The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto

Slavoj Zizek

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509536122
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

No other Marxist text has come close to achieving the fame and influence of The Communist Manifesto. Translated into over 100 languages, this clarion call to the workers of the world radically shaped the events of the twentieth century. But what relevance does it have for us today?

In this slim book Slavoj Zizek argues that, while exploitation no longer occurs the way Marx described it, it has by no means disappeared; on the contrary, the profit once generated through the exploitation of workers has been transformed into rent appropriated through the privatization of the 'general intellect'. Entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg have become extremely wealthy not because they are exploiting their workers but because they are appropriating the rent for allowing millions of people to participate in the new form of the 'general intellect' that they own and control. But, even if Marx's analysis can no longer be applied to our contemporary world of global capitalism without significant revision, the fundamental problem with which he was concerned, the problem of the commons in all its dimensions– the commons of nature, the cultural commons, and the commons as the universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded – remains as relevant as ever.

This timely reflection on the enduring relevance of The Communist Manifesto will be of great value to everyone interested in the key questions of radical politics today.

The end is near… only not the way we imagined it

There is an exquisite old Soviet joke about radio Erevan. A listener asks: ‘Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car on lottery?’ The radio answers: ‘In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.’ Does exactly the same not hold for The Communist Manifesto? Let’s ask radio Erevan: ‘Is this text still actual today?’ We can guess the answer. In principle, yes: it describes wonderfully the mad dance of capitalist dynamics, which reached its peak only today, more than a century and a half later; but… Gerald A. Cohen enumerated the four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class: (1) it constitutes the majority in society; (2) it produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two further features: (5) the working class has nothing to lose from revolution; (6) the working class can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of society.¹ None of the first four features applies to today’s working class, which is why features (5) and (6) cannot be generated. (Even if some of the features continue to apply to parts of today’s society, they are no longer united in singe agent: the needy people in society are no longer the workers, etc.) – Correct as it is, this enumeration should be supplemented by a systematic theoretical deduction: for Marx, they all follow from the basic position of a worker who has nothing but his labour power to sell. As such, workers are by definition exploited; with the progressive expansion of capitalism, they constitute the majority which also produces the wealth; and so on. How, then, are we to find a revolutionary perspective and redefine it in today’s conditions? Is the way out of this predicament a combinatorics of multiple antagonisms, their potential overlapping? But – to use Laclau’s terms – how is it possible to form a ‘chain of equivalences’ from classic proletarians, precariat, unemployed, refugees, oppressed sexual and ethnic groups, and the like?

A good starting point here would be to follow the good old Marxist path and shift the focus from politics to the signs of postcapitalism that are discernible within global capitalism itself. And we don’t have to look far: the public figures who exemplify the privatization of our commons – Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, all ‘socially conscious’ billionaires – leave bagfuls of warnings in their trail. They stand for global capital at its most seductive and ‘progressive’ – in short, at its most dangerous. (In a speech to Harvard graduates in May 2017, Zuckerberg told his public: ‘Our job is to create a sense of purpose!’ This comes from a man who, with Facebook, has created the world’s most expansive instrument of purposeless loss of time.) From Zuckerberg to Gates and Musk, they all warn that ‘capitalism as we know it’ is approaching its end and advocate countermeasures such as minimal income. One cannot but recall here the famous Jewish joke quoted by Freud: ‘Why are you telling me you are going to Lemberg when you are really going to Lemberg?’ Here a lie assumes the form of a factual truth: the two friends established an implicit code by which, when you plan to go to Lemberg, you announce that you will go to Cracow and vice versa, so that, within this space, telling the literal truth means lying. And is it not the case that exactly the same holds for Zuckerberg, Musk, and other false prophets of the end of capitalism? We should simply reply to them: ‘Why are you telling us that capitalism is coming to an end when capitalism is really coming to an end?’ In short, their version of the end of capitalism is the capitalist version of its own end, where everything will change so that the basic structure of domination will remain the same…

More serious is the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin calls the ‘collaborative commons’ (CC), a new mode of production and exchange that leaves behind private property and market exchange: in CC individuals are giving their products for free, releasing them into circulation. This emancipatory dimension of CC should, of course, be located in the context of the rise of what is called ‘the internet of things’ (IoT) in combination with another result of today’s development of productive forces: the explosive rise of ‘zero marginal costs’ whereby more and more products, and not only information, can be reproduced for no additional costs. The IoT is the network of physical devices, vehicles, buildings, and other items embedded in electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data; it allows objects to be sensed and controlled remotely, across an existing network infrastructure. Thus the IoT creates opportunities for a more direct integration of the physical world into computerbased systems and causes improved efficiency, accuracy, and economic benefit across the board. When the IoT is augmented with sensors and actuators, the technology becomes an instance of the more general class of cyberphysical systems, which also encompass technologies such as smart grids, smart homes, intelligent transportation, and smart cities; each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system and is able to interoperate within the existing internet infrastructure. The interconnection of these embedded devices (including smart objects) is expected to usher in automation in nearly all fields, while also enabling advanced applications such as a smart grid and expanding to the areas such as smart cities. ‘Things’ can also refer to a wide variety of devices such as heart-monitoring implants, biochip transponders on farm animals, electric clams in coastal waters, automobiles with built-in sensors, and DNA analysis devices for environmental, food, or pathogen monitoring. These devices collect useful data with the help of various existing technologies and then autonomously reflow these data between other devices. Human individuals, too, are ‘things’ whose states and activities are continuously registered and transmitted without their knowledge: their physical movements, their financial transactions, their health, their eating and drinking habits, what they buy and sell, what they read, listen to, and watch are all collected in digital networks that know them better than they know themselves.

