Why Marx Was Right (8 page)

Marxism is not generally
seen as a tragic vision of the world. Its final Act—communism—appears too
upbeat for that. But not to appreciate its tragic strain is to miss much of its
complex depth. The Marxist narrative is not tragic in the sense of ending
badly. But a narrative does not have to end badly to be tragic. Even if men and
women find some fulfillment in the end, it is tragic that their ancestors had
to be hauled through hell in order for them to do so. And there will be many
who fall by the wayside, unfulfilled and unremem-bered. Short of some literal
resurrection, we can never make recompense to these vanquished millions. Marx's
theory of history is tragic in just this respect.

It is a quality well
captured by Aijaz Ahmad. He is speaking of Marx on the destruction of the
peasantry, but the point has a more general application to his work. There is,
he writes, ''a sense of colossal disruption and irretrievable loss, a moral
dilemma wherein neither the old nor the new can be wholly affirmed, the
recognition that the sufferer was at once decent and flawed, the recognition
also that the history of victories and losses is really a history of material
productions, and the glimmer of a hope, in the end, that something good might
yet come of this merciless history.''
¹⁴
Tragedy is not necessarily
without hope. It is rather that when it affirms, it does so in fear and
trembling, with a horror-stricken countenance.

There is, finally, another
point to note. We have seen that Marx himself assumes that capitalism is
indispensable for socialism. But is this true? What if one were to seek to
develop the productive forces from a very low level, but as far as possible in
ways compatible with democratic socialist values? It would be a fiercesomely
difficult task. But this, roughly speaking, was the view of some members of the
Left Opposition in Bolshevik Russia; and although it was a project that
foundered, there is a strong case that it was the right strategy to adopt in
the circumstances. What, in any case, if capitalism had never happened? Could
not humanity have found some less atrocious way of evolving what Marx sees as
its most precious goods—material prosperity, a wealth of creative human powers,
self-determination, global communications, individual freedom, a magnificent
culture and so on? Might an alternative history not have thrown up geniuses
equal to Raphael and Shakespeare? One thinks of the flourishing of the arts and
sciences in ancient Greece, Persia, Egypt, China, India, Mesopotamia and elsewhere.
Was capitalist modernity really necessary? How does one weigh the value of
modern science and human liberty against the spiritual goods of tribal
societies? What happens when we place democracy in the scales along with the
Holocaust?

The question may prove
more than academic. Suppose a handful of us were to crawl out of the other side
of a nuclear or environmental cataclysm, and begin the daunting task of
building civilisation again from scratch. Given what we knew of the causes of the
catastrophe, would we not be well-advised to try it this time the socialist
way?

FOUR

Marxism is a dream of
utopia. It believes in the possibility of a perfect society, without hardship,
suffering, violence or conflict. Under communism there will be no rivalry,
selfishness, possessiveness, competition or inequality. Nobody will be superior
or inferior to anyone else. Nobody will work, human beings will live in
complete harmony with one another, and the flow of material goods will be
endless. This astonishingly naive vision springs from a credulous faith in
human nature. Human viciousness is simply set aside. The fact that we are
naturally selfish, acquisitive, aggressive and competitive creatures, and that
no amount of social engineering can alter this fact, is simply overlooked.
Marx's dewy-eyed vision of the future reflects the absurd unreality of his
politics as a whole.

S
o will there still be road
accidents in this Marxist utopia of yours?" This is the kind of sardonic
inquiry that Marxists have grown used to dealing with. In fact, the comment
reveals more about the ignorance of the speaker than about the illusions of the
Marxist. Because if utopia means a perfect society, then ''Marxist utopia'' is
a contradiction in terms.

There are, as it happens,
far more interesting uses of the word ''utopia'' in the Marxist tradition.
¹
One of the greatest of English Marxist revolutionaries, William Morris,
produced an unforgettable work of utopia in
News from Nowhere,
which
unlike almost every other utopian work actually showed in detail how the
process of political change had come about. When it comes to the everyday use
of the word, however, it should be said that Marx shows not the slightest
interest in a future free of suffering, death, loss, failure, breakdown, conflict,
tragedy or even labour. In fact, he doesn't show much interest in the future at
all. It is a notorious fact about his work that he has very little to say in
detail about what a socialist or communist society would look like. His critics
may therefore accuse him of unpardonable vagueness; but they can hardly do that
and at the same time accuse him of drawing up utopian blueprints. It is
capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. In
The German Ideology,
he rejects the idea of communism as ''an ideal to which reality will have to
adjust itself.'' Instead, he sees it in
The German Ideology
as ''the
real movement which abolishes the present state of things.''
²

Just as the Jews were
traditionally forbidden to foretell the future, so Marx the secular Jew is
mostly silent on what might lie ahead. We have seen that he probably thought
socialism was inevitable, but he has strikingly little to say about what it
would look like. There are several reasons for this reticence. For one thing,
the future does not exist, so that to forge images of it is a kind of lie. To
do so might also suggest that the future is predetermined—that it lies in some
shadowy realm for us to discover. We have seen that there is a sense in which
Marx held that the future was inevitable. But the inevitable is not necessarily
the desirable. Death is inevitable, too, but not in most people's eyes
desirable. The future may be predetermined, but that is no reason to assume
that it is going to be an improvement on what we have at the moment. The
inevitable, as we have seen, is usually pretty unpleasant. Marx himself needed
to be more aware of this.

