Why Marx Was Right (2 page)

The new information
technologies played a key role in the increasing globalisation of the system,
as a handful of transnational corporations distributed production and
investment across the planet in pursuit of the readiest profits. A good deal of
manufacturing was outsourced to cheap wage locations in the ''underdeveloped''
world, leading some parochially minded Westerners to conclude that heavy
industry had disappeared from the planet altogether. Massive international
migrations of labour followed in the wake of this global mobility, and with
them a resurgence of racism and fascism as impoverished immigrants poured into
the more advanced economies. While ''peripheral'' countries were subject to
sweated labour, privatized facilities, slashed welfare and surreally
inequitable terms of trade, the bestubbled executives of the metropolitan
nations tore off their ties, threw open their shirt necks and fretted about
their employees' spiritual well-being.

None of this happened
because the capitalist system was in blithe, buoyant mood. On the contrary, its
newly pugnacious posture, like most forms of aggression, sprang from deep
anxiety. If the system became manic, it was because it was latently depressed.
What drove this reorganisation above all was the sudden fade-out of the postwar
boom. Intensified international competition was forcing down rates of profits,
drying up sources of investment and slowing the rate of growth. Even social
democracy was now too radical and expensive a political option. The stage was
thus set for Reagan and Thatcher, who would help to dismantle traditional
manufacture, shackle the labour movement, let the market rip, strengthen the
repressive arm of the state and champion a new social philosophy known as
barefaced greed. The displacement of investment from manufacture to the
service, financial and communications industries was a reaction to a protracted
economic crisis, not a leap out of a bad old world into a brave new one.

Even so, it is doubtful
that most of the radicals who changed their minds about the system between the
'70s and '80s did so simply because there were fewer cotton mills around. It
was not this that led them to ditch Marxism along with their sideburns and
headbands, but the growing conviction that the regime they confronted was
simply too hard to crack. It was not illusions about the new capitalism, but
disillusion about the possibility of changing it, which proved decisive. There
were, to be sure, plenty of former socialists who rationalised their gloom by claiming
that if the system could not be changed, neither did it need to be. But it was
lack of faith in an alternative that proved conclusive. Because the
working-class movement had been so battered and bloodied, and the political
left so robustly rolled back, the future seemed to have vanished without trace.
For some on the left, the fall of the Soviet bloc in the late 1980s served to
deepen the disenchantment. It did not help that the most successful radical
current of the modern age—revolutionary nationalism—was by this time pretty
well exhausted. What bred the culture of postmodernism, with its dismissal of
so-called grand narratives and triumphal announcement of the End of History,
was above all the conviction that the future would now be simply more of the
present. Or, as one exuberant postmodernist put it, ''The present plus more
options.''

What helped to discredit
Marxism above all, then, was a creeping sense of political impotence. It is
hard to sustain your faith in change when change seems off the agenda, even if
this is when you need to sustain it most of all. After all, if you do not
resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the
inevitable was. If the fainthearted had managed to cling to their former views
for another two decades, they would have witnessed a capitalism so exultant and
impregnable that in 2008 it only just managed to keep the cash machines open on
the high streets. They would also have seen a whole continent south of the
Panama Canal shift decisively to the political left. The End of History was now
at an end. In any case, Marxists ought to be well accustomed to defeat. They
had known greater catastrophes than this. The political odds will always be on
the system in power, if only because it has more tanks than you do. But the
heady visions and effervescent hopes of the late 1960s made this downturn an
especially bitter pill for the survivors of that era to swallow.

What made Marxism seem
implausible, then, was not that capitalism had changed its spots. The case was
exactly the opposite. It was the fact that as far as the system went, it was
business as usual but even more so. Ironically, then, what helped to beat back
Marxism also lent a kind of credence to its claims. It was thrust to the
margins because the social order it confronted, far from growing more moderate
and benign, waxed more ruthless and extreme than it had been before. And this
made the Marxist critique of it all the more pertinent. On a global scale,
capital was more concentrated and predatory than ever, and the working class
had actually increased in size. It was becoming possible to imagine a future in
which the megarich took shelter in their armed and gated communities, while a
billion or so slum dwellers were encircled in their fetid hovels by watchtowers
and barbed wire. In these circumstances, to claim that Marxism was finished was
rather like claiming that firefighting was out of date because arsonists were
growing more crafty and resourceful than ever.

In our own time, as Marx
predicted, inequalities of wealth have dramatically deepened. The income of a
single Mexican billionaire today is equivalent to the earnings of the poorest
seventeen million of his compatriots. Capitalism has created more prosperity
than history has ever witnessed, but the cost— not least in the
near-destitution of billions—has been astronomical. According to the World
Bank, 2.74 billion people in 2001 lived on less than two dollars a day. We face
a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of resources;
and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. For the
first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to
breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into
labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. Capitalism will behave
antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human
devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is
today no more than sober realism. The traditional leftist slogan ''Socialism or
barbarism'' was never more grimly apposite, never less of a mere rhetorical
flourish. In these dire conditions, as Fredric Jameson writes, ''Marxism must
necessarily become true again."
²

Spectacular inequalities
of wealth and power, imperial warfare, intensified exploitation, an
increasingly repressive state: if all these characterize today's world, they
are also the issues on which Marxism has acted and reflected for almost two
centuries. One would expect, then, that it might have a few lessons to teach
the present. Marx himself was particularly struck by the extraordinarily
violent process by which an urban working class had been forged out of an
uprooted peasantry in his own adopted country of England—a process which Brazil,
China, Russia and India are living through today. Tristram Hunt points out that
Mike Davis's book
Planet of Slums,
which documents the "stinking
mountains of shit'' known as slums to be found in the Lagos or Dhaka of today,
can be seen as an updated version of Engels's
The Condition of the Working
Class.
As China becomes the workshop of the world, Hunt comments, ''the
special economic zones of Guangdong and Shanghai appear eerily reminiscent of
1840s Manchester and Glasgow.''
³

