Marx Reconsidered: A Symposium

Editor’s Note: Nineteen ninety-eight is the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Communist Manifesto.” Apart from Charles Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ slim pamphlet is arguably the most important work of nonfiction written in the 19th century. The contours of our own century have incontestably been shaped by the ideas expressed in their immodest polemic.

Today, after the collapse of communism, what, if anything, is the legacy of the “Manifesto”? Book Review asked several distinguished writers to contribute their thoughts to a reconsideration of Marx on the eve of the millennium.

HANS MAGNUS ENZENSBERGER

Most manifestoes are boring. For a brief moment, they may create a flurry of excitement, but once their immediate cause is gone, they usually sound shrill, and their rhetoric seems overblown to the jaded ear of posterity. As a literary form, the manifesto is a modern invention with origins in the 17th century. Mass production started early in the 20th, when no self-respecting movement could do without one. The genre went into a cycle of inflation and subsequent decline.

The exceptions to the rule are quite rare. A document called “The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteenth United States of America” has retained much of its original impact, and even Emile Zola’s famous letter is still quoted with respect. The most surprising survivor, however, is certainly the “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” a masterpiece written by Messrs. Marx and Engels and published in 1848.

Read today, it is perhaps the most concise and thrilling account of a process that creates havoc in the contemporary world: the inexorable pressure of globalization. Of the four chapters of the “Manifesto,” it is the first (and only the first) that can claim this resonance. Not only do the authors foresee and describe secular developments like urbanization and the rise of a female working force. They also analyze the crisis mechanism inherent in the capitalist economy with an accuracy unmatched by more recent gurus. They give an account of the vertiginous speed of change to which all modern societies are subject, and they foresee with a precision bordering on clairvoyance the consequences of “infinitely improved communications.” They forecast the destruction of traditional basic industries, a catastrophe that has hit many regions and of which we have not yet seen the end. Finally, they see the political implications of a fully globalized economy: the inevitable loss of control on the part of national governments, which are reduced to the role of “a committee administrating the common business of the bourgeois class,” represented today by the multinational corporations.

This is not to say that the authors of the “Manifesto” have proved to be infallible. In fact, their class analysis has turned out to be wide off the mark. The cornerstone of their argument is the claim that “the amount of [industrial] work is increasing.” In fact, the opposite is true. The demand for [industrial] labor has declined in a dramatic way, and the classical working class is dwindling rapidly. A century ago, an enormous part of the working population was engaged in agriculture; today 2% to 3% of the work force is producing more food than the 60% to 80% traditionally occupied in the primary sector. Exactly the same process is now hitting the “proletariat” on which Marx and Engels pinned their revolutionary hope. The concomitant rise of an amorphous and multilayered middle class has disproved the notion that all intermediate strata are doomed to disappear. Instead, we witness the rapid growth of a new underclass, on both the national and the international scale: millions if not billions of unemployable people, not even deemed fit for exploitation by the forces of post-modern globalization.

Notwithstanding these flaws, the strength of the “Manifesto” is in its analysis and not in the remedies it offers. Much to the detriment of the Left, New and Old, Marxists have always been hypnotized by the affirmation and utopian side of their founding fathers’ work. The disastrous results are by now a matter of record. I have always believed that the strength of Marxism lies in its ruthless negativity, its radical criticism of the status quo, and that in this capacity it is still an indispensable tool. As a prophet of “the realm of freedom,” Marx shares the fate of many other utopian thinkers. As an artist of demolition, he is unsurpassed. What Walter Benjamin described as “the destructive character” may not be to the liking of people who prefer comfort to reason, but whoever wants to understand the world he lives in cannot do without “l’artiste demolisseur.”

This is a phrase coined by Baudelaire, who was, like Whitman, a contemporary of Marx and Engels. And these names may suggest another reason for the ongoing fascination of the “Manifesto.” Many parts of it read like great poetry. The grandeur and the misery of the 19th century have rarely been expressed with greater force, and while most of the theoretical works of the past, not to mention the strident manifestoes of the avant-garde, are now dead letter, or at best fodder for the academy, the vibrant sentences of Marx and Engels will go on to shock and enlighten the next century.

