Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

  Capitalism has brought about great material advances. But though this way of organising our affairs has had a long time to demonstrate that it is capable of satisfying human demands all round, it seems no closer to doing so than ever. How long are we prepared to wait for it to come up with the goods? Why do we continue to indulge the myth that the fabulous wealth generated by this mode of production will in the fullness of time become available to all? Would the world treat similar claims by the far left with such genial, let's-wait-and-see forbearance? Right-wingers who concede that there will always be colossal injustices in the system, but that that's just tough and the alternatives are even worse, are at least more honest in their hard-faced way than those who preach that it will all finally come right. If there happened to be both rich and poor people, as there happen to be both black and white ones, then the advantages of the well-heeled might well spread in time to the hard-up. But to point out that some people are destitute while others are prosperous is rather like claiming that the world contains both detectives and criminals. So it does; but this obscures the truth that there are detectives because there are criminals . . .

  TWO

  Marxism may be all very well in theory. Whenever it has been put into practice, however, the result has been terror, tyranny and mass murder on an inconceivable scale. Marxism might look like a good idea to well-heeled Western academics who can take freedom and democracy for granted. For millions of ordinary men and women, it has meant famine, hardship, torture, forced labour, a broken economy and a monstrously oppressive state. Those who continue to support the theory despite all this are either obtuse, self-deceived or morally contemptible. Socialism means lack of freedom; it also means a lack of material goods, since this is bound to be the result of abolishing markets.

  Lots of men and women in the West are fervent supporters of bloodstained setups. Christians, for example. Nor is it unknown for decent, compassionate types to support whole civilisations steeped in blood. Tiberals and conservatives, among others. Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror, which is not the case with Stalinism and Maoism. If Marx was spared this amnesia, it was partly because he lived while the system was still in the making.

  Mike Davis writes in his Late Victorian Holocausts of the tens of millions of Indians, Africans, Chinese, Brazilians, Koreans, Russians and others who died as a result of entirely preventable famine, drought and disease in the late nineteenth century. Many of these catastrophes were the result of free market dogma, as (for example) soaring grain prices thrust food beyond the reach of the common people. Nor are all such monstrosities as old as the Victorians. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, the number of those in the world living on less than two dollars a day has increased by almost one hundred million.1 One in three children in Britain today lives below the breadline, while bankers sulk if their annual bonus falls to a paltry million pounds.

  Capitalism, to be sure, has bequeathed us some inestimably precious goods along with these abominations. Without the middle classes Marx so deeply admired, we would lack a heritage of liberty, democracy, civil rights, feminism, republicanism, scientific progress and a good deal more, as well as a history of slumps, sweatshops, fascism, imperial wars and Mel Gibson. But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union dragged their citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at however horrific a human cost; and the cost was so steep partly because of the hostility of the capitalist West. That hostility also forced the Soviet Union into an arms race which crippled its arthritic economy even further, and finally pressed it to the point of collapse.

  In the meantime, however, it managed along with its satellites to achieve cheap housing, fuel, transport and culture, full employment and impressive social services for half the citizens of Europe, as well as an incomparably greater degree of equality and (in the end) material well-being than those nations had previously enjoyed. Communist East Germany could boast of one of the finest child care systems in the world. The Soviet Union played a heroic role in combating the evil of fascism, as well as in helping to topple colonialist powers. It also fostered the kind of solidarity among its citizens that Western nations seem able to muster only when they are killing the natives of other lands. All this, to be sure, is no substitute for freedom, democracy and vegetables in the shop, but neither is it to be ignored. When freedom and democracy finally rode to the rescue of the Soviet bloc, they did so in the shape of economic shock therapy, a form of daylight robbery politely known as privatization, joblessness for tens of millions, stupendous increases in poverty and inequality, the closure of free nurseries, the loss of women's rights and the near-ruin of the social welfare networks that had served these countries so well.

  Even so, the gains of Communism scarcely outweigh the losses. It may be that some kind of dictatorial government was well-nigh inevitable in the atrocious conditions of the early Soviet Union; but this did not have to mean Stalinism, or anything like it. Taken overall, Maoism and Stalinism were botched, bloody experiments which made the very idea of socialism stink in the nostrils of many of those elsewhere in the world who had most to benefit from it. But what about capitalism? As I write, unemployment in the West is already in the millions and is mounting steadily higher, and capitalist economies have been prevented from imploding only by the appropriation of trillions of dollars from their hard-pressed citizens. The bankers and financiers who have brought the world financial system to the brink of the abyss are no doubt queuing up for cosmetic surgery, lest they are spotted and torn limb from limb by enraged citizens.

