We may no longer be able to praise the Communist Manifesto for its accuracy in predicting the end of capitalism. We may no longer be able to laud the incendiary tract for its power to incite the proletarian masses to throw off their chains and rise up against the bourgeoisie. But Sunday before last in the New York Times, in his "commemorative salute" on the 150th anniversary of the book's publication, Columbia University professor Steven Marcus found one last reason to praise Marx's writing. The Communist Manifesto, it turns out, is an astonishing work of art: "an extraordinary piece of writing, an enduring masterpiece that immediately catches up readers in its transpersonal force and sweep. The compressed formulations of its compacted paragraphs survive as aphorisms far beyond their original context."
Oh, the Manifesto -- as Marcus admits -- may have "prematurely announced" the doom of the West, and it may have led to the slaughter of millions. But what is that compared with the fact that it "possesses a structural complexity and a denseness of thematic play that we ordinarily associate with great works of the literary imagination"?
Announcing in its opening sentences that "a specter is haunting Europe -- the specter of communism," the Manifesto-as-novel seems to be a Gothic tale. Its metaphors quickly segue, however, first to the world of fairy tales, then to the Arabian nights, and at last -- by a "generative fecundity" -- to intimations of "Goethe's Faust, Byron's Manfred, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and a host of other modern and mythological dramatizations."
To the untrained reader of great fiction, this looks like a mess, but for a critic of Marcus's stature, the disorganization proves how profoundly organized the Manifesto actually is: "Such trains of metaphoric figures and images are part of the dense local entwinements that constitute the microstructure of the Manifesto's linguistic fabric and argument."
Ah, the microstructure! That would be the sort of thing one spots after a few microbrews. Then again, Marcus may be on to something. The artistry of the Communists has long been underappreciated. It may have led to the Great Hunger and the Cultural Revolution, but what poetry there is in Chairman Mao's Little Red Book! It may have led to murder and torture, but what drama there is in Lenin's writing! And the gulag? It seems almost churlish to object to Stalin's inspired performance art.