"A Spectre, Haunting" is a 2022 revisiting of The Communist Manifesto by China Miéville, a noted British slipstream/fantasy/horror author whose work I enjoy, 332 pages, 90k words.
It has an introduction, 6 chapters, an afterword, and 5 appendices: the original 1848 manifesto, and the prefaces to the 1872, 1882, 1883, and 1888 editions.
When I was studying Economics, I had thought I would need to read some Marx at some point, probably "Das Kapital". I was leary of it because, who knows what lists that is going to get you put on? But when I saw this book, I thought, "OK".
I read the Appendices 1st, to get a feel for the source material before consuming the exegesis. The manifesto itself is only 12k words. A manifesto is
"A public declaration of principles, policies, or intentions, especially of a political nature."
So not a scholarly paper, and the declarations can be as inflammatory as is desired.
One thing that is surprising is that the manifesto starts off by praising and thanking the bourgeoisie aka capitalism aka neoliberalism for a great job overthrowing feudalism. But, Marx & Engels don't let them rest on their laurels, but rather propose that they should make way for the proletariat, the workers - who Marx & Engels feel are the true producers of value - to take over and run things. The way this is accomplished it by "abolition of private property".
This seems like an eminently bad idea to me. But Miéville clarifies what this actually means:
“private property,” importantly, here understood as the private exploitative control of the economy, rather than, as per a common misrepresentation, as the fact of any personal possessions.
[snark]
Ha ha, the philosophy that actually does disallow any personal possessions is ... Christianity. Acts 2:44-45
All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their possessions and goods, they shared with anyone who was in need.
Acts 4:32
The multitude of believers was one in heart and soul. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they owned.
And the penalty for keeping personal private property was death - see Acts 5:1-11, the story of Ananias and Sapphira.
So, sadly, I will have to stop accusing Christians of being Communists - with regard to property and ownership, Christians were much worse.
[/snark]
Another thing that I was not particularly aware of in the manifesto is its condemnation of the nuclear family. Women are exploited by the system, children would be better off raised by professionals. Damn commies!
Miéville comments on this:
There follow (2.39–2.51) several paragraphs about the “infamous” communist suggestion of the abolition of the family. The Manifesto stresses that this sentimental bourgeois concern for the family is predicated on work that splits real families apart, through, for example, drudgery and child labor. Advocating social education, rather than privatized and familial education, is not to propose indoctrination, but countering the doctrines of the ruling class. To the moralist concern about a communist “community of women”—some version or other of “free love,” a breakdown of the monogamous and privatized model of marriage—the authors (unlike some communist thinkers) don’t outline or defend any such model (in keeping with their career-long preference for critiquing what exists, rather than pre-empting post-capitalist norms). They do, however, insist that such fear bespeaks a bourgeois conception of women as property. With gusto, they point out the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, for whom sanctimonious familial piety co-exists with systematic bed-hopping, infidelity, coercion, exploitation, and abuse. This hypocrisy they see as baked into the system.
LOL, say it ain't so, moral turpitude amongst the well-to-do!
I really wondered, why the urgency to replace the bourgeoisie with the proletariat? One thing the Manifesto does is take potshots at various other socialist groups of the time - pretty standard stuff. It was interesting, tho, that in the introduction to the later editions it was noted that most if not all of the other groups criticized were no longer going concerns - they had been relegated to the dustbin of history. Those potshots though address the source of the urgency:
In their criticisms of the utopian socialists for faint hearts when it comes to anything other than “peaceful means” (3.52), the authors imply that the necessary rupture demands an elasticity of appropriate means. This caution against guiltily limiting “permissible” political methods might seem to be radically anti-ethical. In point of fact, whatever one thinks of the argument and its limits, it isn’t an abjuring of ethics but one predicated on ethical urgency, the absolute necessity of revolution as speedily as possible.
I think they greatly underestimate how we humans can become inured to almost anything. If hungry children aren't treated as an emergency that must be immediately addressed, what will be?
One topic that is discussed very insightfully in Chapters 5 & 6 is how much capitalism for the last 200 years or more has been successful in distracting the proletariat from issues of class with issues of race. Originally in England, it was the English vs the Irish. In the US, it was the white worker vs the black worker (but also, at times, the nativists vs the Irish, the Italian, the German, etc., and currently the Hispanic immigrants). I did not know that a big driver of BREXIT was resentment of Polish workers in England enabled by EU membership.
