JamesBond007
10-31-2022, 04:00 AM
His attacks on utopian and universalistic ideas - whether from the Left or the Right - are very prescient and necessary indeed.
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 naïve 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.
“So will there still be road accidents in this Marxist utopia of yours?” This is the kind of sardonic enquiry 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 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, Marx rejects the idea of communism as “an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.” Instead, he sees it in that book 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 may 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. It represents 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 time 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, semi-destitute country, and remarking: “Well, I wouldn’t start from here.”
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 through 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 ultraleftism (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 recognise that, given a particular present, not any 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 a 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 behaviour 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 behaviour 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 recognise 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 realised 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 thus 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 idealised 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 wilfully 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.
Marx did not entirely subscribe to this “historicist” case. The evidence is that he did believe in a human nature, and was quite right to do so, as Norman Geras argues in an excellent little book.5 He did not see this as overriding the importance of the individual. On the contrary, he thought it a paradoxical feature of our common nature that we are all uniquely individuated. In his early writings, Marx speaks of what he calls human “species being,” which is really a materialist version of human nature. Because of the nature of our material bodies, we are needy, labouring, sociable, sexual, communicative, self-expressive animals who need one another to survive, but who come to find a fulfilment in that companionship over and above its social usefulness. If I may be allowed to quote a previous comment of my own: “If another creature is able in principle to speak to us, engage in material labour alongside us, sexually interact with us, produce something which looks vaguely like art in the sense that it appears fairly pointless, suffer, joke and die, then we can deduce from these biological facts a huge number of moral and even political consequences.”6 This case, which is technically known as philosophical anthropology, is rather out of fashion these days; but it was what Marx argued for in his early work, and there is no compelling reason to believe that he abandoned it later on.
Because we are labouring, desiring, linguistic creatures, we are able to transform our conditions in the process we know as history. In doing so, we come to transform ourselves at the same time. Change, in other words, is not the opposite of human nature; it is possible because of the creative, open-ended, unfinished beings we are. This, as far as we can tell, is not true of stoats. Because of the nature of their material bodies, stoats do not have a history. Nor do stoats have politics, unless they are keeping them cunningly concealed. There is no reason to fear that they might one day come to rule over us, even if they would probably do a far better job than our present leaders. As far as we know, they cannot be social democrats or ultranationalists. Human beings, however, are political animals by their very nature—not only because they live in community with one another, but because they need some system for regulating their material life. They also need some system for regulating their sexual lives. One reason for this is that sexuality might otherwise prove too socially disruptive. Desire, for example, is no respecter of social distinctions. But this is also one reason why human beings need politics. The way they produce their material existence has so far involved exploitation and inequality, and a political system is needed to contain the resulting conflicts. We would also expect human animals to have various symbolic ways of representing all this to themselves, whether we call it art, myth or ideology.
For Marx, we are equipped by our material natures with certain powers and capacities. And we are at our most human when we are free to realise these powers as an end in itself, rather than for any purely utilitarian purpose. These powers and capacities are always historically specific; but they have a foundation in our bodies, and some of them alter very little from one human culture to another. Two individuals from very different cultures who do not speak one another’s language can easily cooperate in practical tasks. This is because the physical body they have in common generates its own set of assumptions, expectations and understandings.7 All human cultures know grief and ecstasy, labour and sexuality, friendship and enmity, oppression and injustice, sickness and mortality, kinship and art. It is true that they sometimes know these things in very different cultural styles. Dying is not the same in Madras as it is in Manchester. But we die anyway. Marx himself writes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that “man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being—and because he feels that he suffers, a passionate being.” Death, he considers, is a harsh victory of the species over the individual. It matters to men and women, he writes in Capital, if their deaths are premature, their lives shorter than they need be because of grinding toil, or afflicted by accident, injury or disease. Communism may see an end to grinding toil, but it is hard to believe that Marx envisages a social order without accident, injury and disease, any more than he anticipates one without death.
