Why Marx Was Right (26 page)

Into my hands themselves
do reach;

Stumbling on melons, as I
pass,

Insnared with flowers, I
fall on grass.

(Andrew Marvell, ''The
Garden'')

Marx believes in what he
calls a ''humanisation of nature''; but Nature in his view will always remain
somewhat recalcitrant to humankind, even if its resistance to our needs can be
diminished. And this has its positive aspect, since surmounting obstacles is
part of our creativity. A magical world would also be a tedious one. One day in
the magic garden would probably be enough for Marvell to wish he was back in
London.

Did Marx believe in a
boundless expansion of human powers, in a way offensive to our own ecological
principles? It is true that he sometimes underplays the natural limits on human
development, partly because opponents like Thomas Malthus overplayed them. He
acknowledges the boundaries

Nature set on history, but
thinks we could still push them a long way. There is certainly a marked strain
of what we might call technological optimism—even, at times, trium-phalism—in
his work: a vision of the human race being borne on the back of unleashed
forces of production into a brave new world. Some later Marxists (Trotsky was
one of them) pushed this to a utopian extreme, foreseeing as they did a future
stocked by heroes and geniuses.
²²
But there is also another Marx, as
we have seen already, who insists that such development should be compatible
with human dignity and welfare. It is capitalism that sees production as
potentially infinite, and socialism that sets it in the context of moral and
aesthetic values. Or as Marx himself puts it in the first volume of
Capital,
"under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race.''

Recognizing natural
limits, as Ted Benton comments, is incompatible not with political emancipation
but only with utopian versions of it.
²³
The world has the resources
not for us all to live better and better, but for us all to live well. ''The
promise of abundance,'' writes G. A. Cohen, ''is not an endless flow of goods,
but a sufficiency produced with a minimum of unpleasant exertion.''
²⁴
What prevents this from happening is not Nature but politics. For Marx, as we
have seen, socialism requires an expansion of the productive forces; but the
task of expanding them falls not to socialism itself but to capitalism.
Socialism rides on the back of that material wealth, rather than building it
up. It was Stalin, not Marx, who saw socialism as a matter of developing the
productive forces. Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up
powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us.
The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under
rational human control.

The two great threats to
human survival that now confront us are military and environmental. They are
likely to converge more and more in the future, as struggles over scarce
resources escalate into armed conflict. Over the years, communists have been
among the most ardent advocates of peace, and the reason for this is ably
summarized by Ellen Meiksins Wood. ''It seems to me axiomatic,'' she writes,
''that the expansionary, competitive and exploitative logic of capitalist
accumulation in the context of the nation-state system must, in the longer or
shorter term, be destabilizing, and that capitalism . . . is and will for the
foreseeable future remain the greatest threat to world peace.''
²⁵
If
the peace movement is to grasp the root causes of global aggression, it cannot
afford to ignore the nature of the beast that breeds it. And this means that it
cannot afford to ignore the insights of Marxism.

The same goes for
environmentalism. Wood argues that capitalism cannot avoid ecological
devastation, given the antisocial nature of its drive to accumulate. The system
may come to tolerate racial and gender equality, but it cannot by its nature
achieve world peace or respect the material world. Capitalism, Wood comments, "may
be able to accommodate some degree of ecological care, especially when the
technology of environmental protection is itself profitably marketable. But the
essential irrationality of the drive for capital accumulation, which
subordinates everything to the requirements of the self-expansion of capital
and so-called growth, is unavoidably hostile to ecological balance.''
²⁶
The old communist slogan ''Socialism or barbarism'' always seemed to some a
touch too apocalyptic. As history lurches towards the prospect of nuclear
warfare and environmental catastrophe, it is hard to see how it is less than
the sober truth. If we do not act now, it seems that capitalism will be the
death of us.

Conclusion

_S
o there we have it. Marx had a
passionate faith in the individual and a deep suspicion of abstract dogma. He
had no time for the concept of a perfect society, was wary of the notion of
equality, and did not dream of a future in which we would all wear boiler suits
with our National Insurance numbers stamped on our backs. It was diversity, not
uniformity, that he hoped to see. Nor did he teach that men and women were the
helpless playthings of history. He was even more hostile to the state than
right-wing conservatives are, and saw socialism as a deepening of democracy, not
as the enemy of it. His model of the good life was based on the idea of
artistic self-expression. He believed that some revolutions might be peacefully
accomplished, and was in no sense opposed to social reform. He did not focus
narrowly on the manual working class. Nor did he see society in terms of two
starkly polarized classes.

