Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

  ''History,'' Marx writes, ''does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles. It is man, real living man, who does all that, who possesses and fights; 'history' is not, as it were, a person apart, using man as a means to achieve its own aims, history is nothing but the activity of man pursuing his aims.''5 When Marx comments on class relations in the ancient, medieval or modern world, he often writes as though these are what are primary. He also insists that each mode of production, from slavery and feudalism to capitalism, has its own distinct laws of development. If this is so, then one no longer need think in terms of a rigorously ''linear'' historical process, in which each mode of production follows on the heels of another according to some inner logic. There is nothing endemic in feudalism that turns it inexorably into capitalism. There is no longer a single thread running through the tapestry of history, but rather a set of differences and discontinuities. It is bourgeois political economy, not Marxism, that thinks in terms of universal evolutionary laws. Indeed, Marx himself protested against the charge that he was seeking to bring the whole of history under a single law. He was deeply averse to such bloodless abstractions, as befits a good Romantic. ''The materialist method turns into its opposite,'' he insisted, ''if it is taken not as one's guiding principle of investigation but as a ready-made pattern to which one shapes the facts of history to suit oneself.''6 His view of the origins of capitalism, he warns, should not be transformed ''into an historico-philosophical theory of the general path prescribed by fate to all nations whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves.''7 If there were certain tendencies at work in history, there were also countertendencies, which implies that outcomes are not assured.

  Some Marxists have played down the ''primacy of the productive forces'' case, and played up the alternative theory we have just examined. But this is probably too defensive. The former model crops up in enough important spots in

  Marx's work to suggest that he took it very seriously. It does not sound like a momentary aberration. It is also the way that Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky generally interpreted him. Some commentators claim that by the time he came to write Capital, Marx had more or less abandoned his previous faith in the productive forces as the heroes of history. Others are not so convinced. Students of Marx, however, are free to select whatever ideas in his work seem most plausible. Only Marxist fundamentalists regard that work as holy writ, and there are far fewer of those nowadays than the Christian variety.

  There is no evidence that Marx is in general a determinist, in the sense of denying that human actions are free. On the contrary, he clearly believes in freedom, and talks all the time, not least in his journalism, about how individuals could (and sometimes should) have acted differently, whatever the historical limits placed on their choices. Engels, who some see as an out-and-out determinist, had a lifelong interest in military strategy, which is hardly a question of fate.8 Marx is to be found stressing courage and consistency as essential for political victory, and seems to allow for the decisive influence of random events on historical processes. The fact that the militant working class in France was ravaged by cholera in 1849 is one such example.

  There are, in any case, different kinds of inevitability. You may consider that some things are inevitable without being a determinist. Even libertarians believe that death is unavoidable. If enough Texans try to cram themselves into a telephone box, some of them will end up being seriously squashed. This is a matter of physics rather than fate. It does not alter the fact that they crammed themselves in of their own free will. Actions we freely perform often end up confronting us as alien powers. Marx's theories of alienation and commodity fetishism are based on just this truth.

  There are other senses of inevitability as well. To claim that the triumph of justice in Zimbabwe is inevitable may not mean that it is bound to happen. It may be more of a moral or political imperative, meaning that the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate. ''Socialism or barbarism'' may not suggest that we will undoubtedly end up living under one or the other. It may be a way of emphasizing the unthinkable consequences of not achieving the former. Marx argues in The German Ideology that ''at the present time . . . individuals must abolish private property,'' but that "must" is more of a political exhortation than a suggestion that they have no choice. Marx, then, may not be a determinist in general; but there are a good many formulations in his work which convey a sense of historical determinism. He sometimes compares historical laws to natural ones, writing in Capital of the ''natural laws of capitalism . . . working with iron necessity towards inevitable results.''9 When a commentator describes his work as treating the evolution of society like a process of natural history, Marx seems to concur. He also approvingly quotes a reviewer of his work who sees it as demonstrating ''the necessity of the present order of things, and the necessity of another order into which the first must inevitably pass.''10 It is not clear how this austere determinism fits with the centrality of class struggle.

