Marx and Engels
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On just 60 pages, Marx and Engels had written down a philosophy of life, which would become dogmatic reality for half the world.
The manifesto had little influence in its own day. Only after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ other writings had made their views on socialism widely known did it become a standard text. For about a century it was one of the most widely read (and some would argue misread) documents in the world.
Karl Marx, the son of a solicitor, was obsessed with the idea of transferring scientific principles to society. The Communist manifesto, first published on the 24 February 1848, became the dogma of a new movement. The misery of the workers was the central social issue of the 19th century. Marx and Engels referred to their plight in the Communist Manifesto that closes with the summons: “Proletarians of all countries unite!”
The Communist manifesto encountered a social reality in the middle of the 19th century, in which “the damned souls of this earth” seemed to be waiting for the ideas expressed in the manifesto:
“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.”
Nevertheless it is to be asked, why a small work, from which not even ten thousand copies were printed till 1871 and distributed among the people, could have such a an enormous long-term effect. Golo Mann answers this question in his German history of the 19th and 20th century ‘ as follows:
“It contains the quintessence of Marxism. What came after that was application, economic infrastructure, demonstration, defence and no more animated development. The manifesto is a work of unprecedented powers of persuasion. Simply a completely rounded piece of work – in spite of all the complicated thoughts that are processed in it. The first people it overwhelmed, so that they could never think of anything else again, were its authors.”
At the Marx-Engels-Platz in East Berlin, immediately after the wall went down, a joker had sprayed graffiti on the memorial of the two authors of the Communist manifesto: “Sorry, it was only an idea of ours”. Nevertheless the idea definitely had its good sides. Without them or without the fear of the spectre of communism many social achievements, which we regard as natural today, would surely not have become reality.
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