The
Communist Manifesto foresaw the predatory and polarised global
capitalism of the 21st century. But Marx and Engels also showed us
that we have the power to create a better world.
by
Yanis Varoufakis
Part
1 - The spirit of communism driving the manifesto is proving hard to
silence
For a
manifesto to succeed, it must speak to our hearts like a poem while
infecting the mind with images and ideas that are dazzlingly new. It
needs to open our eyes to the true causes of the bewildering,
disturbing, exciting changes occurring around us, exposing the
possibilities with which our current reality is pregnant. It should
make us feel hopelessly inadequate for not having recognised these
truths ourselves, and it must lift the curtain on the unsettling
realisation that we have been acting as petty accomplices,
reproducing a dead-end past. Lastly, it needs to have the power of a
Beethoven symphony, urging us to become agents of a future that ends
unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realise its
potential for authentic freedom.
No
manifesto has better succeeded in doing all this than the one
published in February 1848 at 46 Liverpool Street, London.
Commissioned by English revolutionaries, The Communist Manifesto (or
the Manifesto of the Communist Party, as it was first published) was
authored by two young Germans – Karl Marx, a 29-year-old
philosopher with a taste for epicurean hedonism and Hegelian
rationality, and Friedrich Engels, a 28-year-old heir to a Manchester
mill.
As a
work of political literature, the manifesto remains unsurpassed. Its
most infamous lines, including the opening one (“A spectre is
haunting Europe – the spectre of communism”), have a
Shakespearean quality. Like Hamlet confronted by the ghost of his
slain father, the reader is compelled to wonder: “Should I
conform to the prevailing order, suffering the slings and arrows of
the outrageous fortune bestowed upon me by history’s irresistible
forces? Or should I join these forces, taking up arms against the
status quo and, by opposing it, usher in a brave new world?”
For Marx
and Engels’ immediate readership, this was not an academic dilemma,
debated in the salons of Europe. Their manifesto was a call to
action, and heeding this spectre’s invocation often meant
persecution, or, in some cases, lengthy imprisonment.
Today, a
similar dilemma faces young people: conform to an established order
that is crumbling and incapable of reproducing itself, or oppose it,
at considerable personal cost, in search of new ways of working,
playing and living together? Even though communist parties have
disappeared almost entirely from the political scene, the spirit of
communism driving the manifesto is proving hard to silence.
Source,
links:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/20/yanis-varoufakis-marx-crisis-communist-manifesto
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[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
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