11 - What is Living and What is Dead in the Communist Manifesto?

Summary

In a primarily theoretical context (rather than, say, an aesthetic one) there are, broadly speaking, two ways of considering a work like the Communist Manifesto. They may be called the ‘historical’ and the ‘systematic’ approaches. The first asks questions about the conditions of its production (for example, in what concrete problem-situation, theoretical and/or practical, was it an intervention? what discursive materials went into bringing it about?), and about the effects which it had, once produced, about its ‘consumption’, as it were (for example, how has it affected various currents of thought and people's actions?). The second asks questions about its logical structure, its assumptions and premises, explicit and perhaps also implicit, its conclusions, and about the value, from the point of view of current thinking, for tackling current problems to which it may be considered relevant. As in the case of the first, the problems may be either primarily theoretical or primarily practical, that is, roughly speaking, ones having to do mainly either with what is, was, will be the case about certain subject-matters, or with changes in what is the case. A major part of these practical questions may well be (in the case of the Manifesto obviously are) political ones, that is, ones about what should, ought to be the case regarding major aspects of social life and how this might best be achieved. These two general approaches are distinct and, up to a point, separable, though always ultimately complementary.

What follows takes primarily the second path. So, in a nutshell, it poses the question: what, if anything, in the Manifesto is relevant today to the search for solutions to the sorts of problems it addresses, and hence, by implication, what in it is, on the contrary, of ‘merely historical’ significance? Certainly there is no pretence at all to answering these questions comprehensively, even in a sketchy way; my chapter aims only to set out a few relevant considerations which may contribute to further debate about the issues.

Among the central claims of the Manifesto are the following.