Marx and Engels on Revolution

Hello, I'm Catherine Carr, producer of Talking Politics. In today's episode of History of Ideas, David discusses Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' Communist Manifesto. It was written in 1848, the Year of Revolution, but that wasn't the revolution they were after. They wanted something much bigger. Talking politics, History of Ideas is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books, Europe's leading literary magazine. After each episode, continue your exploration of the history of Ideas in their unrivaled archive of essays and reviews, films and podcasts, and find out more about how a subscription to the LRB can be an indispensable home learning and student resource by heading over to their website lrb.me/ideas. That's lrb.me/ideas. So far in these talks, I haven't said much about the economic side of modern political life, all those economic relationships that coexist with the political relationships I have been talking about. And the authors that I've discussed so far all had quite a lot to say about what we would now call economics in different ways. They had different interests. Hobbes, for instance, was very interested in money and how it worked. And he was absolutely adamant that the power of the sovereign state, as well as determining what counted as peace, also had to determine what counted as money. The sovereign had to say what money was. And so it's possible if Hobbes were alive now, and he was looking at our world, who knows what he would think. I can't quite imagine. He probably would think he was right, and he told us if we got our state sorted, we would be so rich and so prosperous and so peaceful. But if you asked him what's the biggest threat to the sovereign state, who knows he might say it's those traditional threats of violence, terrorism, war, disorder. Well he might say it's Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, because Hobbes was pretty clear that if the sovereign no longer gets to decide about money, then the sovereign state is in deep trouble. Wilson Kraft had a lot to say about employment. She was extremely interested in the question of how women could earn a living, because it was in many ways absolutely fundamental to the emancipation of women. The range of opportunities was so absurdly narrow when she was writing, that it was impossible to imagine a just social order where women couldn't work. So work for her was a crucial part of the rights of women, paid work, paid work that wasn't prostitution. Constance had a lot to say about relationships of credit and debt. Credit and debt for Constance runs all the way through modern commercial societies. It's how a form of money, but he was also interested in the power relations that go alongside that. It's never always clear in a debt credit relationship who has the power. Sometimes said that if you owe the bank £10,000, the bank has power over you, but if you owe the bank £100 million, you have power over the bank. And modern states, Constance knew, were always in debt, including to their own citizens. States are in veteran borrowers of money. And if the state owes money to its citizens, who really has the power? Tokville was fascinated by American entrepreneurialism and by American enterprise and not just the craziness of the American boat builders who put their ships out on the water and were happy to watch them sink because a better one would be along in a minute. Tokville was deeply impressed by the dynamism of American commercial and economic life. And part of the dynamism of democracy he knew full well came from that. Money, jobs, debt, entrepreneurialism, these are all economic themes, but for all these writers they weren't really central. Certainly they weren't central to the political project. Politics came first at some level, the political ordering of a modern society creates the conditions in which economic life is possible. But that understanding of the relationship between politics and economics that at some level politics comes first can be challenged and throughout the history of thinking about modern politics, it always has been challenged. Among the people who challenged it were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the authors I'm going to talk about today. The piece of writing I'm discussing is the Communist Manifesto by no means the only thing either of them wrote by no means the only thing that they wrote together. It does pose one of the fundamental challenges to the basic Hobbesian idea of modern politics, which is that political order comes first because the alternative view is that political order is secondary and the fundamental ordering of society lies in its economic relationships. Politics supervines on those, it doesn't in its own terms, determine those. Marxist historians of ideas have read Hobbes as exemplifying the superficiality of political thought over economic relationships because they read him as providing in his political writings a justification for the emergence of what we would now call early capitalism. And so as I said when I was talking about Hobbes, a Marxist might read Hobbes saying that where the state does not intervene, citizens can do what is most profitable to themselves, are simply being a justification for the pursuit of profit, which is the lifeblood of capitalism. But that reading of Hobbes' intellectual history looks a bit one-sided. He wasn't just the political theorist of the rising bourgeois middle class, not least because he didn't seem to spend that much time either writing or thinking about what we might call the middle class. He was much more concerned with the aristocrats and their fights and their contests. In Hobbes' imagination of what goes wrong with politics, the big conflicts are more likely to be conflicts about honor than they are conflicts about economics. But there is in Marx and Engels leaving aside the intellectual history and whose right and whose wrong, an obvious and deep-rooted challenge to the basis of the Hobbes' in conception of the state, and it can be put pretty