In a capitalism wherein the oppression of a group is inextricable from categories of race, defined in opposition to an implied “norm” that has come to be understood as “whiteness,” such a shift is one of racialization. To quote the title of a famous and seminal book on this topic by Noel Ignatiev, one celebrated example of this is “how the Irish became white.”
Not that promotion to “whiteness” might not be withdrawn, or diluted. There’s certainly a danger, in the words of one radical scholar, that as with much theoretical terminology, “[t]he promiscuity of the concept of whiteness” can make it slippery and hard to engage with. But the fact that it can be unhelpfully evasive doesn’t mean that it isn’t an important axis at play in popular consciousness—and the unconscious—and politics. It’s not, for example, a binary category, nor one that precludes internal differentiation. The aftermath of the Brexit vote saw a substantial spike in hate crimes against Eastern Europeans (and others), particularly Poles, in the UK, including the murder of the factory worker Arkadiusz Jóźwik when he was heard speaking Polish. To be sure, given years of Polish “whiteness,” various nuances have been suggested to describe this phenomenon at the edges of whiteness, so to speak, such as “xeno-racism.” But whether xeno- or not, this is a form of racism: indeed, “[r]acialisation does not require putative phenotypical or biological difference,” and “the nominal absence of somatic difference does not get in the way of xenophobic racism; it turns out racialised difference can be invented in situ.” Race, after all, is a function of racism, not the other way around. [My bold]
I don't think that last line can be emphasized too much. Scientifically, there is no such thing as race. The species homo sapiens sapiens (us) has 100s of genetic characteristics which can take on few or many values - 5,000 different skin tones, for example. But it is a single species in which all members can breed and produce productive offspring. So any time anyone talks about race, the correct response is "There is no such thing as race - there's only racism."
I also found this quote re W. E. B. Du Bois to be very powerful:
The great W. E. B. Du Bois, in his towering 1935 work Black Reconstruction, expanded brilliantly and seminally on the affective rewards of racism for the racist. Arguing against any optimistic faith in an ineluctable tendency towards working-class unity—such as the Manifesto can be read as evincing at times, and which remains tenacious—Du Bois sternly diagnosed racism as a key and powerful countervailing pressure.
The theory of laboring class unity rests upon the assumption that laborers, despite internal jealousies, will unite because of their opposition to exploitation by the capitalists. According to this, even after a part of the poor white laboring class became identified with the planters [in the US South after the Civil War] and eventually displaced them, their interests would be diametrically opposed to those of the mass of white labor, and of course to those of the black laborers. This would throw white and black labor into one class, and precipitate a united fight for higher wage and better working conditions.
Most persons do not realize how far this failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest. It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely [to various restricted amenities and milieu] with all classes of white people …
...
For Du Bois, then, racism wasn’t merely an encouragement to spite against a scapegoated other, nor only “compensation” to a poor white that there was someone “lower” (which begs the bleak question of why that would be compensation at all). It was, crucially, a project of generating cross-class solidarity among whites to the overwhelming benefit of the (white) ruling class, and for the downgrading of class itself as a perceived social schism, and its replacement with “the color line.” Such dynamics, in some cases somewhat more decorously dressed up, are hardly unfamiliar today.
Chapter 6, "The Communist Manifesto Today" has a lot of good stuff. I definitely had this thought several times during the pandemic, during which the government assistance programs cut childhood poverty in the US in half:
Such questioning [of Margaret Thatcher's TINA - there is no alternative (to capitalism) - assertion] has also occurred from the other pole of politics, with the profound crisis into which the Covid-19 pandemic has pushed it, forcing capitalism’s partisans to hurriedly offer the kind of massive, systemic support they scoffed at as impossible scant weeks earlier.
This reminds me of the main takeaway of
Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything": that above and beyond wanting to drag out fossil fuel profits as long as possible, capitalism engages in climate change denial because to combat climate change will require concerted, world-wide big government, on a scale never before seen - which the current libertarian rulers of the world want no part of. Aside from a few more tax cuts, they like the way the game is currently rigged just fine. It's interesting that people seemed to be OK with increased government action to combat the pandemic, but that many still resist action against the slower-moving climate crisis.
