Dominic Davies

1 From Communism to Postcapitalism:

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s
The Communist Manifesto (1848)

Abstract
History bears testament to the Manifesto’s planetary circulation, global readership and
material impact. Interpretations of this short document have affected the lives of millions
globally, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century. The text is somehow able
to outline the complex theoretical foundations for the world’s most enduring critique
of capitalism in a comprehensible and persuasive language, and as such, readers of all
classes, professions, nations and ethnicities have drawn on – and in many cases warped and
manipulated – its valuable insights. Whilst arguing for the importance of the Manifesto as
an anti-imperial book and exploring the reasons for its viral circulation, this chapter will
also show that it is a self-reflexive text that predicts its own historic impact. It is the formal
and generic – or, in fact, ‘literary’ – qualities of this astonishing document that have given
it such primacy in the canon of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist writing.

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism.

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
All that is solid melts into air.
[T]he free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains […] WORKING MEN OF
ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!1

1 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin Books,
2002 [1848]), 218, 219, 223, 244, 258. Throughout I use the Penguin edition, with
an introduction and comprehensive notes by Gareth Stedman Jones, and which
includes the numerous prefaces and other paratexts that Marx and Engels wrote for
28 Dominic Davies

That most readers will recognize at least one of these now (in)famous
phrases is testament to the global impact of The Communist Manifesto.
First drafted by Friedrich Engels (1820–95) in October 1847, in December
1847 and January 1848 Karl Marx (1818–83) added the rhetorical force that
launched its words into the world’s imagination. Perhaps of all the books
included in this volume, The Communist Manifesto’s planetary influence
is the least contested. The critics included in this chapter’s bibliography –
by no means a comprehensive list of the thinkers to have reflected on this
short document – are generally in consensus: ‘It is said that the Bible and
the Quran are the only two books that have been printed in more editions
and disseminated more widely than The Communist Manifesto’, remarks
postcolonial theorist Aijaz Ahmad; ‘the Manifesto conquered the world’,
observes historian Eric Hobsbawm; ‘[m]illions of people all around the
world – peasants, soldiers, intellectuals as well as professionals of all sorts,
have over the years, been touched and inspired by it’, comments geographer
David Harvey; philosopher Martin Puchner argues that, ‘[t]he Communist
Manifesto influenced the course of history more directly and lastingly than
almost any other text’; and literary theorist Terry Eagleton claims that
‘[v]ery few [texts] have changed the course of actual history as decisively’
as the Manifesto.2
Eagleton is not wrong. Interpretations of the Manifesto have affected
the material lives of millions of the world’s inhabitants. As Gareth Stedman
Jones writes, the Manifesto’s importance is undeniable ‘not because of its
intrinsic merits, but because of the brute facts of world politics’ – after the
Second World War, ‘millions in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba and Eastern
Europe lived under communist rule’, whilst millions more in Southern

2 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘The Communist Manifesto in its Own Time, and in Ours’, in Prakash
Karat, ed., A World to Win: Essays on The Communist Manifesto (New Delhi: Leftword
Books, 1999), 14; Eric Hobsbawm, introduction in The Communist Manifesto: A
Modern Edition (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 8; David Harvey, introduc-
tion in The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 2008), 1; Martin Puchner,
Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2006), 11; Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011), x.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) 29

Figure 1.1: A stamp of the Soviet Union, issued in 1948 to mark the hundredth
anniversary of the first publication of The Communist Manifesto in 1848,
and bearing the now iconic portraits of Marx and Engels.
30 Dominic Davies

