Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

  Marx believes that the productive forces have a tendency to develop as history unfolds. This is not to claim that they progress all the time, since he also seems to hold that they can lapse into long periods of stagnation. The agent of this development is whatever social class is in command of material production. On this version of history, it is as though the productive forces "select'' the class most capable of expanding them. There comes a point, however, when the prevailing social relations, far from promoting the growth of the productive forces, begin to act as an obstacle to them. The two run headlong into contradiction, and the stage is set for political revolution. The class struggle sharpens, and a social class capable of taking the forces of production forward assumes power from its erstwhile masters. Capitalism, for example, staggers from crisis to crisis, slump to slump, by virtue of the social relations it involves; and at a certain point in its decline, the working class is on hand to take over the ownership and control of production. At one point in his work, Marx even claims that no new social class takes over until the productive forces have been developed as far as possible by the previous one.

  The case is put most succinctly in the following well-known passage:

  At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society enter into contradiction with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression of the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.2

  There are numerous problems with this theory, as Marxists themselves have been quick to point out. For one thing, why does Marx assume that by and large the productive forces keep evolving? It is true that technological development tends to be cumulative, in the sense that human beings are reluctant to let go of what advances they make in prosperity and efficiency. This is because as a species we are somewhat rational but also mildly indolent, and thus inclined to be labour-saving. (It is these factors which determine that supermarket checkout queues are always roughly the same length.) Having invented e-mail, we are unlikely to revert to scratching on rocks. We also have the ability to transmit such advances to future generations. Technological knowledge is rarely lost, even if the technology itself is destroyed. But this is so broad a truth that it does not serve to illuminate very much. It does not explain, for example, why the forces of production evolve very rapidly at certain times but may stagnate for centuries at others. Whether or not there is major technological development depends on the prevailing social relations, not on some built-in drive. Some Marxists see the compulsion to improve the forces of production not as a general law of history, but as an imperative specific to capitalism. They take issue with the assumption that every mode of production must be followed by a more productive one. Whether these Marxists include Marx himself is a contestable point.

  For another thing, it is not clear by what mechanism certain social classes are "selected'' for the task of promoting the productive forces. Those forces, after all, are not some ghostly personage able to survey the social scene and summon a particular candidate to their aid. Ruling classes do not of course promote the productive forces out of altruism, any more than they seize power for the express purpose of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. Instead, they tend to pursue their own material interests, reaping a surplus from the labour of others. The idea, however, is that in doing so they unwittingly advance the productive forces as a whole, and along with them (at least in the long run) the spiritual as well as material wealth of humanity. They foster resources from which the majority in class-society are shut out, but in doing so build up a legacy that men and women as a whole will one day inherit in the communist future.

  Marx clearly thinks that material wealth can damage our moral health. Even so, he does not see a gulf between the moral and the material, as some idealist thinkers do. In his view, the unfurling of the productive forces involves the unfolding of creative human powers and capacities. In one sense, history is not at all a tale of progress. Instead, we lurch from one form of class-society, one kind of oppression and exploitation, to another. In another sense, however, this grim narrative can be seen as a movement onwards and upwards, as human beings acquire more complex needs and desires, cooperate in more intricate, rewarding ways, and create new kinds of relationship and fresh sorts of fulfillment.

  Human beings as a whole will come into this inheritance in the communist future; but the process of building it up is inseparable from violence and exploitation. In the end, social relations will be established that deploy this accumulated wealth for the benefit of all. But the process of accumulation itself involves excluding the great majority of men and women from enjoying its fruits. So it is, Marx comments, that history "progresses by its bad side.'' It looks as though injustice now is unavoidable for justice later. The end is at odds with the means: if there were no exploitation there would be no sizeable expansion of the productive forces, and if there were no such expansion there would be no material basis for socialism.

  Marx is surely right to see that the material and spiritual are in both conflict and collusion. He does not simply damn class-society for its moral atrocities, though he does that too; he also recognizes that spiritual fulfillment requires a material foundation. You cannot have a decent relationship if you are starving. Every extension of human communication brings with it new forms of community and fresh kinds of division. New technologies may thwart human potential, but they can also enhance it. Modernity is not to be mindlessly celebrated, but neither is it to be disdainfully dismissed. Its positive and negative qualities are for the most part aspects of the same process. This is why only a dialectical approach, one which grasps how contradiction is of its essence, can do it justice.

