 Welcome to this online event from the British Library. Today we're delighted to be joined by one of our favourite writers, China Myevil, to discuss his fascinating new exploration of the Communist Manifesto, which had just been published under the title, A Spectre Haunting. China will be talking to Leo Upi, who is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics, and who last year published her acclaimed book, Free, Coming of Age at the End of History. The book is a remarkable memoir of growing up amid political upheaval in Albania, and it was shortlisted for the Bailey Gifford Prize, the Costa Biography Prize, and the slightly foxed first biography prize, and it's being translated into 19 languages. Karl Marx, closely followed perhaps by Lenin, is maybe the most celebrated ever reader here at the British Library. Before we meet China and Leo, I'd like to hand over to my colleague, Susan Reid, who's curator of our Germanic collections, to say a few words about Marx's relationship with the Library, and to give you a very special glimpse onto some of the collection items that we look after. Thank you, John. Yes, so Karl Marx came to London in 1849 with his family, and would live there for the rest of his life. In June 1850 he acquired his first reader's ticket for the British Museum Library, and from 1857 onwards he worked in the famous round reading room, which opened that year, and which, as John has said, was closely associated with him, and still is. He worked for years on his book, Das Kapital. He originally intended to have it finished by the mid-1850s, but that didn't happen. But when he eventually did publish it, he would donate copies to the library out of gratitude, a copy of the second German edition, and of the first French edition. The copy of the French edition actually has manuscript notes in, which we think are amendments and annotations made by Marx himself to the text. He actually made a lot of changes to the French translation, and saw it in some ways as superior to the German original. Many years after Marx's death, the library was able to acquire a first edition of the Communist Manifesto, which he and Friedrich Engels wrote in 1848. It was published in London, a slim green paper-bound pamphlet, for a small group of German radicals living in exile. By the time we acquired it, it had become very rare and very expensive, so we were delighted to be able to acquire a copy. After its publication, the manifesto sank from view for a while, and it was only really in the 1880s that it became prominent again. It was at this time that other German editions and translations into English and other languages were published, including one edited by Engels after Marx's death. Hello, China Miaville is a fiction author, essayist, comic book writer and socialist. He has received numerous awards for his writing, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award three times, and the World Fantasy Award. His novels include Perdido Street Station, The City and the City, Rail, Sea and the Census Taker. In recent years, he has turned his attention to political history and philosophy, publishing a narrative history of the Bolshevik Revolution, October 2017, and now his exploration of the Communist Manifesto entitled A Spectre Haunting, and we are here to talk about it. China, could you perhaps start by telling us how did you first become acquainted with the Communist Manifesto and what attracted you to it? I think probably like most people of any political persuasions, but who are interested in politics, but maybe particularly those on the left, because I encountered it in my late teens in a very sort of shoddily printed, cheap edition, which was very much kind of apropos, I think. And actually, finally enough, didn't think an enormous amount about it, sort of felt like it was quite antiquated, and then returned to it again and again in the years that followed and found more and more each time. And were you an activist before you became attracted to the Manifesto? Was the Manifesto what made you, what turned you into an activist? No, I became politically active a long time before I kind of returned to the Manifesto. So for me, returning to the Manifesto was a question of bringing certain kind of, if you like, socialist assumptions, some of which were validated, some of which were blown apart by the Manifesto itself. But it wasn't for me, if you like, a kind of a text that in and of itself created a sort of change of mind. What it did was it sort of sharpened my, I suppose, understanding of the tradition that I was increasingly identifying with. And the Covenin of Manifesto is one of these incredible texts that was published in 1848, and it still resonates now in 2022. Generations of people have identified with it. Others hate it. It's been an object of scorn and content, but also of admiration. What do you think makes it so live, so relevant? I'm kind of tempted to say in a way, I mean this is not an original thing to say, but I do think that you can make the case that it sort of resonates now more than at the time of its publication. One of the things that's really interesting about it is if you trace the history of the reception of the Manifesto, it goes through these waves, which map pretty well onto waves of kind of social and political discontent activism. And I think one of the things that happens, and this is a strength of the Manifesto, this is a vindication of the Manifesto, but also a danger, is that it can become something onto which people project their own social anxieties, their own social horror, anger, discontent. That's absolutely not to say that it doesn't have its own content. I think very much it does, but that it, like all books, but probably more than most, becomes more than itself. It becomes about more than it is about, because it has, as well as its own content, become this extraordinary symbol of resistance. And your book explores both the context of production of the Manifesto, the arguments that the Manifesto presents, the claims it makes, the criticisms it's generated, and the history of the reception. Would you like to perhaps start by reading something from the book, and then we can talk a bit more about each of these things? Sure. This is from the very beginning of the book. This is from the introduction. Midway through the 19th century, a tiny group of embathled leftist reprobates grandioselly declared that their enemies, the great powers of Europe, were haunted. So opens the Communist Manifesto. The Manifesto predicts and demands the overthrow of industrial capitalism, a system then still burgeoning. It looks urgently forward to its replacement with a new form of society, based not on ruthless competition for profit and the social atomisation and mass human misery that inevitably accompanies it, but on a new collective reality, the fulfilment of human need and the flowering of human potential on the basis of communal, democratically controlled social property. The parameters, pitfalls and possibilities of this goal were and are controversial, including for the left, but what it would be is communism. That is the spectre that's invoked in the opening sentence of the Manifesto. The Manifesto itself is short and rude and vivid and eccentrically organised and its impact has been