The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it; and a State which postpones the interests of their mental expansion and elevation to a little more of administrative skill, or of that semblance of it which practice gives, in the details of business; a State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.
KARL MARX
1818–1883
FRIEDRICH ENGELS
1820–1895
The Communist Manifesto
Karl Marx was born in Prussia, the son of middle-class parents, in 1818. He studied law at the University of Berlin and there discovered Hegel, whose metaphysical interpretations of history he later attacked violently, but who nevertheless was the single greatest influence on his thought. Marx joined the “Young Hegelians,” or Left Republicans, and, leaving the university without a degree, went to Paris, where he embarked on his lifelong career in political journalism. Driven out of Paris by the police, he went to Brussels where, in 1845, there occurred his fateful meeting with Engels.
Friedrich Engels, also originally a bourgeois, was born in Germany in 1820. Educated in the gymnasium of his native town, he left it to go to work for his father, a cotton manufacturer. Engels spent a number of years after 1849 working, first as an employee, then as a partner and director of a textile firm founded by his father in Manchester, England.
When the two young men met in Brussels in 1845 they recognized each other as kindred spirits. Engels, with his considerable financial resources, helped Marx and his family to survive until Marx’s death in 1883; and Marx, with his enormous intellectual resources, enlivened Engels’s mind for four decades. Their joint productions were many, and after Marx’s death Engels continued, until his own death in 1895, to promote the works, notably Das Kapital, of his angry, difficult friend who, Engels rightly understood, had proposed a vision of the world that was going to change it from top to bottom.
Their first joint venture was the most famous of all. In his 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, Engels explained how the tract had come to be. At a Congress of the Communist League, then a secret society, held in London in 1847, he and Marx had been commissioned to prepare for publication “a complete theoretical and practical party platform.” Drawn up in German in January 1848, it was sent to the printer a few weeks before the French revolution of February 24. Within six months, in that famous Year of the FortyEight, Europe was aflame, and the Manifesto seemed to be forgotten in the midst of events that were even more exciting than its words. But when the revolutionary fervor died down, as it did until it blazed up again in 1870, the Manifesto was rediscovered and began its climb toward worldwide fame. Translations were published in French, English, Danish, Polish, and Italian; in 1872 it was published in a new English translation in New York. “Thus the history of the Manifesto,” Engels wrote in 1888, “reflects to a great extent the history of the modern working class movement; at present it is undoubtedly the most widespread, the most international production of all Socialist literature, the common platform,” he concluded, “acknowledged by millions of working men from Siberia to California.”
Engels, writing five years after the death of Karl Marx, was nevertheless generous enough in his Preface to concede that “the fundamental proposition which forms its nucleus” was owing to Marx. Engels’s statement of this “fundamental proposition” is both accurate and succinct. Here is the single sentence in which Engels summed up the doctrine that has come to be called Marxism:
That proposition is: That in every historical epoch the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, forms the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained, the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that, consequently, the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploited and exploiting, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class—the proletariat—cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class—the bourgeoisie—without at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class distinctions and class struggles.
How many men and women have died for, and against, that doctrine! And how many more have been exploited and oppressed in its name!
This consequence, at least, was not foreseen by Engels in 1888, nor indeed by the young Marx and Engels as they struck off the burning brands of the Manifesto in the dark January of forty years before. Indeed, it is a most extraordinary political document. Its few pages—even in an edition on cheap paper and large type it hardly runs more than twenty-five—contain some of the swiftest prose ever composed. “A spectre is haunting Europe,” it begins, “—the spectre of Communism.” And so it should, the Manifesto proclaims; all the powers of the old and dying world are right to fear the new ideas. And the work ends with these ringing words:
Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries, unite!
It does not matter what you think of Communism—whether you are for it or against it, whether you think it is the doctrine of the angels or that of the devils. You cannot claim to be a thinking man or woman in today’s world unless you have read The Communist Manifesto. That seems so obvious as hardly to need stating; but there are nevertheless many places in the United States where you will have to carry the Manifesto under your coat and not take it out in public.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
1821–1867
Flowers of Evil
André Gide, when asked who was the greatest French poet, responded: “Victor Hugo, hélas!” Indeed, it would be a shame if France had no greater poet than Hugo. But in fact it has at least two: La Fontaine and Baudelaire. Unfortunately, La Fontaine only wrote fables; and even for Gide, whose own life was irregular, it was difficult to forgive Baudelaire for the disaster he had made of his life.