The Communist Manifesto as a Work of Melodrama

The second chapter of The Communist Manifesto has always stood out to me from the others. To me, it’s the only point in the text where a more “personal” voice occasionally breaks through the dry, logical argument, and seeing as melodrama is, frankly, designed to be a relatively basic form of entertainment, it seemed to be a good place to look for melodramatic language. Pretty early in, something jumped out to me, “. . .abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property!” This immediately evokes the central principles and emotions surrounding individualism, a concept central to melodrama. In fact, Marx is using the words of anti-communist argument, writing this from the assumed stance of a capitalist defending his modern individualism from being taken away. Marx then completely undermines that argument by demonstrating that the idea of capitalist (and therefore modernist) individualism doesn’t exist in a tangible way for the majority of people. While this is ultimately a straw man argument, Marx is attempting to stir up the emotions of the average reader using clearly melodramatic language.

A word we keep touching on in class discussion is “catharsis,” and regardless of its presence or its painfully noticeable absence, the idea of catharsis is another hallmark of melodrama. The second chapter does, in fact, refer to this intense release of pent-up emotion, but it does so strangely. The chapter ends, “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” This comes after paragraph upon paragraph listing all the ways in which the capitalist working class are consistently denied personal freedoms by the bourgeois. The second half of this sentence, “free development of each. . .free development of all,” is clearly meant to be a sort of rallying cry, along the lines of “No taxation without representation.” But rather than deliver or deny catharsis to the audience, the inclusion of the phrase, “we shall have” instead presents catharsis as a possibility that could be obtained, the goal presumably being to create a call to action. And these are just two examples out of many! In writing The Communist Manifesto, Marx eloquently blended melodramatic speech and logical argument, stirring hearts and minds at once.