The Communist Manifesto

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848: it is a few pages that met with little success initially, but would later be destined to change the world. A text that by the end of the 20th Century was reported to have been published in over two hundred languages and half a billion copies. History and class struggle, bourgeoisie and proletariat, labor and freedom, private property and exploitation, party and revolution, capitalism and communism: these are the crucial nodes of an idea of man, politics and society that marked the 20th century. A text that has been a topic of debate for historiographers, philosophers and political scientists, who have tried, from different perspectives, to interpret, revise, apply and refute it.

The Manifesto is experiencing a new youth today. Left behind by the theoretical implosion of the global left, fought ideologically by globalist capitalism, Marx and Engels' masterpiece is again peeping out among the most widely read texts especially by young people. Why? Perhaps because it is a text that maintains its polemical vigor firmly. Perhaps because, duly repurposed, it succeeds in explaining a good portion of the dynamics that we still experience today. And perhaps because it urges us to imagine that capitalism can still be challenged, in an age seemingly without alternatives.