utterly epochal. It's difficult to imagine, wrote Umbato Eco with palpable awe, that a few fine pages can single-handedly change the world. Admirers celebrate that fact, detractors decry it, but they're united in acknowledging the book's astounding sway over the minds of its readers and its historical power. Now that ghost is back. No surprise, perhaps, repress something and it's as a spectre that it's likely to return. Still there's something truly bizarre about what Richard Seymour has called today's anti-communism without communism. Three decades on from the collapse of the Soviet Union and its allies, states ostensibly committed to the Manifesto's vision for all that that commitment was in large part a cruel joke and absent any serious mass far left presence in world politics. Today's reactionaries are hallucinating a communist threat. This threat is indeed a hallucination. What genuine advances for the left occur today, however welcome, tend to be embattled outliers. They certainly don't imply any systemic shift. And yet for a small but growing and increasingly vocal minority of mostly young activists, the concept of communism is beginning to lose a taint that has for so long been taken for granted and that has been invaluable to those in power. Thank you. Perhaps we can start by exploring the context of production of the Manifesto. It's 1848, it's a time of revolutions in Europe and the Manifesto is both itself a call for revolution that's set against the background of a number of past revolutions, both economic, political, social revolutions. Could you tell us a little bit more about that context, about the history? Absolutely. I mean, 1848 is a year of revolution and Europe, as you say, throughout Europe, but also beyond. You know, ructions in Ceylon, ructions in the Caribbean in Australia and you have in Germany, for example, you know the kind of what appears to be the initial kind of move towards the overthrowing of a kind of very old style, kind of ancien régime by a kind of what we would consider a kind of more kind of liberal bourgeois democratic polity. What's interesting about the Manifesto is that Marx and Engels were writing in this context as part of this very, very small group of leftist radicals. And one of the things that is, it's quite moving but quite funny is that Marx was such a kind of perfectionist in terms of his writing that even this moment that seemed, he's publishing this text in a moment that seems to kind of completely validate this vision of a kind of revolutionary upheaval and yet he won't deliver the thing and his comrades have to keep writing to him and in the end saying like we're going to take further measures, you have to deliver this which is partly I think why the final pages of the Manifesto are incredibly truncated. So it is an expression of a world that's changing very, very rapidly and it both expresses it and attempts to kind of shape it but then in ways that became in certain respects quite tragic is left behind by it in the aftermath of those revolutions as well. And one of the claims that you're making in the book is about the form of the Manifesto itself, about the language of the Manifesto which is sometimes prophetic, sometimes accusatory, the rhetoric, the language is a particular kind of language. What is the Manifesto? What is the Manifesto? How does it fit into this tradition of pamphlets that were circulating at the time, political writings? Many people approach it as a philosophical text where they look for coherence and consistency and try to make arguments on the base of that others purely as a text of political propaganda. But what is the Manifesto? I think this is really important. I think this is one of the key... If I can do anything with this book, this is probably the key thing which is to take seriously the Communist Manifesto precisely as a Manifesto and to take seriously the Manifesto form as a kind of genre, as a form of literature. I think, as you say, it contains all these kind of multiple voices. It's very sort of religios in certain aspects. It's funny, it's rude. There are points that it sounds quite dry and like an economics textbook and then there are points when the writers are sort of teasing the reader in a very rude way. What I think is frustrating is a lot of the criticisms of the Manifesto but also I would say a lot of the praise for the Manifesto essentially kind of writes out the specificity of the Manifesto form and I think that's very Philistine and I think it's a real mistake. Obviously because I'm someone who... I'm certainly not, I hope, uncritical and I have criticisms and thoughts and so on but I make no bones about the fact that I find this a very inspiring and powerful text but this isn't just a question of saying that its critics should be more mindful of its form although it absolutely is saying that. I think if you're going to criticise something then surely the most interesting thing to do is to criticise it at its best and that's something I would try and do if I'm engaging with a text from a tradition that I'm antipathetic to would not be to sort of set up a straw person but would be precisely to try and read it as generously as you can and obviously if you find a text inspiring then it's something that you want to do and what that means in this case is saying for example in the same way it is related to the kind of artistic manifestos that exploded in modernism in fact it's very very formative of them and when an artist says we will never use the following medium or whatever it's not the same kind of truth statement as saying that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade now obviously the political manifesto is not an artistic manifesto but they share certain qualities so when to take one example when Marx and Engels say that the worker has no country critics may say well obviously like nationalism and patriotism are still really strong therefore this text is wrong now if people want to criticise the manifesto have at it but that is an incredibly stupid way of doing so in the context of a text which very explicitly declares as one of its aims a kind of rousing sort of like a recruitment pamphlet so when it says the workers have no country one of the things it's doing is saying you should have no country you should not identify with your country you should identify with the international proletariat again my point here is not to try and inoculate the text from criticism my point is to say that let's criticise it and praise it rigorously and that means reading it sensitively and in the context of a book like the manifesto which precisely does contain all these different registers the exortatory, the dry, the thoughtful the offhand, the playful, the provocative as well as the more serious and considered you have to be sensitive to those nuances whether to praise or criticise and how much do you think the manifesto did to establish Marx and Engels in the socialist movement when they wrote the manifesto they were of course part of that movement but they weren't necessarily hegemonic or the strongest in that movement how much do you think the writing of the text and the language of the text has contributed to them becoming increasingly important as part of that movement my impression from the research is that the