36
of well-being than that of the western consumer portrayed by the media. Yet there can
still be no other way forward for working people anywhere than once more building
movements oriented to ending the rule of private property - beginning with imposing
effective controls on capital mobility through cooperation between national
governments with a popular mandate to do so, and democratizing control over the major
means of production, distribution, communication and exchange.
And here the historic failure of Bolshevism weighs like a nightmare on the brains of
the living. The Russian and Chinese revolutions and their aftermaths dominated our
century; their brute achievements in face of the bitterest odds, the courage and
intelligence they mobilised and consumed, the hopes they raised and ultimately
disappointed, the immense human costs - the memory of all this is now an extra
barrier that the anti-capitalist struggle has to overcome. Giving our goals their
proper name - full democracy - will not prevent them being called communist. But the
effect of that association will not forever be negative if we can figure out how to
make our commitment to democracy genuine and our goals for it viable.
VI
'To win the battle of democracy': this is what the Manifesto saw as 'the first step
in the revolution', the primary condition for establishing 'the political supremacy'
of the working class.
In the established liberal democracies opinion polls show that representative party
politics have never been more despised, and the connection between genuine democracy
and an equitable distribution of social and economic power is becoming clear in a way
not seen, perhaps, since the struggles for franchise extension in the last century.
This is hardly surprising. Not only have national governments transferred power to
determine their citizens' economic fates to 'market forces', but as extreme
inequality has been restored and welfare-state protections have been stripped away,
they have also done their best to close down avenues for popular forces to oppose the
process, let alone reverse it. Presidential decrees of dubious constitutionality
override parliamentary majorities; legislation curtailing democratic rights is pushed
through, contrary to pre-election promises; the powers of local government are
usurped; the powers of the police are extended, the powers of juries curtailed; and
political parties - including, now, the Labour, Socialist, Social Democratic and
Democratic Left parties - are
37
themselves 'modernised' - i.e. power is taken away from their mass membership and
given to small groups of professional politicians ('people who make a business of
politics') and their market-survey, media-oriented advisers.41
Disillusion has also rapidly overtaken the much-touted globalisation of 'liberal
democracy', the so-called 'third wave' democratisation announced by Huntington and
other apologists for neoliberalism. As often as not it has turned out to mean 'no
more than a military despotism and a police state, bureaucratically carpentered,
embellished with parliamentary forms' (as Marx said of 1875 Germany).42 And in any
case international agencies are ready to intervene to ensure that elections do not
get in the way of the interests of global capital: within a few short weeks in
November-December 1997 the IMF extracted public undertakings from all the leading
candidates in the South Korean Presidential elections before the poll that they would
abide by the liberalising conditions of an IMF loan - without which an economic
disaster was categorically promised.43 Perry Anderson's comment is, if anything, an
understatement: 'Democracy is indeed now more widespread than ever. But it is also
thinner - as if the more universally available it becomes, the less active meaning it
retains.'44
A further dimension of the emasculation of democracy everywhere is the importance of
the mass media. Here the legacy of the Manifesto is not of much help. Marx recognised
that 'the class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has
control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby
generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are
subject to it.'45 But he also thought a revolutionary class could create its own
means of mental production; and while for a time they did so with their publishing
houses and newspapers, he did not foresee the way mass-circulation newspapers would
become essentially vehicles for selling advertisements, and would in this way
eventually bankrupt progressive newspapers that could not raise equivalent
advertising revenue.46 Nor could he foresee how this would be repeated on an even
more spectacular scale with radio and television after other means of communication -
and especially the public meeting, which was still the key popular medium of
communication in Marx's time - had become so much less effective.