  All the same, there are real problems with Marx's theory of history. Why, for example, does the same mechanism— the conflict between the forces and relations of production— operate in the shift from one era of class-society to another? What accounts for this odd consistency over vast stretches of historical time? Anyway, is it not possible to overthrow a dominant class while it is still in its prime, if the political opposition is powerful enough? Do we really have to wait until the productive forces falter? And might not the growth of the productive forces actually undermine the class poised to take over—say, by fashioning new forms of oppressive technology? It is true that with the growth of the productive forces, workers tend to become more skilled, well-organised, educated and (perhaps) politically self-assured and sophisticated; but for the same reason there may also be more tanks, surveillance cameras, right-wing newspapers and modes of outsourcing labour around. New technologies may force more people into unemployment, and thus into political inertia. In any case, whether a social class is ripe to make a revolution is shaped by a lot more than whether it has the power to promote the forces of production. Class capacities are moulded by a whole range of factors. And how can we know that a specific set of social relations will be useful for that purpose?

  A change of social relations cannot simply be explained by an expansion of the productive forces. Nor do pathbreak-ing changes in the productive forces necessarily result in new social relations, as the Industrial Revolution might illustrate. The same productive forces can coexist with different sets of social relations. Stalinism and industrial capitalism, for example. When it comes to peasant agriculture from ancient times to the modern age, a wide range of social relations and forms of property has proved possible. Or the same set of social relations might foster different kinds of productive forces. Think of capitalist industry and capitalist agriculture. ProTERRY EAGLETON ductive forces and productive relations do not dance harmoniously hand in hand throughout history. The truth is that each stage of development of the productive forces opens up a whole range of possible social relations, and there is no guarantee that any one set of them will actually come about. Neither is there any guarante
e that a potential revolutionary agent will be conveniently on hand when the historical crunch comes. Sometimes there is simply no class around that could take the productive forces further, as happened in the case of classical China.

  Even so, the connection between forces and relations is an illuminating one. Among other things, it allows us to recognize that you can only have certain social relations if the productive forces have evolved to a certain extent. If some people are to live a lot more comfortably than others, you need to produce a sizeable economic surplus; and this is possible only at a certain point of productive development. You cannot sustain an immense royal court complete with minstrels, pages, jesters and chamberlains if everyone has to herd goats or grub for plants all the time just to survive.

  The class struggle is essentially a struggle over the surplus, and as such is likely to continue as long as there is not a sufficiency for all. Class comes about whenever material production is so organised as to compel some individuals to transfer their surplus labour to others in order to survive. When there is little or no surplus, as in so-called primitive communism, everyone has to work, nobody can live off the toil of others, so there can be no classes. Later, there is enough of a surplus to fund classes like feudal lords, who live by the labour of their underlings. Only with capitalism can enough surplus be generated for the abolition of scarcity, and thus of social classes, to become possible. But only socialism can put this into practice.

  It is not clear, however, why the productive forces should always triumph over the social relations—why the latter seem so humbly deferential to the former. Besides, the theory does not seem to accord with the way that Marx actually portrays the transition from feudalism to capitalism, or in some respects from slavery to feudalism. It is also true that the same social classes have often persisted in power for centuries despite their inability to promote productive growth.

  One of the obvious flaws of that model is its determinism. Nothing seems able to resist the onward march of the productive forces. History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic. There is a single ''subject'' of history (the constantly growing productive forces) which stretches all the way through it, throwing up different political setups as it rolls along. This is a metaphysical vision with a vengeance. Yet it is not a simpleminded scenario of Progress. In the end, the human powers and capacities which evolve along with the productive forces make for a finer kind of humanity. But the price we pay for this is a horrifying one. Every advance of the productive forces is a victory for both civilisation and barbarism. If it brings in its wake new possibilities of emancipation, it also arrives coated in blood. Marx was no nai've progress-monger. He was well aware of the terrible cost of communism.

  It is true there is also class struggle, which would seem to suggest that men and women are free. It is hard to see that strikes, lockouts and occupations are dictated by some providential force. But what if this very freedom was, so to speak, preprogrammed, already factored into the unstoppable march of history? There is an analogy here with the Christian interplay between divine providence and human free will. For the Christian, I act freely when I strangle the local police chief; but God has foreseen this action from all eternity, and included it all along in his plan for humanity. He did not force me to dress up as a parlour maid last Friday and call myself Milly; but being omniscient, he knew that I would, and could thus shape his cosmic schemes with the Milly business well in mind. When I pray to him for a smarter-looking teddy bear than the dog-eared, beer-stained one who sleeps on my pillow at present, it is not that God never had the slightest intention of bestowing such a favour on me but then, on hearing my prayer, changed his mind. God cannot change his mind. It is rather that he decides from all eternity to give me a new teddy bear because of my prayer, which he has also foreseen from all eternity. In one sense, the coming of the future kingdom of God is not preordained: it will arrive only if men and women work for it in the present. But the fact that they will work for it of their own free will is itself an inevitable result of God's grace.