simply. For Hobbes, the problem of politics is revolution. The endless turning of the wheel, the constant posing and reposing of the question, whose side are you on, whose up, whose down, when will the down be up, when will the up be down, and the solution to the problem of revolution is the establishment of the modern sovereign state, which transcends those choices. Revolution is the problem, politics is the solution. For Marx and Engels, politics, that is, the politics of the modern sovereign state, is the problem. Revolution is the solution. The communist manifesto appeared, it was written and appeared, early in 1848, the great year of revolution in Europe, that year of revolution that so depressed Tocqueville, as he came to see the futility of those kinds of hopes. It's something of a coincidence that the great text about revolutionary politics appeared at the same time as the great revolutionary hopes of mid-19th century Europe, because it was conceived a few months earlier before the revolutions broke out. Marx and Engels thought that they were primarily writing to resolve disputes within radical workers movements, including those who are now calling themselves communists, about what they believed in and how they should organize themselves and what they should try to achieve. They believed that modern European societies, modern European states, were indeed on the brink of possible collapse and transformation, but in 1847 they didn't know that 1848 was coming. And when 1848 did come, it somewhat overtook the communist manifesto, because it was a year of revolution and so there were multiple different pieces of writing and text and manifestos and tracks and pamphlets by all sorts of young men and others, Marx and Engels were young men at this time, trying to tell people what change was possible and how they should organize themselves. The communist manifesto made almost no difference in 1848. It was relatively speaking, just another obscure piece of writing. But its history since then shows this that as well as the authors of these pieces of writing having a life of their own, a biography, so does the writing itself. The communist manifesto has its own life story and it's a life story with dramatic twists and turns, near death experiences and rebirths. The communist manifesto has always been most widely read in years where revolutionary change seemed possible and throughout Marx and Engels is life and they both lived right up towards the end of the 19th century. There were a number of such years in which their ideas and their writing came and went. 1871, another year of potential revolution, at moments of economic crisis, including the great crisis of the 1890s, right at the end of their lives, gave another moment, another opportunity perhaps for revolutionary change, and yet it never came and they never saw it. And in 1914, the ideas in the Communist Manifesto did have a near death experience, with the outbreak of the First World War because it turned out that given the choice, the workers of the world did not unite. The workers of the world chose to unite with the capitalists in their own countries and to turn their fire on each other. And then in 1917, the Communist Manifesto had a rebirth, finally with the successful revolution. In Russia of all places, one of the last places that Marx and Engels might have expected, the Leninist revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, the one that happened at the end of 1917, not the liberal revolution that happened at the start of 1917 in Russia. And the Bolshevik revolution turned the Communist Manifesto from a manifesto into a kind of holy text, a sort of Bible of Marxism, Leninism as it came to be called. And it was read and passed and interpreted as though it contained the absolute truth, the absolute truth about the future society that was being built first in Russia and then eventually throughout the world. At the same time through the 20th century, another reading of the Communist Manifesto associated with the West, that is what is sometimes called Western Marxism, which tried not to anchor it in a vision of the future, but to understand it in terms of its own past, in its context, to see the ideas from German and other forms of political thought that informed it, to humanize it, to make it less mechanical, more open to interpretation. That fight in reading the Communist Manifesto went alongside some of the bigger fights of the Cold War, and then in 1989 it had another near death experience when the states of Eastern Europe that called themselves Communist collapsed and the revolution that began in 1917, spotted out of life. And then it had another rebirth in 2008 with the great financial crisis because every time capitalism teeters on the brink of true disaster, the Communist Manifesto becomes a book that people reach for to try and understand what might it come next. That twisting, turning story, that bizarre life, that long life that the Communist Manifesto had might or might not have surprised Marx and Engels, they live long enough to see the hopes of change and then the disappointment of those hopes, to see the ideas in their 1848 Manifesto, sputter into life and then fall away again to know that the journey was going to be long, but when they wrote it, and it was written very quickly, primarily by Marx, but with help from Engels and some of the sharper, snappier ideas probably came from Engels, they were both journalists, but Engels was the sharper, snappier, journalist. He was certainly more concise. When they wrote it in seven or eight weeks, they were writing it in a hurry because they thought that the moment for it was ripe and they were trying to intervene in a moment in time, to explain to people who wanted transformational change that if this was their moment, this was how they were going to have to achieve it. And if there's a word that sums up the Communist Manifesto, both in form and content, and you just have to read a few pages of it to get a feel for it, it is uncompromising. It is an uncompromising piece of writing and it is against