The Communist Manifesto Hits 160

This year marks the 160th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto and capitalism, aka "free enterprise," seems willing to observe the occasion by dropping dead. On Monday night, some pundits were warning that the ATMs might run dry and hinting that the only safe investment left is canned beans. Apocalypse or extortion? No one seems to know, though the populist part of the populace has been leaning toward the latter. An email whipping around the web this morning has the subject line "Sign on Wall St. yesterday," and shows a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying, "JUMP! You Fuckers!"

The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about "production," for example: Did they actually make things in those days? Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: Within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last two outcomes are what Marx called "immiseration," which, in translation, is the process you're undergoing when you have cancer and no health insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.

Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, pro-active, fashion: The workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the "means of production," and insist on running the show themselves, that being the original, pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. The revolution didn't happen, of course, at least not here. For the last several years, American workers have sweetly acquiesced to declining wages, rising prices, speed-ups at work, disappearing pensions, and increasingly threadbare health insurance. While CEO pay escalated to the 8-figure range and above, so-called ordinary Americans took on second jobs and crowded into multi-generational households with uncomfortably long waits for the bathroom.

But all this immiseration - combined with fabulous enrichment at the top - did end up destabilizing the capitalist system, if only because , in the last few years, America's substitute for decent wages has been easy credit. Until about a year ago, we got almost daily messages, by telemarketer and by mail, urging us to consolidate our debts, refinance our homes, transfer our debts from credit card to another, and try tasty new mortgages that didn't even require a down payment. All too often, we bit. It sounded so reasonable, for example, not to let our assets just "sit" in our houses but to start spending that money now.

At the other, Lear jet, end of the economic spectrum, there was the problem of what to do with too much money. Yes, this can be a problem. Some of the super-rich have to hire consultants to help them spend their money: Where do you get a $20,000 bottle of wine or find a Picasso for the bathroom wall? More seriously, there was the problem of what to invest in. As Chuck Collins of the Working Group on Extreme Inequality has pointed out, huge concentrations of wealth can function like rogue waves, smashing around recklessly in their search for ever higher returns. A lot of these money waves flowed, directly or indirectly, into the dodgy credit schemes that were engulfing the un-rich majority, leaving even the fat cats imperiled by the toxic debts of the subprime class.

Marx's argument was that the coexistence of great wealth for the few and growing poverty for the many is not only morally objectionable, it's also inherently unstable. He may have been wrong about the reasons for the instability, but no one can any longer deny it's there. When the greed of the rich collided with the needs of the poor - for a home, for example - the result was a global credit meltdown.

Obviously, the way to address the crisis is to deal with the poverty and inequality that led to it: bail out people facing foreclosures, increase food stamp allotments, extent unemployment insurance, and, make a massive job-generating, public investment in infrastructure, and, since medical debts are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy, enact universal health insurance immediately. But not even Obama, whose lawn sign I still proudly display, seems to have the stomach for such a "trickle upwards" approach. He has announced that he won't bother taking the bail-out as an opportunity to change the bankruptcy law so that people facing foreclosure can renegotiate their mortgages.

So happy birthday, Communist Manifesto - although I'm hoping that capitalism survives this one, if only because there's no alternative ready at hand. At the very least, we should get some regulation and serious oversight out of any bail-out deal, meaning that, yes, the economy will look a little less like "free enterprise." But one thing we should have learned in the last week, if not the last year, is that, when applied to enterprise, "freedom" can be just another word for someone else's pain.

Comments

[Philip N. Cohen - Huffpost Blogger]

Where to put vast piles of ill-gotten gains has been a problem before, and has resulted in extending bad loans before. The oil shock of the 1970s led to huge sums sitting around looking for trouble, and one outcome was the boom in bad loans to poor countries under the IMF and World Bank - the sub-prime peddlers of the last wave.

[MagisterLudi]

Here's an opinion from a German communist Bertold Brecht
------------
You gentlemen who think you have a mission
To purge us of the seven dea-dly sins
Should first sort out the basic food position
Then start your preaching, that's where it begins

You lot, who preach restraint and watch your waist as well
Should learn for all time how the world is run
However much you twist, whatever lies you tell
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those, who now are starving
Get proper helpings, when we all start carving

You lot, who bank on your desires and our disgust
Should learn for all time how the world is run
Whatever lies you tell, however much you twist
Food is the first thing, morals follow on

So first make sure that those, who now are starving
Get proper helpings, when we all start carving

[joebiz]

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." --Marx

Historical materialism looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to live, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).

The best form to analyze social relations and or history is through a process called "the materialist conception of history."

Thanks Barbara.

