Similarly, the 34 English editions were published by and for the scattering of Marxist sects in the Anglo-Saxon world, operating on the left flank of such labour and socialist parties as existed. This was the milieu in which ‘the clearness of a comrade could be gauged invariably from the number of earmarks on his Manifesto’.6 In short, the readers of the Manifesto, though they were part of the new and rising socialist labour parties and movements, were almost certainly not a representative sample of their membership. They were men and women with a special interest in the theory that underlay such movements. This is probably still the case.

This situation changed after the October Revolution – at all events, in the Communist Parties. Unlike the mass parties of the Second International (1889–1914), those of the Third (1919–43) expected all their members to understand – or at least to show some knowledge of – Marxist theory. The dichotomy between effective political leaders, uninterested in writing books, and the ‘theorists’ like Karl Kautsky – known and respected as such, but not as practical political decision-makers – faded away. Following Lenin, all leaders were now supposed to be important theorists, since all political decisions were justified on grounds of Marxist analysis – or, more probably, by reference to the textual authority of ‘the classics’: Marx, Engels, Lenin and, in due course, Stalin. The publication and popular distribution of Marx’s and Engels’s texts therefore became far more central to the movement than they had been in the days of the Second International. They ranged from series of the shorter writings, probably pioneered by the German Elementarbücher des Kommunismus during the Weimar Republic, and suitably selected compendia of readings, such as the invaluable Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels, to Selected Works of Marx and Engels in two – later three – volumes, and the preparation of their Collected Works [Gesamtausgabe]; all backed by the – for these purposes – unlimited resources of the Soviet Communist Party, and often printed in the Soviet Union in a variety of foreign languages.

The Communist Manifesto benefited from this new situation in three ways. Its circulation undoubtedly grew. The cheap edition published in 1932 by the official publishing houses of the American and British Communist Parties in ‘hundreds of thousands’ of copies has been described as ‘probably the largest mass edition ever issued in English’.7 Its title was no longer a historical survival, but now linked it directly to current politics. Since a major state now claimed to represent Marxist ideology, the Manifesto’s standing as a text in political science was reinforced, and it accordingly entered the teaching programme of universities, destined to expand rapidly after the Second World War, where the Marxism of intellectual readers was to find its most enthusiastic public in the 1960s and 1970s.

The USSR emerged from the Second World War as one of the two superpowers, heading a vast region of Communist states and dependencies. Western Communist Parties (with the notable exception of the German Party) emerged from it stronger than they had ever been or were likely to be. Although the Cold War had begun, in the year of its centenary the Manifesto was no longer published simply by communist or other Marxist editors, but in large editions by non-political publishers with introductions by prominent academics. In short, it was no longer only a classic Marxist document – it had become a political classic tout court.

It remains one, even after the end of Soviet communism and the decline of Marxist parties and movements in many parts of the world. In states without censorship, almost certainly anyone within reach of a good bookshop, and certainly within reach of a good library, can have access to it. The object of a new edition is therefore not so much to make the text of this astonishing masterpiece available, and still less to revisit a century of doctrinal debates about the ‘correct’ interpretation of this fundamental document of Marxism. It is to remind ourselves that the Manifesto still has plenty to say to the world in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

II

What does it have to say?

It is, of course, a document written for a particular moment in history. Some of it became obsolete almost immediately – for instance, the tactics recommended for Communists in Germany, which were not those in fact applied by them during the 1848 Revolution and its aftermath. More of it became obsolete as the time separating the readers from the date of writing lengthened. Guizot and Metternich have long retired from leading governments into history books; the Tsar (though not the Pope) no longer exists. As for the discussion of ‘Socialist and Communist Literature’, Marx and Engels themselves admitted in 1872 that even then it was out of date.

More to the point: with the lapse of time, the language of the Manifesto was no longer that of its readers. For example, much has been made of the phrase that the advance of bourgeois society had rescued ‘a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life’. But while there is no doubt that Marx at this time shared the usual townsman’s contempt for – as well as ignorance of – the peasant milieu, the actual and analytically more interesting German phrase (‘dem Idiotismus des Landlebens entrissen’) referred not to ‘stupidity’ but to ‘the narrow horizons’, or ‘the isolation from the wider society’, in which people in the countryside lived. It echoed the original meaning of the Greek term ‘idiotes’, from which the current meaning of ‘idiot’ or ‘idiocy’ is derived: ‘a person concerned only with his own private affairs and not with those of the wider community’. In the course of the decades since the 1840s – and in movements whose members, unlike Marx, were not classically educated – the original sense had evaporated, and was misread.

This is even more evident in the Manifesto’s political vocabulary. Terms such as ‘Stand’ (‘estate’), ‘Demokratie’ (‘democracy’) or ‘Nation/national’ either have little application to late-twentieth-century politics, or no longer retain the meaning they had in the political or philosophical discourse of the 1840s. To take an obvious example: the ‘Communist Party’ whose Manifesto our text claimed to be had nothing to do with the parties of modern democratic politics, or the ‘vanguard parties’ of Leninist Communism, let alone the state parties of the Soviet and Chinese type. None of these as yet existed. ‘Party’ still meant essentially a tendency or current of opinion or policy, although Marx and Engels recognized that once this found expression in class movements, it developed some kind of organization (‘diese Organisation der Proletarier zur Klasse, und damit zur politischen Partei’).