The Continued Relevance of the Communist Manifesto

I present here a quite excellent article asserting the continued relevance of the Communist Manifesto today.
I disagree here only with the IS Review's characterization of the Soviet Union as "state capitalist" (but that is a discussion for another time and another thread).

http://www.isreview.org/issues/05/manifesto.shtml

PS. In 2006 Phil Gasper wrote a book on this subject called The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document
You can read an inside preview (a partial view) of his book here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=ws2y9H-SaHIC&pg=PA8&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

I've been familiar with the International Socialist Review, and Phil Gasper's work in particular, for some time new. Grasper is an astute analyst of modern science and has written several excellent articles for the ISR. I've been wanting to read his book on the Communist Manifesto for quite a while now, and I hope I'll be able to do so in the near future. Judging from his 1998 article on the subject, which you linked to, I can tell it'll be well worth the read.

As for the "state capitalist" term, I understand why many leftists use it to describe the Soviet Union (on occasion, I have done so myself). After all, the workers were still essentially wage laborers, who had no control over the management of their firms or the manner in which their surplus was allocated. However, I'm not sure if the label can accurately be applied to planned economies, since capitalists in the strict sense of the term (i.e., private owners of means of production) didn't actually exist in the post-NEP Soviet Union, Maoist China, etc. I think a more appropriate term would be something along the lines of "managerial technocracy," in the case of state socialist nations. "State capitalism" is more befitting to every hitherto existing post-feudal/non-socialist nation, since capital has always depended on a highly interventionist state just to keep the system viable.