arts. In the natural sciences or the social sciences, a Romantic would usually be concerned with tracing the history, development, and progress of the stars, the earth, plants and animals, man, a nation, a social institution—in short, he would be concerned with evolution, one of the key Romantic ideas. Romantic philosophers often emphasized the evolution of the world and human society. Many Romantics participated in the revival of religion in the early nineteenth century, usually a private and emotional religion. In the arts and in literature, Romantics usually reacted against the many rules and restraints of the French Classical culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in favor of their own national traditions, of freer forms, and of greater emotional expression.

Most Romantics were concerned with some small individual part of the world, a poet with some of his own emotions, a scientist with a few specimens in his laboratory, but the more ambitious Romantics tried to build up vast philosophical or scientific systems to describe the evolution of the universe and the nature of man (e.g., Hegel's philosophy), or vast artistic syntheses to express the emotional life and predicament of man (e.g., Wagner's operas). Obviously no one Romantic personality could combine all the currents mentioned above in himself, least of all Marx. The mature Marx would have angrily denied that he was a Romantic, for he used the term in a narrower sense to denote and abuse a number of emotional, religious, and mushy-headed men he despised. He called himself a scientific philosopher and a scientific socialist. For all that, it is fair and useful to call Marx's science, philosophy, and socialism a Romantic science, philosophy, and socialism. Marx was the greatest of the high Romantic ideologists of the mid-nineteenth century, just as his contemporary, Wagner, was the greatest of the high Romantic composers, and just as another contemporary, Darwin, was the greatest of the high Romantic scientists. Marxists would still deny this heatedly, but a less partisan observer can perhaps see that Marx will always be misunderstood unless he is set against the background of his own Europe of the high Romantic age.

In his years at the University of Berlin, Marx became imbued with the following convictions that were not necessarily Romantic in themselves, but which, taken together, and taken in the peculiar emotional way of young men in Marx's day were Romantic: He came to believe that all the various sciences and philosophies were part of one over-arching system, which, when completed, would give a true and total picture of the universe and man. (The Romantics had transformed this faith, which they had inherited from their scientific predecessors.) He came to believe that the core of such a science and philosophy was the growth, development, progress, and evolution of the world, human society, and the individual, particularly the mechanism by which such evolution took place. He came to believe that nature and man evolve according to certain inexorable scientific laws, whose working out can be embodied but not opposed by even the greatest men, such as Napoleon. Marx and his fellow students found the most thorough statement of these views in the works of the then recently deceased philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, but they were by no means all straightforward disciples of Hegel.

Unlike Hegel, Marx came to believe that there was no God. He even spent some time trying vainly to prove that Hegel had also been an atheist. He became sure that Europe was trembling on the edge of reaction and revolution, that existing societies were dark, cruel, tense, and unstable, and that most of mankind was ground down, unhappy, of divided mind, disaffected from society, and cut off from its own true nature. This was the unfortunate condition that Marx and his contemporaries called man's alienation. Such convictions were a variety of radical Romanticism, which in the Germanies was called Left Hegelianism.

Having become a radical, Marx was in no mood to take up the practice of law in reactionary Prussia when he left the University of Berlin. Instead, he became a radical journalist. Early in 1842 he joined the staff of a liberal newspaper in Cologne, the Rheinische Zeitung. By the end of the year the twenty-four-year-old Marx was made editor-in-chief. Five months later, in 1843, the radicalism and venom of Marx's editorials provoked the Prussian police into suppressing the whole paper. At this point Marx finally got around to marrying his fiancée of long standing, Jenny von Westphalen, a childhood neighbor of his in Treves, who came from a family of Lutheran officials and was four years older than himself. The couple moved from their homeland forever, first to Paris for four years, where Marx tried not very successfully to make a living at journalism and other writing.

During 1843 and 1844, Marx was acquiring, through his reading, another set of convictions that was to be crucial to his future doctrine. He was absorbing the books of Malthus, Ricardo, and other British economists of the earlier Romantic period. Marx accepted much of their economic analysis, but disagreed wholly with their Romantic pessimism and their Romantic reactionary political judgments of the workingmen. Instead, Marx was led to choose the industrial workingmen (for whom he adopted, Romantically, a term out of ancient Roman history, the “proletarians”) as the key to the future development of society, as the great Romantic cause of his life.

