Rev Left Radio - [BEST OF] A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto

Episode Date: May 15, 2025

ORIGINALLY RELEASED Mar 6, 2023 In this insightful episode, bestselling author and acclaimed literary critic China Miéville joins Breht to explore his newest book, "A Spectre, Haunting: On The Communist Manifesto." Together, they examine the enduring literary power and historical significance of Marx and Engels' groundbreaking text, unpacking its vibrant prose and revolutionary fervor. They also delve into the historical circumstances surrounding its creation and discuss its growing contemporary relevance amid today's global challenges. A must-listen for those interested in literature, history, and the ongoing relevance of radical political thought. ---------------------------------------------------- Support Rev Left and get access to bonus episodes: www.patreon.com/revleftradio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio Follow, Subscribe, & Learn more about Rev Left Radio HERE

Hello everybody and welcome back to Rev Left Radio. I have a very exciting episode today. I have on the show the one and only China Mieville to talk about his newest book, A Spectre Haunting on the Communist Manifesto. I absolutely just loved this book. I think it engages with the text in an interesting and really in-depth way, especially for a new generation of people coming up that might be interested in the Communist Manifesto and the politics implied and contained therein.

It was a real pleasure and an honor to be able to get China to come on the show and discuss it. He's a wonderful comrade, a wonderful person, a wonderful author, and I absolutely loved this book. I didn't get to mention it in the show, but you can find the book anywhere. I think in the U.S., it's released by Haymarket. And I also found the audiobook to be very good because China reads the book itself, and it's always great when the author can read the text. So I highly recommend anybody at all that likes this conversation or that once to re-engage with the Communist Manifesto once again to check out the book, A Spectre Haunting on the Communist Manifesto by China Mieville. And this discussion is about that book.

And I also want to give a shout out to my friend John Greenaway, aka the Lit Crit Guy, co-host of the podcast The Horror Vanguard, mini-time visitor of the Rev. left show he's been a guest on multiple occasions here and it was actually through him that i was able to make this interview happen and i think people might know that you know china is someone that is not necessarily the easiest guest to get on your podcast for various reasons um and so i was very very happy that through john i was able to contact him and that he agreed to come on the show and what you're going to hear is a wonderful conversation about his book of specter haunting and about the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, the context in which they wrote, the relevance of that text for us today, how China and myself both came to the manifesto first engaged with

it, its impact on us, etc. And I also want to, it's not going to be in this episode, but very soon here, I want to do basically an audible reading of the manifesto itself. So I kind of want to just read the entire manifesto and put it out as a separate episode, probably in the next week or so, just to ensure that anybody who hasn't read it can read it, anybody who likes hearing a book read to them instead of reading it themselves, especially older books that can be challenging for some people, I want to make that resource available. So keep an eye out for an upcoming audible version, if you will, of the Communist Manifesto that I'll try to read and put out here on Rev. Left. But without further ado, here is my wonderful interview

with China Miavill on his newest book, A Specter Haunting, on the Communist Manifesto. Hi, my name is China, China Mievel. I'm a writer of fiction and nonfiction. And my last book was a nonfiction book called A Spector Haunting on the Communist Manifesto. Yes, and it is a huge pleasure and a huge honor to have you on the show. I absolutely loved this book. I've been a fan of yours for some time. And then once I saw that this book was coming out, I knew I had to try to get you on the show. And I'm very pleased that you agreed to come on. So yes, the book is a Specter. on the communist manifesto. A wonderful book. I cannot sing its praises enough. And just to kind of get into... Well, thank you. Let me just say thank you very much for such a generous introduction. And yeah, I really appreciate that. And I'm very glad you found something in the book, because I'm aware that a lot of people who read it will already be fairly familiar with the manifesto. So although obviously it's great when people who are relative newcomers to this discourse

read my book and maybe read the manifest on the on the back of that, it's also very very very nice when people who are more familiar with it still find value in it. So that means a lot. So thank you. Absolutely. Yeah. No, it's wonderful. If you are new to the manifesto or you've read it many, many times, this book still wrestles with it in exciting and new ways. And I guess my first question for you would be, when did you first come into contact with the manifesto yourself? And sort of what was its impact on you and your sort of political ideology or worldview at that time yeah i mean i came i came into contact with it probably uh 32 years ago because i'm very old and uh i was you know i i came into contact with it in my late teen years um and i know that

it would make a good story to say that it like hit me like a thunderbolt um the truth is i was already moving quite sharply from a position of uh sort of radical liberalism to the left and had already encountered some of Marx's writing and been really shattered. The Thunderbolt had already happened, if you like. So the manifesto, although I found it fascinating and rich and beautiful, which is an adjective that is not as often applied as it should be, in my opinion, to the text, it wasn't the case that it was like a hugely sort of epiphanic or recruiting moment for me, because it was pushing at an open door, if you like.

Yeah, wonderful. I remember coming into contact with it as a teenager having little to no introduction to Marxism or communism, but seeing the book on a shelf at a local bookstore and just kind of taking a shot on it. And I remember reading it and sort of being simultaneously, deeply confused and also deeply entranced. And I just remember the feeling of as a working class teenage kid who's been through the normal panoply of working class depravities in the U.S. for the first time, somebody was talking about the working class in pure terms and partisan terms. Like, not only are we talking about the working class, which at that time in America, even the major political parties didn't, but we're on the side of the working class.