The fact is that in most countries of the world the main 'conversation of society'
now takes place through a medium - television - from which issues of public concern
are increasingly displaced in favour of entertainment and sport, and from which, when
public
38
affairs are discussed, left perspectives are often deliberately excluded.47 This
change - whereby not only has public conversation been commodified, but a medium has
been developed that effectively gives a monopoly of public conversation to capital -
has to be one of the most politically critical developments of the last century; yet
the left has still fully to register its immense significance, and develop a
commensurate response. Solutions exist: broad public access to mainstream media is
not the stuff of fantasy but a democratic necessity, for which institutional models
already exist in various countries in Europe, in particular.48 It is high time to
make it a non-negotiable element in a mass campaign for the restoration of democratic
rights.
But this is only a beginning. Contrary to the interested arguments of the
'professional representative' class (as Raymond Williams aptly called it), periodic
elections - absolutely fundamental as they are - are anything but the only
practicable democratic institution that a complex modern society requires. There is
an rich legacy of genuinely democratic theory - and of practical experience, from the
Paris Commune through Italian Council Communism to the 'social movement'
organisations and experiments (east and west, south and north) of our own times -
that has still to be assimilated. The range of possibilities is vast, including
various kinds of monitoring, reporting and accountability without which elections
alone are ineffective as a means of controlling power; deliberative democratic
procedures (as in 'citizens' juries') that pre-empt the distortion of democratic
debate by adversarial rhetoric; various forms of democratic management
(representative supervisory and executive boards, collective managements, job
rotation, selection by lot); segmented, coalitional forms of organisation;
'socialised' information systems and institutions of the kind proposed by Diane
Elson; the list could be extended almost indefinitely.49
The left must make itself the legitimate champion of this legacy by embodying it in
its own practice, and driving its significance home to the widest possible public. We
need to expose at the same time the way so much local grass roots popular activity is
coming to be structured and appropriated by today's modernizing elites (including the
World Bank working through NGOs). The capitalist class will undoubtedly not
relinquish the power they have recently re-established behind their pseudodemocratic
facade without a bitter fight; but the first necessity is still to articulate a
convincing, practicable and consistent conception of genuine democracy to set against
it. If the point of drawing on the legacy of the Manifesto is indeed 'to exaggerate
the given task in the
39
imagination, rather than to flee from solving it in reality, to recover the spirit of
revolution, rather than to set its ghost walking again',50 then bringing to life
these visions of radical popular democracy must also be at the very top of our
agenda.
The Social Democratic parties - not to mention the Bolsheviks failed to do this
precisely because the political forms they created, or adapted to, sapped the 'spirit
of revolution'. It was because Marx was so sensitive to the danger of bureaucracy
sapping the spirit of revolution that he made so much of what the Paris Commune
suggested about workers discovering new radical democratic means of avoiding this.
Yet the notorious 'statism' of socialism in this century was also perhaps inscribed,
it must be said, in the Manifesto's own conception of what the proletariat would need
to do, at least in the short run, when it achieved power, above all in the stress it
placed on the centralisation of control over credit, communications and production in
the hands of the state - not only to divest the bourgeoisie of its power, but also in
order 'to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.'
What inspired so many Social Democrats and Communists in the twentieth century was
precisely this idea that planning would be more efficient than markets. When,
however, neither the Communists nor the Social Democrats found that planning
production enabled them to displace capitalism ('bury' it, as Khrushchev said), they
came to terms with it: the Communists through 'peaceful co-existence', the Social
Democrats through the Keynesian welfare state. The radical democratic vision was
sacrificed; and this eventually paved the way for the neo-liberal reaction. It was
the neo-liberals, in successfully deploying the rhetoric of revolution to promote
market freedom as the 'common sense' of the era, who showed that capital, even at the
end of the twentieth century, still retained the spirit of bourgeois revolution and
the capacity make the world in its image.51 But capital's idea of freedom brought to
the fore once more the contradiction which had first surfaced during the French
Revolution, between private capital and political equality.52 It is this, together
with the destructive social effect of global free markets - epitomized in Mrs.