If we did not share so much basic common humanity, the socialist vision of global cooperation would be fruitless. Marx speaks in volume 1 of Capital of “human nature in general and then … as modified in each historical epoch.” There is a great deal about human beings that hardly varies across history—a fact which postmodernism either denies or dismisses as merely trivial. It does so partly because it has an irrational prejudice against Nature and biology; partly because it thinks that all talk of natures is a way of denying change;8 and partly because it tends to regard all change as positive and all permanence as negative. In this last opinion, it is at one with capitalist “modernisers” everywhere. The truth—far too banal for intellectuals to appreciate—is that some change is catastrophic and some kinds of permanence deeply desirable. It would be a shame, for example, if all French vineyards were to be burnt down tomorrow, just as it would be a pity if a nonsexist society lasted for only three weeks.
Socialists often speak of oppression, injustice and exploitation. But if this were all humanity had ever known, we would never be able to identify these things for what they are. Instead, they would simply seem like our natural condition. We might not even have special names for them. To see a relationship as exploitative, you need to have some idea of what a nonexploitative relationship would look like. You do not need to appeal to the idea of human nature to have this. You can appeal to historical factors instead. But it is plausible to claim that there are features of our nature which act as a kind of norm in this respect. Human beings, for example, are all “prematurely” born. For a long time after birth they are unable to fend for themselves, and are thus in need of a prolonged period of nurturing. (It is this unusually prolonged experience of care, some psychoanalysts argue, that plays such havoc with our psyches later in life. If babies could get up and walk away at birth, a good deal of adult misery would be avoided, and not only in the sense that there would be no bawling brats to disturb our sleep.) Even if the care they receive is appalling, infants very quickly imbibe some notion of what caring for others means. This is one reason why, later on, they may be able to identify a whole way of life as callously indifferent to human needs. In this sense, we can move from being prematurely born to politics.Needs which are essential to our survival and well-being, like being fed, keeping warm and sheltered, enjoying the company of others, not being enslaved or abused and so on, can act as a basis for political critique, in the sense that any society which fails to meet these requirements is clearly lacking. We can, of course, object to such societies on more local or cultural grounds. But arguing that they violate some of the most fundamental demands of our nature has even more force. So it is a mistake to think that the idea of human nature is just an apology for the status quo. It can also act as a powerful challenge to it.
In early writings like the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx holds to the currently unfashionable view that the way we are as material animals can tell us something important about how we should live. There is a sense in which you can get from the human body to questions of ethics and politics. If human beings are self-realising creatures, then they need to be at liberty to fulfill their needs and express their powers. But if they are also social animals, living alongside other self-expressive beings, they need to prevent an endless, destructive clash of these powers. This, in fact, is one of the most intractable problems of liberal society, in which individuals are supposed to be free, but free among other things to be constantly at one another’s throats. Communism, by contrast, organises social life so that individuals are able to realise themselves in and through the self-realisation of others. As Marx puts it in the Communist Manifesto, “The free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all.” In this sense, socialism does not simply reject liberal society, with its passionate commitment to the individual. Instead, it builds on and completes it. In doing so, it shows how some of the contradictions of liberalism, in which your freedom may flourish only at the expense of mine, may be resolved. Only through others can we finally come into our own. This means an enrichment of individual freedom, not a diminishing of it. It is hard to think of a finer ethics. On a personal level, it is known as love.
It is worth stressing Marx’s concern with the individual, since it runs clean contrary to the usual caricature of his work. In this view, Marxism is all about faceless collectives which ride roughshod over personal life. Nothing, in fact, could be more alien to Marx’s thought. One might say that the free flourishing of individuals is the whole aim of his politics, as long as we remember that these individuals must find some way of flourishing in common. To assert one’s individuality, he writes in The Holy Family, is “the vital manifestation of [one’s] being.” This, one might claim, is Marx’s morality from start to finish.
