Why Marx Was Right (5 page)

Maybe Marx did not take
his own claim literally. The
Communist Manifesto,
after all, is intended
as a piece of political propaganda, and as such is full of rhetorical
flourishes. Even so, there is an important question about how much Marxist
thought does in fact include. Some Marxists seem to have treated it as a Theory
of Everything, but this is surely not so. The fact that Marxism has nothing
very interesting to say about malt whiskies or the nature of the unconscious,
the haunting fragrance of a rose or why there is something rather than nothing,
is not to its discredit. It is not intended to be a total philosophy. It does
not give us accounts of beauty or the erotic, or of how the poet Yeats achieves
the curious resonance of his verse. It has been mostly silent on questions of
love, death and the meaning of life. It has, to be sure, a very grand narrative
to deliver, which stretches all the way from the dawning of civilisation to the
present and future. But there are other grand narratives besides Marxism, such
as the history of science or religion or sexuality, which interact with the
story of class struggle but cannot be reduced to it. (Postmodernists tend to
assume that there is either one grand narrative or just a lot of
mini-narratives. But this is not the case.) So whatever Marx himself may have
thought, ''all history has been the history of class struggle'' should not be
taken to mean that everything that has ever happened is a matter of class
struggle. It means, rather, that class struggle is what is most
fundamental
to human history.

Fundamental in what sense,
though? How, for example, is it more fundamental than the history of religion,
science or sexual oppression? Class is not necessarily fundamental in the sense
of providing the strongest motive for political action. Think of the role of
ethnic identity in that respect, to which Marxism has paid too little regard.
Anthony Giddens claims that interstate conflicts, along with racial and sexual
inequalities, ''are of equal importance to class exploitation.''
¹
But equally important for what? Of equal moral and political importance, or
equally important for the achievement of socialism? We sometimes call a thing
fundamental if it is the necessary basis for something else; but it is hard to
see that class struggle is the necessary basis of religious faith, scientific
discovery or women's oppression, much involved with it though these things are.
It does not seem true that if we kicked this foundation away, Buddhism,
astrophysics and the Miss World contest would come tumbling down. They have
relatively independent histories of their own.

So what
is
class
struggle fundamental to? Marx's answer would seem to be twofold. It shapes a great
many events, institutions and forms of thought which seem at first glance to be
innocent of it; and it plays a decisive role in the turbulent transition from
one epoch of history to another. By history, Marx means not ''everything that
has ever happened,'' but a specific trajectory underlying it. He is using
''history'' in the sense of the significant
course
of events, not as a
synonym for the whole of human existence to date.

So is the idea of class
struggle what distinguishes Marx's thought from other social theories? Not
quite. We have seen that this notion is not original to him, any more than the
concept of a mode of production is. What
is
unique about his thought is
that he locks these two ideas—class struggle and mode of production—together,
to provide a historical scenario which is indeed genuinely new. Quite how the
two ideas go together has been a subject of debate among Marxists, and Marx
himself hardly waxes eloquent on the point. But if we are in search of what is
peculiar to his work, we could do worse than call a halt here. In essence,
Marxism is a theory and practice of long-term historical change. The trouble,
as we shall see, is that what is most peculiar to Marxism is also what is most
problematic.

Broadly speaking, a mode
of production for Marx means the combination of certain forces of production
with certain relations of production. A force of production means any
instrument by which we go to work on the world in order to reproduce our
material life. The idea covers everything that promotes human mastery or
control over Nature for productive purposes. Computers are a productive force
if they play a part in material production as a whole, rather than just being
used for chatting to serial killers disguised as friendly strangers. Donkeys in
nineteenth-century Ireland were a productive force. Human labour power is a
productive force. But these forces never exist in the raw. They are always
bound up with certain social relations, by which Marx means relations between
social classes. One social class, for example, may own and control the means of
production, while another may find itself exploited by it.

Marx believes that the
productive forces have a tendency to develop as history unfolds. This is not to
claim that they progress all the time, since he also seems to hold that they
can lapse into long periods of stagnation. The agent of this development is
whatever social class is in command of material production. On this version of
history, it is as though the productive forces "select'' the class most
capable of expanding them. There comes a point, however, when the prevailing
social relations, far from promoting the growth of the productive forces, begin
to act as an obstacle to them. The two run headlong into contradiction, and the
stage is set for political revolution. The class struggle sharpens, and a
social class capable of taking the forces of production forward assumes power
from its erstwhile masters. Capitalism, for example, staggers from crisis to
crisis, slump to slump, by virtue of the social relations it involves; and at a
certain point in its decline, the working class is on hand to take over the
ownership and control of production. At one point in his work, Marx even claims
that no new social class takes over until the productive forces have been
developed as far as possible by the previous one.

