Why Marx Was Right (9 page)

But there is, of course,
nowhere else to start from. A different future has to be the future of this
particular present. And most of the present is made up of the past. We have
nothing with which to fashion a future other than the few, inadequate tools we
have inherited from history. And these tools are tainted by the legacy of
wretchedness and exploitation by which they descend to us. Marx writes in the
Critique of the Gotha Programme
of how the new society will be stamped with
the birthmarks of the old order from whose womb it emerges. So there is no
''pure'' point from which to begin. To believe that there is is the illusion of
so-called ultra-leftism (an ''infantile disorder,'' as Lenin called it), which
in its revolutionary zeal refuses all truck with the compromised tools of the
present: social reform, trade unions, political parties, parliamentary
democracy and so on. It thus manages to end up as stainless as it is impotent.

The future, then, is not
just to be tacked on to the present, any more than adolescence is just tacked
on to childhood. It must somehow be detectable within it. This is not to say
that this possible future is bound to come about, any more than a child will
necessarily arrive at adolescence. It might always die of leukaemia before it
does. It is rather to recognize that, given a particular present, not any old
future is possible. The future is open, but it is not totally open. Not just
any old thing could happen. Where I might be in ten minutes' time depends among
other things on where I am now. To see the future as a potential within the
present is not like seeing an egg as a potential chicken. Short of being
smashed to smithereens or boiled for a picnic, the egg will turn into a chicken
by a law of Nature; but Nature does not guarantee that socialism will follow on
the heels of capitalism. There are many different futures implicit in the
present, some of them a lot less attractive than others.

Seeing the future like
this is among other things a safeguard against false images of it. It rejects,
for example, the complacent ''evolutionist'' view of the future which regards
it simply as more of the present. It is simply the present writ large. This, by
and large, is the way our rulers like to view the future—as better than the
present, but comfortably continuous with it. Disagreeable surprises will be
kept to the minimum. There will be no traumas or cataclysms, just a steady
improvement on what we have already. This view was known until recently as the
End of History, before radical Islamists inconveniently broke History open
again. You might also call it the goldfish theory of history, given that it
dreams of an existence which is secure but monotonous, as the life of a
goldfish appears to be. It pays for its freedom from dramatic shake-ups in the
coinage of utter tedium. It thus fails to see that though the future may turn
out to be a great deal worse than the present, the one sure thing about it is
that it will be very different. One reason why the financial markets blew up a
few years ago was because they relied on models that assumed the future would
be very like the present.

Socialism, by contrast,
represents in one sense a decisive break with the present. History has to be
broken and remade —not because socialists arbitrarily prefer revolution to
reform, being bloodthirsty beasts deaf to the voice of moderation, but because
of the depth of the sickness that has to be cured. I say ''history,'' but in
fact Marx is reluctant to dignify everything that has happened so far with that
title. For him, all we have known so far is ''prehistory''—which is to say, one
variation after another on human oppression and exploitation. The only truly
historic act would be to break from this dreary narrative into history proper.
As a socialist, you have to be prepared to spell out in some detail how this
would be achieved, and what institutions it would involve. But if the new
social order is to be genuinely transformative, it follows that there is a
strict limit on how much you can say about it right now. We can, after all,
describe the future only in terms drawn from the past or present; and a future
which broke radically with the present would have us straining at the limits of
our language. As Marx himself comments in
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte,
"There [in the socialist future] the content goes beyond
the form.'' Raymond Williams makes essentially the same point in
Culture and
Society 1780-1950,
when he writes: ''We have to plan what can be planned,
according to our common decision. But the emphasis of the idea of culture is
right when it reminds us that a culture, essentially, is unplannable. We have
to ensure the means of life, and the means of community. But what will then, by
these means, be lived, we cannot know or say.''
⁴

One can put the point in
another way. If all that has happened so far is ''prehistory,'' then it is
rather more predictable than what Marx would regard as history proper. If we
slice through past history at any point and inspect a cross-section of it, we
know before we have even come to look something of what we will find there. We
will find, for example, that the great majority of men and women at this period
are living lives of largely fruitless toil for the benefit of a ruling elite. We
will find that the political state, whatever form it takes, is prepared to use
violence from time to time to maintain this situation. We will find that quite
a lot of the myth, culture and thought of the period provides some kind of
legitimation of this situation. We will also probably find some form of
resistance to this injustice among those who are exploited.

Once these shackles on
human flourishing have been removed, however, it is far harder to say what will
happen. For men and women are then a lot more free to behave as they wish,
within the confines of their responsibility for one another. If they are able
to spend more of their time in what we now call leisure activities rather than
hard at work, their behavior becomes even harder to predict. I say ''what we
now call leisure'' because if we really did use the resources accumulated by
capitalism to release large numbers of people from work, we would not call what
they did instead ''leisure.'' This is because the idea of leisure depends on
the existence of its opposite (labour), rather as you could not define warfare
without some conception of peace. We should also remember that so-called
leisure activities can be even more strenuous and exacting than coal mining.
Marx himself makes this point. Some leftists will be disappointed to hear that
not having to work does not necessarily mean lounging around the place all day
smoking dope.

Take, as an analogy, the
behavior of people in prison. It is fairly easy to say what prisoners get up to
throughout the day because their activities are strictly regulated. The warders
can predict with some certainty where they will be at five o'clock on a
Wednesday, and if they cannot do so they might find themselves up before the
Governor. Once convicts are released back into society, however, it is much
harder to keep tabs on them, unless the tabs are of an electronic kind. They
have moved, so to speak, from the ''prehistory'' of their incarceration to
history proper, meaning that they are now at liberty to determine their own
existence, rather than to have it determined for them by external forces. For
Marx, socialism is the point where we begin collectively to determine our own
destinies. It is democracy taken with full seriousness, rather than democracy
as (for the most part) a political charade. And the fact that people are more
free means that it will be harder to say what they will be doing at five
o'clock on Wednesday.

