Notes on Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto

I just finished reading Žižek’s short book The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto and would like to offer some commentary on it. One thing that makes this text interesting was Žižek’s total lack of interest in mentioning it in his debate with Jordan Peterson. Peterson opened with a “critique” of The Communist Manifesto and was looking for Žižek to respond with his own thoughts on it. In true Žižek fashion, he didn’t. This makes sense from a strategic standpoint, since it wasn’t his aim to defend Marx, but, rather, to reach out to Peterson’s fans and get them to see that all leftists are not reducible to the SJW stereotype they dislike. In other words, he was trying to get some of them to identify with him. However, I still wish he would’ve discussed his thoughts on the relevance of the Manifesto for the sake of the young Peterson fans. I think his insights really could’ve helped them see why Marx is still relevant to the world they are living in today. This was a missed opportunity. With that being said, I’d like to touch on some important points Žižek makes in his book and provide some of my own reflections on them. I hope this leads people to read Žižek’s book as well as The Communist Manifesto itself.

Before taking a closer look at the text, I want to give a short summary of it. I just want to state what some of its main insights are. Section one discusses the problematic status and blurred identity of the working class, that is, the problem of the “revolutionary subject”. It also considers how technological advancements do not necessarily carry the promise of a freer tomorrow for workers and how the future may very well end up being a brutally oppressive form of rentism. Section two focuses on the “ghosts” that are currently haunting global capitalism, i.e., the ghosts of revolutionary futures and commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is very relevant to our times, since the financialization (virtualization) of money is giving it an even greater fetishistic power. Section three turns its attention to what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism” (our inability to imagine any alternative to capitalism, i.e., a postcapitalist future). This section also analyzes the financialization of capital and how this process brings with it new forms of personal domination. In the fourth section, Žižek explains the current limitation of Marx’s concept of valorization (which is at the heart of his theory of structural exploitation) and the impact the digital virtualization of the economy (value/money) will have on us. The fifth section tackles the question concerning freedom in capitalist society. The idea is that the new “freedoms” capitalism is currently creating for the precariat hide the growth of a more fundamental unfreedom. The sixth and final section reflects on the revolutionary subject, the nature of revolution, what it means to be a Marxist and how to keep the communist horizon open.

Section One: The end is near. . . only not the way we imagined it

Žižek begins by arguing that the Manifesto is, indeed, relevant to today’s world, but that this relevance is different from the sort it had in Marx’s day. Žižek sees that the world has changed drastically from Marx’s time and certain of his concepts do not easily and accurately map the social world in the way they did in the last half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. One concept in particular that now has a problematic status is that of the working class, i.e., the proletariat. Žižek thinks that we no longer have a clear picture of who the revolutionary agent is. He writes,

[T]he four features of the classic Marxist notion of the working class: (1) it constitutes the majority in society; (2) it produces the wealth of society; (3) it consists of the exploited members of society; (4) its members are the needy people in society. When these four features are combined, they generate two further features: (5) the working class has nothing to lose from revolution; (6) the working class can and will engage in a revolutionary transformation of society. None of the first four features applies to today’s working class, which is why features (5) and (6) cannot be generated. (Even if some of the features continue to apply to parts of today’s society, they are no longer united in a single agent: the needy people in society are no longer the workers, etc.) — Correct as it is, this enumeration should be supplemented by a systematic theoretical deduction: for Marx, they all follow from the basic position of a worker who has nothing but his labour power to sell. As such, workers are by definition exploited; with the progressive expansion of capitalism, they constitute the majority which also produces the wealth; and so on. How, then, are we to find a revolutionary perspective and redefine it in today’s conditions? Is the way out of this predicament a combinatorics of multiple antagonisms, their potential overlapping? But — to use Laclau’s terms — how is it possible to form a ‘chain of equivalences’ from classic proletarians, precariat, unemployed, refugees, oppressed sexual and ethnic groups, and the like?
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, pp. 8–9)

Classical Marxists vehemently reject this take on the working class, but I find it to convey a certain truth. Namely, that there is no working class in the strict sense Marx understood the term to have. What it means to be an employee nowadays depends on what type of job you have. These differentiations are of fundamental importance due to how they shape a person’s sense of identity. In the golden age of class consciousness (roughly 1850 to 1950), workers united around certain particular images of the wage laborer, e.g., the steel worker or the coal miner. What we lack is a unifying image of the worker. What particular worker serves as the universal worker? What’s worse is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to envision such an image taking hold in the collective imaginary. What universal image would unite the computer programer in San Francisco with the barista in Kansas City with the office assistant in New York with the trucker from Nashville with the adjunct professor in Seattle? Are they all exploited in the exact same way as the old factory worker was? Do they all get cheated out of their surplus value the way the commodity producer did? Is their industrial capital (labor power) truly the main source of society’s wealth or has financial capital (virtual transactions, speculations on speculations, algorithmic fuckery, etc.) taken over that position?

Another problem lies in the fact that the vast majority of people do not base their identities on their class positions. Personal identity is far more rooted in one’s religion, culture, gender, sexuality and interests. Hell, people are much quicker to identify with a sports team than they are to identify with a class. Marxists can say that this is no coincidence. Instead, this is the work of capitalist ideology. Fair enough. However, even if you were to get people to agree with this, what image of the worker would you be able to elevate to the Universal in their hearts and minds? What? The industrial commodity producer? Ha! Nobody relates to that at all. There has to be a new concrete embodiment of the Universal for identification to occur and not just the vague notion of this indeterminate “thing” called Capital fucking us all over in some mysterious way. I certainly would love for some sort of class consciousness to emerge and take hold in society (I’m sure Žižek would too), but we have to be realistic about this shit.

However, Žižek does find relevance in the Manifesto. For one, it describes the end of capitalism and this is something we are all living in the shadow of. But the end of capitalism is looking very different from the end of it painted by Marx and Engels. Everyone is concerned about capitalism. No one more so than the most famous capitalists (Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg). They are all aware of the signs of postcapitalism, that is, of some big paradigmatic change coming on the economic horizon. Despite the fact that they are speaking a certain truth, they are still lying to us. They are lying to us through the truth. They’re telling us the truth about capitalism — “it’s coming to an end” — but there’s a catch. As Žižek says, “We should simply reply to them: ‘Why are you telling us that capitalism is coming to an end when capitalism is really coming to an end?’ In short, their version of the end of capitalism is the capitalist version of its own end, where everything will change so that the basic structure of domination will remain the same” (The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 10).

