China Miéville - A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto

A SPECTRE,

HAUNTING

October: The Story of the Russian Revolution

The Last Days of New Paris

This Census-Taker

Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories

Railsea

Londons Overthrow

Embassytown

Kraken

The City & The City

Un Lun Dun

Looking for Jake: Stories

Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law

Iron Council

The Scar

Perdido Street Station

King Rat

A SPECTRE,

HAUNTING

CHINA

MIVILLE

ON THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO

www.headofzeus.com

First published in the UK in 2022 by Head of Zeus Ltd,
part of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright China Miville, 2022

The moral right of China Miville to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The works from which the epigraphs in this book are gratefully taken are:
Denes, Agnes, A Manifesto (1970) Agnes Denes, courtesy Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, New York. The full text, of which the epigraph in these pages is only a short extract, can be seen on the artists website, at www.agnesdenesstudio.com/works15.html .
Keller, Helen, The World I Live In (Hodder and Stoughton, 1908)
Macfarlane, Helen, The Democratic and Social Republic
( Red Republican , 12 October 1850)
Mattar, Mira, Yes, I Am A Destroyer ( MA BIBLIOTHQUE , 2020)
Rodgers, Carolyn, How I got ovah: new and selected poems (Anchor Press, 1975)
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, Youre So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You, in Touching Feeling , pp. 123151 (Duke University Press, 2003)
Shakur, Assata, Assata: An Autobiography (Lawrence Hill Books, 2001)
Solnit, Rebecca, Hope In the Dark (Nation Books, 2004)

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN (HB): 9781786692030
ISBN (ANZTPB): 9781803282244
ISBN (E): 9781786692023

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To Rosie Warren, salvor.

When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realised i didnt have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. Were taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us dont have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is.

ASSATA SHAKUR , Assata: An Autobiography

Im a communist, you idiot.

Ash Sarkar, Good Morning Britain , 12 July 2018

Midway through the nineteenth century, a tiny group of embattled leftist reprobates grandiosely declared that their enemies, the great powers of Europe, were haunted. So opens The Communist Manifesto .

The Manifesto predicts and demands the overthrow of industrial capitalism, a system then still burgeoning. It looks urgently forward to its replacement with a new form of society, based not on ruthless competition for profit, and the social atomisation and mass human misery that inevitably accompanies it, but on a new collective reality, the fulfilment of human need and the flowering of human potential, on the basis of communal, democratically controlled social property. The parameters, pitfalls and possibilities of this goal were, and remain, controversial, including for the Left. But what it would be is communism . This is the spectre thats invoked in the opening sentence of the Manifesto .

The Manifesto itself is short and rude and vivid and eccentrically organised and its impact has been utterly epochal. It is difficult to imagine, wrote Umberto Eco with palpable awe, that a few fine pages can single-handedly change the world. Admirers celebrate that fact; detractors decry it. But theyre united in acknowledging the books astounding sway over the minds of its readers, and its historical power.

Now that ghost is back. No surprise, perhaps: repress something, and its as a spectre that its likely to return. Still, theres something truly bizarre about what Richard Seymour has called todays anticommunism without communism. Three decades on from the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies, states ostensibly committed to the Manifesto s vision (for all that that commitment was in large part a cruel joke), and absent any serious mass far-left presence in world politics, todays reactionaries are hallucinating a communist threat.

Every political generation must encounter the Manifesto anew, learn what to focus on within it, find problems, questions, analyses, answers, gaps and aporia and solutions for and of their own time. This is not, in some partisan clich, to bullishly assert that the text is relevant now more than ever. But just as it was without question a distinct experience to read the Manifesto in the context, say, of decolonisation and neo-colonialism, so too was it to read the text during the rise of the welfare state, or of that systems deliberate diminution, the ascendancy of unregulated financial speculation, the drawn-out exhaustion and collapse of Stalinism, the era of the hard centre, and so on.

These words are written in 2021. Close to half of humanity subsists on less than $5.50 per day. The worlds few billionaires own more than the poorest 60 per cent of the planet. Wealth taxes are at historic lows for the rich and for corporations. Twenty per cent of the worlds children more than a quarter of a billion cannot attend school. Ten thousand people die unnecessarily every day, from causes directly related to poverty. Upheaval has shaken Hong Kong, against the increasingly interventionist and heavy hand of the Chinese state. In May 2021, Palestinians across the whole of historic Palestine rose in furious reaction to the ethnic cleansing of the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood of Jerusalem by Israeli authorities, an uprising to which Israel responded with its usual indiscriminate and provocative violence, including the shelling of the crowded prison that is the Gaza Strip. Thirteen Israelis, including two children, were killed and twenty times as many Palestinians, and thirty-three times as many Palestinian children.

And on and on. To such lists of violence and resistance, countless more examples could be added. What is The Communist Manifesto in this moment?

*

The book you hold doesnt pretend to be an exhaustive evaluation of the Manifesto or its arguments. Its intended as a short introduction to an indispensable text with the curious and open-minded reader in mind. I presume no prior knowledge. I include synopses of, and quote liberally from, all the Manifesto s sections. Ive tried to make this book as freestanding as possible, while honouring the work of scholars and activists on which it draws. Thats why the text is full of echoes, not shy to quote, to name names, even in passing, to speak words spoken best and first by others. And for those readers interested in investigating the sprawling literature further, in the endnotes Ive alluded to and expanded at reasonable length on various debates, discussions and references to which I can only gesture in the main text.