fact that Marx in particular although there is a controversy over whether you attribute this book to Marx or Marx and Engels and I make an argument for the latter even though there's no question that Marx did the heavy lifting but my impression is that the fact that it was Marx in particular who was commissioned to write this bespoke his growing influence within the movement he was a young man but he was becoming he was an extremely powerful orator he was an extremely brilliant thinker and the organisation that he was orienting towards he and Engels had started to kind of win over that group to their perspective and if you look at the way that group was talking beforehand and the way it was talking in the year of the manifesto there's a noticeable shift but I think there's no question that the manifesto itself even though it kind of disappeared quite quickly for a time after it was published was a text that became a kind of touchstone and with the later books particularly I think after 1871 with the Paris Commune people would return to it and this young person's text this text that I think only young people could have written did become a kind of very important touchstone for the sort of authority of both Marx and Engels and who do you think was their audience or the audience they had in mind when they wrote it who were they writing it for? I mean this is a really interesting question because ostensibly and I don't mean that this isn't true but like at an obvious level this is a book that is intended as a recruitment it is a book that is intended to build a mass political movement and therefore what it is trying to do is talk to workers people who are part of the workers movement and so on and that is above all it is a text that is beckoning and saying come join us we have a fight on our hands very specifically a fight that's an important thing I think but the manifesto itself I think partly because of its manifesto form that we've talked about actually does some quite interesting things whether consciously or not I don't know and I don't think that's particularly the most interesting question but for example at one point all of a sudden very abruptly the text starts to talk to the bourgeoisie it slips into the second person and it says you accuse us of this and that is absolutely true you are correct you do want to do this you say this but you do this and a friend of mine the writer Matthew Beaumont had this lovely formulation that I'm going to steal which is the idea that this is a text for the workers and for the workers movement but that it is a text that is intended to be overheard by its enemies and so I think and in its sheer swagger and in its sheer performativity it's a hugely performative text so it is performing and I think it's performing if you like for people immediately before the stage but also for those who are watching slightly more troubled further back in the hall and one of the most interesting things I find in the manifesto in this performative aspects of the manifesto is the fact that it starts with a praise of its enemy it's a combative text it's a text that is supposed to inspire, to fuel to recruit as you say for class against the bourgeoisie and yet it starts with this huge apology of the bourgeoisie talking about the progress that this particular class has made in history the way in which the theories that were coupled with the emergence of this social class had helped under my traditional authorities, the way in which they helped overcome backwardness and there is a sort of rhetoric of enlightenment liberal political thought that pervades these first pages of the manifesto and I find very interesting It's become a bit of a trwism and I stress trwism rather than cliché because it is indeed true that one of the things that's most shocking for readers I think particularly readers of the left who come to it relatively late is quite how much Marx and Engels eulogise the bourgeoisie and bourgeois society and I talk about that quite a lot in the book and I have some things to say about that that are not all positive they were and their enemies have noticed this as well as well you read a lot of for example conservative criticisms of the manifesto and it's one of the things that conservative critics will point out they will say you know I have never read you know praise of capitalist civilisation like this from a capitalist you know and I think that's very true one of the things that I mean this obviously dovetails with your work a lot you talk about a sort of a tradition of Kantian Marxism which I think is really interesting which seems to be essentially tell me if you think this is a fair representation but rather than being a socialism or a communism that turns its back on liberal society and liberal ideals in heavy scare quotes it says rather the fact that these are precisely and systematically not actualised is embedded in the form of liberalism so liberalism is talking about these things and it is also structurally unable to deliver them so this is a kind of liberalism plus or something and I think that is part of at the heart of both the kind of praise of bourgeois civilisation and also the heartbreak which Marx and Engel suffered would you say that's a reasonable depiction I think so and I think it has to do with the fact that perhaps Marx at this stage still shares a number of the enlightenment construction of history whereby all the liberal political theorists and philosophers before him had this understanding and Kant and Hegel and so on were so no exception but had this understanding of history as a history that is built in stages whereby you have particular societies that are replaced by more progressive so-called progressive societies so you start with hunter-gatherer societies then you have pastoral societies agricultural societies and then the highest stage of that is commercial society is the kind of society that the bourgeoisie has helped set up and there is a whole tradition of enlightenment thinking that both praises that praises those kinds of societies and endorses that narrative of history but also criticises criticises all the injustices of commercial society and the fact that it produces a modern subject with both the good aspects of modern subject mainly the departure from authority and for tradition but also with the pathologies of modern subject you have this new envy or competitive rivalry and all these instincts that then become dominant and pervasive and then shape the sort of structural transformations of society and I think Marx is in some ways part of that tradition but then that tradition is also problematic because of the way precisely because of what you hinted at the fact that it takes the development of the world as a development that in some ways is supposed to be compatible with a kind of progressive, teleological understanding of history which seems to think that societies go through stages and that some stages are superior to others and of course later Marxists had much more critical things to say about that and the fact that this seems to lead to a kind of implicit condoning of imperialism or colonialism or practices of expansion of this bourgeois model to other parts of the world and Marx himself later in his life becomes much more critical is much more