Materialists, then, are not soulless creatures. Or if they are, it is not necessarily because they are materialists. Marx himself was a formidably cultivated man in the great central European tradition, who longed to be finished with what he scathingly called the ''economic crap'' of Capital in order to write his big book on Balzac. Unluckily for him, but perhaps fortunately for us, he never did. He once remarked that he had sacrificed his health, happiness and family to writing Capital, but that he would have been an ''ox'' if he had turned his back on the sufferings of humankind.20 He also observed that nobody had written so much on money and had so little. As a man, he was passionate, satirical and humorous, an indomitable spirit full of gusto, geniality and ferocious polemic who stubbornly survived both dire poverty and chronic ill health.21 He was, of course, an atheist; but one does not need to be religious to be spiritual, and some of the great themes of Judaism —justice, emancipation, the reign of peace and plenty, the day of reckoning, history as a narrative of liberation, the redemption not just of the individual but of a whole dispossessed people—inform his work in suitably secularised form. He also inherited the Jewish hostility to idols, fetishes and enslaving illusions.
As far as religion goes, it is worth pointing out that there have been Jewish Marxists, Islamic Marxists, and Christian Marxists who champion so-called liberation theology. All of them are materialists in Marx's sense of the word. In fact, Eleanor Marx, Marx's daughter, reports that Marx once told her mother that if she wanted ''satisfaction of her metaphysical needs'' she should find them in the Jewish prophets rather than in the Secular Society she sometimes attended.22 Marxist materialism is not a set of statements about the cosmos, such as ''Everything is made out of atoms'' or ''There is no God.'' It is a theory of how historical animals function.
In line with his Judaic legacy, Marx was a strenuously moral thinker. If he intended to write a book on Balzac after finishing Capital, he also proposed to write one on ethics. So much, then, for the prejudice that he was a bloodless amoralist whose approach to society was purely scientific. It is hard to feel this of a man who writes that capitalist society ''has torn up all genuine bonds between men and replaced them by selfishness, selfish need, and dissolved the world of men into a world of atomized individuals, hostile towards each other.''23 Marx believed that the ethic that governs capitalist society— the idea that I will only be of service to you if it is profitable for me to be so—was a detestable way to live. We would not treat our friends or children in this way, so why should we accept it as a perfectly natural way of dealing with others in the public realm?
It is true that Marx quite often denounces morality. By this, however, he meant the kind of historical inquiry which ignores material factors in favour of moral ones. The proper term for this is not morality but moralism. Moralism abstracts something called ''moral values'' from the whole historical context in which they are set, and then generally proceeds to hand down absolute moral judgements. A truly moral inquiry, by contrast, is one which investigates all the aspects of a human situation. It refuses to divorce human values, behavior, relationships and qualities of character from the social and historical forces which shape them. It thus escapes the false distinction between moral judgement on the one hand and scientific analysis on the other. A true moral judgement needs to examine all the relevant facts as rigorously as possible. In this sense, Marx himself was a true moralist in the tradition of Aristotle, though he did not always know that he was.
Moreover, he belonged to the great Aristotelian tradition for which morality was not primarily a question of laws, obligations, codes and prohibitions, but a question of how to live in the freest, fullest, most self-fulfilling way. Morality for Marx was in the end all about enjoying yourself. But since nobody can live their lives in isolation, ethics had to involve politics as well. Aristotle thought just the same.
The spiritual is indeed about the otherworldly. But it is not the otherworldly as the parsons conceive of it. It is the other world which socialists hope to build in the future, in place of one which is clearly past its sell-by date. Anyone who isn't otherworldly in this sense has obviously not taken a good hard look around them.
SEVEN
Nothing is more outdated about Marxism than its tedious obsession with class. Marxists seem not to have noticed that the landscape of social class has changed almost out of recognition since the days when Marx himself was writing. In particular, the working class which they fondly imagine will usher in socialism has disappeared almost without trace. We live in a social world where class matters less and less, where there is more and more social mobility, and where talk of class struggle is as archaic as talk of burning heretics at the stake. The revolutionary worker, like the wicked top-hatted capitalist, is a figment of the Marxist imagination.
W e have seen already that Marxists have a problem with the idea of utopia. This is one reason why they reject the illusion that, just because chief executives nowadays might sport sneakers, listen to Rage Against the Machine and beseech their employees to call them ''Cuddlykins,'' social class has been swept from the face of the earth. Marxism does not define class in terms of style, status, income, accent, occupation or whether you have ducks or Degas on the wall. Socialist men and women have not fought and sometimes died over the centuries simply to bring an end to snobbery.
