1. Introduction by David Harvey

INTRODUCTION

David Harvey

The Communist Manifesto of 1848 is an extraordinary document, full of insights, rich in meanings and bursting with political possibilities. Millions of people all around the world – peasants, workers, soldiers, intellectuals as well as professionals of all sorts – have, over the years, been touched and inspired by it. Not only did it render the dynamic political-economic world of capitalism more readily understandable, it moved millions from all walks of life to participate actively in the long, diffi cult and seemingly endless political struggle to alter the path of history, to make the world a better place through their collective endeavours. But why re-publish the Manifesto now? Does its rhetoric still work the old magic it once did? In what ways can this voice from the past speak to us now? Does its siren call to engage in class struggle still make sense?

While we may not have the right, as Marx and Engels wrote in their Preface to the 1872 edition, to alter what had even by then become a key historical document, we do have both the right and the political obligation to refl ect upon and if necessary re-interpret its meanings,

1

to interrogate its proposals, and, above all, to act upon the insights we derive from it. Of course, as Marx and Engels warn, ‘the practical application of the principles will depend as the Manifesto itself states everywhere and at all times, on the historical’ (and, I would add, geographical) ‘conditions for the time-being existing’. We are certainly now, as of 2008, in the midst of one of those periodic commercial crises ‘that put on trial’, as the Manifesto notes, ‘each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society’. And food riots are breaking out all over, particularly in many poorer nations, as food prices rise uncontrollably. So conditions seem propitious for a re-evaluation of the Manifesto’s relevance. Interestingly, one of its modest proposals for reform – the centralisation of credit in the hands of the state – seems to be well on the way to realisation, thanks to the collective actions of the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank and the central banks of the other leading capitalist powers in bailing out the world’s financial system (the British ended up nationalising their leading ailing bank, Northern Rock). So why not take up some of the other equally modest but wholly sensible proposals – such as free (and good) education for all children in public schools; equal liability of all to labour; a heavy progressive or graduated income tax to rid ourselves of the appalling social and economic inequalities that now surround us? And maybe if we followed the proposal to curb the inheritance of personal wealth, then we might pay far more attention to the collective inheritance we