Another way the Manifesto is relevant is in how it describes the struggle between forces of production (i.e., productive forces) and relations of productions. The forces of production have to do with the technology (tools, machinery, infrastructure) and labor power (human bodies, knowledge) we use to produce and reproduce our society while the relations of production are the relations between the people involved in this process (e.g., capitalists and wage laborers). According to certain Marxists, the more forces of production become perfected, automated and developed, the more we move towards a crucial break down in the capitalist relations of production, which, in turn, will bring about a socialist/communist society. Žižek finds this “dialectic of productive forces and relations of production” relevant to what we are calling the “internet of things” and to the “collaborative commons”. This is worth quoting at length.

More serious is the rise of what Jeremy Rifkin calls the ‘collaborative commons’ (CC), a new mode of production and exchange that leaves behind private property and market exchange: in CC individuals are giving their products for free, releasing them into circulation. This emancipatory dimension of CC should, of course, be located in the context of the rise of what is called ‘the internet of things’ (IoT) in combination with another result of today’s development of productive forces: the explosive rise of ‘zero marginal costs’ whereby more and more products, and not only information, can be reproduced for no additional costs. The IoT is the network of physical devices, vehicles, buildings, and other items embedded in electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity that enable these objects to collect and exchange data; it allows objects to be sensed and controlled remotely, across an existing network infrastructure. Thus the IoT creates opportunities for a more direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems and causes improved efficiency, accuracy, and economic benefit across the board. When the IoT is augmented with sensors and actuators, the technology becomes an instance of the more general class of cyberphysical systems, which also encompass technologies such as smart grids, smart homes, intelligent transportation, and smart cities; each thing is uniquely identifiable through its embedded computing system and is able to interoperate within the existing internet infrastructure. The interconnection of these embedded devices (including smart objects) is expected to usher in automation in nearly all fields, while also enabling advanced applications such as a smart grid and expanding to the areas such as smart cities. ‘Things’ can also refer to a wide variety of devices such as heart-monitoring implants, biochip transponders on farm animals, electric dams in coastal waters, automobiles with built-in sensors, and DNA analysis devices for environmental, food, or pathogen monitoring. These devices collect useful data with the help of various existing technologies and then autonomously reflow these data between other devices. Human individuals, too, are ‘things’ whose states and activities are continuously registered and transmitted without their knowledge: their physical movements, their financial transactions, their health, their eating and drinking habits, what they buy and sell, what they read, listen to, and watch are all collected in digital networks that know them better than they know themselves.
The prospect of the IoT seems to compel us to turn Friedrich Hölderlin’s famous line ‘[b]ut where the danger is also grows the saving power’ upside down: ‘but where the saving power is also grows the danger’ (wo aber das Rettende ist, wächst die Gefahr auch). The ‘saving’ aspect of the IoT was described in detail by Jeremy Rifkin, who claims that, for the first time in human history, a path of overcoming capitalism is discernible as an actual tendency in social production and exchange, namely the growth of cooperative commons, so that the end of capitalism is on the horizon. The crudest Marxist hypothesis seems to be re-vindicated: the development of new productive forces makes capitalist relations obsolete. The ultimate irony is that, while former communists (China, Vietnam) are today the best managers of capitalism, developed capitalist countries go furthest in the direction of collaborative or cooperative commons as the way to overcome capitalism.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, pp. 10–2)

Against Marxist and accelerationist optimism, Žižek pessimistically sees big dangers lurking in the newest developments of the forces of production. Something that really worries him is the lengths to which the state and the capitalists will go to regain total power over the collaborative commons and the internet of things, i.e., productive forces or “general intellect”. Žižek thinks that this is a new dynamic that good ol’ fashion Marxism is not conceptually prepared to deal with. We must think this through for ourselves . . . but with a certain aid of Marx.

At the concrete level of social organization, the danger is a clearly discernible tendency of the state and private sector to regain control over the cooperative commons: personal contacts are privatized by Facebook, software by Microsoft, search by Google . . . To grasp these new forms of privatization, one should critically transform Marx’s conceptual apparatus. As a result of his neglect of the social dimension of ‘general intellect’ — which is, roughly, the collective intelligence of a society — Marx didn’t envisage the possibility of privatizating general intellect itself; but this is what lies at the core of the struggle for ‘intellectual property’.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 12)

If general intellect (collaborative commons, internet of things) is privately owned, and if we must have access to it in order to live our lives, then exploitation takes on the form of rent. We end up having to rent general intellect. This rentism replaces to standard sort of exploitation Marx focused on. Industrial wage laborers were exploited through the structure of payment (wage). We are becoming exploited through the structure of purchase (rent). Take Netflix for example: it’s a capitalist enterprise but do we find the source of its enormous profits in the labor power of its employees or in the rent we pay to use the service? In his book Four Futures, Peter Frase sees rentism as one of our four possible futures. Frase says that rentism “is based on the extraction of rents rather than the accumulation of capital through commodity production”. Žižek has something very similar in mind. He also claims that the rise of rentism necessarily goes hand in hand with the strengthening of the state, that is, with a more authoritarian state apparatus.