Thatcher's notorious statement 'that there is no such thing as society' - that makes
the Manifesto's charge that the bourgeoisie is no longer 'fit to rule' seem so very
contemporary: 'society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its
existence is no longer compatible with society.'
Is it too much to hope that the left can learn valuable lessons from neo-liberalism's
sweeping victories over both neo-corporatist and
40
central- command forms of planning? In his Preface to the 1888 English edition of the
Manifesto Engels wrote: 'The very events and vicissitudes of the struggle against
capital, the defeats even more than the victories, could not help bringing home to
men's minds the insufficiency of their favourite nostrums, and preparing the way for
a more complete insight into the true conditions of working-class emancipation.'53
The original new lefts critique of both Bolshevism and Social Democracy pointed in
the right direction -that is, towards democracy over planning, and towards social
revolution rather than co-existence. But the failure of the new left either to
transform the existing Social Democratic and Communist parties or to found viable new
ones led a strong current of left-wing opinion to give up on both socialism and the
working class, in favour of a more diffuse, 'decentred' conception of 'radical
democracy'. This stance swept under the carpet the irreconcilability of democracy
with private property that the French Revolution had itself so clearly brought to
light - and this was something that could hardly be ignored in the era of
globalization and neoliberalism. The 'free development of each' can only be 'the
condition for the free development of all' in so far as private property is
abolished.
This, in other words, must come clearly back onto the agenda. Once again, as in the
Manifesto, it must be made clear that this does not mean personal possessions, that
socialism 'deprives no [one] of the power to appropriate the product of society; all
that it does is to deprive [anyone] of the power to subjugate the labour of others by
means of such appropriation.' And to this end we too need to put for-ward practical
policies, as the Manifesto did with its ten-point programme, that can begin to make
'inroads on the rights of property, the kinds of 'measures... which appear
economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of the movement,
outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the social order.'54
It is sobering to note how far the measures they put forward are still relevant
today. John Bellamy Foster, in his important essay in this volume on the Manifesto
and the environment, makes this point regarding the passages that have to do with
land policy, especially the one which calls for 'the improvement of the soil
generally in accordance with a common plan.' Equally relevant is the Manifesto's
proposal for 'a heavy progressive or graduated income tax', given the massive
redistribution of income and wealth from the poor to the rich over the past twenty
years. And the unprecedented power which capital mobility now places in the hands of
the bourgeoisie, not to mention
41
the financial instability that accompanies it, makes the Manifesto's call for credit
control no less relevant, and moreover prefigures the proposals for capital controls
that are now being put forward even on the liberal and social democratic left, not
just by Marxist political economists writing in the Socialist Register.55
Contemporary proposals for the radical redistribution of working time and life-long
education, such as those advanced by Greg Albo in last year's Socialist Register,56
are also prefigured in the Manifesto's calls for the 'equal liability of all to
labour' and 'combination of education with industrial production. The legacy of the
Manifesto is very much present, in other words, in the most sophisticated socialist
economic proposals being advanced today, such as Albo's ten-point programme for
achieving 'egalitarian, ecologically-sustainable reproduction' through measures
directed at 'expanding the scale of democracy while reducing the scale of
production'.57
The struggle to implement these measures must be both national and global; and this
too is very much part of the Manifesto's legacy. While it called on the workers of
the world to unite, it also argued that 'the proletariat of each country must . .
first of all settle things with its own bourgeoisie' - because to accomplish
anything, the workers 'must first acquire political supremacy, which meant winning
power in the nation-state. But then as now, too, 'united action, of the leading ...
countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the
proletariat.'58 It is inconceivable, for example, that effective capital controls can
be put in place without such cooperation; yet this implies a wave of national
struggles that will commit the leading states to them.
