In the autumn of 1847 a small international society of émigré artisans, meeting in London under the name of the Communist League, asked two young Germans to write down what the League believed. The elder was twenty-nine, the younger twenty-seven. They took their time — long enough that the League's committee sent a sharp reminder — and the finished text reached the printer only weeks before the revolutions of February 1848 broke across the continent. It was published in German, anonymously, as a pamphlet of twenty-three pages. Almost nobody read it. The risings of 1848 were made and defeated without it; for two decades it survived as what the 1882 preface printed here calls, with some bitterness, "a literary curiosity". That a document so overtaken by events should have become the most widely circulated political text ever written after the Bible is one of the stranger facts of modern history, and it is worth holding onto while reading, because the Manifesto is a young work, written at speed for an occasion that passed, and its authors knew it better than its later custodians did.
The edition in your hands is Moscow's: Progress Publishers' Selected Works in three volumes, Volume One, first printed in 1969 and reprinted in 1973, prepared from a Russian edition of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party. The English text is not a Soviet translation. As the note at the foot of the last page states, it is "printed according to the 1888 English edition" — the translation Samuel Moore made and Engels edited and annotated five years after Marx's death, which remains the standard English Manifesto. What Moscow supplied around it is the apparatus: six of the seven prefaces the authors wrote for later editions, and a set of endnotes from the Institute. That apparatus is the proper subject of an introduction to this edition, and it repays attention, because a canon reveals itself as much in what it arranges and omits as in what it prints.
Begin with what the work does that nothing else has done as well. The first section, "Bourgeois and Proletarians", is a description of capitalism written while capitalism was still young, and it has dated less than descriptions written yesterday. Marx and Engels grasped that the bourgeoisie was a revolutionary class — that it "cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production", and that in doing so it tears up every settled relation: "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind." They saw that this revolutionising could not stay within borders. "The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country" — a sentence that reads today less like prophecy than like the morning news. And they saw the sting in it: that the same process which builds a world market builds the class that will end it, so that what the bourgeoisie "produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers." Strip away the confidence of that last clause and the analysis underneath is still the sharpest short account we have of why the society that produces unprecedented wealth also produces unprecedented instability.
That instability the Manifesto named with a precision no economist of the day matched. Modern industry, it observes, is convulsed by "commercial crises that by their periodical return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society." In these crises "there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production." Society is starved not by scarcity but by abundance — "too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce." A century and a half of boom and slump has not improved on that as a description of what a capitalist crisis feels like from the inside, and every financial panic since has been, in this exact sense, a crisis of too much rather than too little.
Here is the honest place to name the pamphlet's deepest weakness, which is not an error of fact but a habit of confidence. The Manifesto does not merely predict the fall of the bourgeoisie; it calls that fall, and the victory of the proletariat, "equally inevitable." The word does a great deal of quiet damage. A future guaranteed by history is a future one can afford to wait for, and the mass parties that took the pamphlet as their charter learned, across the long peace of the Second International, to wait — to treat the deepening of capitalism's contradictions as a substitute for the building of a revolutionary will rather than its occasion. Marx and Engels were not fatalists; the whole point of writing a manifesto is that people must act. But the language of inevitability, laid over a movement growing patient and prosperous, curdled into the fatalism that broke in August 1914, when the parties of the International, told to choose between their class and their flags, chose their flags. The confidence that made the pamphlet thrilling to write made it, in weaker hands, an alibi. That is a charge against the readers more than the authors — but the seed is in the text, and honesty requires saying so.
The famous compression — "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" — is doing real work and not only rhetoric. It proposes that the way people fight is decided by the way they produce, and it turns the reader's attention from the ideas an age tells itself to the material relations underneath them. Section II carries this into the deepest thing in the pamphlet: the claim that communism is not a plan to be imposed but the abolition of a condition, and that its measure is human freedom. The goal, they write, is "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." That formula is the ethical centre of the whole tradition, and everything the twentieth century did in its name has to be measured against it.
The weaknesses are as real, and the honest place to find them is in the authors' own later prefaces, which this edition prints. By 1872 Marx and Engels were telling their readers not to take the pamphlet as gospel. Of its ten-point immediate programme — the graduated income tax, the central bank, the state ownership of transport — they wrote that "no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today." They had watched a real revolution in the meantime, and it had taught them something the Manifesto did not know. "One thing especially was proved by the Commune," the 1872 preface goes on, "viz., that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.'" That is a large admission. The Manifesto had named, among the Communists' aims, the "conquest of political power by the proletariat", without asking what kind of power, or whether the existing state could simply be captured and used. The Paris Commune of 1871 answered the question the pamphlet had left open, and the answer was that the old state must be broken up and replaced by something closer to society itself — elected officials, subject to recall, paid workmen's wages. The most important correction to the Manifesto was made by its own authors, and it pointed away from the state, not towards it. Hold that thought.
