001-32 duo 1 04/02/04, 20:00 What Keeps Mankind Alive? [brecht/weill] isbn 953-6542-84-6 2 001-32 duo 2 04/02/04, 20:00 You gentlemen who think you have a mission To purge us of the seven deadly 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 What keeps mankind alive, the fact that millions Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed Mankind can keep alive, thanks to its brilliance At keeping its humanity repressed For once, you must not try to shirk the facts: Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts. You say the girls may strip with your permission [whoa!] You draw the line dividing ART from SIN So first sort out the basic food position Then start your preaching, that’s where it begins 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 What keeps mankind alive, the fact that millions Are daily tortured, stifled, punished, silenced, oppressed Mankind can keep alive, thanks to its brilliance At keeping its humanity repressed For once, you must not try to shirk the facts Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts Mankind can keep alive, thanks to its brilliance At keeping its humanity repressed For once, you must not try to shirk the facts: Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts 3 001-32 duo 3 04/02/04, 20:00 Karl Marx’s predictions have outlived his prescriptions. ...the history of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom g.f.hegel 4 001-32 duo 4 04/02/04, 20:00 THE SPECTRE IS STILL ROAMING AROUND slavoj æiæek >The first, automatic reaction of today’s enlightened liberal reader to The Communist Manifesto is: isn’t the text simply WRONG on so many empirical accounts, with regard to the picture it gives of the social situation, as well as with regard to the revolutionary perspective it sustains and propagates? Was there ever a political manifesto that was more clearly falsified by the subsequent historical reality? Isn’t The Communist Manifesto, at its best, the exaggerated extrapolation of certain tendencies discernible in the 19th century? So let us approach The Communist Manifesto from the opposite end: where do we live TODAY, in our global “post...” [postmodern, postindustrial] society? The slogan that is imposing itself more and more is that of “globalization”: the brutal imposition of the unified world market that threatens all local ethnic traditions, inclusive of the very form of Nation-State. And is, with regard to this situation, the description of the social impact of the bourgeoisie found in The Manifesto not more actual than ever? - “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 condition of existence for all earlier 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 befire 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 conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the 5 001-32 duo 5 04/02/04, 20:00 national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”01 So is this not, more than ever, our reality today? Think about Ericsson phones which are no longer Swedish, about Toyota cars manufactured 60% in the USA, about Hollywood culture that pervades the remotest parts of the globe... Yes, this is our reality - on condition that we do not forget to supplement this image from The Manifesto with its inherent dialectical opposite, the “spiritualization” of the very material process of production. That is to say, on the one hand, capitalism entails the radical secularization of the social life - it mercilessly tears apart all aura of authentic nobility, sacredness, honour, etc.: “It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasable chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” However, the fundamental lesson of the “critique of political economy” elaborated by the mature Marx’s in the years after The Manifesto is that this reduction of all heavenly chimeras to the brutal economic reality generates a spectrality of its own. When Marx describes the mad self-enhancing circulation of the capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation 01 | Karl Marx and reaches its apogee in today’s meta-reflexive speculations Frederick Engels, on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre The Communist Manifesto, of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path harmondsworth: disregarding any human or environmental concern is an penguin books 1985, p. 83-4. ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, there are real people and 6 001-32 duo 6 04/02/04, 20:01 natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources the capital’s circulation is based and on which it feeds itself like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this “abstraction” is not only in our [financial speculator’s] misperception of social reality, but that it is “real” in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes: the fate of whole strata of population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the “solipsistic” speculative dance of the Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference with regard to how its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but purely “objective”, systemic, anonymous. Here we should recall Etienne Balibar who distinguishes two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s