Why Marx Was Right (20 page)

Nor should one forget the
enormous slum population of the world, growing at an extraordinarily fast rate.
If slum dwellers do not already form a majority of the global urban population,
they soon will. These men and women are not part of the working class in the
classical sense of the term, but neither do they fall entirely outside the
productive process. They tend rather to drift in and out of it, working
typically in low-paid, unskilled, unprotected casual services without
contracts, rights, regulations or bargaining power. They include hawkers,
hustlers, garment workers, food and drink sellers, prostitutes, child
labourers, rickshaw pullers, domestic servants and small-time self-employed
entrepreneurs. Marx himself distinguishes between different layers of the
unemployed; and what he has to say about the ''floating'' unemployed or casual
labourer of his own day, who count for him as part of the working class, sounds
very similar to the condition of many of today's slum dwellers. If they are not
routinely exploited, they are certainly economically oppressed; and taken
together they form the fastest growing social group on earth. If they can be
easy fodder for right-wing religious movements, they can also muster some
impressive acts of political resistance. In Latin America, this informal
economy now employs over half the workforce. They form an informal proletariat
which has shown itself well capable of political organisation; and if they were
to revolt against their dire conditions, there is no doubt the world capitalist
system would be shaken to its roots.

Marx held that the
concentration of working people in factories was a precondition of their
political emancipation. By bringing workers physically together for its own
self-interested purposes, capitalism created the conditions in which they could
organise themselves politically, which was not quite what the system's rulers
had in mind. Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the
working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism. Those who
dwell in the slums of the world's megacities are not organised at the point of
production, but there is no reason to suppose that this is the only place where
the wretched of the earth can conspire to transform their situation. Like the
classical proletariat, they exist as a collective, have the strongest possible
interest in the passing of the present world order, and have nothing to lose
but their chains.
¹²

The demise of the working
class, then, has been much exaggerated. There are those who speak of a shift in
radical circles away from class to race, gender and postcolonialism. We shall
be examining this a little later. In the meantime, we should note that only
those for whom class is a matter of frock-coated factory owners and
boiler-suited workers could embrace such a simpleminded notion. Convinced that
class is as dead as the Cold War, they turn instead to culture, identity,
ethnicity and sexuality. In today's world, however, these things are as
interwoven with social class as they ever were.

EIGHT

Marxists are advocates
of violent political action. They reject a sensible course of moderate,
piecemeal reform and opt instead for the bloodstained chaos of revolution. A
small band of insurrectionists will rise up, overthrow the state and impose its
will on the majority. This is one of several senses in which Marxism and
democracy are at daggers drawn. Because they despise morality as mere ideology,
Marxists are not especially troubled by the mayhem their politics would unleash
on the population. The end justifies the means, however many lives may be lost
in the process.

T
he idea of revolution usually
evokes images of violence and chaos. In this, it can be contrasted with social
reform, which we tend to think of as peaceful, moderate and gradual. This,
however, is a false opposition. Many reforms have been anything but peaceful.
Think of the United States civil rights movement, which was far from
revolutionary yet which involved death, beatings, lynchings and brutal
repression. In the colonial-dominated Latin America of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, every attempt at liberal reform sparked off violent
social conflict.

Some revolutions, by
contrast, have been relatively peaceful. There are velvet revolutions as well
as violent ones. Not many people died in the Dublin uprising of 1916, which was
to result in partial independence for Ireland. Surprisingly little blood was
spilt in the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. In fact, the actual takeover of key
points in Moscow was accomplished without a shot being fired. The government,
in the words of Isaac Deutscher, "was elbowed out of existence by a slight
push,''
¹
so overwhelming was the support of the common people for
the insurgents. When the Soviet system fell over seventy years later, this
sprawling landmass with a ferocious history of conflict collapsed without much
more bloodshed than had occurred on the day of its foundation.

It is true that a bloody
civil war followed hard on the heels of the Bolshevik revolution. But this was
because the new social order came under savage attack from right-wing forces as
well as foreign invaders. British and French forces backed the
counterrevolutionary White forces to the hilt.

For Marxism, a revolution
is not characterized by how much violence it involves. Nor is it a total
upheaval. Russia did not wake up on the morning after the Bolshevik revolution
to find all market relations abolished and all industry publicly owned. On the
contrary, markets and private property survived for a considerable time after
the Bolshevik seizure of power, and for the most part the Bolsheviks approached
their dismantling in gradualist spirit. The left wing of the party took a
similar line with the peasantry. There was no question of driving them into
collective farms by force; instead, the process was to be gradual and
consensual.

Revolutions are usually a
long time in the brewing, and may take centuries to achieve their goals. The
middle classes of Europe did not abolish feudalism overnight. Seizing political
power is a short-term affair; transforming the customs, institutions and habits
of feeling of a society takes a great deal longer. You can socialise industry
by government decree, but legislation alone cannot produce men and women who
feel and behave differently from their grandparents. That involves a lengthy
process of education and cultural change.

