[The novelist China Miéville aims to show that Marx’s words
remain just as vital as when they were first hastily composed. ]
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HOW TO READ THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO  
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James Robins
January 19, 2023
The New Republic
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_ The novelist China Miéville aims to show that Marx’s words
remain just as vital as when they were first hastily composed. _

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At the wintry end of a ravenous year, Karl Marx rode a ferry from
London back to his garret in Brussels, charged with a simple task: to
pull together a written political program for a few hundred radical
émigré workers who had decided to call themselves—openly, in
defiance of all Europe’s spooks and cops—Communists.

Where to start? His close collaborator and friend Friedrich Engels had
already prepared a 20-page question-and-answer sheet. “Question 1):
Are you a Communist?” Answer: “Yes.” Both men agreed it was a
poor first draft. Yet Marx kept it on his desk as he toiled; he stuck
to its rapid-fire rhythms, its brashness. Christmas passed; 1848
shuddered into life. The manuscript piled up with phantasms:
conjurings, spells, sorcerers, colossal enslaving machines, forged
weapons, netherworlds, robes made of cobwebs, and gravediggers. From
the Communist League’s committee in London came a bustle of letters:
anxious at first, then pleading, then grumpy. If Marx did not deliver
soon, “further measures” would be taken.

 

_A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto_
by China Miéville
Buy on Bookshop [[link removed]]
Haymarket Books, 291 pp., $21.95
Harried by comrades (as well as by the Belgian police), Marx finally
dashed off the closing passages and dispatched them to the private
printing works of one J.E. Burghard at 46 Liverpool Street. Under the
tang of hot lye and smeared ink, not more than a thousand copies
of _Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei_ were jammed between cheap
green paper covers in February 1848. The result was, as the novelist
China Miéville puts it in his new study, _A Spectre, Haunting
[[link removed]],_ “short and rude and
vivid and eccentrically organized—and its impact has been utterly
epochal.” Marx was 29 years old.

Because _The_ _Communist Manifesto_
[[link removed]] has been so traduced and
so feared, many people who haven’t yet read it think Marx’s
polemic was either an instruction manual for overthrowing the
government (Step 1, raid the police stations. Step 2, seize the post
office, etc.) or wistful schematics for a society free of want and
poverty. If those misconceptions haven’t put them off, curious
first-timers often approach the _Manifesto_ with fear and suspicion
that it might be too dense, that some kind of rigorous training is
needed to decode its pages, or that it has to be read alongside an
accompanying glossary of terms—like _A Clockwork Orange
[[link removed]]_ or “The Waste Land_._
[[link removed]]”

This is (mostly) untrue. China Miéville’s brief primer aims to show
that Marx’s words remain just as immediate and vital as when they
were first hastily composed more than a century and a half ago. An
“introduction to an indispensable text” for the “curious and
open-minded,” _A Spectre, Haunting_ is an ardent advocate’s
attempt to illuminate and re-enchant a seminal text for fresh
generations. A skilled scholar and synthesizer of the vast corpus of
Marxism, Miéville may, however, overstate how much of Marx and
Engels’s “ecstatic rant” can be applied today. To the radical
workers of 1848, Marx opened up a vast new terrain of struggle. For a
modern socialist movement weakened and regrouping after decades of
defeat, there are limits to what the _Manifesto_ can do.

Miéville is best known for his lucid and eerie novels,
including _The City and the City_
[[link removed]] and _Perdido Street
Station_ [[link removed]]_,_ which blend
far-flung science fiction with a rigorous understanding of class
politics. His most recent work was _October_: a rapid and torquing
narrative history of the Russian Revolutions. One of the best
sympathetic works ever written about the churning days from February
to October 1917, _October_ stripped away the baggage of judgment
from events and characters, transforming the upheaval into a flash of
miraculous potential. Rather than depicting a project doomed by its
own inherent faults to be a disaster, he praises that crucial moment
when the barreling train of history is shunted across onto stranger
sidings. In doing so, Miéville decisively proved that he could
combine the command of the historian with the ingenuity of the
novelist, a forbidding and fearsome accomplishment.

