Manifesto

It was Agnes Heller, the Hungarian philosopher, who said that communism will always remain "a beautiful dream". Of course, the practice has been different and the dreams too often turned to nightmares. We wanted to make a piece of theatre to remind people that history is more complicated: to insist that communist tradition cannot be reduced to an argument which runs - Marxism led to Lenin, Lenin led to Stalin and Stalin equals evil. The politics of The Communist Manifesto inspired a complex set of responses. In many places and at many times the rigidity of scientific socialism was to stifle more creative and progressive political developments. On other occasions, however, thehumanism lodged deep within Marx's thought found common cause with independent movements dedicated to democratic and egalitarian ends.

The collapse of communism and the triumph of the market does not mean that our nostalgia or longing for the "beautiful dream" of communism will end. The history of communism is our history. It is the history of one of the most powerful, progressive and dangerous ideas that the 19th and 20th centuries have produced.

For a long time now it has seemed to us that we are in danger of forgetting this history. We made Manifesto in an attempt to remember, believing like Wilde that "a map of the world that does not include utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing."


"One will have to reawaken in the breast of people the sense of the self-worth of men-freedom. Only such a sense, which vanished from the world with the Greeks and evaporated into the blue with Christianity, can transform society again into a community of people for their highest ends - a democratic state." Karl Marx


"For the choice facing the nation is between two totally different ways of life. And what a prize we have to fight for: no less than the chance to banish from our land the dark, divisive clouds of Marxist socialism." Margaret Thatcher


"Our societies are changing. It is no longer at atmosphere of repression that weighs upon us, that haunts our streets and our minds. It is the glossy, efficiency-minded atmosphere that is knocking the wind out of us. The old pessimism was produced by the idea that everything was getting worse and worse. The new pessimism is produced by the fact that everything is getting better. Jean Baudrillard

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