A genuinely different
future would be neither a mere extension of the present nor an absolute break with
it. If it were an absolute break, how could we recognize it at all? Yet if we
could describe it fairly easily in the language of the present, in what sense
would it be genuinely different? Marx's idea of emancipation rejects both
smooth continuities and total ruptures. In this sense, he is that rarest of
creatures, a visionary who is also a sober realist. He turns from fantasies of
the future to the prosaic workings of the present; but it is precisely there
that he finds a greatly enriched future to be unleashed. He is more gloomy
about the past than many thinkers, yet more hopeful than most of them about
what is to come.

Realism and vision here go
hand in hand: to see the present as it truly is, is to see it in the light of
its possible transformation. Otherwise you are simply not seeing it aright, as
you would not have a full grasp of what it means to be a baby if you had not
realized that it was a potential adult. Capitalism has given birth to
extraordinary powers and possibilities which it simultaneously stymies; and
this is why Marx can be hopeful without being a bright-eyed champion of
Progress, and brutally realistic without being cynical or defeatist. It belongs
to the tragic vision to stare the worst steadily in the face, but to rise above
it through the very act of doing so. Marx, as we have seen, is in some ways a
tragic thinker, which is not to say a pessimistic one.

On the one hand, Marxists
are hardheaded types who are sceptical of high-minded moralism and wary of
idealism. With their naturally suspicious minds, they tend to look for the
material interests which lurk behind heady political rhetoric. They are alert
to the humdrum, often ignoble forces which underlie pious talk and sentimental
visions. Yet this is because they want to free men and women from these forces,
in the belief that they are capable of better things. As such, they combine
their hardheadedness with a faith in humanity. Materialism is too down-to-earth
to be gulled by hand-on-heart rhetoric, but too hopeful that things could
improve to be cynical. There have been worse combinations in the history of
humanity.

One thinks of the
flamboyant student slogan of Paris 1968: ''Be realistic: demand the
impossible!" For all its hyperbole, the slogan is accurate enough. What is
realistically needed to repair society is beyond the powers of the prevailing
system, and in that sense is impossible. But it is realistic to believe that
the world could in principle be greatly improved. Those who scoff at the idea
that major social change is possible are full-blown fantasists. The true
dreamers are those who deny that anything more than piecemeal change can ever
come about. This hardheaded pragmatism is as much a delusion as believing that
you are Marie Antoinette. Such types are always in danger of being caught on
the hop by history. Some feudal ideologues, for example, denied that an
''unnatural'' economic system like capitalism could ever catch on. There are
also those sad, self-deceived characters who hallucinate that, given more time
and greater effort, capitalism will deliver a world of abundance for all. For
them, it is simply a regrettable accident that it has not done so so far. They
do not see that inequality is as natural to capitalism as narcissism and
megalomania are to Hollywood.

What Marx finds in the
present is a deadly clash of interests. But whereas a utopian thinker might
exhort us to rise above these conflicts in the name of love and fellowship,
Marx himself takes a very different line. He does indeed believe in love and
fellowship, but he does not think they will be achieved by some phoney harmony.
The exploited and dispossessed are not to abandon their interests, which is
just what their masters want them to do, but to press them all the way through.
Only then might a society beyond self-interest finally emerge. There is nothing
in the least wrong with being self-interested, if the alternative is hugging
your chains in some false spirit of self-sacrifice.

Critics of Marx might find
this stress on class interests distasteful. But they cannot claim in the same
breath that he has an impossibly rosy view of human nature. Only by starting
from the unredeemed present, submitting yourself to its degraded logic, can you
hope to move through and beyond it. This, too, is in the traditional spirit of
tragedy. Only by accepting that contradictions are of the nature of
class-society, not by denying them in a spirit of serene disinterestedness, can
you unlock the human wealth they hold back. It is at the points where the logic
of the present comes unstuck, runs into impasse and incoherence, that Marx,
surprisingly enough, finds the outline of a transfigured future. The true image
of the future is the failure of the present.

Marxism, so many of its
critics complain, has an impossibly idealized view of human nature. It dreams
foolishly of a future in which everyone will be comradely and cooperative.
Rivalry, envy, inequality, violence, aggression and competition will have been
banished from the face of the earth. There is, in fact, scarcely a word in
Marx's writings to support this outlandish claim, but a good few of his critics
are reluctant to louse up their arguments with the facts. They are confident
that Marx anticipated a state of human virtue known as communism which even the
Archangel Gabriel might have a problem living up to. In doing so, he willfully
or carelessly ignored that flawed, crooked, perpetually discontented state of
affairs known as human nature.

Some Marxists have
responded to this charge by claiming that if Marx overlooked human nature, it
was because he did not believe in the idea. On this view, the concept of human
nature is simply a way of keeping us politically in our place. It suggests that
human beings are feeble, corrupt, self-interested creatures; that this remains
unaltered throughout history; and that it is the rock on which any attempt at
radical change will come to grief. ''You can't change human nature'' is one of
the most common objections to revolutionary politics. Against this, some
Marxists have insisted that there is no unchanging core to human beings. In
their opinion, it is our history, not our nature, that makes us what we are;
and since history is all about change, we can transform ourselves by altering
our historical conditions.