And I remember that stirring something quite deep within me that I would later flesh out in my further pursuits of Marxism and whatnot. But at the time, it was both sort of confusing and deeply inspiring for ways I couldn't fully comprehend at the time. I think that formulation of confusing and inspiring is very good. It's very perspicacious. And I think one of the things that did really strike me about the manifesto and did, I think, surprise me was the unapologetic swagger. Because I read it at a time when, you know, it would have been in the late 80s.

And, you know, it was a very sort of depressed and depressing time. in various ways. And it was, and it particularly in the kind of context of sort of thatcherism and so on, the kind of throwing around the accusation of communism or socialism was a very kind of, even more than now was a sort of shorthand for dispensing with any kind of serious argument. And I was very struck by the unapologeticness and even a kind of what we might now call a kind of trolling swagger of the text. And so, you know, I, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the way where they say, you know, you accuse us of wanting to get a, do away with your property, exactly so. That is exactly what we want to do. Um, and, you know, kind of structure it the way you did, investigate it the way that you did, which I found, again, to be rather new. And kind of, what did you want to accomplish with this book in particular? Well, to be honest. And, to be honest, with you, one of the main things was, it was kind of spurred by a sense of

epochal exasperation because I have for so long sort of sought out, if you like, kind of good faith argument and good faith debate. And there are, you know, obviously as a leftist, you know, just as well as I do, and the leftist based in the states, which has historically been even more fallow ground, you know, how difficult it is to find a good faith debate. because obviously what one wants is for, you know, to find, you know, someone who agrees with one, or someone who doesn't, but who is genuinely interested and genuinely wants to have a discussion. And the thing that struck me about the manifesto is that more than any other of Marx's major works that I can think of, and Marx and Engels is major works, I should say, because I consider the manifesto to have been written by both of them,

even though that's a little controversial. But more than any other of his works, it is true. treated by its opponents with this kind of intense lack of interest and lack of seriousness. So it's like, you know, if you are arguing with Marx and you are in any way a serious, you know, intellectual, of the right or of liberalism, and you engage with something like the Grundresor or you engage with the manifest, with, with capital, you know, this is self-evidently a serious work. And even though you may be all kinds of, you know, bullshit. swear.

Yeah, we encourage it. Even though, okay, so even though you may not be, you know, people may come up with stuff that you and I would find very exasperating, there is a kind of baseline, often more of a kind of baseline sense of respect as this is a kind of hefty work that needs to be treated seriously. Whereas most of the criticisms of the manifesto, including, I think, from people who should really know better, are just embarrassing. They're embarrassing because they are predicated on these kind of total category errors about

what kind of document it is. And this is why I talk quite a lot about the kind of the poetry of the manifesto itself and the manifesto form. So I know this sounds tendentious. It sounds, you know, it may sound like a like a kind of PR line. But with my hand on my heart, partly the book, to write the book was motivated as well as to sort of encourage people to go back to the manifesto, to say to the manifesto's opponents, up your game. Because the way you are talking about, this document, with a few honorable exceptions, is just embarrassing. Like, if you're going to criticize it, criticize it like a serious person. And I do really want to give credit where it's due. Like, when I did a podcast discussion with Chris Hayes, who is by no means, you know, he's not

a Marxist, and he's also not a conservative, he's a liberal. But it was very striking to me because it was a really good, serious discussion. And it struck me because it's how rare that is. And I thought, like, this is a guy who comes out of a different political tradition, and he's a liberal, but he's curious, he's open-minded, he's serious. And it was like, that should be the norm in good faith discussion, and it just isn't. And so partly, this book was written to sort of say, you know, the way this book is mostly talked about by its critics and unfortunately sometimes by its friends is not serious. And it deserves seriousness whether you agree with it or not. Yeah, I could not agree more. And that interview with Chris Hayes, I listened to it.

I found it fascinating because, as you say, it's like one of these rare moments where I know Chris Hayes is like a, you know, straight down the middle sort of progressive liberal type. But I also know that, you know, when he does have on thinkers of your caliber, he will engage sincerely. He has at least engaged with Marx in a serious way in the past, and that comes out quite clearly. And I was very impressed precisely because it was so exceptional that somebody in the mainstream U.S. media, would even, you know, feign to take this thing seriously. But yeah, yeah, but there's a, I completely agree. And I, and I think what frustrates me, and I, you know, and I really respected him for that. And I'm grateful to him.

And one of the things that I, you know, that is so striking is the lack of curiosity in most of the discussions. And I think what struck me about that discussion was that this is a guy who clearly didn't pretend to agree with me about everything, but was curious. And so half of the criticisms that come up about the manifesto, you know, people will say, oh, you know, Marx said capitalism would inevitably come to an end, and it hasn't come to an end, ergo the entire manifesto is nonsense. And it's like, are you not a little bit more curious about what might be going on here? I'm not even asking you to agree with it. I'm asking you to have a scintilla of serious curiosity about this document, you know? Absolutely. Yeah, and there's just a low bar for anti-communism. You can say anything, like a Jordan Peterson type, even a Joe Rogan type.

