Norman Manea - The Fifth Impossibility - Essays on Exile and Language

Yet, it’s always worth reminding ourselves of its potential and of its glorious past.

September 2011

“A specter is haunting Europe”—this isn’t a warning from the latest issue of the New York Times or any other important newspaper of the world, although it might have been in view of the current financial and political crisis.

It is, in fact, the very first sentence in The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, published in 1872.

The specter that was haunting Europe at the time was communism. What followed, in the new century, confirmed that the specter was more than specter. In 1917, the Russian Revolution installed the “proletarian dictatorship” and started the great project of building a communist society, freed from the cruel “exploitation of man by man.” At the end of World War II the East European countries occupied by the Red Army were also pushed into the communist paradise, soon to be joined by China, revitalized by her own Revolution and those of other Asian countries. In 1989, the entire system crumbled from within on account of economic failure, the too-strong connection between utopia and terror, and the decay of a closed, rigid society, corrupt and demagogical. It became obvious to everybody that exploitation of man by man isn’t worse than exploitation of man by the state, that only freedom and free competition can provide social progress.

The inflamed appeal, “Proletarians of the world, unite!” which concludes the famous Manifesto proved at the end of the twentieth century to be an empty slogan, only good for parades and party meetings.

Today, the specter that is haunting Europe, and not only Europe, is no longer the ghostly communist danger, but the last and harsh crisis of capitalism, the global capitalism of the global modern society. Together with the ever active and ubiquitous specter of terrorism, the monetary crisis is at the center of everyone’s anxiety.

Indeed, the difference between rich and poor, between the richest rich and the poorest poor is growing scandalously by the day, as is the difference between developed and underdeveloped countries. The promise of a more harmonious society seems outdated, and the political rhetoric is offering clichés rather than solutions. The entire world sometimes seems ungovernable. Although the rebellious impulse isn’t yet in an explosive phase, the underlying resentment is bubbling up on numerous private Facebook pages, tweets, and cell phones, sharing angry and confused messages to nowhere.

The prediction by Marx that the concentration of capital will, in the end, weaken the state has proved to be true, even if the cure for it is not found in his revolutionary ideal and instructions. Financial crisis is shaking the stability of our free-market society and our free illusions about that society. Has the crisis to be solved by the same people who grasped and used for their own benefit the volatile and complex rules of the capitalist dynamics? What the leading banker Lafitte said in 1830—“now the bankers will rule”—is the reality of today and a not very enjoyable one. Labor is now not the only source of value; the money game itself is creating wealth, and it’s not at all certain, in our global and interconnected, metanational world, whether the enlightened liberal and democratic state, or communities of states, are able to push the powerful capitalists to disgorge part of their wealth, as Keynes had hoped and predicted they would. The world Marx was scrutinizing was a primitive capitalism, just beginning, as was his rationale. We may still want to ask ourselves if, in our evolved capitalism dominated by the power of the corporation, what he saw then as “constant revolutionizing of production, everlasting uncertainty and agitation” are not also valid observations in our complex, refined, populist, and worldly capitalism of today. For now, as then, “the need of a constantly expanding market for its product chases … Over the whole surface of the globe” with the need “to nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.” In every country there is the “cosmopolitan character to production and consumption.”

Fortunately, we may still have reason not to see that “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”

We no longer expect and hope for a Marxist “abolition of private property” as the Manifesto proclaimed. Nor do we believe that the history of all hitherto existing society is only “the history of class struggles,” or that any social class is better than another. We already know too well where such a vision might take us, what terrible consequences such a narrow-minded and oppressive project had. History has forced us to accept the imperfection of human beings. Resigned to accept reality and to wait no longer for idealistic, utopian theories for bettering the world, we have to accept the sometimes brutal pragmatism of our time.

We have to look to the new principal actors in the current crisis, to trust and scrutinize their knowledge, their lucidity and their own motives to solve the impasse. The rich own the world. They are the sponsors of our hospitals, stadiums, museums, monuments, and universities, the board members of the most important economic, cultural, and social institutions. They seem to possess the means for implementing drastic change or catastrophe.

The corporate mentality dominates the main sectors of society and we may wonder when exactly the post or public transportation, the Army and police — and even the White House — will be “privatized” in order to work efficiently and in accordance with the capitalist canon.

The class of the wealthy isn’t a homogenous class and doesn’t necessarily have the rebellious urge of those whom Marx called the proletarians. They turned out to be far from admirable in their role as icons of a new age just as the nouveau riche or even the old rich of today have failed to embody perfection. And I don’t just have Mr. Madoff in mind.

“Capitalism with a human face” may be the latest echo of the enlightened Prague Spring of 1968 that announced the call-up of socialism with or without a human face. We should not forget the lessons of yesterday, nor should we forget that one class of humans is no better than another.

Should a Manifesto of Capitalist Impasse call for unity of all the rich people of the world? Should we emphasize the dark specter of chaos, and the urgent need for a solution? Perhaps our skepticism should be overcome by pragmatism. We might learn some lessons from the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a warning for the behind-the-scenes dictatorship of the privileged rich.

September 2011

I am looking down on Central Park and recall from half a century ago in a small town in northern Romania a tall, white-haired man proclaiming his poem, “The Colors Red and Black.” Gazing over the park, I remember those Stalinist-era verses:

In New York, everything is beautiful.

Heroes come, heroes go.

Children, born for Sing Sing,

Cover the streets like pellagra.

Yellow karate-blood

Pulses through each building.

In the harbor the Statue of Liberty!

Behind her elevated falsehood

Yankee ghosts howl at the moon

Tormented as if from pellagra

By the colors red and black.

The red of the Revolution, of course, and the black of the oppressed race. Cliché was the common currency of all communist dictatorships, but they had the opposite effect to what the regime intended, for they cast an aura of forbidden fruit around the slandered New World metropolis, making it seem a glowing Olympus of modernity, an urban Everest of adventure.