There is good reason to suspect that there can never be any complete reconciliation between individual and society. The dream of an organic unity between them is a generous-hearted fantasy. There will always be conflicts between my fulfilment and yours, or between what is required of me as a citizen and what I badly want to do. Such outright contradictions are the stuff of tragedy, and only the grave, as opposed to Marxism, can put us beyond that condition. Marx’s claim in the Communist Manifesto about the free self-development of all can never be fully realised. Like all the finest ideals it is a goal to aim at, not a state to be literally achieved. Ideals are signposts, not tangible entities. They point us the way to go. Those who scoff at socialist ideals should remember that the free market can never be perfectly realised either. Yet this does not stop free-marketeers in their tracks. The fact that there is no flawless democracy does not lead most of us to settle for tyranny instead. We do not relinquish efforts to feed the hungry of the world because we know some of them will have perished before we can do so. Some of those who claim that socialism is unworkable are confident that they can eradicate poverty, solve the global warming crisis, spread liberal democracy to Afghanistan and resolve world conflicts by United Nations resolutions. All these daunting tasks are comfortably within the range of the possible. It is only socialism which for some mysterious reason is out of reach.
It is easier to attain Marx’s goal, however, if you do not have to rely on everyone being morally magnificent all the time. Socialism is not a society which requires resplendent virtue of its citizens. It does not mean that we have to be wrapped around each other all the time in some great orgy of togetherness. This is because the mechanisms which would allow Marx’s goal to be approached would actually be built into social institutions. They would not rely in the first place on the goodwill of the individual. Take, for example, the idea of a self-governing cooperative, which Marx seems to have regarded as the key productive unit of the socialist future. One person’s contribution to such an outfit allows for some kind of self-realisation; but it also contributes to the well-being of the others, and this simply by virtue of the way the place is set up. I do not have to have tender thoughts about my fellow workers, or whip myself into an altruistic frenzy every two hours. My own self-realisation helps to enhance theirs simply because of the cooperative, profit-sharing, egalitarian, commonly governed nature of the unit. It is a structural affair, not a question of personal virtue. It does not demand a race of Cordelias.
For some socialist purposes, then, it does not matter if I am the vilest worm in the West. In a similar way, it does not matter if I regard my work as a biochemist employed by a private pharmaceutical company as a glorious contribution to the advance of science and the progress of humanity. The fact remains that the main point of my work is to create profit for a bunch of unscrupulous sharks who would probably charge their own toddlers ten dollars for an aspirin. What I feel is neither here nor there. The meaning of my work is determined by the institution.
One would expect any socialist institution to have its fair share of chancers, toadies, bullies, cheats, loafers, scroungers, freeloaders, free riders and occasional psychopaths. Nothing in Marx’s writing suggests that this would not be so. Besides, if communism is about everyone participating as fully as possible in social life, then one would expect there to be more conflicts rather than fewer, as more individuals get in on the act. Communism would not spell the end of human strife. Only the literal end of history would do that. Envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist. It is just that they could not take the forms they assume under capitalism—not because of some superior human virtue, but because of a change of institutions.
These vices would no longer be bound up with the exploitation of child labour, colonial violence, grotesque social inequalities and cutthroat economic competition. Instead, they would have to assume some other form. Tribal societies have their fair share of violence, rivalry and hunger for power, but these things cannot take the form of imperial warfare, free-market competition or mass unemployment, because such institutions do not exist among the Nuer or the Dinka. There are villains everywhere you look, but only some of these moral ruffians are so placed as to be able to steal pension funds or pump the media full of lying political propaganda. Most gangsters are not in a position to do so. Instead, they have to content themselves with hanging people from meat hooks. In a socialist society, nobody would be in a position to do so. This is not because they would be too saintly, but because there would be no private pension funds or privately owned media. Shakespeare’s villains had to find outlets for their wickedness other than firing missiles at Palestinian refugees. You cannot be a bullying industrial magnate if there isn’t any industry around. You just have to settle for bullying slaves, courtiers or your Neolithic workmates instead.
Or consider the practice of democracy. It is true that there are always monstrous egoists who try to browbeat others, as well as people who seek to bribe or smooth-talk their way to power. Democracy, however, is a set of built-in safe-guards against such behaviour. By devices such as one-person one-vote, chairpersons, amendments, accountability, due procedure, the sovereignty of the majority and so on, you do your best to ensure that the bullies cannot win. From time to time they will succeed in doing just that. They might even manage to suborn the whole process. But having an established process means that most of the time they will be forced to submit to the democratic consensus. Virtue, so to speak, is built into the proceedings, not left to the vagaries of individual character. You do not need to make people physically incapable of violence in order to end a war. You just need negotiations, disarmament, peace treaties, monitoring and the like. This can be difficult. But it is not half as difficult as breeding a race of people who would vomit and swoon at the slightest sign of aggression.