[MagisterLudi]

Communist Manifesto is on of the greatest documents of modern era. It has profound influence on modern political, cultural and economic development of the world.

"Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells...
It is enough to mention the commercial crises that, by their periodical return, put the existence of the entire bourgeois society on its trial, each time more threateningly.
And why? Because there is.... too much commerce.
The productive forces at the disposal of society... have become too powerful for these conditions... they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society...
And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises?.... by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented."

KARL MARX/FREDERICK ENGELS
June 24, 1872

WHAT PENETRATING ANALYSIS!
MUST READ FOR EVERY MEMBER OF CONGRESS BEFORE THE UPCOMING VOTE.

[KillTheMessenger]

The problem with all of this is that what Marx calls "capitalism" is fundamentally different from what we have today. Except for the poorest of the poor we are living under better conditions than what he probably imagined as the endpoint of the revolution. I can bet with you that he would be greatly put off by our brain dead car culture which exploits unique natural deposits for the questionable "fun" of two generations to "be mobile", which is really just a euphemism for driving 60 miles to work and back every day in vehicles that in Marx's day would have put ten workers and four horses out of work, each.

The events happening right now have everything to do with the very workers and middle class acting just as insanely egotistically as the Manchester Capitalists in Marx's time. This crisis has grown out of our preoccupation for ourselves. The 20th century was not won by capitalism. It was won by billions of "inner capitalists".

I am not a Marxist and, having been born in a Communist country at the height of the Cold War, also not a particular friend of communism. But trust me, the historical hypothesis behind Marxism has about as much in common with the modern US "proletariat" as a well aged French Brie has in common with processed American cheese.

[Henry]

Help us out here. You say that you were born in a Communist country. There was never a country that reached the state of "communism" as described in the Marxist dialectic. There was the single party, the Communist Party. But, as I understand it, there is no such thing as a Communist government and the Marxist defined communism in the dialectic was never attained and from all practical purposes, it was an idealistic hope at best. Corrrect?

You lived in a single party totalitarian state that prevented private ownership. The state owned everything. The social system was socialism, the governmental system may have been a TRepublic, but it was totalitarian. The communist party ruled. And the Nomenclatura were the equivalent of our corporate elite.

[MagisterLudi]

Henry, you're right that there was never communism anywhere in the world. And obviously neither China nor USSR ever claimed to have built communist societies.
You are wrong on the question of private ownership issue in countries like Poland, USSR etc There was considerable amount of private ownership: autos, houses, condos, boats etc. People were accumulating legal wealth thru' work, personal achievement or business like selling of farm goods, for example. Some small business ownership was also permitted. Government lent capital to citizens for purposes of building cooperative housing owned by the citizens, not government. So your view is limited by lack of information.

[wendy82551]

"...in the last few years, America's substitute for decent wages has been easy credit."

Brilliantly put: that's the whole problem, in a nutshell. It's easy to moralize about working class people "not saving, depending on credit cards, second mortgages--blah blah blah--they're stupid and bad and it's their own fault; they shouldn't buy what they can't afford," but when what you can't afford is health care (I paid my dental bills on a credit card), or home repairs ($2K on the card for exploding plumbing), or car repairs ($1K on the card to keep the 13-year-old Toyota running), it's hard to make those kinds of "suck it up" decisions.

In the past year, my salary went up 2%. Gas went up AT LEAST 25%; food went up what looks to be like 10-20%; condo fees went up a MODEST 2%. My insurance co-pay went up 25%. My insurance payments went up 5%. I mean, seriously, do the freakin' math.

[KillTheMessenger]

"In the past year, my salary went up 2%. Gas went up AT LEAST 25%; food went up what looks to be like 10-20%; condo fees went up a MODEST 2%"

That gas went up is a consequence of peak oil, a simple combination of geology and economics that has been predicted over 50 years ago. Jimmy Carter tried to warn you about that some 30 years ago. And you gave him the shaft. Why complain now?

That food went up is a simple consequence of the price of oil going up. Almost all the energy contained in your food is from oil and natural gas. Something like half the nitrogen atoms in your body went through a Haber-Bosch reactor fed with hydrogen stripped from natural gas. The most important molecules in your body are only there because of millions of years of photosynthesis in the past producing oil and coal reserves which we are now squandering away in SUV and semi-trucks.

"My insurance co-pay went up 25%. My insurance payments went up 5%. "

That's a combination of increasingly more complex medical care (that liquid helium filled superconducting magnet in your hospital's MRI scanner is expensive!), population statistics and very poor political choices. The people who understand health care have been trying to warn you about that for decades. Did you listen?

