Why Marx Was Right (7 page)

There is no evidence that
Marx is in general a determinist, in the sense of denying that human actions
are free. On the contrary, he clearly believes in freedom, and talks all the
time, not least in his journalism, about how individuals could (and sometimes
should) have acted differently, whatever the historical limits placed on their
choices. Engels, who some see as an out-and-out determinist, had a lifelong
interest in military strategy, which is hardly a question of fate.
⁸
Marx is to be found stressing courage and consistency as essential for
political victory, and seems to allow for the decisive influence of random
events on historical processes. The fact that the militant working class in
France was ravaged by cholera in 1849 is one such example.

There are, in any case,
different kinds of inevitability. You may consider that some things are
inevitable without being a determinist. Even libertarians believe that death is
unavoidable. If enough Texans try to cram themselves into a telephone box, some
of them will end up being seriously squashed. This is a matter of physics rather
than fate. It does not alter the fact that they crammed themselves in of their
own free will. Actions we freely perform often end up confronting us as alien
powers. Marx's theories of alienation and commodity fetishism are based on just
this truth.

There are other senses of
inevitability as well. To claim that the triumph of justice in Zimbabwe is
inevitable may not mean that it is bound to happen. It may be more of a moral
or political imperative, meaning that the alternative is too dreadful to
contemplate. ''Socialism or barbarism'' may not suggest that we will
undoubtedly end up living under one or the other. It may be a way of
emphasizing the unthinkable consequences of not achieving the former. Marx
argues in
The German Ideology
that ''at the present time . . .
individuals
must
abolish private property,'' but that
"must"
is more of a political exhortation than a suggestion that
they have no choice. Marx, then, may not be a determinist in general; but there
are a good many formulations in his work which convey a sense of
historical
determinism. He sometimes compares historical laws to natural ones, writing in
Capital
of the ''natural laws of capitalism . . . working with iron
necessity towards inevitable results.''
⁹
When a commentator
describes his work as treating the evolution of society like a process of
natural history, Marx seems to concur. He also approvingly quotes a reviewer of
his work who sees it as demonstrating ''the necessity of the present order of
things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably
pass.''
¹⁰
It is not clear how this austere determinism fits with the
centrality of class struggle.

There are times when
Engels sharply distinguishes historical laws from natural ones, and other times
when he argues for affinities between the two. Marx flirts with the idea of
finding a basis for history in Nature, but also highlights the fact that we
make the former but not the latter. Sometimes he criticizes the application of
biology to human history, and rejects the notion of universally valid
historical laws. Like many a nineteenth-century thinker, Marx hijacked the
authority of the natural sciences, then the supreme model of knowledge, to gain
some legitimacy for his work. But he might also have believed that so-called historical
laws could be known with the certainty of scientific ones.

Even so, it is hard to
credit that that he considered the so-called tendency of the rate of capitalist
profit to decline as being literally like the law of gravity. He cannot have
thought that history evolves as a thunderstorm does. It is true that he sees
the course of historical events as revealing a significant shape, but he is
hardly alone in holding that. Not many people see human history as completely
random. If there were no regularities or broadly predictable tendencies in
social life, we would be incapable of purposive action. It is not a choice
between iron laws on the one hand and sheer chaos on the other. Every society,
like every human action, opens up certain possible futures while shutting down
others. But this interplay of freedom and constraint is far from some kind of
cast-iron necessity. If you attempt to build socialism in wretched economic
conditions, then as we have seen you are very likely to end up with some species
of Stalinism. This is a well-testified historical pattern, confirmed by a whole
number of bungled social experiments. Liberals and conservatives who do not
usually relish talk of historical laws might change their tune when it comes to
this particular instance of them. But to claim that you are
bound
to end
up with Stalinism is to overlook the contingencies of history. Perhaps the
common people will rise up and take power into their own hands; or perhaps a
set of affluent nations will unexpectedly fly to your aid; or perhaps you might
discover that you are sitting on the largest oil field on the planet and use
this to build up your economy in a democratic way.

It is much the same with
the course of history. Marx does not seem to believe that the various modes of
production from ancient slavery to modern capitalism follow upon one another in
some unalterable pattern. Engels remarked that history ''moves often in leaps
and bounds and in a zigzag line.''
¹¹
For one thing, different modes
of production do not just follow each other in the first place. They can
coexist within the same society. For another thing, Marx claimed that his views
on the transition from feudalism to capitalism applied specifically to the West
and were not to be universalised. As far as modes of production go, not every
nation has to make the same trek from one to the other. The Bolsheviks were
able to leap from a part-feudalist Russia to a socialist state without living
through a prolonged interlude of extensive capitalism.

Marx believed at one point
that his own nation of Germany had to pass through a stage of bourgeois rule
before the working class could come to power. Later, however, he seems to have
abandoned this belief, recommending instead a ''permanent revolution'' which
would telescope these stages together. The typical Enlightenment view of
history is of an organically evolving process, in which each phase emerges
spontaneously from the next to constitute the whole we know as Progress. The
Marxist narrative, by contrast, is marked by violence, disruption, conflict and
discontinuity. There is indeed progress; but as Marx commented in his writings
on India, it is like a hideous god who drinks nectar from the skulls of the
slain.