At some point Miéville discusses how The Manifesto greatly underestimated how wily and adaptable capitalism would turn out to be. After 1848, the labor movement started getting things like limited workdays and workweeks, paid vacation, paid sick leave, higher wages, profit sharing, etc. And, as I learned in "Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas Piketty, in Germany there is now "Rhenish Capitalism", "an economic model in which firms are owned not only by shareholders but also by certain other interested parties known as “stakeholders,” starting with representatives of the firms’ workers (who sit on the boards of directors of German firms not merely in a consultative capacity but as active participants in deliberations, even though they may not be shareholders), as well as representatives of regional governments, consumers’ associations, environmental groups, and so on." So maybe we really don't need a full revolution?
This is a good summary of The Manifesto's goals:
To have fidelity at all to the project of this Manifesto, no matter how critically, is to be convinced of certain claims of which capitalism and its ideologues demand we remain unsure: that inequality and oppression aren’t states of nature; that our social reality is controlled by the few; that it’s so controlled in opposition to the needs and rights of the many; that we have the capability, at the very least, to make it worth attempting to change the world.
The last 1/2 of Chapter 6 is a section titled "
ON HATE". Its content is, well, somewhat hateful. I really don't like hateful. Here is some justification for hate:
It would admittedly be a prim and pious socialism which failed at least to empathize with individualized hate, or simply denounced it wholesale as an ethical failure. This is particularly so in our modern epoch, when sadism and trolling have become central to political method, especially among the ruling class. It would take an unreasonable amount of saintliness for no one on the left to feel any hate for, say, hedge fund founder, pharmaceuticals CEO, and convicted fraudster Martin Shkreli, for example, not only because of his ostentatious profiteering from human misery, but given his repeated, performative, stringent efforts precisely to be hated. And, of course, there’s the race-baiting, disability-mocking, sexual-assault-celebrating Trump Agent Orange.
Here's the final 2 paragraphs.
We must hate harder than did the Manifesto, for the sake of humanity. Such class hate is constitutive with and inextricable from solidarity, the drive for human liberty, for the full development of the human, the ethic of emancipation implicit throughout the Manifesto and beyond. We should hate this world, with and through and beyond and even more than does the Manifesto. We should hate this hateful and hating and hatemongering system of cruelty, that exhausts and withers and kills us, that stunts our care, makes it so embattled and constrained and local in its scale and effects, where we have the capacity to be greater.
Hate is not and cannot be the only or main drive to renewal. That would be deeply dangerous. We should neither celebrate nor trust our hate. But nor should we deny it. It’s not our enemy, and we cannot do without it. “At the risk of seeming ridiculous,” said Che Guevara, “let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love.” It’s for the sake of love that, reading it today, we must hate more and better than even The Communist Manifesto knew how.
I'm sorry, but to me hate is the tool of the enemies of progress, and 1 that we should avoid if at all possible. Even the ever-so-hateful Agent Orange is to me a horribly damaged human being who should be pitied - and of course barred from public office. But why upset my mental and physical well-being by allowing myself to hate?
So overall, the proletariat has made a lot of progress since 1848. And we all have cool toys now - supercomputers with access to the knowledge of the world in our pockets. But, as Piketty pointed out, the 15% of capital that the middle class clawed away from the 1% in the 30 years after WW II has now been returned to the 1%. The middle class is disappearing. The 50% of US citizens who cannot deal with a $500 emergency continues to grow - what is it now, 60%, 70%?
But "the abolition of private property" still seems problematic to me. It can be done - the USSR did it - but generally that is considered to not have worked out well. It doesn't seem like the right solution to creating a post-scarcity utopia. I would feel that with the vast advances in computing since the USSR that maybe a planned economy could actually be made to work - except for the fact that it would be based on the weakest "science" I know of, Economics.
Rhenish capitalism seems to have a lot going for it. But anytime I think about this stuff, I seem to go back to Kate Raworth's "Doughnut Economics":
when is each of the four realms of provisioning — household, commons, market and state — best suited to delivering humanity’s diverse wants and needs?
I wonder how much my unhappiness with The Manifesto is due to the general US anti-communist propaganda I have been exposed to throughout my life. We tend to forget that most European countries have active Communist parties. I had thought that Miéville was probably formally a commnunist, but per
his Wikipedia page, apparently he is not. He is described as "active in hard-left politics".
Regardless of how much I agreed with this book, I did learn a lot from it. It was a quick, easy, and informative read, and I recommend it.
