The Capitalist Manifesto

by Alexander Cockburn

Waspishly, I told Colin it looked like an espresso, or maybe a latte, table book, with its somber, stylish cover design of a red flag by the Russian emigre artists Komar and Melamid flapping over a black background: Marxism without hope.

Robinson wasn't irked at all. He said Verso had printed 25,000 copies and they are selling like hot cakes. The publicity had been gratifying. He'd nearly persuaded Barney's to do a window display of fashionable models, all with copies of the "Manifesto" poking out from their handbags or pockets. On his desk, he boasted, were great piles of excited articles that had run in the U.S. press, all touting the new Marx craze.

I should declare an interest here. I'm all for big sales of Verso's edition of the "Manifesto," because Karl and Fred's earnings mean that Verso will make more money and maybe plunge for a bigger advance on my next book. On the other hand, I don't really like Verso's edition. To me, it looks like a memento rather than a manifesto. The old Moscow publishing house booklet that I read back in the late 1950s looked like it meant business. It was aimed at people who wanted to overthrow capitalism and said so right away. By "people" was meant the working class.

Hobsbawm says the proletariat is a failure and maintains that, these days, the prime countervailing force is "the environment." Not the environmental movement, please note. This movement, which springs in part from utopian socialism, implies action and struggle. Hobsbawm seems to see "environmentalism" as prudently managed capitalism on a global scale, with social engineers, nicely equipped with the appropriate degrees, in charge.

Back in 1958, the American sociologist Lewis Feuer introduced his edition of the "Manifesto," writing that "the revolutionary intellectual of the '30s has been replaced by the managerial intellectual of the '50s, and with this change in social temper, the philosophy of Karl Marx would by many persons be consigned to the museum of their youthful indiscretions."

In 1998, these same intellectuals want to manage the entire planet, and Hobsbawm, who had a few youthful indiscretions of his own, sees barbarism as the only alternative to such planetary supervision by credentialed, scientific professionals (presumably financed by George Soros and the Nature Conservancy).

So Verso's is a manifesto without class struggle, without revolution. How different an attitude to history than Marx's. In his last edition of the "Manifesto," in 1882, he excitedly used news of the class struggle in Russia and America to adjust his revolutionary gun sights. His aim remained true, as did his commitment.

But to divorce the "Manifesto" from revolution, as does Hobsbawm, is indeed to produce a Marxism without hope. Marx merely becomes a preface to the great German sociologist Max Weber, who once described capitalism as "mechanised petrification embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance."

Many reviewers of Verso's "Manifesto" have tended to see it as a celebration -- admittedly acerbic -- of global capitalism, sweeping away all hindrances to the basic task of accumulation. Both the neo-liberal New Yorker and conservative Times Literary Supplement have praised Marx for his perspicacity and overall up-to-dateness in seeing which way capitalism was headed, while saying that where he truly messed up was in his revolutionary politics. Marx gets whacked with words like "Promethean" and "utopian" to show how he sent communism off down a blind alley.

Actually, the Soviet "collapse" was preceded by the American "collapse." American democracy, regionalism and localism collapsed in the face of global capitalism fully 30 years earlier than the Soviet Union. Today, the ongoing development of American totalitarianism attracts scant attention. Spending on nuclear weapons in the United States today is 20 percent higher than at the height of the Cold War. And this is to understate the matter, since some of the costs have been moved out of the Defense Department's budget and into the Department of Energy's.

In the 1950s, "law enforcement" was primarily the local police and the FBI. Today, law enforcement has expanded into every government agency. The army is being used domestically in drug enforcement and border control. Five vast new federal prisons are in the process of construction. We have over 3,000 on Death Row, ever-expanding police powers, ever-diminishing civil liberties, roadblocks and random searches with dogs of one's person, surveillance from helicopters, infra-red imagers and kindred snooping. Urine and blood samples are required for menial jobs. McCarthyism at its peak could not begin to match the far-reaching state fascism that is everyday America now.

Just take one zone of capitalist control: agribusiness. So powerful is the agribiz lobby today that to criticize the poison spray in apples is a felony. To claim that your product is better because it is not steeped in techno-dip or irradiated is illegal. The entire language of food description has been captured by the food industry.

There is an alternative to barbaric capitalism or "global management." A dissident Vietnamese communist, Dr. Nguyen Khac Vien, put it well back in 1991, just as the Soviet Union was falling apart: "If a world front of capital is being founded, its counterweight, the democratic popular front on a world scale, is also in formation. ... Freedom of the press, of association, of petition, of demonstration, to strike and of election are the forms of struggle of our epoch." Amid evolving capitalism, these are revolutionary ideas, and the politics of Marx's "Manifesto" are as potent as ever.