The Communist Manifesto

FEB 21 1848 · 12:00

Title page of the first edition of 'Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei', London, February 1848. Place: London (printed); commissioned by the Communist League at its Second Congress in November 1847 Figures: Karl Marx, principal author · Friedrich Engels, co-author and editor · J. E. Burghard, the Bishopsgate printer · the Communist League, the small émigré society that commissioned it Twenty-Three Pages from Bishopsgate The Communist League, an organization of perhaps a few hundred German artisans and émigré intellectuals, commissions a programmatic statement at its Second Congress in London in late November–early December 1847. Marx, who has just been expelled from one country and is about to be expelled from another, writes most of it in January and early February 1848. Engels supplies the structure of a prior draft and edits. The text reaches the printer J. E. Burghard at 46 Liverpool Street, Bishopsgate, in the third week of February. It is printed as a twenty-three-page pamphlet in German and reaches the booksellers around 21 February. Three days later, Paris rises (see [[revolutions-of-1848]]). The pamphlet has, in its first season, almost no readers. The first English translation does not appear until 1850; the first widely-circulated edition is the 1872 German reissue. Its century is the next one, not the one it appears in. Capital Has No Fatherland The text's first sentence (Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa) names a spectre and an audience. Its analytic core, however, is the second chapter's claim that the modern bourgeois state is not a neutral arbiter but the executive committee of a transnational class. Capital, in this reading, is global by structure; the working class is national by happenstance; this asymmetry is the source of the worker's powerlessness and the bourgeoisie's freedom of movement. The political program follows. Workers must organize on the same scale on which capital operates: across borders. Die Arbeiter haben kein Vaterland. The Westphalian principle that politics ends at the border is here named as the specific institutional form that allows capital to escape any single state's regulation. The argument will animate the First and Second Internationals, dissolve into nationalism in August 1914, regroup as the Third International after 1919, and remain the most durable theoretical challenge to the nation-state as the natural container of political life. Whether the 2008 financial crisis (see [[bitcoin-whitepaper-2008]]) is a vindication of the analysis or a reminder of its limits is the live question its tr