attentive to these dynamics especially colonialism, imperialism when he's a journalist he writes about this phenomena would you say that in the manifesto this is still not the case or how would you say that manifesto places the understanding of the bourgeois end of commercial society? My feeling about the manifesto particularly with regard to this question of what we could call Inevitabilism to be very crude you know this sense of a kind of teleological unfolding is I don't want to sound too defensive I don't want to be someone who says no no no there's none of that in there because that's not true there are passages which clearly have a very strong teleological kind of tenet but at the same time this is where one has to get not just I think sensitive to the to the manifesto form but to the particular moment at which this particular manifesto was written because my position is that it's not that the manifesto doesn't contain that it's that it also contains other things including the very opposite so one of the arguments that I make and again I'm not the first person to say this at all is that yes there are these rather teleological passages where one consents a kind of unfolding that's almost sort of premapped but within the same text sometimes like within the same paragraph you also have parts that only make sense if you have an anti-teleological model even down to the fact that this whole pamphlet is designed as an act of urgent recruitment the urgency is constant if there's a teleological unfolding that we can relax into there is no necessity to recruit people certainly not with this kind of urgency and the manifesto itself contains warnings about the mutual ruination of the contending classes rather than the unfolding into a particular kind of society again I think there's a really bad tradition on the left of being essentially a kind of apologetic theologian about Marx's writings and saying anything that doesn't read very comfortably you have to explain away there are teleological elements here but I think it's quite important that they're counterveiled within the text itself and that this is a text that's jostling and I think that in particular this text is jostling because of this particular moment and this is what I mentioned the heartbreak because to me one of the things that's so fascinating about this text this text that has become so influential is that I think it would be extremely different had it been written a few months later because at the point that this text is written this is if you like the great hope of Marx and Engels is precisely that the German Revolution will continue in the way that it is bubbling as they write more than bubbling it's erupting and that the bourgeoisie will proceed even though you shouldn't trust them but you can basically hope that what they're going to do is they're going to fulfil their historic role and that the role of the working classes to push them from the left and wait till they've done their historic bit and been crude but you get the point and then we can move from there to socialism and there's this shattering negative epiphany which is that the bourgeoisie don't do what they're supposed to do they're too craven, they're too pusillanimous and it's this really fascinating thing which is that the content of the text that seems to me is haunted by the heartbreak of Marx and Engels for the decades afterwards particularly after the Paris Commune but before then which is that if you like the left wing of the bourgeoisie the harbingers of the bourgeoisie revolution did not fulfil their historic role so that implicit teleology that you see the text wrestling with scant weeks after this comes out is delivered a shattering blow that really changes the nature of Marxism and the thought in years to come and that you can see reflected for example in some of the afterwards that they write later as well as in their other work and certainly I think I also agree with you that the fact that there is a sort of teleological aspect in the manifesto is not necessarily a bad thing in fact there is a sort of an understanding of teleology that is about the discovery of agency and one of the things that the manifesto does is that it puts forward this agent of world history the proletariat and it puts it in front of this other agent which is the bourgeoisie which is the agent that has emerged from these previous historic revolutions and then in some ways needs to carry forward the realisation of these ideals of these historic revolutions like the French revolution but if that's in mind what seems to me to set the manifesto apart and to set the Marxist analysis of history of art is exactly the discovery of this different kind of agent in history up to that point in the history of the Enlightenment history of modern liberal political thought the agents of conflicts in the world stage were states wars but were between states there were dynastic arrangements it was always about kings and queens and politicians that advised them but this idea that there is now not a state but a social class that shapes the conflict seems to be new and radical and does something to our analysis of globalization of historical practices how would you say this understanding of class and of course this also generates criticism then afterwards for Marx and Engels because the argument from those who object to it is precisely that now they see world history as purely shaped by dynamics of class rivalry and class antagonism and there is a kind of class reductionism we might call it which makes them understand and interpret every conflict, every war every class that there is out there in terms of class at the expense of not just national rivalries which would have been the case at the time but we would now say at the expense of other conflicts based on gender or race or ethnicity so how would you address that concern that some have about the manifesto about the fact that it's purely focused and in general about Marx's thinking the fact that it prioritizes this axis of conflict based on class at the expense of other ways of understanding I mean it's a huge topic on which many books have been written and again to repeat what I was saying about the question of teleology I think it would be facile to deny that you can certainly find formulations within the text that do lend themselves to that kind of reading and I think it would be facile to deny that there have been currents within Marxism that have indeed fallen to my mind pray to that kind of reductionism I don't think one should deny that what I again do think is that not just I truly hope and believe out of a kind of you know defensive fidelity but out of a rigorous reading of the text this text in particular but a lot of Marx and Engels's text as you said yourself earlier you know their positions vary quite a lot as they get older but even within this early text yes you can find these things but you can also find the exact opposite there are these kind of countervailing pools we talked about one the question of nationalism many of the phrases that are often used by critics of Marx and Engels that they underestimate the power of the nation and the state I think are very reductive readings that are not engaging with the manifesto form as a clarion, as an insistent and you know