The convention of the Communist League now under way in here in London has articulated a political platform that calls for nothing less than destruction and reordering, by way of revolution, of the whole of present-day European society, which the League's principal theorists have essentially declared to be nothing less than a blight on the history and experience of the great majority of mankind. Indeed, not only do these theorists, one Karl Marx and one Friedrich Engels (who are German and not English), declare the present social system of Britain and the Continent a curse, but they also challenge virtually the entire history of thought in Western culture on both moral and intellectual grounds. Engels, be it known, comes from a family of German industrialists; Marx is a Jew who appears to have rejected any ties to his Jewish tradition. Indeed, Marx has been at some pains to reject ties to any specific philosophical or religious tradition because Their ideas have been articulated in a variety of writings, but most decisively in a document called The Communist Manifesto. The doctrine that seems meant to reconfigure Judaeo-Christian philosophical and political thought and Western social structure has, as the Manifesto implies, been named Communism.
The Communist League appears to have constituted itself at this time in London in no small part on account of the host of thusfar unsuccessful revolutions that have plagued the political environment on the Continent over the course of this last year. There is no doubt that intellectual currents in Western philosophy and economics, notably the insights of Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau have influenced Marx. For example, it is hard not to see a connection between Rousseau's declaration at the beginning of his Social Contract (387) that man is born free but everywhere is in chains, and the declaration at the end of the Manifesto that powerless workers of the world must unite because th...