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pass on to our kids of a decent living and working environment as well as a natural world that maintains both its fecundity and charm. So let us take this text, fashioned in the gloomy days of January 1848 in Brussels and focus its laser gaze upon on our own actually existing situation in London and Leeds, Los Angeles and New Orleans, Shanghai and Shenzhen, Buenos Aires and Cordoba, Johannesburg and Durban…. Here I am in a brilliantly lit New York City on 31 January 2008 – 160 years almost to the day after Marx put the final touches to the Manifesto – sitting down to write a new introduction to this well-thumbed text. I do so knowing that there are plenty of other past and present splendidly learned introductions available. But too many of the recent ones, in my judgement, view the Manifesto as a mere historical document whose time has passed, whose vision was either faulty or at least so deeply questionable as to make it irrelevant to our more complicated if not sophisticated times. The best we can do, when not cavilling at the text’s obvious omissions and its equally obvious lapses with respect to what is now considered politically correct, is to admire the prose, annotate the references, trace the influences it encapsulated and projected, and bury the central political message either under a blanket of wistful leftist nostalgia or under a mass of academic footnotes. The collapse after 1989 of actually existing communisms and the conversion of those communist parties that do remain in power, as in China and West Bengal, into agents for a ruthlessly exploitative capitalism, have
