Editor’s Prefatory Note:

Karl Marx: rarely read and less understood, but vehemently hated by millions. Whence this animosity? Could it be..manufactured? [CC BY by erdquadrat]

The Greanville Post does not wish to engage in yet another polemic on Marxism, the “evils of Stalinism,”  or communism in general, but a few points need to be made in our view to make this essay as clear and effective as it deserves.
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It scarcely needs saying that we find this article provocative, powerful, and useful, hence our publishing it.  Berman—a “Marxian humanist” associated with “democratic socialist” circles such as Dissent Magazine— is a well established academic and political scientist.  The text, however, presents us with a subtle problem common in democratic socialist commentary which we think important enough to mention: In his presentation Berman—perhaps accidentally— besides using cliché anti-communist tropes like “police states”, perpetuates the notion that the regimes in the former Soviet Union and China under Mao, as well as elsewhere (i.e., Cuba) were “[fully mature] Communist systems”, which, of course, they weren’t.  In our view, such regimes, up until the moment they were dissolved or drastically altered to favor market  “solutions” were stunted processes, in large measure for exogenous reasons.
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This finetuning of the focus is important for reasons I lay out below. First, some contextualization. The label “democratic socialism” carries unpleasant Cold War connotations, associated with the ugly anti-communist, pro-imperialist role played by many liberals during that period. The term seems to concede a rightwing trope, that true socialism admits only of two variants: one “democratic” (as judged by American bourgeois standards, of all things!), the other inherently tyrannical. We find this distinction spurious, cowardly, and intellectually dishonest. In this historical phase of capitalist hegemony, the regimes ruling the world in practice, whatever their theoretical formulations, exhibit a bewildering array of manifestations, ranging from “democracy” as we understand it in the United States, to outright dictatorship. It bears noting here for those who only ascribe “undemocratic” tendencies to socialism that the world has seen and continues to see many capitalist nations with brutal, authoritarian regimes in power, where the capitalist class, merrily allied with the state, thrives in an atmosphere where democracy is non-existent.
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The same can be said for abject poverty. Haiti, again worth noting, is a thoroughly capitalist nation. In fact, the so-called “capitalist periphery” with dozens of countries in a state of perennial underdevelopment, seems to produce chiefly “failed states,” with torrents of poverty (and oppression) in direct proportion to the purity of its free market ideology. The more laissez faire the capitalism, the more desperate the situation of the masses.  This is indisputable. Hence the measurement of capitalism vs. socialism requires extra care.
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After the turn of the 19th century, and the exhaustion of the Napoleonic wars (which should be seen as an effort by the ancien regime to contain the spread of egalitarian ideas issuing from the by then moribund French revolution, a form of proto anti-communism), capitalism developed largely unmolested by the remnants of the old order. We must ask: Why did the feudal forces collapse so conclusively after the bourgeois revolutions?
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Again, this is not the place to discuss this kind of issue in depth, let alone the technical differences, but one argument seems obvious: capitalism, the challenging system, was not that terribly different in its apparent social effects from feudalism. At the core, there was much congruency and continuity in the value systems defining how the new industrial magnates and the old nobles chose to live.  Not surprising, then, that after a couple of generations, and often much sooner, capitalist tycoons were marrying their daughters to impoverished nobles. This was perfectly logical.  Leaving aside the temporary contempt felt by the old aristos for the parvenus, both feudals and capitalists saw nothing wrong with outrageous wealth concentration and inequality, nor with the full enjoyment of accumulated riches. Both deeply believe that class divisions are not only natural but a good thing, that the masses (“the rabble”) are incapable of sound self-government, and that in consequence rank and hierarchy are inevitable. Indeed, both feudals and capitalists consider luxurious living, and the requisite armies of servants, employees, and exploited labor in all its forms a natural condition of civilization. Communism, which took equality and popular democracy seriously, clashed head-on with that arrangement. No wonder it elicited such a fierce and determined resistance.
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[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he above compels a good measure of caution in judging the good and bad of systems;  if nothing else, we must always heed with fairness the historical context, something that in history is as rare as the Unicorn. It’s worth recalling that capitalism, emerging over centuries from the womb of feudalism, overthrew the old order through a series of bourgeois revolutions and independence movements, which, while promising democracy and egalitarianism for all, delivered the fruits primarily to the top layers of the coalescing new society, namely the rising mercantile-industrial elites that today constitute the world’s corporate superclass. America and France provide the best known examples of these bourgeois republican revolutions, but Britain also had a similar shakeup in the 17th century civil wars, a tumult that ended with a regicide and Cromwell at the helm of the nation, representing the triumph of the “middle class” (the term used for businesspeople and trades in feudal setups).  The fact the British later reinstated the monarchy does not cancel the actual shifts in power. And even in nations where a powerful monarchy survived into the 20th century, i.e., Russia, Austro-Hungary, or Germany, the capitalists met few hurdles in their path.
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By the end of WWI, capitalism had won, and it proceeded to extend its tentacles worldwide with little if any feudal opposition. More significant, by the time the first challenges to capitalism began to sprout up, the product of its own predatory nature, first in the form of utopian socialism, later as scientific or Marxian socialism, capitalism was already a mature system. All the above is only meant to underscore the necessity to weigh these and many other factors when evaluating the performance of socialism on the global stage. The trajectory of socialism can’t be measured against the trajectory of capitalism as if they were equivalent phenomena. Socialism never had a chance to develop properly, relatively free from internal and external hostility. In fact, neither the Soviet Union nor Maoist China could be understood as the culmination of the natural and unperturbed evolution of communist construction, as capitalism can. Instead, as history played its cards, these were mutant societies, in transition, badly deformed from birth by the constant and unrelenting blows dealt by the much more powerful capitalist world, a system of organized hostility chiefly led after World War II by the United States. That’s why, for example, the advent and consequences of Stalinism, Maoism, Castroism, etc., with all their real and imagined flaws, can’t be judged solely as the product of “socialism’s inherent tendencies toward tyranny, a police state,” and all the other horrific vices ascribed to communism in practice by the apologists of capitalism. When we take full account of the impact of these constant wars imposed on these tentative societies emerging from centuries of backwardness and long years of civil war and gruesome dislocations (the Soviet Union alone lost more than 26 million people in the war against fascist Germany, the equivalent of wiping out of the entire populations of Texas , New York, and California in the US at the time, plus incalculable damage to her industrial infrastructure) a different, far more balanced picture emerges. But for that to happen we must be prepared to look at the adduced shortcomings of these experiments in non-capitalist social engineering with honesty and compassion, something that is rather scarce or non-existent among capitalist critics (to be expected) but also common among many soi-disant socialists (regrettable if not abominable).—Patrice Greanville

