up fast: Whenever there’s trouble, anywhere in the world, the book becomes an item; when things quiet down, the book drops out of sight; when there’s trouble again, the people who forgot remember. When fascist-type regimes seize power, it’s always on the short list of books to burn. When people dream of resistance—even if they’re not communists, even if they distrust communists—it provides music for their dreams. Get the beat of the beginning and the end. First line: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.” Last lines: “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!” In Rick’s bar in Casablanca, you may or may not love France, but when the band breaks into “La Marseillaise,” you’ve got to stand up and sing.
Yet literate people today, even people with left politics, are amazingly ignorant of what’s actually in the book. For years, I’ve asked people what they think it consists of. The most popular answers are that it’s (1) a utopian handbook on how to run a society with no money or property, or else (2) a Machiavellian handbook on how to create a communist state and keep it in power. People who were communists didn’t seem to know the book any better than people who were not. (At first this amazed me; later I saw it was no accident. Classical communist education was Talmudic, based on a study of commentaries, with an underlying suspicion of sacred primary texts. Among Orthodox Jews, the Bible is a sort of adult movie—a yeshiva-bucher is exposed to it only after years of Talmudic training, to insure that he will respond in orthodox ways. Similarly, a trainee at a party school would begin with Stalin, until l956; then the great indoctrinator Lenin; then, with some hesitation, Engels. Marx came in only at the very end, and then only for those with security clearance.)
Now that security is gone. In just a few years, so many statues and magnifications of Marx have vanished from public squares; so many streets and parks named for him are going under other names today. What does it all mean? For some people, like our Sunday morning princes of the air, the implosion of the USSR simply confirmed what they had believed all along, and released them from having to show respect. One of my old bosses at CCNY said it concisely: “Nineteen eighty-nine proves that courses in Marxism are obsolete.” But there are other ways to read history. What happened to Marx after 1917 was a disaster: A thinker needs beatification like a hole in the head. So we should welcome his descent from the pedestal as a fortunate fall. Maybe we can learn what Marx has to teach if we confront him at ground level, the level on which we ourselves are trying to stand.
So what does he offer? First, startling when you’re not prepared for it, praise for capitalism so extravagant, it skirts the edge of awe. Very early in the Manifesto, he describes the processes of material construction that it perpetrates and the emotions that go with them, especially the sense of being caught up in something magical and 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 the ground – what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive powers slumbered in the lap of social labour?
Or a page before, on an innate dynamism that is spiritual as well as material:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and there by the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society … Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. 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.
Part 1, “Bourgeois and Proletarians,” contains many passages like these, asserted in major chords with great dramatic flair. Somehow, many readers seem to miss them. But Marx’s contemporaries didn’t miss them, and some fellow radicals—Proudhon, 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 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 a golden-age peasant village where everyone was happily in his place (or in her place behind him). For other radicals, from the author of the Book of Revelation 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 far more complex, nuanced, and hard to sustain if you’re not grown up.
Marx is not the first communist to admire capitalism for its creativity; that attitude can be found in some of the great utopian socialists of the generation before him, like Saint-Simon and Robert Owen. But Marx is the first to invent a prose style that can bring that perilous creativity to life. His style in the Manifesto is a kind of expressionist lyricism. Every paragraph breaks over us like a wave that leaves us shaking from the impact and wet with thought. This prose evokes breathless momentum, plunging ahead without guides or maps, breaking all boundaries, precarious piling and layering of things, ideas, and experiences. Catalogues play a large role in Marx’s style—as they do for his contemporaries Dickens and Whitman—but part of the Manifesto’s enchantment comes from our 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. But the items in the pile often seem to clash, and it sounds like the whole vast aggregation could crash. From paragraph to paragraph, Marx makes readers feel that 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 pressing ahead where there is no track.
One feature of modern capitalism that Marx most admires is its global horizon and its cosmopolitan texture. Many people today talk about the global economy as if it had only recently come into being. The Manifesto should help us see the extent to which it has been there all along:
The need of a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. All old established national industries have been destroyed or are being daily destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer process indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.
The cheap prices of its commodities are heavy artillery with which [the bourgeoisie] batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what is called civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
This global spread offers a spectacular display of history’s ironies. These bourgeois are banal in their ambitions, yet their unremitting quest for profit forces on them the same insatiable
