Yanis Varoufakis: Marx predicted our present crisis – and points the way out
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.
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... read more:
see also
Anders Åslund - Russia’s Neo-Feudal Capitalism; More posts on Russia
Posts on Greece
