Originally published in 1999, this introduction to the Manifesto serves as a pretty good executive summary of Losurdo’s output over the previous decade.

This article was machine translated with human editorial oversight. Quotations of works originally written in English have been reproduced as originally published. For works originally written in other languages, quoted passages were aligned with officially published translations, if possible, with consultation of the original publication in cases of ambiguity. In a handful of places, small adjustments were made to in-line quotes for the sake of grammar or readability.

Ancient slavery and modern slavery, nature and history

As we reread the Communist Manifesto over 150 years after its publication, let’s try to examine the fundamental theoretical and political innovations introduced by Marx and Engels in their text. These innovations lie not so much in the awareness of the harshness of the social conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, nor even in the affirmation that this conflict was historically preceded by the class struggle between slaves and slave owners and between serfs and feudal lords. A few years earlier, during his trip to England, Tocqueville was so struck by the stark contrast between the appalling mass poverty and the opulence of the few that he let slip a very significant exclamation: “Here is the slave, there the master, there the wealth of some, here the poverty of most.”¹ On another occasion, the French liberal even warned against the danger of “servile wars,”² that is, slave uprisings like those of classical antiquity. The “spectre of communism” evoked by the Manifesto seems to take on terrifying proportions in Tocqueville, resembling a sort of modern proletarian Spartacus.

The working conditions of the time are thus compared to slavery: even before Marx and Engels, this motif runs deeply, consciously or unconsciously, through the liberal tradition. Locke has no difficulty in observing that “the greatest part of mankind” is “enslaved” by the objective conditions of life and labour.³ Mandeville has no doubt that the “meanest indigent part of the nation” is destined forever to perform “dirty slavish work”;⁴ it is engaged, to quote Burke, in occupations that are not only “mercenary” but also “servile” (servil), that is—as the German translator immediately clarifies—“proper to slaves” (sklavisch).⁵

But all this does not trouble the conscience of the ruling classes and the liberal bourgeoisie of the time, who rid themselves of the problem by relegating it to a sphere beyond the political one. “England,” Marx observed in 1844, “finds poverty to be based on the law of nature according to which the population must always outgrow the available means of subsistence,” and explains “pauperism” as the “bad will of the poor,” who are incapable of resisting sexual incontinence.⁶ The polemical reference is to Malthus, who paradoxically invokes political economy to sanction the restriction of the political sphere. Once it has become “an object of popular teaching,” the poor will understand that they must attribute the cause of their deprivation to unkind Mother Nature or to their own individual weakness or improvidence; “political economy is perhaps the only science, of which it may be said that the ignorance of it is not merely a deprivation of good, but produces great positive evil.”⁷

This is also the opinion of Tocqueville, who believes it is necessary to

spread among the working classes […] some of the most elementary and certain notions of political economy; to make them understand, for example, what is permanent and necessary in the economic laws that govern wage rates; why these laws, being in a sense divinely ordained, since they arise from human nature and the very structure of societies, are beyond the reach of revolutions⁸

The poor—John Stuart Mill later insists—must be dissuaded from marrying, and it is among the “legitimate powers of the State” to impose an actual prohibition.⁹

The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ironically comment on political economy as understood at the time: this “science of marvellous industry” and “science of wealth” reveals itself to be a “science of asceticism” and a “science of renunciation”; its ideal is “the ascetic but productive slave.”¹⁰ The Manifesto also expresses a harsh judgement on such “economists.” But now we witness a further development of this critique. The claim that permanent mass poverty is the fault of Mother Nature completely ignores the crises of overproduction that characterize and affect capitalism. Instead, it is better to focus attention on the following:

[In these commercial crises], a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity—the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce.¹¹

If Smith’s celebration of the “wealth of nations” heralds the end of the old regime, in the Manifesto, the impassioned hymn to the impetuous development of the productive forces stimulated by the bourgeoisie is also and above all an epitaph for a system that—precisely because of the extraordinary successes it has achieved—makes the mass misery and insecurity on which it continues to be based politically and morally unacceptable. We are faced not with a natural constraint, but with a political problem; and the political problem lies not in the now defeated scarcity, but in a “wealth of nations” that fails to become real social wealth.

A sort of objective controversy seems to have arisen between the authors of the Manifesto on the one hand and Tocqueville (and the political tradition of which he is a paragon) on the other. In taking stock of the upheavals and catastrophe of 1848, the French liberal blamed socialism, that is, the “economic and political theories” that would have us believe “that human misery was the work of laws and not of Providence, and that poverty could be suppressed by changing the conditions of society.”¹² This is precisely the thesis put forward on the eve of the revolution by the Manifesto, which aims first and foremost to call on the “proletariat” to become aware of the eminently political dimension of their plight. But for Tocqueville, wanting to intervene in this sphere means undermining the natural order of “society,” “to shake it to the foundations on which it rests.”¹³ In reality, Marx and Engels reply:

The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property.¹⁴

The year before, The Poverty of Philosophy had criticized “economists”: for them, “there has been history, but there is no longer any.”¹⁵

In Tocqueville’s view, it is precisely the illusion that there is a political “remedy for this hereditary and incurable evil of poverty and labour” that causes the “experiments” and “ruins” marking the incessant French revolutionary cycle that culminated in socialism. We are faced with a visionary ideology, a “fatal error” that must be eliminated at all costs.¹⁶ For the Manifesto, socialism is not the elaboration, however crazy or brilliant, of an intellectual or group of intellectuals, but rather the theoretical expression of real needs and possibilities: “The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.” With great effort, through trial and error, the proletariat becomes aware that the “chains” weighing on them, the “slavery” they endure, refer to a historically-determined political and social order that must now be questioned.

Extension of the political sphere and “social and political conditions”

If not due to the limited resources available and the naivety or short-sightedness of individuals, who allow themselves to be carried away by their senses and therefore fail to take into account the “principle of population” dear to Malthus, mass poverty nevertheless refers to a sphere considered to be private. After all—argues the prevailing ideology—wage levels and working conditions are the result of a contract freely agreed between the parties. It is therefore a relationship between private individuals. Bourgeois society—as Engels observed as early as 1845—responds in this way to workers who complain and protest: “You were your own master, no one forced you to agree to such a contract if you did not wish to; but now, when you have freely entered into it, you must be bound by it.”¹⁷

In conclusion—Marx observed in 1843—the causes of mass poverty are sought “partly in nature, which is independent of man, partly in private life, which is independent of the administration, and partly in accidental circumstances, which depend on no one.”¹⁸ We are dealing either with the responsibility of the individual member of civil society, or with nature or Providence; we are faced with either a freedom that cannot and must not be trampled upon, or a destiny that would be ridiculous and even sacrilegious to try to change through human intervention. And so, even if we see the majority of the population afflicted “with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exterior of servitude,” we must bear in mind that this is precisely an exterior that does not substantially undermine the reality of freedom as a “common blessing,” from which even the most miserable are not excluded.¹⁹ This clarification of Burke’s is the clarification endorsed by the liberal tradition as a whole.

