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This chapter aims to locate Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels within the tradition of antirhetoric characteristic of modernity. A major trend in contemporary rhetorical scholarship has sought to develop broad theoretical explanations of our modern malaise based on the decline of rhetoric as a pedagogical and political practice. The chapter analyzes key texts in classical Marxism directly. The metaphors of secrecy/openness and opacity/transparency recur in the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels’s first real foray into political action. Marx, the perceptive analyst of the self-deceptions of the bourgeois economists, sought in the transparency of his antirhetoric a permanent antidote to self-deception. Marx’s attention to the role of class struggle in history, his ethical critique of exploitation and alienation, and his scientific anatomy of the logic of capitalism remain as valid as in the nineteenth century. Marxism as a discourse community emerged from the breakup of the classical tradition. Marxism shared with liberalism an impatience with rhetoric and with political deliberation.
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