Everything can be commodified. Back in 1998, when the eagle of free enterprise still soared unchallenged above the global marketplace, the idea was a truism. Love, power, humanity — all could be bought, sold, transformed into mere exchange value with a ubiquity that seemed as inevitable as the daily rising of the sun or the stock exchange. And if there was an irony in the fact that the notion of commodification had its origins in the work of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, it was lost on most, even in the year of the Communist Manifesto’s 150 birthday.

At Verso, the leftist book publishing house in whose New York office I worked, we’d decided that it was time to wake people up to the significance of Marx’s world-shaking philippic with a new edition marking the anniversary. The prospect of bringing such a project to the market was intriguing. Could the purest critique of commodity culture, now freed of much of the opprobrium that had attached to it in the dark days of Stalinism and the Cold War, find a place in the brutal exchange of the modern cash nexus?

Recent precedents provided some encouragement. “Who would have thought,” a senior editor at Penguin Books had mused openly over lunch some months before our publication, “that 1997 would turn out to be the year of Che Guevara?” It was true. The stern, handsome features of the Argentine revolutionary had, that year, glared out as a marketing pitch for everything from Swatch watches to Fischer skis. The style mavens at the New Yorker had registered their languid interest with pieces by Paul Berman and John Cassidy. No less than three broadly sympathetic biographies had appeared on the lists of major trade houses. And Michael Hutchence, the recently deceased lead singer of INXS, had been photographed reading a copy of Guevara’s Motorcycle Diaries on a beach.