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The Spectral Proletariat: Class, History, and the Continued Relevance of the Communist Manifesto

In this paper, I develop a reading of the Communist Manifesto that interprets Marx's optimistic, even triumphalist rhetoric as a process of reaching out to a not-yet existing proletariat, and which thereby develops a theory of class not as a present, positive reality, but as future-oriented and spectral. I develop this reading of Marx through a critical engagement with Derrida's Specters of Marx, arguing that Marx is not as hostile to the spectral as Derrida believes, and with Laclau's New Reflections of the Revolution of Our Times, in which I argue that Marx's figuration of class does not depend on the "positivity of the social," but is instead a theory of class as a structural category that never has a fully positive existence. Through these engagements, and a close reading of the Manifesto itself, I suggest the outline of a Marxist theory of class which can respond to the political-economic reconfigurations of the past 50 years.