Hence the distinction in Section IV between the ‘existing working-class parties … the Chartists in England and the agrarian reformers in America’ and the others, not yet so constituted.8 As the text made clear, at this stage Marx’s and Engels’s Communist Party was no kind of organization, nor did it attempt to establish one – let alone an organization with a specific programme distinct from that of other organizations.9 Incidentally, nowhere is the actual body on whose behalf the Manifesto was written, the Communist League, mentioned in it.

Moreover, it is clear not only that the Manifesto was written in and for a particular historical situation, but also that it represented one phase – a relatively immature phase – in the development of Marxian thought. This is most evident in its economic aspects. Although Marx had begun to study political economy seriously from 1843 onwards, he did not set out to develop the economic analysis expounded in Capital until he arrived in his English exile after the 1848 Revolution, and acquired access to the treasures of the British Museum Library in the summer of 1850. Thus the distinction between the proletarian’s sale of his labour to the capitalist and the sale of his labour-power, which is essential to the Marxian theory of surplus-value and exploitation, had clearly not yet been made in the Manifesto. Nor did the mature Marx hold the view that the price of the commodity ‘labour’ was its cost of production – that is, the cost of the physiological minimum of keeping the worker alive. In short, Marx wrote the Manifesto less as a Marxian economist than as a communist Ricardian.

And yet, though Marx and Engels reminded readers that the Manifesto was a historical document, out of date in many respects, they promoted and assisted the publication of the 1848 text, with relatively minor amendments and clarifications.10 They recognized that it remained a major statement of the analysis which distinguished their communism from all other projects for the creation of a better society. In essence this analysis was historical. Its core was the demonstration of the historical development of societies, and specifically of bourgeois society, which replaced its predecessors, revolutionized the world, and in turn necessarily created the conditions for its inevitable supersession. Unlike Marxian economics, the ‘materialist conception of history’ which underlay this analysis had already found its mature formulation in the mid–1840s, and remained substantially unchanged in later years.11 In this respect the Manifesto was already a defining document of Marxism. It embodied the historical vision, though its general outline remained to be filled in by fuller analysis.

III

How will the Manifesto strike the reader who comes to it today for the first time? The new reader can hardly fail to be swept away by the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force, of this astonishing pamphlet. It is written, as though in a single creative burst, in lapidary sentences almost naturally transforming themselves into the memorable aphorisms which have become known far beyond the world of political debate: from the opening ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’ to the final ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.’12 Equally uncommon in nineteenth-century German writing: it is written in short, apodictic paragraphs, mainly of one to five lines – in only five cases, out of more than two hundred, of fifteen or more lines. Whatever else it is, The Communist Manifesto as political rhetoric has an almost biblical force. In short, it is impossible to deny its compelling power as literature.13

However, what will undoubtedly also strike the contemporary reader is the Manifesto’s remarkable diagnosis of the revolutionary character and impact of ‘bourgeois society’. The point is not simply that Marx recognized and proclaimed the extraordinary achievements and dynamism of a society he detested – to the surprise of more than one later defender of capitalism against the red menace. It is that the world transformed by capitalism which he described in 1848, in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognizably the world in which we live 150 years later. Curiously, the politically quite unrealistic optimism of two revolutionaries, twenty-eight and thirty years of age, has proved to be the Manifesto’s most lasting strength. For though the ‘spectre of Communism’ did indeed haunt politicians, and though Europe was living through a major period of economic and social crisis, and was about to erupt in the greatest continent-wide revolution of its history, there were plainly no adequate grounds for the Manifesto’s belief that the moment for the overthrow of capitalism was approaching (the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’). On the contrary. As we now know, capitalism was poised for its first era of triumphant global advance.

Two things give the Manifesto its force. The first is its vision, even at the outset of the triumphal march of capitalism, that this mode of production was not permanent, stable, ‘the end of history’, but a temporary phase in the history of humanity – one due, like its predecessors, to be superseded by another kind of society (unless – the Manifesto’s phrase has not been much noted – it founders ‘in the common ruin of the contending classes’).The second is its recognition of the necessary long-term historical tendencies of capitalist development. The revolutionary potential of the capitalist economy was already evident – Marx and Engels did not claim to be the only ones to recognize it. Since the French Revolution some of the tendencies they observed were plainly having substantial effect – for instance, the decline of ‘independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments and systems of taxation’ before nation-states ‘with one government, one code of laws, one national class interest, one frontier and one customs tariff’. Nevertheless, by the late 1840s what ‘the bourgeoisie’ had achieved was a great deal more modest than the miracles ascribed to it in the Manifesto. After all, in 1850 the world produced no more than 71,000 tons of steel (almost 70 per cent of that in Britain) and had built less than 24,000 miles of railroads (two-thirds of these in Britain and the USA). Historians have had no difficulty in showing that even in Britain the Industrial Revolution (a term specifically used by Engels from 1844 on)14 had hardly created an industrial – or even a predominantly urban – country before the 1850s. Marx and Engels did not describe the world as it had already been transformed by capitalism in 1848; they predicted how it was logically destined to be transformed by it.

Now, in the third millennium of the Western calendar, we live in a world in which this transformation has largely taken place. In some ways we can even see the force of the Manifesto’s predictions more clearly than the generations between us and its publication. For until the revolution in transport and communications since the Second World War, there were limits to the globalization of production, to ‘giv[ing] a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country’. Until the 1970s industrialization remained overwhelmingly confined to its regions of origin.