compromise, that is, it is trying to tell people who want social transformation, that they mustn't deal with the order that they're trying to overthrow, and by deal with I mean strike a deal with. They mustn't think that they can cherry-pick the bits that they want to keep. They mustn't think that they could negotiate and maybe get the better off, the people who run the world they're trying to overthrow. They mustn't think that it can happen gradually. They mustn't think that change, transformational change, evolves out of the present. They need to understand that the overthrow has to be total. The break has to be clean, and the wheel has to turn all the way from bottom to top. The reason Marx and Engel's thought you could not compromise with the established order, the order of modern bourgeois capitalist society, was because its political institutions were a kind of lie. So the workers should not think that those institutions, which dress up what they do in the name of freedom and constraint or rights or employment or justice, that those institutions were capable of delivering any of those things. It is among other things, a direct attack on what I take to be the foundational principles of modern politics, those established by Hobbes, which is that the modern state is a kind of double institution all the way through. Its doubleness is its distinguishing characteristic. That state, which is both coercive and emancipatory, which rules both through fear and through hope, which offers the possibility of freedom through terror, that state, the state that does violence to rescue people from violence. For Marx and Engels, that state or rather that idea of the state is a lie, and the lie is that it is anything other than coercion, that it is anything other than simply a tool or an instrument to get people to do things against their will. For Marx and Engels, the modern state is the coercive instrument of the bourgeoisie. But the bourgeoisie can never admit it as such, they have to dress it up as though it was something else. It would not work, it would not function, if it simply was laid bare as an instrument of coercion, designed to guarantee the exploitation and expropriation of labor in order to allow the capitalist, their relentless pursuit of profit. If you told the true story of the modern state, it would be intolerable. So it's dressed up as something that it's not. And if the question is, do the capitalist know that the modern state is a lie, that is, are they deceivers? Are they trying to persuade the workers of something which is not true because they know it's not true? Or are they fools? Are they the self deceived? Do they believe it themselves? Do all those bourgeois intellectuals who write tributes to liberty and rights and freedom? All those people at Benjamin Constan, do they actually know what they're doing? I think the genuine Marxist answer is that it doesn't matter, it's still true that you can't deal with them. So if they are liars, knowing liars, how could you deal with them? These people can't be trusted, they're monsters. And if they are the self deceived, if they don't even understand what it is that they're doing, how can you deal with them? They're fools. And part of the uncompromising nature of the Communist Manifesto is that Marx and Engels have absolute contempt for capitalists and particularly for their functionaries in the modern state, not just their functionaries among the intellectual class, but the bureaucrats and the politicians and the officials who run the tool of coercion for the capitalists. But if they have contempt for those people, if they have contempt for the human face of capitalism, it is not true that they have contempt for capitalism itself, that is for the productive economic system. One of the really striking things about the Communist Manifesto, if you read it fresh, read it as it was written in 1848, quickly, without preconceptions. It's just how awestruck Marx and Engels are by capitalism. That is just how awestruck they are by the productive power, the transformational power, that this form of economic organization, this way of arranging the means of production. Frankly, the productive power of the exploitation and expropriation of labour, just what it has achieved, because before the political revolution that they hoped to achieve, the great revolution that they were living through even as relatively young men, but that the previous one or two generations had also lived through was the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution powered by capitalist forms of production by the pursuit of profit, and as they say in the Communist Manifesto, you just have to look around you in Germany, in Western Europe, in 1848, even in the United States of America, to see what's possible. And what's possible would have been unimaginable 100 years previously. They say and I quote, "The bourgeoisie during its rule of scarce work, 100 years has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of nature's forces to man machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground. What earlier century had even a pre-centrament that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? It says here that the capitalists have done that, but that's not what they mean. What they mean is capitalism has done that, so imagine what capitalism could do if you got rid of the capitalists. Another way that Marx and Engels describe this extraordinary transformational power is as a kind of magic. They see it as magical, almost incomprehensible, but more importantly, they understand that it is almost incomprehensible to the people who have conjured this out of the ground. They say of the bourgeoisie that they are like conjurers, sorcerers who are no longer able to control the powers of the Netherworld that they have conjured into being. They have lost control of their own magic trick. They don't understand the power that they have unleashed. And because they don't understand that power, one of the features of capitalism, one of its inevitable cyclical features, is that it will keep