“Trace your grave”: On the poetry of The Communist Manifesto’s grave-digger thesis

Abstract

The Communist Manifesto (1848) was written by two erstwhile poets, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who dedicated themselves to working-class self-emancipation, which requires the forcible overthrow of capitalist society. Poetry vitalised their revolutionary politics and impelled them beyond poetry to critico-practical class struggle against the bourgeoisie. Using Samuel Moore’s 1888 English translation, which Engels assisted and authorised, this paper presents new readings of famous images and passages in the Manifesto by demonstrating the significance of poetry to its representation of working life and living-dead extremity in bourgeois society. It focuses on the poetry of the Manifesto’s thesis that the bourgeoisie produces its own grave-diggers. Marx and Engels wove poetry into their thesis, including blank verse by Shakespeare and works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Thomas Hood and Heinrich Heine. The paper addresses Marx and Engels’s critical assimilation of one poem in particular: Shelley’s “Song to the Men of England” (1819). It also regards, through poetry, their critique of the extremity of capital – its infinity – which necessitates proletarian revolution for human liberation. The coda posits the Manifesto as a “barricade-poem” in prose form.