Negri is right here: within this frame, exploitation in the classic Marxist sense is no longer possible — which is why it has to be enforced more and more through direct, legal measures, in other words by a noneconomic force. This is why today exploitation more and more takes on the form of rent: as Carlo Vercellone put it, postindustrial capitalism is characterized by ‘the profit’s becoming rent’. And this also explains why direct authority is needed: it is needed to impose the arbitrary yet legal conditions for the extraction of rent, conditions that are no longer ‘spontaneously’ generated by the market. Perhaps therein resides the fundamental ‘contradiction’ of today’s postmodern capitalism: while its logic is deregulatory, antistatal, nomadic-deterritorializing, and so on, the key tendency in it, that of the profit to become rent, signals the strengthening role of the state, whose (not only) regulatory function is more and more all-present. Dynamic deterritorialization coexists with and relies on increasingly authoritarian interventions by the state and its legal and other apparatuses. What one can discern as looming on the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a society in which libertarianism and individual hedonism coexist with (and are sustained by) a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. Far from disappearing, the state is becoming stronger today.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, pp. 12–3)

The idea is that it will eventually be illegal (state) not to rent certain general intellect (private sector). We will be enforced by the Law to rent x, y and z from capitalists in order to participate in society. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, we are witnessing a new marriage between deterritorializing capital and the overcoding state apparatus. In other words, we are granted more and more new freedoms but only within the overarching structure of a dictatorial legal code — more new freedoms but only inside of a new and more pervasive unfreedom. “Rent or . . .”

We now arrive at Žižek’s pessimistic conclusion: the acceleration of our productive forces will not necessarily usher in a postcapitalist society, but, instead, will likely force upon us a vicious rentism. Again, keep the Netflix example in mind while reading his own words on the matter.

When, due to the crucial role of general intellect in the creation of wealth through knowledge and social cooperation, forms of wealth are more and more out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, the result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual and relative transformation of the profit generated through the exploitation of labour — its transformation, namely, into rent appropriated through the privatization of general intellect.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 13)

Žižek now provides his own example of a person/corporation that exploits people through rent and not through wage labor and the production process. The example is Bill Gates/Microsoft.

Let us consider the case of Bill Gates. How did he become the richest man in the world? His wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of the products that Microsoft is selling, in fact one can even argue that Microsoft is paying its intellectual workers a relatively high salary; which means that Gates’s wealth is not the result of his success either in producing better software for lower prices than his competitors or in exerting a more ruthless exploitation over his hired intellectual workers. If it were, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: people would have massively chosen programs like Linux, which are free and, according to specialists, of better quality than Microsoft. Why, then, are millions still buying Microsoft? Because Microsoft imposed itself as a quasi-universal standard that almost monopolized the field, a kind of direct embodiment of general intellect. Gates became the richest man in a couple of decades by appropriating the rent for allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in the new form of general intellect that he privatized and controls. Is it true, then, that today’s intellectual workers are no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labour (they own their laptops, for example) — which is Marx’s description of capitalist alienation? Yes; but, more fundamentally, no: they are cut off from the social field of their work, from a general intellect that is not mediated by private capital.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, pp. 13–4)

In a bizarre twist, workers, at least intellectual workers, are no longer separated (alienated) from the means of production, since they own the computers they must have to produce their products. We own our physical computers but we rent the software (so to speak). What we rent from Gates is the general intellect he owns and controls. Our exploitation is on the side of our purchase and not on that of our wage (well, it can still be there too). Even if some of Marx’s concepts do not immediately apply to our world in the way they used to apply to his, they still hold open a conceptual space that can help us come to understand the details of our particular circumstances. We can understand our times precisely through understanding how they differ from Marx’s — this is just one way The Communist Manifesto is still relevant.

Section Two: What ghosts are haunting us today?

Given the strange differences and deadlocks between our time and Marx’s, we need to think about what ghosts are currently haunting our society. Marx and Engels opened the Manifesto by claiming that the specter of communism haunted Europe at the time. Žižek thinks that the ghost of the revolutionary future still haunts our world. Žižek seems to be channeling the ghost of Mark Fisher here, since the “revolutionary future” would be one of what Fisher called lost futures, that is, futures that now have a “hauntological” status (neither present nor absent, neither alive nor dead). This section can be called Žižek’s hauntology. Despite the desire of today’s liberals, the Manifesto is still relevant because of how certain of its truths continue to haunt global capitalism. For example, its description of globalization is more relevant that ever before.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And, as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.
(The Communist Manifesto)

If this is not an accurate description of our capitalist global order — one even more accurate now than it was in Marx’s day — then what is? Žižek thinks that capital’s process of “deterritorialization” (to use D&G’s term once again) has effected every aspect of our lives

Is this not, more than ever, our reality today? Toyota cars are manufactured 60 per cent in the United States, Hollywood culture pervades the remotest parts of the globe . . . What is more, the same goes for all forms of ethnic and sexual identity. Should we not supplement Marx’s description along these lines, adding that sexual ‘one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness’, too, ‘become more and more impossible’ and that ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’ also in the area of sexual practices, where capitalism tends to replace the standard normative heterosexuality with a proliferation of unstable shifting identities and orientations? Today’s celebration of ‘minorities’ and ‘marginals’ is the predominant majority position; even alt-rightists who complain about the terror of liberal political correctness present themselves as protectors of an endangered minority.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, pp. 17–8)

However, this globalization process brings with it a ghost, that is, there is a specific apparition at its core — the ghost of commodity fetishism. This specter is as relevant as ever. Žižek writes, “So yes, this global dynamism described by Marx that causes all things solid to melt into thin air is our reality — on condition that we do not forget to supplement this image from the Manifesto with its inherent dialectical opposite: the ‘spiritualization’ of the material process of production itself. While capitalism does abolish the power of the old ghosts of tradition, it generates some ghosts of its own, and monstrous ones at that” (The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 19). Simply put, the material production process intrinsically generates the ghost of commodity fetishism. Žižek adds, “what Marx discovered through his problematics of commodity fetishism was a phantasmagoria or illusion that could not be simply dismissed as a secondary reflection because it was operative within the ‘real production process, at its very heart” (The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 22). This means that all of the problems generated by commodity fetishism are still haunting our world; however, given the new dynamics at play, commodity fetishism itself takes on new effects.

And yet the new dynamics at work in global capitalism have changed our ideology. Žižek argues that the very structure of ideology has become inverted.

