The Manifesto Handbook

Unlike fiction or poetry, the manifesto is natively and (for the most part) unapologetically political. Rather than politicizing art, the manifesto aestheticizes politics.

“I for one don’t draw up a plan first as if I were dealing with a time-table, a calculation or a war.” Nietzsche, the philosopher whose influence on the manifesto’s outspoken and aphoristic style was more profound than any other except Marx, wrote: “it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book”—an admirable goal.

Centuries ago, manifestos were used to issue declarations of war on neighboring kingdoms. Take this as your model. Declare war on your opponent. Speak like a monarch. Stick to your principles—the big points. Don’t get hung up on details, which must be negotiated after the battle is over.

The manifesto is about now, this fleeting moment, this world, what’s happening around us. Like journalism, manifestos are caught in the daily trench warfare of the present, making only occasional glances above the parapet at the wider arc of history. Their rhetoric, of course, does not always reflect this: manifestos often begin with sweeping histo

Manifestos have to mean it. This is also what gets them into trouble—when they mean it so much that, frustrated by the limitations of polite language, they reach beyond measured words to make their target feel their point—to make it hurt.

The manifesto, of course, is fundamentally not an essay. This is a key point of difference: that the revolutionary manifesto is ruled by the heart, not the head. As Avital Ronell wrote in her introduction to the 2004 edition of the SCUM Manifesto: “Sometimes you have to scream to be heard.”

“When the world feels stuck, the manifesto—like the work of art—is a mode to disrupt it,”

Aided by graphic design, the manifesto embodies the values of the movement just as a good advertisement embodies its brand.

Manifestos quickly lose their communicative effectiveness as their page count increases. Very long manifestos are usually the products of disturbed minds: think of Hitler’s 700-page Mein Kampf (1925), the Unabomber Ted Kaczinski’s 35,000-word Industrial Society and Its Future (1995) and more recently Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik’s 2083: A

For there is also the long history of manifesto dreams that turn into nightmares. But for all their (many and serious) failures, manifestos are, at their best, repositories of a kind of magic and madness that does not exist in any other genre.