Those who doubt that such
change is possible should take a long hard look at themselves. For we in modern
Britain are ourselves the products of a long revolution, one which came to a
head in the seventeenth century; and the chief sign of its success is that most
of us are completely unaware of the fact. Successful revolutions are those
which end up by erasing all traces of themselves. In doing so, they make the
situation they struggled to bring about seem entirely natural. In this, they
are a bit like childbirth. To operate as "normal" human beings, we
have to forget the anguish and terror of our births. Origins are usually
traumatic, whether of individuals or political states. Marx reminds us in
Capital
that the modern British state, built on the intensive exploitation
of peasants-turned-proletarians, came into existence dripping blood and dirt
from every pore. This is one reason why he would have been horrified to observe
Stalin's forced urbanization of the Russian peasantry. Most political states
came about through revolution, invasion, occupation, usurpation or (in the case
of societies like the United States) extermination. Successful states are those
that have managed to wipe this bloody history from the minds of their citizens.
States whose unjust origins are too recent for this to be possible—Israel and
Northern Ireland, for example—are likely to be plagued with political conflict.

If we ourselves are the
products of a supremely successful revolution, then this in itself is an answer
to the conservative charge that all revolutions end up by failing, or reverting
to how things were before, or making things a thousand times worse, or eating
up their own children. Perhaps I missed the announcement in the newspapers, but
France does not seem to have reinstated the feudal aristocracy in government,
or Germany the landowning Junkers. Britain, it is true, has more feudal
remnants than most modern nations, from the House of Lords to Black Rod, but
this is largely because they prove useful to the ruling middle classes. Like
the monarchy, they generate the kind of mystique that is supposed to keep the
mass of the people suitably daunted and deferential. That most British people
do not see Prince Andrew as exuding a seductive air of mystery and enigma
suggests that there may be more reliable ways of propping up your power.

Most people in the West at
present would no doubt declare themselves opposed to revolution. What this
probably means is that they are against some revolutions and in favour of
others. Other people's revolutions, like other people's food in restaurants,
are usually more attractive than one's own. Most of these people would
doubtless approve of the revolution that unseated British power in America at
the end of the eighteenth century, or the fact that colonized nations from
Ireland and India to Kenya and Malaysia finally won their independence. It is
unlikely that many of them wept bitter tears over the fall of the Soviet bloc.
Slave uprisings from Spartacus to the southern states of America are likely to
meet with their approval. Yet all these insurrections involved vio-lence—in
some cases, more violence than the Bolshevik revolution did. So would it not be
more honest to come clean and confess that it is socialist revolution one
objects to, not revolution itself?

There is, of course, a
small minority of people known as pacifists who reject violence altogether.
Their courage and firmness of principle, often in the teeth of public
revilement, are much to be admired. But pacifists are not just people who abhor
violence. Almost everyone does that, with the exception of a thin sprinkling of
sadists and psychopaths. For pacifism to be worth arguing with, it must be more
than some pious declaration that war is disgusting. Cases with which almost
everyone would agree are boring, however sound they may be. The only pacifist
worth arguing with is one who rejects violence absolutely. And that means
rejecting not just wars or revolutions, but refusing to tap an escaped murderer
smartly over the skull, enough to stun but not kill him, when he is about to
turn his machine gun on a classroom of small children. Anyone who was in a
situation to do this and failed to do so would have a lot of explaining to do
at the next meeting of the PTA. In any strict sense of the word, pacifism is
grossly immoral. Almost everyone agrees with the need to use violence in
extreme and exceptional circumstances. The United Nations Charter permits armed
resistance to an occupying power. It is just that any such aggression has to be
hedged round with some severe qualifications. It must be primarily defensive,
it must be the last resort after all else has been tried and failed, it must be
the only means to undo some major evil, it must be proportionate, it must have
a reasonable chance of success, it should not involve the slaughter of innocent
civilians and so on.

In its brief but bloody
career, Marxism has involved a hideous amount of violence. Both Stalin and Mao
Zedong were mass murderers on an almost unimaginable scale. Yet very few
Marxists today, as we have seen already, would seek to defend these horrific
crimes, whereas many non-Marxists would defend, say, the destruction of Dresden
or Hiroshima. I have already argued that Marxists have offered far more
persuasive explanations of how the atrocities of men like Stalin came about,
and thus how they can be prevented from happening again, than any other school
of thought. But what of the crimes of capitalism? What of the atrocious
bloodbath known as the First World War, in which the clash of imperial nations
hungry for territory sent working-class soldiers to a futile death? The history
of capitalism is among other things a story of global warfare, colonial
exploitation, genocide and avoidable famines. If a distorted version of Marxism
gave birth to the Stalinist state, an extreme mutation of capitalism produced
the fascist one. If a million men and women died in the Great Irish Famine of
the 1840s, it was to a large extent because the British government of the day
insisted on observing the laws of the free market in its lamentable relief
policy. We have seen that Marx writes with scarcely suppressed outrage in
Capital
of the bloody, protracted process by which the English peasantry
were driven from the land. It is this history of violent expropriation which
lies beneath the tranquility of the English rural landscape. Compared to this
horrendous episode, one which stretched over a lengthy period of time, an event
like the Cuban revolution was a tea party.

For Marxists, antagonism
is built into the very nature of capitalism. This is true not only of the class
conflict it involves, but of the wars to which it gives rise, as capitalist
nations clash over global resources or spheres of imperial influence. By
contrast, one of the most urgent goals of the international socialist movement
has been peace. When the

Bolsheviks came to power,
they withdrew Russia from the carnage of the First World War. Socialists, with
their hatred of militarism and chauvinism, have played a major role in most
peace movements throughout modern history. The working-class movement has not
been about violence, but about putting an end to it.