Andrew Zimmerman
George Washington University
The Shifting Temporalities of Communism:
From the Stages of History to the “war of the enslaved against their enslavers”
For “Reframing Latin America’s Nineteenth Century,” Yale University, February 27-28, 2015
Karl Marx had two distinct understandings of the place of communism in history: on the one
hand, communism represented a distant vanishing point of history. Communism, as he wrote in
the “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” of 1844, was “the riddle of history solved.” Yet
communism was also, simultaneously, the ongoing historical process through which
revolutionaries worked toward this end of history. “Communism is the real [wirkliche -- i.e.
actual] movement,” Marx wrote the next year in the German Ideology, “that abolishes the
present [jetzigen] state of things.” Throughout his intellectual career and through his political
engagements, Marx searched for a temporality that would bridge the space between these two
communisms -- the real movement against the present and the future vanishing point that solves
the riddle of history. The stage theory that Marx and Engels proposed in their early work fell
apart in the failure of the 1848 revolutions, while the American Civil War prompted them to
reconsider a self-emancipatory temporality of revolutionary war. The American Civil War of
1861-65 played a role for Marx similar to that which the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, as
Susan Buck-Morss has shown, played for Hegel.
When Marx and Engels formulated a stagist temporality in the manifesto that they
composed for the Communist League in late 1847, they displaced an earlier program by the
tailor-intellectual Wilhelm Weitling. In an 1843 pamphlet, Weitling had demanded an immediate
abolition of money, a community of goods, and a reorganization of society that would end
poverty and, just as importantly, the subjugation of the poor, as workers, to the whims of the
rich. This could occur at any point through armed insurrection.i In their manifesto, Marx and
Engels rejected this immediatism, claiming it only helped a feudal elite and prevented the full
development of capitalism as a necessary stage on the road to socialism. When revolution broke
out in Europe in 1848, Cologne communists condemned this stagist temporality for asking
workers to “precipitat[e] ourselves voluntarily into the purgatory of decrepit capitalist rule in
order to arrive at the cloudy heaven of your Communist Credo.”ii
The bourgeoisie across Europe proved to be an implacable enemy of workers, prompting
Marx and Engels to abandon the mechanistic, stage theory of the Communist Manifesto. (Their
1
Zimmerman, 2
stages of economic growth -- minus the final stage of communism -- would be taken up more
than a century later by W.W. Rostow in his “Non-Communist Manifesto”iii) The “Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” published in 1852 in New York City for the thousands of German
communists émigrés in the US, registered Marx’s post-1848 crisis of communist temporality. In
the “18th Brumaire,” the bourgeois progress that Marx and Engels had praised in the Manifesto
now seemed little more than repetitions of the past. Marx imagined a temporality that breaks
with the linear chronology of conventional history: “The social revolution of the nineteenth
century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future.”
The American Civil War would help Marx and Engels establish a new kind of
temporality, a self-making temporality of revolutionary warfare. The two followed closely the
progress of the war, in which thousands of German communists and other revolutionaries not
only participated and often worked closely with insurrectionary slaves, developing new forms of
anti-slavery politics that exceeded, underwrote, and were finally squashed by, official Union
military policy. It was through the nineteenth-century revolt of the enslaved in the Americas that
Marx finally imagined a communist temporality. The enslaved were, in the nineteenth century, a
kind of absolute proletariat with “nothing to lose but your chains” against whom the journeymen
who made up the rank-and-file Communists of the nineteenth century measured their own
decline. The First International in 1864 and the first volume of Capital of 1867 each situated
themselves explicitly in relation to the defeat of slavery in the United States.
Despite the failure of Reconstruction to weaken other despotic forms of private property,
Marx held on to the self-generating temporality of revolutionary warfare. In his analysis of the
Paris Commune of 1871, an event that moved him as only the US Civil War had, Marx described
the attack of the Third Republic on the Commune as a “slaveholders’ rebellion.” Yet, where the
bourgeois state and party system in the United States had subverted much of the revolutionary
potential of the war, the Commune, though defeated, offered a model politics for future
revolutions. The Commune, for Marx, was an episode in the same struggle as the American Civil
War, “the war of the enslaved against their enslavers, the only justifiable war in history.”
Revolutionary politics had become, for Marx and Engels, an innovative and experimental
form. The mechanistic stages of the manifesto gave way to a surreal temporality of poetry from
the future and opened a place for revolution as war, as the violent moment of political creativity
analyzed by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and others.
Zimmerman, 3
i
Wilhelm Weitling, Die Menschheit, wie sie ist und wie sie sein sollte, 2nd ed. (1838/39; Jenni, Sohn, 1845).
Gottschalk, Freiheit, Arbeit, February 25, 1849, quoted in Hans Stein, Der Kölner Arbeiterverein (1848-1849): ein
Beitrag zur Frühgeschichte des rheinischen Sozialismus (Köln: Gilsbach, 1921), 96. Translated and quoted in David
McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 217.
iii
W. W Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth, a Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1960).
ii