The Communist Manifesto is the founding statement of the revolutionary socialist tradition. In it, Engels and Marx set out a political method that emphasizes capitalism's dynamism and volatility; the need to relate to the exploited and oppressed in the struggle for socialism; to differentiate revolutionary socialists from other political alternatives; and to inspire a struggle for a socially just and fully democratic world. In the following essay, we examine how Marx and Engels saw the evolution of the Manifesto and its various uses in the struggle against capitalism in the last 160 years.

By Robin Wylie

"All that is solid melts into air."

This is how Karl Marx and Frederich Engels described the dynamism and volatility of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto. In the midst of the financial panic of October 2008, this description of capitalism’s nature, as the most dynamic mode of economic production in human history, in constantly revolutionizing economic productive forces and relations, and the most volatile – with an inbuilt tendency for the rate of profit to fall, and for economic crises to result in financial panics leading to disinvestment, deflation and mass unemployment, rings true once more.

Whether financial state capitalism, by massive bailouts, Central Bank interest rate cuts, or nationalizing financial risk itself, can mitigate the current volatility remains to be seen. But what immediately strikes the reader of the Communist Manifesto today is that the reappearance of capitalist crisis at the heart of the market economy makes an examination of Marx and Engels' political conclusions in the Communist Manifesto, and the arguments and different conclusions of succeeding socialist generations in engaging the Communist Manifesto, worth re-examination.

What this paper proposes to do, therefore, is examine what Marx and Engels argued for as a consequence of the historical materialist approach to capitalism; how they modified some of these conclusions as revealed in subsequent prefaces; how the next generation, as embodied in German Social Democracy, divided on the relation between, and ultimately the very question, of reform or revolution; how the Manifesto was taken in radically different directions in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution; and, finally, how the Manifesto plays a dual role in Western radical discourse, as a powerful critique of capitalism, but with populist and radical social democratic reform conclusions.


I

Whatever the status of the Communist Manifesto today as a classic in the political canon of modern political thought, Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto for an eminently practical reason. The Manifesto was written to not just express a new, historical materialist analysis of industrial capitalism, but also to be used as a weapon of political struggle at the onset of the 1848 revolutionary crisis. As such, the Manifesto was intended to give shape to the rise of a new German working class movement, which, in alliance with the German bourgeoisie, would usher in an era of capitalist development, national unity, and republican politics – as the basis for a further working class led social revolution.

As a political tool in the class struggle, this explains why the Manifesto was largely devoted to questions such as the relationship between Communists and workers, the need to clarify why competing ideas such as utopian socialism were not adequate to the revolutionary tasks of the moment and the future, and the non-sectarian attitude communists needed to take in working with other opponents of capitalism.

The Manifesto, however, played a very modest role in the upheavals of 1848. The significance of the Manifesto afterwards came more in the vision of capitalism presented and the political lessons of the class struggle then and later. Thus, in the seven prefaces written by Marx and Engels, (mostly Engels), the Manifesto came to play a dual role – as a basic introduction to the ideas of historical materialism and as a place of political reflection for communist cadre based on the course of the latest revolutionary experience.

In the first German preface of 1872, Marx and Engels made three points. First, the Manifesto was no longer an agitational document. The ten demands of 1848 had been bypassed by subsequent events. That is, the Manifesto was beginning to assume a historical character as a reflection of a particular moment in the class struggle. Secondly, Marx and Engels stood by the Manifesto as a true expression of the ‘general principles’ of historical materialism and communist political methods. Thirdly, as a modification of those political methods, the experience of the Paris Commune revealed a new truth – the proletariat could not simply lay their hands upon the existing state.

This last statement can be read in two senses. After the failure of the German Revolution of 1848, Marx and Engels drew a conclusion about the nature of making the social revolution and political alliances. The bourgeoisie, who had been looked to as a leadership in making the democratic revolution, were not to be relied upon. The workers would have to make both the democratic and social revolution. This folding of revolutionary tasks Marx and Engels described as ‘the revolution in permanence’. As well, a new workers’ state, like the Paris Commune, would have to be created as the vehicle for these tasks.

