CityReads│Happy 200th Birthday, Karl Marx.

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Happy 200^th Birthday, Karl Marx.

The Communist Manifesto foresaw the predatory and polarized global capitalism of the 21st century. But Marx and Engels also showed us that we have the power to create a better world.

Yanis Varoufakis, 2018. Marx predicted our present crisis – and points the way out

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/20/yanis-varoufakis-marx-crisis-communist-manifesto

Tomorrow, May 5^th, is the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. 2018 also marks the 170^th anniversary of the publication of The Communist Manifesto. To commensurate this moment, Vintage republishes it, including a new introduction by the Greek economist, Yanis Varoufakis.

No manifesto has better succeeded than the one published in February 1848 at 46Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto was authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelianrationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester mill.

As a work of political literature, the manifesto remains unsurpassed. Its most infamous lines, including the opening one (“A spectre is haunting Europe – thespectre of communism”), have a Shakespearean quality.

The manifesto was a call to action, and heeding this spectre’s invocation oftenmeant persecution, or, in some cases, lengthy imprisonment. Today, a similar dilemma faces young people: conform to an established order that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it, at considerable personalcost, in search of new ways of working, playing and living together?

But to succeed as Marx and Engels did in accurately describing an era that would arrive a century-and-a-half in the future, as well as to analyze the contradictions and choices we face today, is truly astounding. In the late1840s, capitalism was foundering, local, fragmented and timid. And yet Marx andEngels took one long look at it and foresaw our globalized, financialized, iron-clad, all-singing-all-dancing capitalism. This was the creature that came into beingafter 1991, at the very same moment the establishment was proclaiming the deathof Marxism and the end of history.

Of course, the predictive failure of The Communist Manifesto has long been exaggerated. I remember how even leftwing economists in the early 1970s challenged the pivotal manifesto prediction that capital would “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere”. Drawing up on the sad reality of what were then called third world countries, they argued that capital had lost its fizz well before expanding beyond its “metropolis” in Europe, America and Japan.

Empirically they were correct: European, US and Japanese multinational corporations operating in the “peripheries” of Africa, Asia and Latin America were confining themselves to the role of colonial resource extractors and failing to spread capitalism there. Instead of imbuing these countries with capitalist development (drawing “all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization”), they argued that foreign capital was reproducing the development of underdevelopment in the third world. It was as if the manifesto had placed too much faith in capital’s ability to spread into every nook and cranny. Most economists, including those sympathetic to Marx, doubted the manifesto’sprediction that “exploitation of the world-market” would give “a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country”.

As it turned out, the manifesto was right, albeit belatedly. It would take the collapse of the Soviet Union and the insertion of two billion Chinese and Indian workers into the capitalist labor market for its prediction to be vindicated. Indeed, for capital to globalize fully, the regimes that pledged allegiance to the manifesto had first to be torn asunder. Has history ever procured a moredelicious irony?

Anyone reading the manifesto today will be surprised to discover a picture of a worldmuch like our own, teetering fearfully on the edge of technological innovation. In the manifesto’s time, it was the steam engine that posed the greatest challenge to the rhythms and routines of feudal life. The peasantry were sweptinto the cogs and wheels of this machinery and a new class of masters, thefactory owners and the merchants, usurped the landed gentry’s control oversociety. Now, it is artificial intelligence and automation that loom asdisruptive threats, promising to sweep away “all fixed, fast-frozen relations”.“Constantly revolutionizing … instruments of production,” the manifesto proclaims, transform “the whole relations of society”, bringing about “constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation”.

For Marx and Engels, however, this disruption is to be celebrated. It acts as acatalyst for the final push humanity needs to do away with our remaining prejudices that underpin the great divide between those who own the machinesand those who design, operate and work with them. “All that is solid melts intoair, all that is holy is profaned,” they write in the manifesto of technology’seffect, “and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his realconditions of life, and his relations with his kind”.

Today, we see this reckoning in millions of words, in print and online, used to debate globalization’s discontents. While celebrating how globalization has shifted billions from abject poverty to relative poverty, venerable western newspapers, Hollywood personalities, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, bishops and even multibillionaire financiers all lament some of its less desirable ramifications: unbearable inequality, brazen greed, climate change, and the hijacking of our parliamentary democracies by bankers and the ultra-rich. Do-gooders, establishment politicians and recovering academic economists all respond tothis predicament in the same way, issuing fiery condemnations of the symptoms (income inequality) while ignoring the causes (exploitation resulting from theunequal property rights over machines, land, resources).

None of this should surprise a reader of the manifesto. “Society as a whole,” itargues, “is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into twogreat classes directly facing each other.” As production is mechanized, and theprofit margin of the machine-owners becomes our civilization’s driving motive, society splits between non-working shareholders and non-owner wage-workers. Asfor the middle class, it is the dinosaur in the room, set for extinction.

