Adapted from Yanis Varoufakis’s introduction to The Communist Manifesto,
published by Vintage Classics on 26 April
For The Guardian's site,
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Yanis Varoufakis
For a manifesto to succeed, it
must speak to our hearts like a poem while infecting the mind with images and
ideas that are dazzlingly new. It needs to open our eyes to the true causes of
the bewildering, disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the
possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should make us
feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these truths ourselves,
and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling realisation that we have been
acting as petty accomplices, reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to
have the power of a Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future
that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its
potential for authentic freedom.
No manifesto has better
succeeded in doing all this than the one published in February 1848 at 46
Liverpool Street, London. Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or the Manifesto of the
Communist Party, as it was first published) was authored by two young Germans –
Karl Marx, a 29-year-old philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and
Hegelian rationality, 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 – the spectre of
communism”), have a Shakespearean quality. Like Hamlet confronted by the ghost
of his slain father, the reader is compelled to wonder: “Should I conform to
the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune
bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible forces? Or should I join these
forces, taking up arms against the status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a
brave new world?”
For Marx and Engels’ immediate
readership, this was not an academic dilemma, debated in the salons of Europe.
Their manifesto was a call to action, and heeding this spectre’s invocation
often meant 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
personal cost, in search of new ways of working, playing and living together?
Even though communist parties have disappeared almost entirely from the
political scene, the spirit of communism driving the manifesto is proving hard
to silence.
To see beyond the horizon is
any manifesto’s ambition. 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 analyse the contradictions and choices we face today, is truly
astounding. In the late 1840s, capitalism was foundering, local, fragmented and
timid. And yet Marx and Engels took one long look at it and foresaw our
globalised, financialised, iron-clad, all-singing-all-dancing capitalism. This
was the creature that came into being after 1991, at the very same moment the
establishment was proclaiming the death of 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 upon 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 civilisation”), 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’s prediction 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 labour market for its prediction to be vindicated. Indeed, for
capital to globalise fully, the regimes that pledged allegiance to the
manifesto had first to be torn asunder. Has history ever procured a more
delicious irony?
Anyone reading the manifesto
today will be surprised to discover a picture of a world much 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 swept into the cogs and wheels
of this machinery and a new class of masters, the factory owners and the
merchants, usurped the landed gentry’s control over society. Now, it is
artificial intelligence and automation that loom as disruptive threats,
promising to sweep away “all fixed, fast-frozen relations”. “Constantly
revolutionising … instruments of production,” the manifesto proclaims, transform
“the whole relations of society”, bringing about “constant revolutionising 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 a catalyst for the final push
humanity needs to do away with our remaining prejudices that underpin the great
divide between those who own the machines and those who design, operate and
work with them. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned,” they write in the manifesto of technology’s effect, “and man is at
last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his
relations with his kind”. By ruthlessly vaporising our preconceptions and false
certainties, technological change is forcing us, kicking and screaming, to face
up to how pathetic our relations with one another are.
Today, we see this reckoning
in millions of words, in print and online, used to debate globalisation’s
discontents. While celebrating how globalisation 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.
None of this should surprise a
reader of the manifesto. “Society as a whole,” it argues, “is more and more
splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly
facing each other.” As production is mechanised, and the profit margin of the
machine-owners becomes our civilisation’s driving motive, society splits
between non-working shareholders and non-owner wage-workers. As for the middle
class, it is the dinosaur in the room, set for extinction.
At the same time, the
ultra-rich become guilt-ridden and stressed as they watch everyone else’s lives
sink into the precariousness of insecure wage-slavery. Marx and Engels foresaw
that this supremely powerful minority would eventually prove “unfit to rule”
over such polarised societies, because they would not be in a position to
guarantee the wage-slaves a reliable existence. Barricaded in their gated communities, they find themselves
consumed by anxiety and incapable of enjoying their riches. Some of them, those
smart enough to realise their true long-term self-interest, recognise the
welfare state as the best available insurance policy. But alas, explains the
manifesto, as a social class, it will be in their nature to skimp on the
insurance premium, and they will work tirelessly to avoid paying the requisite
taxes.
