Principles of Communism: Engels's 1847 Catechism Before the Manifesto

In November 1847 the Communist League meets in London and hands Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels a specific assignment: a theoretical and practical party programme. Engels, in Paris at the time, drafts the text as a catechism: twenty-five numbered questions, each with its answer laid out underneath. The piece carries the title The Principles of Communism, and it will sit almost unread for nearly seventy years.

A form built for a programme

The catechism was a familiar genre, built for memorisation, one question at a time.

Practical example: the text’s first question asks what communism is, and the answer calls it the doctrine of the conditions for the liberation of the proletariat. The questions that follow examine who the proletarian is, where that condition comes from, and what sets it apart from the slaves and serfs of earlier ages, down to the final pages, which cover the communists’ stance toward the political parties of England, France, America, Switzerland and Germany.

The proletariat, the text explains, is whoever makes a living by selling their own labour: no factories, no land, no other capital, and their fate follows the market’s demand for labour. The text traces its birth to the industrial revolution that unfolded in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, set off by the invention of the steam engine.

Communism among the other labour currents

The text does not treat communism as an isolated label. It sets the doctrine against three other currents of the era’s labour movement: reactionary socialists, who aim at a goal that cannot be reached; bourgeois socialists, who defend the very society communists want to overturn; and democratic socialists, with whom communists are willing to cooperate in moments of practical action.

A letter gives rise to the Manifesto

A few weeks after finishing the draft, Engels changes his mind about its form. In a letter to Marx dated 23-24 November 1847, sent from Paris to Brussels, he proposes dropping the catechism and naming the new text a Communist Manifesto: the reason he gives is that a piece of history needed telling, something the question-and-answer format did not render well. The letter arrives just as the Communist League’s London congress draws near, the gathering where the party programme would be settled.

Out of that exchange between the two, documented in the correspondence that traces their partnership, comes the text Marx writes in January 1848, using The Principles of Communism itself as a model. The manuscript reaches London for printing only weeks before the February 1848 revolution in France, and the Communist Manifesto is published on 21 February 1848. The next day, revolt breaks out across France and spreads quickly across the rest of continental Europe.

The Principles of Communism, by contrast, stays in the drawer. Engels’s catechism remains unpublished until 1914, when Eduard Bernstein prints it in Vorwärts!, the journal of the German Social Democratic Party. It reaches readers decades after the Manifesto had already become the best-known text of the communist movement.