running into crisis. And the crisis is caused by the fact that it is more powerful than the people who run it are able to deal with. It is too powerful for them. It produces too much that this form of exploitation actually outruns itself. And so what happens regularly, periodically in capitalist societies is that too much is produced more than can be consumed because the laborers, the workers, the proletariat who do the production, whose labor is responsible for the production, do not have the power to consume the financial, the economic power, to consume all that they produce. And that leaves the capitalist exposed because they have too much and they can't sell it and prices are cut and cut through it competition begins. And capitalist enterprises put each other out of business, which means that they have to get rid of the workers, which makes the workers poorer, which means there's even less capacity to consume what is being produced and so it goes on leading to misery, misery for everyone. Capitalism for Marx and Engels is always going to be on the way to crisis. What happens when crisis hits, well one possibility is revolution will come to that. But what do the capitalist do when crisis hits? They don't really have many choices, not least because they don't fully understand the powers that they have unleashed, but they do what they always do. There are only two things that they can reach for. They can reach for the coercive power of the state. They can double down on the coercion. They can try and hold things together by oppression and by force. Or they can pursue other markets to conquer, other places, other peoples to sell their goods to. They can try and expand. They can try and find new places to conquer. But neither of these things can work in the long run. More force, more oppression, just lays bare the lie of modern capitalist societies and pursuing wider markets and more interconnected world, what we might call more global capitalism, just means the next crisis will be bigger. The interconnections will lead to an interconnected crisis and eventually inevitably. The crisis will come that cannot be escaped by force or by conquest. If the capitalist do not understand the magic spells that they are responsible for, who does? One marks an angle's due and they understand it and they lay it out. In the Communist manifesto, they interpret it through what they call using their catchphrase, the history of the class struggle. This is class conflict, the central class conflict of capitalist societies is between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. But do the proletariat understand it? This is one of the deep, fundamentally unresolved and unresolvable questions of Marxist thought, whether the workers truly know their own situation. In one sense, they ought to know it because they are the exploited. For them, it's impossible to believe in the lie. But in another sense, and this was closer to what Lenin thought, they don't truly know it because they are the exploited. An exploitation leads to a kind of blindness to be emisorated and exploited makes it much harder to know what's really going on. And yet relatively speaking, what can be said about the proletariat, about their agency as political actors, as the agents of change, is that they are at least the less deceived. They cannot fully believe in the lie because the lie for them reveals itself as nothing but exploitation. The state is, if you are a member of the proletariat, simply an instrument of coercion. Its talk about rights, injustice, and freedom is not plausible if you know it to be simply an instrument of force. So what's needed is for the proletariat to take over the state. That is the revolution. The revolution is not to turn capitalism on its head. The revolution is not to switch off the productive powers. Marx and Engels love the productive powers of capitalism, or at least they are all struck by them by industrial capacity. What the revolution is is the replacement of the people who run that system with the people who are exploited by that system because those people can use the state simply to manage productive forces and not as an instrument of coercion. In the first instance they will have to be coercion because the bourgeoisie are not going to give up the powers of the state lightly. And there is at the heart of the communist manifesto a clear understanding that the powers of the state are going to have to be turned back against the people who have been using them. That is the coercive powers of the state. The guns are going to have to be turned round and pointed the other way. But the communist manifesto also hints at another idea, another possibility, which is if the exploited take over the powers of the state. So that ultimately the state is only needed to regulate industrial economic life but not to exploit and coerce the workers. Maybe you don't need a state at all. If the state is no longer what Marx and Engels understand it to be at its heart, a tool or an instrument of class oppression, once the oppressed in class the bourgeoisie have been got rid of. What need is there for the state at all? And there is sometimes in the foreground more often distantly in the background of Marxist revolutionary thought, the dream, perhaps the impossible dream of the disappearance of the state altogether. These are the building blocks of Marxist ideas in the communist manifesto, capitalism, crisis, revolution, class. But that leaves out what is possibly the foundational idea, the one that's most often left out, the other thing that is essential to the communist manifesto is the idea of the international. This is an international movement, this is an international project, this must be an international politics, the state that has to be transcended, that has to be overcome is the national state, the nation state. Workers of the world unite means workers of the world because class transcends national state boundaries. That was the idea that was nearly killed in 1914, nearly, but not quite because it never quite dies. If you take all those ideas