Africa, Latin America and South East Asia were caught up in anti-imperial
movements and civil wars fuelled by the communist ideals Marx and Engels
outlined one hundred years earlier.3 The appearance of Marx and Engels’s
portraits on stamps in the Soviet Union, issued in the case of the above
image to mark the centenary of the Manifesto’s publication, bear testament
to the text’s virility and socio-political weight. But separating the Manifesto’s
‘intrinsic merits’ from the ‘brute facts of world politics’ is a mistake: that
the text outlines the theoretical foundations of the world’s most enduring
critique of capitalism in remarkably accessible language has allowed read-
ers of all classes, nations and ethnicities to draw on – and in many cases to
manipulate – its valuable insights.
Whilst emphasizing the importance of the Manifesto as a set of fight-
ing words, this chapter will also demonstrate that the book self-reflexively
predicted its own historic impact. It is the Manifesto’s formal and generic
innovations that have given it such primacy in the canon of anti-imperial
and anti-capitalist writing. Despite recent claims by neoliberal economists
that we have reached ‘the End of History’, the Manifesto’s influence, and
the history it has both described and created, is far from over.4 In 2005
the Manifesto was listed as the most ‘harmful’ book in recent history by
the American Conservative Journal Human Events, while in the same
year a BBC Radio Four poll voted Karl Marx the ‘Greatest Philosopher
of All Time’.5 After the global financial crisis in 2008, there was a surge in
‘Marx-mania’ – capitalism now appears to be on the brink of the collapse
that the Manifesto predicted so long ago, and new kinds of information
networks and collaborative production increasingly resemble the vision
of communism first espoused by Marx and Engels.6

3 Gareth Stedman Jones, introduction in The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin

Books, 2002), 3.
4 Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest (1989) <https://ps321.
community.uaf.edu/files/2012/10/Fukuyama-End-of-history-article.pdf> accessed
5 June 2015.
5 Jeffrey C. Isaac, ed., Rethinking the Western Tradition: The Communist Manifesto
(New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2012), 1.
6 Paul Mason, PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future (London: Allen Lane, 2015), 49.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) 31

The Manifesto as World Literature

To begin, I want to consider what that text, The Communist Manifesto,

actually is. Such a question is not as simple as it seems. The text originally
written and published by Marx and Engels in 1848 was in fact entitled The
Manifesto of the Communist League, ‘a nineteenth century political tract […]
written in two months for an unknown and uninfluential group of German
émigrés in London’.7 It was not until the preface to the German Edition of
1872 that Marx and Engels proclaimed that ‘the Manifesto has become a
historical document which we have no longer any right to alter’.8 Its con-
tent may not have altered significantly in the intervening period, but this
preface reshaped the way it was read. It proclaimed the Manifesto’s global
significance, transforming it from an ‘uninfluential’ political tract into a
‘historical document’. Given the importance of the Manifesto’s conception
of ‘History’ (significantly with a capital ‘H’), the dialogue within the text
between old sections and new reignites the original’s revolutionary rhetoric.
In the Penguin edition used as the primary text for this chapter, no fewer
than seven prefaces precede the actual text of the Manifesto itself. Today,
critics continue to write introductions that relight the explosive energy
lying dormant in the Manifesto; as Harvey rhetorically concludes: ‘We com-
munists are the persistent spectral presence […] The struggle continues’.9
Though ‘[n]obody would have predicted a remarkable future for the
Manifesto in the 1850s and early 1860s’, after nine new editions appeared
in six languages between 1871 and 1872, the Manifesto ‘conquered the
world’.10 However, the Manifesto is a product of the decade in which it
was first written. Throughout the 1840s, social unrest across Europe was so

7 Geoff Dow and George Lafferty, eds, Everlasting Uncertainty: Interrogating The
Communist Manifesto, 1848–1998 (Annandale: Pluto Press, 1998), 1. Indeed, ‘nowhere
is the actual body on whose behalf the Manifesto was written, the Communist League,
mentioned in it’ – from the outset, Marx and Engels emphasized the Manifesto’s
universal and enduring reach. Hobsbawm, ed., The Communist Manifesto, 15.
8 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 194.
9 Harvey, introduction in The Communist Manifesto, 30.
10 Hobsbawm, introduction in The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, 6–7.
32 Dominic Davies

