The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel review

Over the course of the 20th century, more people were called a great—or the greatest—theoretician of Marxism than I can count. Lenin, Che Guevara, Deng Xiaoping, Tony Cliff: all these names and more bore the mantle of Karl Marx’s true inheritor—the standard-bearer who had synthesised historical materialism for a new era and was prepared to lead the working class into a bright, red dawn.

Which was absurd, of course, because none of those people got the platinum trophy in The Communist Manifesto.

I don’t think they unlocked a single cheevo. Unlike me, who has exhaustively pored over every inch of The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel, unlocking glossary entry after glossary entry and bonus music track after bonus track, before walking away absolutely aflame with the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.

Material boys

The meat of The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel consists of a jpeg of Karl Marx delivering the entire text of The Communist Manifesto at you more-or-less line-by-line, unvoiced. There are occasionally interjections by Friedrich Engels—speeding in from the right to ram Marx off centre-stage like a Smash Bros character—who pops up if you ask for clarifications on certain terms.

For instance, if you’re perplexed by Marx’s reference to guild-masters, you can ask for an explanation, and Engels will pop in to deliver his own footnote from the Manifesto’s 1888 edition verbatim: “Guild-master, that is, a full member of a guild, a master within, not a head of a guild.” Thanks, Freddy.

There’s a glossary for some of the more complex terms, too, which all seem to be taken from the Marxists.org glossary. Handy when you run across a word you don’t know in Marx’s speechifying—things like “bourgeoisie” can be clicked on in-text to take you directly to the relevant glossary entry—but not original.

I must admit, this is a tad underwhelming. When you write the words ‘The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel,’ you give my imagination licence to run wild. I start imagining something akin to that Chinese anime about Marx’s life: a narrativisation of the classic text that turns its rather dry political-economic theorising into something livelier—the class struggle dramatised as a doomed romance about a tsundere noble scion, a bildungsroman about a tsundere factory labourer, a picaresque about a folk hero (who is tsundere) bringing Marx’s method to the masses.

To get the text—and just the text, with no voice acting save a Microsoft Sam-style voiceover function—I’ve read a hundred times before but with a picture of Marx (and sometimes Engels, who is not tsundere; quite the opposite) above it is, well, disappointing.

Less disappointing is the soundtrack: a collection of red bangers from across the formerly socialist sixth of the Earth. Einheitsfrontlied, The Internationale, Varshavianka: all the classics are here, playing without cessation as Marx tells you about the centralisation of credit.

These are great songs, but not all of them make sense as a soundtrack to an internationalist text from 1848. The Sacred War, for instance, might be a classic of the Soviet Union’s struggle against Nazi Germany, but that’s the totality of what it is. Its time and place is the eastern front of World War 2, not the Europe of the early 19th century.

At its heart, The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel isn’t so much a visual novel as it is a repackaging of the text itself. There’s little here to recommend it either to people who have read the Manifesto before—there’s nothing new—or to people who are completely new to it: the visual novel format makes engaging with the text awkward, divided by line as it is.

Plus, you’re almost certain to accidentally click with a bit too much enthusiasm and accidentally skip a line at some point; sure, you can check the conversation log to see the bit you missed, but it’s an added layer of complexity that wouldn’t be there if you were just reading the original text on a screen or a page.

In fact, if anything were to make me recommend The Communist Manifesto – A Visual Novel to potential readers, it’d be those daft cheevos. Take it from someone who has been a member of multiple doomed Capital reading groups in the course of his life: sometimes you can get real bogged down trying to read Marx, even the comparatively light and breezy stuff like the Manifesto. If you’re someone who wants to have read The Communist Manifesto but can’t quite stomach the process of reading it, well, maybe the siren lure of achievements is just what you need to drag you to the ending.

But I can’t ding the game, such as it is, too hard for its limitations. It’s free, for one thing, and while I don’t think it has many advantages over just reading the actual text in print or ebook form, it’s not dramatically worse, either. If nothing else, you get to listen to Dem Morgonret Entgegen while you do it.