How far Marx believes in
historical necessity is not only a political and economic matter; it is also a
moral one. He does not seem to suppose that feudalism or capitalism
had
to arise. Given a particular mode of production, there are various possible
routes out of it. There are, of course, limits to this latitude. You would not
move from consumer capitalism to hunter-gathering, unless perhaps a nuclear war
had intervened in the meanwhile. Developed productive forces would make such a
reversion both wholly unnecessary and deeply undesirable. But there is one move
in particular which Marx seems to see as inevitable. This is the need for
capitalism in order to have socialism. Driven by self-interest, ruthless
competition and the need for ceaseless expansion, only capitalism is capable of
developing the productive forces to the point where, under a different
political dispensation, the surplus they generate can be used to furnish a
sufficiency for all. To have socialism, you must first have capitalism. Or
rather,
you
may not need to have capitalism, but
somebody
must. Marx
thought that Russia might be able to achieve a form of socialism based on the
peasant commune rather than on a history of industrial capitalism; but he did
not imagine that this could be accomplished without the help of capitalist
resources from elsewhere. A particular nation does not need to have passed
through capitalism, but capitalism must exist somewhere or other if it is to go
socialist.

This raises some thorny
moral problems. Just as some Christians accept evil as somehow necessary to
God's plan for humanity, so you can read Marx as claiming that capitalism,
however rapacious and unjust, has to be endured for the sake of the socialist
future it will inevitably bring in its wake. Not only endured, in fact, but
actively encouraged. There are points in Marx's work where he cheers on the
growth of capitalism, since only thus will the path to socialism be thrown
open. In a lecture of 1847, for example, he defends free trade as hastening the
advent of socialism. He also wanted to see German unification on the grounds
that it would promote German capitalism. There are several places in his work
where this revolutionary socialist betrays rather too much relish at the
prospect of a progressive capitalist class putting paid to ''barbarism.''

The morality of this
appears distinctly dubious. How is it different from Stalin's or Mao's
murderous pogroms, executed in the name of the socialist future? How far does
the end justify the means? And given that few today believe that socialism is
inevitable, is this not even more reason for renouncing such a brutal sacrifice
of the present on the altar of a future that might never arrive? If capitalism
is essential for socialism, and if capitalism is unjust, does this not suggest
that injustice is morally acceptable? If there is to be justice in the future,
must there have been injustice in the past? Marx writes in
Theories of
Surplus Value
that ''the development of the capacities of the
human
species
takes place at the cost of the majority of individuals and even
classes.''
¹²
He means that the good of the species will finally
triumph in the shape of communism, but that this involves a great deal of
ineluctable suffering and injustice en route. The material prosperity that in
the end will fund freedom is the fruit of un-freedom.

There is a difference
between doing evil in the hope that good may come of it, and seeking to turn
someone else's evil to good use. Socialists did not perpetrate capitalism, and
are innocent of its crimes; but granted that it exists, it seems rational to
make the best of it. This is possible because capitalism is not of course
simply evil. To think so is to be drastically one-sided, a fault by which Marx
himself was rarely afflicted. As we have seen, the system breeds freedom as
well as barbarism, emancipation along with enslavement. Capitalist society
generates enormous wealth, but in a way that cannot help putting it beyond the
reach of most of its citizens. Even so, that wealth can always be brought
within reach. It can be disentangled from the acquisitive, individualist forms
which bred it, invested in the community as a whole, and used to restrict
disagreeable work to the minimum. It can thus release men and women from the
chains of economic necessity into a life where they are free to realize their
creative potential. This is Marx's vision of communism.

None of this suggests that
the rise of capitalism was an absolute good. It would have been better if human
emancipation could have been achieved with far less blood, sweat and tears. In
this sense, Marx's theory of history is not a "teleologi-cal'' one. A
teleological theory holds that each phase of history arises inexorably from
what went before. Each stage of the process is necessary in itself, and along
with all the other stages is indispensable for attaining a certain goal. That
goal is itself inevitable, and acts as the hidden dynamic of the whole process.
Nothing in this narrative can be left out, and everything, however apparently
noxious or negative, contributes to the good of the whole.

This is not what Marxism
teaches. To say that capitalism can be drawn on for an improved future is not
to imply that it exists for that reason. Nor does socialism follow necessarily
from it. It is not to suggest that the crimes of capitalism are justified by the
advent of socialism. Nor is it to clam that capitalism was bound to emerge.
Modes of production do not arise necessarily. It is not as though they are
linked to all previous stages by some inner logic. No stage of the process
exists for the sake of the others. It is possible to leap stages, as with the
Bolsheviks. And the end is by no means guaranteed. History for Marx is not
moving in any particular direction. Capitalism can be used to build socialism,
but there is no sense in which the whole historical process is secretly
labouring towards this goal.

The modern capitalist age,
then, brings its undoubted benefits. It has a great many features, from
anaesthetics and penal reform to efficient sanitation and freedom of
expression, which are precious in themselves, not simply because a socialist
future might find some way to make use of them. But this does not necessarily
mean that the system is finally vindicated. It is possible to argue that even
if class-society happens to lead in the end to socialism, the price humanity
has been forced to pay for this felicitous outcome is simply too high. How long
would a socialist world have to survive, and how vigorously would it need to
flourish, to justify in retrospect the sufferings of class-history? Could it
ever do so, any more than one could justify Auschwitz? The Marxist philosopher
Max Horkheimer comments that ''history's route lies across the sorrow and
misery of individuals. There is a series of explanatory connections between
these two facts, but no justificatory meaning.''
¹³