Vol. 20 No. 21 · 29 October 1998
pages 10-15 | 7893 words
The End of Idiocy on a Planetary Scale
Stephen Holmes
- The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Verso, 82 pp, £8.00, April 1998, ISBN 1 85984 898 2
If Communism is only sketchily described, then post-Communism is simply unthinkable in Marx’s philosophy of history. So how can we make sense of his remarkable masterpiece in the 150th anniversary year of its original publication? The Communist Manifesto still feels alive to the touch. But what does a ‘modern edition’ of the work have to teach those inhabiting a world which Marx himself could not conceivably have anticipated? Generations of scholars have sifted the archives to unearth ‘Marx before Marxism’. But who is Marx after Marxism?
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 22 · 12 November 1998
From John Calderón
Stephen Holmes’s review of The Communist Manifesto, edited by Eric Hobsbawm (LRB, 29 October), parades the usual anxieties of his profession and class. The press is full of articles which seek to assess the Manifesto from a Western capitalist perspective, and which fail to note in the rush to denigrate the value of socialism that nine-tenths of the world is still in the state of barbarism.
Both Holmes and Hobsbawm miss the central message of the Manifesto: that the emancipation of the proletariat can only be the work of the proletariat themselves (the Spanish Civil War and the British General Strike of 1926 are two very different examples of class collaboration leading to failure). Hobsbawm, a skilled apologist for labourism, has no interest in highlighting the clarion call of Marxism because to do so would undermine the position of the apologists of reformism who largely control the British Labour Movement. Those predicting the failure of Marxism should bear in mind two things. First, that while humans live, socialism is a distinct possibility, so we have a while to go yet before consigning the Manifesto to the academics. Second, Marx showed that proletarian internationalism needs to be fought for. Socialists must continue to work to that end – irrespective of the criticisms of liberal thinkers – if the barbarism that afflicts most of this world is to be ended.
John Calderón
London E8
