Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 6, 2023

 

The Political Rhetorical Presentation of Historical Dialectics: The History of the Creation of the Manifesto of the Communist Party from a Stylistic Perspective

(Abstract)

 

Zhang Fengyang

 

In recent years, studies on the history of the creation of the Manifesto of the Communist Party have been conducted at the bibliographical level, including the Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith and The Principles of Communism written by Engels, and comparing them systematically with the final version of the Manifesto written by Marx later. The “theory of three drafts” has been widely recognized. This theory is strong for its detailed bibliographical work, but it comes with the challenging issue to prove the originality and independent value of the final version of the Manifesto. In view of this, it is necessary to introduce a political rhetorical interpretive framework in order to analyze and clarify: (1) What are the major differences between a “manifesto” and a “catechism” in terms of their stylistic functions? (2) What is the substantive distinction between the proletarian “manifesto” and the bourgeois “declaration” in terms of their theoretical basis? (3) How did Marx’s “manifesto” achieve a fundamental transcendence of the various socialist ideologies? The final version of the Manifesto is written with great rhetorical skill, but for Marx, any rhetorical skill must be subordinated to and serve the larger logic of theoretical argumentation, which is the historical dialectics unfolded on the grand scale of past-present-future.