Why Marx Was Right (12 page)

This is not to suggest
that men and women in class-society can be absolved of all blame for their
actions, or that individual depravity has played no part in wars and genocides.
Companies which consign hundreds or even thousands of workers to a life of
enforced idleness can most certainly be blamed. But it is not as though they
take such measures out of hatred, malice or aggression. They create
unemployment because they want to safeguard their profits in a competitive
system in which they fear they might otherwise go under. Those who order armies
to war, where they may end up burning small children to death, may be the
meekest of men. Even so, Nazism was not just a noxious political system; it
also drew on the sadism, paranoia and pathological hatred of individuals who
could genuinely be described as wicked. If Hitler was not wicked, then the term
has no meaning. But their personal viciousness could only have the appalling
results it did because it was yoked to the workings of a political system. It
would be like putting Shakespeare's Iago in charge of a prisoner-of-war camp.

If there is indeed a human
nature, then this is in some ways good news, whatever the postmodernists might
think. This is because one fairly consistent feature of that nature has been a
resistance to injustice. This is one reason why it is foolish to imagine that
the idea of human nature must always work in conservative ways. Surveying the
historical record, it is not hard to conclude that political oppression has
almost always incited rebellion, however subdued or unsuccessful. There seems
to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of
power. It is true that power only really succeeds by winning the collusion of
its underlings. The evidence, however, is that this collusion is usually
partial, ambiguous and provisional. Ruling classes are generally more tolerated
than admired. If our nature is purely cultural, then there is no reason why
political regimes should not mould us into accepting their authority without
question. That they often find this extraordinarily difficult to do testifies
to sources of resistance which run deeper than local cultures.

So was Marx a utopian
thinker? Yes, if by that one means that he envisaged a future which would be a
vast improvement on the present. He believed in the end of material scarcity,
private property, exploitation, social classes and the state as we know it. Yet
many thinkers, casting an eye over the accumulated resources of the world
today, would judge abolishing material scarcity to be perfectly reasonable in
principle, however hard it is to achieve in practice. It is politics that
stands in our way.

As we have seen, Marx also
considered that this would involve the emancipation of human, spiritual wealth
on a major scale. Freed from former constraints, men and women would flourish
as individuals in ways impossible to them before. But there is nothing in
Marx's work to suggest that we would thereby arrive at any sort of perfection.
It is a condition of exercising their freedom that human beings are able to
abuse it. In fact, there cannot be such freedom, on any sizeable scale, without
such abuses. So it is reasonable to believe that in communist society there
would be plenty of problems, a host of conflicts and a number of irreparable
tragedies. There would be child murders, road accidents, wretchedly bad novels,
lethal jealousies, overweening ambitions, tasteless trousers and inconsolable
grief. There might also be some cleaning of the latrines.

Communism is about the
fulfillment of everyone's needs, but even in a society of abundance, this would
need to be restricted. As Norman Geras points out, ''If by way of means of
self-development (under communism) you need a violin and I need a racing
bicycle, this, one may assume, will be all right. But if I need an enormously
large area, say Australia, to wander around in or generally use it as I see fit
undisturbed by the presence of other people, then this obviously will not be
all right. No conceivable abundance could satisfy needs of self-development of
this magnitude . . . and it is not difficult to think of needs much less
excessive of which the same will be true.''
⁹

Marx, as we have seen,
treats the future not as a matter of idle speculation, but as a feasible
extrapolation from the present. He is concerned not with poetic visions of
peace and comradeship, but with the material conditions which might allow a
truly human future to emerge. As a materialist, he was alert to the complex,
recalcitrant, unfinished nature of reality; and such a world is incompatible
with a vision of perfection. A perfect world would be one which had abolished
all contingency—all of those random collisions, chance occurrences and
tragically unforeseeable effects which make up the texture of our daily lives.
It would also be one in which we could do justice to the dead as well as the
living, undoing the crimes and repairing the horrors of the past. No such
society is possible. Nor would it necessarily be desirable. A world without
train crashes might also be one without the possibility of a cure for cancer.

Neither is it possible to
have a social order in which everyone is equal. The complaint that
"socialism would make us all the same'' is baseless. Marx had no such
intention. He was a sworn enemy of uniformity. In fact, he regarded equality as
a
bourgeois
value. He saw it as a reflection in the political sphere of
what he called exchange-value, in which one commodity is levelled in value with
another. The commodity, he once commented, is ''realised equality.'' He speaks
at one point of a kind of communism that involves a general social leveling,
and denounces it in the
Economic and Philosophical

Manuscripts
as ''an abstract negation of the
entire world of culture and civilisation.'' Marx also associated the notion of
equality with what he saw as the abstract equality of middle-class democracy,
where our formal equality as voters and citizens serves to obscure real
inequalities of wealth and class. In the
Critique of the Gotha Programme,
he also rejected the idea of an equality of income, since people have uniquely
different needs: some do more dirty or dangerous work than others, some have
more children to feed, and so on.

This is not to say that he
dismissed the idea of equality out of hand. Marx was not in the habit of
writing off ideas simply because they were of middle-class provenance. Far from
contemptuously spurning the ideals of middle-class society, he was a doughty
champion of its great revolutionary values of freedom, self-determination and
self-development. Even abstract equality, he considered, was a welcome advance
on the hierarchies of feudalism. It was just that he thought that these
precious values had no chance of working for everyone as long as capitalism
still existed. Even so, he lavished praise upon the middle class as the most
revolutionary formation that history had ever witnessed, a fact that his
middle-class opponents tend curiously to overlook. Perhaps they suspect that to
be praised by Marx is the ultimate kiss of death.

