“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
Outdated perhaps, but these words from the 161-year-old ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ have brought hope to the hearts of many and more than most documents of its kind, has popularised the genre. Interestingly, it is said that when Frederick Engels did the first draft, he called it “The Communist Confession of Faith”, but that Marx changed it. This was, after all, an odd title choice for a man who more than Marx thought of their socialism as a ‘scientific’ doctrine. Engels’ choice may however be excused as this was 1848, only 4 years after Marx’s humanistic “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts”, with its focus on alienation, rather than his later dialectical revolutionary trajectory that suggested the inevitability of communism and freedom.
As Janet Lyon has noted, manifestoes were coeval with the rise of capitalists and the working class in seventeenth century Europe with the intention of “…. creating audiences through a rhetoric of