Why Marx Was Right (6 page)

Even so, the connection
between forces and relations is an illuminating one. Among other things, it
allows us to recognize that you can only have certain social relations if the
productive forces have evolved to a certain extent. If some people are to live
a lot more comfortably than others, you need to produce a sizeable economic
surplus; and this is possible only at a certain point of productive
development. You cannot sustain an immense royal court complete with minstrels,
pages, jesters and chamberlains if everyone has to herd goats or grub for
plants all the time just to survive.

The class struggle is
essentially a struggle over the surplus, and as such is likely to continue as
long as there is not a sufficiency for all. Class comes about whenever material
production is so organised as to compel some individuals to transfer their
surplus labour to others in order to survive. When there is little or no
surplus, as in so-called primitive communism, everyone has to work, nobody can
live off the toil of others, so there can be no classes. Later, there is enough
of a surplus to fund classes like feudal lords, who live by the labour of their
underlings. Only with capitalism can enough surplus be generated for the
abolition of scarcity, and thus of social classes, to become possible. But only
socialism can put this into practice.

It is not clear, however,
why the productive forces should always triumph over the social relations—why
the latter seem so humbly deferential to the former. Besides, the theory does
not seem to accord with the way that Marx actually portrays the transition from
feudalism to capitalism, or in some respects from slavery to feudalism. It is
also true that the same social classes have often persisted in power for
centuries despite their inability to promote productive growth.

One of the obvious flaws
of that model is its determinism. Nothing seems able to resist the onward march
of the productive forces. History works itself out by an inevitable internal
logic. There is a single ''subject'' of history (the constantly growing
productive forces) which stretches all the way through it, throwing up
different political setups as it rolls along. This is a metaphysical vision
with a vengeance. Yet it is not a simpleminded scenario of Progress. In the
end, the human powers and capacities which evolve along with the productive
forces make for a finer kind of humanity. But the price we pay for this is a
horrifying one. Every advance of the productive forces is a victory for both
civilisation and barbarism. If it brings in its wake new possibilities of
emancipation, it also arrives coated in blood. Marx was no nai've
progress-monger. He was well aware of the terrible cost of communism.

It is true there is also
class struggle, which would seem to suggest that men and women are free. It is
hard to see that strikes, lockouts and occupations are dictated by some
providential force. But what if this very freedom was, so to speak,
preprogrammed, already factored into the unstoppable march of history? There is
an analogy here with the Christian interplay between divine providence and
human free will. For the Christian, I act freely when I strangle the local
police chief; but God has foreseen this action from all eternity, and included
it all along in his plan for humanity. He did not force me to dress up as a
parlour maid last Friday and call myself Milly; but being omniscient, he knew
that I would, and could thus shape his cosmic schemes with the Milly business
well in mind. When I pray to him for a smarter-looking teddy bear than the
dog-eared, beer-stained one who sleeps on my pillow at present, it is not that
God never had the slightest intention of bestowing such a favour on me but
then, on hearing my prayer, changed his mind. God cannot change his mind. It is
rather that he decides from all eternity to give me a new teddy bear because of
my prayer, which he has also foreseen from all eternity. In one sense, the
coming of the future kingdom of God is not preordained: it will arrive only if
men and women work for it in the present. But the fact that they will work for
it of their own free will is itself an inevitable result of God's grace.

There is a similar
interplay between freedom and inevitability in Marx. He sometimes seems to
think that class struggle, though in one sense free, is bound to intensify
under certain historical conditions, and that at times its outcome can be
predicted with certainty. Take, for example, the question of socialism. Marx
appears to regard the advent of socialism as inevitable. He says so more than
once. In the
Communist Manifesto,
the fall of the capitalist class and
the victory of the working class are described as ''equally inevitable.'' But
this is not because Marx believes that there is some secret law inscribed in
history which will usher in socialism whatever men and women may or may not do.
If this were so, why should he urge the need for political struggle? If
socialism really is inevitable, one might think that we need do no more than
wait for it to arrive, perhaps ordering curries or collecting tattoos in the
meanwhile. Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism. In the
twentieth century, it played a key role in the failure of the communist
movement to combat fascism, assured as it was for a time that fascism was no
more than the death rattle of a capitalist system on the point of extinction.
One might claim that whereas for the nineteenth century the inevitable was
sometimes eagerly expected, this is not the case for us. Sentences beginning
"It is now inevitable that . . .'' generally have an ominous ring to them.

Marx does not think that
the inevitability of socialism means we can all stay in bed. He believes,
rather, that once capitalism has definitively failed, working people will have
no reason not to take it over and every reason to do so. They will recognize
that it is in their interests to change the system, and that, being a majority,
they also have the power to do so. So they will act as the rational animals
they are and establish an alternative. Why on earth would you drag out a
wretched existence under a regime you are capable of changing to your
advantage? Why would you let your foot itch intolerably when you are able to
scratch it? Just as for the Christian human action is free yet part of a
preordained plan, so for Marx the disintegration of capitalism will unavoidably
lead men and women to sweep it away of their own free will.

He is talking, then, about
what free men and women are bound to do under certain circumstances. But this
is surely a contradiction, since freedom means that there is nothing that you
are bound to do. You are not bound to devour a succulent pork chop if your guts
are being wrenched by agonizing hunger pains. As a devout Muslim, you might
prefer to die. If there is only one course of action I can possibly take, and
if it is impossible for me not to take it, then in that situation I am not
free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be
socialism that replaces it.

