Why Marx Was Right (11 page)

These vices would no
longer be bound up with the exploitation of child labour, colonial violence,
grotesque social inequalities and cutthroat economic competition. Instead, they
would have to assume some other form. Tribal societies have their fair share of
violence, rivalry and hunger for power, but these things cannot take the form
of imperial warfare, free-market competition or mass unemployment, because such
institutions do not exist among the Nuer or the Dinka. There are villains
everywhere you look, but only some of these moral ruffians are so placed as to
be able to steal pension funds or pump the media full of lying political
propaganda. Most gangsters are not in a position to do so. Instead, they have
to content themselves with hanging people from meat hooks. In a socialist
society, nobody would be in a position to do so. This is not because they would
be too saintly, but because there would be no private pension funds or
privately owned media. Shakespeare's villains had to find outlets for their
wickedness other than firing missiles at Palestinian refugees. You cannot be a
bullying industrial magnate if there isn't any industry around. You just have
to settle for bullying slaves, courtiers or your Neolithic workmates instead.

Or consider the practice
of democracy. It is true that there are always monstrous egoists who try to
browbeat others, as well as people who seek to bribe or smooth-talk their way
to power. Democracy, however, is a set of built-in safeguards against such
behavior. By devices such as one-person-one-vote, chairpersons, amendments,
accountability, due procedure, the sovereignty of the majority and so on, you
do your best to ensure that the bullies cannot win. From time to time they will
succeed in doing just that. They might even manage to suborn the whole process.
But having an established process means that most of the time they will be
forced to submit to the democratic consensus. Virtue, so to speak, is built
into the proceedings, not left to the vagaries of individual character. You do
not need to make people physically incapable of violence in order to end a war.
You just need negotiations, disarmament, peace treaties, monitoring and the
like. This can be difficult. But it is not half as difficult as breeding a race
of people who would vomit and swoon at the slightest sign of aggression.

So Marxism holds out no
promise of human perfection. It does not even promise to abolish hard labour.
Marx seems to believe that a certain amount of disagreeable work would continue
to be essential even in conditions of plenty. The curse of Adam will linger on
even in the realm of abundance. The promise Marxism does hold out is to resolve
the contradictions which currently stop history proper from happening, in all
its freedom and diversity.

The aims of Marxism,
however, are not just material. For Marx, communism means an end to scarcity,
along with an end to most oppressive labour. But the freedom and leisure which
this would grant men and women can then provide the context for their fuller
spiritual flourishing. It is true, as we have seen, that spiritual and material
development by no means always march side by side. One has only to look at
Keith Richards to recognize that. There are many kinds of material affluence
which spell the death of the spirit. Yet it is also true that you cannot be
free to become what you want when you are starving, sorely oppressed or stunted
in your moral growth by a life of endless drudgery. Materialists are not those
who deny the spiritual, but those who remind us that spiritual fulfillment
requires certain material conditions. Those conditions do not guarantee such
fulfillment. But it cannot be had without them.

Human beings are not at
their best in conditions of scarcity, whether natural or artificial. Such
scarcity breeds violence, fear, greed, anxiety, possessiveness, domination and
deadly antagonism. One would expect, then, that if men and women were able to
live in conditions of material abundance, released from these crippling
pressures, they would tend to fare better as moral beings than they do now. We
cannot be sure of this because we have never known such conditions. This is
what Marx has in mind when he declares in the
Communist Manifesto
that
the whole of history has been the history of class struggle. And even in
conditions of abundance there would be plenty of other things for us to feel
anxious, aggressive and possessive about. We would not be alchemized into
angels. But some of the root causes of our moral deficiencies would have been
removed. To that extent, it is indeed reasonable to claim that a communist
society would tend by and large to produce finer human beings than we can
muster at the moment. But they would still be fallible, prone to conflict and
sometimes brutal and malevolent.

Cynics who doubt that such
moral progress is possible should consider the difference between burning
witches and pressing for equal pay for women. That is not to say that we have
all become more delicate, sensitive and humanitarian than we were in medieval
times. As far as that goes, we might also consider the difference between bows
and arrows and Cruise missiles. The point is not that history as a whole has
morally improved. It is simply that we have made major progress here and there.
It is as soberly realistic to recognize this fact as it is reasonable to claim
that in some ways we have deteriorated since the days of Robin Hood. There is
no grand narrative of Progress, just as there is no fairy tale of Decline.

Anyone who has witnessed a
small infant snatch a toy from its sibling with a bloodcurdling cry of
''Mine!'' needs no reminder of how deep in the mind the roots of rivalry and
possessiveness sink. We are speaking of ingrained cultural, psychological and
even evolutionary habits, which no mere change of institutions will alter in
itself. But social change does not depend on everyone revolutionising their
attitudes overnight. Take the example of Northern Ireland. Peace did not come
to this tumultuous region because Catholics and Protestants finally abandoned
their centuries-old antagonism and fell fondly into each others' arms. Far from
it. Some of them will continue to detest each other as far into the future as
one can see. Changes in sectarian consciousness are likely to be geologically
slow. Yet in one sense this is not all that important. What was important was
securing a political agreement which could be carefully policed and skillfully
evolved, in the context of a general public weariness with thirty years of
violence.

That, however, is only one
side of the story. For the truth is that over long periods of time, changes of
institution do indeed have profound effects on human attitudes. Almost every
enlightened penal reform history has achieved was bitterly resisted in its day;
but we now take these changes so much for granted that we would be revolted by
the idea of breaking murderers on a wheel. Such reforms have become built into
our psyches. What really alters our view of the world is not so much ideas, as
ideas which are embedded in routine social practice. If we change that
practice, which may be formidably difficult to do, we are likely in the end to
alter our way of seeing.