together, that full package of Marxist thought, class-based revolution and a revolution which is more than just the turning of the wheel because if you turn it halfway the right way, you never have to turn it again. Revolution, capitalist crisis, overcome by pro-Tariat emancipation in an international form of politics. That package is very powerful and it has lasted because it speaks to people in different ways and different contexts. But it's rarely the whole package, like most pieces of writing that have proved most influential in the history of ideas, the communist manifesto tends to be picked at a bit, the uncomfortable bits fall away. People choose the bits that's suit the situation they find themselves in. The bit that tends to fall away first and fastest is the international. It did even in Marx and Engels' own lifetime. As the fame of the Communist Manifesto grew, as the fame of Marx and Engels grew, it was published in different languages and different editions throughout their lifetimes, Engels occasionally wrote new introductions to new editions, and concessions were made to nationalist movements. There was a Polish edition that dressed up the Communist Manifesto as though it were consistent with Polish nationalism. There was an Italian edition that pretended that Italian nationalism could also be the cause of communism. Internationalism fell away in 1914 and 1917 didn't really revive it. It did revive. The manifesto itself, it certainly revived the idea of class-based revolution, but the Russian Revolution was a national revolution, and the Russian Revolution had to survive a national civil war. And the Russian Revolution produced a nation-state, a new kind of nation-state that still a recognizable nation-state that became a kind of national empire, and then an international empire, but that's not what Marx and Engels meant by internationalism. The idea of revolution itself, which is integral to the Communist Manifesto, has a checkered history as revolutions come and go, and it probably is worth saying that though for Marx and Engels their revolution does not represent a turning of the wheel, but the end of the turning of the wheel. The most successful revolutions of my lifetime, if success is measured by relatively speaking, durable transformation, were the revolutions that did happen in Eastern Europe, in 1989, the ones that brought down the communist regimes, the ones that turned the wheel back, 360 degrees, that recreated the unified Germany, more or less of the kind it had existed before the First World War, that brought back many of the people who had been driven out by the original communist revolutions. And there's another series of revolutions more recently still, which suggests that an even wider wheel may be turning. The Arab Spring, a period of great hope, roughly a decade ago, when it looked like regimes in parts of the Arab world would be overthrown, not often in the name of the Communist Manifesto, but people looked to see which were the revolutions of the past that these transformational events could be compared to, was this another Russia 1917, was this perhaps more like the velvet revolutions of 1989, we don't know all periods of transformation are different, but if there is a comparison, the best one is probably with 1848. The revolutions in Europe of the year of the communist manifesto, which were so disappointing, so disappointing for the revolutionaries, which led to reaction and repression, which led to chaos and in some cases the restitution of more oppressive regimes than the ones that had sought to be overthrown. And the Arab Spring has something of that pattern to it too. The 1848 revolutions had a long term profound impact on European political life and society. And it's possible to trace ultimately the success of democratic politics later on in the 19th century and into the 20th century in the revolutions of 1848, but you do have to wait an awful long time. What about the idea of class? It's hard to dispute that many people still think of politics as primarily a set of contests and a set of divisions organized around class. That idea has never gone away and many of the people who push it most ardently today would describe themselves as Marxists. For Marx, for Engelth, for class struggle was between the workers and the bourgeoisie, the proletariat and the capitalists. And it's possible that that is still the central struggle of our time. But it's increasingly common to read people describe class politics in other terms. There are new kinds of classes, or at least the possibility of new kinds of class divisions. One that is sometimes discussed, this is a relatively recent phenomenon, is that educational divides have become the new class divides. That our politics is divided fundamentally between people with and people without higher forms of education. And this is reflected in political attitudes, in forms of political representation, in how people vote, in how they express themselves, in the kinds of political cultures that they belong to. And that many of these divisions are deeper rooted now than divisions between capital and labor. One of the problems with thinking that it's the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie is that for Marx and Engels, the divide between them is meant to become clearer and wider over time. And yet through the history of modern capitalism, in many ways, it's become less clear and more blurry over time. It's always possible to find people who are unquestionably the exploited workers. It's always possible to find people who are unquestionably the exploiting capitalists. But there are many, many people whom it is harder to sort between those two groups. One could be the new class divide. Another one could be age. If you look at the politics of modern Western societies, they are fundamentally divided on many of the most important questions between the old and the young. The old and the young think differently, vote differently, the old vote more than the young do. But they also vote for different kinds of parties and different kinds of