The Communist Manifesto
No philosopher’s reputation has plummeted in my lifetime as dramatically as that of Karl Marx. As late as the 1970s, it was still fashionable to claim an ideology deriving from Marx. Ambitious young politicians like John Reid and Alan Milburn called themselves socialists and even Marxists as comfortably as they later called themselves New Labour.
In some circles the allegation that you were not a true Marxist was considered quite hurtful, and there were heated arguments about the master’s precise meaning. “That’s an incorrect analysis,” I recall a student politician shouting across the conference floor when I worked for the National Union of Students in the early ’70s, and he meant it as a Marxian term. Marx had competing interpreters, a bit like Jesus Christ.
From that position there is only one direction to go, and that’s down. Marx’s reputation sank especially fast, until now he is widely seen as irrelevant, if not ludicrous. There were two reasons.
First, unlike a religious leader, what Marx taught was a real threat to the status quo, and he was attacked, ridiculed and denigrated in a way that, if it happened to Christ, would have the Archbishop of Canterbury prattling about persecution. And his later work had a sort of density and ideological rigidity that fed the sectarian spirit of the ideologues, but left most of us unmoved – “the bells and whistles which make his later work impenetrable to the non-believer” as Eric Hobsbawm puts it.
Marx’s real masterpiece was the much earlier Communist Manifesto, written with his collaborator Frederick Engels, and there could be no better person to establish its contemporary relevance than Hobsbawm, Britain’s most distinguished historian, and most distinguished Marxist – the man who, when historians were rushing out of the Communist Party of Great Britain after the Khrushchev revelations of 1956, stubbornly stayed inside.
In a short, lucid, authoritative introduction to this new edition of Marx and Engels’ short, lucid, incendiary manifesto, Hobsbawm writes: “The world transformed by capitalism which he described in 1848, in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognisably the world in which we live 150 years later.” He reminds us how well written the manifesto is – “the passionate conviction, the concentrated brevity, the intellectual and stylistic force of this astonishing pamphlet.”
Of course, there’s a problem, which Hobsbawm acknowledges. Whatever the virtues of the manifesto, it is, in one respect anyway, incontestably wrong. The proletariat have not risen up and destroyed capitalism, and they look less likely to do it today than they did in 1848, when at least there were revolutions going on all over Europe.
In fact, today capitalism seems more firmly established than ever. It is only in the last couple of decades that it has managed the extraordinary confidence trick of equating economic freedom – the freedom of the big corporation to do whatever it likes – with political freedom; and in Britain the gap between rich and poor has been growing steadily throughout the last three decades of neoliberal government.
So what went wrong? Hobsbawm seems to have bought the explanation that the British Communist theoretician Rajani Palme Dutt fell back on in his old age: that the revolution should have happened first in Germany, not Russia, a nation that possessed none of the Marxist criteria for a Communist revolution. In Russia, “historical conditions put success beyond reach,” says Hobsbawm.
I had not read the Communist Manifesto since I was a student at the end of the ’60s. It is as clear, as startling, as compelling as it was then, and Hobsbawm places it firmly in the 21st century.