you could go further and say that in the very strong insistence that the workers have no country is a kind of implicit anxiety about the fact that this is a difficult argument which implies that the workers are rather committed to their country now all of which said I think it's true that the manifesto does flatten out the tenacity of the state form the tenacity of the nation as Marx and Engels went on later to say and I don't think we should deny that I think we should just say the text is pulling in different directions on the question of gender most of the discussion does talk sort of assumes a certain family structure I think this can be overstated but there is a truth there however there is also a very strong and really important set of lines in which Marx talks about essentially the fact that women, Marx and Engels I should say women are paid less than men as a kind of constituent part of the jostling over what labour is paid so essentially you're waging people against each other now that is not only what we would now call the gendering of class in a really important way talking about how this seemingly distinct axis of oppression actually is inextricable from the class axis it also is one of the key elements that I think solves the problem that Marx and Engels have where they have this model of absolute immiseration that workers in this text that workers are getting constantly poorer which is clearly wrong and one of the things that they themselves said that we were wrong about that but one of the dynamics that proves that wrongness is also there in the same text talking about gender even if the text itself doesn't seem to quite understand that doesn't seem to quite draw it out the question of race and ethnicity is something which I talk about quite a lot in the book and again I think there's no question that within this early text if you like the actions of the imperial metropoles are focused with an almost complete lack of focus on the quote periphery at the colonised peoples but I would say not only that that is and that is a criticism that is true and is made within the text within the text in my book including by radicals and Marxists of colour and from those communities and nations talking about this as a shortcoming of the text a shortcoming that again I think you can start to see within the text if not quite so much as in the question of gender alternative conceptions of class and nation that pull against that so I suppose that's one of the things I would say about this which is that I think it's really important that where one can make a sort of straight forward criticism that this is just flatly wrong like the emiseration thesis this is just wrong, it's wrong, they were wrong they said it and it was wrong but then these other criticisms are trenchant, make really valuable points and they therefore hold the text under the waterline it's not just that defensively, politically I don't want that to be true it's that I think a rigorous reading of the text obviates that as well that makes sense that makes sense yes and that takes us to the content of the text of the substance of the Marx and Engels claim which of these claims would you say are still as radical as they were at the time in which they were written some of them would you say are now part of the common sense of sort of also liberal imaginary if you go through the list of requirements of the list of claims that they make in the manifesto there are some of them about child labour, abolition and education for everyone that seems to be now common sense and one would say you don't need to be a communist to make these arguments and there are others that are obviously very radical sounding to date how would you assess first of all perhaps you could say something about what they ask and what they demand and then how you view the actuality, the relevance of these claims I mean it's quite funny when you're reading the manifesto which constantly talks about revolution and rupture and the overthrow of the existing order and then you get to the list of ten proposals and they're remarkably mild and many of them and feel decidedly unrevolutionary and I think in a way I think they're almost contingent like almost immediately in future editions of the text Marx and Engels say look we're not focusing on these were written for a very specific time and in a very specific place I think what's important about them is not those particular list of demands is not their concrete content so much as what they were intended to do and what they were intended to do was not merely reform capitalism Marx and Engels were all for reforming capitalism but they also had a belief that fundamentally capitalism is unreformable and just as a spoiler I think one of the things that I would say is still person and I think that idea that capitalism is fundamentally unreformable I think is really hard to refute but what that meant was that what they were interested in was because you can't flick a switch and have a revolution what you do is you build a sense of kind of this movement that they're trying to build you build a sense of momentum and dynamic and so they're interested not just in things that are going to ameliorate the lot of the working class and the oppressed Engels says anything against the existing order of things so it's not just class but there's no question they focus on class not just about amelioration it's about demands that in the pushing for them you start to push against the logic of capitalism itself and you roll over into questioning some of these kind of fundamental predicates and so on and I think for me you know one of the Marx and Engels they are we talk about them being very praising of the bourgeoisie arguably I think too praising they also have this kind of strange backhanded compliment to capitalism itself and the compliment is capitalism is total it is unbelievably dynamic it is voracious and one of their criticisms of other socialist currents is essentially that you propose all these tinkerings and the tinkerings will never work and I think it's really important to say it's not that they're indifferent to the tinkerings if you can make life better for working people fantastic but what you are not going to do with these tinkerings is fundamentally challenge the dynamic that relentlessly prioritizes profit over need profit over democracy and profit for a very small number of people and that's why they focus on the kinds of reforms that they do now for me Marx himself says one of them the key thing he did essentially was the way he describes it essentially kind of discover the truth of class conflict he's not the first person to talk about class but in this model and it seems to me that whatever quibbles one may have with the proposals for amelioration the idea that class in terms of differential relations of access to the productive forces and the productive decision making of society is a fundamental schism and that we live in a society as I say in which profit always always will be the fundamental driving push on that and that will always ultimately come into conflict with human need and I think just to draw this to a close for me one of the things is human need is not just material I mean it is absolutely material it is safety at work it is food, it is