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Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels: The Communist Manifesto
 Maybe now that terrorism has replaced communism as the major threat to the established order we can take another look at the ideas of Karl Marx and his descendants. What better place to start than with the most brilliant political tract ever written, The Communist Manifesto. Even if you are a champion of capitalism, the Manifesto is worth a read for the beauty of its prose.
Here is how Marx and his comrade and co-author Fredrich Engels describe the coming to power of the new ruling class:
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his "natural superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.
In fifty pages, the Manifesto describes the emergence of capitalism from feudalism, analyzes the economic and political system, explains how the workings of capitalism create the working class that will be the tool of its destruction, outlines a ten-point communist program, polemicizes against other left tendencies, and issues a call to arms.
More than 150 years after its publication, its insight into the workings of capitalism are stunning. Marx and Engels foresaw globalization: "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeois over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere."
Young global-justice activists may think they discovered the enormous power of big corporations over government, but in 1848, the Manifesto said, "The Executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."
A friend of mine once said that Marx is a great analyst but not much of a therapist. His analysis of capitalism, most accessible by reading the Communist Manifesto, is still strikingly accurate. The method of understanding social change through analyzing social forces rather than through utopian dreaming or psychological analysis of human behaviour is a welcome antidote to a lot of the postmodern claptrap that passes for theory today.
But Marx and Engels severely underestimated the capacity of capitalism to adapt to the demands of the working class and other social groups that have since emerged. The stirring last line of the Manifesto—"The proletarian have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win"—is no longer true in the developed world.
Nevertheless the Communist Manifesto is worth reading not only to understand how communism became such a major force in the world but for its incisive analysis of the workings of the system in which we live today.
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 Judy Rebick is the publisher of Canada's irreverent web magazine rabble.ca, author of Imagine Democracy, and the CAW Sam Gindin Chair in social justice and democracy at Ryerson University. She appears frequently on radio and television across Canada and writes for CBC Online and other magazines and newspapers. She lives in Toronto.
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