  There is a similar interplay between freedom and inevitability in Marx. He sometimes seems to think that class struggle, though in one sense free, is bound to intensify under certain historical conditions, and that at times its outcome can be predicted with certainty. Take, for example, the question of socialism. Marx appears to regard the advent of socialism as inevitable. He says so more than once. In the Communist Manifesto, the fall of the capitalist class and the victory of the working class are described as ''equally inevitable.'' But this is not because Marx believes that there is some secret law inscribed in history which will usher in socialism whatever men and women may or may not do. If this were so, why should he urge the need for political struggle? If socialism really is inevitable, one might think that we need do no more than wait for it to arrive, perhaps ordering curries or collecting tattoos in the meanwhile. Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism. In the twentieth century, it played a key role in the failure of the communist movement to combat fascism, assured as it was for a time that fascism was no more than the death rattle of a capitalist system on the point of extinction. One might claim that whereas for the nineteenth century the inevitable was sometimes eagerly expected, this is not the case for us. Sentences beginning "It is now inevitable that . . .'' generally have an ominous ring to them.

  Marx does not think that the inevitability of socialism means we can all stay in bed. He believes, rather, that once capitalism has definitively failed, working people will have no reason not to take it over and every reason to do so. They will recognize that it is in their interests to change the system, and that, being a majority, they also have the power to do so. So they will act as the rational animals they are and establish an alternative. Why on earth would you drag out a wretched existence under a regime you are capable of changing to your advantage? Why would you let your foot itch intolerably when you are able to scratch it? Just as for the Christian human action is free yet part of a preordained plan, so for Marx the disintegration of capitalism will unavoidably lead men and women to sweep it away of their own free will.

  He is talking, then, about what free men and women are bound to do under certain circumstances. But this is surely a contradiction, since freedom means that there is nothing that you are bound to do. You are not bound to devour a succulent pork chop if your guts are being wrenched by agonizing hunger pains. As a devout Muslim, you might prefer to die. If there is only one course of action I can possibly take, and if it is impossible for me not to take it, then in that situation I am not free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be socialism that replaces it.

  It may be fascism, or barbarism. Perhaps the working class will be too enfeebled and demoralized by the crumbling of the system to act constructively. In an uncharacteristically gloomy moment, Marx reflects that the class struggle may result in the ''common ruination'' of the contending classes.

  Or—a possibility that he could not fully anticipate—the system might fend off political insurrection by reform. Social democracy is one bulwark between itself and disaster. In this way, the surplus reaped from developed productive forces can be used to buy off revolution, which does not fit at all neatly into Marx's historical scheme. He seems to have believed that capitalist prosperity can only be temporary; that the system will eventually founder; and that the working class will then inevitably rise up and take it over. But this, for one thing, passes over the many ways (much more sophisticated in our own day than in Marx's) in which even a capitalism in crisis can continue to secure the consent of its citizens. Marx did not have Fox News and the Daily Mail to reckon with.

  There is, of course, another future one can envisage, namely no future at all. Marx could not foresee the possibility of nuclear holocaust or ecological catastrophe. Or perhaps the ruling class will be brought low by being hit by an asteroid, a fate that some of them might regard as preferable to socialist revolution. Even the most determinis
tic theory of history can be shipwrecked by such contingent events. All the same, we can still inquire how much of a historical determinist Marx actually is. If there were no more to his work than the idea of the productive forces giving birth to certain social relations, the answer would be plain. This amounts to a full-blown determinism, and as such a case that very few Marxists today would be prepared to sign up for.3 On this view, it is not human beings who create their own history; it is the productive forces, which lead a strange, fetishistic life of their own.

  Yet there is a different current of thought in Marx's writings, for which it is the social relations of production which have priority over the productive forces, rather than the other way around. If feudalism made way for capitalism, it was not because the latter could promote the productive forces more efficiently; it was because feudal social relations in the countryside were gradually ousted by capitalist ones. Feudalism created the conditions in which the new bourgeois class could grow up; but this class did not emerge as a result of a growth in the productive forces. Besides, if the forces of production expanded under feudalism, it was not because they have some built-in tendency to develop, but for reasons of class interest. As for the modern period, if the productive forces have grown so rapidly over the past couple of centuries, it is because capitalism cannot survive without constant expansion.

  On this alternative theory, human beings, in the shape of social relations and class struggles, are indeed the authors of their own history. Marx once commented that he and

  Engels had emphasized ''the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history'' for some forty years.4 The point about class struggle is that its outcome cannot be predicted, and determinism can therefore find no foothold. You might always argue that class conflict is determined—that it is in the nature of social classes to pursue mutually clashing interests, and that this is determined by the mode of production. But it is only now and then that this ''objective'' conflict of interests takes the form of a full-scale political battle; and it is hard to see how that battle can be somehow predrafted. Marx may have thought that socialism was inevitable, but he surely did not think that the Factory Acts or the Paris Commune were. If he had really been a full-blooded determinist, he might have been able to tell us when and how socialism would arrive. But he was a prophet in the sense of denouncing injustice, not in the sense of peering into a crystal ball.