Why Marx Was Right (13 page)

Friedrich Engels was a
pluralist in just this sense. He vehemently denied that he and Marx ever meant
to suggest that economic forces were the sole determinant of history. That, he
considered, was a ''meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.''
²
The
truth is that nobody is a pluralist in the sense of holding that in any given
situation, any factor is as vital as any other. Everyone believes in
hierarchies, even the most fervent of egalitarians. In fact, almost everyone
believes in absolute, unchanging hierarchies. It is hard to find anyone who
thinks that tickling the starving is ever preferable to feeding them. Nobody
contends that the length of Charles I's fingernails was a more decisive factor
than religion in the English Civil War. There were lots of reasons for my
holding your head underwater for twenty minutes (sadism, scientific curiosity,
that appalling flowery shirt you were wearing, the fact that there was only a
boring old documentary on television), but the overriding reason was to get my
hands on the stable of prize-winning horses you had bequeathed me in your will.
Why should public events not have overriding motives too?

Some pluralists agree that
such events may result from a single predominant cause. It is just that they do
not see why the same cause should be operative in every case. Surely what is
implausible about the so-called economic theory of history is the idea that
everything, everywhere, is conditioned in just the same way. Doesn't this
suggest that history is a single phenomenon, as miraculously uniform all the
way through as a stick of rock? It makes sense to suppose that the cause of my
headache was that ridiculously tight Marilyn Monroe wig I insisted on wearing
to the party; but history is not a single thing like a headache. As the man
complained, it is just one damn thing after another. It does not have the
consistency of a fairy tale, or form a coherent narrative. There is no unbroken
thread of meaning running all the way through it.

We have seen already that
scarcely anybody imagines that there are no intelligible patterns in history at
all. It is rare to find someone who sees history as simply one shambolic heap
of chaos, chance, accident and contingency, though Friedrich Nietzsche and his
disciple Michel Foucault sail close to this view at times. Most people accept
that there are chains of cause and effect in history, however complex or hard
to fathom, and that this lends it some rough kind of pattern. It is hard to
believe, for example, that various nations began to collect colonies at a
certain historical point for reasons that had nothing whatsoever in common.
African slaves were not transported to America for no reason at all. That
fascism emerged at more or less the same time in various twentieth-century
nations was not just a copycat affair. People do not suddenly hurl themselves
on open fires just for the hell of it. There is a remarkably uniform pattern
across the globe of people pointedly not doing so.

The question, surely, is
not whether there are patterns in history, but whether there is one predominant
pattern. You can believe the former without crediting the latter. Why not just
a set of overlapping designs that never merge into a whole? How on earth could
something as diverse as human history form a unified story? To contend that
material interests have been the prime mover all the way from the cave dwellers
to capitalism is a lot more plausible than believing that diet, altruism, Great
Men, pole-vaulting or the conjunction of the planets has been. But it still
seems too singular an answer to be satisfying.

If it is satisfying to
Marx, it is because he considers that history has been by no means as varied
and colourful as it may appear. It has been a much more monotonous story than
meets the eye. There is indeed a kind of unity to it; but it is not one that
should yield us any pleasure, as the unity of
Bleak House
or
High
Noon
might. For the most part, the threads that leash it together have been
scarcity, hard labour, violence and exploitation. And though these things have
taken very different forms, they have so far laid the foundation of every
civilisation on record. It is this dull, mind-numbing recurrence that has lent
human history a good deal more consistency than we might desire. There is
indeed a grand narrative here, and more's the pity. As Theodor Adorno observes,
"The One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional
breathing spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.'' The grand
narrative of history is not one of Progress, Reason or Enlightenment. It is a
melancholic tale which leads in Adorno's words ''from the slingshot to the
atomic bomb.''
³

It is possible to agree
that violence, hard labour and exploitation bulk large in human history without
accepting that they are the foundation of it. For Marxists, one reason why they
are so fundamental is that they are bound up with our physical survival. They
have been abiding features of the way we maintain our material existence. They
are not just random events. We are not speaking of scattered acts of savagery
or aggression. If there has been a certain necessity to these things, it is
because they are built into the structures by which we produce and reproduce
our material life. Even so, no Marxist imagines that these forces shape
absolutely everything. If they did, then typhoid, ponytails, convulsive
laughter, Sufism, the
Saint Matthew Passion
and painting your toenails
an exotic purple would all be the reflex of economic forces. Any battle not
fought for directly economic motives, or any work of art which is silent on the
class struggle, would be inconceivable.

Marx himself occasionally
writes as though the political is simply the reflex of the economic. Yet he
also often investigates the social, political or military motives behind
historical events, without the faintest suggestion that these motives are just
the surface manifestations of deeper economic ones. Material forces do
sometimes leave their mark quite directly on politics, art and social life. But
their influence is generally more long-term and subterranean than this. There
are times when this influence is only very partial, and other times when it
scarcely makes sense to speak in these terms at all. How is the capitalist mode
of production the cause of my taste in neckties? In what sense does it
determine hang-gliding or the twelve-bar blues?

So there is no
reductionism at work here. Politics, culture, science, ideas and social
existence are not just economics in disguise, as some neuroscientists hold that
the mind is just the brain in disguise. They have their own reality, evolve
their own histories and operate by their own inner logic. They are not just the
pale reflection of something else. They also powerfully shape the mode of
production itself. The traffic between economic ''base'' and social
''superstructure,'' as we shall see later, is not just one way. So if we are not
speaking here of some mechanistic determinism, what kind of claim
is
being
made? Is it one so fuzzy and generalized as to be politically toothless?

