“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.” Everyone knows the opening words of the Communist Manifesto, whose lyric resembles two lines of ballad stanza both in German and English. And yet the rest of the preamble is most often ignored or misunderstood.

What is this “spectre of communism”, this mystical syntagm that everyone from Jacques Derrida to David Cronenberg has either purloined or parodied?

The spectre of communism provides Marx and Engels with their explicit motivation for writing The Manifesto of the Communist Party (as it was originally called). As the preamble informs us, Europe’s dominant powers have conjured up a political bogeyman (a “frightful hobgoblin” in Helen Macfarlane’s translation of 1850) for demonising the proletariat and its boiling opposition to social injustice and inequality. The parallel between the “spectre of communism” and contemporary “antisemitism” cannot go unnoticed here:

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power?

Translated into the present conjuncture:

Where are the opponents of Israel’s genocide that have not been decried as antisemitic by the world’s ruling powers?

Like “antisemitism” now, “communism” then served a statist strategy of stigmatising and stirring up moral panic the better to suppress all grassroots politics, regardless of whether it was “communist” or not, which in 1848 included the Chartists, nascent trade unions, agrarian reformers, along with other miscellaneous workers’ organisations agitating for radical reform and revolution against the state.

Grassroots politics of the 1840s in Europe and America was hugely and irreconcilably diverse, a fact which the authors acknowledge in the Manifesto’s third and fourth sections. In this respect whatever “all the powers of old Europe” contrived to conjure up through ideological misrepresentation—somewhat like that of Revisionist Zionism—could only ever amount to a figment of their twisted and nefarious imaginations. Hence the preamble’s emphatic appeal: “It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself.”

So. According to The Manifesto of the Communist Party—of the communists’ coming out party—the spectre of communism isn’t communism, isn’t what communists are about. Whatever their opponents say communism is, that’s what it’s not. The spectre is a “nursery tale” told by the powers that be, for the lack of any progressive politics of their own. Spectre-talk is symptomatic, marking a lack—in truth a discursive wound—in the legitimacy of state-parliamentary power.

And yet over time and with the global expansion of communism, through fits and spectacular starts, from near-invisible “parts” (Teile) of the working class to the fully-fledged “mass” communist parties and states (the latter a flat out contradiction on Marx and Engels’s criteria), the spectres would become far more difficult to pin down. With the internationalisation of “the communist movement” an affirmative demonisation (negation of the negation) of communism would emerge, according to which the communist spectre is possessed of real ontological power. Derrida—whose Spectres de Marx he dedicates to the assassinated South African revolutionary communist Chris Hani—traces the contours of this hantologie, elevating the Manifesto’s nursery tale into a genuine horror story of the return of the repressed (Hamlet), and communism “itself” into the eternal recurrence of atemporal revolutions (“the time is out of joint”) past, present and future. Such spectres, it’s true, harbour immense deconstructive (metaphysical) power.

The global expansion of “the communist movement” is by no means the same as the internationalisation of workers’ struggles that the International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) set in motion. The IWA was inaugurated in 1864 as an umbrella association of diverse ideological tendencies (anarchist, Owenite, trade unionist communist, etc.) that would prove impossible to hold together, and eventually split into multiple internationals. (This deserves far more attention than I can give it here.)

By the time of the establishment of the Communist (Third) International (“Comintern”) in 1919, we witness a short-circuiting of international worker militancy and solidarity on one hand, and “communist leadership” on the other, the latter exemplified by factional infighting between Stalin and Trotsky for control of the Russian Communist Party after Lenin’s demise, and for uncontested control of the Comintern.

Marx already envisaged the longue durée of spectral communism in the aftermath of 1848 as follows: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” For Marx, spectral communism is arguably 1848’s lesson to be learned. Revolution returns, not as progressive consciousness, but as the disembodied spirit or repressed consciousness of the workers—repressed as much through “internal” as “external” enemies—thus halting Marx and Engels’s much anticipated proletarian revolution in its tracks. Without touching on the palace drama of “Hamlet and his treacherous relatives” (and Trotsky and his) or the bloody “revolutions” of the trap door of history, let’s merely note the concrete betrayal of the workers by the Stalinist Third International in collusion with the trade union aristocracy. In Britain alone the revenants are legion: Black Friday 1921, the 1922 engineers’ lockout, Red Friday 1925, and culminating in the General Strike of 1926.

But what of real communism? Given that in the Manifesto Marx and Engels seem as eager as “Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies” to “exorcise this spectre”, does their distinction between real communism and its spectral double, i.e. “nursery tale” communism, still hold? Admittedly the spectre still has the power to strike fear into the hearts of the masses, to terrorize or haunt its enemies, and no less today than in the Soviet era. But for a so-called Communist Partei—a “part” which is also understood to be “the most decisive section” (der entschiedenste, immer weitertreibende Teil) of the working-class, instead of a formal “party”—surely there must be something about communism that distinguishes it from what it’s not.