In the last generation, scholars such as Professor Sidney Hook of New York University and Professor Leonard Krieger of Yale have shown that Marx's ideas during 1843 and 1844 were exceedingly interesting and complex, and much more broad-minded and attractive to our ways of thinking than his later dogmatic obsession with proletarian revolution. More recently a New York psychoanalyst named Erich Fromm has written a curious and unconvincing book on Marx that has dwelt on this early period in an attempt to show that Marx was really a kind of existentialist sage like his Danish contemporary Kierkegaard, and that Marx was chiefly concerned with the sick divided souls of men, with their revulsion and alienation from their work and their lives. Marx, in this view, hit on revolution chiefly as a therapeutic means to heal the sick souls of the working class and the rest of humanity. If this is so, then the world has been long deceived.

By the end of 1844, Marx had established his lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels. Engels was born in 1820 in Barmen, Prussia, a town just south of the then developing industrial district of the Ruhr. His father, a tyrannical Calvinist, was a manufacturer who owned cotton mills near the Ruhr and in England. Young Engels became converted to radicalism during a brief stay at the University of Berlin in 1841. His father at once dispatched him to England to learn the textile business. Engels learned it, and with it he learned of the grim life led by English workers in the early days of the industrial revolution. He also acquired an Irish factory girl, Mary Burns, as a mistress. He never married, but stayed with her over twenty years until her death. Engels' relationship to Mary Burns, during the height of the Victorian age, alienated him from society far more than communism could have. Since Marx and Engels discussed all projects together, even when they did not actually write a piece together, it is often hard to sort out their respective contributions. But everyone, starting with Engels himself, has judged that Marx had the more striking and original mind of the two.

During the middle 1840's, Marx and/or Engels produced a number of works in which they depicted the ghastly condition of the growing working class, engaged in vigorous debates with other radicals, and began to set forth their own version of what they called “communism” in the 1840's, which has usually been called “socialism” since 1850. Today one can usually tell the difference between the Socialist and Communist parties of any given country. Although attempts have been made to distinguish between socialism with a small s and communism with a small c—often by saving the term “communism” to indicate a more radical, more violent, or more evolved stage of “socialism”—the two words have usually been used overlappingly if not interchangeably. Attempts at formal definition, such as the old chestnut that “socialism is the public ownership of means of production, distribution, and exchange,” break up on the rocks of divergent common usage.

No matter what the definition, it is clear that the socialist movement arose in the Romantic age, and is one of the major Romantic legacies to the twentieth century. The hundreds of millions of people who have called themselves Socialists and/or Communists have all believed that the system of private property they knew—whether it was in industrial capital, piles of money, landed estates, serfs, or slaves—was wrong, and that the consequent inequality between the rich and the poor was wrong, and that any exploitation of one human being by another was wrong. This highly Romantic sense of social wrong, and the consequent highly Romantic drive toward social justice, which Marx and Engels shared to a high degree, are the ethical and emotional bases of any socialist movement.

Virtually all socialists have subscribed to a characteristically Romantic solution to these social problems: to end all or much private property; to turn the land, the factories, and the banks, at least, over to the community. Beyond these essentials, socialists disagree among themselves. There is a clear distinction between the religious socialists and the atheist socialists, who are the majority. There is another clear distinction between socialists who want to accomplish their aims by peaceful political means, and those who are willing to engage in violent revolution. Some socialists want to turn private property over to national or international governments; others (including most Russian socialists up to 1917) want to turn private property over to small decentralized social units, co-operatives or village communes. Some socialists want to establish a libertarian democracy soon after the revolution; others insist on a long period of dictatorship for the sake of political consolidation and economic buildup.

Marx and Engels were atheist socialists who urged violent revolution to be followed by a brief “dictatorship of the proletariat” in the course of which much private property would be turned over to the government. Marx furthermore insisted that his was the only scientific socialism, based not on wishful thinking but on the inexorable laws of nature and history, which would drive men toward socialism no matter what anybody or everybody thought, felt, or did. These classifications are difficult because almost all socialist groups take their doctrines so seriously that they deny the name of socialism—and all honorable intention—to all rival socialist groups.

