Specters of Marx:

The first noun in the Manifesto is 'Spectre' and it is repeated: 'A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of communism' ('Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa - das Gespenst des Kommunismus', more accurately, from the German 'Gespenst' is Hobgoblin - source? However, this would rather spoil Derrida's neat analysis and clearly the 'spectre' has relevance). It has become a fashionable term for cultural analysis perhaps because of its ambiguous form (Mavor article? And the more overt references in Slavoj Zizek's writings) and the [Spectre] mailing list suggests a wider interpretation of this term, thus: 
[look it up at http://coredump.buug.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre]
For Derrida, the use of the term 'spectre' suggests a virtual, ineffective, insubstantial state of being, a simulacrum, a ghostly presence. He says: 
'This logic of haunting would not be merely larger and more powerful than an ontology or a thinking of Being in the "to be or not to be," but nothing is less certain' (1994: 10)
The reference to Hamlet's ghost evokes this sense of the silent ghost, the apparition of the spirit of Marxism (perhaps more so than Marx's alleged favourite Shakespeare play Timon of Athens).
 
Derrida continues: 'A traditional scholar does not believe in ghosts - nor in all that could be called the virtual space of spectrality. There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living, being and non-being ("to be or not to be," in the conventional reading), in the opposition between what is present and what is not, for example in the form of objectivity.' (1994: 11)

The Manifesto opens with this sense of indeterminancy (it is no 'dogma machine' as Derrida puts it, 1994: 13). The example of Marx confiding to Engels that: 'What is certain is that I am not a Marxist' disputes any sense of absolute form and points to the problem of (historical, political) translatability: 'How is one to receive, how is one to understand a speech, how is one to inherit it when it does not let itself be translated from itself into itself?' (1994: 34; even Derrida sees that in saying 'I am not a Marxist', Marxism is registered. And how could Marx be a Marxist? It is clear he could not both be a follower of his own thought without becoming a ghost of his former self). 

There is a certain ghostly quality to the manifesto itself and its relevance to the present historical moment. Marx and Engels point to the need for continual reassessment of their theses (Engels, in the 1888 preface explicitly talks of the 'aging' process of the text) in keeping with their view of historical processes. Derrida is impressed by this sense of self-critique: 
'What other thinker has ever issued a similar warning in such an explicit fashion? Who has ever called for the transformation to come of their own theses?... so as to take account there, another account, the effects of rupture and restructuration? And so as to incorporate in advance, beyond any possible programming, the unpredictability of new knowledge, new techniques, and new political givens.' (1994: 13). 
This is how the text remains both relevant and urgent in its response to global capital and technology. Even Derrida (a post-Marxist), agrees that:
'At a time when a new world order is attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has managed to rid itself of all Marx's ghosts.' (1994: 37)

In a note to 'Marx's Three Voices', Blanchot emphasises similar qualities in Marx's use of language:
'... it is the urgency of what it announces, bound to an impatient and always excessive demand, since excess is its only measure: thus calling to the struggle and even (which is what we hasten to forget) postulating "revolutionary terror," recommending "permanent revolution," and always designating the revolution not as a final necessity, but as imminence, since it is characteristic of the revolution, if it opens and traverses time, to offer no delay, giving itself to be lived as ever-present demand.' (1986: 19)

This sense of inheritance is crucial - in tackling the idea of the 'the end of history', and whether this implies the end of Marxism and Marxist theory as Fukuyama insists. Benjamin, as historical materialist, would no doubt regard this with scepticism: 
'The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption.... There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.' ('Uber den Begriff der Geschicht' pp. 253-4, check this). Similarly, Shakespeare's Timon of Athens (Marx's alleged favourite play) is apt in this regard: 'How goes the world? - It wears, sir, as it grows'. Derrida sees this as the nature of growth, in the context of global expansion (1994: 78) and in turn proving that 'The time is out of joint'; Hamlet would do as well in describing how the world goes badly.

