Marxism as commodity
Lars Ekman/Lise Stensrud (stenekm@online.no)
Sun, 3 May 1998 10:10:54 +0200 (MET DST)
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>From: Peter Grimes <p34d3611@jhu.edu>
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>Subject: Marxism as commodity
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>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 ø 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
>
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