Annotated bibliography for http://www.46LiverpoolSt.org/Manifest

to mark the 153.35th aniversary (very precise detail needed when I know when/if it will be published - original date mid Feb 1848)

[add illustrations - in this order, how many? all to scale with 1:5 or whatever declared - very formal and library-like]

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Frederic L. Bender, New York: W.W. Norton & Co. 1988, ISBN 0-393-95616-4 
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto' (1848), in Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan, New York: Prometheus Books 1988, ISBN 0-87975-446-X 
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto' (1848), in eds. Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, The Communist Manifesto Now, Rendlesham: The Merlin Press 1998, ISBN 0-85036-473-6
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, 'The Communist Manifesto' (1848), in ed. Dirk J. Struik, Birth of The Communist Manifesto, New York: International Publishers 1993, ISBN 7178-0320-1
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition (1848), London: Verso 1998, ISBN 1-85984-898-2 
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore, London: Pluto Press 1996, ISBN 0-7453-1034-6
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Samuel H. Beer, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts 1987, ISBN 0-88295-055-X 
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. David McLellan, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-283437-1 
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974, ISBN 0-1402.0915-8
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Samuel Moore, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics 1985, ISBN 0-14-044478-5
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), ed. Christopher Phelps, New York: Monthly Review Press 1998, ISBN 0-85345-936-3 
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), trans. Paul M. Sweezy, New York: Monthly Review Press 1998, ISBN 85345-062-5
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Kommunistiska Manifestet  (1848), trans. Per-Olaf Mattsson, Stockholm/Malmš: Vertigo Fšrlag 1998, ISBN 91-973112-0-0 
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Det Kommunistiske Manifest (1848), Oslo: Falken Forlag 1984, ISBN 82-7009-178-2 
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Det Kommunistke Manifestet (1848), trans. Frans Masareel, Oslo: Falken Forlag 1984, ISBN 82-7009-178-2
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest (1848), eds. Tim Brennan and Geoff Cox, London: Working Press 1999, ISBN 1-870736-48-6 
Carlos Marx and Federico Engels, Manifiesto Comunista (1848), Madrid: B‡sica de Bolsillo Akal 1997, ISBN 84-460-0927-7
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto Comunista (1848), Sao Paulo: Ched 1982,  80-1063
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest Komunisticke Partije (1848), trans. Mosa Pijade, Zagreb: Bastard Biblioteka 1998, ISBN 953-6542-07-2
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei  (1848), Stuttgart: Reclam 1998, ISBN  3-15-008323-0
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifeste du Parti Communiste (1848), trans. Corinne Lyotard, Paris: Librairie GŽnŽrale Francaise 1973, ISBN 2-253-01491-5
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, 'The Manifesto of the Communist Party' (1848), in ed. Mark Cowling, The Communist Manifesto: New Interpretations, trans. Terrell Carver, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 1998, ISBN  0-7486-1035-9 
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Moscow 1999, ISBN 5-7027-0922-5
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Peking: Foreign Languages Press 1977, 1/1-E-736
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), London: Lawrence & Wishart  1983, ISBN 0-85315-732-4 
Karl Marx and Friederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), trans. and ed. Frederick Engels, New York: International Publishers 1998, ISBN 0-7178-0241-8




Alert

'The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first existence for all industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real condition of life, and his relations with his kind.
The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.'1 

Thus, Marx and Engels expressed the transition to the industrial mode of production. Undoubtedly, the mode of production has evolved since 1848, but it has not simply transformed into something else; the present phase of production still remains predicated on the speed and frequency of communications technologies as well as its organization on a global scale. Clearly then and now, these forces are not immutable, and what appears solid is in dialectical conflict with a 'melting vision'. Marshall Berman in All That is Solid Melts into Air (quoting the quote) describes this dialectical conception of modernity in fluid terms: 'it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal'.2 For Berman, what appears solid is fundamentally subject to change and influence, endlessly becoming less solid. But is this coherent vision of useful irony and contradiction still valid? 

'Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei' was first printed as a pamphlet in mid-February 1848, in the office of the Workers' Educational Association (Communistischer Arbeiterbildungsverein), 46 Liverpool Street, Bishopsgate, in the city of London. Since that date it has been reproduced in countless contexts and editions - making it not only one of the most widely read texts but also one whose message has been made literally manifest on a number of occasions to various and arguable levels of success. In a sense, it needs no introduction (and I'd hesitate to pitch myself alongside those lofty historians and intellectuals who have introduced it anyway - what do I know?). It lends itself to and requires translation and reinterpretation. Nevertheless, this process of translation and reproduction from one specific historical and cultural context to the next reveals some contradictory responses. And surely its lasting power lies in these lived contradictions? 

