Manifesting Communism: on the importance of rhetoric in Marxism-Leninism

It is unusual to study rhetoric in relation to Karl Marx, but this is what I have set out to do. He does not broach the subject very often and at first glance it seems unimportant to him. The view of Marx as a hard materialist has been the most common; a hard materialist cannot believe in the notion of action dependent on intellectual activities (or activities of the soul, in Aristotelian terms) such as thought, deliberation, argumentation, and persuasion. His words "We do not set out from what men say" discourage the study of rhetoric in relation to Marx. One can certainly analyze the rhetoric -- emotions, logic, syllogisms, words, arrangement, etc. -- of Marx's writing or speeches; however, I will only address the actual rhetorical devices Marx uses to prove that he does in fact use rhetoric. Herein lies the problem central to this paper -- it is not so much the technical aspects of Marx's use of rhetoric that concern me, but rather whether, though not concretely treated in most of his writings, rhetoric does have a place in Marx's thought. By "place" I mean: Are Marxism and the belief in rhetoric's efficacy mutually exclusive? Does Marx reject the idea of using rhetoric? Does he propose that its use in history had no effect on actual events?