Just anything at all about communism and it's taken on board. and given two thumbs up. But on the other end, of course, we have to know philosophy, history, economics, were questioned from every angle. I did find it very interesting that when Jordan Peterson went to debate Slavo-Jewjijek on Marxism, all Peterson did was thumbed through the manifesto and came to Jizek as if he now had an understanding of Marxism and was humiliated. But I think that's par for the course as far as like so-called public intellectuals in the West engaging with Marxism in any serious way. No, I think that's right. And I think, you know, if we were debating or when we do debate, you know, liberals or or even, you know, a few good faith conservatives, I would be embarrassed to turn up and cite the texts that are important to them with the same kind of incurious, clod hopping kind of sort of, I hesitate to call it stupidity, but just kind of lack of heuris.

of serious interest, it would be embarrassing. And plus which we would be laughed out of court quite rightly, but they are not. Yeah, exactly. Well, as a prolific and renowned literary author yourself, I was very interested in kind of what your thoughts are on before we get into the content itself, what the style, the construction, the imagery of the communist manifesto. And what about it rises to the level of a literary work of art, in your opinion? Well, I mean, there are a Certain phrases and certain passages, such as the one that Marshall Berman uses for the title of his book and, you know, all that is, you know, all fixed, fast frozen, all that is solid melts into air, this incredible kind of beautiful poetic rush. And that's obviously the most, probably the most renowned section of kind of, in inverted commas, fine writing within the manifesto. but rightly so it is an extraordinary beautiful poetic passage and although that's the most prominent

one the the text is is is punctured with these with these passages where what raises in marks and angles a kind of poetic trance is this kind of class fury and I think simply as a matter of kind of literature at its best the manifesto is a, as I say, a remarkably beautiful piece of writing. Now, it's interesting because it's also obviously an intervention in certain political debates, and it's written for a small, you know, leftist group. And so those bits sit alongside some much clunkier or, you know, more kind of more historically specific pieces that don't resonate nearly so beautifully with us today. But even then, I think, and this is to repeat what I was saying a minute ago, I think it is

is really vital to relate to these moments of poetry and moments of kind of urgency, not as, if you like, mere filigrees into the argument, but as an absolutely constitutive part of the nature of this text, which is a manifesto that comes to define the manifesto form. And the thing about the manifesto form is that it is doing many things at once. And I mean, I would say all writing is doing many things at once, but a manifest though very, very particularly because just as it is, you know, making a political argument, it is also trying to recruit someone. And it's also trying to hold their attention in a very urgent way. And it's also trying to make a case. And it's also trying to attack its enemies. And it's doing all this in this very urgent, very intense, very performative mode. And that is why the nature of the claim. that it makes, the very beauty, if you like, of some of its formulations, the very kind of poetic sort of the slide of some of its formulations, their ambiguity even has to be understood as part

of this form. And this is why talking about the nature of the writing, to me, is a necessary part of talking about the nature of the arguments. And the example I always always give, which is in the book, is when Marx and Engel say, you know, the working class has no country. And if you treat that simply as a lot of its opponents do as, and indeed some of its friends do, as like a statement of fact, it's self-evidently wrong. It's self-evidently wrong juridically, and it's self-evidently wrong, unfortunately, in terms of ideology, because there are plenty of working class people who are deeply committed to patriotism and nationalism. But And if you understand the nature of the manifesto form, then this particular kind of urgent declaration, then you can begin to read it as not straightforwardly a statement of fact, but in the context in which it's written, and I try and make the case as to why you should read it like this, as an aspiration and also as a warning.

like when you're telling your working class audience the working class has no country what you're partly doing is saying you relate to your own country as on your side and you should not do it you should not do that it's it's a warning and so that doesn't mean you can't criticize the text but it does mean that you're not going to be criticizing it seriously or uh or or praising it respectfully if you don't understand how the the form of the writing alters the kind of the content of these claims that it makes. You know, whereas if you were laying out a very, very simple kind of plodding narrative history and you sort of said, you know, year 1848, the working class has no country, that's a very

different kind of claim, even though the words are exactly the same. And that's why the form of the writing is centrally important. Yeah. Yeah, really, really interesting. Another thing, of course that I think you and I both share as far as our like of the way that Marx writes in general, Marx and Engels Together, is often the Gothic imagery. And even, of course, the title of your text brings us out, a specter haunting in the work of Marx, especially when he's trying to appeal to your sense of humanity and going on to his polemics, he'll often invoke blood and vampires and ghosts. What do you make of that gothic imagery in its place in Marx's writing? Yeah, I mean, I find it very rich and very, very fecund and very sort of interesting to think with.

There's a very brilliant book that's just come out in English for the first time by Ludovico Silver on Marx's style and the metaphors of Marx. And that book makes a very strong case that the, you know, these kind of, all the metaphors he uses, but very particularly, you know, you know, the metaphors of the Gothic are central to the argument and that they're like central parts of the way he thinks. Particularly in the case of the Gothic is this constant sense of the kind of that which is attempted to be buried, refusing to be buried. Now, I do think there's a little danger here, which is that I think in an epoch where we all on the left have have so little power, one of the ways I think that manifests is in a tendency to overinvest stuff like our cultural bump around us with political meaning. And I want to be clear here,

