[In the following excerpt, Prawer details the literary devices and references present in the Communist Manifesto, while also examining the origins and intentions of the work.]

National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.

(MEW [Werke] IV, 466)

(I)

‘The combination of scientific analysis with moral judgment’, Bottomore and Rubel have said, ‘is by no means uncommon in the field of social studies. Marx is unusual, and his work is exceptionally interesting, because, unlike any other major social thinker, he was the recognized leader, and subsequently the prophet, of an organized political movement.’¹ The document, however, which was to do more than any other to ensure such recognition, the Manifesto of the Communist Party,² went almost unnoticed when it first appeared in London in February 1848. Composed jointly by Marx and Engels at the invitation of the Communist League, this manifesto is pervaded from the very start by what may justifiably be called ‘literary’ imagery: metaphors, images, from oral and written literature, from publishing, and from theatrical performance. ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’, the famous opening words proclaim; and lest we mistake the fictional source of this image, Marx and Engels proceed at once to speak of the need to confront ‘this nursery-tale [Märchen] of the spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself’.³ Many related images follow: ‘spectacle’ (Schauspiel), ‘song of lamentation’ (Klagelied), ‘lampoon’ (Pasquill), ‘pocket-edition (Duodez-Ausgabe) of the New Jerusalem’; and, more elaborate than these, a ‘palimpsest’ image which Marx and Engels may well have borrowed from Heine:

It is well-known how the monks write silly lines of Catholic saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written. The German literati reversed this process with profane French literature. They wrote their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic function of money, they wrote: alienation of humanity …⁴

German readers, in fact, will more than once feel that the Communist Manifesto is itself a palimpsest: that beneath the utterances of Marx and Engels they detect those of German poets. This may be just a matter of an image, or a phrase, that brings reminiscences of another context with it:

The aristocracy, in order to rally the people to them, waved the proletarian alms-bag in front for a banner. But the people, as often as it joined them, saw on their hindquarters the old feudal coats of arms, and deserted with loud and irreverent laughter.

[my italics]⁵

… erblickte es auf ihrem Hintern die alten feudalen Wappen …—no reader of Heine will fail to hear the echo of Germany. A Winter's Tale:

Das mahnt an das Mittelalter so schön
An Edelknechte und Knappen,
Die in dem Herzen getragen die Treu
Und auf dem Hintern ein Wappen.
This is a beautiful reminder of the Middle Ages,
Of noble servants and squires,
Who bore loyalty in their heart
And a coat of arms on their behind.(6)

Another and more complex kind of palimpsest effect is produced by the following passage:

Modern bourgeois society with its relation of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer [gleicht dem Hexenmeister] who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world that he has called up by his spells.⁷

In Goethe's poem ‘The Sorcerer's Apprentice’ (Der Zauberlehrling) it is the apprentice who calls up spirits he cannot, in the end, subdue, and it is the master, the Hexenmeister, who repairs the damage. In The Communist Manifesto the master-sorcerer himself has lost control: the magnitude of that disaster can be best felt if we perceive Goethe's contrasting text in and through that of the Manifesto.

The terms ‘literature’ and ‘literary’, Literatur and literarisch, occur frequently in The Communist Manifesto, and are used in three different ways. The first example is to be found only in the German version; it is absent from the familiar English translation:

Thus arose petty-bourgeois socialism. Sismondi was the head of this school, notably in France but also in England.

Es bildete sich so der kleinbürgerliche Sozialismus. Sismondi ist das Haupt dieser Literatur nicht nur für Frankreich sondern auch für England.⁸

Here the term Literatur denotes ‘the body of technical books, pamphlets, etc., that treat of a given subject, and the writers who produce it’.

The sentence about Sismondi occurs in a section of The Communist Manifesto which is entitled Socialist and Communist Literature and opens as follows:

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French Revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. But even in the domain of literature the old cries of the restoration period had become impossible.

In order to arouse sympathy the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy prepared itself the vengeful satisfaction of singing scornful songs [Schmählieder] about their new master and whispering into his ear more or less sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.⁹

Here ‘literature’, it would seem, denotes more than just the ‘pamphlets’ mentioned in the opening sentence. Poems, plays, and novels could qualify for inclusion if they had some sort of political slant or ‘message’. We find one such novel, Étienne Cabet's Journey to Icaria (Voyage en Icarie. Roman philosophique et social, Paris, 1840 and 1842), mentioned a little later in this section.¹⁰ This is, of course, the work to which ‘communism’ owes its very name; and it had already figured prominently in The German Ideology where it was used, through contrast and comparison, to show up the plagiarisms and misunderstandings which Marx and Engels ascribed to Karl Grün and other ‘true socialists’.¹¹ Literature is not, for Marx, a separate, self-enclosed region. Poems like those of Heine and the song of the Silesian weavers, novels like those of Gustave Beaumont, Étienne Cabet, and George Sand, plays like Gustav Freytag's The Journalists (which Marx was to see much later in life), are clearly related to other, more utilitarian forms of writing, and may profitably be discussed alongside these.