The prospect of the IoT seems to compel us to turn Friedrich Hölderlin’s famous line ‘[b]ut where the danger is also grows the saving power’ upside down: ‘but where the saving power is also grows the danger’ (wo aber das Rettende ist, wächst die Gefahr auch). The ‘saving’ aspect of the IoT was described in detail by Jeremy Rifkin, who claims that, for the first time in human history, a path of overcoming capitalism is discernible as an actual tendency in social production and exchange, namely the growth of cooperative commons, so that the end of capitalism is on the horizon. The crudest Marxist hypothesis seems to be re-vindicated: the development of new productive forces makes capitalist relations obsolete. The ultimate irony is that, while former communists (China, Vietnam) are today the best managers of capitalism, developed capitalist countries go furthest in the direction of collaborative or cooperative commons as the way to overcome capitalism.

But this gives birth to new dangers, even if we discount false worries such as the idea that IoT will boost unemployment. (Isn’t this ‘threat’ a good reason to reorganize production so that workers will work much less? In short, isn’t this ‘problem’ its own solution?) At the concrete level of social organization, the danger is a clearly discernible tendency of the state and private sector to regain control over the cooperative commons: personal contacts are privatized by Facebook, software by Microsoft, search by Google… To grasp these new forms of privatization, one should critically transform Marx’s conceptual apparatus. As a result of his neglect of the social dimension of ‘general intellect’ – which is, roughly, the collective intelligence of a society – Marx didn’t envisage the possibility of privatizating general intellect itself; but this is what lies at the core of the struggle for ‘intellectual property’. Negri is right here: within this frame, exploitation in the classic Marxist sense is no longer possible – which is why it has to be enforced more and more through direct, legal measures, in other words by a noneconomic force. This is why today exploitation more and more takes on the form of rent: as Carlo Vercellone put it, postindustrial capitalism is characterized by ‘the profit’s becoming rent’.² And this also explains why direct authority is needed: it is needed to impose the arbitrary yet legal conditions for the extraction of rent, conditions that are no longer ‘spontaneously’ generated by the market. Perhaps therein resides the fundamental ‘contradiction’ of today’s postmodern capitalism: while its logic is deregulatory, antistatal, nomadic–deterritorializing, and so on, the key tendency in it, that of the profit to become rent, signals the strengthening role of the state, whose (not only) regulatory function is more and more all-present. Dynamic deterritorialization coexists with and relies on increasingly authoritarian interventions by the state and its legal and other apparatuses. What one can discern as looming on the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a society in which libertarianism and individual hedonism coexist with (and are sustained by) a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. Far from disappearing, the state is becoming stronger today.

When, due to the crucial role of general intellect in the creation of wealth through knowledge and social cooperation, forms of wealth are more and more out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, the result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the selfdissolution of capitalism, but the gradual and relative transformation of the profit generated through the exploitation of labour – its transformation, namely, into rent appropriated through the privatization of general intellect. Let us consider the case of Bill Gates. How did he become the richest man in the world? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of the products that Microsoft is selling, in fact one can even argue that Microsoft is paying its intellectual workers a relatively high salary; which means that Gates’s wealth is not the result of his success either in producing better software for lower prices than his competitors or in exerting a more ruthless exploitation over his hired intellectual workers. If it were, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: people would have massively chosen programs like Linux, which are free and, according to specialists, of better quality than Microsoft. Why, then, are millions still buying Microsoft? Because Microsoft imposed itself as a quasi-universal standard that almost monopolized the field, a kind of direct embodiment of general intellect. Gates became the richest man in a couple of decades by appropriating the rent for allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in the new form of general intellect that he privatized and controls. Is it true, then, that today’s intellectual workers are no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labour (they own their laptops, for example) – which is Marx’s description of capitalist alienation? Yes; but, more fundamentally, no: they are cut off from the social field of their work, from a general intellect that is not mediated by private capital.

What ghosts are haunting us today?

All these paradoxes of the contemporary global capitalism compel us to confront in a new way the old question of spectrality, of ghosts haunting our unique historical situation. The most famous ghost that has been roaming around in the last 150 years was not a ghost of the past, but the spectre of a revolutionary future – that, of course, of the first sentence from The Communist Manifesto. Today’s enlightened liberal reader is bound to have an automatic reaction to the Manifesto. Isn’t this text simply wrong, on so many empirical accounts, in the picture it gives of the social situation as well as in the revolutionary perspective it sustains and propagates? Was there ever a political manifesto that was more clearly falsified by the subsequent course of history? Isn’t the Manifesto, at its best, an exaggerated extrapolation of certain tendencies discernible in the nineteenth century? But let us approach the Manifesto from the opposite end. Where do we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• The end is near… only not the way we imagined it
• End User License Agreement