At this point we reach the supreme irony of how ideology functions today: it appears precisely as its own opposite, as a radical critique of ideological utopias. The predominant ideology today is not a positive vision of some utopian future but a cynical resignation, an acceptance of how ‘the world really is’, accompanied by a warning that, if we want to change it (too much), only totalitarian horror can ensue. Every vision of another world is dismissed as ideology. Alain Badiou put it in a wonderful and precise way: the main function of ideological censorship today is not to crush actual resistance — this is the job of repressive state apparatuses — but to crush hope, to denounce immediately every critical project as opening a path at the end of which lies something like a gulag. This is what Tony Blair had in mind when he recently asked: ‘Is it possible to define a politics that is what I would call post-ideological?’ In its traditional mode, ideology uses a familiar injunction: ‘You have to be stupid not to see this!’ You have to be stupid not to see — what? The place will be filled by whatever ideological element is supposed to make sense of a confused situation and explain it. In anti-Semitism, for example, you have to be stupid (enough) not to see the Jew as the secret agent who pulls strings behind the scenes and controls the entire social life. Today, however, in its predominantly cynical functioning, the ruling TINA [‘there is no alternative’] ideology claims the opposite: ‘you have to be stupid to see this’. To see what, exactly? To see hope for a radical change.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 20)

Žižek continues to channel Fisher whose book Capitalist Realism carries the subtitle ‘Is There No Alternative?’ Put differently, our current cynical ideology (postcapitalist futures have been canceled) serves as a capitalist “paranormal” defense-system against the haunting of the lost revolutionary future. We are constantly having the ghost of a postcapitalist future “exorcised” by politicians, political pundits, economists, mass media, etc. Ideology has equipped itself with a proton pack so as to catch the ghost of the revolutionary future in its ghost trap from which it will finally be transferred to its Ecto Containment Unit. ECU: Eternal Communism Unlikelihood.

Section two ultimately aims at pointing out the relevance of two ghosts: commodity fetishism and the revolutionary future. No matter how much capitalism changes itself, commodity fetishism will be relevant so long as the commodity plays an essential role in it. No matter how much cynical ideology (capitalism realism) tries to exercise the ghost of the revolutionary future, this “lost” future will haunt us so long as our lives continue to be threatened and damaged by the effects of global capital.

Section Three: Fictitious capital and the return to personal domination

While Žižek gives Marx credit for discovering commodity fetishism, he also thinks Marx underestimated its “spectral dimension”. In other words, he underestimated how capitalism itself can continue to function once it enters into a ghostly state.

It is this spectral dimension, underestimated by Marx himself, that allows us to account for the historical deadlock of Marxism. The mistake of Marxism was not just that it counted on the prospect of capitalism’s final crisis, and therefore could not grasp how capitalism came out of each crisis strengthened. There is a much more tragic mistake at work in the classic body of Marxism, described in precise terms by Wolfgang Streeck: Marxism was right about the ‘final crisis’ of capitalism, we are clearly entering it today, but this crisis is just that — a prolonged process of decay and disintegration with no easy Hegelian Aufhebung in sight, no agent to give this decay a positive twist and to transform it into a passage to some higher level of social organization[.]
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 24)

In a sense, capitalism is already dead, but what if this death is more like the un-death of a zombie? Capital is dead but it keeps on moving about performing its basic functions. It appears that there’s no revolutionary agent (class conscious proletariat) to step in and double tap (Aufhebung) the motherfucker. Where’s the Zombieland crew when we really need them? The classical image of the proletariat presupposes an immense amount of political control and social presence on its part. We cannot even imagine workers having this level of power and influence within our current paradigm of neoliberalism. In other words, neoliberalism so thoroughly destroyed collective agency and worker unification that it would take many decades to repair the damage. But we need the revolutionary agent right fucking now! We are haunted by the ghost of the revolutionary agent. Given the fact that there seems to be no group of people who can fill this void, what we need now is good theorizing. This is why Žižek is always reversing Marx’s famous formula: The philosophers have only tried to change the world in various ways; the point, however, is to think about it.

Another ghost that haunts us is that of fictitious/financial capital. As stated earlier, financial capital has a much greater role in the global economy than it did when Marx was writing. For Marx, the economy was centered around industrial capital (material production of commodities, extraction of surplus value from wage laborers, the valorization process, etc.). For him, financial capital was merely a secondary phenomenon whose parasitic existence depended on the life blood of industrial capital. Things have changed. This is something Jean Baudrillard was well aware of and one reason why he argued that we have reached the “end of production”. The financialization of capital is simultaneously its simulation. Capital no longer has a real referent (or not one that is of much importance) in the remaining spaces of production, that is, capital does not have its main source in the labor power (time and energy) of the wage laborer; instead, it is now becoming more of a simulation of a simulation of a simulation. Capital, for the most part, had a material-referential base in the real world but now capital has become virtual. What’s worse is that the financialization (simulation, virtualization) of capital leads to “direct personal relations of domination”, which is to say that it brings with it a reassertion of older forms of oppression than that of the capitalist/worker relation.

The paradox of the financial politics of the United States and European Union is that gigantic inputs of money fail to generate production, since they mostly disappear in the operations of fictitious capital. This is why one should reject the standard liberal Hayekian interpretation of the exploding debt (the costs of welfare state): data clearly show that the bulk of these inputs goes to feed financial capital and its profits. Along these lines, Rebecca Carson deploys how the financialization of capital — whereby most profit is generated in interest-bearing capital or money that creates money (M-M’) without a detour through the valorization of the labour force that produces surplus value — paradoxically leads to the return of direct personal relations of domination — paradoxically because, as Marx emphasized, M-M’ is capital at its most impersonal and abstract. It is crucial to grasp here the link between three elements: fictitious capital, personal domination, and the social reproduction (of labour power). Financial speculations take place before the fact (of valorization): they mostly consist of credit operations and speculative investments where no money is yet spent on investment in production. Credit means debt, and therefore the subjects or bearers of this operation (not just individuals, but banks and institutions that manage money) are not involved in the process only as subjects to the value form; they are also creditors and debtors, and hence subject to another form of power relation, which is not based on the abstract domination of commodification[.]
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 25)

The idea is that the creditor/debtor relation is more personal and concrete than the capitalist/worker one tends to be. The financialization of capital means harsher living conditions for people, since it’s based in the creditor/debtor dynamic.

Yet financial capital (speculations on the future of production) still logically depends on industrial capital even if the former has actually usurped the latter. The creditor/debtor relation unfolds out of the abstract domination of commodity production. This means that there is still a crucial importance found in the reproduction of labor power (skill-based education).