There are other limits. The polemics of Section III, against the "Feudal", "Petty-Bourgeois" and "True" Socialisms of the 1840s, are the most dated pages in the work, aimed at opponents nobody now remembers. The pamphlet underrates the staying power of nationalism, which it expected the world market to dissolve, and it has almost nothing to say about the peasantry, then still the great majority of humankind. On this last point, too, the authors corrected themselves, and the correction is printed here in the most remarkable of the prefaces.
That is the preface of 1882, to the Russian edition, the last thing Marx and Engels signed together and one of the least Soviet documents the Soviet edition contains. Russia, they note, is the one country where the Manifesto's assumption of an advanced capitalism does not hold: there, "more than half the land owned in common by the peasants." So they pose a question the pamphlet's scheme of history had seemed to rule out. "Can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?" Their answer is a conditional, and it is the hinge of everything that came after: "If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting-point for a communist development." A backward country might not have to repeat the whole punishing march through capitalism — but only if its revolution set off, and was rescued by, revolution in the developed West. Marx and Engels never imagined a socialism that could be built in one poor and isolated country. They staked the Russian road on the German one.
Which is the natural place to ask the question this series always asks: was the state that canonised the Manifesto consistent with it? The answer is written into the very passages the edition reproduces. Take the 1872 correction first. The whole thrust of the Commune lesson — that the workers "cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery" — was inverted by the Soviet state, which did not break the old machinery of administration and coercion so much as inherit it, staff it, and swell it into something the tsars could not have dreamed of. The Manifesto under Stalin was printed in millions while its authors' warning against the ready-made state was left to gather the dust of a preface. And set beside it the measure from Section II: "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." No sentence in the founding texts sits in sharper judgement on the society that made the sentence a slogan. A state that shot its own revolutionaries, emptied its congresses of debate and filled its camps had not misplaced this idea; it had stood it on its head, making the development of all the enemy of the free development of each.
Then take the 1882 conditional. Marx and Engels had made the Russian road depend on Western revolution. When the German revolution of 1918–23 failed and the Russian one was left alone — besieged, blockaded, its working class scattered and killed in a civil war fought under foreign intervention — the material premise of their answer was gone. What was built afterwards was built on the missing half of their sentence. To turn the isolation into a doctrine — socialism in one country — was to keep the Manifesto's prestige while discarding the internationalism that was its first and last word: the pamphlet opens by having Communists of all nations sketch a common programme and closes on "Working men of all countries, unite!" The Soviet apparatus resolved the contradiction the way apparatuses do — by editing. This volume prints six prefaces and drops one: the 1888 English preface by Engels, even though the text it prints is the 1888 English edition. It gives the 1890 German preface only as an extract, "From the Preface". And it frames the whole with an endnote, the first of the Institute's notes to this work, that tells you how to read before you have read: the Manifesto, it explains, quoting Lenin, "with the clarity and brilliance of genius... outlines a new world-conception". This is canonisation in miniature — the living, self-correcting document of two young men fixed, by the authority of a later leader, into a scripture whose conclusions are known in advance. The prefaces, where Marx and Engels change their minds, are exactly where a scripture is least comfortable, and it is the prefaces the apparatus trims.
None of this is an argument against the Manifesto, and it is emphatically not the liberal argument that reads the whole tradition as a rough draft of the Gulag. The degeneration of the Russian Revolution has causes, and they are first of all material: a workers' state stranded in a peasant country, its revolution unrelieved by the West, its working class consumed in the fighting that saved it, an administering caste rising out of the scarcity to make its privileges permanent and then to require that the founders be made to agree. Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, gave the classic account of how a bureaucracy usurped a revolution it had not made, and the evidence that it never truly superseded Marx is precisely that it went on printing him — in millions, in every language — long after it had betrayed him. A regime that had genuinely outgrown the Manifesto would have had no need to keep it in print. The canonised text is the measure of the betrayal, not its cause. The dictatorship of the proletariat that the Manifesto implies and the Commune defined was a more democratic form than the parliamentary state, not a licence for a party above society; that it was made to mean its opposite is a fact about Stalinism, not about the pamphlet.
So what is this Marxism worth now, read against its own ossification? The description of the world market is worth more than when it was written — a global division of labour that dissolves borders, uproots settled ways of life, and delivers wealth and crisis in the same motion is not a nineteenth-century memory but the water we swim in. The insistence that the way we produce shapes the way we think, and that the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of its ruling class, is a standing warning against taking any society's account of itself at face value — including the Soviet one. The test of the state — is it an organ raised above society, or one subordinate to it? — is still the right test, and the Manifesto and the prefaces that correct it supply it; it can be turned on Moscow in 1973 as readily as on Washington or on any state since. And the closing summons is still the one the twentieth century most needed and least heeded: that the emancipation of the working class is the work of the working class itself, across borders, or it is nothing. "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." Moscow printed those words on the cheapest paper and in the largest editions, and could not make them mean what it did. They are still legible, and they still do not say what the state that canonised them wanted them to say.