It is also said that Marx did not give adequate guidance for overcoming capital, and for this his name is now widely disparaged. For quite some time the project enunciated in the Manifesto seemed to offer such guidance. The Manifesto was composed at a time of rising proletarian activity, which it both thematized and helped organize. More than a century of revolutionary agitation lay ahead, during which Marx's formula seemed accurate. Yes, there were wrinkles: the breakup of capital was taking too long; the most active sites of revolution were taking place in the "periphery," rather than, as had been expected and held necessary, the most highly developed center. But the essential point could not, seemingly, be denied. Capital was creating its own gravediggers. The further it went, therefore, the more imminent its final collapse.

   But it was the socialist movements which collapsed, failing to realize their emancipatory promises, wearing out internally, succumbing to irresistible counterrevolutionary pressure, finally breaking up like so many sand castles subjected to an incoming tide. Equally troubling, the revolutionizing ardor that had attended this phase in the history of socialism began a process of involution toward the close of the last century, from which, despite numerous particular exceptions, it has never recovered. The retreat into Bernsteinian social democracy might have been a betrayal of the proletarian cause. But it was also grounded in the real perception of a stagnating class consciousness.

   It is no doubt true that Marx failed to anticipate much of this. I suppose that for those who seek to either deify or diabolize him this is important information. For the rest of us, however, it merely constitutes evidence that the founder of revolutionary socialism was human and could err in particulars. I would argue, however, that in fundamentals, Marx still tells us something essential about the possibilities of socialist revolution. This emerges from the most basic quality with which Marx was endowed, that of being a fully and consistently critical and dialectical thinker, possessed of, as he put it early in his life, that fearlessness, or "ruthlessness" of criticism which is turned toward its own assumptions no less than the powers that be. The critical faculty in this respect is more than a pointing out of what is wrong. It is also--and this is what makes it fully dialectical--the engagement in a process of transformation-through-negation. Hence the "pointing out of what is wrong" is only a moment in the negation of a pre-existing state of being and its emergence into a more fully realized state of being. Thus what makes Marx "marxist" is the capacity to be self-transcending. And since Marx is consistently dialectical, it follows that that the other features of Marxism are internally consistent with this self-transcendant quality. In particular, an entire vision of human nature is embedded in this dynamic of negation and self-transcendance. Humans are the self-transcending beings. And human nature consists of the capacities and powers essential for self-formation and self-realization--along, to be sure, with the weaknesses, at times tragic, at times comic, imposed upon a creature by such a demand.

   From this standpoint the revolutionary process is not given in any particular historical configuration such as the encounter between capital and labor in the first epoch of socialism now recently ended. A revolution is rather an instance of self-transcendance on a collective and, at its fullest, civilizational scale. Revolution is the realization of human nature in history. First-epoch socialism was an instantiation of revolution in the conditions of early capitalism, and the Manifesto was a call to realize human being under those circumstances. As thought cannot be divorced from reality, Marx's thinking and his praxis were different sides of one entity. The thought embodied in the Manifesto expresses that unity even as it records and mobilizes those workers' movements in the development of which he played an important role. At the same time, Marx, through his superb grasp of abstraction, was able to draw from the worčkers' movements the general transformative principles of history and society.

   In the view of human nature developed by Marx, the self which is formed and transformed is a never-completed project. Nor can it be a project that lives within itself. The self is social, but more than social, it is in continuous metabolic interaction with the entirety of the universe from which it emerges and to which it will return. The self, in other words, is formed and transformed in relation to other humans and nature. Humanity, as nature made self-conscious, represents a peculiarly active moment of transformation in the general flux of the universe, a transformation carried out through production, that is, the conscious objectification of nature. The self-transforming of nature is given in the central categories of labor--as the transformative activity--and production--as the entire process of transformation. If we look at this from the vantage of the self outward, we arrive at political economy, as the aggregate of labor-transformed nature in relation to human needs. If, however, we look at it from the outside in, we arrive at the effects upon the self in a given stage of history. From this the prospects of revolutionary transformation can be developed.

   But what is the effective organ of a revolution; where does this take place in the collective self? Let us call this the revolutionary subject, that is to say, a collectively, class-organized set of dispositions in which the transformative powers of humanity are conjoined and concentrated on a revolutionary goal. Absent a revolutionary subject; there can be no revolution; if it is present, a revolution is possible, although it must be emphasized that the possibility by no means guarantees a worthwhile outcome. Thus the presence of a revolutionary subject is a necessary but not sufficient condition for socialism.