The Communist Manifesto uses the term ‘literary’, however, in yet another sense—one which will not surprise readers of Marx's earlier works. In the section devoted to ‘German or “true” Socialism’, Marx and Engels discuss, once again, the introduction of French socialist and communist writings in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Germany:

German philosophers, would-be philosophers, and beaux esprits eagerly seized on this literature, only forgetting that when these writings immigrated from France into Germany, French social conditions had not immigrated along with them. In contact with German social conditions, this French literature lost all its immediate practical significance, and assumed a purely literary aspect [ein rein literarisches Aussehen] … Thus, to the German philosophers of the eighteenth century, the demands of the first French Revolution were nothing more than the demands of ‘Practical Reason’ in general, and the utterance of the will of the revolutionary French bourgeoisie signified in their eyes the laws of pure Will, of Will as it was bound to be, of true human Will generally.

[my italics]¹²

Here ‘purely literary’ implies—as so often in Marx—a world of words floating loose, words cut off from things, cut off from social and political reality. The Manifesto goes on to describe this effect, in terms which carry suggestions of the sentimental, belletristic, and rhetorical, as a ‘robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment …’, and to make the important point that such literature, however ethereally interpreted, is in nineteenth-century society itself an item of commercial transaction. Its writers and translators are concerned with the sale of their commodity (Absatz ihrer Ware) among the German public.

As such terms show, and as is not surprising in such a context, The Communist Manifesto bids us look at the way writers function in modern society, and concludes that romantic illusions can no longer hide the actualities of the market-place: ‘The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers’ [my italics].¹³ Even poetry, then, is a commodity in the modern world and subject to its economic laws. Nor are poets exempt from that determination of men's thoughts which the Manifesto proclaims in uncompromising terms: ‘Your very ideas are … outgrowths of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property.’¹⁴ And if writers are in this way a product of their society and the social groups for whom they write, those social groupings in their turn are affected by the writings they have indirectly produced and inspired: ‘With very few exceptions, all the so-called socialist and communist publications that now circulate in Germany belong to the domain of this foul and enervating literature’ [my italics].¹⁵ The nemesis of converting writers into paid hirelings is that their productions enervate their readers instead of enlivening and refreshing them with new ideas, new hopes, and new energies.

But if a nation's writings are the product of economic and social conditions, they will alter as those conditions alter—and The Communist Manifesto itself is clearly seen, by its authors, as a sign of the inevitability of change as well as a call to effect change:

Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.¹⁶

The Communist Manifesto, we must infer, heralds the coming change by its resolute adoption and proclamation of ideas which, its authors think, will become those of the proletariat, the ruling class of a future in which ‘the free development of each’ will be ‘the condition for the free development of all’.

The passage about the relation of consciousness to material existence which I have just quoted has often been attacked, by non-Marxists, as bleakly deterministic. Yet as René Wellek has rightly pointed out, Marx's wording seems designed to obviate this charge. Consciousness, he avers, changes with the conditions of material existence. ‘If’, René Wellek comments, ‘one interprets the word “with” freely, no complete economic determinism is yet proclaimed; the intellectual life of man changes with the transformation of economic order. A parallelism, an analogy is taught—not one-sided dependence.’¹⁷

Marx and Engels proclaim, in particular, one great change in literature; a change that Goethe had foreseen in his old age, when he looked at the way increase in international exchange of material goods was bringing related increase in intellectual and spiritual traffic and interchange. The old Goethe therefore spoke, more and more frequently, of ‘world literature’, Weltliteratur.¹⁸ For Goethe, such ‘world literature’ did not imply an abandoning of national characteristics. On the contrary, each national literature would be valued by readers abroad for its distinctiveness and difference, for the special instrumental colour it added to the symphony of world literature. Through becoming conscious of the specific contributions of other nations and learning to value them, we would also learn to value our own. Our own literature, it is true, would to some extent change its character through such contacts; but this would be an enrichment, and the resulting symbioses, like Goethe's own West-Eastern Divan and Chinese-German Seasons and Times of Day, would continue to bear the imprint of the specific national culture within which the foreign works had been received, as well as that of their authors' genius and individual bent.