politicians than the young do. The Labour Party in the United Kingdom, the Socialist Party, what's left of it in France, social democrats around the Western world, the democrats in the United States. Are these still the parties of Labour? Probably not. They are the parties of the educated and they are the parties of the young. The problem with thinking of the educated or the young or the old and the less educated as classes is that they lack a lot of the agency. The Marx and Engels would have attributed both to the bourgeoisie and to the proletariat, both to the exploiters and the exploited, both to the deceived and the less deceived. It's not clear how the young act in politics, that is how as a single class they are able to affect political transformation, there aren't actually parties of the young. The Labour Party represents more young people than old people, but the Labour Party is not the young person's party. The young may lack agency, but there is another way in which I think it's possible that Marx and Engels is analysis of class conflict does map on to contemporary social divisions around age. This is the thing that haunts me, because one of the things about the proletariat for Marx and Engels writing in 1848 is that they can see things for how they are, they are less deceived because they have no reason to fall for the fundamental lie. Even if they lack agency, they don't lack certain forms of knowledge of the future. And one of the features of contemporary politics is that younger and older voters have a fundamentally different conception of the future. For younger voters, fears of climate change, fears of crisis, fears of possible destruction, loom much larger than they do for older voters. There are lots of ways to think about that. Maybe it's just based on interest or self-interest. Maybe young people worry about the future more because they know they're going to live in it for longer than older people do. I think there are lots of different ways to understand that, but one that is neglected and seems to me a real possibility is that the young, as relatively speaking in our societies, currently, the exploited class understand the future better than older people do. They see things that we don't. The ideas that have stood up best from Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto are the ideas of crisis and its relationship to capitalism. It is no coincidence that the book got a great revival in 2008. Not just the Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital 2 and Marx's other writings, as people look to try and understand why is it that capitalism keeps running into trouble. And some of the analysis still seems prescient. The idea that capitalism is a kind of magical force that cannot be controlled by the people who manage it. That the most successful capitalist actually don't know what it is that they've unleashed. And when they've unleashed it, and it goes wrong, they have nothing to fall back on, except either to find new markets or to ask the state to do their dirty work of oppression. And certainly, I think the possibility that capitalists don't understand what they're doing and the most successful capitalist understand least of all the power of what they have unleashed has a real purchase. in the world of Silicon Valley and the tech titans. Do they really know what powers they're dealing with? Do they really know what to do with the forces that they've conjured up from the Netherworld? I'm not sure. I think it's possible that they don't. But there is still a basic question of who or what can manage capitalism through its periodic crises. And Marx and Engels' answer, which is ultimately it will have to be the exploited class. And maybe the crisis will come. I don't think the one that we're currently living through is it, but you never know. Maybe the crisis will come, which will allow national boundaries and national barriers to be overcome, and international solidarity among the most vulnerable to transcend the limits of nation's data politics. Maybe one day that crisis will come. For now, each time we arrive at the crisis that could be it, national boundaries and national barriers seem to get higher. But the other possibility is that the only instrument that can actually control the forces of capitalism and its periodic tendency to lapse into crisis, the kind of crisis that the capitalist themselves do not understand is the Hubsian state, the modern state, that double instrument which is not just coercive, which is also the vehicle of human emancipation, but which has coercive power at its disposal. And there is a way of thinking about the modern state that parallel some of the things that Marx and Engels have to say about capitalism. The modern state is also somewhat awe-inspiring and mysterious and magical. Hubs' state, though it's a machine, just as capitalism in its way, is a kind of machine. It is also something that he was the conjurer, and he was the sorcerer who drew it out of the other world and brought it into being and brought it into life. That automaton that Hubs built does have in itself a kind of life of its own, and it's not clear that the people who run it and manage it understand fully its power. We might be living in a world where the two rival forces for control, economic and political, modern capitalism and the modern state are each instruments that no one can fully control, and that the choice that we have to make particularly at moments of crisis is between them, not because one of them allows us ultimately to be fully undissieved, and the other one is the deceiver, but both of them are in their ways deceptive, but both of them also in their ways are essential, and that the political choices that we face are between different kinds of deception. And if that's the choice, sometimes whatever Marx and Engels might think, we do have to take the side of the modern state. To find the Communist manifesto and other suggestions for reading from today's episode, please go to our show notes. Next time, something very different, Gandhi on non-violence. [BLANK_AUDIO]