There was some useful irony in the sheer volume of publishing activity at the point of the 150th anniversary subjecting it to the rules and mechanisms of contemporary marketing. A classic example is the Verso edition The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, with its high production values and silky red bookmark ribbon. Verso knowingly described it as the 'Prada handbag' edition, and it was received enthusiastically with an edition of 32,000, and by June 1999 had sold 21,000 in North America and 3,400 in the UK and other export. Clearly, this indicates something about its commodity status and the market forces in which Capital appears to have commodified radical politics as something reduced to both nostalgia and fashion simultaneously. Moreover, there is some danger in a project (like this) in rendering politics aesthetic; evoking Benjamin's preferred reading: 'Communism responds by politicizing art' (offering a politics of aesthetics).3 How would one begin to approach the design and packaging of such a book - to conceive of it in terms of form and function, its use and exchange value? To simply judge a book by its cover would be a grave mistake in almost all circumstances. 

Whilst Marxism remains to some (although not that many), a potent form of analysis or even social praxis (collective action), others have simply grown rather cynical of Capital's alleged triumphal claims. In 'post-communist' Eastern Europe this must be particularly evident. Slavoj Zizek's title for another very collectable anniversary edition, published in Zagreb, makes the point: 'The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around!'4 

There is a commonplace assumption that material structures of production have been all but swept away - into a mode of information for instance. On the contrary the publishing industry is a case in point, despite the introduction of computers into the process, books are still produced through mechanical lithographic reproduction that largely remains unchanged from 1848. Furthermore, the computers themselves are assembled in factories and on production lines. Associated technological imperialism 'may well serve as a adequate shorthand to designate that enormous properly human and anti-natural [alienated] power of dead human labour stored up in our machinery'.5 I am reminded here of a similar quote: 'Ironically, it is the very people whose labour is so carefully hidden inside the hygienic white boxes on the desks on the wired world... who will be left outside in the world their work creates. In this way, the production of the material infrastructure for the internet is itself erased under the sign of the universality of its language, its claim to speak for all and with every voice...'.6 The visibility of 'totalizing' global politics is increasingly rendered invisible through clever tricks and effective marketing. Importantly, technology does not determine change but reflects the development of capital still interested in profit above human suffrage. Late Capitalism according to the economist Ernst Mandel (1978) is capitalism in a purer form - commonly described as Multinational Capitalism with its relentlessly expanding global markets and increased mobility to ensure the cheapest work-force.

Things change and things remain the same. Considered as a mode of production, capitalism is still based on the commodification of labour power, the private ownership of the means of production and hence the private appropriation of the surplus generated, with production organized for exchange and profit. In contrast, 'Statism' (Castells's term for the mode of production dominant in the state socialist or communist bloc) is based on the partial decommodification of labour power and state control over the means of production and appropriation of the surplus, with production organised towards maximizing the power of the state over society. In the 1970s according to Castells, a major global economical crisis necessitated restructuring on a global scale. Capitalist restructuring attempted to escape the social and political restrictions imposed by state-controlled industrial forces, by going global. In this way, information technologies were utilized and expanded to facilitate this organisational and growth in productivity through the development of multinational corporations. Ultimately, if only to dispute both versions of events as too straightforward, Castells asks: 'was the new technological paradigm a response by the capitalist system to overcome its internal contradictions? Or, alternatively, was it a way to ensure military superiority over the Soviet foe, responding to its technological challenge in the space race and nuclear weaponry?'7 Fashion is closely associated with war.

Clearly material concerns remain, yet are obscured in the rhetorical language of global and technological networks. For example, according to Doreen Massey, globalization hides its political specificity and the agencies that regulate and produce it.8 The rhetoric of globalization suggests we live in a unitary world in which space and time have collapsed and distance imploded, propelled by an unstoppable force that produces international free-trade, the end of the Cold war, and so on. But this present 'world order', entirely consistent with Marx's view of 'capitalism' as a world system, is far from solid and is marked by tensions and contradictions at local-global levels. A more complex mapping would reveal preferred measurements, spatialities and geographies. This is what Massey refers to as 'two completely different geographical imaginations of the world' contrasting free-trade with tight immigration legislation.9 