This tradition evokes modern wage slavery only to immediately dismiss it as something without any political relevance. To quote the young Marx, in its most developed form, the bourgeois state only “closes its eyes and declares real contradictions to be non-political contradictions which do not disturb it”;²⁰ bourgeois society and bourgeois political theory start from the assumption that social relations, “class distinctions,” have “only the significance of private, hence non-political, distinctions.”²¹ But here the Communist Manifesto instead calls into question the existing “social and political conditions.”

“Social and political conditions”: it is worth reflecting on this expression, which recurs repeatedly and insistently; today it seems obvious, but it certainly wasn’t when it burst into both scientific debate and political struggle. Intervening himself on the eve of the 1848 revolution, Tocqueville observed with concern the behaviour of the “working classes”: they appeared calm, no longer “tormented by political passion”; unfortunately, “their passions, instead of political, have become social”; rather than political institutions, they seem to focus their attention on material living conditions and property relations.²² Judging by this analysis, a barrier separates the social from the political.

This is confirmed, in an illuminating way, by the picture that Tocqueville paints of America. Here, poor people end up in prison even for insignificant debts: in Pennsylvania, the number of individuals incarcerated annually for debt amounts to 7,000; if we add to this figure those convicted of more serious crimes, it turns out that one in every 144 inhabitants ends up in prison each year. And that’s not all: the condition of the poor is such that, even as witnesses, they are locked up in prison until the conclusion of the judicial proceedings. We are witnessing a scandalous paradox: “in the same country where the plaintiff is put in prison, the thief remains free if he can pay bail.” Tocqueville’s condemnation seems harsh and final: “The Americans, sons of the English, have planned everything for the comfort of the rich and almost nothing for the protection of the poor,” and “make light of their freedoms [of the poor].” However, the French liberal continues: “Of all modern nations, the English have been the ones who have incorporated the most freedom into their political laws, and who have made the greatest use of imprisonment in their civil laws.”; the Americans, in turn, despite having modified, sometimes radically, the “political laws,” have “retained most of the civil laws” of England.²³ With this distinction, we have arrived at the heart of the problem: Tocqueville formulates his largely positive judgement on the countries he visited, making a complete abstraction of the lois civiles, which include not only social and property relations but even the imprisonment that certain witnesses are forced to endure solely because of their poverty. On the one hand, there is the “social” and the “civil,” and on the other, the “political.” The traces of servitude that even the liberal tradition was forced to acknowledge in the bourgeois society of the time have become politically irrelevant and appear to have vanished. This restriction of the political is swept away by the Manifesto. Now, in the expression “social and political conditions,” the two adjectives constitute a hendiadys, designating an indissoluble intertwining.

“Committee” for the “common affairs” of the bourgeoisie and the struggle for suffrage

The epistemological revolution thus brought about is the prerequisite for the desired political and social revolution. Just as it cannot be explained by nature, mass poverty cannot be traced back to the private sphere. A radical change is possible and necessary. But how can it be achieved? It certainly cannot be promoted by the political regime that replaced the ancien régime. Having ousted the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie “conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway.” Yes—insists the Manifesto—“modern political power is nothing more than a committee that administers the common affairs of the bourgeois class as a whole.”²⁴

This analysis, which at first glance appears extreme and simplistic, can easily be compared to that developed by Constant, a classic of the liberal tradition: “Poor individuals manage their own affairs; rich men hire stewards”; and they even hire them when forming the political government. “But unless they are foolish”—continues the Discourse on the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns—“rich men who employ stewards carefully and rigorously examine whether these stewards are fulfilling their duties, whether they are negligent, corruptible, or incompetent.” Wealth is and must be the arbiter of political power, and therein lies the essence of modern freedom: “Credit did not have the same influence amongst the ancients; their governments were stronger than individuals, while in our time individuals are stronger than the political powers. Wealth is a power which is more readily available in all circumstances, more readily applicable to all interests, and consequently more real and better obeyed.”²⁵

As in the Communist Manifesto, Constant also believed that the state that had replaced the ancien régime continued to have a clear class connotation; it marked the rise to power of the bourgeoisie. The value judgements and political consequences that they derive are diverse and contrasting. To ensure the proper functioning of institutions, Constant and the liberals of the time continued to fight, with varying degrees of radicalism, for the maintenance of census suffrage.²⁶ It is absolutely unsurpassable in the eyes of Guizot, who, even in 1847, declared: “The dawn of universal suffrage will never come, the day in which all human beings without distinction can be called on to exercise political rights will never arrive.” Yes, Thiers observes, it is true: “32 million men are governed by the vote of 240,000. There are 240,000 men who command and 32 million who obey.” It may seem, and perhaps is, “an appalling disproportion,” but in reality, in granting political rights, we have already gone too far, indeed too low, given that “we have already gone down to a class that does not have sufficient free time, culture, or property to take an interest in political questions.”²⁷

After ironically comparing Guizot to Metternich, the Austrian chancellor who was the protagonist and architect of the Restoration, the Manifesto declares its support for the English “Chartists”, who were at the forefront of the struggle against the restriction of suffrage based on property qualifications. However, it must be immediately clarified that the demand for universal suffrage is not socialist in nature. Several years before the Manifesto, Marx had already made it clear that the immediate political significance of property was destined to disappear in the world that emerged from the American and French revolutions. Once the ancien régime had been overthrown, “the census” was no longer “a condition for active and passive suffrage”; “the penniless became the legislator of the landowner.” Having reached maturity, the bourgeois political state “declares that birth, social rank, education, occupation, are non-political distinctions, when it proclaims, without regard to these distinctions, that every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty, when it treats all elements of the real life of the nation from the standpoint of the state.”²⁸ This was demonstrated by the example of the United States, where census suffrage had been practically eliminated (within the white community): in this sense, the North American republic appeared as the “country of complete political emancipation,”²⁹ or as “the most perfect example of the modern state.”³⁰ However, the other side of the coin of abolishing census suffrage is the declaration of the absolute political irrelevance of material living conditions, of those social relations that enshrine the subjugation of the proletariat. Therefore, however just and necessary it may be, the struggle for universal suffrage is certainly not enough to bring about the desired change.

