Why Marx Was Right (10 page)

Marx did not entirely
subscribe to this ''historicist'' case. The evidence is that he did believe in
a human nature, and was quite right to do so, as Norman Geras argues in an
excellent little book.
⁵
He did not see this as overriding the
importance of the individual. On the contrary, he thought it a paradoxical
feature of our common nature that we are all uniquely individuated. In his
early writings, Marx speaks of what he calls human ''species being,'' which is
really a materialist version of human nature. Because of the nature of our material
bodies, we are needy, labouring, sociable, sexual, communicative,
self-expressive animals who need one another to survive, but who come to find a
fulfillment in that companionship over and above its social usefulness. If I
may be allowed to quote a previous comment of my own: ''If another creature is
able in principle to speak to us, engage in material labour alongside us,
sexually interact with us, produce something which looks vaguely like art in
the sense that it appears fairly pointless, suffer, joke and die, then we can
deduce from these biological facts a huge number of moral and even political
consequences.''
⁶
This case, which is technically known as a
philosophical anthropology, is rather out of fashion these days; but it was
what Marx argued for in his early work, and there is no compelling reason to
believe that he abandoned it later on.

Because we are labouring,
desiring, linguistic creatures, we are able to transform our conditions in the
process we know as history. In doing so, we come to transform ourselves at the
same time. Change, in other words, is not the opposite of human nature; it is
possible because of the creative, open-ended, unfinished beings we are. This,
as far as we can tell, is not true of stoats. Because of the nature of their
material bodies, stoats do not have a history. Nor do stoats have politics,
unless they are keeping them cunningly concealed. There is no reason to fear
that they might one day come to rule over us, even if they would probably do a
far better job than our present leaders. As far as we know, they cannot be
social democrats or ultranationalists. Human beings, however, are political
animals by their very nature—not only because they live in community with one
another, but because they need some system for regulating their material life.
They also need some system for regulating their sexual lives. One reason for
this is that sexuality might otherwise prove too socially disruptive. Desire,
for example, is no respecter of social distinctions. But this is also one
reason why human beings need politics. The way they produce their material
existence has so far involved exploitation and inequality, and a political
system is needed to contain the resulting conflicts. We would also expect human
animals to have various symbolic ways of representing all this to themselves,
whether we call it art, myth or ideology.

For Marx, we are equipped
by our material natures with certain powers and capacities. And we are at our
most human when we are free to realize these powers as an end in itself, rather
than for any purely utilitarian purpose. These powers and capacities are always
historically specific; but they have a foundation in our bodies, and some of
them alter very little from one human culture to another. Two individuals from
very different cultures who do not speak one another's language can easily
cooperate in practical tasks. This is because the physical body they have in
common generates its own set of assumptions, expectations and understandings.
⁷
All human cultures know grief and ecstasy, labour and sexuality,
friendship and enmity, oppression and injustice, sickness and mortality,
kinship and art. It is true that they sometimes know these things in very
different cultural styles. Dying is not the same in Madras as it is in
Manchester. But we die anyway. Marx himself writes in the
Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts
that ''man as an objective, sensuous being is
therefore a
suffering
being—and because he feels that he suffers, a
passionate
being.'' Death, he considers, is a harsh victory of the species
over the individual. It matters to men and women, he writes in
Capital,
if their deaths are premature, their lives shorter than they need be because of
grinding toil, or afflicted by accident, injury or disease. Communism may see
an end to grinding toil, but it is hard to believe that Marx envisages a social
order without accident, injury and disease, any more than he anticipates one
without death.

If we did not share so
much basic common humanity, the socialist vision of global cooperation would be
fruitless. Marx speaks in volume 1 of
Capital
of ''human nature in
general and then . . . as modified in each historical epoch.'' There is a great
deal about human beings that hardly varies across history—a fact which
postmodernism either denies or dismisses as merely trivial. It does so partly
because it has an irrational prejudice against Nature and biology; partly
because it thinks that all talk of natures is a way of denying change;
⁸
and partly because it tends to regard all change as positive and all permanence
as negative. In this last opinion, it is at one with capitalist ''modernisers''
everywhere. The truth—far too banal for intellectuals to appreciate—is that
some change is catastrophic and some kinds of permanence deeply desirable. It
would be a shame, for example, if all French vineyards were to be burnt down
tomorrow, just as it would be a pity if a nonsexist society lasted for only
three weeks.

Socialists often speak of
oppression, injustice and exploitation. But if this were all humanity had ever
known, we would never be able to identify these things for what they are.
Instead, they would simply seem like our natural condition. We might not even
have special names for them. To see a relationship as exploitative, you need to
have some idea of what a nonexploitative relationship would look like. You do
not need to appeal to the idea of human nature to have this. You can appeal to
historical factors instead. But it is plausible to claim that there are
features of our nature which act as a kind of norm in this respect. Human
beings, for example, are all ''prematurely'' born. For a long time after birth
they are unable to fend for themselves, and are thus in need of a prolonged
period of nurturing. (It is this unusually prolonged experience of care, some
psychoanalysts argue, that plays such havoc with our psyches later in life. If
babies could get up and walk away at birth, a good deal of adult misery would
be avoided, and not only in the sense that there would be no bawling brats to
disturb our sleep.) Even if the care they receive is appalling, infants very
quickly imbibe some notion of what caring for others means. This is one reason
why, later on, they may be able to identify a whole way of life as callously
indifferent to human needs. In this sense, we can move from being prematurely
born to politics.