Those who are not subjected to direct commodification but play a crucial role in the reproduction of labour force are also affected by the growing dependence on the future valorization that is supposed to be opened up by the circulation of fictitious capital: fictitious capital is upheld in the expectation that valorization will occur in the future. Thus the reproduction of labour power is put under pressure so that those not labouring in the present will be ready to labour in the future. This is why the topic of education (in its productive-technocratic version: getting ready for the competitive job market) is so important today, and is also intertwined with debt: a student gets indebted in order to pay for his or her education, and this debt is expected to be repaid through self-commodification, that is, when the indebted student will get a job. Education also emerges as one of the main topics in discussions on how to deal with refugees — how to make them into a useful work force.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, pp. 26–7)

But this means that young people are forced into a forced choice. You have to “choose” to become a debtor precisely because you have no other choice. If you want any chance at having a decent life, then you must get a skill-based education (and even then it still isn’t guaranteed). Pierre Bourdieu showed the collusive connection between economic capital and the educational system or institutional cultural capital, but things have changed. Whereas, for Bourdieu, the educational system was there to serve in the reproduction of the bourgeois class, it is now set up to be a machine for the production and reproduction of debt. Capitalist ideology presents this forced choice as pure freedom (this can be understood as a Baudrillardian simulacrum).

Since in our society free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination cannot be allowed to appear as infringing on the subject’s freedom; they have to appear as, and be sustained by, the individuals’ very experience of themselves as free. There is a multitude of forms in which this unfreedom appears in the guise of its opposite: when we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice, namely to choose our healthcare provider; when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious position every couple of years, we are told that we are given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover new, unexpected creative potentials that lurked in our personality; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’, acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how to invest the resources he or she possesses (or borrows) — into education, health, travel . . . Constantly bombarded by imposed ‘free choices’, forced to make decisions that we are, for the most part, not even properly qualified for (or do not possess enough information about), we increasingly experience our freedom as what it effectively is: a burden that deprives us of the true choice of change. Bourgeois society generally obliterates castes and other hierarchies, equalizing all individuals as market subjects divided only by class difference; but today’s late capitalism, with its ‘spontaneous’ ideology, endeavours to obliterate the class division itself, by way of proclaiming us all ‘self-entrepreneurs’, the differences among us being merely quantitative (a big capitalist borrows hundreds of millions for his or her investment, a poor worker borrows a couple of thousands for his or her supplementary education). The expected outcome is that other divisions and hierarchies emerge: experts and nonexperts, full citizens and the excluded, religious, sexual, and other minorities. All the groups not yet included into the process of valorization, up to refugees and citizens of rogue countries, are thus progressively subsumed to forms of personal domination, from the organization of refugee camps to judicial control of those considered potential lawbreakers — a domination that tends to adopt a human face (as do social services intended to ease the refugees’ smooth ‘integration’ into our societies).(The Relevance to the Communist Manifesto, pp. 27–8)

Well, what do you know? It turns out that all of us are already capitalists — none of us are exploited. How is The Communist Manifesto relevant today? It helps us see through this ideological bullshit! We might not all perfectly fit the strict description of the classic proletariat but we certainly are not capitalists. The Manifesto can shine a light on this. The forced choice of getting a skill-based education involves structural unfreedom much the same way as the forced choice to sell one’s labor power to an industrial capitalist did. “Oh, you don’t want to go into debt to get a marketable set of skills? Oh, you don’t want to sell your labor power, the only thing you have to sell, for a wage? Fine. It’s your ‘choice’. Just go live and die in poverty instead!”

Section Four: The limits of Verwertung

The German word Verwertung is translated as “valorization”. This is a key concept in Marx’s critique of political economy. It refers to the process wherein value (capital) augments itself, that is, it is the production of surplus-value. Marx put it like this: “This increment or excess over the original value I call ‘surplus-value’. The value originally advanced, therefore, not only remains intact while in circulation, but increases its magnitude, adds to itself a surplus-value, or is valorized [verwertet sich]. And this movement converts it into capital” (Capital: Volume One, chapter four, pp. 251–2). For Marx, valorization occurs through workers producing more value for capitalists than they receive in their wages. This inequivalence between the value workers produce and the value they get back in the form of wages is the source of surplus-value (valorization). This is the structure of exploitation via the commodification of labor power.

In this fourth section, Žižek is going to argue that there are certain limitations on the applicability of the concept of valorization to our current economic dynamics. Given the changes in capitalism and more changes to it coming on the horizon, the relevance of valorization must be thought anew. Žižek begins by discussing the labor theory of value and the very concept of value itself. According to him, the value of a commodity is not something it possesses all on its own, but, rather, is something it gets from its quantified position within the the system of exchange. In other words, we cannot separate value from exchange, abstract labor from its quantitative representation. This involves a strange sort of ontological retroactivity (effect determines cause, future determines past). Its appearance is its essence, that is, the value of abstract labor (essence) is determined by the exchange-system of general equivalence (appearance) that represents it. Thus, Žižek reads Marx in a thoroughly Hegelian way:

All these complications compel us to rethink the so-called ‘labour theory of value’ — which should in no way be read as claiming that one should discard exchange, or its role in the constitution of value, as a mere appearance that obscures the key fact that labour is the origin of value. One should rather conceive of the emergence of value as a process of mediation by means of which value ‘casts off’ its use — value is surplus value over use value. The general equivalent of use values had to be deprived of use value, it had to function as a pure potentiality of use value. Essence is appearance as appearance: value is exchange value as exchange value . . . In other words, ‘abstract labour’ is a value relationship that constitutes itself only in exchange, it is not the substantial property of a commodity independently of its relations with other commodities. For orthodox Marxists, such a relational notion of value is already a compromise with bourgeois political economy, which they dismiss as a monetary theory of value. However, the paradox is that these orthodox Marxists themselves effectively regress to the bourgeois notion of value: they conceive of value as being immanent in the commodity, as its property, and thus naturalize its spectral objectivity, which is the fetishized appearance of its social character.
We are not dealing here with mere theoretical niceties; the precise determination of the status of money has crucial economic-political consequences. If we consider money as a secondary form of expression of value that exists ‘in itself’ in a commodity before its expression — that is, if money is for us a mere secondary resource, a practical means that facilitates exchange — then the door is open to the illusion, succumbed into by left-wing followers of Ricardo, that it would be possible to replace money with simple notes that designate the amount of work done by their bearer and give him or her the right to the corresponding part of the social product — as if, by means of this direct ‘work money’, one could avoid all ‘fetishism’ and ensure that each worker is paid his or her ‘full value’. The point of Marx’s analysis is that this project ignores the formal determinations of money that make fetishism a necessary effect. In other words, when Marx defines exchange value as the mode of appearance of value, one should mobilize here the entire Hegelian weight of the opposition between essence and appearance: essence exists only insofar as it appears, it does not preexist its appearance. In the same way, the value of a commodity is not an intrinsic substantial property that exists independently of that commodity’s appearance in exchange.
(The Relevance to the Communist Manifesto, pp. 28–30)