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Hans Magnus Enzensberger is the author of numerous books, including “The Sinking of the Titanic: A Comedy,” “The Consciousness Industry” and “Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia.” He was awarded the Buchner Prize in 1963.

DANIEL BELL

In “The Communist Manifesto,” Marx wrote: “The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . ; it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. They are dislodged by new industries whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations. . . . In place of the old local and national seclusion, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations.”

It is a stunning, prescient statement (particularly in the details that I have had to elide), a situation that we have seen unrolled for the past 150 years and will probably continue in the next 50.

Yet there was also a crucial intellectual and political confusion, the focus on “the bourgeoisie.” For Marx, all social structure was class structure. And in this unfolding picture, he thought that in the end there would only be two classes confronting each other, the bourgeoisie and the working class. Thus Marx also wrote: “The little middle class, the small shopkeepers, tradespeople, peasant proprietors, handicraftsmen . . . all these classes sink into the proletariat . . . crushed out in the competition with large capitalists and partly because their specialized skill is depreciated by the new methods of production. Thus is the proletariat recruited from all classes of the population.”

But that was not to be. If anything, the industrial proletariat has been shrinking in every advanced industrial society, while the economies are moving into a post-industrial state. (In the United States today, the professional and managerial class makes up more than 28% of the labor force, and technical, sales and administrative workers make up almost 30% of the labor force!)

What we have been witnessing is the march of capitalism. Curiously, Marx never used the term, though he described the capitalist process; the term capitalism was first popularized, if not coined, by Werner Sombart in 1902. Capitalism is a system in which enterprises (mostly private) compete with one another for profit in the market propelled by the engine of technology and are driven to innovate and expand in order to seek a greater return on capital. In that competition, old industries are destroyed and staid enterprises undercut by those more efficient or using cheaper or more productive labor.

Capitalism has been the first system in world history in which the economy detached itself from the political; all previous systems were subordinated to the creation of wealth for the Empire or the State. At times the national state has helped the capitalist enterprises, (for example, Germany and Japan). But more often, responding to markets, firms cross national boundaries at the expense of local enterprises. And this has been increasingly the case, as Marx predicted.

Lin Biao, who created “the red book” to enshrine Mao Tse-tung (and was killed in an air crash seeking to escape Mao), thought that “the third world” (whatever that is) would be “the external proletariat” against the advanced societies. But Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin have taken China along the capitalist road.

What we have today is not “the bourgeoisie” versus the “working class” but geoeconomics confronting geopolitics in a world driven by markets and profits. So Marx was half right. But he would have preferred the other half.

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Daniel Bell is Henry Ford II professor of social science, emeritus, Harvard University and scholar in residence at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author, among other works, of “The End of Ideology” and “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.”

MARTIN MALIA

Marx pointed out that his system was a synthesis of British political economy, French socialism and German philosophy. Yet it was not until the discovery of his early manuscripts in the 1930s that it became clear that the German, Hegelian element in this amalgam was the most basic.

Briefly put, the particularity of this philosophy is to offer “emancipation” from the iron necessities of history through rational understanding of history’s laws. In 1843-46, Marx recast this redemptive metaphysic in the class-struggle terms of French Revolutionary politics and the scientific categories of British economics to project a communist end of history. He then poured forth his theory in the shock phrases of the “Manifesto” in anticipation of imminent revolution in backward Germany.

This revolution was to take off from an expected socialist explosion in Paris so as to produce a combined bourgeois and proletarian revolution in Germany. Its concrete program was nothing less than the abolition of private property, the market and indeed money--measures that were moreover supposed to yield a society without classes or a coercive state.

Of course, nothing like this happened--anywhere, anytime. The reason was the fallacy of the “Manifesto’s” historical vision. This vision postulated: a) an implacable logic of history leading to capitalism’s collapse and b) a resulting revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat. But historically, these two axes never intersected.

In capitalist but imperial Germany, Marxism gradually withered away into reformist Social Democracy seeking an ordinary welfare state. In autocratic and still largely peasant Russia, Lenin concluded from German “revisionism” that “scientific” revolutionary consciousness must be brought to the workers by a vanguard party of intellectuals.