I'm not suggesting that we, that we shouldn't do really serious political readings of cultural artefacts, but I do sometimes see in some of the discussions about culture a slightly too enthusiastic attempt to kind of either learn lessons or gain ground politically through culture. So you start to see about like, you know, people talking about the Gothic and Marx and extrapolating from that, that like, you know, the subversive narratives of ghost stories and how like, you know, ghost films are inherently critical of capitalism. And I sort of think, like, look, comrades, I wish that were true, but it, I think this is the, this is the council of despair. So I'm all for political readings, but I do think we need to be a little bit serious about

about kind of relative proximity to political traction. So I find these kind of imagery and so on incredibly important and beautiful, but I don't want to kind of reverse engineer from there to questions of the Gothic in general as inherently anything. These are tools and what you do with them, you know, there is a fascist Gothic, no less than there is a radical Gothic, and sometimes these things in here within the same text. Yeah, well said, and an important point. Let's talk about the book in its context. So can you kind of discuss the historical and even maybe the personal context in which Marx and Engels worked on and wrote the manifesto and what they wanted to accomplish with it? Yeah, they were, I mean, they were very young men. They were 28 and 30, and they

were members of this, you know, tiny little group. the Communist League and they this is in 1848 and they were they had just been involved in kind of some some months of like wrestling to kind of win the group over to their perspectives which were if you like a move away from a certain kind of somewhat moralistic humanism towards a more kind of a more radical class politics and and what they would as a, you know, a kind of historical materialist politics rather than as a kind of first and foremost ethically driven politics. I want to put a footnote in that because there's a lot to be said about ethics and its presence or otherwise in the Marxist tradition. But just for now, let's

move on from there. And they, they want essentially one control and to their perspective, and they were tasked, Marx particularly was tasked with writing this manifesto that sort of would lay out the position of this, you know, this radical group and of the kind of current of history of which it saw itself as a, as an avatar. And what was interesting about it is two things for me. One of the reasons that I see the manifesto as written by both Marx and Engels is that Marx wrote his draft drawing very, very directly from previous drafts by Engels. So even though it's Marx who does the kind of, you know, the final lines that we read, this is a palimpsest of a text that is written on top of drafts that Engels did the work on.

And the second is that during the writing, essentially European and to a lesser extent global revolution broke out. And so this extraordinary thing happens, which is this document, which is being written to sort of talk about how you intervene in a kind of revolutionary situation, is being written during a revolutionary situation, a very dramatic one in which, you know, people are rising up throughout Europe and, as I say, beyond. And so Marx's comrades were desperate for him to publish the damn thing. But Marx was always, as one writer, rather beautifully put it,

he had a abiding brinkmanship with deadlines. He was just incapable of handing things in on time. So they sent him more and more and more messages. And eventually, this is why the fourth section of the manifesto is very truncate. because they basically started screaming at him and he had to put it out. So it was a document that was designed to be a sort of statement of general politics that then became aspirationly, at least, an intervention into an actually existing revolutionary situation.

However, by the time it was published, that revolutionary situation was already beginning to turn sour. So you have this kind of this sort of urgency followed by tragedy. And the tragedy is that by the time it begins to be. read on any kind of wider level, the trajectory of the revolution is fairly clear. And it's a and it's and this incredibly urgent and in some ways I think optimistic document emerges into a landscape of political ruin for the left for many years. I do want to touch on the many lives as it were of this text. But before that, you did mention ethics and its role in Marxism. And I think you have really

insightful things to say about that. So would you like to kind of go off on on that point? Sure. Well, I can put the basic case quite simply, which is that I try and make the case in the book. And to be clear, I'm by far that, you know, I'm not the first person to say this, which is that throughout the manifesto, one, and it should be said in most of their work, what Marx and Engels both said is that, you know, we are not interested in ethics. Now, Engels are a little bit more nuanced than Marx, so I do want to put a pin in that. But basically saying, ours is not an ethical politics. It's a politics of like kind of scientific. movement of history and particularly in the in the manifesto the manifesto like uh you know tries to put this case and marks was famously quite dismissive of uh deriving your your your kind of politics including your socialist politics from ethical positions and what i try to argue building on

the writing of various other people is essentially two things one is um you can't do this The idea essentially of there being a kind of rigid separation between the is and the a ort is, I think is a fallacy. I don't think you can neatly derive an aught from an is, but I do think that they are intimately related. And more importantly, for our purposes here, Marx and Engels don't do it. And essentially, Marx and Engels do indeed have an ethical position, as they absolutely should. And it is an entirely laudable ethical position, which is to do, with a drive towards freedom and the full flowering of the human being, much more so than egalitarianism. They were egalitarians because, and insofar as they saw it, as leading to

increased freedom, rather than the other way round. And they don't think they have an ethical position, but I think they're wrong about that. And I think that the manifesto itself has an embedded ethics, as, to repeat myself, as I think it must and should. So the argument I make in the in the book is that despite what they say and appear to believe, there is indeed a communist ethics within the manifesto, as there must be and as there should be. Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with that. Do you think that Marx's downplaying of the ethical is, of course, in part, a product of this separation between scientific and utopian socialism, where utopian socialists have often centered the moral or ethical arguments against capitalism

and the various forms of socialism that could grow out of that. And what Marx and Engels really wanted to be is rooted in a materialist analysis and a scientific analysis. And so that commitment made them extra or overly dismissive of the ethical, even though, of course, as you say, the ethics are built in. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think that one can be quite generous about this in the sense of it is not difficult to diagnose why they take this position for the reasons that you say. And they quite rightly, I think, think that if you make your injunction on, your political injunction on

essentially ethical grounds or moral grounds, it's not going to have the kind of traction that it should and could. And so they, you know, in the tradition of politics that I come out of, we have this phrase which we overuse, which is bend the stick. They bent the stick. too far the other way. And also, you can say that a lot of what Marx is opposing when he talks about opposing morals, again, I try and talk about this in the book. What he's actually opposed to is moralizing and moralistic arguments. And the difficulty with this is that it is, I think that it is, as I say,