The following essay is the introduction to the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of the Communist Manifesto, published this March.

By Marshall Berman

M. Berman

TODAY, IN the early-twenty-first century, the Communist Manifesto is far less read than it once was. It is hard for people who are just growing up to grasp the way in which, for most of the twentieth century, Communist governments dominated much of the world. Communist educational systems were powerful and successful in many ways. But they were twisted in the way they canonized Marx and Engels as official patron saints. It is hard for people who have grown up without patron saints—Americans should not be too hasty to include themselves—to grasp this idea. But for decades, all over the world, any candidate for advancement in a Communist organization was expected to know certain passages and themes from Marx’s writings by heart, and to quote them fluently. (And expected not to know many other Marxian ideas: ideas of alienated labor, ideas of domination by the state, ideas of freedom.)

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the communist political system came apart remarkably fast. All over Central and Eastern Europe, Marx and Engels monuments were torn down. Pictures of people doing this were page-one material for a while. Some people noted skeptically that tearing down public monuments requires lots of organization, and wondered who was doing this organizing. Whatever the answers, it seems certain that, at the end of the twentieth century, there were plenty of ex-citizens of Communist police states who felt that life without Marx was liberation.

Ironically, this thrill was shared by people who were most devoted to Marx. Readers who love writers do not want to see them erected as Sunday-school sages. They can—I should say we can—only be thrilled by this loss of sanctity. Marx’s canonization after 1917 by Communist governments was a disaster. A thinker needs beatification like a hole in the head!