clothing it is leisure, it is rest but it's also about something you talk about a lot in your work which is freedom is that I think is really important is to stress the extent to which this pamphlet even behind the backs of Marx and Engels is predicated on a kind of ethics of emancipation and freedom and that maybe it's a nice way to connect to my other question which is about some of the fundamental criticisms that the manifesto has received which in a way are also the criticisms that you hear still about a radical left project that is or is not tied to the manifesto whether it is or is not connected to the specific requirements or the demands of the manifesto and one of the things that you have a chapter in a book in which you go through these discussions and these criticisms of the manifesto and the platitudes almost that one hears about this text and about communism about the critique of capitalism and one of the concerns that is perhaps I think widespread objections is the fact that it's not a realistic proposal and that communism is a great idea but as you say citing someone for the wrong species that it's not compatible with human need that human beings are a particular kind of being who is not amenable to these concerns and will never build an emancipatory project of freedom that requires so much of human being so much altruism and so on and that I think that comes from a particular reading of Marx which is perhaps one that Marx himself would have been the most reluctant to deny because it romanticizes socialism and it confuses this body of theory and requirements with a set of ideals with almost a sort of utopian element which was exactly what Marx set out to undermine with his work but could you say something about how you engage with that criticism? The paradoxes of the criticisms of I think kind of leftism in general that certainly with the manifesto is that the ones that very often the ones that seem the most stringent and total and the ones that actually have enormous social traction are the most evanescent and in a way it makes it really hard to engage with them because they are fantastically empty. I don't even necessarily mean they're necessarily automatically wrong. I think they are wrong but I think the point is they're not argued for so classically the idea the strongest and most common argument you'll hear against socialism is something along the lines of don't be ridiculous. That's basically it. It's a great idea but it doesn't work. How are you supposed to argue with that? Ridiculous things. Things that a current group of people think are ridiculous have happened all the time throughout history. Now that doesn't mean they're automatically going to happen but the idea that by pointing out that this doesn't seem very likely to you you've managed to land a fundamental blow is just ridiculous. I always think about the beautiful quote that Ursula Le Guin said. I won't get it exactly right but she essentially said capitalism is everywhere. It's incredibly powerful. It seems completely impossible that we could ever live in any other way. I'm not sure of the divine right of kings. Societies have been changed many, many, many times. So if someone wants to say this is impossible for the following reasons then I'm absolutely up for a debate. But the idea that don't be ridiculous this isn't actually an argument. I want to say don't be ridiculous that you think this not the British Library this horrible, horrible chaotic, violent, profiteering world we live in is the best we can do. How utterly absurd. How utterly ridiculous. When it comes to the question of the epistemology of wrong species I think the problem with that is and I have to say as a caveat I think there are elements of the left that don't help their own argument here because they are indeed very sentimental about the working class or people in general not that everyone is always lovely and that we're all just desperate to do the quote right thing all the time the point is that people are fantastically variable and they do all kinds of different things in different social circumstances and the problem with wrong species is it bulldozes bulldozes over the fact that people do indeed do really good collaborative, comradely solidaritous things all the time in certain circumstances and in this model those are either ignored or they're pathologised or somehow they're not important somehow you know from the fact that you know 800 P&O workers have just been fired summarily that'll teach us about human nature but the fact of all the people helping their neighbours for no money at all the fact of all the community gardens the fact of people doing unpaid earthquake relief that doesn't tell us anything about human nature again it's utterly vapid like if we're gonna have a serious argument about the epistemology of human nature and our drives then let's do it but this kind of you know dismissal by kind of middle brow fiat is incredibly exhausting and as I say hard to argue with because there's no there there and do you think that's something that is also supposed to undermine a certain kind of politics because in a way there is of course an ethical aspect to it but what makes the manifesto stand out is that it's the manifesto of the communist party but there of course there wasn't a communist party in the way in which we understand the word party now so when you hear manifesto of a communist party you think this is part of an electoral campaign or there will be a group who will run for elections and this was before the days of universal suffrage before the days of where there was still property qualifications for vote before the days of people voting from the colonies and so on and we mean a number of exclusions of democratic or so-called democratic public sphere to which this debate taps on to in some ways and of course creates a certain kind of politics creates a left that is aware of its position and that needs to become an agent of political change and the manifesto helps the left become that it doesn't find it that it just finds it scattered and disorganized and it becomes an important catalyzer for that but there's something about the form party which when you hear the word manifesto of a communist party is lost because we tend to think of party as the parties that we know now running for elections and so on and you discuss this in the book. Yeah I mean I think there is an element of this which is I mean in a way there's a I think the enemies of from my perspective the enemies of humanity you know people who are deeply committed to you know capitalism and you know profit above all will absolutely in many cases in good faith also in a lot of cases in extremely bad faith use whatever they can as a kind of ideological weapon against radical change but it's also true that there are if you like less kind of cynical problems and some of these are just questions of sort of language and time like the word party as you as you advert to like doesn't mean now what it meant when they were saying this so even within this context it was in a it didn't mean political party in the way we mean it it's sort of it was a vega term but kind of meant sort of current but not not even necessarily so organized you know so there is a you know some of your work on like the dictatorship