Žižek is warning us to not fall in the trap orthodox Marxists set for themselves, which is the fetishization of value. Value is constituted out of a network of quantitative relations (there’s a certain structuralism at play here) and not out of the “immediacy” of human labor power. It’s crucial to recognize value in its “spectral objectivity”. Why? Because it is in this direction that value is actually moving (more on this below). In fact, Žižek thinks that it is of the utmost importance for us not to see intrinsic value in the products of certain laborious activities. Doing so inadvertently commodifies them and this keeps us trapped within capitalist principles. What we need to do is affirm all of those products that evade the logic of commodification and its system of quantification. We should affirm non-values. The problem is not the content of value — the problem is the very form of market-capitalist value insofar as it is based on the commodification of labor power and the exploitation it necessarily entails.

This is also why we should abandon the attempts to expand value so that all kinds of labour will be recognized as a source of value. Recall the great feminist demand, in the 1970s, to legalize all housework, from cooking and household maintenance to looking after the children, as productive of value; or contemporary eco-capitalist demands to integrate the ‘free gifts of nature’ into value production by way of trying to determine the costs of water, air, forests, and all other commons. All these proposals are nothing but green-washing and commodification of a space from which a fierce attack upon the hegemony of the capitalist mode of production and its alienated relation to nature can be mounted. In their desire to be just and eliminate, or at least constrain, exploitation, such attempts only enforce an even stronger, all-encompassing commodification. Although they try to be just at the level of content, that is, about what counts as value, they fail to problematize the very form of commodification; and Harvey is right to propose instead to treat value as being in dialectical tension with nonvalue, in other words to assert and expand spheres not caught in the production of (market) value, such as household work or ‘free’ cultural and scientific work, in their crucial role. Value production can only thrive if it incorporates its immanent negation, the creative work that generates no (market) value, because the former is by definition parasitic on the latter. So, instead of commodifying exceptions and including them in the process of valorization, one should leave them outside and destroy the frame that makes their status inferior with regard to valorization. The problem with fictitious capital is not that it is outside valorization but that it remains parasitic on the fiction of a valorization to come.
(The Relevance to the Communist Manifesto, pp. 30–1)

What we should be problematizing is the process of valorization itself and not what activities get to be included in it. And even if financial (fictitious) capital is more and more becoming the primary type of capital it nonetheless bases itself on valorizations “to come” (speculations on the future of surplus-value production). To attack valorization itself is to attack both industrial and financial capital. Now let’s get back to the relevance of the “spectral objectivity” of value (money). Žižek sees money taking on an even more objectively spectral form by way of virtualization. This structural transformation of money will have huge impacts on the world.

A further challenge to market economy comes from the exploding virtualization of money, which compels us to reformulate thoroughly the standard Marxist topic of ‘reification’ and ‘commodity fetishism’, insofar as this topic still relies on the notion of fetish as a solid object whose stable presence obfuscates its social mediation. Paradoxically, fetishism reaches its acme precisely when the fetish itself is dematerialized, turned into a fluid, immaterial, virtual entity. Money fetishism will culminate in the transition to an electronic form of money, when the last traces of the materiality of money will disappear; electronic money is the third form, after ‘real’ money, which embodies its value directly (gold, silver), and paper money, which, although a mere sign with no intrinsic value, still clings to its material existence. And it is only at this stage, when money becomes a purely virtual point of reference, that it finally assumes the form of an indestructible spectral presence: I owe you £1,000 and, no matter how many material notes I burn, I still owe you £1,000 — the debt is inscribed somewhere in the virtual digital space . . . It is only with this thorough dematerialization — when Marx’s famous old thesis in The Communist Manifesto that in capitalism ‘all that is solid melts into air’ acquires a much more literal meaning than the one he had in mind; when our material social reality is not only dominated by the spectral-speculative movement of capital but is itself progressively ‘spectralized’ (a ‘Protean self’ replaces the old self-identical subject, the elusive fluidity of its experiences replaces the stability of owned objects); in short, when the familiar relationship between firm material objects and fluid ideas is turned on its head (objects progressively dissolve into fluid experiences, while the only stable things are virtual symbolic obligations) — it is only at this point that what Derrida called the spectral aspect of capitalism is fully actualized.
(The Relevance to the Communist Manifesto, pp. 31–2)

Long story short, capitalism and the movements of capital are becoming more and more virtual, imperceptible, invisible, undetectable, elusive, shifty, etc. We have to constantly keep thinking about the becoming-virtual of value and what it will mean for our everyday lives. Capital reaches actual omnipotence through virtual omnipresence. Virtualization is super-fetishization. Trying to reduce our analysis of capitalism to material production no longer works, since capital is becoming less and less detached from perceptible reality and material conditions. The virtualization of the economy calls for a return to Marx (à la Lacan’s return to Freud). There are new virtual ghosts (present absences) haunting us — who you gonna call?

