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
2 - Marx and Engels foresaw our globalised, financialised, iron-clad,
all-singing-all-dancing capitalism
To see
beyond the horizon is any manifesto’s ambition. But to succeed as
Marx and Engels did in accurately describing an era that would arrive
a century-and-a-half in the future, as well as to analyse the
contradictions and choices we face today, is truly astounding.
In
the late 1840s, capitalism was foundering, local, fragmented and
timid. And yet Marx and Engels took one long look at it and foresaw
our globalised, financialised, iron-clad, all-singing-all-dancing
capitalism. This was the creature that came into being after 1991, at
the very same moment the establishment was proclaiming the death of
Marxism and the end of history.
Of
course, the predictive failure of The Communist Manifesto has long
been exaggerated. I remember how even leftwing economists in the
early 1970s challenged the pivotal manifesto prediction that capital
would “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish
connexions everywhere”. Drawing upon the sad reality of what
were then called third world countries, they argued that capital had
lost its fizz well before expanding beyond its “metropolis” in
Europe, America and Japan.
Empirically
they were correct: European, US and Japanese multinational
corporations operating in the “peripheries” of Africa, Asia and
Latin America were confining themselves to the role of colonial
resource extractors and failing to spread capitalism there. Instead
of imbuing these countries with capitalist development (drawing “all,
even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation”), they argued
that foreign capital was reproducing the development of
underdevelopment in the third world. It was as if the manifesto had
placed too much faith in capital’s ability to spread into every
nook and cranny.
Most
economists, including those sympathetic to Marx, doubted the
manifesto’s prediction that “exploitation of the world-market”
would give “a cosmopolitan character to production and
consumption in every country”.
As it
turned out, the manifesto was right, albeit belatedly. It would take
the collapse of the Soviet Union and the insertion of two billion
Chinese and Indian workers into the capitalist labour market for its
prediction to be vindicated. Indeed, for capital to globalise fully,
the regimes that pledged allegiance to the manifesto had first to be
torn asunder. Has history ever procured a more delicious irony?
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