THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND WORLD LITERATURE the other hand, however, this century has been, uniquely, a century of quantum increases in the levels of democratic demand, which requires more and more devolution of power, including cultural power, to the smaller units of human society. In this context, then, a 'world literature' is indeed arising out of the very unification of the globe through this immense increase in productive capacity and communicational technology, but for it to serve as an integral part of the socialist project it must be re-conceived not as an accumulation of certain texts for profit but as a social relation among producers scattered all over the globe, in their specific locales, but connected to each other in relations of radical equality. Like socialism itself, 'world literature' is a horizon: the measure of a time yet to come. Or, to put it another way, 'world literature', like the working class, is a product of the capitalist market but stands in a relation antithetical to it. NOTES 1. See Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State and more particularly the famous essay 'On the Jewish Question' in Quintin Hoare (ed), Karl Marx, Early Writings (London, New Left Books, 1974). This edition includes an excellent introduction by Lucio Colletti. 2. Ibid., p. 229. McLellan in his translation prefers "right of selfishness" in stead of "the right of self-interest" as in Early Writings. See David McLellan (ed), Karl Marx: Selected Writings (Oxford, OUP, 1977), p 53. 3. The image we now have of modern capitalists and the industrial proletariat would be inappropriate when thinking of Marx's early writings, right up to the Manifesto. The famous "Paris proletariat" which was a key force in the revolutionary upheavals of that time was not even remotely "industrial" and consisted of a variety of generally dispossessed masses. The "bourgeoisie" similarly included owners of urban property, the upper reaches of the liberal professions, merchants and the like. In the Manifesto itself the word "proletariat" is sometimes— though not in every formulation— used in that looser sense of a dispossessed mass of people whose only means of livelihood was their own labour. 4. See for a discussion of this point, my essay "The Communist Manifesto and the problem of Universality," Monthly Review, June 1998. 5. The title "Theses on Feurbach" was given by Engels. Marx had used the simple phrase "Concerning Feurbach" which makes them more tentative and provisional, like rough notes. 6. All three texts are available, for convenient comparison Volume 6 of Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Moscow, 1984). . . A distinction must be made here between Marx's distinctive and extensive critique of what in The Poverty of Philosophy he had called "the metaphysics of political economy," which was already fairly well advanced in the writings leading up to the Manifesto, and a properly Marxist theory of capitalism,