pervasive that ‘the idea of revolution, of one kind or another, seemed […]
as natural as the prospect that the sun would set in the evening and rise in
the morning’.11 It was ‘the age of revolution’, a ‘twin upheaval’ of ‘political
revolution’ in France and ‘industrial revolution’ in Britain, culminating
in the revolutions of 1848 that swept across Europe just weeks after the
Manifesto’s first publication.12 Furthermore, its diagnosis of capitalism was
rooted in Engels’s first-hand experience. His 1847 document, ‘Principles
of Communism’, on which much of the book’s first section is based, was
a political response to his experience of Manchester in the early 1840s,
recorded in detail in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845).
Suffering from the depression of 1841–2, the Lancashire cotton industry
offered a ‘classic example of technological unemployment’ and the resulting
exacerbation of class relations between an impoverished working class and
a small bourgeois elite were conditions that would become symptomatic
of industrial capitalism globally.13
Language similarly complicates the text of the Manifesto. As Marx and
Engels admitted in 1872, their document was published first in German,
then quickly in French in 1848 and English in 1850.14 The 544 editions of
the Manifesto published prior to the Russian Revolution in 1917 spanned
thirty-five different languages and though, as Ahmad observes, these were
predominantly ‘European languages’, there were also ‘three editions in
Japanese and one in Chinese’.15 In the following years, it furthered its geo-
graphical and linguistic reach as ‘the two Russian revolutions helped cata-
pult the Manifesto to the position of being the primary revolutionary text’.16

11 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘The Communist Manifesto and “World Literature”’, Social Scientist
29/7–8 (2000), 3.
12 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 1–2.
13 George R. Boyer, ‘The Historical Background of The Communist Manifesto’, The
Journal of Economic Perspectives, 12/4 (1998), 152–62.
14 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 193.
15 Ahmad, ‘The Communist Manifesto in its Own Time, and in Ours’, 14; Hobsbawm,
ed., The Communist Manifesto, 8.
16 Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 38.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) 33

For example, it arrived in India in 1922 and was first published in Bengali
in 1926; by 1933 it had also been translated into Urdu, Marathi, Tamil and
Hindi.17 At no point did Marx and Engels feel that the reader of the trans-
lated text was distanced from the political content of the German original,
nor did this concern the many twentieth-century revolutionary move-
ments inspired by the Manifesto’s words. ‘What emerges’, writes Puchner,
is ‘the dream of a new world literature: all editions of the Manifesto in all
languages are equivalent so that the conception of an original language
no longer matters’.18
However, reading the Manifesto as a world literary text, S. S. Prawer
identifies the proliferation of ‘metaphors [and] images, from oral and writ-
ten literature, from publishing, and from theatrical performance’ present
in the original German.19 For German readers, the Manifesto is a literary
palimpsest: ‘beneath the utterances of Marx and Engels they detect those
of German poets’, most notably that of Goethe, whose poem ‘The Sorcerer’s
Apprentice’ (made famous by Walt Disney’s 1940 film, Fantasia) informs
the Manifesto’s theory of class history.20 In Goethe’s poem, the apprentice
‘calls up spirits he cannot, in the end, subdue’; for Marx and Engels, the
bourgeoisie may have transformed a feudalist society into a capitalist one,
but they cannot ‘subdue’ the proletariat they have created. Throughout,
the Manifesto ‘heightens or varies a well-known quotation’, using ‘the words
of great writers to confirm and sanction [its] own’.21 If these references are

17 Karat, ed., A World to Win, 131–2.

18 Puchner, Poetry of the Revolution, 52.
19 S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1978), 138.
20 Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, 140. Critics have also pointed out the
Manifesto’s allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ and Mary
Shelley’s Frankenstein. See respectively Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (New York
and London: Routledge, 2006); Coral Lansbury, ‘Melodrama, Pantomime, and the
Communist Manifesto’, Browning Institute Studies 14 (1985), 2–6; Marshall Berman,
All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (London: Penguin Books, 1988), 101.
21 Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, 158, 164.
34 Dominic Davies