  It is true that capitalism works some of the time, in the sense that it has brought untold prosperity to some sectors of the world. But it has done so, as did Stalin and Mao, at a staggering human cost. This is not only a matter of genocide, famine, imperialism and the slave trade. The system has also proved incapable of breeding affluence without creating huge swathes of deprivation alongside it. It is true that this may not matter much in the long run, since the capitalist way of life is now threatening to destroy the planet altogether. One eminent Western economist has described climate change as ''the greatest market failure in history.''2

  Marx himself never imagined that socialism could be achieved in impoverished conditions. Such a project would require almost as bizarre a loop in time as inventing the Internet in the Middle Ages. Nor did any Marxist thinker until Stalin imagine that this was possible, including Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership. You cannot reorganise wealth for the benefit of all if there is precious little wealth to reorganise. You cannot abolish social classes in conditions of scarcity, since conflicts over a material surplus too meagre to meet everyone's needs will simply revive them again. As Marx comments in The German Ideology, the result of a revolution in such conditions is that "the old filthy business'' (or in less tasteful translation, ''the same old crap'') will simply reappear. All you will get is socialised scarcity. If you need to accumulate capital more or less from scratch, then the most effective way of doing so, however brutal, is through the profit motive. Avid self-interest is likely to pile up wealth with remarkable speed, though it is likely to amass spectacular poverty at the same time.

  Nor did Marxists ever imagine that it was possible to achieve socialism in one country alone. The movement was international or it was nothing. This was a hardheaded materialist claim, not a piously idealist one. If a socialist nation failed to win international support in a world where production was specialized and divided among different nations, it would be unable to draw upon the global resources needed to abolish scarcity. The productive wealth of a single country was unlikely to be enough. The outlandish notion of socialism in one country was invented by Stalin in the 1920s, partly a
s a cynical rationalisation of the fact that other nations had been unable to come to the aid of the Soviet Union. It has no warrant in Marx himself. Socialist revolutions must of course start somewhere. But they cannot be completed within national boundaries. To judge socialism by its results in one desperately isolated country would be like drawing conclusions about the human race from a study of psychopaths in Kalamazoo.

  Building up an economy from very low levels is a back-breaking, dispiriting task. It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships it involves. So unless this project is executed gradually, under democratic control and in accordance with socialist values, an authoritarian state may step in and force its citizens to do what they are reluctant to undertake voluntarily. The militarization of labour in Bolshevik Russia is a case in point. The result, in a grisly irony, will be to undermine the political superstructure of socialism (popular democracy, genuine self-government) in the very attempt to build up its economic base. It would be like being invited to a party only to discover that you had not only to bake the cakes and brew the beer but to dig the foundations and lay the floorboards. There wouldn't be much time to enjoy yourself.

  Ideally, socialism requires a skilled, educated, politically sophisticated populace, thriving civic institutions, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions and the habit of democracy. None of this is likely to be on hand if you cannot even afford to mend the dismally few highways you have, or have no insurance policy against sickness or starvation beyond a pig in the back shed. Nations with a history of colonial rule are especially likely to be bereft of the benefits I have just listed, since colonial powers have not been remarkable for their zeal to implant civil liberties or democratic institutions among their underlings.

  As Marx insists, socialism also requires a shortening of the working day—partly to provide men and women with the leisure for personal fulfillment, partly to create time for the business of political and economic self-government. You cannot do this if people have no shoes; and to distribute shoes among millions of citizens is likely to require a centralised bureaucratic state. If your nation is under invasion from an array of hostile capitalist powers, as Russia was in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution, an autocratic state will seem all the more inevitable. Britain during the Second World War was far from an autocracy; but it was by no means a free country, and one would not have expected it to be.

  To go socialist, then, you need to be reasonably well-heeled, in both the literal and metaphorical senses of the term. No Marxist from Marx and Engels to Lenin and Trotsky ever dreamt of anything else. Or if you are not well-heeled yourself, then a sympathetic neighbour reasonably flush in material resources needs to spring to your aid. In the case of the Bolsheviks, this would have meant such neighbours (Germany in particular) having their own revolutions, too. If the working classes of these countries could overthrow their own capitalist masters and lay hands on their productive powers, they could use those resources to save the first workers' state in history from sinking without trace. This was not as improbable a proposal as it might sound. Europe at the time was aflame with revolutionary hopes, as councils of workers' and soldiers' deputies (or soviets) sprang up in cities such as Berlin, Warsaw, Vienna, Munich and Riga. Once these insurrections were defeated, Lenin and Trotsky knew that their own revolution was in dire straits.

