Why Marx Was Right (23 page)

There are times when Marx
writes as though the state is simply a direct instrument of the ruling class.
In his historical writings, however, he is usually a good deal more nuanced.
The task of the political state is not just to serve the immediate interests of
the governing class. It must also act to preserve social cohesion; and though
these two goals are ultimately at one, there can be acute conflict between them
in the short or middle term. Besides, the state under capitalism has more
independence of class relations than it does under, say, feudalism. The feudal
lord is both a political and an economic figure, whereas in capitalism these
functions are usually distinguished. Your Member of Parliament is not generally
your employer. This means that the capitalist state's appearance of being set
above class relations is not
just
an appearance. How independent of
material interests the state is depends on changing historical conditions. Marx
seems to argue that in the so-called Asiatic mode of production, involving as
it does vast irrigation works that only the state can establish, the state
really is the dominant social force. So-called vulgar Marxists tend to assume a
one-to-one relation between the state and the economically sovereign class, and
there are occasions when this is actually the case. There are times when the
possessing class directly runs the state. George Bush and his fellow oilmen
were a case in point. One of Bush's most remarkable achievements, in other
words, was to prove vulgar Marxism right. He also seems to have worked hard to
make the capitalist system appear in the worst possible light, another fact
which makes one wonder whether he was secretly working for the North Koreans.

The relations in question,
however, are usually more complex than the Bush administration might suggest.
(In fact, almost everything in human existence is more complex than it tended
to suggest.) There are periods, for example, when one class rules on behalf of
another. In nineteenth-century England, as Marx himself pointed out, the Whig
aristocracy was still the governing political class, while the industrial
middle class was increasingly the dominant economic one; and the former,
generally speaking, represented the interests of the latter. Marx also argued
that Louis Bonaparte ruled France in the interests of finance capitalism while
presenting himself as a representative of the smallholding peasantry. Rather
similarly, the Nazis ruled in the interests of high capitalism, but did so
through an ideology which was distinctively lower-middle class in outlook. They
could thus fulminate against upper-class parasites and the idle rich in ways
which could be mistaken by the politically unwary as genuinely radical. Nor
were the politically unwary wholly mistaken in this view. Fascism is indeed a
form of radicalism. It has no time for liberal middle-class civilisation. It is
just that it is a radicalism of the right rather than the left.

Unlike a great many
liberals, Marx was not allergic to power as such. It is scarcely in the
interests of the powerless to be told that all power is distasteful, not least
by those who already have enough of the stuff to spare. Those to whom the word
"power" always has a derogatory ring are fortunate indeed. Power in
the cause of human emancipation is not to be confused with tyranny. The slogan
"Black Power!'' is a lot less feeble than the cry ''Down with Power!'' We
would only know that such power was truly emancipatory, however, if it managed
to transform not only the present political setup, but the very meaning of
power itself. Socialism does not involve replacing one set of rulers with
another. Speaking of the Paris Commune, Marx observes that ''it was not a
revolution to transfer [the state] from one fraction of the ruling class to
another but a Revolution to break down this horrid machinery of Classdomination
[sic] itself.''
³

Socialism involves a
change in the very notion of sovereignty. There is only a dim resemblance
between what the word ''power'' means in London today and what it meant in
Paris in 1871. The most fruitful form of power is power over oneself, and
democracy means the collective exercise of this capacity. It was the
Enlightenment that insisted that the only form of sovereignty worth submitting
to is one we have fashioned ourselves. Such self-determination is the most
precious meaning of freedom. And though human beings may abuse their freedom,
they are not fully human without it. They are bound to make rash or brainless
decisions from time to time —decisions that a shrewd autocrat might well not
have taken. But unless these decisions are
their
decisions, there is
likely to be something hollow and inauthentic about them, however sagacious
they may be.

So power survives from the
capitalist present to the socialist future—but not in the same form. The idea
of power itself undergoes a revolution. The same is true of the state. In one
sense of the word ''state,'' ''state socialism'' is as much a contradiction in
terms as ''the epistemological theories of Tiger Woods.'' In another sense,
however, the term has some force. For Marx, there is still a state under
socialism; only beyond socialism, under communism, will the coercive state give
way to an administrative body. But it is not a state we ourselves would easily
recognize as such. It is as though someone were to point to a decentralised
network of self-governing communities, flexibly regulated by a democratically
elected central administration, and announce
"There
is the
state!,'' when we were expecting something altogether more imposing and
monumental—something, for example, along the lines of Westminster, Whitehall
and the mysteriously enigmatic Prince Andrew.

Part of Marx's quarrel
with the anarchists was over the question of how fundamental power is in any
case. Is it what ultimately matters? Not in Marx's opinion. For him, political
power had to be set in a broader historical context. One had to ask what material
interests it served, and it was these that in his view lay at the root of it.
If he was critical of conservatives who idealized the state, he was also
impatient with anarchists who overrated its importance. Marx refuses to
''reify'' power, severing it from its social surroundings and treating it as a
thing in itself. And this is undoubtedly one of the strengths of his work. Yet
it is accompanied, as strengths often are, by a certain blind spot. What Marx
overlooks about power is what his compatriots Nietzsche and Freud both
recognized in strikingly different ways. Power may not be a thing in itself;
but there is an element within it which luxuriates in dominion simply for its
own sake—which delights in flexing its muscles with no particular end in view,
and which is always in excess of the practical goals to which it is harnessed.
Shakespeare acknowledged this when he wrote of the relationship between
Prospero and Ariel in
The Tempest.
Ariel is the obedient agent of
Prospero's power, but he is restless to escape this sovereignty and simply do
his own thing. In puckish, sportive spirit, he wants simply to relish his
magical powers as ends in themselves, not have them tied down to his master's
strategic purposes. To see power simply as instrumental is to pass over this
vital feature of it; and to do so may be to misunderstand why power should be
as formidably coercive as it is.