This multiple set of conditions explains the superabundance of 'firsts' in the
Manifesto. Yet all these first steps and conditions are themselves conditional on yet
another, even more primary: the 'formation of the proletariat into a class.' The
various other kinds of socialist so mordantly criticised in Part III of the Manifesto
had one common fault in Marx's eyes: that of seeing socialism in terms of the
introduction of measures 'for the benefit of the working class' by people 'outside
the working-class movement . . . looking rather to the 'educated' classes for
support'.59 The priority Marx attached to the 'formation of the proletariat into a
class' needs to be understood in terms of his commitment to the self-emancipation of
the workers. But this did not mean merely the formation of unions and parties that
would express the particular interests of workers. 'The basic thought running through
the Manifesto', as Engels later put it, was that the
42
class oppression and conflict that has marred all previous human history could only
be ended once humanity reached 'a stage where the exploited and oppressed class (the
proletariat) can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits it (the
bourgeoisie), without at the same time for ever freeing the whole of society from
exploitation, oppression and class struggles.'60
The working classes' lack of credibility as general emancipators in our time not only
explains why the feminist and ecology movements, engaged in struggles crucial to
human emancipation, have often defined themselves in opposition to the working class;
it also explains why, for the first time in a century, and despite the rise of the
new social movements, we lack a sense that there is an alternative to capitalism. The
separation of the social movements from working class politics, unfortunate but
understandable, tragically became crystallized into dogma by a generation of
intellectuals. As Edward Thompson noted in the Socialist Register as early as 1973:
'There were real reasons for this [dismissal of the working class as an agent of
general emancipation] but the writing off did damage to intellectual growth itself.'
He went on to say, in his famous 'Open Letter To Leszek Kolakowski':
You appear to share this instant dismissal, writing: . . . 'Let us imagine what the
"dictatorship of the proletariat" would mean if the (real, not imaginary) working
class took over exclusive political power now in the U.S.' The absurdity of the
question appears (in your view) to provide its own answer. But I doubt whether you
have given to the question a moment of serious historical imagination: you have
simply assumed a white working class, socialized by capitalist institutions as it is
now, mystified by the mass media as it is now, structured into competitive
organizations as it is now, without self-activity or its own forms of political
expression: i.e. a working class with all the attributes of subjection within
capitalist structures which one then 'imagines' to achieve power without changing
either those structures or itself. which is, I fear, a typical example of the fixity
of concept which characterizes much capitalist ideology.61
Of course, the question of how the alteration of people 'on a mass scale' can come
about is a huge one, to which there is no ready-made answer. But, to repeat, classes
are never frozen and fixed, they are constantly changing; and there is good reason to
look forward to - and to work for - developments through which working classes will
increasingly acquire a broad emancipatory outlook, a 'spirit of revolution'
expressive of the full range of identities they comprise. Their potential power can
in any case now only be fully realized if, far from trying to ignore or efface these
differences, working class organisations express and gain strength from the plurality
of identities that make up the
43
proletariat. The recomposition of the proletariat that has been going on in recent
decades 'before our eyes' (to employ, in a particularly relevant context, another of
Marx's favourite terms)62 needs to be soberly examined from this perspective, as the
essays in this volume by David Harvey, Sam Gindin, Sheila Cohen and Kim Moody seek to
do. What is certainly clear is how little help the parties that once based themselves
on the working classes have been in this respect. Nothing speaks more clearly than
this to the need for new ones.
For the moment we might seek inspiration from the remarkable
communist-internationalists of the 1830s and '40s who were then trying to fashion
appropriate organizations through which working people could develop themselves.
After the leaders of League of the Just were expelled from France in 1839 they made
their way to London, where Schapper, Bauer and Moll founded the German Workers'
Educational Society. We could do worse today than emulate their efforts, as
advertised on one of the Society's posters:
The main principle of the Society is that men can only come to liberty and
self-consciousness by cultivating their intellectual faculties. Consequently, all the
evening meetings are devoted to instruction. One evening English is taught, on
another, geography, on a third history, on the fourth, drawing and physics, on a
fifth, singing, on a sixth, dancing and on the seventh communist politics.63
NOTES
We are grateful to Greg Albo, Fred Bienefeld, Martin Eve, Sam Gindin, Margie Mendell,
Ellen Wood and Alan Zuege for their comments and criticisms on an earlier draft of
this essay.
