THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO 129 manifesting the destination nor transcendentally predestined; it is much rather the product of human labour simply because this labour is purposive and work directed towards goals generates a telos. With all these preceding developments, the Manifesto is the arrival at the outlines of a complete revolutionary theory with its accent on class struggle and thus of the conception of historical materialism. Thirdly, to note in passing, the Manifesto also provides for a clear and unequivocal basis for distinguishing "scientific" socialism or communism from all the other currents of socialism in vogue then or as were to emerge later and as these continue to do to our day as manifested in the various New Left currents or radical versions of post-modernism. It is these and such other resources in the Manifesto which gives it an abiding relevance. I will soon argue that the prophecy or the forecast about the shape of the world as the basis of its lasting value is, in relation to the formulations within the Manifesto itself but more so in the accounts of counterrevolutions written immediately after the writing of the Manifesto, deeply problematic. In fact I would like to point out that the reading of the Manifesto only in terms of its diagnoses and projections about Capitalism make our analyses pronouncedly celebratory. Celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Manifesto is one thing but becoming celebratory is quite another. We must guard ourselves from reading it in the way believers do with the scriptures as has happened in many cases during these celebrations. II Given the great importance of this, the book entitled A World to Win is an important contribution to the growing literature over the last year while the 150 years of the publication of the Manifesto in 1848 are being assessed. Three renowned Indian Marxists scholars— Aijaz Ahmad, Irfan Habib and Prabhat Patnaik—have contributed to this book together with an Introduction by Prakash Karat. All the contributors start with a broad agreement that this is the first mature text of Marx and Engels and that it occupies an unequaled place in the revolutionary literature and also that no other secular text has ever exerted as much influence on the course of developments as the Manifesto has. While Aijaz Ahmad does not enter any caveat to this both Irfan Habib and Prabhat Patnaik argue that in some important respects it is also an incomplete text. For both there is the absence of ajny notion of primitive accumulation and of colonialism, both these being so important in the rapid development of capitalism through