Faust. They may think of only one thing, but their narrow focus leads to the broadest integrations; their shallow outlook wreaks the most profound transformations; their peaceful economic activity devastates every human society like a bomb, from the most primitive tribes to the mighty USSR. Marx was appalled at the human costs of capitalist development, but he always believed that the world horizon it created was a great achievement on which socialism must build. Remember, the grand appeal to Unite with which the Manifesto ends is addressed to “WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES.”
A crucial global drama was the unfolding of the first-ever world culture. Marx, writing when mass media were just developing, called it “world literature.” I think it is legitimate at the end of this century to update the idea into “world culture.” The Manifesto shows how this culture will evolve 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 seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual [or spiritual—geistige can be translated either way] production. The intellectual [spiritual] creations of individual nations become common property … and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.
This vision of world culture brings together several complex ideas. First, the expansion of human needs: The increasingly cosmopolitan world market at once shapes and expands everybody’s desires. Marx doesn’t elaborate on this in detail; but he wants us to imagine what it might mean in food, clothes, religion, music, love, and in our most intimate fantasies as well as our public presentations. Next, the idea of culture as “common property” in the world market: Anything created by anyone anywhere is open and available to everyone everywhere. Entrepreneurs publish books, produce plays and concerts, display visual art and, in our century, create hardware and software for movies, radio, TV, and computers in order to make money. Nevertheless, in this as in other ways, history slips through the owners’ fingers, so that poor people get to possess culture—an idea, a poetic image, a musical sound, Plato, Shakespeare, a Negro spiritual (Marx loved them)—even if they can’t own it. Culture stuffs people’s heads full of ideas. As a form of “common property,” modern culture helps us to imagine how people all around the world could share all the world’s resources someday.
It’s a vision of culture rarely discussed, but it is one of the most expansive and hopeful things Marx ever wrote. In our century, the development of movies, television and video and computers has 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 way these guys write, it’s as if the world has passed them by.
But if capitalism is a triumph in so many ways, exactly what’s wrong with it? What’s worth spending your life in opposition? In the twentieth century, Marxist movements around the world have concentrated on the argument, made most elaborately in Capital, that workers in bourgeois society had been or were being pauperized. Now, there were times and places where it was absurd to deny that claim; in other times and places (like the United States and Western Europe in the fifties and sixties, when I was young) it was pretty tenuous, and Marxist economists went through strange dialectical twists to make the numbers come out. But the problem with that discussion was that it converted questions of human experience into questions of numbers: It led Marxism to think and talk exactly like capitalism! 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 adapt to a cold-blooded world. In the course of “pitilessly tear[ing] asunder the motley feudal ties,” bourgeois society “has left remaining 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 water of egotistical calculation.” It has “resolved personal worth into exchange-value.” It has collapsed every historical tradition and norm of freedom “into that single, unconscionable freedom—free trade.” The worst thing about capitalism is that it forces people to become brutal in order to survive.
For 150 years, we have seen a huge literature that dramatizes the brutalization of the bourgeoisie, a class in which those who are most comfortable with brutality are most likely to succeed. But the same social forces are pressing on the members of that immense group that Marx calls the “modern working class.” This class has been afflicted with a case of mistaken identity. Many readers have always thought that “working class” meant only factory workers, or industrial workers, or manual workers, or blue-collar workers, or impoverished workers. These readers then note the changing nature of the workforce over the past half-century or so—increasingly white collar, educated, working in human services, in or near the middle class—and they infer the Death of the Subject and conclude that all hopes for the working class are doomed. Marx did not think the working class was shrinking: In all industrial countries it already was, or was in the process of becoming, “the immense majority”; its swelling numbers 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 labourers, who live only so long as they find work, and who find work only so long as their labour increases capital. These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce, and are consequently exposed to all the vicissitudes of competition, to all the fluctuations of the market.
The crucial factor is not working in a factory, or working with your hands, or being poor. All these things can change with fluctuating supply and demand and technology and politics. The crucial reality is the need to sell your labor to capital in order to live, the need to carve up your personality for sale—to look at yourself in the mirror and think, “What have I got that I can sell?”—and an unending dread and anxiety that even if you’re OK today, you won’t find anyone who wants to buy what you have or what you are tomorrow, that the changing market will declare you (as it has already declared so many) worthless, that you will find yourself physically as well as metaphysically homeless and out in the cold. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, a twentieth-century masterpiece, brings to life the consuming dread that may be the condition of most members of the working class in modern times. The whole existentialist tradition dramatizes this situation with great depth and beauty, yet its visions tend to be weirdly disembodied. Its visionaries could learn from the Manifesto, which gives modern anguish an address.
A great many people are in the working class but don’t know it. Many are the people who fill up the huge office buildings that choke all our downtowns. They wear elegant suits and return to nice houses, because there is a great demand for their labor right now, and they are doing well. They may identify happily with the owners, and have no idea how contingent and fleeting their benefits are. They may not discover who they really are, and where they belong, until they are laid off or fired—or deskilled, outsourced, downsized. (It is fascinating how many of these crushing words are quite new.) And other workers, lacking diplomas, not dressed so nicely, working in cubicles, not offices, may not get the fact that many of the people who boss them around are really in their class. But this is what organizing and organizers are for.
One group whose working-class identity