Needs which are essential
to our survival and well-being, like being fed, keeping warm and sheltered,
enjoying the company of others, not being enslaved or abused and so on, can act
as a basis for political critique, in the sense that any society which fails to
meet these requirements is clearly lacking. We can, of course, object to such
societies on more local or cultural grounds. But arguing that they violate some
of the most fundamental demands of our nature has even more force. So it is a
mistake to think that the idea of human nature is just an apology for the
status quo. It can also act as a powerful challenge to it.

In early writings like the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,
Marx holds to the currently
unfashionable view that the way we are as material animals can tell us
something important about how we should live. There is a sense in which you can
get from the human body to questions of ethics and politics. If human beings
are self-realising creatures, then they need to be at liberty to fulfill their
needs and express their powers. But if they are also social animals, living
alongside other self-expressive beings, they need to prevent an endless,
destructive clash of these powers. This, in fact, is one of the most
intractable problems of liberal society, in which individuals are supposed to
be free, but free among other things to be constantly at one another's throats.
Communism, by contrast, organises social life so that individuals are able to
realize themselves in and through the self-realisation of others. As Marx puts
it in the
Communist Manifesto,
"The free development of each
becomes the condition for the free development of all.'' In this sense,
socialism does not simply reject liberal society, with its passionate
commitment to the individual. Instead, it builds on and completes it. In doing
so, it shows how some of the contradictions of liberalism, in which your
freedom may flourish only at the expense of mine, may be resolved. Only through
others can we finally come into our own. This means an enrichment of individual
freedom, not a diminishing of it. It is hard to think of a finer ethics. On a
personal level, it is known as love.

It is worth stressing
Marx's concern with the individual, since it runs clean contrary to the usual caricature
of his work. In this view, Marxism is all about faceless collectives which ride
roughshod over personal life. Nothing, in fact, could be more alien to Marx's
thought. One might say that the free flourishing of individuals is the whole
aim of his politics, as long as we remember that these individuals must find
some way of flourishing in common. To assert one's individuality, he writes in
The Holy Family,
is ''the vital manifestation of [one's] being.'' This, one
might claim, is Marx's morality from start to finish.

There is good reason to
suspect that there can never be any complete reconciliation between individual
and society. The dream of an organic unity between them is a generous-hearted
fantasy. There will always be conflicts between my fulfillment and yours, or
between what is required of me as a citizen and what I badly want to do. Such
outright contradictions are the stuff of tragedy, and only the grave, as
opposed to Marxism, can put us beyond that condition. Marx's claim in the
Communist Manifesto
about the free self-development of all can never be
fully realised. Like all the finest ideals it is a goal to aim at, not a state
to be literally achieved. Ideals are signposts, not tangible entities. They
point us the way to go. Those who scoff at socialist ideals should remember
that the free market can never be perfectly realized either. Yet this does not
stop free-marketeers in their tracks. The fact that there is no flawless
democracy does not lead most of us to settle for tyranny instead. We do not
relinquish efforts to feed the hungry of the world because we know some of them
will have perished before we can do so. Some of those who claim that socialism
is unworkable are confident that they can eradicate poverty, solve the global
warming crisis, spread liberal democracy to Afghanistan and resolve world
conflicts by United Nations resolutions. All these daunting tasks are
comfortably within the range of the possible. It is only socialism which for
some mysterious reason is out of reach.

It is easier to attain
Marx's goal, however, if you do not have to rely on everyone being morally
magnificent all the time. Socialism is not a society which requires resplendent
virtue of its citizens. It does not mean that we have to be wrapped around each
other all the time in some great orgy of togetherness. This is because the
mechanisms which would allow Marx's goal to be approached would actually be
built into social institutions. They would not rely in the first place on the
goodwill of the individual. Take, for example, the idea of a self-governing
cooperative, which Marx seems to have regarded as the key productive unit of
the socialist future. One person's contribution to such an outfit allows for
some kind of self-realisation; but it also contributes to the well-being of the
others, and this simply by virtue of the way the place is set up. I do not have
to have tender thoughts about my fellow workers, or whip myself into an
altruistic frenzy every two hours. My own self-realisation helps to enhance theirs
simply because of the cooperative, profit-sharing, egalitarian, commonly
governed nature of the unit. It is a structural affair, not a question of
personal virtue. It does not demand a race of Cordelias.

For some socialist
purposes, then, it does not matter if I am the vilest worm in the West. In a
similar way, it does not matter if I regard my work as a biochemist employed by
a private pharmaceutical company as a glorious contribution to the advance of
science and the progress of humanity. The fact remains that the main point of
my work is to create profit for a bunch of unscrupulous sharks who would
probably charge their own toddlers ten dollars for an aspirin. What I feel is
neither here nor there. The meaning of my work is determined by the institution.

One would expect any
socialist institution to have its fair share of chancers, toadies, bullies,
cheats, loafers, scroungers, freeloaders, free riders and occasional
psychopaths. Nothing in Marx's writing suggests that this would not be so.
Besides, if communism is about everyone participating as fully as possible in
social life, then one would expect there to be more conflicts rather than
fewer, as more individuals get in on the act. Communism would not spell the end
of human strife. Only the literal end of history would do that. Envy,
aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist. It is
just that they could not take the forms they assume under capitalism—not
because of some superior human virtue, but because of a change of institutions.