Why Marx Was Right (22 page)

NINE

Marxism believes in an
all-powerful state. Having abolished private property, socialist revolutionaries
will rule by means of a despotic power, and that power will put an end to
individual freedom. This has happened wherever Marxism has been put into
practice; there is no reason to expect that things would be different in the
future. It is part of the logic of Marxism that the people give way to the
party, the party gives way to the state, and the state to a monstrous dictator.
Liberal democracy may not be perfect, but it is infinitely preferable to being
locked in a psychiatric hospital for daring to criticize a savagely
authoritarian government.

M
arx was an implacable opponent of
the state. In fact, he famously looked forward to a time when it would wither
away. His critics might find this hope absurdly utopian, but they cannot
convict him at the same time of a zeal for despotic government.

He was not, as it happens,
being absurdly utopian. What Marx hoped would wither away in communist society
was not the state in the sense of a central administration. Any complex modern
culture would require this. In fact, Marx writes in the third volume of
Capital,
with this point in mind, of ''common activities arising from the
nature of all communities.'' The state as an administrative body would live on.
It is the state as an instrument of violence that Marx hopes to see the back
of. As he puts it in the
Communist Manifesto,
public power under
communism would lose its political character. Against the anarchists of his
day, Marx insists that only in this sense would the state vanish from view.
What had to go was a particular kind of power, one that underpinned the rule of
a dominant social class over the rest of society. National parks and driving
test centres would remain.

Marx views the state with
cold-eyed realism. It was obviously not a politically neutral organ,
scrupulously even-handed in its treatment of clashing social interests. It was
not in the least dispassionate in the conflict between labour and capital.
States are not in the business of launching revolutions against property. They
exist among other things to defend the current social order against those who
seek to transform it. If that order is inherently unjust, then in this respect
the state is unjust as well. It is this that Marx wants to see an end to, not
national theatres or police laboratories.

There is nothing darkly
conspiratorial about the idea that the state is partisan. Anyone who thinks so
has clearly not taken part in a political demonstration recently. The liberal
state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like
they're winning. Then it moves in with its water hoses and paramilitary squads,
and if these fail with its tanks. Nobody doubts that the state can be violent.
It is just that Marx gives a new kind of answer to the question of who this
violence ultimately serves. It is belief in the state's disinterestedness which
is starry-eyed, not the proposal that we might one day get along without its
knee-jerk aggression. In fact, even the state has ceased in some ways to
believe in its own disinterestedness. Police who beat up striking workers or
peaceful demonstrators no longer even pretend to be neutral. Governments, not
least Labour ones, do not bother to conceal their hostility to the labour
movement. As Jacques Rancière comments, "Marx's once scandalous thesis
that governments are simple business agents for international capital is today
an obvious fact on which 'liberals' and 'socialists' agree. The absolute
identification of politics with the management of capital is no longer the
shameful secret hidden behind the 'forms' of democracy; it is the openly declared
truth by which our governments acquire legitimacy."
¹

This is not to suggest
that we can dispense with police, law courts, prisons or even paramilitary
squads. The latter, for example, might prove necessary if a gang of terrorists
armed with chemical or nuclear weapons was on the loose, and the more
tender-minded species of left-winger had better acknowledge the fact. Not all
state violence is in the name of protecting the status quo. Marx himself draws
a distinction in volume three of
Capital
between the class-specific and
class-neutral functions of the state. Police officers who prevent racist thugs
from beating a young Asian to death are not acting as agents of capitalism.
Dedicated suites for women who have been raped are not sinister examples of state
repression. Detectives who cart off computers loaded with child pornography are
not brutally violating human rights. As long as there is human freedom there
will also be abuses of it; and some of these abuses will be horrendous enough
for the perpetrators to need locking away for the safety of others. Prisons are
not just places for penalizing the socially deprived, though they are certainly
that as well.

There is no evidence that
Marx would have rejected any of these claims. In fact, he believed that the state
could be a powerful force for good. This is why he vigorously supported
legislation to improve social conditions in Victorian England. There is nothing
repressive about running orphanages for abandoned children, or ensuring that
everyone drives on the same side of the road. What Marx rejected was the
sentimental myth of the state as a source of harmony, peacefully uniting
different groups and classes. In his view, it was more a source of division
than of concord. It did indeed seek to hold society together, but it did so
ultimately in the interests of the governing class. Beneath its apparent
evenhandedness lay a robust partisanship. The institution of the state ''bound
new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich . . . fixed forever
the laws of property and inequality; converted clever usurpation into
inalienable right; and for the sake of a few ambitious men, subjected all
mankind to perpetual labour, servitude and misery.'' These are not Marx's
words, but (as we have seen already) those of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his
Discourse on Inequality.
Marx was no lone eccentric in seeing a relation
between state power and class privilege. It is true that he did not always hold
these views. As a young disciple of Hegel, he spoke of the state in glowingly
positive terms. But this was before he became a Marxist. And even when he
became a Marxist, he insisted that he wasn't one.

Those who speak of harmony
and consensus should beware of what one might call the industrial chaplain view
of reality. The idea, roughly speaking, is that there are greedy bosses on one
side and belligerent workers on the other, while in the middle, as the very
incarnation of reason, equity and moderation, stands the decent, soft-spoken,
liberal-minded chaplain who tries selflessly to bring the two warring parties
together. But why should the middle always be the most sensible place to stand?
Why do we tend to see ourselves as in the middle and other people as on the
extremes? After all, one person's moderation is another's extremism. People
don't go around calling themselves a fanatic, any more than they go around
calling themselves Pimply. Would one also seek to reconcile slaves and slave
masters, or persuade native peoples to complain only moderately about those who
are plotting their extermination? What is the middle ground between racism and
antiracism?

