Abstract
The Communist Manifesto—rhetorical masterpiece of proletarian revolution—was published 69 years before the Bolshevik Revolution and had a complex reception history that implicated America and Russia in the long interval between. But once the Revolution shook the world, the Manifesto became indissolubly tied to it, forged together as constitutive moments of some supratemporal revolutionary dynamic. Its subsequent and further reception in America bore the marks of Bolshevik contagion, negatively in many quarters, positively in the early American communist movement. As various communist parties morphed and multiplied in the 1910s and 1920s, they announced themselves in manifestoes—communist manifestoes that in form and content followed and kept centrally in view the original of 1848. This essay explores the symbioses and synergies between the Manifesto, its Anglophone reception in America, and the Bolshevik contagion that spread into an emergent medium, namely, the manifestoes of American communist parties that heralded the revolution in Russia, a century ago.
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Notes
The original German was “Proletarier aller Lander vereinigt Euch!” English translations besides the Authorized English Translation, quoted above, vary: “Let the proletarians of all countries unite!” “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” On Marx’s tombstone, “WORKERS OF ALL LANDS UNITE!” “Workers of the World, Unite” was first used in Flora Tristan, The Workers’ Union (1843). It became the motto of the Soviet Union and of the American Communist Manifestoes.
Pagination in the first section refers to Marx and Engels (1976).
Jones (2002, 191) allows of an alternative translation: “Carver is right to point out that the spirit in which Moore and Engels approached the text in 1888 was quite different from that in which Marx had written the text forty years before.” Carver’s translation is an appendix to Carver and Farr (2015, 237–260).
Marxism and the Manifesto were of course central figures in the Red Scare of the 1920s and, later, in the House UnAmerican Activities Committee during the Cold War. Over the course of the twentieth century, the Manifesto earned its nickname as “the blueprint of revolution.”
Editions identified from Andréas (1963) and Kerr Company Archives at the Newberry Library, Chicago. There are some discrepancies about dates.
“Fraina was that common phenomenon in radical movements, the self-taught intellectual. The Marxist movements have been especially favorable breeding grounds for this revolutionary type because they are so top heavy theoretically, beginning with Marx. The very effort to read his works—and later those of Lenin and Stalin—can become a tremendous incentive to further study or self-improvement (Draper 1957, 63).”
Fraina’s biographer, Buhle (1995, 76), calls The Proletarian Revolution in Russia “the first significant English-language document of the Russian Revolution.”
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Acknowledgements
I am especially indebted to Tim Davenport for sustained correspondence about the pamphlet media of the early American communist movement. His website (www.marxisthistory.org) contains the transcribed and digitized versions of many of the manifestoes and pamphlets discussed in this essay. He, in turn, acknowledges the parallel efforts by Martin Goodman and colleagues of the Riazanov Library digital archives project whose work shows up prominently at www.marxist.org. Additionally, cf. Johnpoll (1994). These are invaluable resources that I have relied upon. For historical and literary reasons, I have chosen to cite the various manifestoes and pamphlets in their original published form.
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Farr, J. The Communist Manifestoes: media of Marxism and Bolshevik contagion in America. Stud East Eur Thought 70, 85–105 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-018-9310-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-018-9310-8