1. 'Ultimately, when stubborn historical facts had dispersed all intoxicating effects
of self-deception, this form of Socialism ['Petty-Bourgeois Socialism'] ended in a
miserable fit of the blues' (Karl Marx 'The Manifesto of the Communist Party', in
Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings Volume I, D. Fernbach (ed.),
Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974, p. 90. On 'new times' see Stuart Hall and Martin
Jacques (eds.), New Times. The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, London,
Lawrence and Wishart and Marxism Today, 1989, a collection of articles published by
Marxism Today in the late 1980s. The book ended by suggesting that Gorbachev's
perestroika was an inspiring example of the politics needed for 'new times', and
Marxism Today closed soon after Gorbachev's fall. On 'radicalism of the centre' as
articulated by the Blair leadership of the Labour Party see Leo Panitch and Colin
Leys, The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour, London, Verso,
1997, chapter 11.
2. On these 'new populations' at the end of the twentieth century, see Nigel Harris,
The New Untouchables: Immigration and the New World Worker, London,
44
Penguin, 1996.
3. A 'teach-in' in Toronto-on 'challenging corporate rule', sponsored by the Council
of Canadians in November, 1997 drew over 1,500 people. One press report headed its
account 'Not Scared of the C-Word', The Varsity, 11 November, 1997.
4. Boris Kagarlitsky, 'The Unfinished Revolution', Green-Left Weekly, Sydney,
Australia, 5 November, 1997.
5. The most dramatic examples are the 'melt-down' of Canada's Progressive
Conservatives, who went from being the governing party to holding only two seats in
the Federal Parliament in the election of 1993, and the British Conservatives, who
after 18 years in office pursuing neoliberal policies were reduced to less than a
quarter of the parliamentary seats (and none at all in Scotland or Wales) in the
election of 1997. Even without such dramatic collapses, it was noteworthy that by
1997 social democratic parties were in office in 12 of the 15 states of the EU.
6. Giovanni Arrighi, 'Workers of the World at Century's End', Review XIX/3, Summer
1996, pp. 339-40.
7. The UK, which had the longest working hours in the EU, also had the fastest rising
index of inequality (second only to New Zealand within the OECD), while the numbers
of people unable to work due to chronic illness rose steadily from about 600,000 in
1979 to nearly 1.8 million in 1997 (equal to the total of those officially
unemployed). Britain was also second to the OECD in the proportion of the population
in jail, while in the USA, which ranked first, the probability in 1997 of any adult
being jailed at some time in his or her lifetime was 5.1 per cent (9 per cent for all
men, and 28 per cent for all black men). Business Week August 11, 1997.
8. Alexander Cockburn, 'The Witch Hunt and the Crash', The Nation, November 17, 1997.
'Between 1992 and 1995, 15 percent of people holding jobs for more than one year lost
those jobs; their new jobs, if they found one, paid 14 percent less on average. The
rate of job loss in the nineties 'boom' is higher than in the recession years of the
early eighties or of 1990-9l.' Cockburn adds that 'about one-third of the U.S. labor
force makes $15,000 or less'. This reflects the fact that, as Kim Moody reports: 'The
80% of the total workforce in the US that hold working-class jobs saw their real
average weekly earnings slip by 18% from 1973 through 1995. Real hourly earnings in
that period fell by 12%, indicating that the growth of part-time work had reduced the
average weekly income of US workers by another 6 percentage points.' Kim Moody,
Workers in a Lean World, London, Verso, 1997, p. 188.
9. 'Fighting the class war', The Economist, 27 September, 1997.
10. 'The Downsizing of America, The New York Times, 5 March, 1996.
11. Cynthia Cockburn, The Local State, London, Pluto, 1977, p. 118.
12. Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal and Hilary Wainwright, Beyond the Fragments,
London, Merlin Press, 1979.
