Originally published in Global Discourse: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Current Affairs and Applied Contemporary Thought 2, no. 2 (2011). Full paper.

“Everything begins by the apparition of a specter,” Derrida writes, describing both the Communist Manifesto and Hamlet. But while in Hamlet the arrival of the ghost sets in motion a train of events in which the ghost does not participate, the Communist Manifesto, I will argue, begins and ends with the apparition of a specter. The specter of communism reveals a more general way in which the proletariat, as Marx construes it in the Manifesto, it itself spectral. The metaphysics, or rather anti-metaphysics, of specters and haunting that Derrida develops in Specters of Marx helps to explain the conception of politics which Marx develops in the Manifesto. The Communist Manifesto has tended to be interpreted either as a determinist work, based on a historical ontology in which the future is determined by what exists in the present, or as a voluntarist work, based on a subjectivist ontology in which the future is brought about by the free actions of independent agents. I argue that, while these two approaches can both be seen in the Manifesto, Marx is, in accordance with the Derridean idea of hauntology, not concerned with what exists, but with what does not exist, and in particular with what does not exist yet. Reading the Manifesto in light of Derrida’s discussion of spectrality provides reasons to reject views which criticize Marx’s supposed essentialist understanding of class (I discuss, in particular, Laclau’s attempt to provide a post-Marxist alternative to Marx’s supposed determinism). That the proletariat is not fixed but is, rather, spectral, allows us to understand the particular futurity Marx associates with the class, and the politics he derives from this.