you know, I think you will have and should have an ethics of your politics. but it is also perfectly correct that moralism is, you know, a pernicious problem in politics. And one way, it's ironic, which is that, you know, if you've spent much time on the left, that the Marxist left at least supposedly has this very strong position against abstract morality. And yet too many of its currents are appallingly moralistic and kind of encourage activism through moralizing and guilt and shame and all of this. And I think that not just the rational colonel, but the saliatry and healthy cynicism

about morality in Marx and Engels is precisely in part this deep and deeply important antipathy to moralism. Now, unfortunately, I think sometimes you extend that to saying, therefore, we have no kind of ethical position. And as I say, I don't think that can hold. But I don't want to just say, well, they said this silly thing for no particular reason. I think exactly as you say, there are very good reasons that they took the position they did.

I just think they took it a little further than they could actually sustain. And even their own texts argue gently against them on those grounds. Yeah, well, well said. And one area where I think the ethical dimension of Marxism comes in real handy is when you're trying to appeal to regular people, people that might not, you know, be committed, you know, Marxists or even have a hardcore ideological, you know, orientation. But there is a deep well of ethical things you can point to and ethical arguments you can make about how capitalism actually manifests in the daily lives of working people that I feel can be much more initially compelling to the average person

than perhaps the more scientific, historical materialism, dialectics, etc. aspect of Marxism. I find that to be true in my life, at least. Yeah, and I think at its best, we shouldn't counterpose these two things. It's a difficult thing to do, but the point is that, you know, one, you know, to an extent, the two are need to be integrated in the sense that like if you say, you know, look at the appalling situation of the world for most working class people and someone says, well, yeah, but unfortunately, that's just the way of the world. Now, if you have a historical materialist understanding that you, you then get. to say, and not only a historical material is understanding, but from our perspective, you say, but that isn't just the way of the world. The way the world is, is for very specific reasons, and we also have an analysis of why it need not be like that. That makes the ethical situation that much more pregnant and trenchant, whereas it's perfectly possible to have a situation. I mean, a lot of bourgeois morality is precisely around tragedy. You know, it's like, yes,

the world is terrible. Isn't it a tragedy? And so it's about that integration, I think, of the kind of, if you like, more kind of, I always I always hesitate a little bit about the word scientific, but okay, the more scientific elements integrating them with the ethics, you know, you're doing the scientific because of the ethical position and the scientific thing strengthens the ethical position. They are in fact part of a total project when they're done at their most rigorous, I think. And I think that what's interesting for me about the manifesto is I don't think the ethics in the manifesto. is clumsy. I think it's incredibly moving and powerful and strengthens the overall argument.

It's just a little quirk of intellectual history that Marx and Engels don't seem to realize that they're doing it. Wonderfully said. Yeah, absolutely. So in your book, and I was mentioning this a little bit earlier, you discussed the mini lives of the manifesto as tied to historic and social upheavals, disappearing from view at certain times of relative ease and re-emerging at others. Can you talk about the life of the manifesto over time and specifically under what conditions it seems to pop back into popular consciousness. Yeah, I mean, it's very simple. For the most part, the manifesto's fortunes in terms of its sales, its translations, new additions, popular consciousness, ebb and flow according to social problems and social crisis that

if you have any kind of a class analysis, you see as inextricable from class conflict. So, you know, when in the aftermath of the failed revolutions of 1848, then there's a moment of great class repression and the radical movement is dampened down and there's like a decade of reaction. And, I mean, it wouldn't be fair to say that there was no interest in the manifesto, but it would be fair to say that it essentially sort of, you know, was a kind of, you know, hidden thread. And then in 1871, when you hit the Paris Commune, all of a sudden, the manifesto gains this incredible new lease of life. And in fact, I think to a certain extent, almost becomes a new document because it's now being read against the background of a situation of temporary and unstable, but nonetheless, kind of working class rule. And then into the 20th century, you have this enormous wave of interest in the manifesto in 1917 and all the way up to, modern times you have um you know that it's it's it's more anecdotal but apparently in 2008 with the the great you know um economic crisis uh amazon reported a huge spike in sales of the manifesto um

now very occasionally you get a counter example like there was a there was a moment of interest in the manifesto on its 150th birthday even though that was essentially a pretty reactionary moment but that's kind of a quirk of a quirk of the calendar. Basically speaking, and again, Marshall Berman stresses this, as does Mike Davis. The manifestos shouts most loudly at a moment when there is struggle and it becomes, it is accompanying the soundtrack to that struggle. And that I think is why there seems to be even now, not only a resurgence and interest in books like the manifesto, but a resurgence or a deepening of interest, especially among millennial and Gen Z, in socialism, in an alternative to this capitalist system that for us, I'm 33 years old,

I was 19 when the 2008 financial crisis hit. All we've seen is Trump and COVID. Our political memories start at 9-11, and we're living in a time where, for the first time in the U.S., our lives are worse than our parents' lives, which is antithetical to everything we were told growing up and why we should support this system is because your life will be better than your parents and your kid's life will be better than theirs. And in this text, you mention a preface written by friend of the show, Jodie Dean, in which she argues that the manifesto is actually more relevant today than maybe it's ever been in any other time. Do you agree with that? And if so, why is that the case? Yeah, I do. I'm a very big fan of Jody Deans and I'm a big fan of that introduction.