“Despotism” of the factory, negative freedom, and positive freedom

It is necessary to intervene in conditions repressed into a purely private sphere by bourgeois ideology and society; we must first and foremost assail the places where modern slavery is most clear and evident. The Communist Manifesto draws attention to the reality of the capitalist factory. Here we can see first-hand the “despotism” that weighs on the workers: “organized like soldiers,” “as privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants.”³¹ Although the government is ultimately the political expression of the ruling class, it can and must be pressured to intervene to limit this “despotism” or to strike at its most odious aspects; in fighting for this goal, the worker’s movement can draw on the many contradictions that run through the bourgeoisie and the power bloc.

It is therefore easy to understand why the Manifesto welcomes “the 10-hour working day in England” won by the workers’ struggle. Once again, it may be instructive to compare this with Tocqueville, who instead pronounces an unconditional condemnation of the legislative regulation in France that aims to limit the working day to 12 hours. From the point of view of Marx and Engels, in addition to improving the quality of life of workers, the struggle to reduce working hours aims to restrict the “despotism” prevailing in factories. It is therefore also a struggle for freedom. Having removed factory “despotism” and labour relations and material living conditions from the private sphere, Tocqueville has no difficulty in condemning as attacks on freedom the intervention of political power in an area that is solely “social” and “civil” and the “socialist doctrine” that this intervention encourages and imposes.³²

As can be seen, the usual configuration of the contrast between Marx and Engels on the one hand and the liberal tradition on the other is completely untenable, as if the former reserved their attention exclusively for political rights and material living conditions (for “positive freedom”) while disregarding so-called “negative freedom” (the individual’s ability to think, act, and live without external coercion). On the contrary, the struggle against a fundamentally militaristic and despotic organisation such as the capitalist factory, from which an entire social class cannot escape unless it seeks the alternative in death by starvation, the workers’ struggle called for by the Manifesto aims precisely to universalize and make concrete this same negative freedom.

The liberal tradition, which insists so strongly on the need to limit power, loses sight of the goal so solemnly proclaimed as soon as one crosses the threshold of the factory: the “absolute law-giver” who, in Engels’ eyes, is the capitalist master, must be able to continue to act undisturbed.³³ Tocqueville acknowledges that capitalist industry “is becoming increasingly organized in an aristocratic form” and that within it, wage earners find themselves “in a state of strict dependence” on their employers.³⁴ It is a constraint, adds Constant, that manifests itself even before entering the factory: the wage earner lacks the “necessary income to exist independently of any other party’s will”; “proprietors are masters of his life, for they can refuse him work.”³⁵ To quote Sieyès, the “slavery of necessity” forces the “uneducated masses” to submit to “forced labour” and thus to a condition “lacking in freedom.”³⁶ But we are still dealing with social relationships that have no political relevance; and so, for Tocqueville, the claim to “substitute the foresight and wisdom of the state for the wisdom and foresight of the individual” is foolish and liberticidal; “there is nothing that authorizes the State to intervene in industry.”³⁷

For the Manifesto, however, a celebration of freedom that does not question, on the one hand, the “despotism” of the employers and, on the other hand, the social relations that degrade “workers” to “commodities” sounds empty and hypocritical. There is now a mature awareness that incisive “political change” implies “a change in the material conditions of existence, in economical relations.”³⁸ But let’s be clear: material does not equate to economic, nor can this term be reduced in any way to merely the level of wages and the standard of living. Material is everything that comes out of the “aerial life,” the “ethereal region,” the “sky of the political state,” as defined and limited by modern bourgeois theory and society. It is a matter of putting an end to a situation in which individuals are free and equal “in the heaven of their political world,” while continuing to suffer unfreedom and inequality “in the earthly existence of society.”³⁹ Here, material is the earthly existence of society, the concrete world of life, expunged from the political sphere by theory and bourgeois society, but which now, fully incorporated into the sphere of “social and political conditions,” must finally be freed from its burden of misery and oppression.

Movement from below and initiative from above in the emancipation process

While trying to impose intervention from above on the bourgeois government itself, the workers promote an autonomous movement of transformation from below: “workers begin to form combinations against the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of wages”⁴⁰. The “combinations” and the emerging trade union movement hailed by the Manifesto have a long history of denunciation and persecution behind them. At the beginning of the 18th century, Mandeville expressed his amazement at a new and disturbing phenomenon:

I am credibly informed, that a parcel of footmen are arrived to that height of insolence, as to have entered into a society together, and made laws, by which they oblige themselves not to serve for less than such a sum, nor carry burdens, or any bundle or parcel above a certain weight, not exceeding two or three pounds, with other regulations directly opposite to the interest of those they serve, and altogether destructive to the use they were designed for. ⁴¹

Within this “private” sphere constituted by economic and social relations, the proletariat is not permitted to avail itself either of the support it claims from political power or the collective organisation it seeks to build. Only contracts outside of any form of organisation from below, any “combination or collusion,” are truly freely made;⁴² this was the opinion expressed at the end of the 18th century by Burke, with a transparent and complacent allusion to the Combination Laws that prohibited and punished workers’ coalitions.⁴³

Smith’s position is particularly interesting. He recognizes that forming coalitions is a vital necessity, a real matter of life and death: we are dealing with “desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands.”⁴⁴ On the other hand, coalitions are a fact of life: “Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate” or indeed aim to “sink the wages of labour even below this rate.”⁴⁵ This does not prevent the great economist from recommending that the government severely crack down on any attempt at worker organisation.