world: the “ultra-objective” [“structural”] violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism [the “automatic” creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed], and the “ultra-subjective” violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious [in short: racist] “fundamentalisms” - this second “exce- ssive” and “groundless” violence is just a counterpart to Karl Marx & Friedrich the first violence. The fact of this “anonymous” violence Engels, Manifest also allows us to make a more general point about anti- KomunistiËke Partije Communism: the pleasure provided by anti-Communist [1848], trans. Moπa Pijade, zagreb: arkzin, reasoning was that, with Communism, it was so easy to bastard biblioteka 1998 play the game of finding the culprit, blaming the Party, Stalin, Lenin, ultimately Marx himself, for the millions of dead, for terror and gulag, while in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms, although capitalism has been no less destructive in terms of human and environmental costs, destroying aboriginal cultures... In short, the difference between capitalism and Communism is that Communism was perceived as an Idea which then failed in its realization, while capitalism functioned “spontaneously”: there is no Capitalist Manifesto… from: The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around! [An introduction to the 150th Anniversary Edition of the Communist Manifesto], zagreb: arkzin 1998 7 001-32 duo 7 04/02/04, 20:01 www.arkzin.com/munist 8 001-32 duo 8 04/02/04, 20:01 ALL THAT IS SOLID ENDS UP ON THE WEB marek kohn >If you want to know which bits of Marx’s thought continue to haunt us, the digital industries will tell you. Of all Marx’s writings, one passage leaps into electric relief: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising 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 condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of productions, 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 conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. That’s from the Communist Manifesto, which Marx and Engels wrote in 1848. At the time of the final great upsurge of Marxist faith, in 1968, these words 9 001-32 duo 9 04/02/04, 20:01 would perhaps have seemed anachronistic to many of the great unconverted. Television was going into colour and men were going to the Moon, but for millions of people in the West, the phrase “everlasting uncertainty and agitation” would not have spoken to their own experience of daily life. People thought that they could enjoy both progress and security. If they were lucky, they might stay in a job for life; their times of sickness and old age underwritten by social contracts that would not be rewritten or torn up. By now they have become much richer, but everlasting uncertainty and agitation is the normal condition. The digital industries are the vanguard of the constant production revolution, in which technology is stable for weeks rather than months, let alone years. Last spring, wanting to check the quote, I downloaded a copy of The Communist Manifesto from the Marx/Engels Internet Archive. When I came back to it in the summer, it wouldn’t open, because the copy I had saved using Internet Explorer 4.0 was incompatible with Explorer 4.01, to which I had upgraded in the meantime. Meanwhile, over in Zagreb, the wired dissidents at Arkzin were working on a new interface for the Manifesto itself, which they have published in print and as a multimedia Web production, with an opening title sequence and images that drift around the text. A old communist logo bearing the faces of Marx and Engels is followed by those of Microsoft and Sony. The Manifesto can be launched by clicking on a Windows ‘Start’ icon. It’s Pop Art in reverse: instead of taking the ideology out of an icon of, say, Chairman Mao, it pastes the ideology into the pages of popular culture. And it re-brands communism as a dynamic force for the coming century, complete with Dynamic HTML. As the Arkzin crew say, the spectacle is worth a look even if you can’t read Croatian, in which the text appears. It would be unwise to assume that just because the pages look cool, the exercise is merely a fashion venture. Whatever the reasons for the minor vogue that Marx and the Communist Manifesto enjoyed in this country earlier in this 150th anniversary year, the motives in an ex-communist region are different. “Perhaps the answers offered by The Communist Manifesto are no longer pertinent,” admits the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Æiæek in his introductory essay, sections of which appear in English on the Arkzin site. But the post- communists know better than anyone why answers are needed, Æiæek observes. Forced as they are to live out the contradiction between globalised capitalism and reasserted national identity, most of them get the worst of both worlds. On the Web page, the IBM logo hovers above these remarks, together with the corporate slogan: Solutions for a small planet. It can only be a matter of time before some Internet enterprise enhances its brand with ‘All that is solid melts into air’. ● [Technofile 67 | originally published in The Independent, Jan 3, 1999] 10 001-32 duo 10 04/02/04, 20:01