Marx, Engels and Other Socialisms
t Marx and Engels treat the movement for socialism and communism as a modern phenomenon. Commentators are sometimes tempted to treat socialism and communism in a historically expansive fashion – dating back, for instance, to the institution of the jubilee in pre-exilic Israel, or to the social arrangements of primitive Christianity. However, Marx and Engels maintain that socialist and communist systems “proper” [eigentlich] emerged only with the first stirrings of the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat, a struggle which they describe earlier in the Manifesto (CM 257). Pre-modern expressions of socialism and communism might, of course, be of interest, but they necessarily foundered on the “undeveloped condition” of the proletariat and the lack of “material conditions for its emancipation” – two conditions which are only met with the development of the bourgeois epoch (CM 257). Until the theoretical and practical connection is made between the movement for communism and the int...