In the new world order, power is collective and dispersed. The economist Doug Henwood explains: 'Right now it sure looks like a truly global ruling class is constituting itself through public institutions like the I.M.F. and private ones like the Davos World Economic Forums[...] with the U.N. and N.A.T.O. acting the part of imperial enforcers, and stock markets arranging ownership and discipline,'10 but these tendencies are more difficult to oppose or offer alternatives for. To Zizek, liberal capitalism manifests as the 'real' and remains solid despite the fact that everything around it is described in terms of fundamental technological change or scientific paradigm shifts. He is drawing on a (Lacanian) distinction between reality and the 'Real' that determines reality through its unerring generative 'logic'. Herein lies what Jameson calls the 'Sartrean irony'11 wherein the totalizing system is described so effectively that the subject feels powerless to effect any change. It's all too easy to not bother voting when a single vote makes no difference if it counts at all, and the whole system is a charade - now proved beyond doubt in the Presidential elections in the USA. Although generally out of favour, totalizing thinking (by this I mean, any consensus but including class politics, for instance) is not all bad, and may simply be a strategic means of making a convincing enough case for change (rather like representational politics was intended once upon a time). On the other hand if you wish to be negative about the term, the most obvious example of totalization on a global scale is globalization itself. The recent protests against globalization and the W.T.O. (Seattle, London, Prague, etc.) might figure here - although they tend to only highlight opposition, and unfortunately for the most part do not to suggest any kind of working alternative. Correspondingly, Zizek suggests we might more readily assume the apocalyptic end of history or nature rather than a mere workable alternative to the capitalist mode of production. Even the recent anti-corporate protests against globalization are only reluctantly characterised as anti-capitalist. The problem for Zizek is: 'how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal-democratic multi-culturalism.'12 

All this points to what Zizek characterizes as the 'post-political' condition wherein, for the most part, a regressive separation takes place between cultural and economic struggles - this is typified as Anthony Giddens' 'third way' or in the UK, New Labour's ludicrous notion of the 'radical centre' (until recently prevalent in the USA too). Under liberal rule, it would seem that the diversification of constituencies of oppression works against the idea of effective political agency based on social relations of production. Zizek sees this as partly the failure of identity politics, in that the political field has become dispersed and fragmented too. Upsetting many, he goes as far as to suggest that perverse and multiple subjectivities are generated by the present conditions of global capitalism. In fact, this is the trick of capitalism to incorporate and normalise any potential threat - 'queer is the new straight' and so on. Even the 'radical' counter-culture of hacking is big business these days - in a scenario where yesterday's hacker becomes tomorrow's business executive. Clearly, the nicely packaged versions of The Communist Manifesto require close reading to balance their decorative function. Thus capital neutralises opposition by it very liberal acceptance and pseudo-tolerance of difference. In the light of this, Zizek's recent parody of the manifesto (in The Ticklish Subject, 1999) lends currency and persuasively demands a 'recentring' of political consciousness. He playfully begins:

'A spectre is haunting western academia, the spectre of the Cartesian subject. All academic powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the New Age obscurantist... and the postmodern deconstructionist... the Habermasian theorist of communication... and the Heideggarian proponent of the thought of Being... the cognitive scientist... and the Deep Ecologist... the critical (post-) Marxist... and the feminist. Where is the academic orientation which has not been accused by its opponents of not yet properly disowning the Cartesian heritage?'13 

Zizek is concerned to address this 'absent centre' of political consciousness, seemingly replaced by multiple forms of subjectivity that tend to obscure socio-economic forces. Contemporary forms of domination are expressed as fluid, multiple and rhizomic in structure like the theories that support it. The multiculturalist tendency extends to multinational interests and multimedia technologies seamlessly expressing freedom of choice, the free market and free internet connections. In contrast, new media commentators tend to think old materialist critical frameworks that embrace a concept of ideology must be rejected as they do not take sufficient account of the ways in which subjectivity is being produced as multiple and 'decentred'. The problem for Mark Poster (himself a lapsed Marxist) is that the idea of emancipatory politics is based on the idea that autonomous subject-agents can free themselves from externally imposed constraints, as if subjectivity itself was not the result of its own set of social and historical conditions, and subsequently as decentred is as the structures of the internet itself.14 He argues that critical frameworks need to be upgraded and dismisses the critical tools inherited from the industrial age, rejecting Marx for concentrating too heavily on action and institutions, and neglecting language. This may be the case but, in a way this claim in itself is subject to the same critique it proposes. In other words, the most obvious case of ideology at work is evident in the '... privileged place, somehow exempted from the turmoils of social life, which enables some subject-agent to perceive the very hidden mechanism that regulates social visibility and non-visibility'.15 So too, with this essay of course.