And this substitution of the party for the proletariat did at last put Marxism in power. Stalin then used the coercive “class struggle” to build the lacking industrial base under the party--not exactly “logical” perhaps, but the only way Marx’s impossible utopia could be imposed on real history.

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Martin Malia is the author of “Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism” and “The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991.”

DAVID HOROWITZ

Since the “Manifesto” was written 150 years ago, 100 million people have been killed in its name. Between 10 and 20 times that number have been condemned to lives of unnecessary misery and human squalor, deprived of the life chances afforded the most humble citizens of the industrial democracies that Marxists set out to destroy.

Marx was a brilliant mind and a seductive stylist, and many of his insights look reasonable enough, on paper. But the evil they have wrought, on those who fell under their practical sway, far outweighs any possible intellectual gain. It would be a healthy development for everyone, rich and poor alike, if future generations regarded Marx’s “Manifesto” in the same sinister light as “Mein Kampf” and other destructive products of the human soul.

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David Horowitz, a former senior editor of Ramparts magazine, is the author of numerous books, including “Empire and Revolution: A Radical Interpretation of Contemporary History,” “The Rockefellers” and, most recently, “Radical Son: A Journey Through Our Times.” He is president of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

WILLIAM PFAFF

The legacy of “The Communist Manifesto” to the 19th century was the Communist Party. The legacy of the Communist Party to the 20th century is that it not only discredited the program of social justice put forth in the “Manifesto” itself but did all in its considerable powers to destroy every alternative movement or theory of social reform.

In the “Manifesto,” and in the other writings of Marx and Engels, a theory of history and a program of social and political struggle were proposed. Both were false.

Their millenarianism, and their claim to “scientific” and historical validity, gave the world modern ideological absolutism and the totalitarian state--two crucial contributions to making the century now ending the cruelest history records.

The legacy of “The Communist Manifesto” is that of idealism betrayed, justice destroyed by injustice and the suffering and deaths of millions of human beings. Its anniversary is an occasion for reflection on the human capacity for doing wrong in the guise and with the arrogance of doing right.

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William Pfaff is the author of several books, including “Barbarian Sentiments: How the American Century Ends” and “The Wrath of Nations: Civilization and the Furies of Nationalism.”

RUSSELL JACOBY

Marx and Engels loved capitalism--the first pages of “The Communist Manifesto” were more a paean to its revolutionary energy than a call to the working class. These two young socialists exulted that capitalism is the first economic system “to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals.” It has destroyed “old established industries” and “old wants” with new industries and new wants. “The cheap price of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls. . . . It compels all nations, on the pain of extinction” to turn capitalist. In a world of BMWs, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, these pages bear up well. The nations of the world join in the marketing frenzy or disappear.

To be sure, much of “The Communist Manifesto” missed the mark. Yet to saddle its authors with the killing fields in the Soviet Union and elsewhere is unfair. “The Communist Manifesto” breathed of the Enlightenment, not slaughter. The practical measures the pamphlet called for included the graduated income tax and “free education for all children in public schools.” These bookish socialists looked forward to a society in which the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” If 150 years later we have left this idea far behind, have we progressed beyond or fallen behind it?

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Russell Jacoby teaches in the departments of history and education at UCLA. He is the author of “Dogmatic Wisdom,” “The Last Intellectuals” and “Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism,” among other books.

SIMON LEYS

Whatever is well-written is bound to last. On literary grounds alone, the future of Marx’s “Manifesto” is secure. Whether it still has a political future is a question which I am not competent to assess.

My own political experience is limited to 40 years spent observing the theory and practice of Leninism and Stalino-Maoism in China. Marx was of no relevance for this task.

The criminal record and catastrophic failure of all the countries that were called “communist” have given a bad name to Marxism. Which is perhaps unfair: After all, has it ever been really tried?

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Simon Leys is the pseudonym of Pierre Ryckmans, professor emeritus of Chinese studies at the Australian National University and at the University of Sydney. He is the author of, among other works, “Chinese Shadows” and “The Burning Forest: Essays on Chinese Culture and Politics.” Most recently, he has translated “The Analects of Confucius” (W.W. Norton).