Now, I think there's a note of caution to be said here, which is that, in fact, I tease myself a little bit at the beginning of this book, which is, I think you, I think there is a case to be made that every single leftist who has ever written anything at all about the Communist Manifesto at any point in history has said it is more relevant now than ever. Now, but the thing is, that doesn't mean we were all wrong, you know, and I think, I think that, I think that Jody Dean is right, and I think you're right, and I think I'm right, in the sense that, you know, capitalism does not have a steady state. And if I can, you know, pick up on something that you mentioned in the, when we were talking, when we were corresponding about this discussion, you talked about the phrase late capitalism

and that that sort of implies possibly an end to capitalism. Now, there is obviously an aspirational end to capitalism. But even if capitalism limps on for another 200, 500 years, even if, you know, I think it's far more likely the world would end before then, but whatever, even if, even if we don't overthrow capitalism. This is very really late capitalism in the sense that it is senescent, it is sclerotic, it is no longer, as you say, able to perform even the kind of minimal tasks of amelioration and generational betterness that it offered at a certain point for a certain important section of the working class. We see the upsurge of like pathologies and excrescences, like fascism, let alone before we even get into climate crisis and so on.

Like, there is a kind of arrogance to thinking that history just maintains itself and kind of rolls on and rolls on and rolls on. It's like capitalism in 2023 is not able to offer the same kind of social deal that it offered in 1960. And we are seeing, you know, we are seeing the results, the social and economic results. of what I have no problem calling late-stage capitalism. And even if, as I say, even if capitalism continues, this is still late-stage capitalism. The crisis of neoliberalism is such that what we have, we're living in a moment of capitalism in which we have

a truly globalized capitalism in a way that wasn't nearly as true at the time of the manifesto, but also a capitalism that has therefore run through all the kind of relatively simple kinds of expansion geographically and so on that it can do. It has, you know, moved into this moment of like cartilized monopolization where, you know, with the intervention of like finance and so on, even those like, that kind of excuse that capitalism offered for years about like less effective, less efficient capitalism's going under and that therefore it encourages efficiency. Now,

this was always dramatically exaggerated and was always a, byproduct of a fundamentally rapacious system. But it was more true a few decades ago than it is now, because now plenty of, in inverted commas, more efficient and better companies within their own terms go under because they don't have the backing of the big finance companies who have, for contingent reasons, backed some incredibly wasteful and less sufficient system. Even within its own terms, capitalism is limping from crisis to crisis in a way that it wasn't some decades ago. So both in terms of a diagnostic of the crisis of capitalism and in terms of an urgent demand for a move beyond it, I think, yes, I think we can say we have

earned the claim that the manifesto is relevant now more than ever. Beautifully said, yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that you touched on this, just in that answer and beyond that as well is throughout socialist history, you read back at these various points in history, the German Revolution, the Russian Revolution, even in Marx and Engels' work themselves, and there's this undying optimism that, you know, revolution is just around the corner, and time and time again, capitalism readjust, re-adapt. Now, you make a great point about it picked all the low-hanging fruit as far as the ways in which it can spread, which it, in the ways in which it can adapt, but now we live in the technological age. We have artificial

intelligence, the emergence of something like quantum computing, the context of, the contradiction between these automated technologies and the need for people to still be employed and have a paycheck and the papering over of that contradiction with half measures like a UBI, et cetera. And so I just, I always kind of have this hesitation. Well, I totally agree with your point about late capitalism, this hesitation of what will capitalism pull out of its hat next? And that could just be instead of a new period of renewal, it could just be on the darker

side of things, a deeper and deeper entrenchment of its inequality. and its contradictions that last way longer than we think they could possibly last and life just deteriorates for everybody slowly over time as it happens. But yeah, so I don't, yeah. No, I mean, I think you're right. And I think that the question of, what's the word?

The question of adaptability of capitalism is really crucially important. And I think it's something I try and stress very strongly in the book is I think we have to be very clear about the fact that Marx and Engels underestimated the adaptability, of capitalism. And I think that, as you say, I think they were excessively optimistic. And I think

that the adaptability of capitalism operates on at least two levels. And one is, as you imply, when you're talking about some of these recent sort of technological breakthroughs, to which possibly we can start to add cold fusion, you know, this is something people have started talking about again. I think it would be a hostage to fortune to be one of those many Marxists who has said over the years, it is literally physically impossible that capitalism will be able to extricate itself from this situation because capitalism has extricated itself from an awful, awful lot. And even with the climate crisis, like I have said, and I absolutely stand by, the idea of leaving capitalism to be the thing to fix the climate crisis is global suicide.

It's insanity. But I don't necessarily automatically follow those comrades. who say it is 100% definite that there will be no ameliorations under capitalism because it just can't do that. I think there may very well not be. It would be far more sensible to move to a needs-based economy and socialism. But I don't think it's impossible that, you know, with a combination of the monetization of certain kind of cleanup operations and certain technological developments, which may or may not come along, I don't think it's impossible that capitalism or certain aspects of it would start to do certain. things about certain aspects of the climate crisis. Now, what you and I know is, even if I'm

correct about that, and I don't say it's likely, I just don't think it's impossible, it would always be hedged and it would always be countervailed by those other capitals who are making their profit from, you know, from kind of ecocidal technologies and so on. So it's no way to fix the planet. But I do think that it is worth always reminding our stuff that capitalism is like the most, even in its sclerotic form, it's like the most incredible contortionist. And more importantly, the other aspect of adaptability that doesn't get talked about enough