In Marx's view, what was
awry with the prevailing notion of equality was that it was too abstract. It
did not pay sufficient attention to the individuality of things and people—
what Marx called in the economic realm ''use-value.'' It was capitalism that
standardised people, not socialism. This is one reason why Marx was rather
chary of the notion of rights. ''Right,'' he comments, ''by its very nature can
consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals
(and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are
measurable by an equal standard only in so far as they are brought under an
equal point of view, are taken from one
definite
side only, for
instance, in the present case, regarded only as
workers
and nothing more
is seen in them, everything else is ignored.''
¹⁰
So much, then, for
the Marx who wants to reduce us all to the same dead level. So much also for
the Marx who when he looks at people can see nothing but workers. Equality for
socialism does not mean that everyone is just the same—an absurd proposition if
ever there was one. Even Marx would have noticed that he was more intelligent
than the Duke of Wellington. Nor does it mean that everyone will be granted
exactly the same amount of wealth or resources.

Genuine equality means not
treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different
needs. And this is the kind of society which Marx looked forward to. Human
needs are not all commensurate with one another. You cannot measure them all by
the same yardstick. Everyone for Marx was to have an equal right to
self-realisation, and to participate actively in the shaping of social life.
Barriers of inequality would thus be broken down. But the result of this would
be as far as possible to allow each person to flourish as the unique individual
they were. In the end, equality for Marx exists for the sake of difference.
Socialism is not about everyone wearing the same kind of boiler suit. It is
consumer capitalism which decks out its citizens in uniforms known as
tracksuits and trainers.

In Marx's view, socialism
would thus constitute a far more pluralistic order than the one we have now. In
class-society, the free self-development of the few is bought at the cost of
the shackling of the many, who then come to share much the same monotonous
narrative. Communism, precisely because everyone would be encouraged to develop
their individual talents, would be a great deal more diffuse, diverse and
unpredictable. It would be more like a modernist novel than a realist one.
Critics of Marx may scorn this as a fantasy. But they cannot complain at the
same time that Marx's preferred social order looks much like the one in George
Orwell's
Nineteen Eighty-Four.

A virulent form of
utopianism has indeed afflicted the modern age, but its name is not Marxism. It
is the crazed notion that a single global system known as the free market can
impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their
ills. The purveyors of this totalitarian fantasy are not to be found hiding
scar-faced and sinisterly soft-spoken in underground bunkers like James Bond
villains.

They are to be seen dining
at upmarket Washington restaurants and strolling on Sussex estates.

Theodor Adorno's answer to
the question of whether Marx was a utopian thinker is a decisive yes and no. He
was, Adorno writes, an enemy of utopia for the sake of its realization.

FIVE

Marxism reduces
everything to economics. It is a form of economic determinism. Art, religion,
politics, law, war, morality, historical change: all these are seen in the
crudest terms as nothing more than reflections of the economy or class
struggle. The true complexity of human affairs is passed over for a monochrome
vision of history. In his obsession with economics, Marx was simply an inverted
image of the capitalist system he opposed. His thought is at odds with the
pluralist outlook of modern societies, conscious as they are that the varied
range of historical experience cannot be crammed into a single rigid framework.

I
n one sense, the claim that
everything comes down to economics is surely a truism. In fact, it is so
blindingly obvious that it is hard to see how anyone could doubt it. Before we
can do anything else, we need to eat and drink. We also need clothing and shelter,
at least if we are living in Sheffield rather than Samoa. The first historical
act, Marx writes in
The German Ideology,
is the production of the means
to satisfy our material needs. Only then can we learn to play the banjo, write
erotic poetry or paint the front porch. The basis of culture is labour. There
can be no civilisation without material production.

Marxism, however, wants to
claim more than this. It wants to argue that material production is fundamental
not only in the sense that there could be no civilisation without it, but that
it is what ultimately determines the nature of that civilisation. There is a
difference between saying that a pen or computer is indispensable to writing a
novel, and claiming that it somehow determines the content of the novel. The
latter case is by no means blindingly obvious, even though the Marxist
equivalent of it has the support of some anti-Marxist thinkers as well. The
philosopher John Gray, who is scarcely an apologist for Marxism, writes that
''in market societies . . . not only is economic activity distinct from the
rest of social life, but it conditions, and sometimes dominates, the whole of
society.''
¹
What Gray confines to market societies, Marx generalizes
to human history as such.

Critics of Marx regard the
stronger of the two claims as a form of reductionism. It boils everything down
to the same factor. And this seems clearly wrongheaded. How could the stunning
variety of human history be straitjacketed in this way? Surely there is a
plurality of forces at work in history, which can never be reduced to a single,
unchanging principle? We might wonder, however, how far this kind of pluralism
is prepared to go. Is there
never
any single factor in historical
situations which is more important than the others? This is surely hard to
swallow. We might argue till Doomsday about the causes of the French
Revolution, but nobody thinks that it broke out because of biochemical changes
in the French brain brought about by too much cheese-eating. Only a seriously weird
minority claims that it happened because Aries was in the ascendant. Everyone
agrees that some historical factors are more weighty than others. This does not
prevent them from being pluralists, at least in one sense of the word. They
might still accept that every major historical event is the upshot of a
multiplicity of forces. It is just that they are reluctant to assign all these
forces the same importance.