Globalization and internationalism: How up-to-date is the communist manifesto?

Monthly Review

Volumn 50, Issue 6, 1998, Pages 16-27

  Löwy, Michael ^a  

^a CNRS   (France)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0347722630     PISSN: 00270520     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.14452/MR-050-06-1998-10_2     Document Type: Article

References (12)

1. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law, Paris 1971, p.81.
2. Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review, 1998), pp. 21-22.
3. ibid. p. 22.
4. Manifesto, p. 22. For a discussion in depth of this problem area, I refer to Nestor Kohan's excellent text "Marx en su trec mundo," Casa delas Americas, 207, April-June 1977.
5. Manifesto, p. 40. This affirmation of the Manifesto is particularly contradicted several lines further on, where the authors seem to link the end of national antagonisms to that of capitalism: "In proportion as the exploitation of one individual by another is put an end to, the exploitation of one nation by another will also be put an end to. In proportion as the antagonism between class within the nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end."
6. I here take as my own the analyses of Daniel Bensaid in his remarkable book Le Paz Mélancolique (The Melancholic Wager) (Paris, Fayard, 1997).
7. Manifesto, p. 21.
8. ibid, p. 31.
9. ibid., p.25.
10. ibid., p.20.
11. Eight years after the fall of the Wall, what do the Germans themselves think about this subject? Do they believe that "today, the class struggle is outmoded, Employers and employees ought to relate to each others as partners," or rather do they hold that "it is right to speak of the class struggle. Basically, employers and employees have totally incompatible interests?" Here is an interesting opinion poll, published on December 10, 1997, by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper scarcely to be accused of sympathizing with Marxism: although in 1980 some 58% of West-German citizens chose the former answer against 25% for the latter, by 1997 the balance had been reversed: some 41% still considering the class struggle to be outmoded, but 44% thinking it to be on the agenda. In the former GDR - that is, among the very people who overturned the Berlin Wall - the majority is strikingly clearer: 58% of adherents to class struggle against 26%! (cf. Le Monde Diplomatique, n.526, January 1998, p.8).
12. Marx and Engels, L'ldéologie Allemande, Paris, Editions Sociales, 1968, p.67.