In 1882 in the Preface to the Russian edition, Marx and Engels recognized a new circumstance in the class struggle, its growing global character. Now modern capitalism had spread to the great powers of Russia and the United States. Marx and Engels also speculated as to whether pre-capitalist forms of social organization could act as a platform for a transition to socialism, as in the case of the Russian peasant commune. This was not to be but it indicated a new attention to the political challenge of applying revolutionary socialist ideas and organization to the combined and uneven development circumstances of capitalism on a world scale as it encountered previous modes of production, and different levels of capitalist development.

In the third, German, Preface of 1883, Engels registered the fact of Marx’s passing and underscored the importance of the Manifesto as an educational document, as an introduction to the basic components of historical materialism. Engels also emphasized the broad burden of leadership the proletariat bore as the emancipators of all of society.

Then, in 1888, the famous Samuel Morehouse translation was developed for the English-speaking world. Here Engels was concerned to explain to English readers, without a continental background, what the circumstances had been in the creation and evolution of the Manifesto, the materialist conception of history, and why the term Communism had been used to differentiate themselves from other reform or Socialist' currents of the 1840s.

In 1890, Engels wrote another preface for German workers stressing the growth of German class struggles, as in trade union organization and the demand for an eight hour day. While Engels’ tone is optimistic, in a context where German Social Democracy (SDP) had become the world’s largest proletarian party, this preface was written also with an eye to committing the SDP to full Marxist principles with the adoption of the Erfurt Program in 1891.

In 1892 and 1893 Engels penned introductions for new wage workers in Poland and Italy. Besides noting the extension and deepening of capitalism to Eastern and Mediterranean Europe, Engels put a new emphasis on the importance of the democratic demand for national self-determination. In regards to Poland, Engels forcefully asserted that sincere international collaboration between workers could only exist “if each of these nations are autonomous in its own house.” Collaboration in the class struggle against exploitation had to be based on recognition of national oppression and the right to an autonomous national existence, a premise embodied with the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922.1


II

While Marx and Engels were prepared to amend some of their political conclusions from 1848, as based on the experiences of 1848-51 and the Paris Commune in 1871 (to argue for even more militant conclusions), they clearly saw the Manifesto as having permanent value as an introduction to historical materialism and as an expression of the political commitment of a workers’ class struggle for a social revolution. But in the conditions of capitalist boom and working class reforms before 1914, many social democrats questioned this revolutionary or ‘catastrophist’ perspective. In the lead was Eduard Bernstein with a critique of the Manifesto.

Bernstein had been the editor of the SDP’sémigré newspaper, the Social Democrat in Switzerland, during the SDP’s banning from 1879 to 1890. When the party was legalized, however, a warrant for the arrest of Bernstein stood until 1901. Bernstein moved to England to become Engels’ literary executor and a contributor to the European socialist press, but in exile. In the conditions of relative social peace in the 1890s, Bernstein urged adaptation to whatever opportunities presented themselves: participation in the discriminatory Prussian state elections in 1893, to condemn a British Engineers strike as provocative, and then articulated this new reformist (or opportunist) practice in a series of newspaper articles in 1896, ‘Problems of Socialism’, to culminate in his 1899 book, Evolutionary Socialism.2

Bernstein argued that, while the Manifesto correctly described the general tendencies of modern capitalism, “Social conditions have not developed to such an acute opposition of things and classes as is depicted in the Manifesto".3 Indeed modern credit, cartels, the advance of trade unions and co-operatives, and the gradual conquest of parliamentary democracy by workers, had so mitigated capitalism’s tendency to crisis that the social revolution could be achieved gradually and peacefully within the context of capitalism. ‘Catastrophism’, or the social revolution argued for by Marx and Engels, was a throwback to the struggle against the feudal state and should be discarded.4

Bernstein even went so far as to explicitly identify social democracy with the liberal imperialist theory of Europe’s mission to civilize the world. This included a defence of German imperialist interests like its Chinese Shandong (Kiauchow Bay) concession.

As Bernstein famously said, given this new and permanent world of reformist possibilities, the final aim is nothing and the movement is everything.