So Marxism holds out no promise of human perfection. It does not even promise to abolish hard labour. Marx seems to believe that a certain amount of disagreeable work would continue to be essential even in conditions of plenty. The curse of Adam will linger on even in the realm of abundance. The promise Marxism does hold out is to resolve the contradictions which currently stop history proper from happening, in all its freedom and diversity.
The aims of Marxism, however, are not just material. For Marx, communism means an end to scarcity, along with an end to most oppressive labour. But the freedom and leisure which this would grant men and women can then provide the context for their fuller spiritual flourishing. It is true, as we have seen, that spiritual and material development by no means always march side by side. One has only to look at Keith Richards to recognise that. There are many kinds of material affluence which spell the death of the spirit. Yet it is also true that you cannot be free to become what you want when you are starving, sorely oppressed or stunted in your moral growth by a life of endless drudgery. Materialists are not those who deny the spiritual, but those who remind us that spiritual fulfilment requires certain material conditions. Those conditions do not guarantee such fulfilment. But it cannot be had without them.
Human beings are not at their best in conditions of scarcity, whether natural or artificial. Such scarcity breeds violence, fear, greed, anxiety, possessiveness, domination and deadly antagonism. One would expect, then, that if men and women were able to live in conditions of material abundance, released from these crippling pressures, they would tend to fare better as moral beings than they do now. We cannot be sure of this because we have never known such conditions. This is what Marx has in mind when he declares in the Communist Manifesto that the whole of history has been the history of class struggle. And even in conditions of abundance there would be plenty of other things for us to feel anxious, aggressive and possessive about. We would not be alchemised into angels. But some of the root causes of our moral deficiencies would have been removed. To that extent, it is indeed reasonable to claim that a communist society would tend by and large to produce finer human beings than we can muster at the moment. But they would still be fallible, prone to conflict and sometimes brutal and malevolent.
Cynics who doubt that such moral progress is possible should consider the difference between burning witches and pressing for equal pay for women. That is not to say that we have all become more delicate, sensitive and humanitarian than we were in medieval times. As far as that goes, we might also consider the difference between bows and arrows and cruise missiles. The point is not that history as a whole has morally improved. It is simply that we have made major progress here and there. It is as soberly realistic to recognise this fact as it is reasonable to claim that in some ways we have deteriorated since the days of Robin Hood. There is no grand narrative of Progress, just as there is no fairy tale of Decline.
Anyone who has witnessed a small infant snatch a toy from its sibling with a bloodcurdling cry of “Mine!” needs no reminder of how deep in the mind the roots of rivalry and possessiveness sink. We are speaking of ingrained cultural, psychological and even evolutionary habits, which no mere change of institutions will alter in itself. But social change does not depend on everyone revolutionising their attitudes overnight. Take the example of Northern Ireland. Peace did not come to this tumultuous region because Catholics and Protestants finally abandoned their centuries-old antagonism and fell fondly into each others’ arms. Far from it. Some of them will continue to detest each other as far into the future as one can see. Changes in sectarian consciousness are likely to be geologically slow. Yet in one sense this is not all that important. What was important was securing a political agreement which could be carefully policed and skilfully evolved, in the context of a general public weariness with thirty years of violence.
That, however, is only one side of the story. For the truth is that over long periods of time, changes of institution do indeed have profound effects on human attitudes. Almost every enlightened penal reform that history has achieved was bitterly resisted in its day; but we now take these changes so much for granted that we would be revolted by the idea of breaking murderers on a wheel. Such reforms have become built into our psyches. What really alters our view of the world is not so much ideas, as ideas which are embedded in routine social practice. If we change that practice, which may be formidably difficult to do, we are likely in the end to alter our way of seeing.
