Manifesto again

I often grouse around with colleagues that students have no knowledge of the Cold War, and that we need to teach courses specifically on the period 1945-1989. They have no sense of the polarization of everything and what it was like to think that the entire world could really be completely destroyed anytime, as in now or tomorrow, --not by climactic change, but by an instantaneous white flash of overwhelming heat that melted your body along with everyone else you knew.

Of course there’s a fascinating turn to forgetfulness, --after ten years of students professing no interest in Marx and Engels, I had the first lively discussion in class of the Communist Manifesto. All the comments were about contemporary economics, lots of references to globalization, a few students were clearly completely conversant in the lingo. This was quite a shift from the sullen refusal to consider the existence of class conflict that predominated a few years ago. Now the Manifesto seems to speak on its own about globalization’s inequalities.

I teach the pamphlet in the context of nineteenth-century industrialization and the 1848 revolution, all very historical, all very ancient. So it is quite the delight when the dead rise from the text –yet another day for the Gespenst.