The first British edition of this hugely consequential bowdlerised edition of the Communist Manifesto produced by the emigré German anarchist Johann Most (1846-1906), being the first edition in English of the Manifesto to be published in book-form in Britain.
Most’s bowdlerised edition was of enormous consequence for the history of the Manifesto and stands as an excellent example of the ideological struggle that so often accompanied the translation and publication of Marxist literature. Johann Most imposed an explicitly anarchist interpretation on his edition of Manifesto, and the publication directly prompted Engels to produce the ‘Authorised’ English translation of 1888.
Most had a long and fractious relationship with Marx and Engels, an antagonism that accelerated after Marx’s death in 1883 and culminated with the publication of the present bowdlerised version of the Communist Manifesto. Most had earlier produced the earliest abridgement of Das Kapital to appear in any language, published in 1873 under the title Kapital und Arbeit, but would soon veer towards anarchism. After emigrating to America in 1882, and following Marx’s death in 1883, “Johann Most saw an opportunity to use Marx’s ghostly coattails to push himself forward as the chief disciple of the dead leader, who could no longer protest. … The centre piece of Most’s manoeuvring was to be a new English-language edition of the Communist Manifesto” (Draper).
Most’s edition of the Manifesto was originally published as a pamphlet in New York at the beginning of June 1883 (see Andréas, 147), standing as the very first edition in English of the Manifesto to be published in book-form. Rather than an entirely new translation, Most’s edition was simply a bowdlerisation of the original English translation by Helen Macfarlane, published in 1850 in the Chartist newspaper The Red Republican, with deliberate omissions and significant garbling, including the entire deletion of the ten-point program in Section II. To help further the impression that the text was an entirely new translation, a few American idioms were introduced, with currency references altered to dollars and cents, and the bizarre inclusion of the word “buncombe”. Even the title was revised to the ‘Manifesto of the Communists’ and, most pertinently of all, Engels was demoted from co-author to a mere assistant – no doubt a very deliberate slight.
The present British edition was published in London at the beginning of June 1886, as advertised in the 12 June 1886 issue of The Commonweal. The publisher, the International Publishing Company, was owned by the English secularist and individualist anarchist Henry Seymour (1860-1938), editor of The Anarchist: A Revolutionary Review. The advertisements leaf at the rear pertains exclusively to anarchist literature, with writings by Proudhon, Reclus and Kropotkin as well as the monthly The Anarchist.
There are some subtle differences between the 1883 New York edition and the present 1886 London edition. Although the main body of text is virtually an exact reproduction of the 1883 edition, with even the new spellings and American idioms being preserved, we note the addition of an entirely new footnote on page 1 signed ‘Publisher’s Note’ explaining the terms Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. Another note has been added as a substitution for the bowdlerised ten-point program in Section II, stating: “[Here a series of measures are proposed which are not applicable at the present time, as more radical measures are necessary.]” (p. 19).
The present example bears the stamp of The Scottish Land and Labour League to the front cover, an organisation formed in 1884 by members of the Scottish section of H.M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation. Among its founding members was the Austrian emigré Andreas Scheu (1844-1927), a longstanding associate and political ally of our very own Johann Most. Given the close association between Most and Scheu, it is plausible that, rather than being a mark of ownership, the stamp indicates that the Scottish Land and Labour League acted as distributors for the publication in Scotland.
OCLC list five copies in North America (Library of Congress, Northwestern, MIT, University of Michigan, and Syracuse University), three copies in the UK (BL, Cambridge University, and National Library of Scotland) and one apiece in Germany (Bibliothek der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung) and Ireland (Trinity College, Dublin). LibraryHub adds another two copies in the UK at the London School of Economics and University of Oxford. KVK adds another copy in Germany at the Bundesarchiv.
See: Hal Draper, Adventures of the Communist Manifesto.
Andréas, 205.