Supplementing Bernstein’s assault on the social revolutionary essence of the Manifesto was Emile Vandervelde’s introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of the Communist Manifesto in 1898 (“The Golden Wedding of International Socialism”). Vandervelde argued Marx and Engels got three issues wrong: that they were proponents of the ‘iron law of wages’ or immiseration; that capitalism tended to concentrate and centralize capital over time; and that economic power and political power were linked – and thus who controlled the means of production could be divorced from the class nature of the existing state.5

Bernstein’s (and Vandervelde’s) explicit recognition of social democracy’s reformist agenda and practice, with a clear theoretical break from the main political conclusions of the Communist Manifesto – that history was driven by class struggle and that workers have to smash the old state system to lay the basis for a social revolution in the interests of the majority – outraged Marxist theorists. In particular a number of leading SDP members responded, Parvus (Alexander Helphand), Rosa Luxemburg, and Karl Kautsky.

Parvus wrote a series of articles, "Bernstein’s Overthrow of Socialism", to immediately condemn Bernstein’s economic analysis and to argue that breaking with the final goal of proletarian revolution was to abandon socialism itself.6 Rosa Luxemburg in her classic Reform or Revolution? challenged Bernstein, and supporters like Vandervelde, on four grounds: lack of theory; denying capitalist crisis; omitting a class theory of the state; and not understanding the relationship between reform struggles and the final goal of social revolution.

First, Luxemburg argued that Bernstein’s ‘amendment’ of Marx was not an amendment but a departure from historical materialism itself to regress into an earlier form of petit bourgeois socialism (in the name of Marx). Secondly, Bernstein was simply wrong on the nature and facts about credit and cartels in stabilizing capitalism. There were a number of financial crises in the early 1890s, 1900, and especially in 1907. As well, the persistence of small property in some economic sectors and the rise of a new, salaried middle class did not nullify the tendency to concentration and centralization by large capitals. In fact, these concentrated forms of organization deepened the tendencies to inter-state competition by tariffs and militarism.

Thirdly, in a profoundly challenging way, Luxemburg argued that the extension of bourgeois democracy, while an important tool for workers in the class struggle, was an expression of capitalism’s need to more thoroughly integrate nations behind capitalist causes. Indeed, even state ownership was an expression of capitalist needs to socialize the costs of accumulation. The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie operated in both realms, economy and state.

Finally, Luxemburg argued that Bernstein et al had completely misunderstood Marx and Engels’ emphasis on the importance of daily struggles as the ‘long, stubborn’ school for workers in developing organization, insights and theory, and the resolution to overthrow capitalism through overthrowing the capitalist state.7

Karl Kautsky, editor of the SDP’s leading theoretical journal, NeueZeit, condemned Bernstein’s break from the Manifesto with his introduction to the seventh German edition in 1902 (and his book Social Revolution). Here Kautsky took on Vandervelde’s economic questions to convincingly show that Marx and Engels were not proponents of the iron law of wages (i.e., immiseration), that workers could see a relative increase in their standard of living while exploitation and instability could also increase. And Kautsky reinforced Parvus and Luxemburg’s finding about the persistence and necessity of capitalist crisis.8 However, as Lenin pointed out later in State and Revolution, Kautsky did not address Bernstein’s assertion about the ameliorating effects of parliamentary activity on the class struggle.9 Indeed, Kautsky would break with the Manifesto and repudiate the dictatorship of the proletariat in 1918.

The formal outcome of the ‘Revisionist’ Debate was the defeat of the Reformist position in SDP Hanover Congresses in1899. The party reaffirmed its commitment to the basic ideas of scientific socialism as embodied in the Communist Manifesto. But, as the vote on war credits in August 1914 demonstrated, reformist practice would triumph. Still, it is important to note that the SDP clung to a formal loyalty to Marx and the Manifesto as illustrated in a series of exchanges with Lenin by Kautsky and the Austrian Social Democratic leader, Max Adler, in the 1920s.10 Even the British Labour Party, in the 1940s, justified state intervention as a practical fulfillment of the Manifesto.11 It was only in the context of the Cold War, by the SPD at Bad Godesburg in 1959, that western social democratic parties finally repudiated any formal commitment to historical materialism. Yet, Michael Harrington, founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, argued for using Marx’s ideas in mainstream electoral politics as late as the 1970s.12


III

The Russian Revolution revived the Communist Manifesto as a living political document in preparing for the October Revolution, in the launch of the Third International (the Comintern), and in the debate between Stalin and Trotsky over command methods in the building of socialism.