13. Writing in the mid-1980s, when he was a close adviser to Jesse Jackson, Vicente
Navarro chastised 'post-Marxists' whose proposals for 'a constantly shifting pattern
of alliances ... [were] but a recycling of the old pluralist-interest groups'
theories that have been the dominant form of political discourse and practice in the
US for many years. The emergence and importance of social movements in the US - the
main trademark of US political behaviour and mass mobilization - are a direct
consequence of the absence of class-based practices by the dominated
45
classes... This is not to deny the enormous importance for the left to be sensitive
to forms of exploitation other than class exploitation, nor to ignore the importance
of establishing coalitions with strata outside the working class.... The operational
meaning of this awareness is not, however, the mere aggregate of the demands of each
component of the 'people'. Class practices are not the mere aggregate of 'interest
group' politics .... This was, incidentally, the main problem with Jesse Jackson's
'rainbow coalition' ... with [its] heavy emphasis on the rights of blacks without
providing enough linkage with other components of the working class.' 'The 1980 and
1984 Elections and the New Deal', The Socialist Register 1985/6, pp. 199-200.
14. Margaret Kecks account of the Workers' Party of Brazil in the 1980s, offers a
rich portrait of what this entails in our own time: 'The PT's origins were deeply
influenced by the perception of widespread mobilization around social demands in the
late 1970s; in the early 1980s, as it became clear that local organization around
specific equity demands did not automatically translate into a societal movement, the
party was placed in the ambiguous position of having to help organize what it was
claiming to represent.' The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil, New Haven,
Yale University Press 1992, p. 242.
15. 'We know that heed must be paid to the institutions, customs and traditions of
the various countries, and we do not deny that there are countries, such as America
and England, and if I was familiar with its institutions, I might include Holland,
where the workers may attain their goals by peaceful means. That being the case, we
must recognise that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will
have to be force; a resort to force will be necessary one day to set up the rule of
labour'; Speech on the Hague Congress, in David Fernbach (ed.), Marx: The First
International and After, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974, p. 322.
16. See Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, London, Routledge, 1983.
17. Frederick Engels, 1895 Preface to Marx's The Class Struggles in France, in
Marx-Engels Selected Works, Vol. 1, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962,
p. 135.
18. The Prophet Armed, Oxford, OUP, 1954, pp. 338-9.
19. Preface to The Class Struggles in France, p. 132.
20. Ibid., p. 134.
21. For an excellent discussion of the unfortunate use made of this in the German
SPD, see Gugliemeo Carchedi, Class Analysis and Social Research, Oxford, Blackwell,
1987, ch. 1.
22. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, in Karl Marx, The First International and
After. Political Writings Volume III, D. Fernbach (ed.), Harmondsworth, Penguin,
1974, p. 213.
23. This is the phrase that Ronald Aronson repeats like a mantra throughout his After
Marxism, New York, Guilford, 1995.
24. John Gray, 'Socialism for the unconverted', The Times Higher Education
Supplement, October 6, 1995.
25. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes. The short Twentieth Century 1914-1991, London,
Michael Joseph, 1994, pp. 564-5.
26. 'Why the Left lost utopia, the Guardian, 24 November, 1996.
27. The Future of Socialism (1956), New York 1963, pp. 7-16.
28. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism, London, I.B. Taurus, 1996, pp.
558-9.
46
29. Gabriel Kolko, Century of War, New York, New Press, 1995, p. 457.
30. See, e.g., John Cassidy, 'The Next Thinker: The Return of Karl Marx', The New
Yorker, October 20, 1997, pp. 248-59.
