Doug
----
Have folks here seen Berman's review of the new (translation, book-jacket, introduction?) Verso edition of the Communist Manifesto? I think it's pretty good --- delightful, actually, giving inter alia a very decent account of Marx's prescient understanding of the global economy --- though there are a few places I feel are a bit lacking.
On p. 15, Berman paraphrases Marx's critique of capitalism:
[Capitalists] may think of only one thing, but their narrow
focus leads to the broadest integrations; their shallow
outlook wreaks the most profound transformations; their
peaceful economic activity devastates every human society
like a bomb.... Marx was appalled at the human costs of
capitalist development ...
My take on this is simple. To be bound in servitude to another is slavery. Period. Whether bound because your master purchases your skin or rents it, the result is the same: violence to freedom. Marx was, if I understand him correctly, quite concerned not only about the violent results of capitalism, but this very violence to freedom, which is perhaps better known by the name "alienation". It seems to me to slight Marx's critique by eliding this, which leaves Marx sounding much more like an appreciative if gloomy Schumpeter than he really was. Besides, Marx would never say anything like "peaceful economic activity" exists under capitalism, would he??
Berman then goes on to claim that "Marxist movements around the world have concentrated on the argument, made most elaborately in *Capital*, that workers in bourgeois society had been or were being pauperized." This may be true, but it is also true that a deeper understanding of Marx reveals that this is not all there is to the criticism. Berman recognizes this, and claims that what is lacking is an appreciation of the relations between people in a bourgeois society; people "have to freeze their feelings for each other to adapt to a cold-blooded world." He then quotes Marx that bourgeois society "has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous 'cash payment.'" Berman then concludes his summary of Marx's position on this by saying, "The worst thing about capitalism is that it forces people to become brutal in order to survive."
Again, this is all quite true, but doesn't it leave out the crucial relationship between worker and capitalist, which is, after all, the defining relationship under capitalism? Note that here I don't mean to slight other relations in the least; there is plenty of room under the leftist tent for a critique of the different relationships of modern society to co-exist in bliss. Butler is right about one thing, leaving gender relationships out of the capitalist critique, or slighting them as "less important" doesn't make sense, even in Marxist terms (as she quite cleverly argues in her recent New Left Review piece), but more on that another time...
Perhaps Berman makes up for all this when he writes energetically:
The crucial reality is the need to sell your labor to capital in
order to live, the need to carve up your personality for sale ---
to look at yourself in the mirror and think, "What have I got
that I can sell?" --- and an unending dread and anxiety that
even if you're O.K. today, you won't find anyone who wants to buy
what you have or what you are tomorrow, that the changing market
will declare you (as it has already declared so many) worthless,
that you will find yourself physically as well as metaphysically
homeless and out in the cold.
Berman concludes his review with a rousing affirmation (and a bit of a swipe at the pomoistas) of the relevance of Marx:
The nineties began with the mass destruction of Marx effigies.
It was the "postmodern" age: We weren't supposed to need big
ideas. As the nineties end, we find ourselves in a dynamic
global society ever more unified by downsizing, de-skilling and
dread --- just like the old man said. All of a sudden, the
iconic looks more convincing than the ironic; that classic
bearded presence, the atheist as biblical prophet, is back just
in time for the millennium. At the dawn of the twentieth
century, there were workers who were ready to die with the
*Communist Manifesto*. At the dawn of the twenty-first, there
may be even more who are ready to live with it.
I'm off to Borders to satisfy my covetous need for this new edition.
Bill