While the Russians had condemned Bernstein’s break from Marx’s ideas and methods, with Plekhanov and Lenin criticizing the reformists’ adaptation to a period of capitalist boom13, the Manifesto became a major source of authority in launching the October Revolution.

In State and Revolution, Lenin emphasized the one great correction Marx and Engels had learned in the course of European workers’ struggles against the state – the need to smash it. One, Lenin reiterated Marx’s analysis of the state as an organization of force to coerce the exploitation of the majority by the minority who controlled the means of production. Two, Lenin reminded activists that the aim of the socialist revolution was to create a unique workers’ state premised on its withering away. Three, Lenin stressed the importance of Marx’s insight from the experience of revolutionary struggle in 1848-51 and 1871 that the workers would have to destroy the rulers’ state and construct ‘a dictatorship of the proletariat’, i.e., a workers’ democracy based on ‘a people’s revolution’ (i.e., an alliance of oppressed groups led by the working class). This transitional state would then be faced with the enormous challenge of laying the economic base for the proletarian state to wither away. Lenin then repeated many of the pre-war criticisms about how social democracy had adapted to the bourgeois state, the chief apologist now being Karl Kautsky.14

In 1919, the new Soviet regime created a new, Third International of revolutionary socialist parties to wage the struggle for socialism on a global scale. Its founding document, authored by Trotsky, was the ‘Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World’. This Manifesto noted that while the class struggle had ebbed and flowed from the first publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, World War had created the epoch of final struggle in which proletarian class struggle faced the tasks of civil war, developing alliances with national struggles for self determination (among ‘small peoples’ and anti-colonial movements), and the construction of a workers soviet democracy. Unlike the 1848 Manifesto, with its description of the revolutionary powers and contradictions of capitalism, the 1919 Manifesto stressed the political tasks of the moment – to generalize the revolutionary experience of the working class, to fight reformist opportunism, and to unify all revolutionary parties to maximize the spread of the revolution.15

Once the Soviet regime was consolidated and stabilized, however, the Communist Manifesto became a battleground in the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky. To begin with the Communist Manifesto entered into its most popular era, as Lenin described it, as ‘a basic handbook of communism’. The USSR’s Foreign Languages Publisher turned the Communist Manifesto into the second most published book on the planet.

The Manifesto also became the object of serious and systematic historical study as evidenced in D. Ryazonoff’s introduction of the 1920s for communist party-state building purposes (a tradition revived in 1971 with Dirk Struik’s even more detailed historical contextual introduction to the Manifesto).16

By the 1930s, however, introductions to the Manifesto served as nationalist forums for arguments about the building of socialism in one country. In 1938, the Director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, V. Adoratsky, presented a new reading at odds with the actual content and circumstances of the Manifesto. Now the victory of socialism was ‘inevitable’, as opposed to Marx’s prognosis that either the workers would win or society would end ‘in common ruin’; that the Manifesto was the product of ‘personal genius’, as opposed to the circumstances of the class struggle; and that the 1936 Constitution of the USSR represented the achievement of the first stage of the struggle, socialism – a re-assertion of the divorce between economic substance and political formalism, and a celebration of the permanent state.17

In the 1950s, a new introduction by G. Obichkin, focused on the context of the Cold War with the USSR’s competition with the United States. In this case, Obichkin asserted a correction to the Manifesto, claiming Lenin’s authority in his writings about Imperialism, that the nation had become the focus of the class struggle with each People’s Democracy following its own national path.18 It was this new focus on national revolution or Socialism in One Country that led Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman to assert an optimistic view about the spread of socialism in developing countries, despite disagreements with Stalinism, in their introduction to the Manifesto upon its 100th anniversary.19

Trotsky, upon the 90th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto penned a very different appreciation. Trotsky emphasized three concerns: where the document had become historically dated, where the ideas of historical materialism retained their full force, and where some modification or alteration was necessary.

