Oct

18

2024

Alice Radosh (co-chair, JC Council): When was the last time you picked up a copy of The Communist Manifesto and settled down for a good read? Never? Too long ago to remember or admit? If so, I urge you to get a copy of China Miéville’s book, A Spectre Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto (Haymarket Books). Miéville, a British writer and leftist activist, is best known for his award-winning speculative fiction. He brings the same brilliance, humor, and combativeness to his non-fiction.

A Spectre Haunting opens by describing the Manifesto as “short and rude and vivid,” a text whose impact “has been utterly epochal.” Miéville reminds us that The Communist Manifesto is just that—a manifesto, a call to arms, not a “judicious, cautious set of scholarly propositions.” It was written hastily and under pressure in 1848 by Marx (primarily) and Engles (to a lesser extent). At the time, Europe was in the throes of political and economic crises, and the Communist League (a “small group of squabbling émigrés,” as Miéville describes them) needed to respond quickly. Marx, tasked with drafting the League’s response, toiled endlessly over the document. Infuriated by what became known as Marx’s lifelong “abiding brinkmanship with deadlines,” the League threatened him with “further measures” if he did not deliver the promised tract. The result is what Miéville describes as a “rush-written pamphlet, where flawed and hastily conceived passages sit alongside brilliant insight.”

Miéville’s slim volume systematically takes the reader through the text’s 194 paragraphs, with the unabridged 23-page Manifesto presented as an appendix. In Miéville’s deft hands, you see the text as he does, vivid with fury and sarcasm, as well as with respect for the strength of the forces aligned against communism. There are a number of surprises: Every leftist can quote, “The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains” and “WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES UNITE” (caps in the original), but how many of us know that the Manifesto begins by crediting the bourgeoisie with playing a “most-revolutionary” role in the areas of chemistry and agriculture and in the development of steam navigation and railways? In fact, the bourgeoisie, according to Marx and Engels, have accomplished “wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals.” Miéville, in elucidating the text’s more surprising elements, ensures that the Manifesto does not become a reified object instead of a work to be grappled with, and his thorough and thoughtful explication of the text is followed by two detailed chapters that evaluate the criticisms that have followed the Manifesto from its publication to the present.

Marx’s work has proved enduring in part because his analysis remains so relevant. Indeed, as Miéville notes, sales of Marx’s works have consistently proven to be a barometer of the times. During the financial crisis of 2008, for example, there was a substantial spike in sales of his works. Explaining this trend, Miéville quotes the critic Marshall Berman: “Whenever there’s trouble, anywhere in the world, the book becomes an item. When people dream of resistance . . . it provides the music for their dreams.” It is because of this enduring relevance and artistry, Miéville argues, that the Manifesto demands not only to be read but “to be read aloud to savor the poetry.” And, aloud or not, A Spectre Haunting demands to be read along with it.

Arielle Angel (editor-in-chief): Last week, just before I began my Yom Kippur fast, I finished The Designated Mourner, a play by Wallace Shawn (who you might also know as an actor from My Dinner with Andre and The Princess Bride), first performed in 1996. I carried it with me through the holy day and have not stopped thinking about it since. The play is an account of a small group of dissidents in an unnamed country amid an authoritarian turn—and a “vague hanger-on,” Jack, who defects when things start getting bloody. Jack’s wife, Judy, the daughter of dissident poet Howard, offers a simple explanation for Jack’s betrayal even before we learn of its contours. “If you stop and think about it,” she says to the audience, “you have to admit that human motivation is not complex, or it’s complex only in the same sense that the motivation of a fly is complex. In other words, if you try to swat a fly, it moves out of the way.” But this is the starting point and not the terminus of Shawn’s exploration of Jack’s psyche—his tenuous sense of self and eerie dislocation, his libidinal distractions, and a contempt for “highbrow” culture that seems to prefigure the “edgelord.” We follow him to nice hotels and living room parties as tens of thousands of bodies pile up “in every sort of inappropriate spot, such as the carousel in the middle of the park” and friends are publicly executed while dining out, bullets in the back of their heads.