However, as is always the case in a properly dialectical process, such a spectralization of the fetish contains the seeds of its opposite, of its self-negation: the unexpected return of direct relations of personal domination. While capitalism legitimizes itself as the economic system that implies and furthers personal freedoms (as a condition of market exchange), its own dynamics brought about a renaissance of slavery. Although slavery had become almost extinct at the end of the Middle Ages, it exploded again in the European colonies from early modernity until the American Civil War. And one can risk the hypothesis that today, in the new epoch of global capitalism, a new era of slavery is also arising. Although it no longer affects the direct legal status of enslaved persons, slavery acquires a multitude of new forms: millions of immigrant workers in the Saudi peninsula who are deprived of elementary civil rights and freedoms; total control over millions of workers in Asian sweatshops, which are often organized as concentration camps; massive use of forced labour in the exploitation of natural resources in many central African states (Congo and others). But in fact we don’t have to look so far as these countries. On 1 December 2013, a Chinese-owned clothing factory in an industrial zone in the Italian town of Prato, 10 kilometres from the centre of Florence, burned down killing seven workers who were trapped inside, living and working in conditions of near slavery. So we cannot permit ourselves the luxury of looking at the miserable life of new slaves far away in the suburbs of Shanghai (or Dubai and Qatar) and hypocritically criticizing the countries that house them. Slavery can be right here, in our own house, we just don’t see it — or rather we pretend not to see it. This new apartheid, this systematic explosion in the number of different forms of de facto slavery, is not a deplorable accident but a structural necessity of today’s global capitalism.
(The Relevance to the Communist Manifesto, pp. 32–3)

The emergence of new forms of slavery is the most worrisome of all of Žižek’s predictions. The idea that the virtualization of the economy dialectically leads to actual slavery must be considered. It’s as if the exponential complication of our virtual economy is compensated for with simple and brutal forms of domination. It’s as if an increase in virtual domination produces an equivalent in actual domination. Capitalism is a system of violence split into virtual intricacy and actual simplicity. People like to say that capitalism is just “slavery with extra steps”, but if Žižek is right, virtual capitalism is currently in the process of discarding these extra steps.

To take this line of thought in another direction, is not the growing perplexity of the global economy a catalyst in the creation of the desire for a new master, for an authoritarian figure who can step in and get control of things? Is this not the appeal of someone like Trump? “I’m tough enough and smart enough to get things under control!” Is there not a fundamental correlation between virtualization and the return of proto-fascist masters? People are willing to sell their souls for the slightest bit of a sense of stability. Everyone feels as though they have lost a safe and secure sense of worldhood and intelligibility. This loss, this void, functions as the cause of the desire for a return to “better times”. The master can step in and position himself as that which can fill the void.

Section Five: Unfreedom in the guise of freedom

This section can be a bit confusing due to Žižek’s meandering discussion of law, order, crime, property, etc. He talks about how philosophers have often been viewed as being worse than criminals because of how they want to destroy the whole social order and not merely violate one or more of its principles for selfish reasons (this charge is leveled against today’s deconstructionists). Žižek cites G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday here and, then, goes on to argue against his condemnation of philosophers. In true Hegelian fashion, Žižek dialectically shows how law itself is universalized crime and he does this by making reference to a couple of Richard Wagner’s statements. The key insight is in recognizing “the decisive shift from the distortion of a notion to the distortion that is constitutive of this notion — that is, to this notion as a distortion in itself” (The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 38). However, for our purposes, I’m going to skip ahead to the very last part of this section, since I find it to be the most important part it has to offer. Everything that comes before these two paragraphs is just leading up to them. It’s here that we arrive at unfreedom in the guise of freedom.

Capitalist freedom is, in effect, the kind of freedom that one can buy and sell on the market, hence it is this freedom that represents the very form of unfreedom for those who have nothing but their labour force to sell. It is capitalist property itself that means ‘abolition’ of property for those who own no means of production. It is the bourgeois marriage itself that is a kind of universalized prostitution . . . In all these cases, the external opposition is internalized, so that one opposite becomes the form of appearance of the other: bourgeois freedom is the form of appearance of the unfreedom of the majority, and so on. But does not exactly the same hold for today’s precarious ‘self-entrepreneurs’? Their unfreedom — a precarious existence with no social welfare — appears to them in the guise of its opposite, as freedom to renegotiate the terms of one’s existence many times over.
It is already a commonplace that the exploding rise of precarious work deeply affects the conditions of collective solidarity. Precarious work deprives workers of a whole series of rights that, until recently, were taken to be self-evident in any country that perceived itself as a welfare state. Workers themselves have to take care of their health insurance and retirement options; there is no paid leave; and the future is uncertain. Besides, precarious work generates antagonism within the working class, between permanently employed and precarious workers; trade unions often tend to privilege permanent workers and it is very difficult for precarious workers even to organize themselves into a union or to establish another form of collective self-organization. One might have expected that this strengthened exploitation would also strengthen workers’ resistance, but in fact it renders resistance even more difficult. The main reason for this is ideological. Precarious work is presented (and up to a point even effectively experienced) as a new form of freedom: I am no longer just a cog in a complex enterprise but an entrepreneur of the self, I am my own boss — someone who freely manages his or her employment, is free to choose from new options, to explore different aspects of his or her creative potential, to decide his or her priorities . . .
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, pp. 40–1)

It’s not that unfreedom is one element among others within capitalism, but, rather, that the capitalist order (law) is a universalized crime — capitalist freedom (law) is universalized unfreedom (crime). Crime and unfreedom are intrinsic aspects of capitalist society. Today’s precariat is a testament to the structural unfreedom that lies beyond our new “freedoms”. The structural unfreedom that conditions the growing state of precarity is another thing that makes Marx’s work relevant. Marx was all about investigating the structural dynamics of capitalism and this is something we must also be investigators of. Capitalism has always showcased its liberal freedoms as proofs of itself being a free system, but, of course, there is a catch. The freedoms to buy what commodities you want, or live where you want, or say what you want, all function to conceal the wage laborer’s more fundamental unfreedom: either sell your labor power to a capitalist or suffer and die in poverty. True freedom would be found in being freed from this very choice. The same is true of the precariat’s new “freedoms” — they are just new chains.

