There were two communist manifestos of 1848. One had no influence whatsoever on the revolutions of that year, but now symbolises the struggle against bourgeois capitalism. The other secured a small readership, and is almost forgotten today, but it also laid the foundations of a business that catered to bourgeois propriety.
The gestation of Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Manifesto is fascinating — notably their attempts to peel socialism away from its roots in Christianity and the ‘utopian’ theories of Saint-Simon and Fourier. The gestation of John Humphrey Noyes’s Bible Communism is astounding.
And gestation is the word. The Perfectionist community that the tyrannical preacher Noyes created at Oneida, New York, in early 1848 didn’t only produce cutlery. It also produced people. Oneida’s ‘stirpiculture’ was the first modern eugenic experiment.
Noyes believed that the Second Coming had already occurred, and that it was possible to live without sin.
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