“Miéville’s recasting of the opening words of the Manifesto for his title is particularly telling in that “a spectre, haunting” offers a continual, omnipresent, global apparition. If we normally think of ghosts as rooted to a particular time and place, then this specter is as rootless and shifting as capital itself”
“Fox News fearmongers, whose vitriol is animated by their hatred of the poor, of immigrants, of non-heteronormative communities and anyone else who isn’t a Christian ethnonationalist, cannot contain or even properly name true communism because the movement’s real basis is fidelity to radical love”
“the Manifesto’s root terms of class and labor must be raced, sexed, and gendered. This is not simply an additive process, however. Rather, such root concepts must be dialectically rethought through active engagement and interrogation”
“As he writes in the context of gender, “The missed opportunity for the project isn’t one of merely adding gender to class, but […] of gendering class, of understanding class as a relation from which gender is inextricable, precisely to better understand class, gender and capitalism.””
“For readers interested in the development of Miéville’s own radical marxist thought, the last chapter — “The Communist Manifesto Today” — will likely be the most interesting. Here, Miéville engages with two tropes — hate and salvage — that often appear in his writings in the political journal Salvage, which Miéville helped to found and continues to edit”
“it’s important to situate this emphasis on hate within the context of Miéville’s own conception of a contemporary communism that goes by the name of “‘ruin communism,’ or ‘salvage communism.’””
“The salvage communism that Miéville refers to here was originally theorized in the editorial introduction to the first issue of Salvage”
“Expounding on the title and concept, the editorial directs us to the mass devastation and destitution that contemporary capitalism propagates:
Why Salvage?
Salvage because we are wrecked.
Because we need a strategy for ruination. […]
A bleaker perspective is necessary.
Hope must be abandoned before it can be salvaged”
“There is a world to win: won, it must be fixed. This is “ruin communism,” or “salvage communism.””
“It is a vision of communism more in line with degrowth than fully automated luxury communism”