  It is not that the building of socialism cannot be begun in deprived conditions. It is rather that without material resources it will tend to twist into the monstrous caricature of socialism known as Stalinism. The Bolshevik revolution soon found itself besieged by imperial Western armies, as well as threatened by counterrevolution, urban famine and a bloody civil war. It was marooned in an ocean of largely hostile peasants reluctant to hand over their hard-earned surplus at gunpoint to the starving towns. With a narrow capitalist base, disastrously low levels of material production, scant traces of civil institutions, a decimated, exhausted working class, peasant revolts and a swollen bureaucracy to rival the Tsar's, the revolution was in deep trouble almost from the outset. In the end, the Bolsheviks were to march their starving, despondent, war-weary people into modernity at the point of a gun. Many of the most politically militant workers had perished in the Western-backed civil war, leaving the Bolshevik party with a dwindling social base. It was not long before the party usurped the workers' soviets and banned an independent press and justice system. It suppressed political dissent and oppositional parties, manipulated elections and militarized labour. This ruthlessly antisocialist programme came about against a background of civil war, widespread starvation and foreign invasion. Russia's economy lay in ruins, and its social fabric had disintegrated. In a tragic irony that was to mark the twentieth century as a whole, socialism proved least possible where it was most necessary.

  The historian Isaac Deutscher depicts the situation with his usual matchless eloquence. The situation in Russia at the time ''meant that the first and so far the only attempt to build socialism would have to be undertaken in the worst possible conditions, without the advantages of an intensive international division of labour, without the fertilizing influence of old and complex cultural traditions, in an environment of such staggering material and cultural poverty, primitiveness, and crudity as would tend to mar or warp the very striving for socialism.''3 It takes an unusually bold-faced critic of

  Marxism to claim that none of this is relevant since Marxism is an authoritarian creed in any case. If it took over the Home Counties tomorrow, so the case goes, there would be labour camps in Dorking before the week was out.

  Marx himself, as we shall see, was a critic of rigid dogma, military terror, political suppression and arbitrary state power. He believed that political representatives should be accountable to their electors, and castigated the German Social Democrats of his day for their statist politics. He insisted on free speech and civil liberties, was horrified by the forced creation of an urban proletariat (in his case in England rather than Russia), and held that common ownership in the countryside should be a voluntary rather than coercive process. Yet as one who recognized that socialism cannot thrive in poverty-stricken conditions, he would have understood perfectly how the Russian revolution came to be lost.

  In fact, there is a paradoxical sense in which Stalinism, rather than discrediting Marx's work, bears witness to its validity. If you want a compelling account of how Stalinism comes about, you have to go to Marxism. Mere moral denunciations of the beast are simply not good enough. We need to know in what material conditions it arises, how it functions and how it might fail, and this knowledge has been best provided by certain mainstream currents of Marxism. Such Marxists, many of them followers of Leon Trotsky or of one or another ''libertarian'' brand of socialism, differ from

  Western liberals in one vital respect: their criticisms of the so-called communist societies have been far more deep-seated. They have not contented themselves with wistful pleas for more democracy or civil rights. Instead, they have called for the overthrow of the entire repressive system, and called for this precisely as socialists. Moreover, they have been issuing such calls almost since the day that Stalin took power. At the same time, they have warned that if the communist system were to collapse, it might well be into the arms of a predatory capitalism waiting hungrily to pick among the ruins. Leon Trotsky foresaw precisely such an end to the Soviet Union, and was proved right some twenty years ago.

  Imagine a slightly crazed capitalist outfit that tried to turn a premodern tribe into a set of ruthlessly acquisitive, technologically sophisticated entrepreneurs speaking the jargon of public relations and free market economics, all in a surreally short period of time. Does the fact that the experiment would almost certainly prove less than dramatically successful constitute a fair condemnation of capitalism? Surely not. To think so would be as absurd as claiming that the Girl Guides should be disbanded because they cannot solve certain tricky problems in quantum physics. Marxists do not believe that the mighty liberal
lineage from Thomas Jefferson to John Stuart Mill is annulled by the existence of secret CIA-run prisons for torturing Muslims, even though such prisons are part of the politics of today's liberal societies. Yet the critics of Marxism are rarely willing to concede that show trials and mass terror are no refutation of it.

  There is, however, another sense in which socialism is thought by some to be unworkable. Even if you were to build it under affluent conditions, how could you possibly run a complex modern economy without markets? The answer for a growing number of Marxists is that you do not need to. Markets in their view would remain an integral part of a socialist economy. So-called market socialism envisages a future in which the means of production would be socially owned, but where self-governing cooperatives would compete with one another in the marketplace.4 In this way, some of the virtues of the market could be retained, while some of its vices could be shed. At the level of individual enterprises, cooperation would ensure increased efficiency, since the evidence suggests that it is almost always as efficient as capitalist enterprise and often much more so. At the level of the economy as a whole, competition ensures that the informational, allocation and incentive problems associated with the traditional Stalinist model of central planning do not arise.