Fight the Bourgeoisie Again and Again
C lass conflict once seemed and so straightforward. Marx and Engels wrote in the 2d best-selling volume of all fourth dimension, The Communist Manifesto: "What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are as inevitable." (The acknowledged book of all time, incidentally, is the Bible – it only feels similar information technology's fifty Shades of Grayness.)
Today, 164 years after Marx and Engels wrote nearly grave-diggers, the truth is almost the verbal opposite. The proletariat, far from burying commercialism, are keeping it on life support. Overworked, underpaid workers ostensibly liberated by the largest socialist revolution in history (Cathay's) are driven to the brink of suicide to go along those in the westward playing with their iPads. Chinese money bankrolls an otherwise bankrupt America.
The irony is scarcely wasted on leading Marxist thinkers. "The domination of capitalism globally depends today on the existence of a Chinese Communist party that gives de-localised capitalist enterprises cheap labour to lower prices and deprive workers of the rights of self-organisation," says Jacques Rancière, the French marxist thinker and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII. "Happily, it is possible to hope for a earth less absurd and more merely than today'south."
That hope, maybe, explains another improbable truth of our economically catastrophic times – the revival in interest in Marx and Marxist thought. Sales of Das Kapital, Marx's masterpiece of political economy, accept soared e'er since 2008, as have those of The Communist Manifesto and the Grundrisse (or, to give it its English championship, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy). Their sales rose equally British workers bailed out the banks to keep the degraded organization going and the snouts of the rich firmly in their troughs while the residual of the states struggle in debt, job insecurity or worse. There's even a Chinese theatre director called He Nian who capitalised on Das Kapital's renaissance to create an all-singing, all-dancing musical.
And in possibly the almost lovely reversal of the luxuriantly bearded revolutionary theorist's fortunes, Karl Marx was recently called from a list of 10 contenders to appear on a new upshot of MasterCard by customers of German bank Sparkasse in Chemnitz. In communist East Germany from 1953 to 1990, Chemnitz was known every bit Karl Marx Stadt. Clearly, more than two decades after the autumn of the Berlin Wall, the former East Deutschland hasn't airbrushed its Marxist by. In 2008, Reuters reports, a survey of east Germans institute 52% believed the free-marketplace economy was "unsuitable" and 43% said they wanted socialism back. Karl Marx may be dead and buried in Highgate cemetery, but he's alive and well among credit-hungry Germans. Would Marx have appreciated the irony of his image beingness deployed on a card to get Germans deeper in debt? You'd call up.
Afterward this week in London, several m people will attend Marxism 2012, a 5-day festival organised past the Socialist Workers' Political party. It's an annual issue, but what strikes organiser Joseph Choonara is how, in recent years, many more of its attendees are young. "The revival of interest in Marxism, especially for young people comes considering information technology provides tools for analysing capitalism, and especially capitalist crises such as the 1 nosotros're in now," Choonara says.
There has been a glut of books trumpeting Marxism'due south relevance. English literature professor Terry Eagleton last twelvemonth published a book called Why Marx Was Correct. French Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou published a little red book called The Communist Hypothesis with a red star on the cover (very Mao, very at present) in which he rallied the true-blue to conductor in the third era of the communist thought (the previous ii having gone from the institution of the French Commonwealth in 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871, and from 1917 to the plummet of Mao's Cultural Revolution in 1976). Isn't this all a delusion?
Aren't Marx'south venerable ideas as useful to united states of america as the paw loom would exist to shoring upwards Apple tree's reputation for innovation? Isn't the dream of socialist revolution and communist club an irrelevance in 2012? Subsequently all, I propose to Rancière, the bourgeoisie has failed to produce its own gravediggers. Rancière refuses to be downbeat: "The bourgeoisie has learned to make the exploited pay for its crisis and to use them to disarm its adversaries. Merely we must non opposite the idea of historical necessity and conclude that the electric current situation is eternal. The gravediggers are withal here, in the form of workers in precarious conditions like the over-exploited workers of factories in the far east. And today'southward popular movements – Greece or elsewhere – also bespeak that in that location's a new volition non to allow our governments and our bankers inflict their crunch on the people."
That, at least, is the perspective of a seventysomething Marxist professor. What about younger people of a Marxist temper? I ask Jaswinder Blackwell-Pal, a 22 yr-old English and drama educatee at Goldsmiths College, London, who has just finished her BA course in English and Drama, why she considers Marxist idea however relevant. "The bespeak is that younger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union," she says. "Nosotros tend to run across it more as a way of agreement what nosotros're going through now. Think of what'south happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It bankrupt and so many stereotypes – commonwealth wasn't supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a procedure, non as an event. And then in that location was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What nosotros learned from it was the importance of arrangement."
This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the due west: for younger people, it is untainted by clan with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book The End of History – in which commercialism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine – exercises less of a choke-concord on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders.
Blackwell-Pal volition be speaking Thursday on Che Guevara and the Cuban revolution at the Marxism festival. "It'southward going to exist the first time I'll have spoken on Marxism," she says nervously. But what's the signal thinking almost Guevara and Castro in this twenty-four hours and age? Surely violent socialist revolution is irrelevant to workers' struggles today? "Not at all!" she replies. "What'due south happening in Britain is quite interesting. We have a very, very weak government mired in in-fighting. I think if we tin really organise we tin can oust them." Could Britain accept its Tahrir Square, its equivalent to Castro's 26th of July Movement? Let a immature woman dream. Later on last year'due south riots and today with most of Uk alienated from the rich men in its government's cabinet, only a fool would dominion it out.
