Manifesto.

Following the direction initiated by Roger Caillois (1974), when considering Marxism, we are not to comprehend the totality of Marx’s texts, but the sum of formulae and the sociological patterns which remain historically available.

Paul LeBlanc (2006, p. 15) brightly condenses the critique of important publications such as the New York Times and the London Times Literary Supplement of the Communist Manifesto:

…the vision of a working-class revolution that would usher in a shinning communist future has proved to be a colossal illusion, but that to understand the workings of the capitalist economy, Marx’s analysis continues to be remarkably relevant.

Consequently, the leading African-American labour leader A. Philip Randolph, cited in Le Blanc (2006 , p. 16) laid emphasis on the four focal rudiments that are to be found in Marx’s momentous Communist Manifesto: economic progress as the underpinning of human progress, the analogy between the economic element and socio-political as well as ideological realities, the evolution of humanity seen in terms of a sequence of economic systems, and, perhaps more important, the exploitation of a powerful minority of “haves” over the greater part of “have nots”; all those factors are analyzed in the context of common knowledge. For this daily form of human intelligence was attentively considered by Marx, in a structural and genetic sense, since it is in its function of semantic netting, the sine qua non condition of dynamic society. Concluding, human nature exists only in the direction of a variety of anthropological constants, for man fabricates his own nature, producing himself – “Homo sapiens is always and equally homo socius” (Berger and Luckmann 1986, p. 74).

Conversely, regardless of its significance as a broad outlook, critics have discovered a series of severe lacunae in the Manifesto. Recent developments (Le Blanc 2006) have led to a renewed interest in the centrality of non-class identities such as race, nationality, gender or ethnicity. Accordingly, the utopian socialist Charles Fourier cited in Le Blanc (2006, p. 21), states: “…the change in a historical epoch can always be determined by the progress of women towards freedom”.

References

Berger, P. L. and Luckmann, Th. 1984. The social construction of reality: a treatise in the sociology of knowledge.  Harmondsworth: Penguins Books.

Caillois, R. 1974. Approches de l’imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard.

Le Blanc, P. 2006. Marx, Lenin, and the revolutionary experience: studies of communism and radicalism in the age of globalization. New York: Routledge.                  

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