lost on non-German readers, the Manifesto’s self-conscious reflections on

translation still develop ‘a new understanding of international literature
that resonates in various ways with current discourses on literature and
globalisation’.22 It actively predicts its own transcendence of linguistic,
cultural and geographical barriers.
Somewhat contrarily, the Manifesto’s focus is not the blueprint for
a communist utopia, but rather the celebration of bourgeois capitalism
and the unified global culture it facilitates. Marx and Engels praise the
bourgeoisie’s ‘infinite horizons, its revolutionary energy and audacity,
its dynamic creativity, its adventurousness and romance’, so that ‘next to
the Communist Manifesto, the whole body of capitalist apologetics, from
Adam Ferguson to Milton Friedman, is remarkably pale and empty of
life’.23 If, as Puchner continues, it is ‘nowhere clearer how much Marx and
Engels admire the bourgeoisie than in [their] remark about bourgeois
world literature’, this is because the potential for communist revolution
is rooted in the international solidarities built through a globalizing cul-
ture.24 The Manifesto emphasizes that the global economy and culture
created by bourgeois capitalism is a necessary predicate for the interna-
tional communism that it advocates – it is the ‘WORKING MEN OF
ALL COUNTRIES’, not of one region or nation, that must ‘UNITE!’ It
then creates that global audience by overcoming the problem of its own
translatability. The Manifesto anticipates ‘the world-wide dissemination
and mingling of “national and local” literatures’ that defines contempo-
rary global culture, as critics such as David Damrosch and Franco Moretti
have subsequently explored.25

22 Puchner, Poetry of Revolution, 3.

23 Berman, All That Is Solid, 98.
24 Puchner, Poetry of Revolution, 49.
25 Prawer, Karl Marx and World Literature, 146; David Damrosch, What is World
Literature? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). Franco Moretti,
‘Conjectures on World Literature’, New Left Review 1 (2000), 54–68.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) 35

The Manifesto and Anticolonialism

The Manifesto’s prediction of a global culture is exemplified by its own

history of publication, translation and dissemination. Throughout the
twentieth century, it not only informed the revolutions in Russia and
China, but became ‘the most zealous advocate of the world’s anticoloni-
alist movements’; after all, though Marx was European, it would be ‘in
Asia that his ideas first took root, and in the so-called Third World that
they flourished most vigorously’.26 It influenced numerous anticolonial
leaders and organizations, from Fidel Castro in Cuba to Frantz Fanon in
Algeria, from Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana to Julius Nyerere in Tanzania,
and from the Indian National Congress in India to the African National
Congress in South Africa. Proliferating translations allowed the Manifesto
to fuse ‘with local traditions and [create] new versions of world litera-
ture and new visions of internationalism’, a flexibility embedded within
its formal structure and rhetorical techniques.27 It offered a concise and
lucid critique of capitalism before, almost immediately, predicting that
system’s disintegration; the Manifesto spoke to political movements of the
twentieth century because they were as much anti-capitalist as they were
anti-imperial or anticolonial.
It was Lenin’s reflections on the Manifesto that realized the Manifesto’s
full anticolonial weight. Regardless of what Lenin ‘effectively did’ in Russia,
argues Slavoj Žižek, ‘the field of possibilities he opened up’ have rightly
made Leninist-Marxism the most dominant form of Marxism, both histori-
cally and today.28 Lenin’s two pamphlets, What is to be Done? (1902) and
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), updated the Manifesto’s
critique for the ‘Age of Empire’, a period that saw ‘the triumph and

26 Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, 215–25.

27 Puchner, Poetry of Revolution, 63.
28 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist
Manifesto for the Twenty-first Century?’, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of
Economics, Culture & Society 13/3–4 (2001), 198.
36 Dominic Davies

