In Engels he acquired a partner who brought to the partnership the concept of the ‘Industrial Revolution’, an understanding of the dynamics of capitalist economy as it actually existed in Britain, and the rudiments of an economic analysis,22 all of which led him to predict a future social revolution, to be fomented by an actual working class about which, living and working in Britain in the early 1840s, he knew a great deal. Marx’s and Engels’s approaches to ‘the proletariat’ and communism complemented one another. So did their respective conceptions of the class struggle as a motor of history – in Marx’s case derived largely from the study of the French Revolutionary period; in Engels’s from the experience of social movements in post-Napoleonic Britain. It is no surprise that they found themselves (in Engels’s words) ‘in agreement in all theoretical fields’.23 Engels brought to Marx the elements of a model which demonstrated the fluctuating and self-destabilizing nature of the operations of the capitalist economy – notably the outlines of a theory of economic crises24 – and empirical material about the rise of the British working-class movement and the revolutionary role it could play in Britain.

In the 1840s the conclusion that society was on the verge of revolution was not implausible. Nor was the prediction that the working class, however immature, would lead it. After all, within weeks of the publication of the Manifesto a movement of the Paris workers overthrew the French monarchy, and gave the signal for revolution to half of Europe. Nevertheless, the tendency for capitalist development to generate an essentially revolutionary proletariat could not be deduced from the analysis of the nature of capitalist development. It was one possible consequence of this development, but could not be shown to be the only possible one. Still less could it be shown that a successful overthrow of capitalism by the proletariat must necessarily open the way to communist development. (The Manifesto claims no more than that it would then initiate a process of very gradual change.)25 Marx’s vision of a proletariat whose very essence destined it to emancipate all humanity, and end class society by its overthrow of capitalism, represents a hope read into his analysis of capitalism, but not a conclusion necessarily imposed by that analysis.

What the Manifesto’s analysis of capitalism could undoubtedly lead to – especially when it is extended by Marx’s analysis of economic concentration, which is barely hinted at in 1848 – is a more general and less specific conclusion about the self-destructive forces built into capitalist development. It must reach a point – and in 2012 it is not only Marxists who will accept this – where:

Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world, whom he has called up…. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to encompass the wealth created by them.

It is not unreasonable to conclude that the ‘contradictions’ inherent in a market system based on ‘no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment” ’, a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome; that at some point in a series of transformations and restructurings the development of this essentially self-destabilizing system will lead to a state of affairs that can no longer be described as capitalism. Or – to quote the later Marx – when ‘centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument’, and that ‘integument is burst asunder’.26 By what name the subsequent state of affairs is described is immaterial. However – as the effects of the world economic explosion on the world environment demonstrate – it will necessarily have to mark a sharp shift away from private appropriation to social management on a global scale.

It is extremely unlikely that such a ‘post-capitalist society’ would correspond to the traditional models of socialism, and still less to the ‘really existing’ socialisms of the Soviet era. What forms it might take, and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx’s and Engels’s communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about. For this, as the Manifesto holds, is central to the shaping of historical change.

V

In the Marxian view, however we describe that historic moment when ‘the integument is burst asunder’, politics will be an essential element in it. The Manifesto has been read primarily as a document of historical inevitability, and indeed its force derived largely from the confidence it gave its readers that capitalism was inevitably destined to be buried by its gravediggers, and that now – and at no earlier era in history – the conditions for emancipation had come into being. Yet contrary to widespread assumptions – inasmuch as it believes that historical change proceeds through men making their own history, it is not a determinist document. The graves have to be dug by or through human action.

A determinist reading of the argument is indeed possible. It has been suggested that Engels tended towards it more naturally than Marx, with important consequences for the development of Marxist theory and the Marxist labour movement after Marx’s death. However, though Engels’s own earlier drafts have been cited as evidence,27 it cannot in fact be read into the Manifesto itself. When it leaves the field of historical analysis and enters the present, it is a document of choices, of political possibilities rather than probabilities, let alone certainties. Between ‘now’ and the unpredictable time when, ‘in the course of development’, there would be ‘an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’ lies the realm of political action.

Historical change through social praxis, through collective action, is at its core. The Manifesto sees the development of the proletariat as the ‘organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party’. The ‘conquest of political power by the proletariat’ (the winning of democracy’) is ‘the first step in the workers’ revolution’, and the future of society hinges on the subsequent political actions of the new regime (how ‘the proletariat will use its political supremacy’). The commitment to politics is what, historically, distinguished Marxian socialism from the anarchists, and the successors of those socialists whose rejection of all political action the Manifesto specifically condemns. Even before Lenin, Marxian theory was not just about ‘what history shows us will happen’, but also about ‘what must be done’. Admittedly, the twentieth-century Soviet experience has taught us that it might be better not to do ‘what must be done’ under historical conditions which virtually put success beyond reach. But this lesson might also have been learned from considering the implications of The Communist Manifesto.

But then, the Manifesto – and this is not the least of its remarkable qualities – is a document which envisaged failure. It hoped that the outcome of capitalist development would be ‘A revolutionary reconstitution of society at large’ but, as we have already seen, it did not exclude the alternative: ‘common ruin’.