The following article appeared in SALON magazine today. Enjoy.
--Peter Grimes
BY BARBARA EHRENREICH
Ah, Karl! You thought those frantic scratchings and snortings
were the sounds of capitalism digging its own grave, but all it was
doing was preparing a nice niche for you -- a market niche, in
fact. The leftish British press Verso has seized upon the 150th
anniversary of "The Communist Manifesto" to re-issue that rousing
old tract in an upscale version, suitable for display at the cash
register. "It's very chic and looks like something for the
sybaritic classes," Verso's PR person observes proudly, adding that
it should "get us some great displays in the book chains." Adding
impenetrable levels of irony, the cover has been designed by those
playful ex-Soviet artists Komar and Melamid, whose gorgeously
rippling red banner against a black background should be readily
accessorizable with the cashmeres in primary tones coming to us for
fall.
Why didn't Marx, or his co-author, Friedrich Engels, who knew
a thing or two about running a business himself, think of this long
ago? As Eric Hobsbawm tells us in his introduction to the Verso
edition, sales of the original manifesto were pathetically sub-mid-
list for decades after it was written. As for foreign rights,
forget about it until well into the 1860s, when the International
Working Men's Association began to take off. One can imagine their
editor taking the authors to lunch and saying, "Karl, Fred, you've
got some great stuff in here. That part about 'nothing to lose but
your chains' just blew me away. I mean, the prose rocks. But we
have to think packaging too. Like what about a pop-up version? A
collectible bourgeois-piggie figures tie-in with Taco Bell? Or the
movie version with Kate Winslet as the factory gal and Anthony
Hopkins as the specter-that-is-haunting-Europe?"
But of course back in those days it would have been at least unwise
for members of the "sybaritic classes" to go mincing about with
their designer copies of "The Communist Manifesto" in hand. In the
mid-19th century, fat cats could still recall the whistle of the
guillotine blade as it headed for an overprivileged neck; they had
seen the delirious, underfed masses rise up -- in Germany, Italy,
France and the Austrian Empire -- in 1848. So there's no use
blaming Karl and Fred for their lack of entrepreneurial initiative.
One hundred fifty years ago, the conditions -- both "objective" and
"subjective," as they would have put it -- were not yet ripe for
the commodification of revolution itself. First the world had to be
made safe for irony on this scale and complexity. Communism -- or
at least something superficially resembling the manifesto's
prescription -- had to be attempted, road-tested and rejected
worldwide. "Centralization of the means of communication and
transport in the hands of the State": Been there, done that.
"Centralization of credit in the hands of the State": No danger
that that's going to catch on among America's gun-bearing blue-
collar class. In its naive faith that "the State" could be
commandeered overnight to serve the workers as loyally as it
normally serves the rich, "The Communist Manifesto" is as much an
antique as those darling little Lenin pins that are available by
the fistful at the flea markets in Berlin today. Post 1989, the
manifesto bears the implicit warning label: Fun as it may sound,
you don't want to try this at home.
But it was not enough for communism to fail.
Before it could contemplate marketing Marx, capitalism itself
had to change: It had to evolve to the point where it fully
conformed to its own description in the manifesto. For a sizable
stretch of the 20th century, in at least the "advanced" parts of
the globe, only crackpots and subscribers to Monthly Review
believed that the workers were being ground down to pauperdom.
Anyone could see that machinists and truck drivers were buying
houses in Levittown, second cars and college educations for their
kids. "In rapidly changing modern urban America," a 1964 sociology
text triumphantly declared, "traditional social classes are
nonexistent." As for the destruction of "all old-established
national industries," as predicted in the manifesto, and their
replacement by a global system of production and consumption: Sure,
but you had to wait until the 1990s to find Benneton in Beijing or
Kentucky Fried Chicken in New Delhi.
So for a while there, in the golden age after World War II,
capitalism sought to spite communism by treating the workers as if
they might be useful as consumers too, and hence worthy of a living
wage. It was not until some time in the 1970s that capitalism
decided to take "The Communist Manifesto" as its personal self-
improvement guide -- going global with a vengeance, treating the
workers (including increasing numbers of doctors, teachers,
scientists and writers as well as the old-fashioned heavy-lifting
and lug-turning proles) like so many disposable "factors of
production." The Great Polarization between rich and poor,
predicted so long ago in the manifesto, now dominates the social
contours of the world, from Los Angeles to Johannesburg, from
London to Santiago. And it is of course this deepening polarization
and "immiserization" that gives the up-market new manifesto its
delightfully up-to-date frisson and leads book dealers to believe
that stockbrokers will want to display it in their corner offices
as a sign of terminal cockiness. They can buy it on their lunch
hour just a few blocks from Wall Street, at the World Trade Center
Borders, for example, which is planning a colorful window display,
and where the workers ($7 an hour) exist in what one of them
described to me as a "culture of absolute hopelessness," thanks to
management's obsessive wage-busting campaign. Or they can take it
home to the coffee table and insist that the maid ($8 an hour and
zero benefits) dust it daily so that the red banner on the cover
maintains its high gleam. Commie chic is no end of fun once the
commies are dead and the workers of the world have been beaten into
submission.
So, thanks to the inner Hegelian workings of capitalism, "The
Communist Manifesto" finally works as an accessory, a stocking-
stuffer, a badge of consummate capitalist cool. But what about its
"use value," as Karl himself might have asked? Does it work, in
other words, as a manifesto? Well, there are a few problems, and
not just the obvious one that real-and-existing communism let Marx
and Engels down so unkindly. The other disappointment is
capitalism. There is not and has never been a social system as
brilliantly dynamic and relentlessly all-consuming as the
capitalism of "The Communist Manifesto." It was, according to its
authors, slated to destroy every vestige of the feudal and
patriarchal past and, with one big steam-powered whoosh, propel
humankind into the bleak cold world of the Modern, where our true
options -- socialism or barbarism -- would finally be disclosed:
"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of
ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept
away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they
can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is
holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face
with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind."
Faced with the capitalist leviathan, religion was supposed to
wither away, gender differences disappear and nationalism -- the
most successful religion of all -- was supposed to be smashed by
globalization, along with its peculiar object of worship, the
nation-state. Then and only then, without the distractions of
jingoism, superstition and patriarchy, would the working class be
ready to address itself full time to the business of class war.
So we must note with sorrow that the manifesto greatly
overestimated the power and brilliance of capitalism. As we near
2000, religions are as febrile as ever, patriarchy lingers on and
nationalism -- well, it was nationalism that blew the infant
socialist-international movement out of the water at the outbreak
of World War I in 1914, clearing the way for the hideously un-
Marxist possibility of socialism-in-one-nation, that being the
Soviet Union. As for the nation-state, it continues to do what it
has done best since Carthage and Rome, which is not feeding the
hungry or running the steel mills, but mustering the troops for
war. Still, "The Communist Manifesto" is well worth the $12 that
Verso is asking. Despite the hype, its message is a timeless one
that bears repeating every century or so: The meek shall triumph
and the mighty shall fall; the hungry and exhausted will get
restless and someday -- someday! -- rise up against their
oppressors. The prophet Isaiah said something like this, and so, a
little more recently, did Jesus. At a mere 96 pages, you can think
of it as a greeting card, or even a kind of wake-up call, for that
special person in your life -- such as, for example, your boss.
SALON | April 30, 1998
"Where the wealth's displayed, thieves and sycophants parade and
where it's made, the slaves will be taken.
Some are treated well in these games of buy and sell
And some like poor beasts are burdened down to breaking."
---Joni Mitchell