Communist Manifesto Birthday! 160 years!

On the failures of "really existing capitalism"

The Communist Manifesto Turns 160

by Barbara Ehrenreich


This year marks the 160th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto and
capitalism--a "free enterprise"--seems willing to observe the occasion
by dropping dead. On Monday night, some pundits were warning that the
ATMs might run dry and hinting that the only safe investment left is
canned beans. Apocalypse or extortion? No one seems to know, though the
populist part of the populace has been leaning toward the latter. An
e-mail whipping around the web this morning has the subject line "Sign on
Wall Street yesterday," and shows a hand-lettered cardboard sign saying,
"JUMP! You Fuckers!"

The Manifesto makes for quaint reading today. All that talk about
"production," for example: Did they actually make things in those days?
Did the proletariat really slave away in factories instead of call
centers? But on one point Marx and Engels proved right: within
capitalist societies, or at least the kind of wildly unregulated
capitalism America has had, the rich got richer, the workers got poorer,
and the erstwhile middle class has been sliding toward ruin. The last
two outcomes are what Marx called "immiseration," which, in translation,
is the process you're undergoing when you have cancer and no health
insurance or a mortgage payment due and no paycheck coming in.

Marx predicted that capitalism would fall in a spirited, proactive,
fashion: the workers, fed up with immiseration, would revolt, seize the
"means of production" and insist on running the show themselves, that
being the original, pre-Soviet, notion of socialism. The revolution
didn't happen, of course, at least not here. For the past several years,
American workers have sweetly acquiesced to declining wages, rising
prices, speed-ups at work, disappearing pensions and increasingly
threadbare health insurance. While CEO pay escalated to the eight-figure
range and above, so-called ordinary Americans took on second jobs and
crowded into multi-generational households with uncomfortably long waits
for the bathroom.

But all this immiseration--combined with fabulous enrichment at the
top--did end up destabilizing the capitalist system, if only because ,
in the last few years, America's substitute for decent wages has been
easy credit. Until about a year ago, we got almost daily messages, by
telemarketer and by mail, urging us to consolidate our debts, refinance
our homes, transfer our debts from credit card to another and try tasty
new mortgages that didn't even require a down payment. All too often, we
bit. It sounded so reasonable, for example, not to let our assets just
"sit" in our houses but to start spending that money now.

At the other, Learjet, end of the economic spectrum, there was the
problem of what to do with too much money. Yes, this can be a problem.
Some of the super-rich have to hire consultants to help them spend their
money: Where do you get a $20,000 bottle of wine or find a Picasso for
the bathroom wall? More seriously, there was the problem of what to
invest in. As Chuck Collins of the Working Group on Extreme Inequality
has pointed out, huge concentrations of wealth can function like rogue
waves, smashing around recklessly in their search for ever higher
returns. A lot of these money waves flowed, directly or indirectly, into
the dodgy credit schemes that were engulfing the un-rich majority,
leaving even the fat cats imperiled by the toxic debts of the subprime
class.

Marx's argument was that the coexistence of great wealth for the few and
growing poverty for the many is not only morally objectionable, it's
also inherently unstable. He may have been wrong about the reasons for
the instability, but no one can any longer deny it's there. When the
greed of the rich collided with the needs of the poor--for a home, for
example--the result was a global credit meltdown.

Obviously, the way to address the crisis is to deal with the poverty and
inequality that led to it: bail out people facing foreclosures, increase
food stamp allotments, extend unemployment insurance and make a
massive job-generating, public investment in infrastructure--and, since
medical debts are the number-one cause of personal bankruptcy, enact
universal health insurance immediately. But not even Obama, whose lawn
sign I still proudly display, seems to have the stomach for such a
"trickle upwards" approach. He has announced that he won't bother taking
the bailout as an opportunity to change the bankruptcy law so that
people facing foreclosure can renegotiate their mortgages.

So happy birthday, Communist Manifesto--although I'm hoping that
capitalism survives this one, if only because there's no alternative
ready at hand. At the very least, we should get some regulation and
serious oversight out of any bailout deal, meaning that, yes, the
economy will look a little less like "free enterprise." But one thing we
should have learned in the last week, if not the last year, is that,
when applied to enterprise, "freedom" can be just another word for
someone else's pain.



This article can be found on the web at:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081013/ehrenreich



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