Profecía congelada: El Manifiesto Comunista hoy

This short essay aims to move beyond hagiographic, monumentalising cele- brations of The Communist Manifesto, to reflect on what lessons can be drawn from the specific forms of its failed realisation. Against the cliché that the Manifesto is a prophetic text, we should explore the dis- junction between the incisive forecast of the ‘prose’ of capitalism and the thwarted antici- pation of the ‘poetry’ of revolution. This essay argues that the analytical and political limitations of the Manifesto are to be located in the excessive linearity and homogeneity with which if frames capital’s powers of abs- traction. To the extent that capital proceeds through a dialectic of homogenisation and differentiation, spatial expansion and divi- sion, corrosion of tradition and its cynical refunctioning for the purpose of shoring up domination, the tasks of working class unity and internationalism set by the Manifesto become all the more politically pressing, and anything but inevitable.