Such a conception was clearly congenial to Marx and Engels, who had described in The German Ideology how one generation after another learnt to develop further the material wealth, capital, and forces of production it had inherited:

In the course of this development, the circles which act upon one another expand—and the more they do this, the more the pristine isolation of individual nationalities is annihilated by perfected means of production, exchange and commerce [Verkehr] and a consequent division of labour between different nations, the more history becomes world history.¹⁹

The Communist Manifesto supplements this with speculations about the effect such developments will have on literature:

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-fashioned national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.²⁰

What is chiefly remarkable about this passage, as about so many others in Marx's work, is the compliment it pays to the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. Not for him the out-and-out anti-capitalism of the German Romantics, or of Thomas Carlyle—he never forgot the extent to which the order he wanted to overturn had in fact served the cause of progress. And what ‘progress’ meant in this context had once again been clearly spelt out in The German Ideology, where Marx and Engels had looked forward to a time when ‘separate individuals will be liberated from the various national and local barriers, be brought into practical connection with the material and intellectual production of the whole world and be put into a position to acquire the capacity to enjoy this all-sided production of the whole earth (the creations of man)’.²¹

The Communist Manifesto goes on to consider the part a victorious working class would play in a process which affects literature along with all other spheres of life:

National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the condition of life corresponding thereto.

The supremacy of the proletariat will cause them to vanish still faster.²²

It may well be thought that The Communist Manifesto does not, in this passage, make enough allowances for resistance to the trends it detected: national antagonisms and differences have not vanished as fast or as universally as the logic of production and commerce seemed to suggest. Marx came, in fact, to realize this and consistently distanced himself, in his later life, from would-be followers who underestimated the power of national feeling. In 1866 he ridiculed French delegates to a Council meeting of the First International for announcing ‘that all nationalities and even nations were “antiquated prejudices”’. For these delegates, he added, ‘negation of nationalities seemed to mean their absorption into the model French nation’. Later still he praised the Russian economist Flerovsky because he had ‘a great feeling for national characteristics’, and he took up the cause of the Irish as ‘a national question’.²³

The prophecy of The Communist Manifesto has not, however, gone wholly unfulfilled. We have seen, in this our twentieth century, a world-wide dissemination and mingling of ‘national and local’ literatures, through translations, paperbacks, theatre-tours, broadcasts, films, and television, which have transformed our cultural perspective in ways that would not have surprised Marx. ‘World literature’ has arrived with a vengeance—as a vast Imaginary Museum, as a great Library of Babel.

The Communist Manifesto is essentially a call to action. As such it commits itself, in the main, to what one might call a Dives and Lazarus view—or better, perhaps: a Master-Slave view—of modern society: the opposition of two classes, haves and have-nots, bourgeoisie and proletariat. But as a Polish scholar has pointed out,

if all political or religious struggles are to be interpreted as class struggles, if we are to correlate the various literary and artistic trends with underlying class relations, if we are to look for a reflection of class interests and class prejudices in moral norms, then we must make use of a greater number of classes than the two basic ones in The Communist Manifesto.²⁴

This may help to explain why one can detect, in Marx's works, three-layered and other multi-layered models of class structure as well as the dichotomous one of the Manifesto; and also, perhaps, why, when Marx at last addresses himself to a definition of ‘class’ in what was later to become volume III of Capital, his manuscript should so tantalizingly break off before the definition has properly begun.

What, then, of the intellectual, what of the artist, and his class-affiliations? Here we must remember what had been said about ‘oppositional’ writers and thinkers in The German Ideology. Such men, Marx and Engels had there suggested, can oppose dominant ideas because of the contradictions in society itself at any given moment. They can identify themselves with forces already at work in their society, or in similar societies beyond the frontiers of their own country; forces which are destined to change radically the socio-economic relations obtaining in a given society and hence, ultimately, to change intellectual and artistic life too. ‘A portion of the bourgeoisie’, we read, therefore, in The Communist Manifesto, ‘goes over to the proletariat; in particular a portion of the bourgeois ideologists, who have raised themselves to the level of comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole.’²⁵ In this dynamic situation the bourgeois intellectual—whether as artist, as economist, or as historian—can free himself, through the exercise of his theoretical consciousness, from the shackles of the class to which he would seem to belong by birth and upbringing. The Communist Manifesto is clearly written from the point of view of men who think they have done just that; men who have constituted themselves champions of the proletariat and now address the bourgeoisie in that role:

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population, its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.

The famous last sentence of the Manifesto is the more dramatic because here, for the first time, the authors directly address the proletariat instead of the bourgeoisie.

