Marx-Engels

"A spectre is haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies."

Marx utilizes a suspensive series of juxtapositions that simultaneously evoke a sense of the immediate and the universal. His subject transcends rank, conviction, prejudice and -most essentially- generation barriers. His cause seems timeless, but suddenly contemporary. Yet the 'subject,' his 'cause' may well evade most readers, for the stylistic power of Marx's writing, it's sensory effect on the ear, contains it's interminable substance.

"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Freeman and slave, patrician and plebian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."

Very eloquent language, the loose alliteration of 'patrician and plebian,' the rhythmic, assonance of the opposing terms 'guild-master and journeyman,' all promote the illustrious tone of Marx's message; regardless of what that message actually says.

I think the lasting quality of Marx's work as the premier statement of Communist ideas may derive from his tone. Surely there were other great and similar political theorists scribing their quarrels in illustrious statements throughout the 19th century, but Marx explicitly establishes his notions as an expression of the ages; as a truism, relatively adaptable to any era. And his language, his grandiose style of statement, exudes the romance of an oration in antiquity. Leftist of the twentieth century may have idealized the revolutionary content of Marx as rhetoricians of the thirteenth century held Cicero on a pedestal.