transformation of capitalism in the historically specific forms of bourgeois

society in its liberal vision’.29 Lenin’s bridging of theoretical analysis and
the enactment of political change is a ‘lesson’ inscribed into, and ‘learned’
from, the Manifesto’s form, genre and rhetoric.30 As Thomas Kemple argues
in his close-reading of the Manifesto’s final line (‘WORKING MEN OF
ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!’), the gap that separates these capitalized
words from the rest of the written prose ‘open[s] space for action’ by calling
‘a specific class’ into existence: the Manifesto ‘proposes not simply a theory
of history’, but also a ‘thesis about the historicization of theory’.31 Formally, it
connects the written word to historical and material revolution, develop-
ing an intimate relationship between theory and action. The Manifesto is
a book that not only shaped the postcolonial world, but actually theorized
the processes of its own revolutionary shaping.
Despite its global uptake, the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the
Soviet Union in the 1980s suggested that ‘the communist hypothesis’ had
‘failed’.32 However, these societies and states departed from the Manifesto’s
quite specific formulation of communism in fundamental ways, not least
in the size of the state (virtually non-existent in the Manifesto’s account)
and in the centrality of individualism (an ideology to which many of so-
called ‘communist’ states were opposed, but that the Manifesto’s version
harnesses for the greater social good). This is not to detach the kinds
of political governance of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, say, from
‘communism’ as it is outlined in the Manifesto. Such an effort would risk
repeating arguments that, in their attempts to defend Marx and Engels,
begin to look like apologies for those murderous regimes – though
Eagleton’s point that capitalism has only ‘brought untold prosperity
to some sectors of the world […] as did Stalin and Mao, at staggering

29 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 8–9.
30 Puchner, Poetry of Revolution, 40.
31 Thomas Kemple, ‘Post-Marx: Temporal Rhetoric and Textual Action in the
Communist Manifesto’, Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture &
Society 12/2 (2000), 57–8.
32 Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoran
(London and New York: Verso, 2010), 2.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) 37

human cost’, is a convincing one.33 Nevertheless, I want to conclude that,

despite communism’s apparent ‘failure’, the Manifesto is still relevant in
the twenty-first century. Indeed, ‘the horizon that conditions our experi-
ence’, more than ever before, is communism as Marx and Engels originally
conceived it.34

The Manifesto and Postcapitalism

Marshall Berman emphasizes the ‘individualism’ that underpins the

Manifesto’s ‘vision of communism’, pointing out that ‘Marx is closer to some
of his bourgeois and liberal enemies than he is to traditional exponents of
communism’.35 The Manifesto celebrates the social and economic condi-
tions brought about by bourgeois capitalism because they lay the material
foundations for the next stage in ‘History’: communism. As the Manifesto
famously puts it, ‘What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is
its own grave-diggers’.36 Bourgeois capitalism, or today’s neoliberalism, is a
necessary prerequisite to communism as Marx and Engels envisage it. The
enormous wealth generated by capitalist society, no matter how unevenly
distributed, is essential: ‘Marx himself never imagined that socialism could
be achieved in impoverished conditions’, such as those of revolutionary
Russia or China.37 To do so would, and did, require an authoritarian state
to impose industrial revolution at huge human cost. Despite the historical
association of communism with big government, the Manifesto’s vision of
communism in fact promotes the eradication of the state entirely. It draws

33 Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, 15. See also Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis, 3.
34 Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 2.
35 Berman, All That Is Solid, 98.
36 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 233.
37 Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, 16.
38 Dominic Davies

on liberal individualism, but transforms it, ever so slightly, to benefit not

capitalism itself, but rather other individuals:
In bourgeois society, living labour is but a means to increase accumulated labour.
In Communist society, accumulated labour is but a means to widen, to enrich, to
promote the existence of the labourer. […] By freedom is meant, under the present
bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. […] In place
of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have
an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free
development of all.38

As Hannah Arendt argues, ‘it was not Karl Marx but the liberal econo-
mists themselves who had to introduce “the communist fiction”’; but it is
the Manifesto that is ‘courageous’ enough to ‘conclude that the “socializa-
tion” of man would produce automatically a harmony of all interests’.39
Paradoxically, in 1989 the neoliberal economist Francis Fukuyama drew
directly on the Manifesto to proclaim that the world had reached ‘The
End of History’. He claimed that the ‘two major challenges to liberalism,
those of fascism and of communism’, had been defeated, and that the ‘class
issue’ – the antagonism that for Marx and Engels had been ‘[t]he history
of all hitherto existing society’ – had ‘actually been successfully resolved in
the West’.40 ‘History’, used in the ‘Hegelian-Marxist sense of the progressive
evolution of human political and economic institutions’, had for Fukuyama
‘culminated not in socialism but in democracy and a market economy’.41
Peculiarly enough, as Li Xing points out, Fukuyama’s argument, along
with other defences of neoliberalism, actually returns ‘to the most essential
basis of the Marxian world-view – the material foundations of society, in

38 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 236–7, 244.