31. Engels wrote to Marx on 23-24 November 1847, just before the London Congress of
the Communist League which commissioned Marx to write the Manifesto: 'As more or less
history has got to be related in it ... I am bringing what I have done here [Paris]
with me; it is in simple narrative form, but miserably worded, in fearful haste. I
begin: What is Communism? And then straight to the proletariat - history of its
origin, difference from former labourers, development of the antithesis between
proletariat and bourgeoisie, crises, conclusions.' (Marx-Engels, Selected
Correspondence, Moscow Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d., pp. 52-53.)
32. See Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, pp. 289-93; and Michael Kidron and Ronald Segal,
The State of the World Atlas, London, Penguin, 1995, pp. 28-9.
33. Giovanni Arrighi, 'Marxist Century, American Century: The Making and Remaking of
the World Labour Movement', New Left Review 179, 1990, pp. 29-63.
34. International Labour Organization, World Employment 1996/97, Geneva and
Washington, D.C., 1996.
35. A projection of 370 million 'surplus' rural workers by the year 2000 appeared in
the China Daily on December 2, 1997, citing a report by the State Council issued on
June 11, 1997.
36. The Swedish/Swiss engineering transnational corporation, ABB, which between 1990
and 1996 'shed 59,000 jobs in western Europe and North America while creating 56,000
chiefly in Asia and eastern Europe' was as a consequence 'heavily exposed in Asia's
tiger economics. Confronted with government decisions to abandon investment projects
in the region, [ABB] promptly announced it was laying off 10,000 in western Europe
and North America.. .' Financial Times, October 24, 1997.
37. As the Manifesto puts it: 'The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy
artillery with which [the bourgeoisie] forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate
hatred of foreigners to capitulate.'
38. This is a metaphor Marx himself was wont to use, albeit more aptly in relation to
Russian agriculture. See Shanin., p. 115.
39. 'Luddism must be seen as arising at the crisis-point in the abrogation of
paternalist legislation, and the imposition of the political economy of laissez-faire
upon, and against the will and conscience of, the working people ... True enough,
much of this paternalist legislation had been in origin not only restrictive, but,
for the working man, punitive. Nevertheless, there was within it the shadowy image of
a benevolent corporate state, in which there were legislative as well as moral
sanctions against the unscrupulous manufacturer or the unjust employer, and in which
the journeymen were a recognized 'estate', however low, in the realm... These ideals
may never have been much more than ideals; by the end of the eighteenth century they
may have been threadbare. But they had a powerful reality, none the less, in the
notion of what ought to be, to which artisans, journeymen, and many small masters
appealed.' E.P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London, Penguin,
1968, p. 594.
40. In September 1997 the Russian State Duma reported that life expectancy had fallen
far below the levels of other industrialised countries; per capita
47
consumption of meat, milk and fish had fallen by about a third between 1990 and 1996,
the rate of illness among schoolchildren had increased fivefold and only ten per cent
of high-school graduates could be considered healthy, with forty per cent chronically
ill. Toronto Star September 13, 1997.
41. In North America, Engels wrote, 'each of the two major parties which alternately
succeed each other in power is itself in turn controlled by people who make a
business of politics, who speculate on seats in the legislative assemblies... or who
make a living by carrying on agitation for their party and on its victory arc
rewarded with positions.' Introduction to Marx's The Civil War in France in Robert C.
Tucker (ed), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York, Norton 1972, p. 535.
42. Marx, 'Critique of the Gotha Programme' ('Marginal Notes on the Programme of the
German Workers' Party), in Fernbach (ed.), The First International and After, p. 356.
43' Report on Business, The Globe and Mail, Toronto, 4 December 1997.
44. Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement, London, Verso, 1992, p. 356.
45. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, New York, International Publishers, 1947,
P. 39.
46. James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power Without Responsibility: The Press and
Broadcasting in Britain, London, Fontana, 1981.
47. See e.g. Brian McNair, News and journalism in the UK, London, Routledge 1994;
Douglas Kellner, Television and the Crisis of Democracy, Boulder, Westview 1990.
