Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: Communist Manifesto

Impact

At first only a few radicals and police authorities paid attention to this mission statement of a small activist group. The 1848 revolutions swirled around nationalism and liberal democracy, not Communism. But the harsh repressions that subdued the rebels of 1848 suggested that moving beyond liberal, democratic, and national issues to the remoter problem of undoing capitalism's hold over the workers was unlikely to be accomplished by persuasion. The Marxist interpretation of society and the Marxist promise of revolutionary transformation attracted attention from people interested in improving their world, including many of the proletarians who were indeed increasing their numbers as industrialization advanced. Anyone wishing to know what the issues were was directed toward the Communist Manifesto for a reasonably concise, comprehensible summary. When rival variations on Marxism emerged after the founders' deaths, most leftist sects put out their own editions of the manifesto, providing introductions to persuade the reader that their own peculiar movements represented what Marx and Engels had really meant. Anticommunists also produced editions with know-your-enemy introductions. The fact that many people read the manifesto and absorbed Marxist views of the world did not mean that the prophecies came true.

Although few people paid attention to the Communist Manifesto when it was first published, Marx's views ultimately had a profound impact in Europe. By the end of the nineteenth century, Marxist concepts had been accepted by the trade union movement, and Socialist parties throughout Europe absorbed Marxist principles. However, a split began to emerge. Many Europeans accepted Marx's view that violent revolution and the overthrow of the capitalist state were necessary and inevitable. In contrast, others believed that some of the goals of Marxism, particularly the improvement of the condition of the working class, could be achieved through existing governmental structures. Until this time, the terms Communism and Socialism were used interchangeably. As the movements split, the words came to have different meanings. Communism was applied to a more-or-less pure form of revolutionary Marxism; Socialism came to refer to an economic and political system in which the existing state owned the means of production and distribution. In effect, Socialism was regarded as a less radical form of Communism. Even today, the words Communism, Socialism, and Marxism tend to be used without precise meaning or clear distinctions, but all represent a critique of the capitalist system. Further, pure capitalism, many would argue, does not really exist, and even in capitalist states such as the United States, governments try to correct market imperfections by providing benefits—tax breaks, agricultural subsidies, food stamps, welfare—and by imposing regulations that have a slightly Marxist flavor in that they try to curb the excesses of capitalism.

Marxism play a key role in the Russian Revolution of 1917 that gave rise to the Communist Soviet Union. Soviet leaders such as Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin claimed to base their political views on Marxism, and the Soviets' numerous satellite states, principally those in Eastern Europe, asserted that they were Marxist states. At various times, numerous other nations have adopted Marxism as their ruling orthodoxy, including Albania, Angola, Benin, Bulgaria, Chile, the Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Grenada, Laos, Mongolia, Mozambique, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Yemen, Venezuela, and Vietnam. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Eastern European nations and others throughout the world, including Russia, have adopted capitalism, sometimes in modified form, as their governing political and economic orthodoxy. In the early twenty-first century, only North Korea, Cuba, and China claim to be purely Communist states, although China and, to a lesser extent Cuba, have adopted some capitalist practices. The worldwide revolution that Marx predicted did not come about, and his views were corrupted by monolithic single-party states that were, in effect, dictatorships. In the twentieth century and into the new millennium, “Communism” evolved from a set of political, historical, and economic viewpoints into a hated ideology that, most would argue, has been thoroughly discredited.

Marxism, though, had and still has important social and philosophical impacts. The social view that people too often are alienated from their employers and source of income owes its origins to Marxist principles. Liberal and Socialist political parties continue their critique of capitalism in an effort to eliminate the extremes of class and economic distinctions. In the arts, novelists, playwrights, and poets espouse Marxist principles, even if they do not refer explicitly to Karl Marx. Marxist thought has influenced literary scholarship, with Marxist theories applied to the interpretation of fictional worlds and class structures depicted by such writers as Charles Dickens, Bertolt Brecht, and many others; indeed, it is possible to apply Marxist criticism to any literary work. The German sociologist Max Weber led a school that examined, for example, the relationship of Protestantism to the emergence of the modern capitalist system, using some of the principles of Marxism; the so-called Frankfurt School, based at the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany, is a loose gathering of neo-Marxists whose critique of capitalism is based on Marxist principles. Numerous liberation groups throughout the world, including Catholic proponents of “liberation theology,” advocates of “black Marxism,” and feminists, still appeal to Marx's underlying views in their quest for political and social justice.