By and large Trotsky argued the Manifesto had stood up remarkably well to the passage of time. The materialist conception of history, the primacy of the class struggle, as opposed to class conciliation (often on the grounds of national unity within the left), the anatomy of capitalism (including the tendencies to crisis and absolute immiseration in the Depression), the class nature of the state (with the tasks to smash the old state and construct a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat where the state will wither away), and the international character of the proletarian revolution across the spectrum of ‘civilization’ all were still valid. As well, Trotsky stressed the methodological value of the Communist League’s Ten Demands as a bridge between general theory and the tasks of the moment.

What Trotsky thought needed revision was Marx and Engels’ tendency to underestimate capitalism’s recuperative abilities, the persistence of intermediate classes (including a new salaried middle class), and to overestimate the revolutionary maturity of the proletariat. In particular, Trotsky argued that no economic system was likely to disappear before exhausting its creative potential, one concrete illustration being Lenin’s arguments about the expansive power of monopoly in the Imperialist era, and that reformism was a powerful force within the working class that could only be combated by a tempered revolutionary socialist party. However antiquated much of the historical content now appeared, which was compensated for by the first four congresses of the Third International, Marx and Engels’ revolutionary method endured.20


IV

The Cold War effectively ended the role of the Communist Manifesto as a living political document. In the absence of a mass proletarian movement independent of national interests, the Manifesto became a tool in inter-state competition to be viewed in the west as more of a religious statement of faith, or, in more liberal moments, as an important historical document that lived only in the past, rather than embodying a rational, grounded theory as to how capitalism worked and the political strategies needed to combat it in the present.21

Since 1991, with the end of the Cold War and the revival of popular anti-capitalist sentiment, however, the Communist Manifesto is being re-examined as to whether it can be a living guide once more.

The first thing to note is that upon the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto in 1998 there was a spate of articles in high end newspapers and magazines debating Marx’s economic relevance – from the New York Times to the Los Angeles Times, from the New Yorker to Britain’s Guardian. Even Thomas Friedman, in his paean to globalization, The World is Flat, paid tribute to Marx’s analysis of capitalism’s dynamism.22

More importantly, new anti-capitalist currents have explicitly endorsed Marx’s ideas as tools in the struggle against an unfettered capitalism. Hugo Chavez, at the head of the Populist Bolivarian movement in Latin America, has called upon his supporters to study Marx. And new, if modest, radical social democratic and anti-capitalist currents have appeared in Europe – from the Party of the European Left (an association of small mass parties like Italy’s RifondazioneComunista (a left split from the Italian Communist Party) to Germany’s Die Linke (a combination of left SDPers led by ex-SPD leader Oskar Lafontaine and part of the East German Communist Party) to Europe’s Anti-Capitalist Left (a grouping of extra-Parliamentary Marxist groups). In the developing world, among India’s left parties, a major revival of Marxist thought has occurred in applying historical materialism to contemporary issues such as India’s neo-liberal economic opening, class and caste, gender and national minorities.23

In a very broad sense, the appearance of an anti-capitalist movement since the 1999 protests in Seattle against the Work Bank and the International Monetary Fund; the World Social Forum process as an ongoing platform to protest the consequences of neo-liberal capitalism; and the widely popular writing of Canadian journalist-social activist Naomi Klein – in getting youth to question how big business works through market branding and educating a new audience about the deliberate shock tactics of neo-liberalism in causing more poverty and chaos to build trickle-down economies24, have all served to create an atmosphere where it is possible to discuss Marx before audiences in ways denied during Cold War polarization.

Even in the academic realm, there has been a re-examination of Marx’s relevance to the post-1991 neo-liberal globalized order. While more traditional voices, like Eric Hobsbawm, Gareth Stedman Jones, and John Toewes continue to focus on the political break of Stalinism with revolutionary socialist ideas, in effect walling off Marx and the Manifesto as a living political resource25, other scholars like Ellen Meisksins Wood, in her introduction to the Monthly Review Press edition, once more questions the rationality of capitalism and points to the constructive role class struggle can have in overcoming the irrationality of the market place.26 This is a remarkable change from two generations of academic dismissal and/or pessimism.

