BUT the triumphalism did not last long. With the onset of the South-Asian crisis of 1997-98, the same New Yorker in its October 20, 1997 issue announced “The Return of Karl Marx”. Marxist scholars and parties also came forward to revisit the classics. A number of new editions of the Communist Manifesto were published in 1998 (150th anniversary of its first publication) e.g., one with a Introduction by Eric Hobsbawm and another, published by the Monthly Review Press, with a Foreword by Paul M Sweezy and an Article by Ellen Meiksins Wood.

By the turn of the new millennium, TINA was yielding place first to the vaguely optimistic slogan of “Another World Is Possible” and then to the confident battle-cry of “21st-Century Socialism”.The world began to look increasingly like a turbulent sea of myriad mass movements. In a situation like this, Alain Badiou’s “The Communist Hypothesis” (2008) – which generated a lot of interest and provided the stimulus for an international conference devoted to the “Idea of Communism”, conducted chiefly by Slavoj Zizek, in London in 2009 – and Terry Eagleton’s “Why Marx Was Right” (2011) helped create a new awareness about the relevance of Marxism in the 21st century. Jason Barker, writer-director of the 2011 German documentary film “Marx Reloaded”, sounded quite convincing when he said, “[P]olitical thinking today is again converging on precisely the type of social conditions in which Marx lived”.

As a backdrop to the last-mentioned books, films and events, of decisive importance was the financial crisis-cum-economic recession that struck the world in 2007-08. While the bourgeois ideologues once again started screaming about the resurrection of the dead philosopher whom their counterparts in the 19th century used to grudgingly call “the Red Doctor” (a reference to the doctorate degree in philosophy Marx earned at the age of 21), the more intelligent among them were trying to explore if the Marxian theory could be used for saving capitalism. Among others, the Pope and the French President were reported to be consulting Capital to understand the causes (maybe cures too) of the ravaging crisis. Financial Times then conducted an extensive discussion focussed on Marx’s Capital and featured an interview with Jason Barker titled “Can Marx Save Capitalism?”; now The Economist has hailed Thomas Piketty as “The Modern Marx”. Well, they think they have found a sterilised, innocuous Marx, who is not questioning the foundations of capitalism – such as the extraction of surplus value – or the devastating ways of present day imperialism. A mellowed Marx, who instead of saying expropriators will be expropriated, solemnly declares: rentiers will be heavily taxed! In Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty demonstrates that, as a rule, the rate of return on private capital (money, land, factories and other properties) has been significantly higher than the rate of growth of income and output. This implies that “Wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than output and wages.... The entrepreneur inevitably tends to become a rentier, more and more dominant over those who own nothing but their labor.” The result is a consistent (covering the past three centuries, save the period spanning the two world wars) growth of inequality of income and wealth, which was one of the major causes of the crisis of 2008 and which can endanger the whole system again. Interested readers may see a brief critical review of Piketty’s propositions in Liberation, June 2014.

Such shifts in ideological-political discourse, considered in conjunction with various social upheavals, clearly point to a constant quest – going on at various levels of the conscious and the subconscious among ever larger sections of people – for a radical, viable alternative to capitalism. It is to aid this quest, particularly in our country, that we considered it necessary to bring out the present Indian edition of the seminal vision statement of communists – the Communist Manifesto – in English and different Indian languages. Of course, one cannot expect ready-made solutions to our contemporary concerns in a document this old and this brief. But definitely one would find here – in this panoramic view of the historical evolution and global spread of capitalism as well as its contradictions, crises and ultimate collapse – possibly the best point of entry into a serious, systematic study of the society we are born into. As Chris Harman observed,

“There is still a compulsive quality to its prose as it provides insight after insight into the society in which we live, where it comes from and where it’s going to. It is still able to explain, as mainstream economists and sociologists cannot, today’s world of recurrent wars and repeated economic crisis, of hunger for hundreds of millions on the one hand and “overproduction” on the other.”“The Manifesto and the World of 1848” in The Communist Manifesto (Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick). Bloomsbury, London: Bookmarks.

This is certainly true. Indeed there are passages – those on globalisation readily come to mind – which by common consent sound even more realistic and relevant today than they did when the document was published. We shall return to this shortly, but let us first acquaint ourselves with the specific historical setting in which this timeless classic appeared.