This attitude appears cruel or ruthless, but we must understand the logic behind it. Smith insists on one essential point: it is necessary to “[allow] every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice”;⁴⁶ “according to the system of natural liberty,” every man must be able to offer and compete with “his industry and capital,” without hindrance of any kind.⁴⁷ Given these assumptions, even workers’ coalitions end up being seen as “violations of natural liberty, and therefore unjust.”⁴⁸

Liberal France under the July Monarchy argued similarly. The authorities warned workers protesting against piecework: “If the workers of Paris have well-founded claims to raise, these should be presented individually and in a regular form to the competent authorities,” and in any case without affecting “the principle of the liberty of industry” and “liberty of labour.”⁴⁹ In the second half of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill thundered against the “moral police, which occasionally becomes a physical one,” exercised by the labour movement: “the bad workmen who form the majority of the operatives in many branches of industry” attempted to block piecework and thus “weigh oppressively” on the workers of “superior skill or industry,” who seek to earn more. Yet, the consequences of piecework had been described by Smith several decades earlier: the workers who submit to it “are very apt to overwork themselves, and to ruin their health and constitution in a few years”; if they listened to the dictates of reason and humanity, employers themselves should limit this type of remuneration. But philanthropic intervention from above is one thing; organized intervention from below in what even Mill continues to consider “private concerns” is quite another.⁵⁰

Even today, Hayek accuses trade unions of eliminating the “competitive determination of prices” of labour, thereby undermining the liberal system at its roots.⁵¹ We cannot remain passive in the face of such destruction: it is “the clear moral duty of government not only itself to refrain from any such interference in the game [of the market], but also to prevent the arrogation of such power by any organized group.”⁵² In the sphere that it has sovereignly declared “private,” the liberal bourgeoisie tolerates not only the intervention of political power but also that coming from within civil society.

From the perspective of the liberal tradition, in order to not violate the market, contracts must be individual; if the orderly functioning of the factory requires the regimentation of the workers, the orderly functioning of the labour market requires the most radical fragmentation possible of those who are called upon to provide and sell it. To quote the Communist Manifesto, “wage labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers.”⁵³ On the surface, it is a triumph of freedom: the individual worker is now independent of both the state and his fellow workers. In reality, it is now possible to see first-hand how the worker has been reduced to a commodity, to a thing: “forced to sell themselves piecemeal,” workers “are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.”⁵⁴

From the perspective of the liberal tradition, despotism is synonymous with the attempt to overcome the fragmentation of the working class by intervening in a sphere defined as “private,” in contrast to the political state, and constructed and deconstructed (even by force, through legislative measures, which are in this case desired and demanded) as a simple collection of individuals, with the consequent condemnation, more or less explicit and more or less rigorous, of any attempt to organize the subaltern classes. From the point of view of Marx and Engels, fragmentation consecrates the triumph of master’s “despotism” and makes the “slavery of necessity” and “forced labour” of workers—to use Sieyès’s phrases—insurmountable.

We can now better understand the profound meaning of the closing words of the Manifesto: “Workers of all countries, unite!” This is not a rhetorical appeal. These were the years when Carlyle, to give just one example, after justifying the enslavement of African Americans across the Atlantic, branded the Irish who tended to occupy the lower segments of the labour market in Great Britain as “black.”⁵⁵ The struggle against the fragmentation of the working class is at the same time the struggle against national or racial prejudice.

Struggle for political power and transformation of society

But reforms achieved through movements from below and interventions from above will always be insignificant as long as “political power” continues to be the business “committee” of the bourgeoisie. Those same limited reforms can be overturned by the ruling class, aided by the fact that the organisation called upon to promote resistance against the “despotism” of the bosses “is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.”⁵⁶ A radical and irreversible change in “social and political conditions” presupposes—as Marx already emphasized in 1844—a “political revolution with a social soul.”⁵⁷ The “organisation of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party” ⁵⁸ must aim, the Manifesto clarifies, at the conquest of political power.

This is the moment when change from below and change from above come together in a process of radical transformation of society. The “property question,” which the liberal bourgeoisie would like to expunge from the political sphere, now clearly and explicitly emerges as the “fundamental question of the movement” of the workers and of the new society to be built; it is a matter of acting “by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production.”

In addition to a broad program of nationalization of the means of production, the “despotic inroads” considered here also include a “highly progressive tax.”⁵⁹ It is a seemingly modest measure. It is worth focusing our attention on this aspect in order to understand the great influence that the Manifesto has had on Western society and history.

The young Engels’ interpretation of this measure is particularly significant:

For the principle of taxation is, after all, a purely communist one […] For either private property is sacrosanct, in which case there is no such thing as national property and the state has no right to levy taxes, or the state has this right, in which case private property is not sacrosanct, national property stands above private property, and the state is the true owner.⁶⁰

The tax system, or more precisely, progressive taxation, which involves a redistribution of income in favour of the poorest classes, is cited here as proof of the unsustainability of the principle of the absolute inviolability of private property. This explains the hostility of liberal authors. To tell the truth, for Montesquieu, only indirect taxation is consistent with the principles of liberty: “per capita taxation is more natural to slavery; taxation on goods is more natural to liberty, because it has not so direct a relation to the person”; personal income tax, on the other hand, involves “perpetual rummaging and searching into their houses” and “nothing is more contrary than this to liberty.”⁶¹

However, the liberal tradition focuses primarily on progressive taxation. In Benjamin Constant’s view, favourable tax treatment for the poor not only penalizes “wealth” but also ends up “portraying poverty as a privilege” and even creating “a privileged caste.”⁶² This is a singular thesis, if only because it comes at a time when the combined effect of famine and inflation is reducing, according to the testimony of Constant’s friend Madame de Staël herself, “the lowest class of society to a state of the utmost wretchedness,” inflicting upon them “unheard of evils,” even starvation.⁶³ But we are already familiar with the logic that brands any intervention in the private sphere as an attack on freedom. If anything, spontaneous individual charity can alleviate mass poverty. Spencer compares “state charity” (taxation of the rich) to the “state church” dear to monarchical absolutism: both stifle spontaneity and prevent authentic charity and religiosity from flourishing.⁶⁴

Is this clear condemnation of progressive taxation motivated solely by a love of liberty? Hobbes was already taking a firm stance on indirect taxes and supporting the argument that only consumption taxes guarantee equal treatment before the tax authorities:

Why should someone who works hard and saves the fruits of his labour, consuming little, be charged more than someone who lives idly, earns little, and spends everything he earns; one has no greater protection from the state than the other?⁶⁵

Montesquieu could have made this objection of Leviathan his own. Paradoxically, in its distrust or hostility toward income tax, and even more so toward progressive income tax, the liberal tradition ends up aligning itself with a theorist of absolutism. It is in light of this centuries-old debate on taxation⁶⁶ that the decisive stance of the Manifesto must be read: the necessary redistribution of income cannot be entrusted to individual charity; far from being limited to acting on the intimacy of consciences, real change requires intervention in “social and political conditions,” which also includes the tax system.