48. For rich analyses of existing and possible ways of restoring the media to
democracy see James Curran, 'Mass Media and Democracy Revisited' in J. Curran and P
Gourevitch, eds., Mass Media and Society, London, Arnold, 1996; and Don Hazen and
Julie Winokur (eds.), We the Media.- A Citizen! Guide to Fighting For Media
Democracy, New York, The New Press, 1997.
49. On citizens' juries see John Stewart, Elizabeth Kendall and Anna Coote, Citizens'
Juries, London, IPPR 1994. On the idea of a socialised market see Diane Elson,
'Market Socialism or Socialization of the Market?,' New Left Review, 172, 1988. On
the GLC and democratic 'deepening' in a Swedish women's education centre, see Hilary
Wainwright Arguments for a New Left, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994, chapters 5 to 7; On
democratic management in the workplace and the state, see respectively, Michael
Albert and Robin Hahnel, Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty
First Century, Boston, South End Press, 1991, and Gregory Albo, David Langillc, and
Leo Panitch, eds., A Different Kind of State. Popular Power and Democratic
Administration, Toronto, Oxford, 1993.
50. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile.
Political Writings.- Volume II, D. Fernbach (ed), London, Penguin, 1973, p. 148. See
Leo Panitch, 'Capitalism, Socialism and Revolution: The Contemporary Meaning of
Revolution in the West,' Socialist Register 1989, London, Merlin, 1989.
In addition to Moss, infra, see F.L. Bender's excellent introduction to his edition
of The Communist Manifesto, New York, Norton, 1988, esp. pp. 3-4.
53, Frederick Engels, Preface to the 1888 English edition of the Manifesto, in
Bender, ed. p. 47. His claim that lessons had been learned, coinciding as it did with
the rise of industrial unionism and mass working class parties, was quite valid.
54. The measures were advanced as only 'generally applicable': they would be
'different in different countries'. And when Marx and Engels a quarter of a century
later wrote their first preface to the Manifesto (for the 1872 German
48
edition), they insisted that 'no special stress' should be laid on the measures
proposed, and that the whole 'passage would, in many respects, be very differently
worded today.' See Bender., p. 43.
55. See William Greider, 'Saving the Local Economy, The Nation, 15 December 1997 as
well as the declaration and memorandum by 25 European economists, Full Employment,
Social Cohesion and Equity for Europe: Alternatives to Competitive Austerity, May
1997. In the Socialist Register, among others essays, see especially Jim Crotty and
Gerald Epstein, 'In Defence of Capital Controls' Socialist Register 1996, London,
Merlin, 1996.
56. Gregory Albo, 'A World Market of Opportunities? Capitalist Obstacles and Left
Economic Policy, Socialist Register 1997, esp. pp. 27-39.
57. Ibid, p. 28.
58. 'The text actually says 'leading civilized countries'. Without wishing to burke
the question of how far Marx's use of Hegel's concept of 'world-historical' nations
(in which the principle of 'freedom' had been most fully realised, etc.) involved
assumptions of a racialist nature, we have omitted the word 'civilized' in the
quotation in order to focus on the main point, which remains valid - the need for
joint action by the leading or major economic powers.
59. Engels, Preface to the 1888 English edition, in Bender, ed., p. 48.
60. Preface to the 1883 German edition in Bender, ed., pp. 45-6.
61. E.R Thompson, 'An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski', The Socialist Register 1973,
London, Merlin, 1973, pp. 84 and 99-100 n. 69.
62. Marx's observations on the contemporary study of social and economic history are
worth recalling: 'Much research has been carried out to trace the different
historical phases that die bourgeoisie has passed through ... But when it is a
question of making a precise study of strikes, combinations and other forms in which
the proletarians carry out before our eyes their organisation as a class, some are
seized with real fear and others display a transcendental disdain.' The Poverty of
Philosophy, Moscow, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1956, p. 196.
63. Quoted in Bender's introduction to the Manifesto., p. 10.
-------------------------------------------
Macdonald Stainsby
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