Is this not what has
transpired? The ultra-rich are an insecure, permanently disgruntled clique,
constantly in and out of detox clinics, relentlessly seeking solace from
psychics, shrinks and entrepreneurial gurus. Meanwhile, everyone else struggles
to put food on the table, pay tuition fees, juggle one credit card for another
or fight depression. We act as if our lives are carefree, claiming to like what
we do and do what we like. Yet in reality, we cry ourselves to sleep.
Do-gooders, establishment
politicians and recovering academic economists all respond to this predicament
in the same way, issuing fiery condemnations of the symptoms (income
inequality) while ignoring the causes (exploitation resulting from the unequal
property rights over machines, land, resources). Is it any wonder we are at an
impasse, wallowing in hopelessness that only serves the populists seeking to
court the worst instincts of the masses?
With the rapid rise of
advanced technology, we are brought closer to the moment when we must decide
how to relate to each other in a rational, civilised manner. We can no longer
hide behind the inevitability of work and the oppressive social
norms it necessitates. The manifesto gives its 21st-century reader an
opportunity to see through this mess and to recognise what needs to be done so
that the majority can escape from discontent into new social arrangements in
which “the free development of each is the condition for the free development
of all”. Even though it contains no roadmap 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 did in 1848, it is because
the struggle between social classes is as old as time itself. Marx and Engels
summed this up in 13 audacious words: “The history of all hitherto existing
society is the history of class struggles.”
From feudal aristocracies to
industrialised empires, the engine of history has always been the conflict
between constantly revolutionising 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 realise 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 a metamorphosis, which must involve
the social ownership of machinery, land and resources. Now, when new
technologies are unleashed in societies bound by the primitive labour contract,
wholesale misery follows. 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.”
The sorcerer will always
imagine that their apps, search engines, robots and genetically engineered
seeds will bring wealth and happiness to all. But, once released into societies
divided between wage labourers and owners, these technological marvels will
push wages and prices to levels that create low profits for most businesses. It
is only big tech, big pharma and the few corporations that command
exceptionally large political and economic power over us that truly benefit. If
we continue to subscribe to labour contracts between employer and employee,
then private property rights will govern and drive capital to inhuman ends.
Only by abolishing private ownership of the instruments of mass production and
replacing it with a new type of common ownership that works in sync with new
technologies, will we lessen inequality and find collective happiness.
According to Marx and Engels’
13-word theory of history, the current stand-off between worker and owner has
always been guaranteed. “Equally inevitable,” the manifesto states, is the
bourgeoisie’s “fall and the victory of the proletariat”. So far, history has
not fulfilled this prediction, but critics forget that the manifesto, like any
worthy piece of propaganda, presents hope in the form of certainty. Just as
Lord Nelson rallied his troops before the Battle of Trafalgar by announcing
that England “expected” them to do their duty (even if he had grave doubts that
they would), the manifesto bestows upon the proletariat the expectation that
they will do their duty to themselves, inspiring them to unite and liberate one
another from the bonds of wage-slavery.
Will they? On current form, it
seems unlikely. But, then again, we had to wait for globalisation 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? While the jury
is still out, Marx and Engels tell us that, if we fear the rhetoric of
revolution, or try to distract ourselves from our duty to one another, we will
find ourselves caught in a vertiginous spiral in which capital saturates and bleaches
the human spirit. The only thing we can be certain of, according to the
manifesto, is that unless capital is socialised we are in for dystopic
developments.
On the topic of dystopia, the
sceptical reader will perk up: what of the manifesto’s own complicity in
legitimising authoritarian regimes and steeling the spirit of gulag guards?
