The opening statement of Marx's famous manifesto, that the history of mankind is the history of class struggle, is really the essence and sum of its message. This message is above all a call to arms. According to Marx, democratic societies are not really different in kind from the aristocratic and slave societies that preceded them. Like their predecessors, liberal societies are divided into classes that are "oppressed" and those who oppress them. The solution to social problems lies in a civil war that will tear society asunder and create a new revolutionary world from its ruins.

This idea of Marx has proven to be as wrong as idea any ever conceived; more destructive in its consequences then any intellectual fallacy in the history of mankind. Since the Manifesto was written 150 years ago a hundred million people have been killed in its name. Between ten and twenty times that number have been condemned to lives of unnecessary misery and human squalor, deprived of the life chances afforded the most humble citizens of the industrial democracies that Marxists set out to destroy.

Marx was a brilliant mind and a seductive stylist, and many of his insights look reasonable enough, on paper. But the evil they have wrought, on those who fell under their practical sway, far outweighs any possible intellectual gain. It would be a healthy development for everyone, rich and poor alike, if future generations put Karl Marx's Manifesto on the same sinister shelf as Mein Kampf and other destructive products of the human soul.

The request for this article came from the editor of the Book Review, Steve Wasserman, an old radical friend from Berkeley. Wasserman had been a political protégé of Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer, who were then quoting Mao and Kim Il Sung, and attempting to organize "guerrilla fronts" in American cities, with which they hoped to launch a "war of liberation" in America. Inspired by texts like the Manifesto, Hayden's troops practiced with weapons at local firing ranges and planned for the day when they would seize power, abolish private property and take over the means of production. It was therefore of some interest to me how Wasserman would treat the Manifesto now that he was an editor of one of the largest metropolitan newspapers in America.

After the failure of the revolutionary hopes that the Sixties had encouraged, Wasserman went into the literary world and became the editor of Times Books, and then of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. I kept in touch with him from a distance, over the years, and knew him to be like so many other radicals, one who was chastened by the failures of that revolutionary and destructive left, but who had not given up the intellectual traditions, and political ambitions that had given it birth. So I was curious and ready to respond when he called me to this task.

Wasserman requested a piece assessing the Manifesto in 250 words. "Yours will be one of six," he explained. "Well, I guess that's a challenge, Steve," I said to him halfjokingly. At 256 words, the article I submitted was 6 over his specification. In fact, he cut the first 126 words of my piece, so that the copy available to 1 million Times' subscribers began with the sentence in the middle paragraph that reads "Since the Manifesto was written 150 years ago a hundred million people have been killed in its name." The part of the article describing the sinister message of the Manifesto, as a call to war, and pointing out the falsehood of all its major claims did not appear.

The reason for the cut was that Wasserman had not kept his word, or perhaps more accurately had not indicated to me his true design. The "symposium" of minipieces, like mine, little more than soundbites, was actually appended to a twopage spread with a picture of Marx and a poem by the German Communist Bertolt Brecht, and featured 3,000 word lead essay by the unreconstructed Marxist Eric Hobsbawm, a man who had joined the British Communist Party in the 1920s and remained a member through the1960s and all the slaughter of innocents along the way. This was the impression of the Manifesto with which the Times' editor really wanted to leave his readers.

For leftists like Hobsbawm, the nightmare of Soviet Communism may have been "actually existing socialism" but it was nonetheless not "real" socialism and had little to with Marx. My comments about 100 million people being killed, therefore, were beside the point, even though Marxists like Hobsbawm did the killing, and justified it to fellow travelers and credulous audiences in the West. For Hobsbawm, the Manifesto is not really a historical document but a living prophecy. It correctly analyzed the dynamics of industrial capitlist societies and provided a vision of the social future. The one concession he is willing to make is that it did not correctly predict that the proletariat would be the carrier of its revolutionary truth: "However, if at the end of the millenium we must be struck by the acuteness of the Manifesto's vision of the then remote future of a massively globalized capitalism,...it is now evident that the bourgeoisie has not produced 'above all, its own gravediggers' in the proletariat."

This error is of no consequence, however, for the Manifesto's central theme that democratic capitalism must be destroyed or it will destroy us. Even the failure of Communism only strengthens this idea, according to Hobsbawm: "The Manifesto it is not the least of its remarkable qualities is a document that envisaged failure. It hoped that the outcome of capitalist developoment would be 'a revoluiotnary reconstitution of society at large,' but, as we have already seen, it did not exclude the alternative 'common ruin.' Many years later another Marxian rephrased this as the choice between socialism and barbarity. Which of these will prevail is a question which the 21st Century must be left to answer."

In other words the democratic postindustrial society we inhabit, with living standards higher and living conditions better for the mass of its citizens than available to any other people since the beginning of time, is no more than "barbarity" a "common ruin." And the only alternative is the socialism that Marx envisioned.

This, in 1998, is what the editor of the Times' thinks is the epitome of progressive thought. Of course the slogan "Socialism or Barbarism" was first raised by Rosa Luxemburg at the end of the First World War, when Communists like Hobsbawm set out to destroy the liberal societies of the West and to create a Marxist utopia in the ruins of the Russian empire. Seventy years and 100 million deaths later, Eric Hobsbawm and Steve Wasserman have learned nothing from the experience. Oh, I know that Steve Wasserman is not going to mount the barricades tomorrow and attempt to implement the vision laid out in this intellectual trash. But many, younger than he will.

I did not call Wasserman when the symposium appeared. Instead, I wrote him a note:

Dear Steve,

The 75th anniversary of Mein Kampf is coming up. It's too bad that Heidegger and deMan are dead, but I'm sure you could get David Irving or David Duke to come up with a 3,000 word spread telling us why, even though it was written so long ago and has resulted in nothing but human misery ever since, it is still one of the most prescient and indispensable works for understanding western civilization and the Jews. You might also try that French Holocaustdenier whom Chomsky likes so much. For my part, I'll be glad to provide you with 250 words of balance again. Of course, if you should need more room for the fascists, feel free to cut whatever I send you in half.

 How embarrassing, my friend.