   We find here an undertheorized dimension in Marxism. For between the objective social conditions and the transformation of those conditions lies a domain of the collective self, configured according to class. Marxism has tended to overlook this domain or to treat it reductively, as a mere internal reflex of economic processes. However, the self, or as we would say here, the subject, cannot be collapsed into the object, but has certain intrinsic properties. The dialectical nature of things insists upon the distinction between subjective or objective worlds within human being. For either to be collapsed into the other, the principle of negation would no longer hold, and human being would lose its specificity.

   Bearing this in mind, let us look more closely at the failures of socialism, which can be appreciated as a twofold contradiction:

• the more "advanced" the capitalist society, the less likely is the emergence of a revolutionary subject; and
• those "backward" situations in which revolutionary subjects have tended to appear do not provide the proper conditions for socialist development.

   It does appear as if Marx erred in ascribing revolutionizing powers to the industrial experience. He thereby overlooked the potency of a contradiction to which he himself had called attention, namely, the alienation of labor. First addressed in the Manuscripts, then concretely laid out in brilliant detail in Capital, Marx was able to show how the rationalized production of capitalism deadens the mind, no less than it exploits the body and disrupts human association. Yet in the face of this, Marx asserted that capitalist production also evoked radical potential because it brought large numbers of workers together and educated them in the use of machinery.

   He thus defined a contradiction without giving sufficient reflection into the balance of forces between its moments. However, history has shown which moment of this contradiction has been decisive in the development of a revolutionary Subject. The further developed capitalist production becomes, the less inclined are workers to revolt, or even to think collectively. The issue is not one of simple exploitation, or the development of a "labor aristocracy." More basic is the induced rationalization of the workplace, an internalization, not of critical or transformative reason, but of the instrumentality and the suppression of spirit inher‹ent to capitalist production. Along side this is the systemic fear built into those who have signed onto the system, have no coherent vision of an alternative, and face its endemic insecurities.

   When, in addition to this, we take into account the fragmentation of personal and communal life, the disappearance of public space, the occupation of where that space had been by the intellectual and cultural ruin of the industries of the mass media, and, overall, by that gigantic operation known as consumerism, we find small mystery in the withering of a revolutionizing subject in contemporary society, nor in its replacement by a general narcissism and submission to the logic of commodity fetishism. This loss of disposition is crucial; for it occurs anterior to any specific state-sponsored repression, and often renders overt repression unnecessary, or potentiates its effectiveness.

   To summarize: workers under capital are rather more shaped by the mode of production than by resistance to that mode. If not the full-fledged personnifications of capital such as have become the bourgeoisie in its various manifestations, workers still exhibit a definite attenuation of radical potential as a result of the action of capitalist economy and society. Everyone in capitalist society is a victim of the system; and few escape its ravages of possessive individualism, bureaucratic instrumentalism and cynical despair. This is not to depreciate the powers of resistance now manifesting themselves, nor, certainly, to foreclose the possibility of their becoming fully risen in the period ahead. It is only to restate the obvious, that these powers are today still in a dormant state. They flicker as best they can against the nihilism and moral despair of "advanced" capitalism.

   It follows that capital must be fought and overcome, not simply at the macro level but as it inhabits and infests everyday life through the structures of bureaucratic rationalization and consumerist desire. And capital cannot be overcome unless it is replaced, at the level of the subject, with an alternative notion. It was this power of envisioning alternatives that created the possibilities for the instances of successful revolt against capital, from the workers Marx and Engels addressed in the Manifesto to the many actual revolutions that have taken place since. We know that these revolts have by and large failed. In terms of the standard critique, they did so because the societies in which they took place were "insufficiently developed." From Tsarist Russia, to China, to Vietnam, to Cuba, and to Nicaragua, the story repeats itself. Somehow, the revolution has jumped the gun, occurring before the full development of the productive forces and of civil society. Authoritarian measures on the part of the revolutionary regime were required because of this (and also, it must never be forgotten, because of relentless counterrevolutionary pressure), and these became fetters upon the further development of productive forces and the democratic institutions necessary for sustaining the revolutionary process. The common failing of all previous socialism has been its inability to build democracy into itself; and no revolutionary movement can be considered worthy of success unless democratic structures are built into its foundation and given the potential to reproduce themselves on an expanding scale.

   Notwithstanding, we can understand the reason for the revolutionizing potential of "underdeveloped" peoples: what was underdeveloped in them included that totalizing inroad of capital we come to take for normal in the so-called advanced societies. Less weighted with rationalization and consumerism, they could more readily see beyond the imposed order.