The manifesto gives its 21st-century reader an opportunity to see through this messand to recognize what needs to be done so that the majority can escape fromdiscontent into new social arrangements in which “the free development of eachis the condition for the free development of all”. Even though it contains noroadmap of how to get there, the manifesto remains a source of hope not to be dismissed.

If the manifesto holds the same power to excite, enthuse and shame us that it didin 1848, it is because the struggle between social classes is as old as timeitself. Marx and Engels summed this up in 13 audacious words: “The history ofall hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

From feudal aristocracies to industrialized empires, the engine of history has always been the conflict between constantly revolutionizing technologies and prevailing class conventions. With each disruption of society’s technology, the conflict between us changes form. Old classes die out and eventually only two remain standing: the class that owns everything and the class that owns nothing– the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

This is the predicament in which we find ourselves today. While we owe capitalism for having reduced all class distinctions to the gulf between owners and non-owners, Marx and Engels want us to realize that capitalism is insufficiently evolved to survive the technologies it spawns. It is our duty to tear away at the old notion of privately owned means of production and force ametamorphosis, In the manifesto’s unforgettable words: “A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

According to Marx and Engels’ 13-word theory of history, the current stand-off betweenworker and owner has always been guaranteed. “Equally inevitable,” the manifesto states, is the bourgeoisie’s “fall and the victory of theproletariat”. So far, history has not fulfilled this prediction, but critics forget that the manifesto, like any worthy piece of propaganda, presents hopein the form of certainty.

Will they? On current form, it seems unlikely. But, then again, we had to wait for globalization to appear in the 1990s before the manifesto’s estimation of capital’s potential could be fully vindicated. Might it not be that the new global, increasingly precarious proletariat needs more time before it can play the historic role the manifesto anticipated?

The manifesto argues that the problem with capitalism is not that it produces too much technology, or that it is unfair. Capitalism’s problem is that it is irrational. Capital’s success at spreading its reach via accumulation for accumulation’s sake is causing human workers to work like machines for apittance, while the robots are programmed to produce stuff that the workers canno longer afford and the robots do not need. Capital fails to make rational useof the brilliant machines it engenders, condemning whole generations todeprivation, a decrepit environment, underemployment and zero real leisure from the pursuit of employment and general survival. Even capitalists are turned into angst-ridden automatons. They live in permanent fear that unless they commodifytheir fellow humans, they will cease to be capitalists – joining the desolateranks of the expanding precariat-proletariat.

If capitalism appears unjust it is because it enslaves everyone, rich and poor, wasting human and natural resources. The same “production line” that pumps out untold wealth also produces deep unhappiness and discontent on an industrialscale. So, our first task – according to the manifesto – is to recognize the tendency of this all-conquering “energy” to undermine itself.

The manifesto lambasts bourgeois-liberal virtues. Given Marx and Engels’ adherenceto Hegel’s fantastic idea that no one is free as long as one person is inchains, their quarrel with the bourgeoisie is that they sacrifice everybody’sfreedom and individuality on capitalism’s altar of accumulation.

Although Marx and Engels were not anarchists, they loathed the state and its potentialto be manipulated by one class to suppress another. At best, they saw it as anecessary evil that would live on in the good, post-capitalist future coordinating a classless society. If this reading of the manifesto holds water,the only way of being a communist is to be a libertarian one.

What is the bottom line of the manifesto? And why should anyone, especially youngpeople today, care about history, politics and the like? Marx and Engels basedtheir manifesto on a touchingly simple answer: authentic human happiness andthe genuine freedom that must accompany it. For them, these are the only things that truly matter. Their manifesto does not rely on strict Germanic invocationsof duty, or appeals to historic responsibilities to inspire us to act. It doesnot moralise, or point its finger. Marx and Engels attempted to overcome the fixations of German moral philosophy and capitalist profit motives, with arational, yet rousing appeal to the very basics of our shared human nature.

Key to their analysis is the ever-expanding chasm between those who produce andthose who own the instruments of production. The problematic nexus of capital and waged labor stops us from enjoying our work and our artefacts, and turnsemployers and workers, rich and poor, into mindless, quivering pawns who arebeing quick-marched towards a pointless existence by forces beyond our control.

But why do we need politics to deal with this? Isn’t politics stultifying, especially socialist politics, which Oscar Wilde once claimed “takes up toomany evenings”? Marx and Engels’ answer is: because we cannot end this idiocy individually; because no market can ever emerge that will produce an antidoteto this stupidity. Collective, democratic political action is our only chancefor freedom and enjoyment. And for this, the long nights seem a small price topay.

Humanity may succeed in securing social arrangements that allow for “the free development of each” as the “condition for the free development of all”. But, then again, we may end up in the “common ruin” of nuclear war, environmental disaster or agonizing discontent. In our present moment, there are no guarantees. The manifesto is one of those emotive texts that speak to each of us differently at different times, reflecting our own circumstances. We can turn to the manifesto for inspiration, wisdom and energy but, in the end, what prevails is up to us.

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