Section Five: The communist horizon

Žižek starts off this section by discussing how the image of capitalism collapsing under the weight of the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat never occurred and how every communist victory in the 20th century happened by way of a minority vanguard that took advantage of a crisis (e.g., war). In the West, the biggest problem Marxists faced was the absence of a revolutionary subject. By the second half of the 20th century, consumerism had already neutralized the vast majority of the working class. This reconfiguration of capitalist society made it effortless for worker’s to desire and enjoy their own exploitation. All consumer jouissance asked in return was for the total dissipation of class consciousness. Nevertheless, Marxists have never stopped looking for the revolutionary subject. Perhaps there is no single type of agent that can fill this role. Perhaps revolution will be the work of an eclectic ensemble. “A revolution never occurs when all antagonisms collapse into the big One, but when they synergetically combine their power” (The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 44). Žižek now describes the problematic trajectory of the communist revolutions.

The problem here is rather complex. The point is not just that revolution no longer rides the train of history in accordance with its laws — since there is no history, since history is a contingent and open process; there is a different problem. It is as if there is a law of history, a more or less clear and predominant main line of historical development, which indicates that revolution can occur only in interstices, against the current. Revolutionaries have to wait patiently for the (usually very brief) period of time when the system openly malfunctions or collapses, seize their window of opportunity, grab the power — which at that moment lies in the street and is up for grabs, as it were — and then fortify their hold on it by building repressive apparatuses and what not, so that, once the moment of confusion is over and the majority gets sober and disappointed by the new regime, it is too late to get rid of them, they are firmly entrenched. Communists were also always carefully calculating the right moment to stop popular mobilization. Let’s take the case of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which undoubtedly contained the elements of an enacted utopia. At its very end, before the agitation was blocked by Mao himself — since he had already achieved his goals of regaining full power and getting rid of competition in the top ranks of the nomenklatura — there was the Shanghai Commune: 1 million workers who simply took the official slogans seriously, demanding the abolition of the state, even of the party itself, and a direct, communal organization of society. It is significant that it was at this very point that Mao ordered the army to intervene and to restore order. The paradox is that of a leader who triggers an uncontrolled upheaval while trying to exert full personal power, in an overlap between extreme dictatorship and extreme emancipation of the masses.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 44–5)

Another problem communists face is that “the people” do not want to remain politically engaged for long. Communists have a limited window of opportunity to utilize large scale mobilizations before the people fall back asleep again. Only a small minority is capable of prolonged political engagement (the one’s whose libidinal economies have become tied to political activity itself). The problem of the worker’s permanent engagement must be kept in mind.

The underlying problem here is the one I already encountered at the beginning of my essay. How are we to think of the singular universality of the emancipatory subject as not purely formal, that is, as objectively, materially determined, yet without the working class as its substantial base? The solution is a negative one: it is capitalism itself that offers a negative substantive determination. The global capitalist system is the substantive ‘base’ that mediates and generates the excesses (slums, ecological threats, etc.) that open up the site of resistance. Left-wing visions abound around us of how our task is to bring together different groups of the exploited and underprivileged of today’s global capitalism (immigrants, unemployed, precarious workers, victims of sexual, racial, and religious oppression, dissatisfied students . . .) into a united front of emancipatory struggle; but the problem is that we, in clear contrast to Marxists, can no longer envisage the process of this unification in global solidarity.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, p. 46)

In other words, capitalism is constantly producing sites of resistance, but despite this fact, we cannot imagine a way to globally unite people. In the 1990s, many leftists thought that the internet would provide the road to communism (global solidarity). However, what the internet actually does is divide people up into monadic “existences” of consumer narcissism. People can’t even agree when it comes to shit like Star Wars movies. The idea of a global consensus being formed via the internet is now fucking laughable. And yet, in some ways, the world is only now catching up to Marx’s predictions. What he had to say about the globalization process has never been more true than it is now. But we still lack the answer to capitalism. We still do not know how to escape capitalist realism and actualize a postcapitalist society. For Žižek, “communism” is not the name of the Answer but that of a set of problems.

So what is the conclusion? Should we write off The Communist Manifesto as an interesting document of the past and nothing more? In a properly dialectical paradox, the very impasses and failures of twentieth-century communism, impasses that were clearly grounded in the limitations of The Communist Manifesto itself, at the same time bear witness to its actuality: the classic Marxist solution failed, but the problem remains. Today communism is not the name of a solution but the name of a problem, namely that of commons in all its dimensions: the problem of a commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (‘intellectual property’), and, last but not least, the problem of a commons as the universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution, it will have to deal with these problems.
In Soviet translations, Marx’s well-known statement to Paul Lafargue, Ce qu’il y a de certain, c’est que moi je ne suis pas marxiste [‘What is certain is that I am not a Marxist’], was rendered thus: ‘If this is Marxism then I am not a Marxist.’ This mistranslation renders perfectly the transformation of Marxism in university discourse. In Soviet Marxism, even Marx was a Marxist and participated in the same universal knowledge that composes Marxism; the fact that he created the teaching later known by this label made no difference. So his denial above does not refer just to a specific, wrong version that falsely proclaimed itself to be ‘Marxism’. Marx meant something more radical: a gap separates him, the creator who has a substantive relationship with his teaching, from the ‘Marxists’ who follow this teaching. There is a well-known joke by the Marx Brothers that captures this idea: ‘You look like Emmanuel Ravelli. — But I am Emmanuel Ravelli. — So no wonder you look like him.’ The guy who is Ravelli doesn’t look like Ravelli, he simply is Ravelli. In the same way, Marx himself is not a Marxist — one among others; he is the point of reference exempted from the series, because it is by reference to him that others are Marxists. And the only way to remain faithful to Marx today is to stop being a Marxist and to repeat instead Marx’s grounding gesture in a new way.
(The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, pp. 47–8)

To conclude, what we need is a return to Marx, that is, we need to rethink his concepts within the context of the current state of global (digital) capitalism. Truly being a Marxist does not mean trying to reduce our situation to the one Marx was analyzing. Applying his concepts to our world in the way he did to his has many limitations. Truly being a Marxist means structurally critiquing capitalism for the sake of freedom for all. In other words, to be Marxists means to critique capitalism in new ways with new concepts. To be a Marxist means to critically think capitalism anew — this is how the communist horizon remains a horizon.