The quaint American concept of ''classism'' would seem to suggest that class is mostly a question of attitude. The middle class should stop feeling contemptuous of the working class rather as whites should stop feeling superior to African-Americans. But Marxism is not a question of attitude. Class for Marxism, rather like virtue for Aristotle, is not a matter of how you are feeling but of what you are doing. It is a question of where you stand within a particular mode of production—whether as slave, self-employed peasant, agricultural tenant, owner of capital, financier, seller of one's labour power, petty proprietor and so on. Marxism has not been put out of business because Etonians have started to drop their aitches, princes of the royal household puke in the gutter outside nightclubs, or some more antique forms of class distinction have been blurred by the universal solvent known as money. The fact that the European aristocracy are honoured to hobnob with Mick Jagger has signally failed to usher in the classless society.
We have heard a good deal about the supposed disappearance of the working class. Before we turn to that topic, however, what of the less-heralded passing of the traditional haute bourgeoisie or upper-middle class? As Perry Anderson has noted, the kind of men and women unforgettably portrayed by novelists such as Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann are now all but extinct. ''By and large,'' Anderson writes, ''the bourgeoisie as Baudelaire or Marx, Ibsen or Rimbaud, Groz or Brecht—or even Sartre or O'Hara—knew it, is a thing of the past.'' Socialists, however, should not get too excited by this obituary notice. For as Anderson goes on to remark, ''In place of that solid amphitheatre is an aquarium of floating, evanescent forms—the projectors and managers, auditors and janitors, administrators and speculators of contemporary capital: functions of a monetary universe that knows no social fixities or stable identities.''1 Class changes its composition all the time. But this does not mean that it vanishes without trace.
It is in the nature of capitalism to confound distinctions, collapse hierarchies and mix the most diverse forms of life promiscuously together. No form of life is more hybrid and pluralistic. When it comes to who exactly should be exploited, the system is admirably egalitarian. It is as antihierarchical as the most pious postmodernist, and as generously inclusivist as the most earnest Anglican vicar. It is anxious to leave absolutely nobody out. Where there is profit to be made, black and white, women and men, toddlers and senior citizens, neighbourhoods in Wakefield and rural villages in Sumatra are all grist to its mill, to be treated with impeccable evenhanded-ness. It is the commodity form, not socialism, that is the great leveller. The commodity does not check up on where its potential consumer went to school, or whether she pronounces ''basin'' to rhyme wi
th ''bison.'' It imposes just the kind of uniformity that, as we have seen, Marx sets his face against.
We should not be surprised, then, that advanced capitalism breeds delusions of classlessness. This is not just a façade behind which the system conceals its true inequities; it is in the nature of the beast. Even so, there is a telling contrast between the dressed-down matiness of the modern office and a global system in which distinctions of wealth and power yawn wider than ever. Old-style hierarchies may have yielded in some sectors of the economy to decentralised, network-based, team-oriented, information-rich, first-name, open-neck-shirted forms of organisation. But capital remains concentrated in fewer hands than ever before, and the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed swell by the hour. While the chief executive smoothes his jeans over his sneakers, over one billion on the planet go hungry every day. Most of the mega-cities in the south of the globe are stinking slums rife with disease and overcrowding, and slum dwellers represent one-third of the global urban population. The urban poor more generally constitute at least one-half of the world's population.2 Meanwhile, some in the West seek in their evangelical fervor to spread liberal democracy to the rest of the globe, at the very point that the world's destiny is being determined by a handful of Western-based corporations answerable to nobody but their shareholders.
Even so, Marxists are not simply ''against'' the capitalist class, as one might be against hunting or smoking. We have seen already that no one admired their magnificent achievements more than Marx himself. It was on these achievements—a resolute opposition to political tyranny, a massive accumulation of wealth which brought with it the prospect of universal prosperity, respect for the individual, civil liberties, democratic rights, a truly international community and so on—that socialism itself would need to build. Class-history was to be used, not simply discarded. Capitalism, as we have noted, had proved an emancipatory force as well as a catastrophic one; and it is Marxism, more than any other political theory, which seeks to deliver a judicious account of it, in contrast with mindless celebration on the one hand and blanket condemnation on the other. Among the mighty gifts that capitalism bestowed on the world, however unintentionally, was the working class—a social force which it reared up for its own self-interested purposes to the point where it became in principle capable of taking it over. This is one reason why irony lies at the heart of Marx's vision of history. There is a dark humour in the vision of the capitalist order giving birth to its own gravedigger.
