NOTE: I REGRET THE INTERMITTENT INTERRUPTIONS IN THIS SERIES. MY EXCUSES ARE LACK OF MORE TIME – AND SO MANY OTHER INDIVIDUALS AND ISSUES ON WHICH TO COMMENT. BUT AS YOU SEE, IT, THIS VERY SHORT COURSE, CONTINUES.
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As indicated in my post of last August 21, I am giving a very short course, specifically on this site, on the classics of leadership literature. (See the post for how “classic” is defined.)
The posts will be drawn from my edited collection, Leadership: Essential Selections on Power, Authority, and Influence (McGraw-Hill, 2010). While here I can provide only short bursts of texts, my hope is they will prompt you to dig deeper.
The selections are grouped into three parts. Part I comprises classics About Leadership. Part II is a compilation of Literature as Leadership. And Part III consists of selections by Leaders in Action. Leaders who have used words – written, oral, or both – as instruments of leadership.
Today’s leadership literacy classic is in Part II of the book, Literature as Leadership. The idea that writing can be an act of leadership at first seems astonishing. But it is not, or it should not be. After all, writing is communicating. It is using words to send a message, in this case about change. Specifically, every writer in this section of the book was a leader. An intellectual leader who sought to create change by so convincingly making their case that people would feel compelled to act.
The eight men and four women who fall into this category all set out to right what they deeply believed was a wrong. Remarkably they did. Moreover, they wrote so well that we read them still.
Today’s writers as leaders – or, if you prefer, leaders as writers – are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Recall that their immediate predecessor in this series was Elizabeth Cady Stanton. All three were products of the Enlightenment and all three were products of their time – specifically the year 1848. As I previously wrote, it was a year during which there were, in several countries in Europe, popular revolutions against unpopular monarchs. Perhaps no surprise then that 1848 was not just the year during which Stanton penned her brilliant feminist rant but also the year during which Marx and Engels wrote the most famous, and infamous, revolutionary document of all time, The Communist Manifesto.
It is impossible to overestimate the enormous and enduring impact of the Manifesto. Consider this: in the mid-20th century Communists were in control of fully one third of the world’s total population. Moreover, communism endures, most obviously in China. Under the iron grip of President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party of China continues to have final say on nearly everything of consequence in China, including history and ideology, politics, economics and education.
But while there is debate about how much, if at all, The Communist Manifesto bears responsibility for what has been done in its name, there is no doubt that in general communist regimes – especially but not exclusively those in the Soviet Union under Stalin and in China under Mao Zedong – have been relentlessly ruthless, oppressive and repressive, brutal even, to the point of killing many millions of their own.
However, to read The Communist Manifesto is not to read a political document so much as an economic one. For what Marx and Engels sought to address was what they considered the insidious impact of capitalism. The insidious impact of dividing people into two groups: one consisting of small numbers of employers (owners, bourgeoisie) who were permanently advantaged; the other consisting of large numbers of employees (workers, proletariats) who were permanently disadvantaged. As they saw it the situation that even then existed was intolerable and unacceptable and certain to get worse. It was certain to get worse unless someone or something intervened to stop it. Which is of course where Marx’s and Engels’s economic argument become a political one. It’s impossible to overturn the economy, they argued, without overturning the ruling class.
Hence the urgency for the “formation of the proletariat into a class.” Hence the urgency for the “overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy.” Hence the urgency for the “conquest of political power by the proletariat”! And hence the need for The Communist Manifesto – a treatise in which pens were used as swords. A treatise that ended with an exhortation to revolution. You have nothing to lose but your chains…. Workers of the world, unite!
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Excerpts from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto – 1848.
- A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism….
- The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, professor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another….
- The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.
- The immediate aim of the Communists is the same as that of all the other proletarian parties: formation of the proletariat into a class, overthrow of the bourgeois supremacy, conquest of political power by the proletariat.
- In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things….