Communism on your coffee table!

Barbara Ehrenreich on how all-conquering capitalism has turned Karl Marx's "Communist Manifesto" into a glossy adornment that goes with most decorating schemes.

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Apr 30, 1998 |

Ah, Karl! You thought those frantic scratchings and snortings were the sounds of capitalism digging its own grave, but all it was doing was preparing a nice niche for you -- a market niche, in fact. The leftish British press Verso has seized upon the 150th anniversary of "The Communist Manifesto" to re-issue that rousing old tract in an upscale version, suitable for display at the cash register. "It's very chic and looks like something for the sybaritic classes," Verso's PR person observes proudly, adding that it should "get us some great displays in the book chains." Adding impenetrable levels of irony, the cover has been designed by those playful ex-Soviet artists Komar and Melamid, whose gorgeously rippling red banner against a black background should be readily accessorizable with the cashmeres in primary tones coming to us for fall.

Why didn't Marx, or his co-author, Friedrich Engels, who knew a thing or two about running a business himself, think of this long ago? As Eric Hobsbawm tells us in his introduction to the Verso edition, sales of the original manifesto were pathetically sub-mid-list for decades after it was written. As for foreign rights, forget about it until well into the 1860s, when the International Working Men's Association began to take off. One can imagine their editor taking the authors to lunch and saying, "Karl, Fred, you've got some great stuff in here. That part about 'nothing to lose but your chains' just blew me away. I mean, the prose rocks. But we have to think packaging too. Like what about a pop-up version? A collectible bourgeois-piggie figures tie-in with Taco Bell? Or the movie version with Kate Winslet as the factory gal and Anthony Hopkins as the specter-that-is-haunting-Europe?"

But of course back in those days it would have been at least unwise for members of the "sybaritic classes" to go mincing about with their designer copies of "The Communist Manifesto" in hand. In the mid-19th century, fat cats could still recall the whistle of the guillotine blade as it headed for an overprivileged neck; they had seen the delirious, underfed masses rise up -- in Germany, Italy, France and the Austrian Empire -- in 1848. So there's no use blaming Karl and Fred for their lack of entrepreneurial initiative. One hundred fifty years ago, the conditions -- both "objective" and "subjective," as they would have put it -- were not yet ripe for the commodification of revolution itself.

First the world had to be made safe for irony on this scale and complexity. Communism -- or at least something superficially resembling the manifesto's prescription -- had to be attempted, road-tested and rejected worldwide. "Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State": Been there, done that. "Centralization of credit in the hands of the State": No danger that that's going to catch on among America's gun-bearing blue-collar class. In its naive faith that "the State" could be commandeered overnight to serve the workers as loyally as it normally serves the rich, "The Communist Manifesto" is as much an antique as those darling little Lenin pins that are available by the fistful at the flea markets in Berlin today. Post 1989, the manifesto bears the implicit warning label: Fun as it may sound, you don't want to try this at home.

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