THOUGHTS ON COMMUNIST MANIFESTO the state. Our understanding about those objective conditions also undergo changes which is why 'reconstitutions' are required for Marxism to grasp the totality of changing realities. But the 'other side of the contradiction' i.e. the working class, can never be subjected to even that level of theorization, because it is the subjective condition. Strategies for revolution and immediate tactics have to be formulated to advance the revolutionary movement and then tested for their validity through practice; the quantum and direction of change of tactics or even strategy should then be decided through a tension of ideas in the light of practice. This is where the role of the vanguard i.e., the party, becomes crucially important. It is true that the prognostications of the Manifesto vis-a-vis the European revolution did not materialize. But Marx did not blame the working class for it and discard his treatment about it as the revolutionary agent in the Manifesto; he rather tried to further theorize the problematic aspects of his earlier formulation. And that theorization was in the light of practice; those abortive revolutionary attempts inspired by the Manifesto. Moreover, there is no need to be unduly apologetic about the formulation of revolution as being 'inevitable' in the Manifesto. While giving a call to arms, a Manifesto cannot be expected to mention explicitly that it might fail and what to do in case it fails. Not many would be inclined to believe that the authors of the Manifesto had blindly believed in the inevitability of the revolution. But can a revolutionary project be undertaken without 'revolutionary optimism'? Since we ourselves, put in our bit to become subjects of history, 'optimism of the will' is definitely required despite 'pessimism of the intellect'. That does not imply a metaphysical faith in the inevitability of revolution which would amount to fatalism. This 'mechanical determinism', as pointed out by Irfan Habib, would be 'a fatal position for any revolutionary movement'. However, the danger which appears to be more pertinent today, comes not from 'revolutionary optimism' stretched to the extent of 'mechanical determinism', but from a revisionist pessimism which has eroded the energies of entire of entire communist parties across the world which have given up the revolutionary project altogether. The Manifesto in its section on Socialist and Communist Literature demonstrated the need for revolutionaries to wage continuous ideological battles against non-working class ideologies in order to delineate the correct revolutionary ideology. Revisionism, which reduces revolutionary theory into vacuous explanatory exercises by detaching it from