Critics of Karl Marx and and Friedrich Engels sometimes dismiss their landmark work The Communist Manifesto on the basis that capitalism has proven remarkably resilient — contrary to their prediction that the proletariat would put capitalism in the grave on a rather short timescale. But industrial capitalism is still relatively young in epochal terms, its period of dominance still shorter than feudalism’s. While Marx and Engels may have failed to anticipate capitalism’s multiform capacities to stabilize itself through reforms and interventions, it’s also still far too early to declare them wrong.

In 1848, writes China Miéville in his 2022 book A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto, “Bourgeois civilization wasn’t firmly established. Rather than the nature of today’s ‘late capitalism’ . . . it was its ‘earliness’ that was a complication for Marx and Engels, those fascinated critics.” This early anticapitalist work still provides us with resources to clarify the terrain of struggle, alongside a compass that can guide us beyond the horizon.

In this interview, transcribed from an episode of the Jacobin Radio podcast the Dig, host Daniel Denvir spoke to Miéville about the meaning, legacy, and utility of Marx and Engels’s most famous work. Indeed, by some accounts, The Communist Manifesto is the most influential twelve thousand words ever written, making it a worthy candidate of close reading and critical inquiry this many years later.