Instead of responding defensively, pointing out that no one blames Adam Smith
for the excesses of Wall Street, or the New Testament for the Spanish
Inquisition, we can speculate how the authors of the manifesto might have
answered this charge. I believe that, with the benefit of hindsight, Marx and
Engels would confess to an important error in their analysis: insufficient
reflexivity. This is to say that they failed to give sufficient thought, and
kept a judicious silence, over the impact their own analysis would have on the
world they were analysing.
The manifesto told a powerful
story in uncompromising language, intended to stir readers from their apathy.
What Marx and Engels failed to foresee was that powerful, prescriptive texts
have a tendency to procure disciples, believers – a priesthood, even – and that
this faithful might use the power bestowed upon them by the manifesto to their
own advantage. With it, they might abuse other comrades, build their own power
base, gain positions of influence, bed impressionable students, take control of
the politburo and imprison anyone who resists them.
Similarly, Marx and Engels
failed to estimate the impact of their writing on capitalism itself. To the
extent that the manifesto helped fashion the Soviet Union, its eastern European
satellites, Castro’s Cuba, Tito’s Yugoslavia and several social democratic
governments in the west, would these developments not cause a chain reaction
that would frustrate the manifesto’s predictions and analysis? After the
Russian revolution and then the second world war, the fear of communism forced
capitalist regimes to embrace pension schemes, national health services, even
the idea of making the rich pay for poor and petit bourgeois students to attend
purpose-built liberal universities.
Meanwhile, rabid hostility to
the Soviet Union stirred up paranoia and created a climate of fear that proved
particularly fertile for figures such as Joseph Stalin and Pol Pot.
I believe that Marx and Engels
would have regretted not anticipating the manifesto’s impact on the communist
parties it foreshadowed. They would be kicking themselves that they overlooked
the kind of dialectic they loved to analyse: how workers’ states would become
increasingly totalitarian in their response to capitalist state aggression, and
how, in their response to the fear of communism, these capitalist states would
grow increasingly civilised.
Blessed, of course, are the
authors whose errors result from the power of their words. Even more blessed
are those whose errors are self-correcting. In our present day, the workers’
states inspired by the manifesto are almost gone, and the communist parties
disbanded or in disarray. Liberated from competition with regimes inspired by
the manifesto, globalised capitalism is behaving as if it is determined to
create a world best explained by the manifesto.
What makes the manifesto truly
inspiring today is its recommendation for us in the here and now, in a world
where our lives are being constantly shaped by what Marx described in his
earlier Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as “a universal energy which
breaks every limit and every bond and posits itself as the only policy, the
only universality, the only limit and the only bond”. From Uber drivers and
finance ministers to banking executives and the wretchedly poor, we can all be
excused for feeling overwhelmed by this “energy”. Capitalism’s reach is so
pervasive it can sometimes seem impossible to imagine a world without it. It is
only a small step from feelings of impotence to falling victim to the assertion
there is no alternative. But, astonishingly (claims the manifesto), it is
precisely when we are about to succumb to this idea that alternatives abound.
What we don’t need at this
juncture are sermons on the injustice of it all, denunciations of rising
inequality or vigils for our vanishing democratic sovereignty. Nor should we
stomach desperate acts of regressive escapism: the cry to return to some
pre-modern, pre-technological state where we can cling to the bosom of
nationalism. What the manifesto promotes in moments of doubt and submission is
a clear-headed, objective assessment of capitalism and its ills, seen through
the cold, hard light of rationality.
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 a pittance, while the robots are programmed
to produce stuff that the workers can no longer afford and the robots do not
need. Capital fails to make rational use of the brilliant machines it
engenders, condemning whole generations to deprivation, 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 commodify their fellow humans,
they will cease to be capitalists – joining the desolate ranks 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 industrial scale. So, our first
task – according to the manifesto – is to recognise the tendency of this
all-conquering “energy” to undermine itself.
When asked by journalists who
or what is the greatest threat to capitalism today, I defy their expectations
by answering: capital! Of course, this is an idea I have been plagiarising for
decades from the manifesto. Given that it is neither possible nor desirable to
annul capitalism’s “energy”, the trick is to help speed up capital’s
development (so that it burns up like a meteor rushing through the atmosphere)
while, on the other hand, resisting (through rational, collective action) its
tendency to steamroller our human spirit. In short, the manifesto’s
recommendation is that we push capital to its limits while limiting its
consequences and preparing for its socialisation.