Marxism does not focus on the working class because it sees some resplendent virtue in labour. Burglars and bankers toil away too, but Marx was not notable for his championship of them. (He did, however, once write about housebreaking, in a splendid parody of his own economic theory.) Marxism, as we have seen, wants to abolish labour as far as possible. Nor does it assign such political importance to the working class because it is supposedly the most downtrodden of social groups. There are many such groups—vagrants, students, refugees, the elderly, the unemployed and chronically unemploy-able—who are often more needy than the average worker. The working class does not cease to interest Marxists the moment it acquires indoor bathrooms or colour television. It is its place within the capitalist mode of production which is most decisive. Only those within that system, familiar with its workings, organised by it into a skilled, politically conscious collective force, indispensable to its successful running yet with a material interest in bringing it low, can feasibly take it over and run it instead for the benefit of all. No well-meaning paternalist or bunch of outside agitators can do it for them— which is to say that Marx's attention to the working class (by far the majority of the population of his time) is inseparable from his deep respect for democracy.
If Marx assigns the working class such importance, it is among other things because he sees them as the bearers of a universal emancipation:
A class must be formed which has radical chains, a class in civil society which is not a class of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional status but only a human status . . . which is, in short, a total loss of humanity and which can only redeem itself by a total redemption of humanity. This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the proletariat . . .3
The working class for Marx is in one sense a specific social group. Yet because it signifies for him the wrong which keeps so many other kinds of wrong in business (imperial wars, colonial expansion, famine, genocide, the plundering of Nature, to some extent racism and patriarchy), it has a significance far beyond its own sphere. In this sense, it resembles the scapegoat in ancient societies, which is cast out of the city because it represents a universal crime, but which for just the same reason has the power to become the cornerstone of a new social order. Because it is both necessary to and excluded by the capitalist system, this ''class which is not a class'' is a kind of riddle or conundrum. In a quite literal sense, it creates the social order—it is on its silent, persistent labour that the whole mighty edifice is reared—yet it can find no real representation within that order, no full recognition of its humanity. It is both functional and dispossessed, specific and universal, an integral part of civil society yet a kind of nothing.
Because the very foundation of society is in this sense self-contradictory, the working class signifies the point at which the whole logic of that order begins to unravel and dissolve. It is the joker in the pack of civilisation, the factor which is neither securely inside nor outside it, the place where that form of life is forced to confront the very contradictions that constitute it. Because the working class has no real stake in the status quo, it is partly invisible within it; but for just the same reason it can prefigure an alternative future. It is the ''dissolution'' of society in the sense of its negation—the garbage or waste product for which the social order can find no real place. In this sense, it acts as a sign of just what a radical breaking and remaking would be needed to include it. But it is also the dissolution of present society in a more positive sense, as the class which when it comes to power will finally abolish class-society altogether. Individuals will then finally be free of the straitjacket of social class, and will be able to flourish as themselves. In this sense, the working class is also ''universal'' because in seeking to transform its own condition, it can also ring down the curtain on the whole squalid narrative of class-society as such.
Here, then, is another irony or contradiction—the fact that it is only through class that class can be overcome. If Marxism is so taken with the concept of class, it is only because it wants to see the back of it. Marx himself seems to have viewed social class as a form of alienation. To call men and women simply ''workers'' or ''capitalists'' is to bury their unique individuality beneath a faceless category. But it is an alienation that can be undone only from the inside. Only by going all the way through class, accepting it as an unavoidable social reality rather than wishing it piously away, can it be dismantled. It is just the same with race and gender. It is not enough to treat every individual as unique, as with those American liberals for whom everyone (including, presumably, Donald Trump and the Boston Strangler) is ''special.'' The fact that people are massed anonymously together may be in one sense an alienation, but in another sense it is a condition of their emancipation. Once again, history moves by its ''bad'' side. Well-meaning liberals who regard every member of the Ruritanian Liberation Movement as a unique individual have failed to grasp the purpose of the Ruritanian Liberation Movement. Its aim is to get to the point where Ruritanians can indeed be free to be themselves. If they could be that right now, however, they would not need their Liberation Movement.
There is another sense in which Marxism looks beyond the working class in the act of looking to it. No self-respecti
ng socialist has ever believed that the working class can bring down capitalism all by itself. Only by forging political alliances is such a daunting task conceivable. Marx himself thought that the working class should support the petty bourgeois peasantry, not least in countries like France, Russia and Germany where industrial workers were still a minority. The Bolsheviks sought to forge a united front of workers, poor peasants, soldiers, sailors, urban intellectuals and so on.
It is worth noting in this respect that the original proletariat was not the blue-collar male working class. It was lower-class women in ancient society. The word ''proletariat'' comes to us from the Latin word for ''offspring,'' meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children. They had nothing to yield up but the fruit of their bodies. What society demanded from them was not production but reproduction. The proletariat started life among those outside the labour process, not those within it. Yet the labour they endured was a lot more painful than breaking boulders.
Why Marx Was Right Page 13