and that I think goes hand in hand with it is the fact that what you need is to move beyond capitalism is, you know, as Malatesta once put it, you know, everything depends on what people are capable of wanting. And, tragically, I think we have to talk really seriously about the psychic damage that is done by

capitalism because it is simply not the case that if things reach a certain level of badness, automatically people are going to start to resist. It would be lovely if that were true. But tragically, we know that it isn't necessarily true. Despair or scapegoating or even a kind of occulted death drive, a kind of nihilistic push towards collapse, is very deeply embedded in capitalism and in the psyches of people who live in capitalist societies, including the working class. So, you know, that is just as much a part of the adaptability of capitalism, which is partly why I think that the kind of chiborite approach of focusing on something called interests as opposed to like drives or desires is ultimately not going to work because you can't

have an interest without a drive or a desire and drives and desires are not necessarily happy progressive things though writer tad delay writes about this very brilliantly he writes about you know people in his family who are dependent on Medicaid for their for their life but who are still advocating very strongly against Medicaid because they're so committed to the social sadism of taking something away from someone who they have designated a scapegoat, that they will do that up to and beyond the point of their own death. That is the kind of death cult of capitalism that we have to contend with. I think that's incredibly insightful and essential for people to think about.

And there's a certain strain of people on the revolutionary left that see collapse as the way through. Like, yeah, climate change is going to bring down these systems and in the ruins or in the process of collapse, we'll have the opportunity to do revolution. But as you say, in a moment of collapse and crisis, when fear is the dominant emotion and uncertainty is the dominant emotion, people don't necessarily want to roll the dice on new liberatory forms of social organization. They'll often give in to strong men or fascist movements that scapegoat vulnerable communities and reify certain identities.

And so there's no sort of certainty whatsoever that collapse in and of itself is going to give way to revolution. it could very well and probably almost certainly will give rise to a whole bunch of pathologies in the other direction. Well, I mean, this has already happened. I mean, we are living in the, well, I mean, obviously it already happened in Germany and, you know, in the 30s, but I mean, in a slightly less dramatic way, you know, look at the explosion of, um, of, of, of, of, of kind of, um, excrescential alt-right in the aftermath of 2008. And one of the things that can be a little exasperating for, um, um, um, um, yeah, on the, um, um, on the, um, um, um, on

the left is every single time there is a recession or there is a you know something like that there are some people on the left who are saying well you know this is painful but it's good because now people are going to wake up and it's like well a you know the the the um the formulation of wake up is a really um i think unhelpful elitist and and uh and and wrongheaded way of thinking about politics but b how many catastrophes that don't end in social revolution do you you need before you begin to believe that catastrophes don't automatically lead to radicalization. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I guess I just want to briefly touch on the text itself or the manifesto the strongest and maybe some of the weakest points of the text. Let's start with the strongest,

meaning what aspects of the manifesto seem the most convincing or perhaps impervious to attack, in your opinion? I wouldn't say they're impervious to attack. I don't think anything is impervious to attack. I think most of the attacks on these elements have been either bad faith or not very smart, which would be for me the fact of class struggle. The fact of class struggle and the fact of capitalism as being predicated on the exploitation of the many by the few and the fact the fact of that fundamental tension and the fact that capitalism will always enter crisis. Those three things. Class struggle, capitalism as an inherently deeply exploitative and oppressive system, and the fact that capitalism endlessly oscillates into crisis seem to me to be very

strong claims. And to be clear, they are claims that even a certain number of far-sighted and honest conservatives would not contest. And then there's various other things we can get into into the weeds but those are that that kind of broad um broad claim i think are the things that most of the attacks on them like you see you know you read you read like one person uh yeah a fairly serious you know um academic writing that like the idea that there's a class struggle between workers and um bosses isn't true because most workers don't see themselves as in conflict with a lot of bosses, which bracket whether or not that's even true these days, but even if it is true, even if, you know, even if you think that the boss is your best friend, that's nothing to do with

the nature of the claim that Marx and Engels are talking about. They're talking about the fundamental motor of history. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's a wild claim, but yeah, I've heard people make it for sure. Well, you get a different version of it, which is to do with, you know, it's very, very useful to talk about the culture, the culture of class. So you end up because there's this kind of inherently nos people always accuse marxists of having this nostalgic version of class which some do you know about kind of horny handed sons of toil and you know train workers and minors and so on as as being the only real working class people but then it's usually the right wing who will say well you know how can you say that that barista is working class you know uh you know she uses hand lotion and she watches netflix which is like you know and so does Elon must which is so unbelievably stupid. You know, who owns the means of production? Who is reliant on selling their labor power to live?

The idea that, you know, because someone wears a certain set of clothes, they have more in common with, you know, Elon Musk than they do with other working class people. It's so ridiculous. But that is the level of class analysis of a great number of the kind of critics of the manifesto. Yeah, I could not agree more on that point. I've seen that argument. I mean, on Twitter in the last few months, there is a huge argument about our baristas really workers, and it's just exhausting to have to put up with that.

Yeah, and it often comes from the left, which is very irritating. Yes, absolutely. In fact, this whole last spout was about elements of the ostensible left talking like that, and very workerist, very chauvinist, and their idea of who is and isn't working class. That's how the right infiltrates to the left and uses left posturing to get to fascist or right-wing reactionary ends. Yeah, it's, yeah. And, you know, Marx and Engels never did that. And you read Marx and Engel for, you can criticize them on all kinds of things.