(Note: In speaking of the “real” we aim to avoid the spectral “reality” of the mundane—or the form of appearance of capitalist society, its relations of production, etc., as relations of exchange—namely, of commodity fetishism.)

Real (or real-Real) communism. Not imaginary (or imaginary-Real) communism. Our communism, not theirs. The communism of the communists (the protagonists of the drama, the avant-garde of the workers), not the tellers of the tale (the Shakespearean bards) however well-intentioned or solidary they may be. Derrida’s theatrical insistence on the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father may occasion the no less histrionic reprimand: We are not repressed, so you get fucked.

And yet the difficulty here in obtaining this real is that, unlike Marxism-Leninism, communism has never been in need of ideological purification. How could the real movement which abolishes the present state of things—the immanence of communism to capitalism’s creative destruction—require any subjective representation? The idea that “it is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a manifesto of the party itself” is in this respect gratuitous: somewhat like “telling tales” about communism, making a show of one’s commitment, rather than adapting to the real movement itself. Surely the communists no more owe “the whole world” a confession of faith than communism itself would be capable of announcing the exact time of its arrival (whatever that might mean). For that would surely be to misconstrue the real movement in actu with the abstraction of its idea as an alternative government, reality, a specific set of beliefs, demands, strategies, etc.

Some years ago, a metapolitical debate concerning “the idea of communism” got underway. The debate, under Alain Badiou’s direction, had less to do with real communism, or making the distinction between real and spectral communism, than with the splacing of the political signifier “communism”, and of investigating the potentials for a third sequence of “the communist hypothesis” (Badiou dates the first 1792—1871, the second 1917—1976). In Badiou’s hypothesis an attention to minimalist communism, as opposed to the maximalist, dictatorial, statist, world-shattering variety, was the order of the day. According to Badiou, the idea of communism is eternal, relying on those transhistorical indices of egalitarian politics he describes as “communist invariants”.

From the Neolithic Revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution, political events, somewhat incredibly according to Badiou’s reading of history, boil down to the aforementioned two; which explains why he believes contemporary politics have more in common with Marx’s time than the post-Bolshevik 20th century. Now that’s what I call really kicking the philosophical can down the road. We might just as well ask a caveman as Marx and Engels to point us in the direction of real communism. (I’m reminded of the scene in Alexander Kluge’s News from Ideological Antiquity: Marx/Eisenstein/Capital where Marx actually recites Capital with a caveman.)

The cognitive dissonance of minimalist communism is reaffirmed when one hears it said that, in Plato’s work, “the model taken up again in the 19th century by the communist movement was the community of equals”:

It should be remembered that the various communist schools, the utopian communists, Marxists, etc., of the 19th century, considered Plato a communist and as the origin of communist thought. (Alain Badiou par Alain Badiou, Puf, 2021)

For balance one might like to add that Plato’s “community of equals” nonetheless still required a highly disciplined police force.

Taking Badiou at his word, those of us dedicated to real communism face a double challenge. First, the proliferation of its universalising potential, or the immanence which enables communism to erupt “virtually” anywhere, seemingly as a matter of contingency, albeit strictly through the disruption of the dominant order.

Second, the stagnation of its actuality, or the transcendence of “the communist movement” to the point where any future Event of sufficient universal-egalitarian pedigree is ruled out in advance by the sheer magnitude of human history, which stretches considerably further back in time than the Neolithic (Revolutionary) Age: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Note: all dead generations. Let me suggest that what weighs just as much on the “brains” [Gehirne] of us living creatures is the legacy of prehistory, given how the measly recorded history bequeathed to us makes up the mere crust of the sedimentation of the natural evolution of the human species.

(Frank Ruda is currently working on the fascinating question of “capitalist prehistory”, although I’ll leave the constitutional basis of prehistory to one side here.)

Keen readers of the Manifesto will know that prehistory is very much on the agenda in the 1888 English edition (and the 1890 German). In the light of Lewis Henry Morgan’s anthropology (Ancient Society was published in 1877), Marx and Engels’s original claim that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” is modified by Engels in a footnote stressing “written history”. Morgan provided the basis for Engels’s now debunked argument for communist-like organisation in societies existing “before recorded history”, which in a flurry of his own written history Engels published in 1894 as The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Suffering from flawed methodology, historical inaccuracies, lacking empirical evidence and betraying a riot of Eurocentric prejudices, Engels’s accent on the prehistoric nonetheless raises the prospect, not of exorcising the spectre of communism, but the spectre of primitive communism. Isn’t that the real nursery tale, the one which has had everyone from Pope Pius IX to Donald Trump wanking themselves senseless at the thought of a return to Planet of the Apes? (The Donald is of the vintage to recall Charlton Heston’s line, “Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty ape!” and clearly the original film, released in 1968 at the height of the Vietnam War and the year of Martin Luther King’s assassination, has made a deep and lasting impression on the Neanderthal.)

The Origin of the Family is worth quoting for the delightful image (question-begging on several fronts) Engels paints of a museum of antiquities, from the future perspective of a returned (primitive) communist society:

The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganise production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe.

Jason Barker