Jeg henviste til årets luksus-utgave av Det Kommunistiske
Manifest. Her følger en anmeldelse, sakset fra
http://www.salonmagazine.com/books/feature/1998/04/cov_30feature.html
Trond Andresen
>Communism on your coffee table!
>
> All-conquering capitalism
> has turned Karl Marx's
> "Communist Manifesto"
> into the perfect accessory
> for your ironic, upwardly
> mobile lifestyle.
> - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO ø BY KARL MARX AND
> FRIEDRICH ENGELS ø VERSO ø 96 PAGES
>
> BY BARBARA EHRENREICH ø 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 ø April 30, 1998
>
> Barbara Ehrenreich's most recent book is "Blood Rites: Origins
> and History of the Passions of War" (Holt).