of the proletariat suffers from the same you know this is a concept that suffers from the same problem which is yes this has certain ramifications now some of them very very unfortunate but that's again it's kind of like both praise and criticise on a best on a kind of most generous reading and generously speaking that's not what these mean in this context and I think the left sometimes makes the same mistake says you know well I would like there to be a party I agree with this this is the manifesto the communist party this is clearly my electoral manifesto and it's like mmm that's not how it works yeah this is a historic document it needs to be read as a historic document clearly doesn't mean we can't learn things from it that we can apply in the everyday but the idea that it is a blueprint would be facile whether that came from its detractors or its proponents and this text in the end succeeded in being central politically to the creation of the international to the creation of the first international which Marx and Engels were involved but then also to the heritage of that left for the second international and of course Marxism was also then part of a number of revolutions in Europe that said they were inspired by these principles and went on and changed the state starting with the Bolshevik revolution then spreading across eastern Europe and the rest of the world, China and so on and one of the criticisms that one hears to Marxism, to communism, to the communist manifesto precisely starts with that with one line of objection and you tackle that one as well perhaps interesting to explore it here one line of objection is that this is not compatible with human nature but the second one which is historically seems to be more informed as well it may be compatible with human nature but to the extent that it has been tried it's failed and we know that it's failed and we now have to learn from those failures of communism in the east so how would you could you tell us something about how you engage with that claim well I mean I feel cheeky this is something that I want to hear from you about because I mean you precisely growing up in Albania in a state that did profess allegiance to these tenets your personal and intellectual journey is a fascinating example I think of the way these ideas impact someone differently in different circumstances to put it very briefly in the book what I try and do is say one of the paradoxes of the criticism about Stalinism is that both the rise and the fall of Stalinism is adused against Marxism in general the communist manifesto because Stalinist polities rise and basically they're pretty horrible so we don't want this and then they fall so they're unsustainable so it doesn't work and what that leaves out is a serious engagement with you know what actually were these societies now you've said yourself and I think it's a really important corrective that there is a kind of an easy version of a left argument here which is to simply wave one's hand and say well those weren't real socialism those weren't real Marxism so we're not going to talk about them here and I think that we have to take that very seriously what's frustrating to me is that there has been a left and a Marxist tradition obviously of taking that seriously not all I mean some people haven't but there's been rigorous Marxist debates over precisely the nature of the Stalinist polities since before Stalinism since the early days of the Bolshevik state you had people who absolutely identified in the tradition of the communist manifesto saying here's where I think these states are doing this, that the other here's where I think they're going wrong here's why I think they're going wrong here's where I think they were precisely trying to apply this kind of thinking to me when and again I have to stress this all the time because I make no no bones about my own politics here but I do want this to be a book that anyone can read and learn about the manifesto from so I am really eager to have serious critical arguments about the manifesto and Marxism in general but the the intellectual laziness of suggesting that Marxism and the left in general have not thought about this in really interesting and sophisticated ways whether or not you agree is not the point but to simply say aha Stalinism again that wouldn't wash in most sort of political or philosophical debates so why on earth do people get a pass with this it's just it's not serious thinking I think and I I mean you said to me before we started this really beautiful phrase which is that this body of work and the manifesto can be both dogma and a criticism of dogma and I thought that was really powerful and I would be really interested to hear a little bit about how you sort of reevaluated your own relationship to Marxism in the context of studying and living in different political and social contexts yeah for me it really was about sort of growing up in Albania which was the country that claimed to be Marxist but that when you then went and explored further the claims you know Albania only became and I think it's not entirely atypical it tells you something about the circumstances of these countries in which these ideologies were endorsed by particular political elites for different purposes but basically Albania became a state in 1912 and before that was under the Ottoman Empire and it wasn't really an industrial state to begin with and so it became a state in 1912 and a communist state in 1946 so it had basically these 34 years of whatever in the middle in which the claim was well communism was tried there and failed and you think well what communism so Albania had no capitalist class had no industrialization basically importing this theory into state making was a way of just boosting modernization in the country because part of the idea and in part going back to these theories of development and history and so on part of the inspiration was to try and build roads and create state structures and create infrastructure that would help just create an independent entity but that had nothing to do with the way in which that politics appears in the communist manifesto or in the critique of European society at the time simply because the circumstances were so very different and I think in a number of other European states I mean Russia itself and there was this engagement of marks with Russian socialists at some point about the nature of socialism in Russia and what would be the social background against which this would develop so I think there's very interesting conversations to be had about the constraints and the circumstances under which these ideas develop which if people were more willing to engage in the conversation might be more productive and to just say well obviously communism doesn't work because it was tried and obeyed and it failed so that's the sort of sense in which it's a lazy argument but more widely Marxism has also inspired social democracy European social democracy I mean we wouldn't have the welfare state that we had if we didn't have a political movement that in some ways put these claims at the center and that was transnational was organized transnational at the idea of having a working class that is at the center of European politics as the working class not just the