He did not make a fetish
of material production. On the contrary, he thought it should be done away with
as far as possible. His ideal was leisure, not labour. If he paid such unflagging
attention to the economic, it was in order to diminish its power over humanity.
His materialism was fully compatible with deeply held moral and spiritual
convictions. He lavished praise on the middle class, and saw socialism as the
inheritor of its great legacies of liberty, civil rights and material
prosperity. His views on Nature and the environment were for the most part
startlingly in advance of his time. There has been no more staunch champion of
women's emancipation, world peace, the fight against fascism or the struggle
for colonial freedom than the political movement to which his work gave birth.

Was ever a thinker so
travestied?

Notes

PREFACE

1. Peter Osborne, in
Leo Panich and Colin Leys (eds.),
The Communist Manifesto Now: Socialist Register
(New York, 1998), p. 190.

2. Quoted by Robin
Blackburn, ''Fin de Siècle: Socialism after the Crash,''
New Left Review,
no. 185 (January/February 1991), p.
7.

CHAPTER ONE

1. Though some
Marxists doubt how vital they were. Alex Callinicos, for example, in
Against Postmodernism
(Cambridge, 1989), Ch. 5.

2. Fredric Jameson,
The Ideologies of Theory
(London, 2008), p. 514.

3. Tristram Hunt,
''War of the Words,''
Guardian,
9 May 2009.

CHAPTER TWO

1. See Joseph Stiglitz,
Globalisation and Its
Discontents
(London,
2002), p. 5.

2. Quoted in Slavoj
ZZizek,
First
as Tragedy, Then as Farce
(London, 2009), p. 91.

3. Isaac Deutscher,
The Prophet Armed: Trotsky
1879—1921
(London,
²⁰⁰
3X P. 373.

4. See, for example,
Alec Nove,
The Economics of Feasible Socialism
(London, 1983), David Schweickart,
Against Capitalism
(Cambridge, 1993), and Berteli
Oilman (ed.),
Market Socialism: The Debate Among Socialists
(New York and London, 1998). A more
philosophical defence of market socialism is to be found in David Miller,
Market, State and Community: The
Theoretical Foundations of Market Socialism
(Oxford, 1989).

5. Melvin Hill (ed.),
Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of
the Public World
(New York, 1979), pp. 334-35.

6. Quoted by Robin
Blackburn, ''Fin de Siècle: Socialism after the Crash,''
New Left Review,
no. 185 (January/February 1991), p.
29.

7. See, for example,
Pat Devine, Democracy and
Economic Planning
(Cambridge, 1988), David McNally,
Against the Market
(London, 1993), and Michael Albert,
Parecon: Life After Capitalism
(London, 2003). A useful summary of
this case is to be found in Alex Callinicos,
An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto
(Cambridge, 2003), Ch. 3.

8. See Ernest Mandel,
''The Myth of Market Socialism,''
New Left Review,
no. 169 (May/June 1988), p. 109 n.

9. Devine,
Democracy and Economic Planning,
pp. 253, 265-66.

10. Albert,
Parecon,
p. 59.

11. Raymond Williams,
Communications
(Harmondsworth, 1962).

CHAPTER THREE

1. Quoted in Alex
Callinicos (ed.),
Marxist Theory
(Oxford, 1989),

p. !43.

2. Marx, Preface to
A Contribution to the Critique
of Political Economy,
in
Marx and Engels: Selected Works
(London, 1968), p. 182.

3. The most effective
defence of the theory is to be found in G. A. Cohen,
Marx's Theory of History: A
Defence
(Oxford, 1978). Rarely has a wrongheaded idea been so magnificently championed.
For an excellent account of Marx's theory of history, see S. H. Rigby,
Marxism and History
(Manchester and New York, 1987), a
work I have drawn upon here.

4. Quoted in Alex
Callinicos and Chris Harmon,
The Changing Working Class
(London, 1983), p. 13.

5. Marx,
The Holy Family
(New York, 1973), p. 101.

6. Marx & Engels,
Selected Correspondence
(Moscow, 1975), pp. 390-91.

7. Ibid., pp. 293-94.

8. A point made by
John Maguire,
Marx's Theory of Politics
(Cambridge, 1978), p. 123.

9. Marx,
Capital,
vol. 1 (New York, 1967), p. 9.

10. Quoted in T.
Bottomore (ed.),
A Dictionary of Marxist Thought
(Oxford, 1983), p. 140.

11. Quoted in Umberto
Melotti,
Marxism and the Third World
(London, 1972), p. 6.

12. Marx,
Theories of Surplus Value
(London, 1972), p. 134.

13. Quoted in Alfred
Schmidt,
The
Concept of Nature in Marx
(London, 1971), p. 36.

14. Aijaz Ahmad,
In Theory: Classes, Nations,
Literatures
(London, 1992), p. 228.

CHAPTER FOUR

1. For one of the
finest studies of the more positive meanings of the idea, see Fredric Jameson,
Archaeologies of the Future
(London, 2005).