TEN

All the most interesting
radical movements of the past four decades have sprung up from outside Marxism.
Feminism, environmentalism, gay and ethnic politics, animal rights,
antiglobalisation, the peace movement: these have now taken over from an
antiquated commitment to class struggle, and represent new forms of political
activism which have left Marxism well behind. Its contributions to them have
been marginal and uninspiring. There is indeed still a political left, but it
is one appropriate to a postclass, postindustrial world.

O ne of the most
flourishing of the new political currents is known as the anticapitalist
movement, so it is hard to see how there has been a decisive break with
Marxism. However critical of Marxist ideas this movement might be, the shift
from Marxism to anticapitalism is hardly a huge one. In fact, Marxism's
dealings with other radical trends have been largely to its credit. Take, for
example, its relations with the women's movement. These, to be sure, have
proved fraught enough from time to time. Some male Marxists have contemptuously
brushed aside the whole question of sexuality, or sought to appropriate
feminist politics for their own ends. There is plenty in the Marxist tradition
that is at best complacently gender-blind and at worst odiously patriarchal.
Yet this is far from being the whole story, as some separatist feminists in the
1970s and '80s liked self-servingly to suppose. Many male Marxists have learned
enduringly from feminism, both personally and politically. And Marxism in turn
has made a major contribution to feminist thought and practice.

Some decades ago, when the
Marxist-feminist dialogue was at its most energetic, a whole set of vital
questions were raised.
¹
What was the Marxist view of domestic
labour, which Marx himself had largely ignored? Did women form a social class
in the Marxist sense? How was a theory largely concerned with industrial
production to make sense of child care, consumption, sexuality, the family? Was
the family central to capitalist society, or would capitalism herd people into
communal barracks if it found it more profitable and could get away with it?
(There is an assault on the middle-class family in the
Communist Manifesto,
a case which the philandering Friedrich Engels, eager to achieve a dialectical
unity of theory and practice, zealously adopted in his private life.) Could
there be freedom for women without the overthrow of class-society? What were
the relations between capitalism and patriarchy, given that the latter is a
great deal more ancient than the former? Some Marxist-feminists held that
women's oppression could end only with the fall of capitalism. Others, perhaps
more plausibly, claimed that capitalism could dispense with this mode of
oppression and still survive. On this view, there is nothing in the nature of
capitalism which requires the subjection of women. But the two histories, that
of patriarchy and class-society, are so tightly interwoven in practice that it
would be hard to imagine the overthrow of the one without great shock waves
rolling through the other.

Much of Marx's own work is
gender-blind—though this can sometimes be explained by the fact that capitalism
is too, at least in certain respects. We have already noted the system's
relative indifference to gender, ethnicity, social pedigree and so on when it
comes to who it can exploit or to whom it can peddle its wares. If Marx's
worker is eternally male, however, it is because Marx himself was an
old-fashioned Victorian patriarch, not just because of the nature of
capitalism. Even so, he sees sexually reproductive relations as of the first
importance, and in
The German Ideology
even claims that to begin with
the family is the only social relation. When it comes to the production of life
itself—''both of one's own in labour and of fresh life in procreation''—the two
grand historical narratives of sexual and material production, without either of
which human history would grind rapidly to a halt, are seen by Marx as closely
interwoven. What men and women create most notably are other men and women. In
doing so, they generate the labour power that any social system needs to
sustain itself. Both sexual and material reproduction have their own distinct
histories, which are not to be merged into one; but both are sites of age-old
strife and injustice, and their respective victims thus have a joint interest
in political emancipation.

Engels, who practiced
sexual as well as political solidarity with the proletariat by taking a
working-class lover, thought the emancipation of women inseparable from the
ending of class-society. (Since his lover was also Irish, he considerately
added an anticolonial dimension to their relationship.) His work
The Origin
of the Family, Private Property and the State
is an impressive piece of
social anthropology, full of flaws but rife with good intentions, which while
never challenging the conventional division of sexual labour, regards the
oppression of women by men as ''the first class subjection.'' The Bolsheviks
took the so-called woman question equally seriously: the uprising that was to
topple the Tsar was launched with mass demonstrations on International Women's
Day in 1917. Once in power, the party gave equality for women a high political
priority and set up an International Women's Secretariat. That Secretariat in
turn summoned the First International Working Women's Congress, attended by
delegates from twenty countries, whose appeal ''To the Working Women of the
World'' viewed the goals of communism and the liberation of women as closely
allied.

''Up until the resurgence
of the women's movements in the 1960s,'' writes Robert J. C. Young, ''it is
striking how it was only men from the socialist or communist camps who regarded
the issue of women's equality as intrinsic to other forms of political
liberation.''
²
In the early twentieth century, the communist
movement was the only place where the issue of gender, along with questions of
nationalism and colonialism, was systematically raised and debated.
''Communism,'' Young continues, ''was the first, and only, political programme
to recognize the interrelation of these different forms of domination and
exploitation [class, gender and colonialism] and the necessity of abolishing
all of them as the fundamental basis for the successful realization of the
liberation of each."
³
Most so-called socialist societies have
pressed for substantial progress in women's rights, and many of them took the
''woman question'' with commendable seriousness long before the West got round
to addressing it with any ardour. When it comes to issues of gender and
sexuality, the actual record of communism has been seriously flawed; but it
remains the case, as Michèle Barrett has argued, that ''outside feminist
thought there is no tradition of critical analysis of women's oppression that
could match the incisive attention given to the question by one Marxist thinker
after another.''
⁴