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But it was not enough for communism to fail. Before it could contemplate marketing Marx, capitalism itself had to change: It had to evolve to the point where it fully conformed to its own description in the manifesto. For a sizable stretch of the 20th century, in at least the "advanced" parts of the globe, only crackpots and subscribers to Monthly Review believed that the workers were being ground down to pauperdom. Anyone could see that machinists and truck drivers were buying houses in Levittown, second cars and college educations for their kids. "In rapidly changing modern urban America," a 1964 sociology text triumphantly declared, "traditional social classes are nonexistent." As for the destruction of "all old-established national industries," as predicted in the manifesto, and their replacement by a global system of production and consumption: Sure, but you had to wait until the 1990s to find Benneton in Beijing or Kentucky Fried Chicken in New Delhi.

So for a while there, in the golden age after World War II, capitalism sought to spite communism by treating the workers as if they might be useful as consumers too, and hence worthy of a living wage. It was not until some time in the 1970s that capitalism decided to take "The Communist Manifesto" as its personal self-improvement guide -- going global with a vengeance, treating the workers (including increasing numbers of doctors, teachers, scientists and writers as well as the old-fashioned heavy-lifting and lug-turning proles) like so many disposable "factors of production." The Great Polarization between rich and poor, predicted so long ago in the manifesto, now dominates the social contours of the world, from Los Angeles to Johannesburg, from London to Santiago.

And it is of course this deepening polarization and "immiserization" that gives the up-market new manifesto its delightfully up-to-date frisson and leads book dealers to believe that stockbrokers will want to display it in their corner offices as a sign of terminal cockiness. They can buy it on their lunch hour just a few blocks from Wall Street, at the World Trade Center Borders, for example, which is planning a colorful window display, and where the workers ($7 an hour) exist in what one of them described to me as a "culture of absolute hopelessness," thanks to management's obsessive wage-busting campaign. Or they can take it home to the coffee table and insist that the maid ($8 an hour and zero benefits) dust it daily so that the red banner on the cover maintains its high gleam. Commie chic is no end of fun once the commies are dead and the workers of the world have been beaten into submission.

So, thanks to the inner Hegelian workings of capitalism, "The Communist Manifesto" finally works as an accessory, a stocking-stuffer, a badge of consummate capitalist cool. But what about its "use value," as Karl himself might have asked? Does it work, in other words, as a manifesto? Well, there are a few problems, and not just the obvious one that real-and-existing communism let Marx and Engels down so unkindly. The other disappointment is capitalism. There is not and has never been a social system as brilliantly dynamic and relentlessly all-consuming as the capitalism of "The Communist Manifesto." It was, according to its authors, slated to destroy every vestige of the feudal and patriarchal past and, with one big steam-powered whoosh, propel humankind into the bleak cold world of the Modern, where our true options -- socialism or barbarism -- would finally be disclosed:

"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

Faced with the capitalist leviathan, religion was supposed to wither away, gender differences disappear and nationalism -- the most successful religion of all -- was supposed to be smashed by globalization, along with its peculiar object of worship, the nation-state. Then and only then, without the distractions of jingoism, superstition and patriarchy, would the working class be ready to address itself full time to the business of class war.

So we must note with sorrow that the manifesto greatly overestimated the power and brilliance of capitalism. As we near 2000, religions are as febrile as ever, patriarchy lingers on and nationalism -- well, it was nationalism that blew the infant socialist-international movement out of the water at the outbreak of World War I in 1914, clearing the way for the hideously un-Marxist possibility of socialism-in-one-nation, that being the Soviet Union. As for the nation-state, it continues to do what it has done best since Carthage and Rome, which is not feeding the hungry or running the steel mills, but mustering the troops for war.

Still, "The Communist Manifesto" is well worth the $12 that Verso is asking. Despite the hype, its message is a timeless one that bears repeating every century or so: The meek shall triumph and the mighty shall fall; the hungry and exhausted will get restless and someday -- someday! -- rise up against their oppressors. The prophet Isaiah said something like this, and so, a little more recently, did Jesus. At a mere 96 pages, you can think of it as a greeting card, or even a kind of wake-up call, for that special person in your life -- such as, for example, your boss.
SALON | April 30, 1998

Barbara Ehrenreich's most recent book is "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War" (Holt).