175 Years Since (2023)

Book Review from the November 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto. By China Miéville. Head of Zeus £10.99.

China Miéville is best-known as a science fiction author. He is also a former member of the SWP, and his history of the Bolshevik ‘Revolution’, October, was reviewed in the November 2017 Socialist Standard. Here he examines the writing, reception and arguments of the Communist Manifesto.

The Manifesto was written in 1848. It bears the names of both Marx and Engels, though it is usually ascribed to Marx alone, who certainly authored the text. But Miéville takes the reasonable view that Engels was equally responsible, as he not only influenced Marx but had previously written documents that were ‘a crucial concrete foundation’ for the work. Its German title is more exactly rendered as Manifesto of the Communist Party, but a party at that time was a tendency or current of opinion, not an organised group. The fact that Marx was working against a deadline probably explains why the final section is brief and unfinished.

The first English translation, by Helen Macfarlane, appeared in 1850, but there was rather little interest in the text, in any language, until the 1870s, in the aftermath of the Paris Commune. The standard English translation, by Samuel Moore with support from Engels, was published in 1888.

One point which often surprises those who read the Manifesto for the first time is the extent of praise for capitalism in the first section, such as ‘The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together’, though Miéville sees this admiration as ambivalent, given the suffering that was also caused. The text is understandably unaware of the adaptability of capitalism. The actions mentioned in the second section (including making the means of production state property) were described as already out-of-date by the time the preface to the German edition of 1872 was composed. One reasonable point Miéville makes is that the Manifesto does not pay sufficient attention to the status of women, noting that they are oppressed in the family but not saying much about the relation between gender and class.

One chapter deals with criticisms of the Manifesto, including of course absurd claims that it is responsible for dictatorial regimes such as the former Soviet Union. Miéville argues that the problems there really began with its isolation in the 1920s, which opened the way to the appalling repression under Stalin. But this conveniently ignores the authoritarian policies under Lenin and Trotsky.

This edition also contains the text of the Moore translation, with a few adjustments. The most important of these is the rendering ‘the isolation of rural life’ rather than ‘the idiocy’.

Paul Bennett