Intellectuals all over the world have welcomed this end-of-the-century crash as a fortunate fall. One of my old bosses at City College, who had grown up under Communist governments in Eastern Europe, said now that the Wall was down, I shouldn’t be allowed to teach Marx anymore, because “1989 proves that courses in Marxism are obsolete.” I told him today’s Marx, without police states, was a lot more exciting than yesterday’s patron saint. Now we could have direct access to a thinker who could lead us through the dynamics and contradictions of capitalist life. He laughed then. But by the end of the century, it seemed that the thrill had caught on. John Cassidy, the New Yorker magazine’s financial correspondent, told us in 1997 that Wall Street itself was full of study groups going through Marx’s writings, trying to grasp and synthesize many of the ideas that are central to his work: “globalization, inequality, political corruption, modernization, impoverishment, technological progress…the enervating nature of modern existence….” He was “the next great thinker” on the Street.

What are Marx’s connections like? First—and startling when you’re not prepared for it—is praise for capitalism so extravagant, it skirts the edge of awe. Very early on, in “Part One: Bourgeois and Proletarians,” Marx describes the processes of material construction that it perpetrates, and the emotions that go with them. He is distinctive in the way he connects historical processes and emotions. He highlights the sense of being caught up in something magical, uncanny:

The bourgeoisie has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways…clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of he ground—what earlier century had any idea that such productive powers slumbered in the womb of social labor?

Or, a page before, on an innate dynamism that is spiritual as well as material:

This first section of the Manifesto contains many passages like these, asserted in major chords. Marx’s contemporaries didn’t miss them, and some of his fellow radicals, like Proudhon and Bakunin, saw his appreciation of capitalism as a betrayal of its victims. This charge is still heard today, and deserves serious response. Marx hates capitalism, but he also thinks it has brought immense real benefits, spiritual as well as material, and he wants the benefits to be spread around and enjoyed by everybody, rather than monopolized by a small ruling class. This is very different from the totalitarian rage that typifies radicals who want to blow it all away. Sometimes, as with Proudhon, it is just modern times they hate: they dream of golden-age peasant villages where everyone was happily in his place (or in her place just behind him). For other radicals, from the author of the Book of Revelation to Thomas Müntzer to Joseph Conrad’s Verloc to the Unabomber, it goes over the edge into something like rage against reality, against human life itself. Apocalyptic rage offers immediate, sensational cheap thrills. Marx’s perspective is more complex and nuanced, and hard to sustain if you’re not grown up. On the other hand, if you are grown up, and attuned to a world full of complexity and ambiguity, Marx may fit you better than you thought.

Marx is not the first communist to admire capitalism for its creativity. This attitude can be found in some of the great “utopian socialists” of the generation before him, like Robert Owen and Saint-Simon and their brilliant followers. But Marx is the first writer to invent a style that brings this creativity to light before the early-twentieth century. (In French, with Baudelaire and Rimbaud, poetic language was a few decades ahead.) For readers who have grown up on T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and their successors, it shouldn’t be a problem to see how the Manifesto is a great piece of poetry. It throws together an enormous range of things and ideas that no one ever thought to throw together before. If you can get a feeling for Marx’s horizon, it will help to make the modern world make sense.

We could call the Manifesto’s style a kind of expressionist lyricism. Paragraphs break over us like waves that leave us shaking from the impact and wet with thought. This prose evokes breathless momentum, plunging ahead without guides or maps, breaking boundaries, piling up and layering things, ideas, experiences. Catalogues play a big role for Marx—as they do for his contemporaries Dickens and Whitman. Part of the enchantment of this style is the feeling that the lists are never exhausted, the catalogue is open to the present and the future, we are invited to pile on things, ideas, and experiences of our own, to pile ourselves on if we can find a way. But the items in the pile often seem to clash, and sometimes it feels like the whole aggregation could crash. From paragraph to paragraph, Marx makes readers feel like we are riding the fastest and grandest nineteenth-century train through the roughest and most perilous nineteenth-century terrain, and though we have splendid light, we are pushing through to where there is no track.

ONE FEATURE of modern capitalism that Marx most admires is its global horizon and cosmopolitan texture. Many people today talk about the global economy as if it had only just come into being. Marx helps us see the ways in which it has been operating all along.

The need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeois over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

Manifesto ends, is addressed to the “workers of all countries.”

