The Communist Manifesto, first published on this day in 1848, doesn’t suggest that we should imagine the future. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels tell us that the future is harbored within things themselves, and that is why it is rational to desire it. So it makes no sense to establish a dualism between the present and the future; if we reasoned according to this dichotomy, then we would be condemned either to desire the impossible or else to suffer the curse of Adam and accept suffering and poverty as divine punishments. The Manifesto instead tells us to take up the tasks we are capable of resolving — and by “us,” Marx and Engels mean not individuals or an aggregate of individuals but a class determined by economic processes.

The Manifesto is an extraordinary document of political activism, both urgent and enthusiastic — and it was received as such by both admirers and critics: “The memorable date of publication of The Communist Manifesto (February 1848) reminds us of our first and definitive entry into history,” wrote the materialist philosopher Antonio Labriola in 1895. “It is against this date that the course of the new era can be measured, rising and blossoming. This is how this new era escaped from and developed out of the present, through intimate and immanent development, in a necessary and ineluctable fashion.”

For Labriola, the scansion of the temporality of communism was clear: it was blossoming in a present determined by the past and pregnant with the future. History did not make jumps; it was determined, and thus capable of providing certainty to political action — that is, the confidence that the sacrifices, struggles, and repressions will not be in vain, as Carlo Rosselli put it in his 1930 work Liberal Socialism.