Why Marx Was Right (14 page)

Or take this little-known
piece of historical materialist commentary:

The inhabitant [of human
society] must go through the different stages of hunter, shepherd, and
husbandman, then when property becomes valuable, and consequently gives cause
for injustice; then when laws are appointed to repress injury, and secure
possession, when men by the sanction of these laws, become possessed of
superfluity, when luxury is thus introduced and demands its continual supply,
then it is that the sciences become necessary and useful; the state cannot
subsist without them . . .
⁷

Not the reflections of a
Marxist with a quaintly archaic prose style, but the ruminations of the
eighteenth-century Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, who was a devout Tory. If the
Irish seem to have been particularly inclined to the so-called economic theory
of history, it was because it was hard to live in such a down-at-heel colony,
dominated as it was by the Anglo-Irish landowning class, and overlook such
matters altogether. In England, with its complex cultural superstructure,
economic issues were less painfully evident to poets and historians. Today,
many of those who would scornfully reject Marx's theory of history behave for
all the world as though it were true. These people are known as bankers,
financial advisors, Treasury officials, corporate executives and the like.
Everything they do testifies to their faith in the priority of the economic.
They are spontaneous Marxists to a man.

It is worth adding that in
a pleasing symmetry, the ''economic theory of history'' was born in and around
Manchester, just as industrial capitalism was. It was his time in the city,
Engels remarked, which first made him aware of the centrality of the economic.
Since his father, as we have seen, ran a mill there which supported both Engels
and (for much of the time) Marx himself, this insight, one might say, began at
home. The well-heeled Engels acted as the material base to Marx's intellectual
superstructure.

The claim that everything
for Marx is determined by ''economics'' is an absurd oversimplification. What
shapes the course of history in his view is class struggle; and classes are not
reducible to economic factors. It is true that Marx sees classes for the most
part as groups of men and women who occupy the same place within a mode of
production. But it is significant that we speak of social classes, not of
economic ones. Marx writes of the ''social'' relations of production, as well
as of ''social'' revolution. If the social relations of production have
priority over the forces of production, then it is hard to see how something baldly
labelled ''the economic'' can be the prime mover of history.

Classes do not exist only
in coal mines and insurance offices. They are also social formations,
communities as much as economic entities. They involve customs, traditions,
social institutions, sets of values and habits of thought. They are also
political phenomena. In fact, there are hints in Marx's work that a class
lacking political representation is not in the full sense a class at all.
Classes, he seems to suggest, only truly become classes when they become
conscious of themselves as such. They involve legal, social, cultural,
political and ideological processes. In precapitalist societies, so Marx
argues, these noneconomic factors are of especial importance. Classes are not
uniform, but reveal a good deal of internal division and diversity.

Besides, as we shall see
shortly, labour for Marx concerns a great deal more than the economic. It
involves a whole anthropology—a theory of Nature and human agency, the body and
its needs, the nature of the senses, ideas of social cooperation and individual
self-fulfillment. This is not economics as the
Wall Street Journal
knows
it. You do not read much about human-species-being in the
Financial Times.
Labour also involves gender, kinship and sexuality. There is the question of
how labourers are produced in the first place, and of how they are materially
sustained and spiritually replenished. Production is carried on within specific
forms of life, and is thus suffused with social meaning. Because labour always
signifies, humans being significant (literally, sign-making) animals, it can
never be simply a technical or material affair. You may see it as a way of
praising God, glorifying the Fatherland or acquiring your beer money. The
economic, in short, always presupposes a lot more than itself. It is not just a
matter of how the markets are behaving. It concerns the way we become human
beings, not just the way we become stockbrokers.
⁸

Classes, then, are not
just economic, any more than sexuality is simply personal. In fact, it is hard
to think of anything that is just economic. Even coins can be collected and
displayed in glass cases, admired for their aesthetic qualities or melted down
for their metal. To speak of money, incidentally, is to grasp why it is so easy
to reduce the whole of human existence to the economic, since there is a sense
in which this is exactly what money does. What is so magical about money is
that it compresses such a wealth of human possibilities into its slim compass.
It is true that there are a great many things in life more valuable than money,
but it is money which gives us access to most of them. Money allows us to
engage in fulfilling relationships with others without the social embarrassment
of suddenly falling down dead of hunger. It can buy you privacy, health,
education, beauty, social rank, mobility, comfort, freedom, respect and
sensuous fulfillment, along with a Tudor grange in Warwickshire. Marx writes
wonderfully in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
of the protean,
shape-changing, alchemical nature of money, the way you can conjure such a
dazzling array of goods from its unremarkable form. Money is itself a kind of
reductionism. It packs whole universes into a handful of copper.