  There are times when Engels sharply distinguishes historical laws from natural ones, and other times when he argues for affinities between the two. Marx flirts with the idea of finding a basis for history in Nature, but also highlights the fact that we make the former but not the latter. Sometimes he criticizes the application of biology to human history, and rejects the notion of universally valid historical laws. Like many a nineteenth-century thinker, Marx hijacked the authority of the natural sciences, then the supreme model of knowledge, to gain some legitimacy for his work. But he might also have believed that so-called historical laws could be known with the certainty of scientific ones.

  Even so, it is hard to credit that that he considered the so-called tendency of the rate of capitalist profit to decline as being literally like the law of gravity. He cannot have thought that history evolves as a thunderstorm does. It is true that he sees the course of historical events as revealing a significant shape, but he is hardly alone in holding that. Not many people see human history as completely random. If there were no regularities or broadly predictable tendencies in social life, we would be incapable of purposive action. It is not a choice between iron laws on the one hand and sheer chaos on the other. Every society, like every human action, opens up certain possible futures while shutting down others. But this interplay of freedom and constraint is far from some kind of cast-iron necessity. If you attempt to build socialism in wretched economic conditions, then as we have seen you are very likely to end up with some species of Stalinism. This is a well-testified historical pattern, confirmed by a whole number of bungled social experiments. Liberals and conservatives who do not usually relish talk of historical laws might change their tune when it comes to this particular instance of them. But to claim that you are bound to end up with Stalinism is to overlook the contingencies of history. Perhaps the common people will rise up and take power into their own hands; or perhaps a set of affluent nations will unexpectedly fly to your aid; or perhaps you might discover that you are sitting on the largest oil field on the planet and use this to build up your economy in a democratic way.

  It is much the same with the course of history. Marx does not seem to believe that the various modes of production from ancient slavery to modern capitalism follow upon one another in some unalterable pattern. Engels remarked that history ''moves often in leaps and bounds and in a zigzag line.''11 For one thing, different modes of production do not just follow each other in the first place. They can coexist within the same society. For another thing, Marx claimed that his views on the transition from feudalism to capitalism applied specifically to the West and were not to be universalised. As far as modes of production go, not every nation has to make the same trek from one to the other. The Bolsheviks were able to leap from a part-feudalist Russia to a socialist state without living through a prolonged interlude of extensive capitalism.

  Marx believed at one point that his own nation of Germany had to pass through a stage of bourgeois rule before the working class could co
me to power. Later, however, he seems to have abandoned this belief, recommending instead a ''permanent revolution'' which would telescope these stages together. The typical Enlightenment view of history is of an organically evolving process, in which each phase emerges spontaneously from the next to constitute the whole we know as Progress. The Marxist narrative, by contrast, is marked by violence, disruption, conflict and discontinuity. There is indeed progress; but as Marx commented in his writings on India, it is like a hideous god who drinks nectar from the skulls of the slain.

  How far Marx believes in historical necessity is not only a political and economic matter; it is also a moral one. He does not seem to suppose that feudalism or capitalism had to arise. Given a particular mode of production, there are various possible routes out of it. There are, of course, limits to this latitude. You would not move from consumer capitalism to hunter-gathering, unless perhaps a nuclear war had intervened in the meanwhile. Developed productive forces would make such a reversion both wholly unnecessary and deeply undesirable. But there is one move in particular which Marx seems to see as inevitable. This is the need for capitalism in order to have socialism. Driven by self-interest, ruthless competition and the need for ceaseless expansion, only capitalism is capable of developing the productive forces to the point where, under a different political dispensation, the surplus they generate can be used to furnish a sufficiency for all. To have socialism, you must first have capitalism. Or rather, you may not need to have capitalism, but somebody must. Marx thought that Russia might be able to achieve a form of socialism based on the peasant commune rather than on a history of industrial capitalism; but he did not imagine that this could be accomplished without the help of capitalist resources from elsewhere. A particular nation does not need to have passed through capitalism, but capitalism must exist somewhere or other if it is to go socialist.