In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama's new 'gospel' (Derrida calls Fukuyama's work the new 'gospel', to refer to its Christian overtones) does indeed insist on the triumph of neo-liberalism over Marxist 'materialist economism' correcting its 'Hegelian-Christian "pillar" of recognition or that "thymotic" element of the soul' (note: 'thymotic' is the desire for recognition), and making 'the State of the end of history' now rest on the 'twin pillars of economics and recognition' (1994: 61). Fukuyama is drawing upon Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit here but also the earlier work of Kojve (Alexander Kojve (1947), Introduction ˆ la lecture de Hegel: Leons sur "La PhŽnomŽnologie de l'Esprit", Paris: Gallimard), and his 'postscript on post-history and post-historical animals' in looking at the post-war United States; thinking the United States, in 1947 (and later Japan), had reached the final stage of 'Marxist communism' (1994: 70 & 72). In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel 'transfigures the individual into 'consciousness' and the world into 'object' - both life and history are thoroughly transfigured into 'relations of consciousness to the object' (Derrida, 1994: 123). For Fukuyama's concept of history, Hegel is preferred over Marx but both are key reference points, and neo-liberal democracy is now the actual reality and ideal.

On the other hand, Marx looks to Hegel and adapts the famous remark on the repetition of history: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' (1968: 96) Is it simply that the Fukuyama thesis is farcical? Revolutions perhaps especially repeat themselves even if they appear as counter-revolutions - from generation to generation; they are generative in every sense of providing for new conditions. Marx concludes that men make their own history, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: 
'Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted by the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.' (Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 1968: 96)

Thus the living borrow from the dead - so to speak. This is both the pulse of history and its revolutionary frequency. According to Marx, the more the present is in crisis, the more one has to borrow from the 'spirits of the past' (the spectre - 'gespenst') to evoke revolutionary crisis (the spirit of the revolution - 'geist'). This distinction between spirit and spectre is made clearly in The German Ideology (ref. here?): the spectre is of the spirit, and follows it like its ghostly 'other'.

This sounds rather like the distinction between use-value and exchange value - one as a ghost of its former self. Evoking Benjamin's puppet and automaton figures in Theses on the Philosophy of History perhaps, Derrida stretches his poetic license in describing (actually referring to a wooden table), the Thing (life, beast, object, commodity - in other words, spectre): 
'which is no longer altogether a thing, here it goes and unfolds (entwickelt), it unfolds itself, it develops what it engenders through a quasi-spontaneous generation' and 'it is the contradiction of automatic autonomy, mechanical freedom, technical life. Like every thing, from the moment it comes onto the stage of the market, the table resembles a prosthesis of itself. Autonomy and automatism, but automatism of this wooden table that spontaneously puts itself into motion, to be sure, and seems thus to animate, animalize, spiritualize, spiritize itself, but while remaining an artifactual body, a sort of automaton, a puppet, a stiff and mechanical doll whose dance obeys the technical rigidity of a program. [...] Becoming like a living being, the table resembles a prophetic dog that gets up on its four paws, ready to face up to its fellow dogs: an idol would like to make the law. [...] The automaton mimes the living. The Thing is neither dead or alive but dead and alive at the same time.[...] The commodity table, the headstrong dog, the wooden head faces up, we recall, to all other commodities. The market is a front, a front among fronts, a confrontation. Commodities have business with other commodities, these hardheaded specters have commerce among themselves. [...] That is what makes them dance. So it appears.    
(194: 152-5)

In this production of the commodity form, labour too becomes ghostly, workers become ghosts. Derrida explains 'this phastasmagoria of a commerce between market things': 
'when a piece of merchandise seems to enter into a relation, to converse, speak and negotiate with another, corresponds at the same time to a denaturing, a denaturalization, and a dematerialization of the thing become commodity, of the wooden table when it comes to stage as exchange-value and no longer use-value. For commodities, as Marx is going to point out, do not walk by themselves, they do not go to market on their own in order to meet other commodities. This commerce among things stems from this phantasmagoria. The autonomy lent to commodities corresponds to an anthropomorphic projection. The latter inspires the commodities, it breathes the spirit into them, a human spirit... (1994: 157) 
It is as if the life is sucked out of the worker by the commodity as a vampire. The commodity and correspondingly the worker are the living dead. It is only at this commodity stage that the spectre enters the scene.

Can this be simply transferred to the idea of virtuality? That somehow virtual objects are ghostly commodity forms? 
Furthermore, how does this transfer to the idea of immaterial labour and the division of labour: distinction between intellectual and manual labour?

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