The Communist Manifesto was based on a ‘catechism’ drafted by Engels—but its final redaction belongs entirely to Marx. A single page of the manuscript, preserved by chance, shows how much trouble he took over the filing and refining of its formulations; and an outline plan for section III demonstrates the careful attention he paid to coherent and ordered presentation of his case. To him, therefore, must go the credit for the lucid over-all structure of the Manifesto, for its clear exposition, its subtle changes of tone and perspective, its indignation and humour, its powerful imagery, its skilful deployment of revolutionary slogans,²⁶ and its use of a multitude of rhetorical devices not for their own sake, but for the sake of the social message that was to be conveyed. David McLellan has listed some of the devices Marx constantly used in his works, though not always with the appositeness and the success characteristic of their use in the Manifesto: ‘climax, anaphora, parallelism, antithesis and chiasmus’. To this should be added the distinctive rhythm and word-music of the Manifesto in its original German. The opening lines afford as good an example as any with their tolling word-repetitions, their linking alliterations and assonances (some of which I have underlined below), and their effective pairing of less and less well-matched partners, first monosyllabic titles (der Papst und der Zar), then polysyllabic names with two main stresses separated by four slacks (Metternich und Guizot), and finally the more intricate rhythms of the last deliberately ill-matched pair (französische Radikale und deutsche Polizísten).

Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa—das Gespenst des Kommunismus. Alle Mächte des alten Europa haben sich zu einer heiligen Hetzjagd gegen dieses Gespenst verbündet, der Papst und der Zar, Metternich und Guizot, französische Radikale und deutsche Polizisten.

A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to track down and exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German policemen.²⁷

Marx did not always write with such distinction—but at his best he shows a command of didactic and polemical prose which assures his work a place in the history of German literature as well as in the history of ideas and political action. …

Notes

1. BR [Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy] 40.

2. From now on this work will be called by its better-known title: The Communist Manifesto.

3. SW [Selected Works in Three Volumes] I, 108; MEW [Werke] IV, 461.

4. SW I, 131; MEW IV, 486. Heine used the palimpsest image in Die Harzreise and Französische Maler. The image is not, however, an uncommon one.

5. SW I, 128; MEW IV, 483.

6. Even the famous phrase which concludes The Communist Manifesto may be an echo of Heine. In his essay on Ludwig Marcus (Ludwig Marcus. Denkworte) Heine had spoken ‘of that fraternal union of the workers of all lands [Verbrüderung der Arbeiter in allen Ländern], of that wild army of the proletariat [von dem wilden Heer des Proletariats], which is bent on doing away with all concern about nationality in order to pursue a common purpose in Europe, to call into being a true democracy’. Cf. Dolf Sternberger, Heinrich Heine und die Abschaffung der Sünde (Hamburg and Düsseldorf, 1972), p. 360.

7. SW I, 113; MEW IV, 467.

8. SW I, 130; MEW IV, 484.

9. SW I, 127; MEW IV, 482-3.

10. SW I, 136; MEW IV, 491. Marx had mentioned Cabet's Utopian novel before—in the letters to Ruge published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (MEW I, 344).

11. MEW III, 507 ff.

12. SW I, 130-1; MEW IV, 485-6.

13. SW I, 111; MEW IV, 465.

14. SW I, 123; MEW IV, 477.

15. SW 132; MEW IV, 488.

16. SW I, 125; MEW IV, 480.

17. R. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, Vol. iii, p. 235.

18. Cf. F. Strich, Goethe und die Weltliteratur (Berne, 1946), pp. 13-103.

19. MEW III, 45.

20. SW I, 112; MEW IV, 466.

21. GI 55.

22. SW I, 124-5; MEW IV, 479.

23. Letters to Engels, 20 June 1866 and 12 Feb. 1870—MEW XXXI, 228-9 and XXXII, 443; to S. Meyer and A. Vogt, 9 Apr. 1870—MEW XXXII, 668.

24. S. Ossowski, Class Structure in the Socialist Consciousness, trans. S. Patterson (London, 1963), p. 88. It is not irrelevant to recall that Disraeli's Sybil; or The Two Nations had been published in 1845, and that a character in Heine's William Ratcliff had as early as 1822 divided mankind into two warring nations: the wellfed and the hungry.

25. SW I, 117; MEW IV, 471-2.

26. ‘The Communist Manifesto is almost an anthology of revolutionary rhetoric, and some of its most effective slogans are borrowed. Werner Sombart has shown that “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains” and “The workers have no country” are Marat's, and that “the exploitation of men by men” is from Bazard. The nexus of “cash payment” is Thomas Carlyle's, and had been quoted in Engels' The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 …’ (S. E. Hyman, The Tangled Bank (1966 edn.), p. 100.)

27. MEW IV, 461. Cf. Pamela Hansford Johnson, ‘The Literary Achievement of Marx’, The Modern Quarterly, New Series, ii (1946-7), 240: ‘This paragraph demonstrates two of his most notable stylistic traits. Firstly, the brief simple statement in the form of a metaphor, followed by a long and rolling sentence of qualification. Secondly, the use of bathos, the sharply descending curve of glory from the Pope to the German police spy. Examples of bathetic irony abound throughout his work …’

List of Abbreviations

BR Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, ed. T. Bottomore and M. Rubel (Harmondsworth, 1963).

MEW Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke. Herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED (Berlin, 1956-68).

SW Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in Three Volumes (Moscow, 1969).