Red Chartist

By Helen Macfarlane

It must occasionally happen that translators would rather not work on a particular passage. Perhaps such a thing happened to the Scottish Chartist Helen Macfarlane when she was translating The Communist Manifesto from its original German. She was a socialist with strong religious beliefs, whereas Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels seem to have regarded religion as a dead end. 

Marx’s family boasted some eminent rabbis on both sides, while Engels came from a stiffly pious Protestant lot. Nevertheless, in the section where their manifesto casts shade on various forms of socialism that are not of the Marx and Engels variety, Christian Socialism is dismissed as ‘the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat’. That at least is how the sentence is rendered in the ‘authorised’ English version translated by Engels’ friend Samuel Moore in 1888. 

Helen Macfarlane’s version was serialised before that in the Chartist paper The Red Republican, in 1850. Readers can now access it in this collection of her writings, edited by her biographer and champion, David Black. 

The translation kicks off with an unexpected variation to the Manifesto’s famous opening words. These are rendered by Samuel Moore as: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.’ Macfarlane gives us: ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.’ In Red Antigone, his biography of Macfarlane, David Black relates how her use of ‘hobgoblin’ for the German gespenst was mocked in the London Review of Books. Black leapt to Macfarlane’s rescue, asserting in a letter that she was quite right.

Where Moore uses ‘Christian Socialism’, Macfarlane gives us ‘Sacred Socialism’. Although she may have baulked at using the phrase ‘Christian Socialism’ out of respect for readers who were socialists as well as Christians, the way this passage couches its critique of left-wing Christians is not inconsistent with Macfarlane’s own religious beliefs. ‘Priestly Socialism’ is presented as a sub-type of feudal socialism, a ‘ludicrous’ variant used by the aristocracy in their vain attempts to discredit the bourgeoisie.  

Marx, Engels and Macfarlane turned their backs on this priestly socialism, which, according to the Manifesto, only appeared because ‘the parson has always gone hand-in-hand with the landlord’. In her 1850 article ‘Red-Stockings versus Lawn-Sleeves’, Macfarlane expressed, in her customary electric prose, her disdain for both protestant and catholic churches, and the bickering that characterised much of their interaction. In a review of Thomas Carlyle’s Latter-Day Pamphlets she set out the stall for her own spiritual approach, which she called Pantheism: ‘the doctrine that the soul and nature, thought and existence, the absolute and the conditioned, the infinite and the finite, God and man, are identical.’ It was in this ‘holy religion of freedom and love’ that ‘we, the communists, socialists, and “republican vagabonds” of the 19th century, rejoice’, as did ‘our precursors, the early oriental converts [to Christianity]… of whom it is written, that there “was none among them who wanted, for they had all things in common”’.

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