  This raises some thorny moral problems. Just as some Christians accept evil as somehow necessary to God's plan for humanity, so you can read Marx as claiming that capitalism, however rapacious and unjust, has to be endured for the sake of the socialist future it will inevitably bring in its wake. Not only endured, in fact, but actively encouraged. There are points in Marx's work where he cheers on the growth of capitalism, since only thus will the path to socialism be thrown open. In a lecture of 1847, for example, he defends free trade as hastening the advent of socialism. He also wanted to see German unification on the grounds that it would promote German capitalism. There are several places in his work where this revolutionary socialist betrays rather too much relish at the prospect of a progressive capitalist class putting paid to ''barbarism.''

  The morality of this appears distinctly dubious. How is it different from Stalin's or Mao's murderous pogroms, executed in the name of the socialist future? How far does the end justify the means? And given that few today believe that socialism is inevitable, is this not even more reason for renouncing such a brutal sacrifice of the present on the altar of a future that might never arrive? If capitalism is essential for socialism, and if capitalism is unjust, does this not suggest that injustice is morally acceptable? If there is to be justice in the future, must there have been injustice in the past? Marx writes in Theories of Surplus Value that ''the development of the capacities of the human species takes place at the cost of the majority of individuals and even classes.''12 He means that the good of the species will finally triumph in the shape of communism, but that this involves a great deal of ineluctable suffering and injustice en route. The material prosperity that in the end will fund freedom is the fruit of un-freedom.

  There is a difference between doing evil in the hope that good may come of it, and seeking to turn someone else's evil to good use. Socialists did not perpetrate capitalism, and are innocent of its crimes; but granted that it exists, it seems rational to make the best of it. This is possible because capitalism is not of course simply evil. To think so is to be drastically one-sided, a fault by which Marx himself was rarely afflicted. As we have seen, the system breeds freedom as well as barbarism, emancipation along with enslavement. Capitalist society generates enormous wealth, but in a way that cannot help putting it beyond the reach of most of its citizens. Even so, that wealth can always be brought within reach. It can be disentangled from the acquisitive, individualist forms which bred it, invested in the community as a whole, and used to restrict disagreeable work to the minimum. It can thus release men and women from the chains of economic necessity into a life where they are free to realize their creative potential. This is Marx's vision of communism.

  None of this suggests that the rise of capitalism was an absolute good. It would have been better if human emancipation could have been achieved with far less blood, sweat and tears. In this sense, Marx's theory of history is not a "teleologi-cal'' one. A teleological theory holds that each phase of history arises inexorably from what went before. Each stage of the process is necessary in itself, and along with all the other stages is indispensable for attaining a certain goal. That goal is itself inevitable, and acts as the hidden dynamic of the whole process. Nothing in this narrative can be left out, and everything, however apparently noxious or negative, contributes to the good of the whole.

  This is not what Marxism teaches. To say that capitalism can be drawn on for an improved future is not to imply that it exists for that reason. Nor does socialism follow necessarily from it. It is not to suggest that the crimes of capitalism are justified by the advent of socialism. Nor is it to clam that capitalism was bound to emerge. Modes of production do not arise necessarily. It is not as though they are linked to all previous stages by some inner logic. No stage of the process exists for the sake of the others. It is possible to leap stages, as with the Bolsheviks. And the end is by no means guaranteed. History for Marx is not moving in any particular direction. Capitalism can be used to build socialism, but there is no sense in which the whole historical process is secretly labouring towards this goal.

  The modern capitalist age, then, brings its undoubted benefits. It has a great many features, from anaesthetics and penal reform to efficient sanitation and freedom of expression, which are precious in themselves, not simply because a socialist future might find some way to make use of them. But this does not necessarily mean that the system is finally vindicated. It is possible to argue that even if class-society happens to lead in the end to socialism, the price humanity has been forced to pay for this felicitous outcome is simply too high. How long would a socialist world have to survive, and how vigorously would it need to flourish, to justify in retrospect the sufferings of class-history? Could it ever do so, any more than one could justify Auschwitz? The Marxist philosopher Max Horkheimer comments that ''history's route lies across the sorrow and misery of individuals. There is a series of explanatory connections between these two facts, but no justificatory meaning.''13

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

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

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