We need more robots, better
solar panels, instant communication and sophisticated green transport networks.
But equally, we need to organise politically to defend the weak, empower the
many and prepare the ground for reversing the absurdities of capitalism. In
practical terms, this means treating the idea that there is no alternative with
the contempt it deserves while rejecting all calls for a “return” to a less
modernised existence. There was nothing ethical about life under earlier forms
of capitalism. TV shows that massively invest in calculated nostalgia, such
as Downton Abbey, should make us glad to live when we do. At
the same time, they might also encourage us to floor the accelerator of change.
The manifesto is one of those
emotive texts that speak to each of us differently at different times,
reflecting our own circumstances. Some years ago, I called myself an erratic,
libertarian Marxist and I was roundly disparaged by non-Marxists and Marxists
alike. Soon after, I found myself thrust into a political position of some
prominence, during a period of intense conflict between the then Greek
government and some of capitalism’s most powerful agents. Rereading the
manifesto for the purposes of writing this introduction has been a little like
inviting the ghosts of Marx and Engels to yell a mixture of censure and support
in my ear.
Adults in the Room, my memoir of the time I served as
Greece’s finance minister in 2015, tells the story of how the Greek spring was
crushed via a combination of brute force (on the part of Greece’s creditors)
and a divided front within my own government. It is as honest and accurate as I
could make it. Seen from the perspective of the manifesto, however, the true historical
agents were confined to cameo appearances or to the role of quasi-passive
victims. “Where is the proletariat in your story?” I can almost hear Marx and
Engels screaming at me now. “Should they not be the ones confronting
capitalism’s most powerful, with you supporting from the sidelines?”
Thankfully, rereading the
manifesto has offered some solace too, endorsing my view of it as a liberal
text – a libertarian one, even. Where the manifesto lambasts bourgeois-liberal
virtues, it does so because of its dedication and even love for them. Liberty
happiness, autonomy, individuality, spirituality, self-guided development are
ideals that Marx and Engels valued above everything else. If they are angry
with the bourgeoisie, it is because the bourgeoisie seeks to deny the majority
any opportunity to be free. Given Marx and Engels’ adherence to Hegel’s
fantastic idea that no one is free as long as one person is in chains, their
quarrel with the bourgeoisie is that they sacrifice everybody’s freedom and
individuality on capitalism’s altar of accumulation.
Although Marx and Engels were
not anarchists, they loathed the state and its potential to be manipulated by
one class to suppress another. At best, they saw it as a necessary 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. Heeding the manifesto’s call to “Unite!”
is in fact inconsistent with becoming card-carrying Stalinists or with seeking
to remake the world in the image of now-defunct communist regimes.
When everything is said and
done, then, what is the bottom line of the manifesto? And why should anyone,
especially young people today, care about history, politics and the like?
Marx and Engels based their
manifesto on a touchingly simple answer: authentic human happiness and the
genuine freedom that must accompany it. For them, these are the only things
that truly matter. Their manifesto does not rely on strict Germanic invocations
of duty, or appeals to historic responsibilities to inspire us to act. It does
not moralise, or point its finger. Marx and Engels attempted to overcome the
fixations of German moral philosophy and capitalist profit motives, with a rational,
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 and those who own the
instruments of production. The problematic nexus of capital and waged labour
stops us from enjoying our work and our artefacts, and turns employers and
workers, rich and poor, into mindless, quivering pawns who are being
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 too many evenings”? Marx and Engels’
answer is: because we cannot end this idiocy individually; because no market
can ever emerge that will produce an antidote to this stupidity. Collective,
democratic political action is our only chance for freedom and enjoyment. And
for this, the long nights seem a small price to pay.
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 agonising
discontent. In our present moment, there are no guarantees. 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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