Most of us do not have to be forcibly restrained from relieving ourselves on crowded streets. Because there is a law against it, and because it is socially frowned on, not to do so has become second nature to us. This is not to say that none of us ever do it, not least in city centres when the pubs have just closed. It is just that we are a lot less likely to do it than if it were considered the height of elegance. The British injunction to drive on the left does not have to struggle in the breasts of Britishers with a burning desire to drive on the right. Institutions shape our inner experience. They are instruments of reeducation. We shake hands on first meeting partly because it is the conventional thing to do, but also because, being the conventional thing to do, we feel an impulse to do it.
These changes of habit take a long time. It took some centuries for capitalism to root out modes of feeling inherited from feudalism, and a tourist outside Buckingham Palace might well consider that some vital areas were carelessly overlooked. It would not, one hopes, take quite so long to produce a social order in which schoolchildren studying history would greet with utter incredulity the fact that once upon a time millions of people went hungry while a handful of others fed caviar to their poodles. It would seem as alien and repellent to them as the thought of disembowelling a man for heresy now seems to us.
To mention schoolchildren raises an important point. A great many children today are fervent environmentalists. They regard the clubbing to death of seals or the pollution of the atmosphere with horror and disgust. Some of them would even be appalled by the dropping of a piece of litter. And this is largely because of education—not just formal education, but the influence of new forms of thought and feeling on a generation in which old habits of feeling are less entrenched. No one is arguing that this will save the planet. And it is true that there are children who would cheerfully brain a badger. Even so, there is evidence here of how education can change attitudes and breed new forms of behaviour.
Political education, then, is always possible. At a conference in Britain in the early 1970s, a discussion took place over whether there were certain universal features of human beings. One man stood up and announced “Well, we’ve all got testicles.” A woman in the audience shouted out “No, we haven’t!” Feminism in Britain was still in its early days, and the remark was greeted by a good many men in the room as merely eccentric. Even some of the women looked embarrassed. Only a few years later, if a man had made such a fatuous statement in public, he might rapidly have become the only exception to his claim.
In medieval and early modern Europe, avarice was regarded as the foulest of vices. From that to the Wall Street slogan “Greed is good!” involved an intensive process of reeducation. What did the reeducating was not in the first place schoolteachers or propagandists but changes in our material forms of life. Aristotle thought slavery was natural, though some other ancient thinkers did not agree. But he also thought it contrary to human nature to gear economic production to profit, which is not quite the opinion of Donald Trump. (Aristotle held this view for an interesting reason. He thought that what Marx was later to call “exchange-value”—the way that one commodity can be exchanged with another, and that with another, and so on ad infinitum—involves a kind of bound-lessness which was foreign to the finite, creaturely nature of human beings.) There were medieval ideologues who viewed profit-making as unnatural, because human nature for them meant feudal nature. Hunter-gatherers probably took an equally dim view of the possibility of any social order but their own. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, believed for much of his professional life that socalled free markets were rooted in human nature, a claim as absurd as holding that admiring Cliff Richard is rooted in human nature. Free markets are in fact a recent historical invention, and were confined for a long time to a minor region of the globe.
Similarly, those who speak of socialism as contrary to human nature do so because in their myopic way they identify that nature with capitalism. The Tuareg people of the central Sahara are really capitalist entrepreneurs at heart. They would secretly like nothing better than to start up an investment bank. The fact that they do not even have the concept of an investment bank is neither here nor there. But one cannot desire something of which one has no notion. I cannot hanker to become a stockbroker if I am an Athenian slave. I can be rapacious, acquisitive and religiously devoted to my own self-interest. But I cannot be a closet capitalist, just as I cannot aspire to be a brain surgeon if I am living in the eleventh century.
I claimed before that Marx, rather strangely, was both unusually pessimistic about the past and unusually optimistic about the future. There are several reasons for this, but one of them in particular bears on the issues we are examining. Marx was gloomy about much of the past because it seemed to represent one wretched form of oppression and exploitation after another. Theodor Adorno once remarked that pessimistic thinkers (he had Freud rather than Marx in mind) do more service to the cause of human emancipation than callowly optimistic ones. This is because they bear witness to an injustice which cries out for redemption, and which we might otherwise forget. By reminding us of how bad things are, they prompt us to repair them. They urge us to do without opium.