39 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), 43–4.
40 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 219, and Fukuyama, ‘The End of
History?’.
41 Francis Fukuyama, ‘Second Thoughts: The End of History 10 Years Later’, New
Perspectives Quarterly 16/4 (1999), 40.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) 39

other words, the materialist conception of history’.42 Fukuyama assumes that

‘the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement
of the classless society envisioned by Marx’, blaming issues such as ‘black
poverty’ not on ‘liberalism’ but rather on ‘the “legacy” of slavery and racism’;
as though those two historical phenomena were somehow unrelated.43
A quarter century later, during which time neoliberalism has tightened
its grip, Fukuyama’s argument that ‘class’ is no longer an ongoing social
and economic contradiction sounds absurd.44 As Thomas Piketty’s recent
study has shown, in the past decade capitalism has generated ‘arbitrary
and unsustainable inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic
values on which democratic societies are based’.45 Just as Marx and Engels
predicted over 150 years ago, capitalism is ‘unsustainable’, sowing the seeds
of its own destruction.
If ‘History’ is not over, where might the beginnings of the communist
society that Marx and Engels predicted would succeed capitalism be found
today? Badiou, who recently proclaimed ‘the rebirth of history’, argues
that the 2011 riots in London and the recent revolutions in the Arab world
resemble ‘the first working-class insurrections of the nineteenth century’.46
But it is also manifesting in other, less obvious ways. Paul Mason, echoing
the Manifesto, argues that ‘capitalism, a complex, adaptive system […] has
reached the limits of its capacity to adapt’.47 In its place, he identifies the
‘rise of collaborative production’: collective organizations such as Wikipedia
that provide the ‘biggest information product in the world’ for free, creating
‘[n]ew forms of ownership, new forms of lending [and] new legal contracts’.48

42 Li Xing, ‘Capitalism and Globalisation in the Light of the Communist Manifesto’,

Economic and Political Weekly 33/33–4 (1998), 2227.
43 Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’.
44 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press,
2005), 2.
45 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer
(London: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1.
46 Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory
Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 5.
47 Mason, PostCapitalism, xiii (emphasis in original).
48 Mason, PostCapitalism, xv.
40 Dominic Davies

Whilst Mason does not specifically use the word ‘communist’, other com-
mentators argue that ‘Wikipedia’s mode of production […] bears strong
resemblance with what Marx and Engels described as communism’, and
that ‘the classic demands of the left – for less work, for an end to scarcity,
for economic democracy, for the production of socially useful goods, and
for the liberation of humanity – are materially more achievable than at
any other point in history’.49
This is not the communism of Stalin and Mao, but rather the kind of
‘participatory democracy’ that the Manifesto first propagated in the 1840s.
Just as the ‘steam and machinery’ that had ‘revolutionized industrial produc-
tion’ was a crucial technological development that would make communism
possible for Marx and Engels, new technologies such as the internet are
making ‘communist production practices’ realizable today.50 Though these
microcosms of communist production are still ‘antagonistically entangled
into capitalist class relations’, they might yet ‘be developed, extended, and
intensified’ into other spheres of society.51 As Srinicek and Williams argue,
the ‘utopian potentials inherent in twenty-first-century technology cannot
remain bound to a parochial capitalist imagination; they must be liberated
by an ambitious left alternative’.52 The world literary and social commons
that The Communist Manifesto drew on and created, in both content and
form, and which informed many of the twentieth century’s anti-imperial
movements, may also be fundamental to the realization of a postcapitalist
society in the twenty-first.

49 Sylvain Firer-Blaess and Christian Fuchs, ‘Wikipedia: An Info-Communist Manifesto’,

Television & New Media 15/2 (2014), 88; Nick Srinicek and Alex Williams, Inventing
the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (London and New York: Verso,
2015), 1–3.
50 Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 220; Firer-Blaess and Fuchs, ‘Wikipedia’,
90.
51 Firer-Blaess and Fuchs, ‘Wikipedia’, 90, 99.
52 Srinicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, 1–3.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto (1848) 41

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