   Let us rephrase this in terms familiar to everyday life but strange to the language of Marxist socialism: what is underdeveloped in those people as yet relatively outside the clutches of capital is rationalization. What remains developed in them--and becomes attenuated under capitalist conditions--is their spirituality. It is this force that enables the revolutionary subject.

   Spirit is a transhistorical potential of humanity. It is, one might argue, the dialectic as an inwardly lived power, not in thought or as a principle of logic, but in the concrete and collective life of the self. Spirit pertains to that faculty of the self to negate itself (hence its dialectical character) and go beyond its boundaries (which from the standpoint of psychology may be called the limits of the ego). It is that motion in human being that appears when the given is dissolved and the self is reconstituted in relation to a larger entity. Religion, by contrast, is the historically situated binding of the spiritual life of a people into a coherent social project. At the same time religion constitutes a setting for the production of spiritual life. The world religions relate the self to the larger entity of Godhead, or to some divine princiüple in the universe, or, as in the case of Buddhism, to a relentless dissolution of the socially constituted self as illusory. Thus religion is one, but not the only possible spiritual project open to humanity.

   It follows that the revolutionary subject is also a spiritual project, one in which the expanded self is attached not to a church or to any godhead, but to a universalizing circle that moves, like the ripples on a pond, from isolated, alienated being, to the productive collectivity, and, through "solidarity," to the class-for-itself and so toward societal transformation through the motion of socialism, eventually locating its realization in communism, the society in which class is overcome. This was the specific meaning of the the revolutionary subject posited by Marx in the Manifesto, whose narrative of the spirit was situated at that moment when capital had set into motion the industrial apparatus and the classes corresponding to it. The Manifesto is about the spiritual-revolutionary overcoming čof that entire conjuncture and not merely its economic or technical components. The very endurance of the Manifesto as an inspirational call occurring across many different political and economic conditions is pr oof of this.

   In these situations, the presence of coherent and powerful religious traditions should be seen, then, as a much more complex influence than as merely the hostile antagonist of socialism. The enmity toward socialism of established churches is a major historical fact, and the internalization of submissive attitudes by the faithful could and often has become a major bulwark of ruling classes. But powerful religions also signified a relatively organic society which could generate active spiritual existence, a spirit which inherently possessed subversive as well as conformist potential. A world organized about religion was geared to the production of spiritually inclined individuals at home with the idea that life could have a larger meaning than that dished out by the ěauthorities, and who, at least in the case of Christianity, adopted as their ideal a savior whose message overturned the class system and brought good news to those cast into darkness and poverty. Marx's subtle and dialectical view of religion, as the "heart of a heartless world" as well as the "opium of the people," along with other writings, especially Engels' The Peasant War in Germany, make clear that the founders of modern socialism were cognizant of the spiritual power necessary for socialist revolution. It is accurately said that Marx was steeped in German philosophy, French political theory and British political economy. To this, however, should be added a fourth dimension, stemming from the radical Reformation, which eventuated in the modern revolutionary tradition. Communism was the secularization of the radical Reformation, and the Manifesto can be regarded as a version of the Book of Revelation, where the passage of spirit moves through the proletariat instead of Christ.

   As capital becomes installed, the direction is reversed. Because it must generalize the commodity, and because it cannot live unless labor power is converted into a commodity, capital necessarily delimits the self as it turns an organic society into one of atomized, self-maximizing individuals. The individual under capitalism clings to the self and puts its up for sale. There is not enough enthusiasm, compassion and, ultimately, faith extant in such circumstances to permit the radical risking and supercession of the ego required for the emergence of a revolutionary subject. The previously mentioned manifestations of the failure of this subject, namely, the adherence to bureaucratic rationalization, possessive individualism, and consumerist desire, are fundamentally mediations through which this anti-spiritual process is played out.

   The argument so far is one of loss--the dissolution of the older spiritual order and its replacement by the instruments of capital, with sad consequences for the posěsibility of proletarian revolution. But this itself is only a partial view of things; and there are two major reasons why the transformations outlined here can augur favorably for another socialist epoch.

   First, bad things as well as good have been lost. The fact that precapitalist sources of spirituality entered into the formation of a revolutionary subject in the first phase of socialism was by no means an unalloyed boon. No doubt spiritual ardor contributed to the success of these movements. But the kinds of spirituality inherent to traditional socialism also contributed substantial