The proletariat from “instrument of labour” to universal historical political subject

A class that suffers “despotism” in the factory not only from the boss but also from the “machine” is called upon to be the protagonist of a great political and social revolution. It is worth pausing for a moment on what is perhaps the most radical innovation of the Manifesto. It is not difficult to find lucid descriptions of the dulling effects produced by the capitalist factory in the liberal tradition. Forced to obsessively repeat “a few very simple operations; frequently [only] one or two,” the worker, Smith observes, ends up becoming “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become”; he is unable to form “any just judgement concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life,” not to mention political issues. If there is a remedy for this situation, it can only come from above and from outside, from an enlightened or philanthropic bourgeoisie. For the Manifesto, however, dullness is only one aspect; on the other hand, it is precisely the harsh daily and collective experience of exploitation and “despotism” in the factory that can constitute the prerequisite for the working class to emerge as the central subject of transformation. In Smith, the worker seems to lose even his most human characteristics: he becomes “not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment”; for Marx, the proletariat is the very “heart” of human emancipation.⁶⁷

This is a radical innovation that is still difficult to understand today. Consider Hannah Arendt, who contrasts productive work and the struggle of workers and the people for better living conditions with the “public happiness” that arises from political action and communication as an end in itself. According to the author, this dimension would have remained completely foreign to Marx and historical materialism. In reality, Arendt fails to see that, precisely in the course of the struggle against the material oppression to which it is subjected, an entire social class discovers and experiences the taste and passion of political action. “Now and then,” observes the Manifesto, “the workers are victorious, but only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers.”⁶⁸

The unity of workers is not merely a means to an end. By breaking, through trade union and political action, the isolation to which the bourgeoisie would like to confine it, an entire social class gains its dignity even before achieving concrete results. This is what strikes Engels during his trip to England; addressing the workers, the young revolutionary expresses his happiness at being able to “chat with you on your condition and grievances, to witness your struggles against the social and political power of your oppressors.”⁶⁹

Remaining firm in Smith’s point of view, Arendt ignores the real historical effectiveness that unfolds from Marx and Engels’ theory, which brings to politics the exterminated masses of men, dehumanized by the social order and ideology that had dominated until then. Burke subsumed the farm labourer or wage worker under the category of instrumentum vocale and thus, following a classical division, placed him among the tools of labour together with the ox (instrumentum semivocale) and the plow (instrumentum mutum). Sieyès referred to “most men as working machines,” or “human instruments of production” or “bipedal instruments.” At best, we are dealing with an “eternally childlike multitude.” This is also Constant’s point of view, who likened the proletariat to “children” who, forced to work day and night, remain in a situation of “endless dependence”;⁷⁰ in some ways they are men, but with the unique characteristic that they do not become, and can never become, adults.

And so these “tools” of labour, these “bipedal machines,” or rather these eternal “children,” reject the condition they had until then endured as a natural calamity. What is being called into question is human and political degradation even before economic exploitation. Arendt’s economistic reading of Marx and Engels can be countered by the fact that the Manifesto harshly criticizes those who would like to “make the working class lose its taste” for politics and “political change”: according to their preaching, it should be satisfied with a few minor “changes in the material conditions of existence,” renouncing not only all revolutionary projects but also political action as such, thereby also setting aside the struggle for the abolition of property-based discrimination in suffrage. It is worth noting that during this same period, similar sermons were addressed to “free” blacks in the North of the United States and, later, in the South as well: they were urged to renounce, for their own interest, their claims to political equality and full human dignity, and instead focus exclusively on wages and other aspects of daily life and material well-being. Marx and Engels had nothing but contempt for such an attitude.

Properly understood, the struggle for better living and working conditions is also a struggle for recognition. In demanding recognition from the ruling and exploiting class, the proletariat begins to recognize one another. It is a process described with emotional emphasis in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means has become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating, and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.⁷¹

This passage could be contrasted with the one in which Smith recommends that the government promptly dissolve wage-earning coalitions, intervening against any possible form of worker aggregation, even if, unfortunately, “people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices” (of labour power).⁷² And once again, a comparison with Marx may be useful. France’s Le Chapelier Law of 1791, which prohibited “coalitions”, was branded by Capital as a kind of “bourgeois coup d’état” by which the new ruling class wrested from the workers “the right of association they had just won.”⁷³

In conclusion, for Marx and Engels, beyond its sacrosanct economic and political demands, the workers’ movement has a much more ambitious goal. The Manuscripts describe it in philosophical terms: bourgeois society forces the proletariat into painful mutilation, caging and isolating them in the “the abstract existence of man as a mere workman who, therefore, tumbles day-after-day from his fulfilled nothingness into absolute nothingness, into his social and, hence, real non-existence.”⁷⁴ It is this situation that must be brought to an end. The language of the Manifesto is more directly political: economic and social relations that involve the “transformation into machines” of the proletariat, degraded to “instruments of labour”, to an “appendage of the machine”; “capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.”

Cities and countryside, proletarian and colonial peoples

Not only can the proletariat design and build a social system different from the dominant one, but within capitalism itself it can become the decisive force for the overthrow of the ancien regime and the realization of political democracy. In this case, it is called upon to link the struggle for political democracy to the struggle to overcome capitalist society. In certain circumstances—the Manifesto emphasizes—these tasks can become intertwined in an indissoluble unity:

The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution.

With its gaze levelled on a country still relatively backward in economic and political terms, the possibility of a socialist revolution developing in the wake of an anti-feudal revolution led by the proletariat is evoked here. This theory of revolution has proven historically effective, not the one presented in the famous pages of Capital, which sees socialist revolution as the immediate and automatic consequence of the completion of the process of capitalist accumulation, that is, as the “expropriation” (by the proletariat) of the “expropriators” (the bourgeoisie).