The claim is in the first
place a negative one. It is that the way men and women produce their material
life sets limits to the kind of cultural, legal, political and social
institutions they construct. The word ''determine'' literally means ''to set
limits to.'' Modes of production do not dictate a specific kind of politics,
culture or set of ideas. Capitalism was not the cause of John Locke's
philosophy or Jane Austen's fiction. It is rather a context in which both can
be illuminated. Nor do modes of production throw up only those ideas or
institutions which serve their purposes. If this were true, then Marxism itself
would be impossible. It would be a mystery where anarchist street theatre comes
from, or how Tom Paine came to write one of the best-selling books of all
time—the revolutionary
Rights of Man
—at the heart of the repressive
police state that was the England of his day. Even so, we would be astonished
to discover that English culture contained nothing but Tom Paines and anarchist
theatre groups. Most novelists, scholars, advertisers, newspapers, teachers and
television stations do not produce work that is dramatically subversive of the
status quo. This is so glaringly obvious that it generally fails to strike us
as significant. Marx's point is simply that it is not an accident. And it is
here that we can formulate the more positive aspect of his claim. Broadly
speaking, the culture, law and politics of class-society are bound up with the
interests of the dominant social classes. As Marx himself puts it in
The
German Ideology,
"The class that is the ruling
material
force
of society is at the same time the ruling
intellectual
force.''

Most people, if they pause
to think about it, would probably accept that the business of material
production has loomed so large in human history, absorbed such boundless
resources of time and energy, provoked such internecine conflicts, engrossed so
many human beings from cradle to grave and confronted so many of them as a
matter of life or death, that it would be amazing if it were not to leave its
mark on a good many other aspects of our existence. Other social institutions
find themselves inexorably dragged into its orbit. It bends politics, law,
culture and ideas out of true by demanding that rather than just flourish as
themselves, they spend much of their time legitimating the prevailing social
order. Think of contemporary capitalism, in which the commodity form has left
its grubby thumbprints on everything from sport to sexuality, from how best to
swing oneself a front-row seat in heaven to the ear-shattering tones in which
U.S. television reporters hope to seize the viewer's attention for the sake of
the advertisers. The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history
is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which his case is becoming
truer as time passes. It is capitalism, not Marxism, which is economically
reductionist. It is capitalism which believes in production for production's
sake, in the narrower sense of the word ''production.''

Marx, by contrast,
believes in production for its own sake in a more generous sense of the word.
He argues that human self-realisation is to be valued as an end in itself,
rather than reduced to the instrument of some other goal. This, he thought,
would prove impossible as long as the narrower sense of production for
production's sake prevailed— for then most of our creative energy would be
invested in producing the means of living rather than savouring life itself.
Much of the meaning of Marxism can be found in the contrast between these two
uses of the phrase "production for production's sake''—one of them economic,
the other creative or artistic. Far from being an economic reductionist, Marx
is a stern critic of reducing human production to tractors and turbines. The
production that mattered to him was closer to art than it was to assembling
transistor radios or slaughtering sheep. We shall be returning to this subject
in a moment.

It is true, even so, that
Marx insists on the central role played by the economic (in the narrow sense of
the word) in history to date. But this is far from a belief confined to
Marxists. Cicero held that the purpose of the state was to protect private
property. The ''economic'' theory of history was a commonplace of the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment. A number of Enlightenment thinkers saw
history as a succession of modes of production. They also believed that this
could explain rank, lifestyles, social inequalities and relations within both
family and government. Adam Smith regarded each stage of material development
in history as generating its own forms of law, property and government. Jean-Jacques
Rousseau argues in his
Discourse on Inequality
that property brings war,
exploitation and class conflict in its wake. He also insists that the so-called
social contract is a fraud perpetrated by the rich on the poor to protect their
privileges. Rousseau speaks of human society fettering the weak and giving
powers to the rich from the outset—powers that ''irretrievably destroyed
natural liberty, established for all time the law of property and inequality .
. . and for the benefit of a few ambitious men subjected the human race
thenceforth to labour, servitude and misery.''
⁴
The law, Rousseau
considers, generally backs the strong over the weak; justice is for the most
part a weapon of violence and domination; and culture, science, the arts and
religion are harnessed to the business of defending the status quo, flinging
''garlands of flowers'' over the chains which weigh men and women down. It is
property, Rousseau claims, that lies at the root of human discontent.

The great
nineteenth-century Irish economist John Elliot Cairnes, who regarded socialism
as ''a rank outgrowth of economic ignorance'' and was once described as the
most orthodox of all classical economists, observed ''how extensively the
material interests of men prevail in determining their political opinions and
conduct.''
⁵
He also remarked in the Preface to his book
The Slave
Power
that ''the course of history is largely determined by the action of
economic causes.'' His compatriot W. E. H. Lecky, the greatest Irish historian
of his day and a virulent antisocialist, wrote that ''few things contribute so
much to the formation of the social type as the laws regulating the succession
of property.''
⁶
Even Sigmund Freud clung to a form of economic
determination. Without the need to labour, he considered, we would simply lie
around the place all day shamelessly indulging our libidos. It was economic
necessity which jolted us out of our natural indolence and prodded us into
social activity.