A Spectre, Haunting

China Miéville's brilliant reading of the modern world's most controversial and enduring political document: the Communist Manifesto. In 1848 a strange political tract was published by two emigres from Germany. Marx and Engels's apocalyptic vision of an insatiable system that penetrates every corner of the world, reduces every relationship to that of profit, and bursts asunder the old forms of production and of politics, is still a picture of a recognisable world, our world, and the vampiric energy of the system is once again highly contentious. The Manifesto is a text that shows no sign of…