Most of us do not have to
be forcibly restrained from relieving ourselves on crowded streets. Because
there is a law against it, and because it is socially frowned on, not to do so
has become second nature to us. This is not to say that none of us ever do it,
not least in city centres when the pubs have just closed. It is just that we
are a lot less likely to do it than if it were considered the height of
elegance. The British injunction to drive on the left does not have to struggle
in the breasts of Britishers with a burning desire to drive on the right.
Institutions shape our inner experience. They are instruments of reeducation.
We shake hands on first meeting partly because it is the conventional thing to
do, but also because, being the conventional thing to do, we feel an impulse to
do it.

These changes of habit
take a long time. It took some centuries for capitalism to root out modes of
feeling inherited from feudalism, and a tourist outside Buckingham Palace might
well consider that some vital areas were carelessly overlooked. It would not,
one hopes, take quite so long to produce a social order in which schoolchildren
studying history would greet with utter incredulity the fact that once upon a
time millions of people went hungry while a handful of others fed caviar to
their poodles. It would seem as alien and repellent to them as the thought of
disembowelling a man for heresy now seems to us.

To mention schoolchildren
raises an important point. A great many children today are fervent
environmentalists. They regard the clubbing to death of seals or the pollution
of the atmosphere with horror and disgust. Some of them would even be appalled
by the dropping of a piece of litter. And this is largely because of
education—not just formal education, but the influence of new forms of thought
and feeling on a generation in which old habits of feeling are less entrenched.
No one is arguing that this will save the planet. And it is true that there are
children who would cheerfully brain a badger. Even so, there is evidence here
of how education can change attitudes and breed new forms of behavior.

Political education, then,
is always possible. At a conference in Britain in the early 1970s, a discussion
took place over whether there were certain universal features of human beings.
One man stood up and announced ''Well, we've all got testicles.'' A woman in
the audience shouted out ''No, we haven't!'' Feminism in Britain was still in
its early days, and the remark was greeted by a good many men in the room as
merely eccentric. Even some of the women looked embarrassed. Only a few years
later, if a man had made such a fatuous statement in public, he might rapidly
have become the only exception to his claim.

In medieval and
early-modern Europe, avarice was regarded as the foulest of vices. From that to
the Wall Street slogan ''greed is good!'' involved an intensive process of
reeducation. What did the reeducating was not in the first place schoolteachers
or propagandists but changes in our material forms of life. Aristotle thought
slavery was natural, though some other ancient thinkers did not agree. But he
also thought it contrary to human nature to gear economic production to profit,
which is not quite the opinion of Donald Trump. (Aristotle held this view for
an interesting reason. He thought that what Marx was later to call
''exchange-value''—the way that one commodity can be exchanged with another,
and that with another, and so on ad infinitum—involves a kind of boundlessness
which was foreign to the finite, creaturely nature of human beings.) There were
medieval ideologues who viewed profit-making as unnatural, because human nature
for them meant feudal nature. Hunter-gatherers probably took an equally dim
view of the possibility of any social order but their own. Alan Greenspan,
former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, believed for much of his
professional life that so-called free markets were rooted in human nature, a
claim as absurd as holding that admiring Cliff Richard is rooted in human
nature. Free markets are in fact a recent historical invention, and were
confined for a long time to a minor region of the globe.

Similarly, those who speak
of socialism as contrary to human nature do so because in their myopic way they
identify that nature with capitalism. The Tuareg people of the central Sahara
are really capitalist entrepreneurs at heart. They would secretly like nothing
better than to start up an investment bank. The fact that they do not even have
the concept of an investment bank is neither here nor there. But one cannot
desire something of which one has no notion. I cannot hanker to become a
stockbroker if I am an Athenian slave. I can be rapacious, acquisitive and
religiously devoted to my own self-interest. But I cannot be a closet
capitalist, just as I cannot aspire to be a brain surgeon if I am living in the
eleventh century.

I claimed before that
Marx, rather strangely, was both unusually pessimistic about the past and
unusually optimistic about the future. There are several reasons for this, but
one of them in particular bears on the issues we are examining. Marx was gloomy
about much of the past because it seemed to represent one wretched form of
oppression and exploitation after another. Theodor Adorno once remarked that
pessimistic thinkers (he had Freud rather than Marx in mind) do more service to
the cause of human emancipation than cal-lowly optimistic ones. This is because
they bear witness to an injustice which cries out for redemption, and which we
might otherwise forget. By reminding us of how bad things are, they prompt us
to repair them. They urge us to do without opium.

If Marx also retained a
good deal of hope for the future, however, it was because he recognized that
this dismal record was not for the most part our fault. If history has been so
bloody, it is not because most human beings are wicked. It is because of the
material pressures to which they have been submitted. Marx can thus take a
realistic measure of the past without succumbing to the myth of the darkness of
men's hearts. And this is one reason why he can retain faith in the future. It
is his materialism which permits him that hope. If wars, famines and genocide
really did spring simply from some unchanging human depravity, then there is
not the slightest reason to believe that the future will fare any better. If,
however, these things have been partly the effect of unjust social systems, of
which individuals are sometimes little more than functions, then it is
reasonable to expect that changing that system may make for a better world. The
bugbear of perfection, meanwhile, can be left to frighten fools.