In 1847, while Marx was calling most other socialist thinkers in Europe “dirty Jews of Negro blood,” he was kicked out of Paris and France by the French police, in order to please the Prussian police. He moved to Brussels, and then to London to join Engels. Throughout the 1840's they had been involved with one or another miniscule group of socialist intellectuals and/or workingmen. In 1847 they were most interested in the Communist League, an allegedly international group of workingmen, chiefly composed of exiled German intellectuals. They attended a minute congress of this League in London in November, 1847—indeed they dominated it. They had themselves commissioned to draw up a complete theoretical and practical party program. The Communist League lasted only long enough to see some of its members railroaded to prison in 1852 by the Prussian police. But the program of Marx and Engels, which was printed in German and published February, 1848, in London, has survived as the first definitive statement of their variety of socialism. Their program—The Communist Manifesto—has become the most widely read and influential pamphlet in the history of the world.

The Communist Manifesto was allegedly addressed to the workingmen of the world (by which Marx and Engels meant Europe). In fact, it seems to be addressed as much if not more to educated middle-class people who rejected communism; there are whole pages of argument directed to such people. Today it is read mainly by students. In communist countries the pamphlet is read in all the schools; in America it is read in college courses on European history, economics, and Western civilization. To most American students it seems windy and rhetorical in style, and simultaneously radical and old-fashioned in substance. The argument can hardly have converted any American to socialism for decades. At this late date, it is wholly “non-subversive”!

Marx and Engels began with the famous sentence, “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism.” Nowadays this makes most people smile because it is true today as it never was in 1848, but with a wholly different meaning. At the beginning of 1848, the tsar of Russia and his fellow rulers feared a revolution, but it was a liberal revolution by the middle classes they feared, not a socialist revolution by the workingmen. Marx and Engels Romantically exaggerated the importance of their movement.

The Communist Manifesto is divided into four chapters of decreasing importance. The first chapter, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” is crucial. There are a number of ways of sub-dividing humanity—by sexes, by age groups, by religions, etc. The most characteristic Romantic way to sub-divide humanity was into nations. Most Romantic thinkers were nationalists to some degree; they were much concerned with their own nation, or people, a group that usually shared a common territory, language, religion, culture, and history. If the people had already been unified into a common nation-state—as the English, French, and Russians had—a nationalist was concerned with the past and present glories of the state, and with strengthening and perfecting the unity of the people. If the people had not yet been unified—as the Germans and the Italians had not—or if they were occupied by foreign powers—as the Irish and Poles were—a nationalist was concerned with the past glories of his people, and with political campaigns to expel the foreigners and unify the country. Nationalists tended to play down the class divisions within a people in the interest of national unity. These nationalist movements were very widespread and deep in Romantic Europe. Nationalist sentiment has been a major legacy of the Romantic age to the later Europe of the two World Wars, and to all the backward and colonial peoples of the world.

It is therefore amazing that Marx and Engels, who lived right in the middle of it all, not only failed to share the nationalist feelings of their fellow Germans, but failed to recognize the force of Romantic nationalism in others. “The workingmen have no country,” they wrote in The Communist Manifesto. “National differences and antagonisms are vanishing gradually from day to day, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market. …” This was flatly false, more obviously and stupidly false than anything else in Marx's whole doctrine. On the eve of the revolutions of 1848, a titanic set of nationalist explosions, Marx judged that national feeling was on the way out. At the beginning of a hundred-year period in which workingmen were to become increasingly swept up by nationalist feelings, Marx declared that they had no country.

Marx's feelings, but not Marx's blindness, are explained by the fact that he and many other socialists divided humanity in another characteristically Romantic way, into social classes. At a time when most European countries were still ruled, or at least co-ruled, by kings and nobles, Marx had the vision to see that the bourgeoisie was taking over. “Bourgeoisie” had originally meant the inhabitants of cities, but by the Romantic age the term had come to mean the middle classes, whether they lived in cities or not. Businessmen from the greatest textile magnates to the smallest hole-in-the-wall shop-keepers, doctors, lawyers, teachers and other educated and professional people, all the groups that we now call “white collar workers” were part of the bourgeoisie. Marx often felt compelled to give a narrow economic definition of the bourgeoisie—“the owners of the means of capitalist production”—but he used the term to indicate the middle classes as a whole.

