On This Day in 1848

On this day in 1848, the most influential political tract of all time was published.

In 1848, a wave of liberal democratic revolutions spread across Europe, starting in Sicily but eventually enveloping France, the German states, Italy, Hungary, the Hapsburg Empire, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, and smaller events in a number of other nations. There were even offshoots far afield in places like Canada and South America. The aim of all of them was to overthrow hereditary monarchies and replace them with democratically elected governments.

The uprisings were led by ad hoc coalitions of reformers, the middle classes and workers, which did not hold together for long. Tens of thousands of people were killed, and many more were forced into exile. Significant lasting reforms included the abolition of serfdom in Austria and Hungary, the end of absolute monarchy in Denmark, and the introduction of representative democracy in the Netherlands. But most of them fizzled due to endless arguing between middle class reformers and working class radicals. The old guard exploited those divisions and mostly rolled by the revolutionaries' gains.

Most of what the men of 1848 fought for was brought about within a quarter of a century, and the men who accomplished it were most of them specific enemies of the 1848 movement. Thiers ushered in a third French Republic, Bismarck united Germany, and Cavour, Italy. Deák won autonomy for Hungary within a dual monarchy; a Russian czar freed the serfs; and the British manufacturing classes moved toward the freedoms of the People's Charter.

It also marks a turning point in the development of modern antisemitism through the development of conspiracies that presented Jews as representative both of the forces of social revolution (apparently typified in Joseph Goldmark and Adolf Fischhof of Vienna) and of international capital, as seen in the 1848 report from Eduard von Müller-Tellering, the Viennese correspondent of Marx's Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which declared: "tyranny comes from money and the money belongs to the Jews".

About 4000 exiles came to the United States fleeing the reactionary purges. Of these 100 went to the Texas Hill Country as German Texans. More widely, many disillusioned and persecuted revolutionaries, in particular (though not exclusively) those from Germany and the Austrian Empire, left their homelands for foreign exile in the New World or in the more liberal European nations: these emigrants were known as the Forty-Eighters.

And in a room above the Red Lion pub in the Soho district of London, two men spent a week and a half brainstorming the contents of a political pamphlet intended to influence the course of the revolutions.

Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels wrote: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles."

They called for the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions: “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!"

The Communist Manifesto more or less vanished without a trace, falling into the ocean of revolution with barely a ripple. It became so difficult to find that Marx saw fit to reprint parts of it in a magazine he edited. It reappeared in 1872 largely due to the treason trial of the German Social Democratic Party. Parts of the manifesto were read by the defense and became part of the official record. This meant it could be published legally in Germany so Marx and Engels rushed out a new German translation, followed by additional editions in 9 languages.

In 1882, Georgi Plekhanov produced a Russian edition, with a preface by Marx and Engels. In it they wondered if Russia could directly become a communist society, or if she would become capitalist first like other European countries.

Some time in the following 10 years, it came to the attention of one Vladimir Lenin, who became a Marxist activist after the Russian state executed his brother. By 1950, after the Chinese Revolution of 1949, half of the people on earth lived under Marxist governments.