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ISBN: 978-0-9872283-3-8 (e-book)

Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 2004106393

First Printed 2005

Reprinted 2007, 2015

Also published by Ocean Sur in Spanish as Manifiesto.

PUBLISHED BY OCEAN PRESS

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contents

preface: Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara

By Adrienne Rich

introduction

By Armando Hart

The Communist Manifesto

By Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels

Reform or Revolution

By Rosa Luxemburg

Socialism and Man in Cuba

By Ernesto Che Guevara

notes on the contributors

PREFACE

adrienne rich

“KARL MARX, ROSA LUXEMBURG AND CHE GUEVARA”

If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are troubled as to why, how and by whom political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good intellectual reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wishing to act with others, to “do something,” you already have much in common with the writers of the three essays in this book.

The essays in Manifesto were written by three relatively young people — Karl Marx when he was 30, Rosa Luxemburg at 27, Che Guevara at the age of 37. Born into different historical moments and different generations, they shared an energy of hope, an engagement with history, a belief that critical thinking must inform action, and a passion for the world and its human possibilities. That society as it was materially constructed would have to undergo radical change in order for such possibilities, stifled or denied under existing conditions, to be realized, all three affirmed in their lives and work. They were educated, reflective people who sharpened their thinking powers on that endeavor.

Marx lived most of his prodigiously creative life in poverty and exile. Rosa Luxemburg and Che Guevara were targeted and assassinated for their intellectual and active leadership in socialist movements. Any one of them might have led the life of a relatively comfortable professional. Each made a different choice. Yet reading what they wrote, including the essays in this book, one feels not the grimness of a tooth-gritting, dogma-driven politics, but the verve and exuberance of mind that accompanies creative indignation. For all three, feeling intensely alive translated into the vision of an integrated society, in which each person could become both individuated and socially responsible: “an association,” as a famous phrase from The Communist Manifesto expresses it, “in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”¹ Or, as Che told a group of Cuban medical students and health workers in 1960:

The revolution is not, as some claim, a standardizer of collective will, of collective initiative. To the contrary, it is a liberator of human beings’ individual capacity.

What the revolution does do, however, is to orient that capacity.²

None of them was thinking in isolation or in a historical vacuum. They had the past and its earlier thinkers to learn from and critique; they observed and participated in social movements; they worked out and argued ideas and strategies, sometimes fiercely, with comrades (Marx especially with Friedrich Engels, Luxemburg with Leo Jogiches, Clara Zetkin, Karl Kautsky and others of the German Social Democratic Party, Che Guevara with Fidel Castro, other Latin Americans and with leaders of the “nonaligned” nations). They saw themselves not as “public intellectuals” but as witnesses of and contributors to the growing consciousness of a class which produced wealth and leisure without sharing in it, a class fully capable of reason and enlightened action, though often lacking the formal education that could lead to political power.

That the working people who produced the wealth of the world could move toward political and economic emancipation, they did not simply believe but saw as a necessary evolution in human history. Revolutions were all around them, mass movements, strikes, international organizing. But it was not just the temper of their times that drew them into activity. (Many professionals and writers, especially when young, have been attracted by a moment’s flaring promise of social change, only to pull back as the windchill of opposition begins to freeze the air.) Rather, they observed around them the accelerating relationship between private wealth and massive suffering, capital’s devouring appetite for expansion of its markets at whatever human cost (including its wars); and in that awareness they also saw the meaning of their lives.

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