SOCIAL SCIENTIST analysis of the history of human society. That Marx and Engels were working towards such a theory through their earlier writings in the same decade when the Manifesto was published has been elaborated in details by many of the authors. However, the Manifesto stands out from all of them because it was not meant to be only an analytical document but a guide to action for the contemporary working class movement. The necessity of 'comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole' was understood while charting out the course of immediate revolutionary action. The urge to 'change' the world as against merely 'interpreting it in many ways' led the authors of the revolutionary Manifesto to interpret the wrorld (read society) and its history in the way they did it. This grand unity of revolutionary ideology and revolutionary praxis was attained for the first time in the Manifesto which accounts for its unique place in the revolutionary literature of the world. One can attempt a summarization of the conceptual core contained in the Manifesto. The movement of history is characterized by the dialectical interplay between production relations and the productive forces in a society. In this process the property relations or the ownership of the means of production becomes central and the dialectics is realized through social classes and class struggle. The development of capitalism or the bourgeois mode of production took place through a struggle with the feudal mode and when 'the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces, they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder'.2 The modern bourgeoisie was itself a product of this struggle. With the help of this analysis of historical development of capitalism the Manifesto goes on to demonstrate the 'revolutionary' nature of the bourgeois mode of production on the one hand along with the contradictions ('new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle')3 emerging out of it. The anti-capitalist ('communistic') revolution as projected in the Manifesto is a climax to the class antagonisms under capitalism. Amongst the other dazzling insights of the Manifesto, some are relevant even in today's context; quite exceptionally so. As Javeed Alam has cautioned us '"to examine both sides of... antagonism" within a evolving reality, I would take up two themes relevant in