But even coins, as we have
seen, are not raw economics. In fact, ''the economy'' never appears in the raw.
What the financial press calls ''the economy'' is a kind of phantom. Certainly
nobody has ever clapped eyes on it. It is an abstraction from a complex social
process. It is orthodox economic thought which tends to narrow the notion of
the economic. Marxism, by contrast, conceives of production in the richest,
most capacious kind of way. One reason why Marx's theory of history holds good
is the fact that material goods are never just material goods. They hold out
the promise of human well-being. They are the portal to so much that is
precious in human life. This is why men and women have struggled to the death
over land, property, money and capital. Nobody values the economic simply as the
economic, other than those who make a professional career out of it. It is
because this realm of human existence folds so many other dimensions into
itself that it plays such a key role in human history.

Marxism has often been
accused of being a mirror image of its political opponents. Just as capitalism
reduces humanity to Economic Man, so does its great antagonist. Capitalism
makes a deity of material production, and Marx does just the same. But this is
to misunderstand Marx's notion of production. Most of the production that goes
on, he insists, is not true production at all. In his view, men and women only
genuinely produce when they do so freely and for its own sake. Only under
communism will this be fully possible; but meanwhile we can gain a foretaste of
such creativity in the specialized form of production we know as art. John
Milton, Marx writes, ''produced
Paradise Lost
for the same reason that a
silkworm produces silk. It was an activity of
his
nature.''
⁹
Art
is an image of nonalienated labour. It is how Marx liked to think of his own
writings, which he once described as forming ''an artistic whole'' and which he
penned (unlike most of his disciples) with a meticulous attention to style. Nor
was his interest in art purely theoretical. He himself wrote lyric poetry, an
unfinished comic novel, a fragment of verse drama and a sizeable unpublished
manuscript on art and religion. He also planned a journal of dramatic criticism
and a treatise of aesthetics. His knowledge of world literature was staggering
in its scope.

Human labour has rarely
been of a fulfilling kind. For one thing, it has always been coerced in one way
or another, even if the coercion in question is simply the need not to starve.
For another thing, it has been carried on in class-society, and thus not as an
end in itself but as a means to the power and profit of others. For Marx, as
for his mentor Aristotle, the good life consists of activities engaged in for
their own sake. The best things are done just for the hell of it. We do them simply
because they belong to our fulfillment as the kind of animals we are, not out
of duty, custom, sentiment, authority, material necessity, social utility or
fear of the Almighty. There is no reason, for example, why we should delight in
one another's company. When we do so, however, we are realizing a vital
capacity of our ''species being.'' And this in Marx's view is as much a form of
production as planting potatoes. Human solidarity is essential for the purpose
of political change; but in the end it serves as its own reason. So much is
clear from a moving passage in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

When communist workmen
gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at
the same time they acquire a new need—a need for society—and what appears as a
means has be
TERRY
EAGLETQN

come an end. Smoking,
eating and drinking, etc, are no longer means of creating links between people.
Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal,
is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a
reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn
figures.
¹⁰

Production for Marx, then,
means realizing one's essential powers in the act of transforming reality. True
wealth, he claims in the
Grundrisse,
is ''the absolute working-out of
human creative potentialities . . . i.e. the development of all human powers as
an end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick.''
¹¹
Beyond class-history, he writes in
Capital,
can begin ''that development
of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom.''
¹²
The word ''production'' in Marx's work covers any self-fulfilling activity:
playing the flute, savouring a peach, wrangling over Plato, dancing a reel,
making a speech, engaging in politics, organising a birthday party for one's
children. It has no muscular, macho implications. When Marx speaks of
production as the essence of humanity, he does not mean that the essence of
humanity is packing sausages. Labour as we know it is an alienated form of what
he calls ''praxis''—an ancient Greek word meaning the kind of free,
self-realising activity by which we transform the world. In ancient Greece, the
word meant any activity of a free man, as opposed to a slave.

Yet only the economic in
the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the
resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow
the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will
become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to
think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from
being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human
potential. He wanted a society where the economic no longer monopolised so much
time and energy.

That our ancestors should
have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. Where you can
produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will
perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort
of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale.
The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant
accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in
ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a
result, modern men and women, surrounded by an affluence unimaginable to
hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and
hard as ever these predecessors did.

Marx's work is all about
human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure.
Free self-realisation is a form of ''production,'' to be sure; but it is not
one that is coercive. And leisure is necessary if men and women are to devote
time to running their own affairs. It is thus surprising that Marxism does not
attract more card-carrying idlers and professional loafers to its ranks. This,
however, is because a lot of energy must be expended on achieving this goal.
Leisure is something you have to work for.

SIX

Marx was a materialist.
He believed that nothing exists but matter. He had no interest in the spiritual
aspects of humanity, and saw human consciousness as just a reflex of the
material world. He was brutally dismissive of religion, and regarded morality
simply as a question of the end justifying the means. Marxism drains humanity
of all that is most precious about it, reducing us to inert lumps of material
stuff determined by our environment. There is an obvious route from this
dreary, soulless vision of humanity to the atrocities of Stalin and other
disciples of Marx.