Yes, in the Twentieth Century, socialist revolutions erupted in countries that had not yet reached capitalist maturity—but outside the geographical framework considered by the Manifesto. For its authors, Europe is synonymous with civilization and the East with barbarism. Not that Marx and Engels totally aligned themselves with the liberal tradition, which in those years, with Tocqueville and Mill, was busy lyrically celebrating even the Opium Wars. The Manifesto is more problematic: what the West imposes is “so-called civilization”, that is, “bourgeois” relations. An article by Marx written a few years later expresses this even more incisively. Denouncing the horror of colonial expansion, he observes how it sheds light on the true nature of the capitalist metropolis: “The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked.”⁷⁵ In the colonies, the violence of domination manifests itself without mediation or pretence: “Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.”⁷⁶

And yet, despite the horrific crimes committed, Marx saw the British conquest of India as “the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”⁷⁷ While the idea of the revolutionary subjectivity of the working class was completely foreign to Smith, Marx and Engels were only occasionally able to grasp the revolutionary subjectivity of colonial peoples. For this to happen, we must await the intervention of Lenin, in a different and objectively more advanced situation. With him, another process came to completion. Locke celebrated freedom but considered the slavery of Black people in the colonies to be obvious and peaceful; Mill condemned despotism, but celebrated its pedagogical effectiveness with his gaze levelled at the “races” he considers “minors.” Heavy exclusion clauses accompanied the celebration of freedom within the liberal tradition. Tocqueville described in a lucid and moving way the terrible treatment reserved for Black and Indigenous people in America, and yet the United States continued to be, in his eyes, the country of democracy, “living, active, triumphant.”⁷⁸ In all three cases, democracy is defined independently of the fate of those excluded.

Traces of this attitude can also be found in Marx and Engels, who, as we know, considered the United States to be the “country of complete political emancipation,” or “the most perfect example of the modern state,” which ensured the domination of the bourgeoisie without excluding any social class a priori from the enjoyment of political rights. In reality, contrary to what Tocqueville, Marx, and Engels believed, far from disappearing, class discrimination continued to exist across the Atlantic in the form of ethnic and racial discrimination, and in this form it proved to be much more tenacious than in Europe.

Another motif that is very present in the work of Marx and Engels (“A nation cannot become free and at the same time continue to oppress other nations.”⁷⁹) was taken up by Lenin,⁸⁰ who definitively broke with the exclusionary clauses of the liberal tradition and with any vision of democracy that claimed to define this regime independently of the fate of those who are excluded. This theme played a powerful role in the October Revolution, which thus marked a radical turning point in the unfolding of the revolutionary subjectivity of colonial and former colonial peoples.⁸¹

Globalization and the “industrial war of extermination between nations”

The revolutions invoked by the Manifesto broke out in regions on the margins of the developed West. Its authors are generally accused of having a catastrophic view of historical development. In reality, at least as far as international politics is concerned, they did not go all the way in demystifying the contemporary bourgeois ideology of supposed universal harmony, which celebrated its global expansion as the triumphal march of civilization and peace. These were the years when Constant prophesied the disappearance or decline of war as a result of the expansion of trade.⁸² Later, Spencer saw the figure of the industrialist-merchant supplant that of the warrior,⁸³ right at the time that European cities expanded industrially and commercially not only through bloody colonial wars, but also through growing rivalry between the industrial-commercial powers themselves, a rivalry that later had a significant influence on the outbreak of the First World War.

This harmonious vision sometimes also emerges in the Communist Manifesto. A process of general pacification seems to be advancing in the metropolis: “National differences and antagonisms between peoples are daily more and more vanishing, owing to the development of the bourgeoisie, to freedom of commerce, to the world market, to uniformity in the mode of production and in the conditions of life corresponding thereto.” It appears that we are witnessing the decline of war in developed bourgeois society, without having to wait for communism, when “the antagonism between classes within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.” On the other hand, the Manifesto credits Sismondi with denouncing the reality of the “industrial war of extermination between nations.” Just a few months later, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung ironically commented on Ruge: he had failed to understand that the phenomenon of war would not disappear with the feudal system and that countries dominated by the bourgeoisie were by no means “natural allies,” separated as they were by fierce competition, the outcome of which could well be war.⁸⁴

As soon as the Manifesto evoked it, the “industrial war of extermination between nations” contributed significantly to the success of the revolutions it called for. Starting with the struggle against the carnage that began in 1914, a country and, subsequently, a “socialist camp” emerged under conditions of double “barbarism” (to use the language of the Manifesto): the severe backwardness of the East and, above all, the horror of the two world wars and total war. It goes without saying that Marx and Engels did not in any way foresee such an attempt to build a post-capitalist society. But after the collapse of the “socialist camp,” a situation arose that once again brings us back to the Manifesto. In a text that appeared 150 years ago, it is possible to read an analysis that is surprisingly relevant today:

All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production.⁸⁵

The globalization that everyone is talking about today could not be better described. This homogenization tends to affect even what remains of the “socialist camp.” Once again, a text of venerable age sounds prophetic. The expansion of the bourgeoisie appears unstoppable:

The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.⁸⁶

In imposing this standardization on a global scale, the bourgeoisie actually asserts not only its economic and ideological power, as the passage just seen asserts, but also its political and military power, made evident by a whole series of measures that lie somewhere between peace and actual armed conflict: embargoes, economic warfare and threats of economic warfare, military intimidation, and international ideological campaigns that can draw on impressive multimedia firepower. On the other hand, albeit in an uncertain and contradictory manner, the Manifesto already recognizes that the “universal inter-dependence” produced by capitalism is not in contradiction with the phenomenon of “industrial war of extermination” or with other more or less catastrophic conflicts.

From the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat to the gulag?

The double “barbarism” that characterized the historical context of the revolutions invoked by the Manifesto resulted in the gulag. Should we consider its authors jointly responsible? It’s a poorly-formulated question: it seems to assume that the political prophecies of that text lead only in the direction of “real socialism.” But that’s not how it is. Let’s take two unimpeachable testimonies. Popper believes he can demonstrate the irremediable obsolescence of Marx’s theory on the basis that “modern democracies” have already put into practice “most” of the programmatic demands of the Communist Manifesto, starting with “highly progressive or graduated income tax.”⁸⁷ In truth, the wording used here is rather imprecise and unusual, as it assimilates and unifies two quite different types of taxation! Given that he refers to the Communist Manifesto, it is however presumable that the theorist of the “open society” actually means the “starke Progressivsteuer,” or “highly progressive tax,” which we have already discussed. The fact remains that, by arguing in this way, Popper demonstrates the debt that “modern democracies” owe to Marx and Engels, not the obsolescence of their theories. This type of taxation is more than ever at the centre of political debate, and is strongly contested by Hayek, for example, who refers precisely to “progressive taxation as a means to effect a redistribution of income in favour of the poorer classes” to denounce the intolerable socialist contamination suffered by Western society itself.⁸⁸ And so, together with Popper, despite their different and opposing value judgements, even the patriarch of neoliberalism ends up acknowledging the influence that Marx and Engels exerted on Western “real democracy.”