It may be fascism, or
barbarism. Perhaps the working class will be too enfeebled and demoralized by
the crumbling of the system to act constructively. In an uncharacteristically
gloomy moment, Marx reflects that the class struggle may result in the ''common
ruination'' of the contending classes.

Or—a possibility that he
could not fully anticipate—the system might fend off political insurrection by
reform. Social democracy is one bulwark between itself and disaster. In this
way, the surplus reaped from developed productive forces can be used to buy off
revolution, which does not fit at all neatly into Marx's historical scheme. He
seems to have believed that capitalist prosperity can only be temporary; that
the system will eventually founder; and that the working class will then
inevitably rise up and take it over. But this, for one thing, passes over the
many ways (much more sophisticated in our own day than in Marx's) in which even
a capitalism in crisis can continue to secure the consent of its citizens. Marx
did not have Fox News and the
Daily Mail
to reckon with.

There is, of course,
another future one can envisage, namely no future at all. Marx could not
foresee the possibility of nuclear holocaust or ecological catastrophe. Or
perhaps the ruling class will be brought low by being hit by an asteroid, a
fate that some of them might regard as preferable to socialist revolution. Even
the most deterministic theory of history can be shipwrecked by such contingent
events. All the same, we can still inquire how much of a historical determinist
Marx actually is. If there were no more to his work than the idea of the productive
forces giving birth to certain social relations, the answer would be plain.
This amounts to a full-blown determinism, and as such a case that very few
Marxists today would be prepared to sign up for.
³
On this view, it
is not human beings who create their own history; it is the productive forces,
which lead a strange, fetishistic life of their own.

Yet there is a different
current of thought in Marx's writings, for which it is the social relations of
production which have priority over the productive forces, rather than the
other way around. If feudalism made way for capitalism, it was not because the
latter could promote the productive forces more efficiently; it was because
feudal social relations in the countryside were gradually ousted by capitalist
ones. Feudalism created the conditions in which the new bourgeois class could
grow up; but this class did not emerge as a result of a growth in the
productive forces. Besides, if the forces of production expanded under
feudalism, it was not because they have some built-in tendency to develop, but
for reasons of class interest. As for the modern period, if the productive
forces have grown so rapidly over the past couple of centuries, it is because
capitalism cannot survive without constant expansion.

On this alternative
theory, human beings, in the shape of social relations and class struggles, are
indeed the authors of their own history. Marx once commented that he and

Engels had emphasized
''the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history'' for some forty
years.
⁴
The point about class struggle is that its outcome cannot be
predicted, and determinism can therefore find no foothold. You might always
argue that class
conflict
is determined—that it is in the nature of
social classes to pursue mutually clashing interests, and that this is
determined by the mode of production. But it is only now and then that this
''objective'' conflict of interests takes the form of a full-scale political
battle; and it is hard to see how that battle can be somehow predrafted. Marx
may have thought that socialism was inevitable, but he surely did not think
that the Factory Acts or the Paris Commune were. If he had really been a
full-blooded determinist, he might have been able to tell us when and how
socialism would arrive. But he was a prophet in the sense of denouncing
injustice, not in the sense of peering into a crystal ball.

''History,'' Marx writes,
''does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man,
real living man, who does all that, who possesses and fights; 'history' is not,
as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims,
history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.''
⁵
When Marx comments on class relations in the ancient, medieval or modern world,
he often writes as though these are what are primary. He also insists that each
mode of production, from slavery and feudalism to capitalism, has its own
distinct laws of development. If this is so, then one no longer need think in
terms of a rigorously ''linear'' historical process, in which each mode of
production follows on the heels of another according to some inner logic. There
is nothing endemic in feudalism that turns it inexorably into capitalism. There
is no longer a single thread running through the tapestry of history, but
rather a set of differences and discontinuities. It is bourgeois political
economy, not Marxism, that thinks in terms of universal evolutionary laws.
Indeed, Marx himself protested against the charge that he was seeking to bring
the whole of history under a single law. He was deeply averse to such bloodless
abstractions, as befits a good Romantic. ''The materialist method turns into
its opposite,'' he insisted, ''if it is taken not as one's guiding principle of
investigation but as a ready-made pattern to which one shapes the facts of
history to suit oneself.''
⁶
His view of the origins of capitalism,
he warns, should not be transformed ''into an historico-philosophical theory of
the general path prescribed by fate to all nations whatever the historical
circumstances in which they find themselves.''
⁷
If there were certain
tendencies at work in history, there were also countertendencies, which implies
that outcomes are not assured.

Some Marxists have played
down the ''primacy of the productive forces'' case, and played up the
alternative theory we have just examined. But this is probably too defensive.
The former model crops up in enough important spots in

Marx's work to suggest
that he took it very seriously. It does not sound like a momentary aberration.
It is also the way that Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky generally interpreted
him. Some commentators claim that by the time he came to write
Capital,
Marx had more or less abandoned his previous faith in the productive forces as
the heroes of history. Others are not so convinced. Students of Marx, however,
are free to select whatever ideas in his work seem most plausible. Only Marxist
fundamentalists regard that work as holy writ, and there are far fewer of those
nowadays than the Christian variety.