The Manifesto of The Communist Party - is The Start of Manifest Epoch

The genre of the manifesto encompasses not only a textual ability to linguistically instil political motivations, but also provides a medium connecting author and responder in a way largely unprecedented in the early twentieth century. Whilst politics has firmly remained entrenched within society, the recognition of new art and literary forms is a thoroughly modern movement. The genre of the manifesto therefore not only liberates political movement, but enables renewed modes of thought through future writing practices which revolutionised how the arts was perceived. 

Adopting such a visceral and raw approach of expression allowed authors of politics and the arts to digress from formulaic structures of rhetoric – burgeoning the era of individualism. The response of twentieth-century arts as rapidly developing movements from Modernist utopianism at the break of the twentieth-century to the rise in feminist literature in the 1960s, highlights how the susceptibility of the arts hallmarked its desperation for liberation. The unparalleled and illuminating nature of the manifesto form inevitably destructed such stagnancy. In this way, renewed ways of expression, characterised through a revolutionised perception of the arts, created modern aesthetics and understandings of the genre of the manifesto.

Conceived within the turmoil of social conflict and political agenda, the genre of the manifesto began as an unconventional medium to challenge and provoke new perceptions of politics. Due to its linguistic persuasion, the form inevitably revolutionised a stagnant and unsatisfied movement of the twentieth century – the arts. Literature and art prior to the twentieth century largely treated genres as a textual matter, focusing primarily on grammatical and syntactic structures to evoke values. Such an approach tended to conflate the intricacies of literary construction, veiling the importance of compositional integrity. The art form yearned for liberation from linguistical constrains to assume new dimensions of understanding. Discourse of the manifesto provided the impetus and opportunity for this revolutionization. 

Tethered by its foundational text, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, the manifesto form heralds controversy over its definition as a genre. Whether the medium is seen as relentlessly masculine, paradigmatically modernist or utopian, Marx and Engels undoubtedly provided the impetus and opportunity for the interplay between politics and arts. The brink of the twentieth century signalled a radicalised shift in literature with the birth of Modernism stimulated by ideas of philosophy and experimental discourse. Such authenticity was undeniably inspired by the avant-garde nature of The Communist Manifesto. Written in 1848, a period of sweeping political upheaval throughout Europe, the text symbolises the height of literary dependence through the upsurge of nationalism and widespread dissatisfaction with authority. These grievances were desperate for an avenue of expression, and Marx and Engels provided this medium. The candidness of the Manifesto in addressing the responder, “you reproach us… that is just what we intend”, provokes within the reader an active compulsion to either join the “we” or become an “other”. This division indicates the nuanced subjugation underlying all manifestos in using imperatives and operative moods to signal the urgency of change. Indeed, such visceral language as the veneer of political motivations appealed to citizens, inspiring a renewed literary perception of language.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ ‘Manifesto of the Communist Party’ in the nineteenth-century enlightened ordinary citizens to participate in politics in a that was method uncharacteristically effective. Indeed, Marx and Engels provided the impetus for countless manifestos following – including Hugo Ball’s ‘Dada Manifesto’, Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifestos, and Valerie Solanas’ ‘SCUM Manifesto’ – each challenging the rigidity of nineteenth-century modes of thought.