No abstract

This essay begins with a question that is simple, yet at the same time difficult to answer: What would we have before us today if we were to translate Marx and Engels' 1842 Communist Manifesto, written in 1842, into the present? Beyond translation from one language into another, this paper is, simultaneously, a provocation and an invitation to think about the translation of one time into another and of one political experience into another. The political translation of Marx and Engels' manifesto, a translation in which the original would become hardly recognizable in the present day, could be found encoded in a document written by Subcomandante Marcos in 1997: “The Fourth World War Has Begun”, a kind of Zapatista Manifesto. Thus, after reviewing and problematizing the first translations of the Communist Manifesto, Subcomandante Marcos' text is proposed as one of its best and most current translations. My essay ends by offering a possible translation of what Marx and Engels defined in their own time as proletarian struggle: the spectral politics of the disposable. The original article is in Spanish.