But if we want to distance ourselves from Jack, Shawn denies us the satisfaction of an easy identification with his former circle. Here, the playwright retains a suspicion of the comforts of bourgeois life—the way its fleeting material pleasures and even its most treasured cultural artifacts can act as pacifiers—that he first explored in his 1991 play The Fever. Indeed, in The Designated Mourner, the dissidents are largely impotent. Howard, their elderly unofficial leader, has seemingly last written something truly subversive in his 20s; he remains in the crosshairs of the regime less because of continued action, but because of his silence, his refusal to renounce his former work. His group reads books, attends plays, drinks tea, and debates morality and the lot of the poor, but rarely do we see them do any more than that, which makes it all the more striking when that is enough to call down a death sentence—and not at all surprising that they are helpless to stop it.

In the spring, during the brutal crackdowns on student encampments, I experienced a new kind of fear. I saw clips of CNN’s Dana Bash offering the number of student arrests at various schools as their own justification, incontrovertible evidence of protester violence, even as the picture on screen showed the violence of police. I had known, intellectually, that we on the left were on our own, that greater and greater repression was on its way, but this time I felt it. Our continued protest threatens the comfort of polite, liberal society. And in response, they bare their teeth, the way a dog does when you reach for its bone. I am thinking of this again as we near the election, all the various ways that things stand to get even worse, particularly as it relates to movement repression. And yet, perhaps many of us—and I indict myself here, just as his plays implicate Shawn—are also still too comfortable, not organized enough, or resistant to organization altogether, and therefore unable to stop what’s coming.

Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): Errol Morris’s latest documentary, Separated, is a reminder of something that should never be forgotten: Under Trump, to borrow from Adam Serwer, it’s the cruelty that was—and will be—the point. There are no surprises in the film, which focuses on the policy of family separation at the border instituted by his administration. Indeed, this is not a film of the quality and originality of Morris’s masterpieces, like The Thin Blue Line (1988) or The Fog of War (2003). Made for MSNBC, it is a cautious, straightforward, and very un-Morris-like movie; the director’s voice is seldom heard pushing the interview subjects into revelations or confessions they’d rather not make. And while Morris has never shied away from reenactment, this film contains more than is really advisable: As the camera follows a group of migrants from Central America until their capture and the separation of a mother and child, the artificiality undercuts the film’s overall effect. Still, for all its limitations, the film is worthwhile, informative—and horrifying.

The villains in this story are many. Of course there’s Trump and his advisor, the reptilian Stephen Miller. There’s Scott Lloyd, the pathetic director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), a political appointee who simply rubber-stamped anything passed down to him. (He provides the nearest thing to a gotcha moment in Separated: When asked about a “possibly apocryphal story” around the separations he’s stumped; he clearly doesn’t know the meaning of the word “apocryphal.”) Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirsten Nielsen, and the revoltingly thuggish head of ICE, Thomas Homan—who delights in the horrors his henchmen carry out—round out the list of perpetrators. Jonathan White, who ran day-to-day operations at the ORR, comes as close to a hero as any government official in the film. It was he who realized what was going on at a time when those above him were denying there was any such program, and it was he who tried to put a stop to a practice that was both illegal and inhumane. The enormous increase in kids being held at White’s children’s holding facilities put the lie to the government’s claim that the only children separated from their parents were those few taken from asylum-seekers who provided an unsafe environment. The other heroic figure is NBC reporter Jacob Soboroff, whose firsthand descriptions depict the sheer awfulness of the policy, and whose work was the basis for the film.

All of this, we are told, was done to please Trump’s base. I’ve read Arlie Russell Hochschild’s impressive books on what made them what they are, but however much they might have had their pride stolen or been made strangers in their own land, none of this really explains, let alone justifies, the gratuitous viciousness on display in Separated. For many, though, none of it was vicious enough. Now they crave the deportation of millions. By the time J.D. Vance runs for president in 2028, they’ll be calling for mass executions.