One of the crucial events of modern times has been the unfolding of the first-ever world culture. Marx was writing at an historical moment when mass media were just developing. Marx worked in the vein of Goethe, who in his last year, speaking to Eckermann, described it as “world literature.” Writing more than a hundred and fifty years later, I think it is legitimate to call the new thing “world culture.” Marx shows how this culture evolves spontaneously from the world market:

In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants requiring for their satisfaction products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property…and from the numerous national and local literatures, there rises a world literature.

Marx believed that Shakespeare, writing at the very start of modernity, was the world’s first thoroughly modern writer. As a student, he learned many Shakespearean plays by heart. He didn’t realize, in the 1840s, how deeply involved with the English language he would become. After the failed 1848 Revolution in Germany, he spent about half his life in exile in London. He wrote hundreds of articles through the years, at first translated by Engels but increasingly in English, especially for the New York Daily Tribune, as “Our European Correspondent.” And he never stopped working on Capital, a book with footnotes from different languages and cultures on every page. In London his wife Jenny became a drama critic, writing for German papers about the London stage. His daughter Eleanor, the first English translator of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, and one of the inventors of “community organizing,” remembered growing up with the whole family on Hampstead Heath on Sundays, acting Shakespeare out. Meanwhile they were broke, desperate, evicted from apartments, unable to go out in the winter because so many of their clothes were in the pawnshop. But they kept on inventing the world.

Marx’s vision of world culture brings together several complex ideas. First, the expansion of human needs: the increasingly complex world market at once shapes and expands everybody’s desires. Marx wants us to imagine what it might mean in food, clothes, religion, love, and in our most intimate fantasies as well as our public presentations. Next, the idea of culture as “common property”: anything created by anyone anywhere is open and available to everyone everywhere. Entrepreneurs publish books (and e-books), produce plays and concerts, display visual art, and, in post-Marx centuries, create hardware and software for movies, radio, TV, and computers, in order to make money. Still, in this as in other ways, history slips through their fingers, so that people can possess culture—an idea, a poetic image, musical sound, Plato, Shakespeare, a Negro spiritual (his whole family learned them in the 1860s)—even if they can’t own it. If we can think about modern culture as “common property,” and the ways in which popular music, movies, literature, and TV can all make us feel more at home in the world, it can help us imagine how people all over the world could share the world’s resources someday.

This is a vision of culture rarely discussed, but it is one of the most expansive and hopeful things Marx ever wrote. In the last century or so, the development of movies, television, video, and computers have created a global visual language that brings the idea of world culture closer to home than ever, and the world beat comes through in the best of our music and books. That’s the good news. The bad news is how sour and bitter most left writing on culture has become. Sometimes it sounds as if culture were just one more Department of Exploitation and Oppression, containing nothing luminous or valuable in itself. At other times, it sounds as if people’s minds were empty vessels with nothing inside except what Capital put there. Read, or try to read, a few articles on “hegemonic/counterhegemonic discourse.”

The Manifesto occasionally makes some version of this claim. But it offers what strikes me as a much more trenchant indictment, one that holds up even at the top of the business cycle, when the bourgeoisie and its apologists are drowning in complacency. That indictment is Marx’s vision of what modern bourgeois society forces people to be: they have to freeze their feelings for each other to find a place in a cold world. Bourgeois society “has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.” It has “drowned every form of sentimental value in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.” It has “resolved personal worth into exchange-value.” It has collapsed every idea of freedom “into that single, unconscionable freedom—free trade.” It has “torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.” It has “converted the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.” “In one word, for exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” It forces people to degrade themselves in order to survive.

For more than 150 years, we have seen a huge literature that attacks the brutality of a class where those who are most comfortable with brutality are most likely to succeed. But those same social forces are also pressing on the members of that immense group that Marx calls “the modern working class.” This class has always been afflicted with a case of mistaken identity. Many of Marx’s readers have always thought that “working class” meant only men in boots—in factories, in industry, with blue collars, with calloused hands, lean and hungry. These readers then note the changing nature of the workforce: increasingly educated, white-collar, working in human services (rather than in growing food or making things), in or near the middle class—and they infer the Death of the Subject, and conclude that the working class is disappearing and all hopes for it are doomed. Marx did not think the working class was shrinking: in all industrial countries it was already, or in the process of becoming, “the immense majority.” Its swelling numbers, Marx thought, would enable it to “win the battle of democracy.” The basis for his political arithmetic was a concept that was both simple and highly inclusive:

The modern working class developed…a class of laborers who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labor increases capital. These workers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are commodities, like every other article of commerce, and are constantly exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition and the fluctuations of the market.