Foretelling the future,
however, is not only pointless; it can actually be destructive. To have power
even over the future is a way of giving ourselves a false sense of security. It
is a tactic for shielding ourselves from the open-ended nature of the present,
with all its precariousness and unpredictability. It is to use the future as a
kind of fetish—as a comforting idol to cling to like a toddler to its blanket.
It is an absolute value which will not let us down because (since it does not
exist) it is as insulated from the winds of history as a phantom. You can also
seek to monopolise the future as a way of dominating the present. The true
soothsayers of our time are not hairy, howling outcasts luridly foretelling the
death of capitalism, but the experts hired by the transnational corporations to
peer into the entrails of the system and assure its rulers that their profits
are safe for another ten years. The prophet, by contrast, is not a clairvoyant
at all. It is a mistake to believe that the biblical prophets sought to predict
the future. Rather, the prophet denounces the greed, corruption and
power-mongering of the present, warning us that unless we change our ways we
might well have no future at all. Marx was a prophet, not a fortune-teller.

There is another reason
why Marx was wary of images of the future. This is because there were a lot of
them about in his time—and they were almost all the work of hopelessly idealist
radicals. The idea that history is moving onwards and upwards to a state of
perfection is not a leftist one. It was a commonplace of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, which was hardly renowned for its revolutionary socialism. It
reflected the confidence of the European middle class in its early, exuberant
phase. Reason was in the process of vanquishing despotism, science was routing
superstition, and peace was putting warfare to flight. As a result, the whole
of human history (by which most of these thinkers really meant Europe) would
culminate in a state of liberty, harmony and commercial prosperity. It is
hardly likely that history's most celebrated scourge of the middle classes
would have signed on for this self-satisfied illusion. Marx, as we have seen,
did indeed believe in progress and civilisation; but he considered that, so far
at least, they had proved inseparable from barbarism and benightedness.

This is not to say that
Marx learnt nothing from utopian thinkers like Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert
Owen. If he could be rude about them, he could also commend their ideas, which
were sometimes admirably progressive. (Not all of them, however. Fourier, who
coined the term ''feminism,'' and whose ideal social unit was designed to
contain exactly 1,620 people, believed that in the future society the sea would
turn into lemonade. Marx himself would probably have preferred a fine
Riesling.) What Marx objected to among other things was the utopianists' belief
that they could win over their opponents purely through the power of argument.
Society for them was a battle of ideas, not a clash of material interests.
Marx, by contrast, took a sceptical view of this faith in intellectual
dialogue. He was aware that the ideas which really grip men and women arise
through their routine practice, not through the discourse of philosophers or
debating societies. If you want to see what men and women really believe, look
at what they do, not at what they say.

Utopian blueprints for
Marx were a distraction from the political tasks of the present. The energy
invested in them could be used more fruitfully in the service of political
struggle. As a materialist, Marx was chary of ideas which were divorced from
historical reality, and thought that there were usually good historical reasons
for this separation. Anyone with time on their hands can hatch elaborate
schemes for a better future, just as anyone can sketch endless plans for a
magnificent novel they never get around to writing because they are endlessly
sketching plans for it. The point for Marx is not to dream of an ideal future,
but to resolve the contradictions in the present which prevent a better future
from coming about. When this has been achieved, there will be no more need for
people like himself.

In
The Civil War in
France,
Marx writes that the revolutionary workers ''have no ideals to
realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which the old
collapsing bourgeois society is itself pregnant.''
³
The hope for a
better future cannot just be a wistful ''wouldn't it be nice if . . .'' If it
is to be more than an idle fantasy, a radically different future must be not
only desirable but feasible; and to be feasible, it has to be anchored in the
realities of the present. It cannot just be dropped into the present from some
political outer space. There must be a way of scanning or X-raying the present
which shows up a certain future as a potential within it. Otherwise, you will
simply succeed in making people desire fruitlessly; and for Freud, to desire
fruitlessly is to fall ill of neurosis.

So there are forces in the
present which point beyond it. Feminism, for example, is a political movement at
work right now; but it works by reaching for a future which would leave much of
the present a long way behind. For Marx, it is the working class—at once a
present reality and the agent by which it may be transformed—which provides the
link between present and future. Emancipatory politics inserts the thin end of
the wedge of the future into the heart of the present. They represent a bridge
between present and future, a point where the two intersect. And both present
and future are fuelled by the resources of the past, in the sense of precious
political traditions which one must fight to keep alive.

Some conservatives are
utopianists, but their utopia lies in the past rather than the future. In their
view, history has been one long, doleful decline from a golden age set in the
age of Adam, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Jefferson, Disraeli,
Margaret Thatcher or more or less anyone you care to mention. This is to treat
the past as a kind of fetish, rather as some utopian thinkers do with the future.
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels
as though it does. But there are also conservatives who reject this myth of the
Fall on the grounds that every age has been just as dreadful as every other.
The good news for them is that things are not getting worse; the bad news is
that this is because they cannot deteriorate any further. What governs history
is human nature, which is (a) in a state of shocking disrepair and (b)
absolutely unalterable. The greatest folly—indeed, cruelty—is to dangle before
men and women ideals that they are constitutionally incapable of achieving.
Radicals just end up making people loathe themselves. They plunge them into
guilt and despair in the act of cheering them on to higher things.

Starting from where we are
may not sound the best recipe for political transformation. The present seems
more an obstacle to such change than an occasion for it. As the stereotypically
thick-headed Irishman remarked when asked the way to the railway station:
''Well, I wouldn't start from here." The comment is not as illogical as
some might think, which is also true of the Irish. It means ''You'd get there
quicker and more directly if you weren't starting from this awkward,
out-of-the-way spot.'' Socialists today might well sympathise with the
sentiment. One could imagine the proverbial Irishman surveying Russia after the
Bolshevik revolution, about to embark on the task of building socialism in a
besieged, isolated, semidestitute country, and remarking: ''Well, I wouldn't
start from here.''