Frozen Phrofecy: The Communist Manifesto Today
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/isegoria.2014.050.03Keywords:
Abstraction, crisis, unevenness, Brecht, Marx, David Harvey, Peter OsborneAbstract
This short essay aims to move beyond hagiographic, monumentalising celebrations of The Communist Manifesto, to reflect on what lessons can be drawn from the specific forms of its failed realisation. Against the cliché that the Manifesto is a prophetic text, we should explore the disjunction between the incisive forecast of the ‘prose’ of capitalism and the thwarted anticipation of the ‘poetry’ of revolution. This essay argues that the analytical and political limitations of the Manifesto are to be located in the excessive linearity and homogeneity with which if frames capital’s powers of abstraction. To the extent that capital proceeds through a dialectic of homogenisation and differentiation, spatial expansion and division, corrosion of tradition and its cynical refunctioning for the purpose of shoring up domination, the tasks of working class unity and internationalism set by the Manifesto become all the more politically pressing, and anything but inevitable.
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References
Bertolt Brecht, "Das Manifest", en Die Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, pp. 921-2.
Fredric Jameson, Entrevista en The Rabble: http://rabble.ca/books/reviews/2012/02/capitalism-infernal-machine-interview-frederic-jameson [7 diciembre de 2013]
David Harvey, "The Geography of Class Power", Socialist Register. Communist Manifesto Now, Vol 34, 1998, pp. 49-74.
David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Karl Marx y Friedrich Engels, Manifiesto del partido comunista: http://www.marxists.org/espanol/m-e/1840s/48-manif.htm [16 de febrero de 2014]
Peter Osborne, "Remember the Future? The Communist Manifesto as Historical and Cultural Force", Socialist Register. Communist Manifesto Now, Vol 34, 1998, pp.190-204.
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