What if it were not Marxism
that is outdated but capitalism itself? Back in Victorian England, Marx saw the
system as having already run out of steam. Having promoted social development
in its heyday, it was now acting as a drag on it. He viewed capitalist society
as awash with fantasy and fetishism, myth and idolatry, however much it prided
itself on its modernity. Its very enlightenment—its smug belief in its own
superior rationality—was a kind of superstition. If it was capable of some
astonishing progress, there was another sense in which it had to run very hard
just to stay on the spot. The final limit on capitalism, Marx once commented,
is capital itself, the constant reproduction of which is a frontier beyond
which it cannot stray. There is thus something curiously static and repetitive
about this most dynamic of all historical regimes. The fact that its underlying
logic remains pretty constant is one reason why the Marxist critique of it
remains largely valid. Only if the system were genuinely able to break beyond
its own bounds, inaugurating something unimaginably new, would this cease to be
the case. But capitalism is incapable of inventing a future which does not
ritually reproduce its present. With, needless to say, more options . . .

Capitalism has brought
about great material advances. But though this way of organising our affairs
has had a long time to demonstrate that it is capable of satisfying human
demands all round, it seems no closer to doing so than ever. How long are we
prepared to wait for it to come up with the goods? Why do we continue to
indulge the myth that the fabulous wealth generated by this mode of production
will in the fullness of time become available to all? Would the world treat
similar claims by the far left with such genial, let's-wait-and-see forbearance?
Right-wingers who concede that there will always be colossal injustices in the
system, but that that's just tough and the alternatives are even worse, are at
least more honest in their hard-faced way than those who preach that it will
all finally come right. If there happened to be both rich and poor people, as
there happen to be both black and white ones, then the advantages of the
well-heeled might well spread in time to the hard-up. But to point out that
some people are destitute while others are prosperous is rather like claiming
that the world contains both detectives and criminals. So it does; but this
obscures the truth that there are detectives
because
there are criminals
. . .

TWO

Marxism may be all very
well in theory. Whenever it has been put into practice, however, the result has
been terror, tyranny and mass murder on an inconceivable scale. Marxism might
look like a good idea to well-heeled Western academics who can take freedom and
democracy for granted. For millions of ordinary men and women, it has meant
famine, hardship, torture, forced labour, a broken economy and a monstrously
oppressive state. Those who continue to support the theory despite all this are
either obtuse, self-deceived or morally contemptible. Socialism means lack of
freedom; it also means a lack of material goods, since this is bound to be the
result of abolishing markets.

Lots of men and women in
the West are fervent supporters of bloodstained setups. Christians, for
example. Nor is it unknown for decent, compassionate types to support whole
civilisations steeped in blood. Tiberals and conservatives, among others.
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide,
violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet
Union. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has
survived long enough to forget about much of this horror, which is not the case
with Stalinism and Maoism. If Marx was spared this amnesia, it was partly
because he lived while the system was still in the making.

Mike Davis writes in his
Late Victorian Holocausts
of the tens of millions of Indians, Africans,
Chinese, Brazilians, Koreans, Russians and others who died as a result of
entirely preventable famine, drought and disease in the late nineteenth
century. Many of these catastrophes were the result of free market dogma, as
(for example) soaring grain prices thrust food beyond the reach of the common
people. Nor are all such monstrosities as old as the Victorians. During the last
two decades of the twentieth century, the number of those in the world living
on less than two dollars a day has increased by almost one hundred million.
¹
One in three children in Britain today lives below the breadline, while bankers
sulk if their annual bonus falls to a paltry million pounds.

Capitalism, to be sure,
has bequeathed us some inestimably precious goods along with these
abominations. Without the middle classes Marx so deeply admired, we would lack
a heritage of liberty, democracy, civil rights, feminism, republicanism,
scientific progress and a good deal more, as well as a history of slumps,
sweatshops, fascism, imperial wars and Mel Gibson. But the so-called socialist
system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union dragged their
citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at
however horrific a human cost; and the cost was so steep partly because of the
hostility of the capitalist West. That hostility also forced the Soviet Union
into an arms race which crippled its arthritic economy even further, and
finally pressed it to the point of collapse.

In the meantime, however,
it managed along with its satellites to achieve cheap housing, fuel, transport
and culture, full employment and impressive social services for half the
citizens of Europe, as well as an incomparably greater degree of equality and
(in the end) material well-being than those nations had previously enjoyed.
Communist East Germany could boast of one of the finest child care systems in
the world. The Soviet Union played a heroic role in combating the evil of
fascism, as well as in helping to topple colonialist powers. It also fostered
the kind of solidarity among its citizens that Western nations seem able to
muster only when they are killing the natives of other lands. All this, to be
sure, is no substitute for freedom, democracy and vegetables in the shop, but
neither is it to be ignored. When freedom and democracy finally rode to the
rescue of the Soviet bloc, they did so in the shape of economic shock therapy,
a form of daylight robbery politely known as privatization, joblessness for
tens of millions, stupendous increases in poverty and inequality, the closure
of free nurseries, the loss of women's rights and the near-ruin of the social
welfare networks that had served these countries so well.