working class of Germany, France, England and so on but having this kind of coordinated platform of these social democratic parties which were still radical at the point in which they were engaging with these claims I think it's a really important resource and again one doesn't need to engage with this history either in a triumphalist way of saying well this is great because clearly Marxism and Marxist theory and the importance of the working class tells us something about the welfare state or the history of the welfare state or in a damning way which says well Russia and Albania Yugoslavia or whatever I think we engage with them as historical resources and we try to learn from them and we try to engage critically with the societies in which we live on the basis of the knowledge that we acquire but another aspect of that which I think maybe takes me to another very interesting claim that you make in the book every complex of ideas of reality in a way has both a part of it that is doctrine and dogma and almost religious but also a part of it that is practice and blood and so on the Catholic church has a similar thing there's a lot of people who are Catholics but then there's also the Crusades and we don't usually go to someone and say oh but there were the Crusades so how could you be a Catholic there's a part of belief, there's an ethics of belief component of how that ethics of belief manifests itself in messy historical circumstances and that I think has often led to this understanding not just a marks but also political theories more general as quasi-religious when they come in this more totalitarian not in a sort of negative connotation but as a totality as a view of the world that makes complex claims about the world that has both a diagnosis and a set of principles and interpretation of how to move forward and a kind of eschatology almost a kind of salvation aspect and you engage in a very interesting way in the book with that debate around you know is communism like a religion and is that a bad thing or a good thing well yeah I mean to some extent this is a I suppose a more kind of speculative I wouldn't say tentative but it's a more kind of speculative and ruminative way in than to some of these debates some of the debates earlier on in the book feel more grounded to me but I I would be interested to know the extent to which this is this can cleave with your own work because I know that you know like for example the stuff you've done on Kent questions of rationalism are very very key to the sort of discernment of freedom now to me I increasingly am very interested in traditions whereby what is central to humaneness not to the exclusion of everything else but central to humaneness is the non-rational and to be very clear here that's not the same as the irrational like the non-rational, the rational and the irrational so no one here is defending the irrational but you know to sort of quote a very comradely argument I had with some people a couple of years ago you know it's rational as a socialist you know you're arguing for bread and roses one of our classic demands it's rational to argue for bread if you're starving it's not irrational to argue for the roses but it's not quite rational either what is it that makes you want roses in your room this came through an engagement with a very moving anecdote that the political, the IR theorist the international relations theorist Morgan Tau made his father was a doctor which I talk about in the book who ministered to a very very poor working class area and apparently it was very very common for people who he would come to see and he couldn't help them, they were dying they knew they were dying and they would take him aside and they would whisper to him to say make sure that that priest doesn't put a Bible in the coffin when I go I want a copy of the communist manifesto and there is a version of the criticism of the manifesto that says you see how ridiculous these people think they're going to get comfort from this book this isn't scientific and again there's a tradition of scientific leftism which is not that much less dismissive and what I want to say is what if we start from thinking what an amazing validation of this book that there is something in it that cleaves to freedom in such a way that at the point of death at the loss of your life your own moment of reaching for something better even though you know that this book says there are no gods says there's no afterlife this is what you want in your hand when you go I find that so moving now obviously that doesn't mean that therefore you don't make any criticism of the book or any book that anyone wants to be buried with is a okay but I don't think it's coincidence that so many people wanted to be buried with this book and this is Marx himself is actually he's really polite about the utopian socialists compared to the other socialists I mean he makes his criticisms but there is a utopian tradition in Marx sometimes he pretends there's not but there absolutely is in the same way he likes to pretend he has no ethics he absolutely does and that's fine, that's a good thing and it seems to me that there is like an affective non-rational not the same as irrational drive for freedom for liberation for dignity that is not reducible to the desire for bread it's not separable it's part of the same thing but it's not reducible to it and it seems to me that when people say well Marxism is just a religion to the extent that what they mean is people who cling to it never question it's tenets and you know you can't talk to them and they're all like members of cult like to the extent that that's true and we can all think of leftists who are maybe a little bit like that mostly it's not true but that's clearly not defensible but there is also an aspect of religion which is that it is the thing that makes sense of the world that hurts and the world hurts and you know famously Marx said you know it's the opiate of the masses he also said it's the heart of a heartless world he also said it's the cry of the oppressed creature and it seems to me that in that sense in the sense of a book that yes lays out a theory of the world yes that tries to recruit people to a fighting position to improve things but also that says it does not have to be like this and this sense that you have that you are hurting is right and you deserve not to hurt and that's so moving and I think it is such a diminishing and a miserly reading of socialism or communism that that would be an embarrassment I feel like I have a lot of questions but we got to such a great place to end and this was such a wonderful conclusion of all that we said and this reminder that in a way this book that is about conflict and about classes and about struggle and about the bourgeois and the proletarian is also a book about humanity and our shared humanity and to some extent about the meaning that we make through politics through engaging with each other that I feel we can end there and thank you very much for this wonderful book which is not just a wonderful analysis of the manifesto but also contains the manifesto in it with various introductions and the discussions so it's a wonderful invitation for readers to engage not just with your interpretation of Marx's words so thank you very much