The proletarians had originally been the poverty stricken masses of ancient Rome, who had no property save their children (proles). The Roman poor had nothing whatsoever to do with factories, but Marx took over the term for modern factory workers because he liked its grand Romantic historical sweep. In spite of his formal economic definitions, Marx usually included all the urban poor in the proletarians, whether they worked in factories or not. He was convinced that with the evolution of industrial society, almost everybody would become proletarian. The peasants would be drawn into the cities by economic necessity, and most of the bourgeoisie would become bankrupt by capitalist competition, and would sink into the proletariat. This has never happened; it was one of Marx's most famous wrong predictions. As industry advances the working classes grow, but the middle classes grow more rapidly still. There has never been a country in which the industrial workers were a majority. In most advanced countries, such as America, Great Britain, and Germany, the middle classes form a majority.

In the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto, Marx pictured Europe as being in the throes of a tremendous struggle for “the upper hand” between the rising bourgeoisie and the developing proletariat. The struggle was marked by strikes, lock-outs, sabotage, wage slashes, bankruptcies, business crises, the simultaneous rise of industrial combines and trade unions, increasing proletarian “class consciousness” (realization of its nature and predicament), and violence. This vast dramatic clash between sharply contrasted antagonists was precisely the sort of thing a Romantic thinker would hope to find in society, especially a follower of Hegel, who believed that progress came about through “the fruitful struggle of opposite principles.”

Following Hegel's Romantic tenets, Marx saw the contemporary struggle in Europe as only one chapter in the whole vast sweep of universal history, which they both believed to be a continuous evolutionary sequence of struggles between mutually interacting opposites, each struggle producing something higher that would in its turn struggle with its opposite. This supposed process of struggle and evolution, to which Hegel gave the celebrated name “dialectic,” included absolutely everything, as Hegel presented it—God, spirit, reason, the universe, and man. Marx got rid of God, spirit, and some of the other abstractions, a process which he snidely called “standing Hegel on his head.” This left him with an earthly, visible, tangible, material world as the scene of the evolutionary struggle—the subject matter of his celebrated doctrine, dialectical materialism. For Marx, the Romantic struggle of universal history was reduced to an economic struggle between social classes. “The history of all hitherto existing societies has been the history of class struggles.”

In the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto, Marx sketched the dramatic history of the world, the struggles of ancient patricians and ancient slaves, of feudal lords and feudal serfs, and above all, the struggles of the bourgeoisie. For Marx, the bourgeoisie was the collective hero of a Romantic tragedy. Like many heroes of Romantic tragedies, the bourgeoisie rose from low estate against enormous odds, burst its chains and hurled the older masters from their seats of power. Like many heroes of Romantic tragedies—Prometheus and Faust—the bourgeoisie was possessed of an enormous and restless energy. Marx wrote, “It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that have put in the shade all former migrations of nations and crusades … it batters down all Chinese walls.” Finally, in Marx's view, the bourgeoisie accomplished what so many Romantic heroes strove for, what only God was previously thought to have achieved: “In one word, it creates a world in its own image.”

So far, Marx's bourgeoisie was the hero of a Romantic triumph beyond the dreams of Goethe or Byron. But this triumph was so Romantically extreme as to approach blasphemy. Nemesis, the goddess of retribution, lay in wait, as she did in so many other tragedies. In its pride of triumph the bourgeoisie became insolent, and in its insolence it forgot that in the depths from which it had risen so far, it was itself producing its fatal enemy, the proletariat. “What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers.” The more the bourgeoisie produces, the stronger its subterranean antagonist grows. Marx believed that in the last act of this inevitable Romantic tragedy the bourgeoisie, grown old and tyrannical, would be hurled from its thrones into the abyss, like the haughty kings and insolent titans of so many Romantic dramas. “Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”

