For schools of thought that base themselves on reasoning and rationality, no text or quotation can be an article of faith or be eternal. Scriptualism and texturalist views have more in common with supernatural and revelatory religions. Divine religions base their belief on the thesis that the pronouncement of God, or whatever the source of revelation, is valid for all time and for all occasions, in an identical form as it was originally revealed. The text is invalidated by the slightest alteration.

Marxism bases itself on dialectic, where nothing is fixed or taken for granted bar change itself. Everything in the text is interpretable in the context of a specific time and place. Marxism is after all the approach of Marx (and Engels) to phenomena under study. If when faced with a dilemma on tackling a problematic – say exploitation or the labour movement – you refer immediately to Marx’s text your behaviour is no different than the believer in a supernatural religion. They too would refer to the holy book or some religious leader rather than think, when faced with a problem.

If they approach the phenomenon dialectically, study it, find its true and false points, objectively criticise and analyse it, they have acted in a Marxist fashion. The teachings of Karl Marx, in his position as the great teacher of the proletariat, occupies its towering position because he approached the phenomena of his time objectively, discovered and highlighted its strong and weak points – even if these did not fit his wishes – and criticised its negative aspects. He himself repeatedly corrected his texts and hand written notes, or even put them aside when further study had revealed their inaccuracy or imprecision. With this introduction, which seems to have exceeded the actual text, we can now ask: why is the Communist Manifesto important one and half centuries after it was written?

The Manifesto is one of the earliest documents of the European workers’ and communist movement of the mid 19th century. Marx and Engels, on confronting the capitalist system of their day, studied it in depth and unravelled its inner functional mechanisms. Even while, in their position as leader of the workers’ movement, they opposed the capitalist system, they did not fail to list its positive points impartially, and present its positive and revolutionary role in particular historical junctures. At the same time they approached the various socialist movements of their time – even though these movements considered themselves in the service of the working class – in the same critical manner. They unmasked their weaknesses under the labels of "reactionary socialism" "feudal socialism" "utopian socialism" and others. Finally they invited the workers of the world to unite.

In the Manifesto we read:

We need to look at the material conditions of its time: namely the revolutions of 1848, in order to explain the optimistic spirit dominating the Manifesto. In the years 1847-8 the revolutions sweeping almost the whole of Europe had pushed reaction into retreat and compromise. Even in the East, we have Amir Kabir [1] in Iran in its political dimension and the Babi movement [2] in its social and ideological dimension both calling the ancien regime to combat.

In those years the main pillars of the European revolution were the industrial workers. The revolutionary rising of the proletariat facilitated the independence of Italy, Germany and Hungary – even if at the hands of Garibaldi, Bismark, and Napoleon III.

The Manifesto is a general document. As such, while taking care to remain faithful to the principles and ideals of the workers’ movement, and not compromising on principles, it was also acceptable to the broad revolutionary spectrum of labour and socialists active at the time. There are parts of this historic document that were deliberately left vague in order to avoid conflict and division among the ranks of the workers’ movement. The aim of writing the Communist Manifesto, was the "unity of the worker of the world". It avoided anything that could provoke dissension within these ranks.

In those years there was no shortage of leaflets, tracts, theses, and articles dealing with the labour, communist and revolutionary movement. Yet the Manifesto, because of the objective approach Marx and Engels adopted on the question of the movement, the capitalist system and on discovering the essence of that system, namely class exploitation, has retained its commanding position in the labour movement and the history of revolutions. So much so that Engels writing in the introduction to the Hungarian translation of the Manifesto in 1892 correctly noted:

Yes. The Manifesto became the testing ground, the basis for assessing the progress of the workers’ movement and measuring its strength in the years, decades and the century that followed its publication. The greater the demand for translation and publication and distribution of this document, the more evidence for the presence and activity of the industrial proletariat.

Without violating what I said in the introduction, I wish to point to the objective truths within the Manifesto that have proven and retained their value and correctness, by quoting from two parts of this document to show why, after seven decades, the Soviet Union and indeed the socialist world faced the fate they did.

In Chapter two, Proletarians and Communist the Manifesto says:

The Communists do not form a separate party opposed to other working-class parties.

Again in the same chapter we read:

… the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.

We might ask: did not the communists in the former Soviet countries, and other parts of the world (Korea, Cuba, Albania, China) create a party separate – if not in opposition – to the working class?

Or did the communist parties in any of the above mentioned countries strive to establish and strengthen democracy?

Ahmad Tadayon

Ahmad Saman is an Iranian writer currently living in exile. He has translated some of Marx and Engels works into Farsi – including the Grundrisse.