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The first, automatic reaction of today's enlightened liberal reader to The Communist Manifesto is: isn't the text simply wrong on so many empirical accounts, with regard to the picture it gives of the social situation, as well as with regard to the revolutionary perspective it sustains and propagates? Was there ever a political manifesto that was more clearly falsified by subsequent historical reality? Isn't The Communist Manifesto, at best, an exaggerated extrapolation of certain tendencies discernible in the 19th century?

The fact of this "anonymous" violence also allows us to make a more general point about anti-Communism. The pleasure provided by anti-Communist reasoning was that Communism made it so easy to play the game of finding the culprit, blaming the Party, Stalin, Lenin, ultimately Marx himself, for the millions of dead, for terror and gulag, while in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms, although capitalism has been no less destructive in terms of human and environmental costs, destroying aboriginal cultures… In short, the difference between capitalism and Communism is that Communism was perceived as an Idea which then failed in its realization, while capitalism functioned "spontaneously". There is no Capitalist Manifesto.

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