There have been unrelenting attempts to unlock deterministic interpretations of Marx's work on ideology. For example, Louis Althusser set about examining the possibility that ideology possesses degrees of autonomy and internal logic.16 In this way, in addition to viewing the State as the overt 'machine of repression' (what Althusser calls the 'repressive state apparatuses'), there are also more subtle and less-violent articulations of social institutions (the 'ideological state apparatuses'), that discipline us into the kind of subjectivity most suitable for the continuation of the existing relations of production - this is what he calls a process of 'interpellation'. Interpellated subjects consider themselves as being free to 'choose' and liberated from social control when in actuality the ideological matrix holds them firmly in place. This offers a neat analogy for the spurious choices that much interactivity offers the user, better described for the most part by 'interpassivity'.17 Interpassivity neatly summarises the tendency to remain active whist being passive through another, reversing the conventional sense of acting through an agent while remaining passive. His example is the engagement with the virtual pet Tamagotchi that demands attention as if alive - what he calls 'pure demand', expressing a desire that is displaced into an inanimate object.18 He draws the comparison with people's active engagement with what they think matters at a political level whilst ultimately remaining passive and subject to the bigger picture of the logic of Capital. This spurious 'freedom of choice' lies at the very heart of capitalist ideology, rather like the freedom to choose any of the supplied books on offer that accompany this essay. After all, there is the glaringly obvious fact that: 'There is no Capitalist Manifesto'.19 

Perhaps Capital comes close but is a partial view...

Manifestos are currently fashionable (fashionable enough to feature in a magazine of art and culture such as this). A search on the internet will offer countless examples of 'alternative' polemic views - such as A Manifesto for Bad Subjects in Cyberspace.20 It therefore seems all the more important to remain sceptical of the proliferation of manifestos and calls for change if they do not embrace contradiction. If contradiction is inherent in these processes, then change on all levels is inherent too. Change is built into the system, especially if the system is a generative one. For Zizek, the 'spectre of ideology' remains a 'generative matrix' regulating what appears 'old' or 'new', visible or hidden, manifest or latent, possible or impossible, as the case may be.21 The Communist Manifesto is fundamentally a description of this dialectical movement and contradictory aspect - what Berman calls 'revolutionary dynamism'.22 Moreover, globalization renders its thesis more actual than ever and the contradictions it describes appear even more pronounced and hence demonstrate the dialectical poetics of the phrase: 'all that is solid melts into air'.

 

* This essay draws upon an earlier version written with Tim Brennan, and reflects upon the web site http://www.46LiverpoolSt.org/manifest, produced in collaboration with Adrian Ward.

1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto. London: Penguin, 1985) p.83.
2 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (London: Verso, 1999) p.15.
3 Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in Illuminations, London: Fontana, 1992, p.235. A fuller quote would be: 'This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art'.
4 Slavoj Zizek, The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around!, [an introduction to the 150th Anniversary Edition of The Communist Manifesto], Zagreb: Bastard Books, 1998.
5 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991) p.35. 
6 Sean Cubitt, 'Orbis Tertius', in Third Text 47 (Summer, 1999) p.6.
7 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Blackwell 1996, p.51
8 Doreen Massey, 'Problems with Globalisation', Soundings, issue 7, Autumn 1997.
9 Massey, p.10.
10 Doug Henwood, 'Does it mean anything to be a Leninist in 2001?' (for the conference Towards a Politics of Truth: The Retrieval of Lenin, Essen, Germany, February 4, 2001) published on Nettime, 10 Feb 2001.
11 Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). 1991: xviii
12 Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: the absent centre of political ontology (London: Verso, 1999), p.4.
13 Zizek, Ibid, p.1-2.
14 Mark Poster, The Second Media Age. (Cambridge: Polity Press 1995).
15 Zizek, 1997:3
16 Louis Althusser, 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)'. In Zizek, ed. Mapping Ideology, (London: Verso 1997), pp.100-140.
17 Zizek, The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around!, p.55
18 Zizek, Ibid., p.62 but also 'Is it Possible to Traverse the Fantasy in Cyberspace?', in E & E. Wright, eds., The Zizek Reader. Oxford: Blackwell 1999, pp. 102-124.
19 Slavoj Zizek, The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around!, p.18. 
20 http://www.eserver.org/bs/18/Manifesto.html
21 Slavoj Zizek, ed., Mapping Ideology (London: Verso 1997).
22 Berman, p.20.