But you read the way Engels, for example, wrote about what it is to be a worker, the distinction. It is absolutely crystal clear. There's nothing about this culturalist bullshit. You know, I mean, who was some of the most radical? Yeah, anyway, I won't labor the point. Yes, I agree. Absolutely. Okay.

On the other side of that coin, you do spend some time in your book talking about some criticisms. And this is important, I think, for Marxists in general to be self-critical, to engage honestly and in good faith with possible weak points in our traditions or in the text that we laud. And so with all that in mind, what are some of the main criticisms or the main weak points of the manifesto that you explore in your book? Sure. Well, again, this is another point where I think it's very important to stress that this is a manifesto and it is the manifesto form. So we are not talking here about, you know, a large systematic textbook. And that does not mean in any way that it's beyond criticism. And as you say, I criticize it.

But it does mean that you need to be criticizing it, you know, as what it is rather than, you know, rather than against some kind of platonic idea of what it should have been. Now, that said, I think that I quite strongly think that most of the elements where you will often hear it accused of inevitabilism, where like, you know, the capitalism will inevitably collapse, you know, the working class has no country, that kind of thing. Now, I think that's a very simplistic criticism because what I think the text does a lot is contains that argument, but also contains the opposite argument. And this is where the rhetoric has to be unpicked. But that doesn't mean that I don't think that those formulations taken in isolation

are always very helpful. So I would say that what you can't do is derive what the manifesto says about history from one line. And that's just not a very serious reading. But you can also say, if you do have a serious reading, yeah, that line was much too straightforwardly put. That was not very nuanced things. So there are formulations about inevitableism, you know, that imply an inevitableist position in the manifesto that I do think are unhelpful. At a deeper level, the two things that have loomed probably most large for me are an insufficient gendering. and racing of class. And that's a very specific formulation

because what I'm trying to suggest is there is, if you like, a kind of radical liberal criticism, which is to have a kind of arithmetic idea where you add these things and you stir them. And it says, well, like Marx and Engels only talk about class, they don't talk about gender,

so we need to stir gender in. But that is not actually a kind of, I think, sufficient, because I do think that there is something, and I try to make the case that I agree with Marks and Engels that there is something very specific in terms of the kind of historical dynamic about the specific relationship of class. Class as a productive phenomenon, class as a conflictual phenomenon, class as a question of relationship to power.

But seeing class as distinct in certain ways does not mean that it is not inflected by race and gender in very specific ways. So the example I use is they have a very brilliant and moving discussion about kind of patriarchy and sexism. But what they don't do is integrate their own insights, partial insights, about the nature of family life and the nature of the lower paid pay given to women because of the ideology of where they sit in family life to the replacements. of class and the keeping down of wages, which means the valuation of labour power.

This is why gender is integral to the class relationship. Similarly, relations of imperialism and thus of racism have a, they are not just a question of like ethics and political ethics and liberation in their own terms. They're also about the way class is replicated internationally, and these are not fully developed. There is no question that the manifesto is a sort of... To say it's Eurocentric begs a question, because... And again, the book talks about this a bit. There is that kind of Eurocentrism which sees the European subjectivity

as explicitly more important and more rigorous and better than any other viewpoint. and then there's a kind of Eurocentrism that's predicated on essentially not thinking to include the other viewpoints. Now, neither of these is innocent. Neither of these shouldn't be criticized. But there is a fairly strong distinction about an explicit valorization of one viewpoint as opposed to a kind of myopic failure to engage. And I think a lot of the criticisms of the manifesto, particularly from scholars from the Global South and scholars of color, although not solely, has been a very friendly and comradely criticism, but saying that essentially the non-European working class and indeed peasantry and others are not subjects of history in the manifesto. And when you bring them

into being subjects of history, you don't just do a more rigorous job of understanding the world. You also do a more rigorous job of understanding the way class works. And to be fair, Marx, and Engels, particularly Marx, improved on this greatly over the course of their lives. They became far more nuanced about the role of racism in the nature of class society. But I do think it's fair to say that as the Combehi River collective, and as Fanon put it, you know, you need to extend and stretch the Marxism of the manifesto. to incorporate a more rigorous understanding of race and racism. Yeah. Could not agree more. And that was a wonderful answer. And the book is a wonderful book.

The book, again, is a specter haunting on the Communist Manifesto. But I do have one more question for you, China. Ultimately, what do you hope people take away from your work and from the manifesto itself? Well, I mean, from my fictional work, I hope people enjoy reading. the stories. From my non-fictional work, I hope my dream is that they are convinced by my arguments. If they are not convinced by my arguments, I hope they come away feeling that they have been in the company of a serious interlocutor whose positions deserve serious engagement. And if they do, particularly in a case of something like a specter haunting, I mean, you know I'm going to say this, Brett. This is a, this is a shoe-in and a gimmee for the fans, isn't

it, but what I hope people come away with is the sense that we deserve better than this fucking shit hole world and that it is within our power to build something that we deserve. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much, China, for coming on. I'm a huge fan of your work. I absolutely love that you came on our show. It's an honor and a pleasure.

Where can listeners find your book before we let you go? Oh, at all good book shops. In America, it's published by, in the U.S., I should say it's published by Haymarket Books, in Britain it's published by head of Zeus and yeah if you Google my name and haunting you will probably find it thank you so much for having me on it's been a real pleasure

absolutely let's do it again sometime thank you take care