Marx understands that many people in this class don’t know their address. They wear elegant clothes and return to nice houses, because there is great demand for their labor right now, and they are doing well. They may identify happily with the owners of capital, and have no idea how contingent and fleeting their benefits are. They may not discover who they are, and where they belong, until they are laid-off or fired—or outsourced, or deskilled, or downsized. And other workers, lacking credentials, not dressed so nicely, may not get the fact that many who push them around are really in their class, and, despite their pretentions, share their vulnerability. How can this reality be put across to people who don’t get it, or can’t bear it? The complexity of these ideas helped to create a new vocation, central to modern society: the organizer.

One group whose identity as workers was crucial for Marx was his own class: intellectuals.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to in reverent awe. It has converted the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.

This does not mean that these activities lose meaning or value. If anything, they become more urgently meaningful. But the only way people can get the freedom to do what they can do is by working for capital. Marx himself had to live this way. Over a forty-year span, he wrote brilliant journalism. Sometimes he was paid, often not. Marx was brilliant in figuring out how workers could organize, and how their capacity to organize could make nineteenth-century life a great deal more human than it had been in the 1840s, the days of the Manifesto, when he was just starting out. But nobody then had figured out how the creators of culture could organize. When Marx, and every other writer and artist of those days, went up against capital, he went alone.

Manifesto might be prophetic. Most people I spoke with said China had no class system, no stratification, so Marx’s categories were meaningless there. A few suggested that no one believed this, but that today as in the past, Chinese people knew what they had to say.

Students told me, sadly, that my paper was being left out of the conference proceedings. Some said they would love to read Marx if they could. I told them the crucial idea was that they too were part of the working class, and the working class had the capacity to organize. I gave them some titles and websites, and wished them well. Now, in 2010, a collection has appeared in which not only am I included, but, more important, Marx is included. I saw this as a sign that Chinese workers had probably begun to organize and to act on a large scale. Who knows with what success? But it may be that another front in “the battle of democracy” has opened up.

MARX SEES the modern working class as an immense worldwide community waiting to happen. Such large possibilities give the history of organizing a permanent gravity and grandeur. The process of creating unions is not just an item in interest-group politics, but a vital part of what Lessing called “The Education of the Human Race.” As workers gradually come to learn who they are, Marx thinks they will see they need one another in order to be themselves. Workers will get it eventually, because bourgeois society forces them to get smart, in order to survive its constant upheavals. Learning to give yourself to other workers who may look and sound very different from you, but who turn out to be like you in depth, delivers the soul from dread and gives a man or a woman a permanent address in the world.

This insistence on free development, rather than development enforced by the market, is a theme that Marx shares with the smartest and noblest liberal of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill. Like Marx, Mill came to see “free development” as a basic human value. But as he grew older, he became convinced that the capitalist form of modernization—featuring cutthroat competition, social conformity, and cruelty to the losers—blocked its best potentialities. The world’s greatest liberal proclaimed himself a socialist in his old age.

Ironically, the ground that liberalism and socialism share might be a problem for both of them. What if Mister Kurtz isn’t dead after all? What if authentically “free development” brings out horrific depths in human nature? Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud all forced us to face the horrors. Marx and Mill might both say that until we have overcome social domination, there is no way to tell how deep our inner degradation goes. The process of reaching that point—where Raskolnikovs won’t rot on Avenue D, and where Svidrigailovs won’t possess thousands of bodies and souls—should be enough to give us all steady work. And even if we do reach that point, and come to see our inner bad guys will never go away, we will have learned how to cooperate for our mutual defense. Trotsky in the 1920s came to believe that psychotherapy was a revolutionary right, to protect us from ourselves.

Communist Manifesto. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there may be even more who are ready to live with it.

Marshall Berman teaches political theory and urbanism at CCNY/CUNY. He is the author of, among other books, Adventures in Marxism.

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