If Marx also retained a good deal of hope for the future, however, it was because he recognised that this dismal record was not for the most part our fault. If history has been so bloody, it is not because most human beings are wicked. It is because of the material pressures to which they have been submitted. Marx can thus take a realistic measure of the past without succumbing to the myth of the darkness of men’s hearts. And this is one reason why he can retain faith in the future. It is his materialism which permits him that hope. If wars, famines and genocide really did spring simply from some unchanging human depravity, then there is not the slightest reason to believe that the future will fare any better. If, however, these things have been partly the effect of unjust social systems, of which individuals are sometimes little more than functions, then it is reasonable to expect that changing that system may make for a better world. The bugbear of perfection, meanwhile, can be left to frighten fools.
This is not to suggest that men and women in classsociety can be absolved of all blame for their actions, or that individual depravity has played no part in wars and genocides. Companies which consign hundreds or even thousands of workers to a life of enforced idleness can most certainly be blamed. But it is not as though they take such measures out of hatred, malice or aggression. They create unemployment because they want to safeguard their profits in a competitive system in which they fear they might otherwise go under. Those who order armies to war, where they may end up burning small children to death, may be the meekest of men. Even so, Nazism was not just a noxious political system; it also drew on the sadism, paranoia and pathological hatred of individuals who could genuinely be described as wicked. If Hitler was not wicked, then the term has no meaning. But their personal viciousness could only have the appalling results it did because it was yoked to the workings of a political system. It would be like putting Shakespeare’s Iago in charge of a prisoner-of-war camp.
If there is indeed a human nature, then this is in some ways good news, whatever the postmodernists might think. This is because one fairly consistent feature of that nature has been a resistance to injustice. This is one reason why it is foolish to imagine that the idea of human nature must always work in conservative ways. Surveying the historical record, it is not hard to conclude that political oppression has almost always incited rebellion, however subdued or unsuccessful. There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power. It is true that power only really succeeds by winning the collusion of its underlings. The evidence, however, is that this collusion is usually partial, ambiguous and provisional. Ruling classes are generally more tolerated than admired. If our nature is purely cultural, then there is no reason why political regimes should not mould us into accepting their authority without question. That they often find this extraordinarily difficult to do testifies to sources of resistance which run deeper than local cultures.
So was Marx a utopian thinker? Yes, if by that one means that he envisaged a future which would be a vast improvement on the present. He believed in the end of material scarcity, private property, exploitation, social classes and the state as we know it. Yet many thinkers, casting an eye over the accumulated resources of the world today, would judge abolishing material scarcity to be perfectly reasonable in principle, however hard it is to achieve in practice. It is politics that stands in our way.
As we have seen, Marx also considered that this would involve the emancipation of human, spiritual wealth on a major scale. Freed from former constraints, men and women would flourish as individuals in ways impossible to them before. But there is nothing in Marx’s work to suggest that we would thereby arrive at any sort of perfection. It is a condition of exercising their freedom that human beings are able to abuse it. In fact, there cannot be such freedom, on any sizeable scale, without such abuses. So it is reasonable to believe that in communist society there would be plenty of problems, a host of conflicts and a number of irreparable tragedies. There would be child murders, road accidents, wretchedly bad novels, lethal jealousies, overweening ambitions, tasteless trousers and inconsolable grief. There might also be some cleaning of the latrines.
Communism is about the fulfilment of everyone’s needs, but even in a society of abundance, this would need to be restricted. As Norman Geras points out, “If by way of means of self-development (under communism) you need a violin and I need a racing bicycle, this, one may assume, will be all right. But if I need an enormously large area, say Australia, to wander around in or generally use as I see fit undisturbed by the presence of other people, then this obviously will not be all right. No conceivable abundance could satisfy needs of self-development of this magnitude … and it is not difficult to think of needs much less excessive of which the same will be true.”9
Marx, as we have seen, treats the future not as a matter of idle speculation, but as a feasible extrapolation from the present. He is concerned not with poetic visions of peace and comradeship, but with the material conditions which might allow a truly human future to emerge. As a materialist, he was alert to the complex, recalcitrant, unfinished nature of reality; and such a world is incompatible with a vision of perfection. A perfect world would be one that had abolished all contingency—all of those random collisions, chance occurrences and tragically unforeseeable effects which make up the texture of our daily lives. It would also be one in which we could do justice to the dead as well as the living, undoing the crimes and repairing the horrors of the past. No such society is possible. Nor would it necessarily be desirable. A world without train crashes might also be one without the possibility of a cure for cancer.
