Why Marx Was Right (4 page)

Market socialism does away
with private property, social classes and exploitation. It also places economic
power into the hands of the actual producers. In all of these ways, it is a
welcome advance on a capitalist economy. For some Marxists, however, it retains
too many features of that economy to be palatable. Under market socialism there
would still be commodity production, inequality, unemployment and the sway of
market forces beyond human control. How would workers not simply be transformed
into collective capitalists, maximizing their profits, cutting quality,
ignoring social needs and pandering to consumerism in the drive for constant
accumulation? How would one avoid the chronic short-termism of markets, their
habit of ignoring the overall social picture and the long-term antisocial
effects of their own fragmented decisions? Education and state monitoring might
diminish these dangers, but some Marxists look instead to an economy which
would be neither centrally planned nor market-governed.
⁷
On this
model, resources would be allocated by negotiations between producers,
consumers, environmentalists and other relevant parties, in networks of
workplace, neighbourhood and consumer councils. The broad parameters of the
economy, including decisions on the overall allocation of resources, rates of
growth and investment, energy, transport and ecological policies and the like,
would be set by representative assemblies at local, regional and national
level. These general decisions about, say, allocation would then be devolved
downwards to regional and local levels, where more detailed planning would be
progressively worked out. At every stage, public debate over alternative
economic plans and policies would be essential. In this way, what and how we
produce could be determined by social need rather than private profit. Under
capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce
more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. Under socialism, this freedom would
be regularly exercised.

Power in such assemblies
would pass by democratic election from the bottom up rather than from the top
down. Democratically elected bodies representing each branch of commerce or
production would negotiate with a national economic commission to achieve an
agreed set of investment decisions. Prices would be determined not centrally,
but by production units on the basis of input from consumers, users, interest
groups and so on. Some champions of such so-called participatory economics
accept a kind of mixed socialist economy: goods which are of vital concern to
the community (food, health, pharmaceuticals, education, transport, energy, subsistence
products, financial institutions, the media and the like) need to be brought
under democratic public control, since those who run them tend to behave
antisocially if they sniff the chance of enlarged profits in doing so. Less
socially indispensable goods, however (consumer items, luxury products), could
be left to the operations of the market. Some market socialists find this whole
scheme too complex to be workable. As Oscar Wilde once remarked, the trouble
with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. Yet one needs at least to
take account of the role of modern information technology in oiling the wheels
of such a system. Even the former vice-president of Procter & Gamble has
acknowledged that it makes workers' self-management a real pos-sibility.
⁸
Besides, Pat Devine reminds us of just how much time is currently consumed by
capitalist administration and organisation.
⁹
There is no obvious
reason why the amount of time taken up by a socialist alternative should be
greater.

Some advocates of the
participatory model hold that everyone should be remunerated equally for the
same amount of work, despite differences of talent, training and occupation. As
Michael Albert puts it, "The doctor working in a plush setting with
comfortable and fulfilling circumstances earns more than the assembly worker
working in a horrible din, risking life and limb, and enduring boredom and
denigration, regardless of how long or how hard each works.''
¹⁰
There is, in fact, a strong case for paying those who engage in boring, heavy,
dirty or dangerous work more than, say, medics or academics whose labours are
considerably more rewarding. Much of this dirty and dangerous work could
perhaps be carried out by former members of the royal family. We need to
reverse our priorities.

Since I have just
mentioned the media as ripe for public ownership, let us take this as an
exemplary case. Over half a century ago, in an excellent little book entitled
Communications,
¹¹
Raymond Williams outlined a socialist plan for
the arts and media which rejected state control of its content on the one hand
and the sovereignty of the profit motive on the other. Instead, the active
contributors in this field would have control of their own means of expression
and communication. The actual ''plant'' of the arts and media—radio stations,
concert halls, TV networks, theatres, newspaper offices and so on—would be
taken into public ownership (of which there are a variety of forms), and their
management invested in democratically elected bodies. These would include both
members of the public and representatives of media or artistic bodies.

These commissions, which
would be strictly independent of the state, would then be responsible for
awarding public resources and ''leasing'' the socially owned facilities either
to individual practitioners or to independent, democratically self-governing
companies of actors, journalists, musicians and the like. These men and women
could then produce work free of both state regulation and the distorting
pressures of the market. Among other things, we would be free of the situation
in which a bunch of power-crazed, avaricious bullies dictate through their
privately owned media outlets what the public should believe—which is to say,
their own self-interested opinions and the system they support. We will know
that socialism has established itself when we are able to look back with utter
incredulity on the idea that a handful of commercial thugs were given free rein
to corrupt the minds of the public with Neanderthal political views convenient
for their own bank balances but for little else.

Much of the media under
capitalism avoid difficult, controversial or innovative work because it is bad
for profits. Instead, they settle for banality, sensationalism and gut
prejudice. Socialist media, by contrast, would not ban everything but
Schoenberg, Racine and endless dramatized versions of Marx's
Capital.
There would be popular theatre, TV and newspapers galore. ''Popular'' does not
necessarily mean ''in-ferior.'' Nelson Mandela is popular but not inferior.
Plenty of ordinary people read highly specialist journals littered with jargon
unintelligible to outsiders. It is just that these journals tend to be about
angling, farm equipment or dog breeding rather than aesthetics or endocrinology.
The popular becomes junk and kitsch when the media feel the need to hijack as
large a slice of the market as quickly and painlessly as possible. And this
need is for the most part commercially driven.