Brassy and swaggering, _The Communist Manifesto_ rushes up on
readers like an avalanche. Its vigorous language was necessary to sum
up how the planet had been rapidly remade since the start of the
century.

Movement, momentum, rupture, possible worlds felt but not yet grasped:
No wonder Miéville should be drawn to examine Marx and Engels’s
famous declarations, not only as a committed leftist but as a stylist
too. Brassy and swaggering, _The Communist Manifesto_ rushes up on
readers like an avalanche. In its compacted span, the text skips, as
if powered by some infernal engine, across eons and eras: from mud hut
to modern hovel, from Iron Age to ironclads. Its tense and tenor, the
Marx biographer Sven-Eric Liedman observed, “is at once the present
and the future.” Marshall Berman called its prose style
“expressionist lyricism.” Its vigorous language was necessary to
sum up how the planet had been rapidly remade since the start of the
century—a voice that reached far beyond Blake’s “dark, Satanic
mills.”

Marx imagines the emerging economic system as something like a
whirlwind: all the peasant smallholders, all the artisans and
journeymen thrown down from their stable lot, scrubbed clean of what
had once been sure identities. Not long ago, the system of landlords,
family plots of farmland, guilds, workshops, and the national church
seemed secure and unchanging, yet it was all being upended by the
squalid factory, the city slum, the ballooning fat cat. The bravura
first section sees Marx trying to apprehend this new world, even as it
squalls and thunders around him, with its most famous passage serving
as both an indictment of and a hymn to capitalism’s terrible power:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to
all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn
asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural
superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and
man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”.… All
fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. 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.

And still it hurries on, leaving bluster, awe, and questions in its
wake. Marx’s goal was not merely journalistic, or even narrowly
political. Many adherents often forget this because it seems obvious,
but the _Manifesto_ also saw the debut of a singular theory. All
written history, the theory goes, is the history of class struggle.
This conflict waged between the dominating and the dominated produced,
at the dawn of modernity, a new class: the capitalists, defined by the
profits they extract from the labor of everyone beneath them. Because
the exploited—the proletariat—have nothing to fall back on,
nowhere further to sink, their liberation would be the liberation of
history from class struggle.

In _A Spectre, Haunting,_ China Miéville summarizes it this way:
“It’s _as workers_ that workers create capitalism’s wealth.
It’s that position, and the power implicit in it, that underlies why
the working class is uniquely placed to change the economic
system—to take control of society and its productive capacity, which
does not exist without it.” The point of _The Communist
Manifesto,_ then, is to taunt its readers to roll up their sleeves
and crack knuckles, to enter this “uninterrupted, now hidden, now
open fight.”

For as long as radicals have squabbled over the meaning of Marx and
Engels’s works, there has been a lot of fretting over whether the
revolution they herald is inevitable. After all,
the _Manifesto _shivers with fervent certainty, liberally employs
words like “necessary,” and smudges the line between prediction
and incitement. When Marx insists that “the working men have no
country,” is he stating a universal truth? Or instead urging the
workers to throw off their national allegiances? In other words,
should the _Manifesto_ today be considered primarily as a work of
meticulous doctrine or a compelling and detailed piece of propaganda?

Throughout _A Spectre, Haunting,_ Miéville tries to argue that it
can be both. He can write observantly of how the _Manifesto_ echoes
the pulse of Christian creeds familiar to millions of Europeans, and
also how it evoked millenarian pamphlets that popped up during periods
of rural strife with their frantic summons to the apocalypse. But in a
long section on criticisms of the _Manifesto__,_ Miéville runs
close to thinking the pamphlet is rigorous or developed enough to be
treated as a bit of scripture, with falsifiable forecasts at its
heart. In fact, precisely because of its passion and haste, there is a
fair amount of the _Manifesto_ that does not hold up to challenge.