Neither is it possible to have a social order in which everyone is equal. The complaint that “socialism would make us all the same” is baseless. Marx had no such intention. He was a sworn enemy of uniformity. In fact, he regarded equality as a bourgeois value. He saw it as a reflection in the political sphere of what he called exchange-value, in which one commodity is levelled in value with another. The commodity, he once commented, is “realised equality.” He speaks at one point of a kind of communism that involves a general social levelling, and denounces it in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts as “an abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation.” Marx also associated the notion of equality with what he saw as the abstract equality of middle-class democracy, where our formal equality as voters and citizens serves to obscure real inequalities of wealth and class. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he also rejected the idea of an equality of income, since people have uniquely different needs: some do more dirty or dangerous work than others, some have more children to feed, and so on.
This is not to say that he dismissed the idea of equality out of hand. Marx was not in the habit of writing off ideas simply because they were of middle-class provenance. Far from contemptuously spurning the ideals of middle-class society, he was a doughty champion of its great revolutionary values of freedom, self-determination and self-development. Even abstract equality, he considered, was a welcome advance on the hierarchies of feudalism. It was just that he thought that these precious values had no chance of working for everyone as long as capitalism still existed. Even so, he lavished praise upon the middle class as the most revolutionary formation that history had ever witnessed, a fact that his middle-class opponents tend curiously to overlook. Perhaps they suspect that to be praised by Marx is the ultimate kiss of death.
In Marx’s view, what was awry with the prevailing notion of equality was that it was too abstract. It did not pay sufficient attention to the individuality of things and people—what Marx called in the economic realm “use-value.” It was capitalism that standardised people, not socialism. This is one reason why Marx was rather chary of the notion of rights. “Right,” he comments,
by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable by an equal standard only in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else is ignored.10
So much, then, for the Marx who wants to reduce us all to the same dead level. So much also for the Marx who when he looks at people can see nothing but workers. Equality for socialism does not mean that everyone is just the same—an absurd proposition if ever there was one. Even Marx would have noticed that he was more intelligent than the Duke of Wellington. Nor does it mean that everyone will be granted exactly the same amount of wealth or resources.
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone’s different needs. And this is the kind of society that Marx looked forward to. Human needs are not all commensurate with one another. You cannot measure them all by the same yardstick. Everyone for Marx was to have an equal right to self-realisation, and to participate actively in the shaping of social life. Barriers of inequality would thus be broken down. But the result of this would be as far as possible to allow each person to flourish as the unique individual they were. In the end, equality for Marx exists for the sake of difference. Socialism is not about everyone wearing the same kind of boiler suit. It is consumer capitalism that decks out its citizens in uniforms known as tracksuits and trainers.
In Marx’s view, socialism would thus constitute a far more pluralistic order than the one we have now. In class-society, the free self-development of the few is bought at the cost of the shackling of the many, who then come to share much the same monotonous narrative. Communism, precisely because everyone would be encouraged to develop their individual talents, would be a great deal more diffuse, diverse and unpredictable. It would be more like a modernist novel than a realist one. Critics of Marx may scorn this as a fantasy. But they cannot complain at the same time that Marx’s preferred social order looks much like the one in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the modern age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazed notion that a single global system known as the free market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills. The purveyors of this totalitarian fantasy are not to be found hiding scar-faced and sinisterly softspoken in underground bunkers like James Bond villains. They are to be seen dining at upmarket Washington restaurants and strolling on Sussex estates.
Theodor Adorno’s answer to the question of whether Marx was a utopian thinker is a decisive yes and no. He was, Adorno writes, an enemy of utopia for the sake of its realisation.
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