The case is put most
succinctly in the following well-known passage:

At a certain stage of
their development, the material productive forces of society enter into
contradiction with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal
expression of the same thing—with the property relations within which they have
been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces,
these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social
revolution.
²

There are numerous
problems with this theory, as Marxists themselves have been quick to point out.
For one thing, why does Marx assume that by and large the productive forces
keep evolving? It is true that technological development tends to be
cumulative, in the sense that human beings are reluctant to let go of what
advances they make in prosperity and efficiency. This is because as a species
we are somewhat rational but also mildly indolent, and thus inclined to be
labour-saving. (It is these factors which determine that supermarket checkout
queues are always roughly the same length.) Having invented e-mail, we are
unlikely to revert to scratching on rocks. We also have the ability to transmit
such advances to future generations. Technological knowledge is rarely lost,
even if the technology itself is destroyed. But this is so broad a truth that
it does not serve to illuminate very much. It does not explain, for example,
why the forces of production evolve very rapidly at certain times but may
stagnate for centuries at others. Whether or not there is major technological
development depends on the prevailing social relations, not on some built-in
drive. Some Marxists see the compulsion to improve the forces of production not
as a general law of history, but as an imperative specific to capitalism. They
take issue with the assumption that every mode of production must be followed
by a more productive one. Whether these Marxists include Marx himself is a
contestable point.

For another thing, it is
not clear by what mechanism certain social classes are "selected'' for the
task of promoting the productive forces. Those forces, after all, are not some
ghostly personage able to survey the social scene and summon a particular candidate
to their aid. Ruling classes do not of course promote the productive forces out
of altruism, any more than they seize power for the express purpose of feeding
the hungry and clothing the naked. Instead, they tend to pursue their own
material interests, reaping a surplus from the labour of others. The idea,
however, is that in doing so they unwittingly advance the productive forces as
a whole, and along with them (at least in the long run) the spiritual as well
as material wealth of humanity. They foster resources from which the majority
in class-society are shut out, but in doing so build up a legacy that men and
women as a whole will one day inherit in the communist future.

Marx clearly thinks that
material wealth can damage our moral health. Even so, he does not see a gulf
between the moral and the material, as some idealist thinkers do. In his view,
the unfurling of the productive forces involves the unfolding of creative human
powers and capacities. In one sense, history is not at all a tale of progress.
Instead, we lurch from one form of class-society, one kind of oppression and
exploitation, to another. In another sense, however, this grim narrative can be
seen as a movement onwards and upwards, as human beings acquire more complex
needs and desires, cooperate in more intricate, rewarding ways, and create new
kinds of relationship and fresh sorts of fulfillment.

Human beings as a whole
will come into this inheritance in the communist future; but the process of
building it up is inseparable from violence and exploitation. In the end,
social relations will be established that deploy this accumulated wealth for
the benefit of all. But the process of accumulation itself involves excluding
the great majority of men and women from enjoying its fruits. So it is, Marx
comments, that history "progresses by its bad side.'' It looks as though
injustice now is unavoidable for justice later. The end is at odds with the
means: if there were no exploitation there would be no sizeable expansion of
the productive forces, and if there were no such expansion there would be no
material basis for socialism.

Marx is surely right to
see that the material and spiritual are in both conflict and collusion. He does
not simply damn class-society for its moral atrocities, though he does that
too; he also recognizes that spiritual fulfillment requires a material
foundation. You cannot have a decent relationship if you are starving. Every
extension of human communication brings with it new forms of community and
fresh kinds of division. New technologies may thwart human potential, but they
can also enhance it. Modernity is not to be mindlessly celebrated, but neither
is it to be disdainfully dismissed. Its positive and negative qualities are for
the most part aspects of the same process. This is why only a dialectical
approach, one which grasps how contradiction is of its essence, can do it
justice.

All the same, there are
real problems with Marx's theory of history. Why, for example, does the same
mechanism— the conflict between the forces and relations of production— operate
in the shift from one era of class-society to another? What accounts for this
odd consistency over vast stretches of historical time? Anyway, is it not
possible to overthrow a dominant class while it is still in its prime, if the
political opposition is powerful enough? Do we really have to wait until the
productive forces falter? And might not the growth of the productive forces
actually undermine the class poised to take over—say, by fashioning new forms
of oppressive technology? It is true that with the growth of the productive
forces, workers tend to become more skilled, well-organised, educated and
(perhaps) politically self-assured and sophisticated; but for the same reason
there may also be more tanks, surveillance cameras, right-wing newspapers and
modes of outsourcing labour around. New technologies may force more people into
unemployment, and thus into political inertia. In any case, whether a social
class is ripe to make a revolution is shaped by a lot more than whether it has
the power to promote the forces of production. Class capacities are moulded by
a whole range of factors. And how can we know that a specific set of social
relations will be useful for that purpose?

A change of social
relations cannot simply be explained by an expansion of the productive forces.
Nor do pathbreak-ing changes in the productive forces necessarily result in new
social relations, as the Industrial Revolution might illustrate. The same
productive forces can coexist with different sets of social relations.
Stalinism and industrial capitalism, for example. When it comes to peasant
agriculture from ancient times to the modern age, a wide range of social
relations and forms of property has proved possible. Or the same set of social
relations might foster different kinds of productive forces. Think of
capitalist industry and capitalist agriculture. Pro
TERRY EAGLETON
ductive forces and productive
relations do not dance harmoniously hand in hand throughout history. The truth
is that each stage of development of the productive forces opens up a whole
range of possible social relations, and there is no guarantee that any one set
of them will actually come about. Neither is there any guarantee that a
potential revolutionary agent will be conveniently on hand when the historical
crunch comes. Sometimes there is simply no class around that could take the
productive forces further, as happened in the case of classical China.