In the full sense of the term, the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto is a high Romantic drama on a vast scale, in which the bourgeoisie plays the role of the most immense of all Romantic tragic heroes. It was doubtless very satisfying for Marx to feel that he understood and approved the course of the grand drama of history. One might ask why Marx threw himself so wholeheartedly into revolutionary work if he was convinced that the revolution would inevitably come at a given moment, no matter what he or the rest of the world did to hurry or prevent it. The answer, of course, is that Marx was possessed of an activist temperament, like many other believers in universal determinist schemes (e.g., Mohammed and Calvin). He was constantly driven from within to write, to make speeches, to organize, to act, driven by what the arch-Romantic Goethe would have called a Daemon, which meant not a devil, but an insatiable psychic compulsion. It is intellectually silly for a determinist to be an activist; all the efforts of Marx and his followers to make logic out of such illogic are unconvincing. Yet for Marx and his followers, these two inconsistent mental traits seemed to go naturally together.

The second chapter of The Communist Manifesto, “Proletarians and Communists,” is essentially an argument with bourgeois critics of communism about whether communism is good or not. This was necessary at some point, for many things may be inevitable without being desirable (e.g., death and taxes). Marx began, “In what relation do the Communists stand to the proletarians as a whole?” The honest answer would have been that they stood in no relation to the proletarians, for there wasn't any communist organization to speak of. Instead, Marx wrote as if there was already a well organized international network of Communists which sought to offer its services to the various national proletarian movements, and to co-ordinate their revolutionary work.

The communist program was “the abolition of private property.” This was expected to bring a thrill of horror to any bourgeois reader, and Marx spent the rest of the chapter arguing with and/or taunting such bourgeois readers. In this mock debate, Marx changed his tone drastically from the first chapter. He no longer sang of the bourgeoisie as heroes of a high historic drama; he squabbled with them and sneered at them as if the bourgeoisie were thieving, bloated, stupid villains of some vulgar horse opera—a tone that has been adopted by most people who call themselves Marxists.

Why should the bourgeoisie squawk about losing their private property, Marx wanted to know, when they themselves have stolen all their property from the hard-working, upstanding proletarians and farmers who produced it? Why should the bourgeoisie cry out that the Communists want to abolish freedom and individuality, when the bourgeoisie have themselves enslaved the huge majority of the population in the factories? The bourgeoisie moan that the Communists want to annihilate the state, culture, religion, and the family but they have themselves deprived the workers of any state, any culture, any true religion, and any decent family life, and so on.

This is certainly the least convincing part of The Communist Manifesto. The charges against the bourgeoisie are so exaggerated that one realizes that Marx was not entirely serious. He depicted the bourgeoisie screaming in chorus that the Communists wanted to nationalize all women, and then went on to assert that the bourgeoisie spent its own time seducing proletarian girls, and each other's wives as well. This, in the depths of the Victorian age, was presumably a heavy jest. Even if the arguments were true, all Marx proposed in this section was to drag the bourgeoisie down into the depths with the workers, apparently for the sake of sheer revenge. In other writings he dealt with the problem more seriously, and asserted that the abolition of bourgeois privilege would lead to a tremendous resurgence of true freedom, true creativity, and true culture among the former proletariat, which would more than make up for the loss of bourgeois freedom and culture in the revolution.

The chapter ends with Marx's famous ten-point communist program, which often startles and amuses modern readers by its combination of proposals that we still regard as “communist” or otherwise extremely radical—such as the nationalization of factories, banks, transport and land—with calls for reforms long established in advanced capitalist societies—such as income and inheritance taxes, and free public schools. The program was not intended to be a detailed or well-thought-out blueprint for the future beyond the revolution, nor was Marx ever to provide such a detailed blueprint in his other writings.

The last two chapters of The Communist Manifesto are only of historical interest, and not much of that. First Marx explained why he was right, and why every other group that called itself socialist was inadequate, unscientific, wrong, and vile. Right or wrong, all those groups soon disappeared as Marx predicted. Then Marx indicated his support—usually qualified—for various revolutionary groups scattered around Europe, the more extremist the better. None of those groups were destined to amount to anything. At the very end of the pamphlet, Marx returned to his vein of ringing Romantic rhetoric. He insisted on “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions” with uninhibited abandon. “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries, unite!” Millions have thrilled to this most memorable of all appeals that have come down to us from the Romantic age.