This influence applies not only to progressive taxation (and the welfare state). The very configuration of political institutions, based on the principle of “one person, one vote,” bears much greater similarities to the program advocated by the Communist Manifesto than to the statements of the liberal theorists of the time, who were more or less attached to the principle of property discrimination in voting and far removed from even the idea of abolishing the upper chamber of the legislature (established on the basis of privilege of birth rather than wealth). And if today, in politics and civil society, wage workers can no longer be immediately identified with the instrumentum vocale, the “bipedal machine”, and the eternal “child” referred to in the liberal tradition, this is primarily due to the Communist Manifesto and the historical events it set in motion.

All this is glossed over by the thesis that attempts to draw a line of continuity starting from Marx and Engels’ theory of a transitional phase of revolutionary dictatorship all the way to the gulag. In reality, similar arguments were made by their contemporaries, but with very different positions. Consider the theory put forward in Mazzini’s Young Italy movement in 1833 of “a strongly centralized dictatorial power” that proceeds to “suspend” the bill of rights and only completes its task with the final victory of the national revolution.⁸⁹ Or consider Tocqueville who, around the same time, after describing the tragedy of the Irish people, decimated by poverty and oppressed and tyrannized by a foreign aristocracy, wondered whether “a temporary dictatorship under firm and enlightened guidance, like that of Bonaparte after the 18th Brumaire, would be the only means of saving Ireland.”⁹⁰

The Manifesto, however, barely hints at the thesis of the transitional phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat: it can be glimpsed in the passage on the “despotic inroads” that the proletariat, constituted as the “ruling class,” is called upon to carry out on existing property relations.⁹¹ In any case, Marx and Engels’ text was written about fifteen years after the invocation of a revolutionary or reformist dictatorship seen in Mazzini and Tocqueville. Obviously, within the liberal tradition (European and American), even more widespread is the conservative theorization of dictatorship for the state of exception. Indeed, it is difficult to find a more magniloquent celebration of the “admirable institution” that was the Roman dictatorship than that found in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws.⁹² It is senseless to denounce the catastrophic effects of the justification of dictatorship by drawing on Marx and Engels, behind whom a long tradition clearly extends.

Finally, perhaps the most important consideration. It is legitimate and indeed necessary to question the responsibility of Marx and Engels, starting from their theory’s actual history and rejecting the myth of the theory’s innocence. But we must proceed similarly for all great intellectuals, even those who belong to different and opposing traditions of thought. Take Locke: is there a connection between his refusal to extend tolerance and even “compassion” to “papists” on the one hand, and on the other hand, the massacres later suffered by Catholics in Ireland?⁹³ And what connection exists between his theorization of slavery in the colonies and the slave trade and the tragedy of Black people, which today’s African-American activists refer to as the Black Holocaust? This problem is all the more pressing given that, at the end of the seventeenth century, many Black slaves were branded with the letters RAC, the initials of the Royal African Company, of which Locke was a shareholder.⁹⁴ The least that can be said is that Marx and Engels did not benefit from the forced labour that, decades after their deaths, would characterize the gulag.

Or, to refer to the historical period of the Manifesto, take Tocqueville. He celebrated the colonists who landed in North America for their combat against “the wilderness and savage life,” against “savages” who were irredeemably alien to “civilization,” and depicted the territory prior to the arrival of the colonists as “the empty cradle of a great nation”;⁹⁵ is there a connection between all this and the subsequent forced removals suffered by Indigenous peoples until the consummation of what today’s descendants of Indigenous nations call the American Holocaust? And is there a connection, as far as John Stuart Mill is concerned, between the theory of “despotism” that the West is called upon to exercise over “under age” races (who are in turn required to show “absolute obedience”)⁹⁶ and the terror (and massacres) that accompanied colonial expansion?

Even if we disregard colonies and populations of colonial origin, we must question the link that may connect the celebration of laissez-faire and the free market with the tragedies (including starvation) that, as acknowledged by the liberal authors themselves (Smith, Constant, Madame de Staël), afflict the masses. Shortly before the Manifesto, the Irish population was decimated, sentenced to death not only by the disease that destroyed the potato crop but also by a ruthless orthodoxy that condemned as unacceptable despotism any intervention by political power in a sphere that must remain “private.”⁹⁷ This is the ideology that Marx and Engels question or indict.

Revolutionary dialectics and messianism

Once freed from the one-sidedness and instrumentalism with which it is generally formulated, the problem of the relationship between theory and its historical effectiveness must also be kept firmly in mind with regard to Marx and Engels. Already in the Manifesto, the uncritical utopia of a society begins to take shape, in which “public power will lose its political character”, ultimately becoming a society not only without classes but also without a state and without national borders, without a market, without religions, without conflicts of any kind. This exalted vision of post-capitalist society has certainly played a disastrous role in attempts to build it. To give just one example: what was the point of rushing to build a democratic socialist state if the state was then destined to disappear?

Those who would like to dismiss the authors’ ideas wholesale as a form of superficially secularized eschatology draw on the messianic elements that are undoubtedly present in the Manifesto. Doesn’t the claim of the Manuscripts that communism is the solution to the “riddle of history” clearly hark back to the dreams and dogmatic certainties of religions?⁹⁸ In reality, this infamous statement is a citation to an author who was very dear to Marx. In denouncing Christianity’s “condemnation (Verdammnis) of the flesh” and “renunciation of all earthly pleasures,” Heine celebrates “communism” as the “natural consequence” of a new “world view”: “The masses can no longer bear their worldly misery with Christian patience; they yearn for happiness on earth.” At this point, the fate of Christianity is sealed, “for every epoch is a sphinx that plunges into the abyss as soon as its riddle has been solved.”⁹⁹ For Marx, too, communism is the solution to the riddle of history, in that it surpasses, both theoretically and practically, the asceticism recommended for and imposed on the masses not only by religion but also by a society that continues to be based on the denial of earthly happiness and of the very meaning of life for the majority of the planet’s population.