Cuts to the costs of production do not always, as Marx claimed, push
down workers’ wages. The _Manifesto_’s brief passages on the
relationship between women and capital are, while observant,
perfunctory at best and hardly as nuanced or incisive as what early
feminists were discovering for themselves. (That didn’t deter Helen
Macfarlane, the Scottish Chartist who was the first to translate it
into English in 1850, from rendering the famous “spectre” of the
opening line as “frightful hobgoblins.”) In the benighted colonies
of European powers, the bourgeoisie did not create, as Marx insisted
it would, a “world after its own image.” Far from rapidly
industrializing like the northern countries, British-ruled India was
kept in a permanent state of ruinous underdevelopment; regearing the
mass of agricultural society for the export market sparked periodic
famines rather than plenty. The _Manifesto_ also contains nothing at
all on the subject of race, despite Marx’s own public fidelity to
abolition.

Many of these errors, omissions, and oversights would be refined by
Marx and Engels themselves in the later works; others had to be
painfully corrected by those following in their stead. Still, that
corrections need to be made at all highlights the problem of rummaging
through the _Manifesto_ as if were an academic textbook. Submit it
to too much hairsplitting, and the whole thing will be robbed of its
incantatory power. On the other hand, treat the _Manifesto_ as
exquisite propaganda, and its blunders and lapses can be overlooked in
favor of its overriding spirit.

Sales of the _Manifesto_ shoot up when the edifice of capitalism
seems a little more rickety than normal, _after_ working people have
already realized that they don’t have much left to lose but their
shackles.

In a way, what China Miéville has written is an inadvertent tribute
to the smallness of _The Communist Manifesto._ Its influence was
“utterly epochal,” yes, but that came much later—especially when
the European socialist parties came to the fore in the early 1900s,
especially after the formation of the Soviet Union. In its own time,
Marx and Engels’s program was hardly read beyond the tiny
correspondence committees of radical workers and intellectuals already
well versed in the emerging socialism of Proudhon, Fourier, and Owen.
If one were to make an educated guess, between 1848 and the Paris
Commune of 1871, probably not more than a few thousand people had ever
heard about this swingeing little book. In the grand tradition of
left-wing groupuscules, the first Communist League, for which the
Manifesto was written, fell apart as quickly as it assembled.

Contrary to the deranged fevers of its enemies, the _Manifesto_ is
not some latent malevolent force in the world, lying in wait to curse
and seduce the innocent. In fact, its popularity is more often a
barometer of radical action already underway: Sales and samizdat
prints shoot up when the edifice of capitalism seems a little more
rickety than normal, _after_ working people have already realized
that they don’t have much left to lose but their shackles. This was
true of the _Manifesto_ in its birth as well. By the time it was
being fired out of Mr. Burghard’s shop in London, the masses were
already assembling their barricades in Paris, in Warsaw, in Budapest,
in Frankfurt. Marx prophesied the revolutions of 1848, but he did not
spark them.

Despite its immense oratorical push, the _Manifesto_ could only ever
be a first declaration of hostilities against capitalism. It was the
anchor to which a long chain of radicalism could be fixed, not
the _summa_ of a vast and world-shaking belief. Marx couldn’t
quite distill all the world in its period of violent flux; he had the
vision but not the particulars. Yet its brisk and sharp voice still
gives us whiplash; its grand historical argument still moves. As
China Miéville puts it in one of his more eloquent phrases, there was
“soil in its pages in which such understandings could grow.”

_James Robins
[[link removed]] @James_ARobins
[[link removed]] is an award-winning journalist
and historian. His first book, When We Dead Awaken: Australia, New
Zealand, and the Armenian Genocide, was published in 2020._

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* The Communist Manifesto
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* Karl Marx
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* Frederick Engels
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* capitalism
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* socialism
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