If Marx had no time for
the state, it was partly because he viewed it as a kind of alienated power. It
was as though this august entity had confiscated the abilities of men and women
to determine their own existence, and was now doing so on their behalf. It also
had the impudence to call this process ''democracy.'' Marx himself began his
career as a radical democrat and ended up as a revolutionary one, as he came to
realize just how much transformation genuine democracy would entail; and it is
as a democrat that he challenges the state's sublime authority. He is too
wholehearted a believer in popular sovereignty to rest content with the pale
shadow of it known as parliamentary democracy. He is not in principle opposed
to parliaments, any more than was Lenin. But he saw democracy as too precious
to be entrusted to parliaments alone. It had to be local, popular and spread
across all the institutions of civil society. It had to extend to economic as
well as political life. It had to mean actual self-government, not government
entrusted to a political elite. The state Marx approved of was the rule of
citizens over themselves, not of a minority over a majority.

The state, Marx
considered, had come adrift from civil society. There was a blatant
contradiction between the two. We were, for example, abstractly equal as
citizens within the state, but dramatically unequal in everyday social
existence. That social existence was riven with conflicts, but the state
projected an image of it as seamlessly whole. The state saw itself as shaping
society from above, but was in fact a product of it. Society did not stem from
the state; instead, the state was a parasite on society. The whole setup was
topsy-turvy. As one commentator puts it, ''Democracy and capitalism have been
turned upside down''—meaning that instead of political institutions regulating
capitalism, capitalism regulated them. The speaker is Robert Reich, a former
U.S. labour secretary, who is not generally suspected of being a Marxist.
Marx's aim was to close this gap between state and society, politics and
everyday life, by dissolving the former into the latter. And this is what he
called democracy. Men and women had to reclaim in their daily lives the powers
that the state had appropriated from them. Socialism is the completion of
democracy, not the negation of it. It is hard to see why so many defenders of
democracy should find this vision objectionable.

It is a commonplace among
Marxists that real power today lies with the banks, corporations and financial
institutions, whose directors had never been elected by anyone, and whose
decisions can affect the lives of millions. By and large, political power is
the obedient servant of the Masters of the Universe. Governments might chide
them from time to time, or even slap an Anti-Social Behavior Order on them; but
if they sought to put them out of business they would be in dire danger of
being clapped in prison themselves by their own security forces. At most, the
state can hope to mop up some of the human damage the present system wreaks. It
does so partly on humanitarian grounds, and partly to restore the system's
tarnished credibility. This is what we know as social democracy. The fact that,
generally speaking, politics is in hock to economics is the reason why the state
as we know it cannot simply be hijacked for socialist ends. Marx writes in
The
Civil War in France
that the working class cannot simply lay hands on the
ready-made machinery of the state and wield it for its own purposes. This is
because that machinery already has a built-in bias to the status quo. Its
anaemic, woefully impoverished version of democracy suits the antidemocratic
interests that currently hold sway.

Marx's main model for
popular self-government was the Paris Commune of 1871, when for a few tumultuous
months the working people of the French capital took command of their own
destiny. The Commune, as Marx describes it in
The Civil War in France,
was made up of local councillors, mostly working men, who were elected by
popular vote and could be recalled by their constituents. Public service had to
be performed at workmen's wages, the standing army was abolished, and the
police were made responsible to the Commune. The powers previously exercised by
the French state were assumed instead by the Communards. Priests were banished
from public life, while educational institutions were thrown open to the common
people and freed of interference by both church and state. Magistrates, judges
and public servants were to be elective, responsible to the people and
recallable by them.

The Commune also intended
to abolish private property in the name of cooperative production.

''Instead of deciding once
in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the
people in Parliament,'' Marx writes, ''universal suffrage was to serve the
people, constituted in Communes.'' The Commune, he goes on, ''was essentially a
working-class government . . . the political form at last discovered under
which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.''
²
Though he
was by no means uncritical of this ill-fated enterprise (he pointed out, for
example, that most of the Communards were not socialists), he found in it many
of the elements of a socialist politics. And it was from working-class
practice, not from some theoretical drawing board, that this scenario had
sprung. For a brief, enthralling moment, the state had ceased to be an
alienated power and had taken instead the form of popular self-government.

What took place in those
few months in Paris was what Marx describes as the ''dictatorship of the
proletariat.'' Few of his well-known phrases have sent more of a chill through
the veins of his critics. Yet what he means by this sinister-sounding term was
nothing more than popular democracy. The dictatorship of the proletariat meant
simply rule by the majority. In any case, the word ''dictatorship'' in Marx's
time did not necessarily suggest what it does today. It meant an extralegal
breach of a political constitution. Marx's political sparring partner Auguste Blanqui,
a man who had the distinction of being gaoled by every French government from
1815 to 1880, coined the phrase ''dictatorship of the proletariat" to mean
rule on behalf of the common people; Marx himself used it to mean government by
them. Blanqui was elected president of the Paris Commune, but had to settle for
the role of figurehead. As usual, he was in prison at the time.