Karl Marx's Paranoid Ideation in the Communist Manifesto

Abstract

In the Communist Manifesto, written on behalf of the Communist League and published in 1848, Karl Marx maintained that communism was a Power recognized as such by other European Powers and that these Powers, as represented by the Pope, the Tsar, Austria's statesman Metternich, and France's Guizot, haunted as they were by the spectre of communism, had allied themselves in order to exorcise that spectre. I propose that the view of communism as propounded by Marx during his Brussels exile discloses his paranoid ideation of grandiosity and suspiciousness as conceptualized by W. W. Meissner [1]. In reality, the Communist League was a small group of mostly German émigré artisans and a few intellectuals residing in France, Belgium, and England. Although watched by the Prussian police, the Communist League, along with other revolutionary political groups, was too insignificant a group to concern leading European statesmen who, although fearing a repetition of the horrors of the French Revolution and the rising tide of nationalism, were either torn by rivalries in the pursuit of grand political schemes or preoccupied with maintaining the balance of power. The possible influence of Marx's paranoid ideation on I. V. Stalin's paranoid behavior is also considered.