My good friend Michael Löwy reflects on the relevance of The Communist Manifesto 160 years on. Its obsolete aspects notwithstanding, he pinpoints the prescience of its two young authors in foreseeing the expansion of capitalism across the globe and the capitalist domination of all areas of human existence. After quoting some key passages from the Manifesto covering these themes, Michael writes:
In fact, capital has never succeeded as it has in the 21st century in exerting a power so complete, absolute, integral, universal and unlimited over the entire world. Never in the past was it able, as today, to impose its rules, its policies, its dogmas and its interests on all the nations of the globe. International financial capital and multinational companies have never so much escaped the control of the states and peoples concerned. Never before has there been such a dense network of international institutions - like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation - devoted to controlling, governing and administering the life of humanity according to the strict rules of the capitalist free market and of capitalist free profit. Finally, never at any time prior to today, have all spheres of human life – social relations, culture, art, politics, sexuality, health, education, sport, entertainment - been so completely subjected to capital and so profoundly plunged into the "... icy water of egotistical calculation".
Of course, this is not the kind of vindication that, more than a century and a half after they wrote, Marx and Engels would have wanted or expected: the continued world-wide hegemony of capitalism. And Michael tries to provide some counterpoint to it by referring to the 'categorical imperative both ethical and strategic' which the two men offered in their work for the movement of all those victimized and oppressed by capitalism, and fighting for 'a society based on solidarity and equality'. Yet the balance here is, in truth, a very lopsided one. Socialism today lacks not only (as Michael says it does) international coordination; it lacks political confidence, lacks a strategy, lacks persuasive models of an alternative future, and lacks, amongst too many of its supporters, an unambiguous commitment to democracy and human rights.