This program and this hope find expression in a thought that is not without elements of messianism, but it is precisely the Manifesto that puts us on the path to understanding their genesis and significance: the “fantastic pictures of future society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of society.” Of course, this thesis is put forward in opposition to utopian socialism, but that does not prevent it from being applied to the authors of the Manifesto themselves. This is the objective dialectic of every revolutionary process, brilliantly explained on other occasions, particularly by Engels. In the wake of the struggle against a situation perceived as intolerable, and in an effort to generate the enthusiasm needed to overcome the terrible obstacles standing in the way of the overthrow of the existing regime, every revolutionary process tends to see the future it proposes to build in somewhat exalted terms, tending to represent it as a kind of end of history.¹⁰⁰

This exaltation proves fruitful in the phase of destruction, but disastrous in the next phase; the attempt to build a post-capitalist society has oscillated between the two poles of a permanent state of exception (the two world wars and the Cold War) and a celebrated utopia, which in turn has ended up prolonging and further exacerbating the state of emergency.

The relevance and irrelevance of a “classic”

If the attempt to liquidate Marx and Engels by reducing them to the gulag is devoid of historical and theoretical dignity, the attempt to politically neutralize them by elevating them to the respectability of “classics” is highly questionable. This definition hits the mark if it aims to highlight the fact that their lesson far transcends the confines of the communist movement. Through a series of categories that are now inescapable (“political and social conditions,” social class, mode of production, ideology, etc.), the work of the authors of the Manifesto has enriched and reinterpreted the lexicon, reformulating the grammar and syntax of political and historical discourse. But the same consideration applies to every great author, who is not thereby shielded from political conflict. Plato and Hegel are undoubtedly “classics,” who, according to Popper, remain the great and disastrous inspirers of totalitarianism! Equally undoubtedly, Locke and Tocqueville are “classics,” but they too can be called into question, as we have seen, for tragedies that continue to fuel cultural and political debate today.

If it is futile to attempt to remove a great author from the turmoil and passions of political conflict by elevating him above the fray into the empyrean realm of the classics, then it is naive to approach this classic by questioning immediately, and simplistically, its relevance or irrelevance today. Many pages written by various exponents of the liberal tradition strike us as decidedly outdated, not only those documenting their attitude towards colonized peoples or wage labourers in the capitalist metropolis, but also, as we have seen, those that refer more directly to the constitution and functioning of representative bodies. And yet, this does not mean closing the book on these authors, as if there were nothing to learn from them for understanding (and organizing or transforming) the world in which we live.

Marx and Engels should be approached in a similar manner. In fact, in this case, any discourse that sought to immediately proclaim their relevance would be self-contradictory. We are in fact dealing with authors who have repeatedly stated that their theory developed through engagement with the actual historical movement. To consider the Communist Manifesto immediately relevant today, dismissing over 150 years of extraordinarily rich and tragic history as irrelevant to theoretical development, means effectively ignoring or rejecting the theoretical approach on which that text is based.

There is one further consideration to add. Marx and Engels, on the one hand, aim to accurately reflect reality, while on the other hand, they are committed to radically changing it. The observation that workers in capitalist society are reduced to mere instruments of labour is at the same time an appeal levelled at these instruments to question their condition, to become conscious of themselves, to gain political subjectivity and even revolutionary political subjectivity. “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains”: once again, a passionate denunciation sparks a gigantic global process and movement that profoundly alters the initial situation and affects the very chains themselves, leaving them loosened, if not broken.

On the other hand, the Manifesto reveals a clear awareness that bourgeois society is very different from the societies that preceded it. It continues to be characterized by class domination, but this domination is by no means synonymous with stasis or even stability. It is a society that is constantly revolutionizing itself. And this sort of permanent bourgeois revolution refers, on the one hand, to an internal dialectic (the bitter competition between capitalists) and, on the other, to a challenge that comes from outside the bourgeois sphere proper. The workers’ struggle for shorter working hours is matched by the bourgeois initiative for further mechanization of the production process, for the replacement of workers by machines, for the relocation of factories in pursuit of cheaper and more docile labour, as well as the most advantageous use of raw materials.

Outlined in the Manifesto, this dialectic of challenge and response is further developed in Capital and in the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy. It also reveals a more immediately political aspect. The unrest and agitation among workers in Great Britain and Germany were met with political and social reforms by Disraeli and Bismarck, which expanded citizenship and introduced some early elements of social protection. In conclusion, the bourgeoisie proves capable of domination and government to the extent that and for as long as it is able to forestall the threat of a revolution from below with a revolution from above.

Given this dialectic of challenge and response, it follows that when the former disappears or weakens, the latter also disappears or weakens. The current process of globalization seems to be reducing the entire population of the planet to “instruments of labour, more or less expensive to use, according to their age and sex”¹⁰¹, reduced to commodities in an increasingly tumultuous market. Thus, outside and beneath the “aerial life,” the “ethereal region,” the “sky of the political state” characterized by freedom and equality of citizens, emerge “social and political conditions,” an earthly life, whose extremes are represented on the one hand by factory “despotism” (which in the Third World presents itself without disguise or veils) and on the other by the growing precariousness and unemployment typical of an increasingly global labour market. The harsh analysis of the condition of workers contained in the Manifesto regains its “relevance.” However, while this renewed “relevance” confirms the validity of a theory, it is also the symptom of a defeat, the defeat of the “historical movement” that Marx and Engels’ text intended to be the conscious and mature expression of, and which they sought to bring to completion and victory. And this defeat in turn points to political and theoretical weaknesses, to the limits of the messianism already mentioned.

Nec tecum possum vivere nec sine te!¹⁰² This motto could apply to our relationship with Marx and Engels, as it does to our relationship with any other great author separated from us by a considerable temporal distance and, above all, by colossal historical upheavals that have radically changed the face of the world. It is therefore at a different level that we must try to distinguish between the various authors. It is not a question of separating what is alive from what is dead and quantitatively calculating which aspect should be considered primary. It is above all important to assess to what extent an author has contributed, through their theory, to render remote the world their theory actively reflects; secondly, to what extent that author’s theory is still capable of explaining the new world. It would be worth comparing the Communist Manifesto with what we might call two manifestos of the liberal party, one from the first half of the 19th century (Constant’s Discourse on the Liberty of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns) and the other from the second half of the century (Mill’s essay On Liberty). A comparative reading of these three texts, in light of the criteria outlined above, could constitute a highly instructive and fruitful intellectual experiment.

Last modified on 2025-12-10