For a different perspective I take hold of up with Owen Jones, 27-yr-old poster boy of the new left and writer of the bestselling politics book of 2011, Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Class. He'due south on the train to Brighton to address the Unite conference. "There isn't going to exist a encarmine revolution in United kingdom, but there is promise for a society past working people and for working people," he counsels.
Indeed, he says, in the 1860s the later Marx imagined such a post-capitalist gild equally being won by means other than violent revolution. "He did look at expanding the suffrage and other peaceful means of achieving socialist society. Today not even the Trotskyist left call for armed revolution. The radical left would say that the interruption with capitalism could only exist achieved by democracy and organisation of working people to plant and hold on to that but society against forces that would destroy it."
Jones recalls that his begetter, a Militant supporter in the 1970s, held to the entryist idea of ensuring the ballot of a Labour government and and then organising working people to make sure that government delivered. "I call up that's the model," he says. How very united nations-New Labour. That said, after we talk, Jones texts me to brand it clear he's not a Militant supporter or Trotskyist. Rather, he wants a Labour government in ability that will pursue a radical political programme. He has in mind the words of Labour'southward February 1974 election manifesto which expressed the intention to "Bring nigh a primal and irreversible shift in the balance of ability and wealth in favour of working people and their families". Allow a young man dream.
What'southward striking about Jones's literary success is that it'southward premised on the revival of involvement in class politics, that foundation rock of Marx and Engels'due south analysis of industrial society. "If I had written it four years earlier it would have been dismissed as a 1960s concept of class," says Jones. "But class is back in our reality because the economic crisis affects people in different means and because the Coalition mantra that 'We're all in this together' is offensive and ludicrous. Information technology'southward impossible to contend now equally was argued in the 1990s that nosotros're all middle class. This authorities's reforms are grade-based. VAT rises impact working people unduly, for case.
"It'due south an open up class war," he says. "Working-class people are going to be worse off in 2022 than they were at the start of the century. Only yous're defendant of existence a course warrior if y'all stand up up for 30% of the population who suffers this mode."
This chimes with something Rancière told me. The professor argued that "ane matter about Marxist thought that remains solid is class struggle. The disappearance of our factories, that'southward to say de-industrialisation of our countries and the outsourcing of industrial piece of work to the countries where labour is less expensive and more docile, what else is this other than an act in the grade struggle by the ruling bourgeoisie?"
There's some other reason why Marxism has something to teach u.s. every bit we struggle through economic low, other than its analysis of class struggle. It is in its assay of economical crisis. In his formidable new tome Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Slavoj Žižek tries to apply Marxist idea on economical crises to what we're indelible right now. Žižek considers the central form antagonism to be between "use value" and "exchange value".
What's the divergence betwixt the two? Each article has a use value, he explains, measured past its usefulness in satisfying needs and wants. The commutation value of a commodity, by contrast, is traditionally measured by the amount of labour that goes into making it. Under electric current capitalism, Žižek argues, commutation value becomes autonomous. "It is transformed into a spectre of self-propelling capital which uses the productive capacities and needs of actual people simply as its temporary disposable apotheosis. Marx derived his notion of economic crisis from this very gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of coin begetting more money – this speculative madness cannot continue indefinitely, information technology has to explode in even more serious crises. The ultimate root of the crunch for Marx is the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange-value follows its ain path, its own made trip the light fantastic toe, irrespective of the existent needs of real people."
In such uneasy times, who ameliorate to read than the greatest catastrophist theoriser of man history, Karl Marx? And still the renaissance of interest in Marxism has been pigeonholed as an apologia for Stalinist totalitarianism. In a recent blog on "the new communism" for the journal Globe Affairs, Alan Johnson, professor of democratic theory and do at Edge Loma University in Lancashire, wrote: "A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new grade of leftwing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.
"The New Communism matters not considering of its intellectual merits but because it may even so influence layers of young Europeans in the context of an exhausted social democracy, austerity and a self-loathing intellectual civilisation," wrote Johnson. "Tempting every bit it is, we can't afford to merely shake our heads and pass on by."
That's the fear: that these nasty old left farts such equally Žižek, Badiou, Rancière and Eagleton will corrupt the minds of innocent youth. But does reading Marx and Engels's critique of capitalism mean that you thereby accept on a worldview responsible for more deaths than the Nazis? Surely there is no straight line from The Communist Manifesto to the gulags, and no reason why immature lefties need uncritically to adopt Badiou at his most chilling. In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to contend that the "contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'greenbacks payment', a arrangement of exploitation and of 'endless aggregating' can never be overcome: that at some point in a serial of transformations and restructurings the evolution of this substantially destabilising organisation will lead to a country of affairs that can no longer be described as commercialism".
That is postal service-capitalist society every bit dreamed of past Marxists. But what would it be like? "It is extremely unlikely that such a 'post-capitalist gild' would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the 'really existing' socialisms of the Soviet era," argues Hobsbawm, calculation that information technology will, however, necessarily involve a shift from individual appropriation to social management on a global scale. "What forms it might accept and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx'southward and Engels'southward communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came well-nigh."
This is surely Marxism at its well-nigh liberating, suggesting that our futures depend on u.s. and our readiness for struggle. Or as Marx and Engels put it at the finish of The Communist Manifesto: "Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians take goose egg to lose just their chains. They have a world to win."
Marxism 2012, University College and Friends Coming together Firm, London, 5-9 July. Further data: marxismfestival.org.uk
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jul/04/the-return-of-marxism
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