The Communist Manifesto Turns 160
Barbara Ehrenreich in The Nation:
This year marks the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto and capitalism—a k a “free enterprise”—seems willing to observe the occasion by dropping dead. On Monday night, some pundits were warning that the ATMs might run dry and hinting that the only safe investment left is canned beans. Apocalypse or extortion? No one seems to know, though the populist part of the populace has been leaning toward the latter. An e-mail whipping around the web this morning has the subject line “Sign on Wall Street yesterday,” and shows a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying, “JUMP! You Fuckers!”
The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about “production,” for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called “immiseration,” which, in translation, is the process you’re undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.
(Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Bons Mots and Bêtes Noires
Christopher Hitchens reviews Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism in the Times. There are a number of interesting anecdotes in the article, such as the ones about how several prominent French ex-Communists supported Sarkozy against Royal in the most recent French presidential election. But then it kind of fizzles out at the end with a tired, signature diatribe against GOD and FUNDAMENTALISM. (Via Lenin’s Tomb.)
Transcendental Revolution
No Useless Leniency:
How does Deleuze resist the problem Althusser courts – that of functionalism, in which the depth of ideological structuring appears to prevent any rupture with such a ‘system’? Deleuze argues that to perform this rupture requires the power to raise the false existent sociability to the level of a ‘transcendent exercise’ that can break this regime of commonsense. This ‘transcendental object’ is revolution as ‘the social power of difference, the paradox of society, the particular wrath of the social idea.’ (Deleuze 1994: 208)
It is better to do nothing than to work formally toward making visible what the West declares to exist.
—Alain Badiou
Communism
Mike Johnduff at Countermemory:
On the left, things seem just as nuts. There is no theory of this spread and the resistance to it, except those promising ones of micro-loans. This leaves them with the specter of Lenin: communism has not died out there either. The idea of mobilization (Zizek) and the general idea that social-democracy is, as Jean-Luc Nancy put it, a “compromise” (“Is Everything Political?”) is flawed.
Regardless, one thing is clear from all this, Communism still remains a specter—one cannot simply, as we have been doing, forget about it. The key is to see that it does not return into our thinking as a big massive homogenous thing: we are realizing that our framework for dealing with these problems remains very locally determined by Communism and Marxism in general as a model. This is chiefly Frederic Jameson’s insight, and it is to his credit that he continually insists, against the pragmatists (and one needs to apply this critique to the Lacanians and to the Nancy-type radicals too), that this is actually the greatest unifying discourse of our time.
Who, We?
Jodi Dean:
Ultimately, what bugs me the most about critiques of ‘we’ is the way that they mobilize a suspicion toward collectivity and privilege individualism. To this extent, they are little machines or engines of neoliberalism, neoliberal-bots that drive writers and thinkers to dismantle any collective sense or feeling of solidarity in advance, to suspect such sentiments rather than be responsible to them. Most of us who write in contemporary left political and media theory have been reading and writing about difference for a long time now. It’s time that we redirect the suspicions leveled toward collectivity toward suppositions of individuality and autonomy.
Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again … till there is victory; that is the logic of the people.
—Mao Zedong
(Via No Useless Leniency.)
Fed Raises Specter of Class Struggle
World Socialist Website:
The US ruling elite is determined to do everything in its power to transfer its own enormous losses onto the backs of the American working class. The unlimited bailout power being called for by the Treasury and the Fed constitutes one part of this attempt. The systematic drive to slash real wages in order to finance the return to profitability constitutes another.
Russians Vote Stalin as “Face of the Nation”
Eh-oh! History is on our side!
The Tailor of Ulm
Lucio Magri in the New Left Review:
A first task for the new era, then, is to draw up a balance sheet—in a spirit of truth, whatever the convictions with which one begins and the conclusions at which one arrives; without fabricating facts, without offering excuses or separating lived experience from its context… In sum, to recompose the thread of a titanic undertaking and dramatic decline, not seeking to make allowances or to pursue an impossible neutrality, but aiming at an approximation to the truth.
(Via No Useless Leniency, where you can find a copy of Brecht’s poem.)
Do Communists Have Better Sex?
I just came across this amazing looking film by André Meier, which is a comparative analysis of the sex lives of people living in East and West Germany. I’m currently downloading a copy, so I haven’t watched it yet, but here’s a great line from the documentary’s website:
Is dictatorship plus a planned economy the sure-fire formula for a natural aphrodisiac? At least in bed, according to the statistics, the communists were victorious.
Lisa Schiffren: Worst Person of the Day
In an unsurprisingly sleazy move from the (proto-fascist) National Review Online, Lisa Schiffren, utilizing her extraordinary apparatus of political acumen, pens a remarkable tale of Barack Obama’s “political origins,” arguing that because his parents were in an interracial marriage, they were Communists—yes, the kind of analytical profundity one would expect from this epic publication.
For a better analysis, check out Edge of the American West’s post. If you choose to read the original Schiffren article, I would suggest keeping Stuff White People Like in mind.