[elbzee]

And did you provide an answer in all those decades KTM?

[FirstShirt]

"Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, pro-active, fashion: The workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the "means of production," and insist on running the show themselves, that being the original, pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. "

Marx failed to consider the impact of tight jeans. A simple but devastingly important facet that destroyed communism and left socialism on the ropes.

In a dictatorship of the proletariat the means of production are not governed by the market so we have full employment without an interest or knowledge of the consumer. And, the result is we make extra large jeans to fit the Soviet women and not smaller jeans to fit the normal consumer. Result? A loss of interest in a gray, colorless, androgenous system in which politics infuses every facet of life.

The wall came down. You can thank Reagan.

[KillTheMessenger]

"The wall came down."

Yes. But not because of Reagan but because of the Lech Wałęsas and the Gorbachevs. Which is why they got the Nobel Peace Price and not Reagan.

:-)

[MagisterLudi]

The wall came down because Gorbachev foolishly believed that Western Europeans would actually honor the agreement not to expand NATO into Eastern Europe. this was the main condition of Soviets to allow dissolution of Warsaw Pact. Little did they know... UK did they wost to betray USSR during WW2 and now they're up to the same old tricks.

[ga4ry]

This was a joy to read and ponder, I loved the letters and exchange of ideas. I feel it is time America puts aside its red hateing ideology and looks at Marx and Engles as the humanitarians they were.

[oncethere]

The personal is the political (a Marxist concept). How many families with money are there in which money is spent/wasted on luxury goods, while those in the family who are barely getting by are left to struggle and slave? I think this happens more often than we care to admit. I see it as the difference between Democrat and Republican. Democrats would want the money to be more equally distributed; Republicans would protest that their membership at the country club is essential.

The "struggle for existence," a Marxist phrase, needs to be resolved before we start throwing away money on luxury items.

[juggernaut1729]

"Within capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer, and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin"

That is demonstrably false. The rich got richer, true but so did workers and the middle class. A household at the poverty line in America makes as much as the average household in a social democratic country like Sweden. The difference between the two clearly is how big the Government is. In America, the Government steals "only" 30% of what the people produce while in Sweden, it is more like 50%.

[Doug77]

Actually, the size of the government isn't the only difference. A household at the poverty line in America would still have to pay for child care, education, and health care (none of which they could afford), whereas the middle class Swedish family would, after paying taxes, have all those things provided for them.

[Egalitare]

And yet Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad was able to scrape together enough after the heavy burden of Swedish taxation to be the 7th richest person on the planet.

Tax burden doesn't prevent capital from flowing to a really good idea.

[Svendem]

Demonstrably false. The average individual salary in Sweden is about $33k (230k SEK) a year. Which would only put them on the US poverty line if your average Swedish family had 12 kids or something. The average income tax is about 30% there. It's the total tax revenue as a percentage of GDP that's closer to 50%.

Their system didn't come out of nowhere. They voted for it, and did so consistently. 3 terms of right-wing governance in 80 years worth of elections. Maybe you think you know something they don't. I think it's more likely the other way around. It's not like they haven't heard of the US.

[Red0rGreen]

But a household at the poverty line in the US gets almost nothing in exchange for their 30%, while the Swedish family gets healthcare, higher education, disability benefits, pensions, and up to 18 months paid maternity (and paternity) leave. As my employer has often reminded me, the value of benefits has to be added to salary and so the average Swedish family is probably much better "paid" than the average US equivalent.

[RButler]

Now. How do we blame the collapse of Wall Street, banks and the housing market on terrorists? We did more damage to the security of this country than those 19 bad guys did.

I want to ask how nobody saw this coming. But, I'm guessing everyone wanted to get theirs while the getting was good. In addition to the sub-prime fiasco, we were borrowing from China, outsourcing jobs, allowing illegal immigration to drive down wages, large credit card and no savings in savings accounts and urged to spend, spend, spend to keep the economy going. Watching people talk on their iPhones while waiting in a soup kitchen line will be the lasting image of this era.

[indyleftist]

Communism and Capitalism are both equally wrong

They are opposing forces

[Bellanova]

Brilliant, sober, much needed. Thank you!

[ContraEgoiste]

"Kudos Ms/Mrs Ehrenreich."

Seems I find myself saying this same sentence every time I read you. Thank you.

[elbzee]

You & me both ContraEgoiste!

[aconir]

"...Power that controls the economy belongs in the hands of elected representatives of the people, not an industrial oligarchy, not subject to the whims of a few self-appointed men..."
-William O. Douglas (in U.S. versus Columbia Steel):

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”
-Sinclair Lewis

2 quotes both correct