Socialists will no doubt
continue to argue about the detail of a postcapitalist economy. There is no
flawless model currently on offer. One can contrast this imperfection with the
capitalist economy, which is in impeccable working order and which has never
been responsible for the mildest touch of poverty, waste or slump. It has
admittedly been responsible for some extravagant levels of unemployment, but
the world's leading capitalist nation has hit on an ingenious solution to this
defect. In the United States today, over a million more people would be seeking
work if they were not in prison.

THREE

Marxism is a form of
determinism. It sees men and women simply as the tools of history, and thus
strips them of their freedom and individuality. Marx believed in certain iron
laws of history, which wor\ themselves out with inexorable force and which no
human action can resist. Feudalism was fated to give birth to capitalism, and
capitalism will inevitably give way to socialism. As such, Marx's theory of
history is just a secular version of Providence or Destiny. It is offensive to
human freedom and dignity, just as Marxist states are.

W
e may begin by asking what is
distinctive about Marxism. What does Marxism have that no other political
theory does? It is clearly not the idea of revolution, which long predates
Marx's work. Nor is it the notion of communism, which is of ancient provenance.
Marx did not invent socialism or communism. The working-class movement in
Europe had already arrived at socialist ideas while Marx himself was still a
liberal. In fact, it is hard to think of any single
political
feature
that is unique to his thought. It is certainly not the idea of the
revolutionary party, which comes to us from the French Revolution. Marx has
precious little to say about it in any case.

What about the concept of
social class? This won't do either, since Marx himself rightly denied that he
invented the idea. It is true that he importantly redefined the whole concept,
but it is not his own coinage. Nor did he think up the idea of the proletariat,
which was familiar to a number of nineteenth-century thinkers. His idea of
alienation was derived mostly from Hegel. It was also anticipated by the great
Irish socialist and feminist, William Thompson. We shall also see later that
Marx is not alone in giving such high priority to the economic in social life.
He believes in a cooperative society free of exploitation run by the producers
themselves, and holds that this could come about only by revolutionary means.
But so did the great twentieth-century socialist Raymond Williams, who did not
consider himself a Marxist. Plenty of anarchists, libertarian socialists and
others would endorse this social vision but vehemently reject Marxism.

Two major doctrines lie at
the heart of Marx's thought. One of them is the primary role played by the
economic in social life; the other is the idea of a succession of modes of
production throughout history. We shall see later, however, that neither of
these notions was Marx's own innovation. Is what is peculiar to Marxism, then,
the concept not of class but of class
struggle?
This is certainly close
to the core of Marx's thought, but it is no more original to him than the idea
of class itself. Take this couplet about a wealthy landlord from Oliver
Goldsmith's poem ''The Deserted Village'':

The robe that wraps his
limbs in silken sloth Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth.

The symmetry and economy
of the lines themselves, with their neatly balanced antithesis, contrast with
the waste and imbalance of the economy they describe. The couplet is clearly
about class struggle. What robes the landlord robs his tenants. Or take these
lines from John Milton's
Comus:

If every just man that now
pines with want

Had but a moderate and
beseeming share

Of that which lewdly
pampered luxury

Now heaps upon some few
with vast excess,

Nature's full blessings
would be well dispensed

In unsuperfluous even
proportion . . .

Much the same sentiment is
expressed by King Lear. In fact, Milton has quietly stolen this idea from
Shakespeare. Voltaire believed that the rich grew bloated on the blood of the
poor, and that property lay at the heart of social conflict. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
as we shall see, argued much the same. The idea of class struggle is by no
means peculiar to Marx, as he himself was well aware.

Even so, it is mightily
central to him. So central, in fact, that he sees it as nothing less than the
force that drives human history. It is the very motor or dynamic of human
development, which is not an idea that would have occurred to John Milton.
Whereas many social thinkers have seen human society as an organic unity, what
constitutes it in Marx's view is division. It is made up of mutually
incompatible interests. Its logic is one of conflict rather than cohesion. For
example, it is in the interest of the capitalist class to keep wages low, and
in the interests of wage earners to push them higher.

Marx famously declares in
the
Communist Manifesto
that ''the history of all previously existing
society is the history of class struggles.'' He can't of course mean this
literally. If brushing my teeth last Wednesday counts as part of history, then
it is hard to see that this is a matter of class struggle. Bowling a leg break
in cricket or being pathologically obsessed with penguins is not burningly
relevant to class struggle. Perhaps ''history'' refers to public events, not
private ones like brushing one's teeth. But that brawl in the bar last night
was public enough. So perhaps history is confined to
major
public
events. But by whose definition? Anyway, how was the Great Fire of London a
product of class struggle? It might count as an instance of class struggle if
Che Guevara had been run over by a truck, but only if a CIA agent was at the
wheel. Otherwise it would have just been an accident. The story of women's
oppression interlocks with the history of class struggle, but it is not just an
aspect of it. The same goes for the poetry of Wordsworth or Seamus Heaney.
Class struggle can't cover everything.