However, having said there is a much more open milieu in which to discuss Marx and the Manifesto, two caveats need to be noted.

A new Cold War atmosphere has been fostered since the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in the United States in an effort to close off the anti-capitalist space. But the length and contradictions of the retaliatory wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have diminished the power of imperial nationalism. The sub-prime mortgage crisis, with neo-liberal governments having to use aggressive state capitalist strategies of nationalization, also puts in question the pro-market ideology that has ruled much of public discourse in the west for the last generation.

Perhaps more importantly, while many new forces are willing to consider Marx’s critique of capitalism, there is much ignorance and reservations about whether Marx’s political solutions have any relevance. Can the working class be a force for positive change, and is there a legitimate political tradition of democratic transformative change based on working class self-emancipation and self rule? Any honest assessment of the anti-capitalist movement today has to acknowledge that social reform, not social revolution, is dominant. But the Communist Manifesto, and the debates and experience of applying it in the class struggle, stand as a resource if regulation is not possible.

1For the text of all seven prefaces see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, with an introduction by A.J.P. Taylor, Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1967. For a bibliographical history of the Manifesto see H. Draper, The Adventures of the Communist Manifesto, Berkeley, California: Center for Socialist History, 1994.

2See the introduction to H. Tudor and J.M. Tudor, editors, Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate, 1896-1898, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

3E. Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism, New York: Schocken, 1961 (Originally 1899), x.

4Ibid, 163.

5Ian Thatcher, "Past Receptions of the Communist Manifesto" in M. Cowling, editor, The Communist Manifesto: New Interpretations, New York: New York University Press, 1998, 65-66.

6Tudors, Marxism and Social Democracy, 174-204.

7Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, with an introduction by D. Gluckstein, London: Bookmarks, 1989.

8Tudors, Marxism and Social Democracy, see Introduction.

9R.C. Tucker, editor, The Lenin Anthology, New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 1975, 387-388.

10F.L. Bender, editor, Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1988. For Kautsky, see pages 127-131 and Adler, pages 136-138.

11H. Laski, Karl Marx: An Essay, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949 (original edition 1925).

12Bender, Karl Marx, 106.

13Thatcher, 66-67.

14V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution in Tucker, 311-398

15A. Alder, editor, Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International, London: Ink Links, 1980, 27-36.

16See D. Ryazonoff, editor, The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, New York: Russell and Russell Inc., 1963 (originally 1930). Ryazonoff’s historical materials were developed as a set of lectures for Sverdlov University in 1919-1920 and at the Socialist Academy, 1921-1922 for a course on the Communist Manifesto. For an even more thorough historical description see D. Struik, Birth of the Communist Manifesto, New York: International Publishers, 1971.

17V. Adoratsky, The History of the Communist Manifesto, New York: International Publishers, 1938.

18G. Obichkin, On the Manifesto of the Communist Party of Marx and Engels, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955.

19P. Sweezy and Leo Huberman, The Communist Manifesto After 100 Years, New York: Montly Review Press, 1949.

20Leon Trotsky, 90 Years of the Communist Manifesto, New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987 (originally 1938).

21See A.J.P. Taylor’s 1967 introduction or Gareth Stedman Jones 2002 introduction for examples. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels with an introduction and notes by Gareth Stedman Jones, London: Penguin, 2002.

22See Phil Gasper, editor, The Communist Manifesto, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005, 93-95

23For examples see: P. Karat, editor, A World to Win: Essays on the Communist Manifesto, New Delhi: Leftword Books, 1999 and A. Pinto and S. Chakraborty, The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 2000.

24See N. Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2000 and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007.

25See Eric Hobsbawm, editor, The Communist Manifesto, London: Verso, 1998, Gareth Stedman Jones, editor, The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin, 2002, and John Toews, editors, The Communist Manifesto (Student Edition), Boston: Bedford Press, 1999. While Hobsbawm and Stedman Jones do acknowledge the possibility of a post-capitalist future, Toews revives Bernstein’s arguments with a remarkable fidelity.

26Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto with an introduction by Ellen Meisksins Wood, New York: Montly Review Press, 1998.