Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

  Some Marxists claim that Marx himself was a market socialist, at least in the sense that he believed that the market would linger on during the transitional period following a socialist revolution. He also considered that markets had been emancipatory as well as exploitative, helping to free men and women from their previous dependence on lords and masters. Markets strip the aura of mystery from social relations, laying bare their bleak reality. So keen was Marx on this point that the philosopher Hannah Arendt once described the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto as "the greatest praise of capitalism you ever saw.''5 Market socialists also point out that markets are by no means specific to capitalism. Even Trotsky, so some of his disciples may be surprised to hear, supported the market, though only in the period of transition to socialism and in combination with economic planning. It was needed, he thought, as a check on the adequacy and rationality of planning, since "economic accounting is unthinkable without market relations."6 Along with the Soviet Left Opposition, he was a strong critic of the so-called command economy.

  Market socialism does away with private property, social classes and exploitation. It also places economic power into the hands of the actual producers. In all of these ways, it is a welcome advance on a capitalist economy. For some Marxists, however, it retains too many features of that economy to be palatable. Under market socialism there would still be commodity production, inequality, unemployment and the sway of market forces beyond human control. How would workers not simply be transformed into collective capitalists, maximizing their profits, cutting quality, ignoring social needs and pandering to consumerism in the drive for constant accumulation? How would one avoid the chronic short-termism of markets, their habit of ignoring the overall social picture and the long-term antisocial effects of their own fragmented decisions? Education and state monitoring might diminish these dangers, but some Marxists look instead to an economy which would be neither centrally planned nor market-governed.7 On this model, resources would be allocated by negotiations between producers, consumers, environmentalists and other relevant parties, in networks of workplace, neighbourhood and consumer councils. The broad parameters of the economy, including decisions on the overall allocation of resources, rates of growth and investment, energy, transport and ecological policies and the like, would be set by representative assemblies at local, regional and national level. These general decisions about, say, allocation would then be devolved downwards to regional and local levels, where more detailed planning would be progressively worked out. At every stage, public debate over alternative economic plans and policies would be essential. In this way, what and how we produce could be determined by social need rather than private profit. Under capitalism, we are deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals. Under socialism, this freedom would be regularly exercised.

  Power in such assemblies would pass by democratic election from the bottom up rather than from the top down. Democratically elected bodies representing each branch of commerce or production would negotiate with a national economic commission to achieve an agreed set of investment decisions. Prices would be determined not centrally, but by production units on the basis of input from consumers, users, interest groups and so on. Some champions of such so-called participatory economics accept a kind of mixed socialist economy: goods which are of vital concern to the community (food, health, pharmaceuticals, education, transport, energy, subsistence products, financial institutions, the media and the like) need to be brought under democratic public control, since those who run them tend to behave antisocially if they sniff the chance of enlarged profits in doing so. Less socially indispensable goods, however (consumer items, luxury products), could be left to the operations of the market. Some market socialists find this whole scheme too complex to be workable. As Oscar Wilde once remarked, the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings. Yet one needs at least to take account of the role of modern information technology in oiling the wheels of such a system. Even the former vice-president of Procter & Gamble has acknowledged that it makes workers' self-management a real pos-sibility.8 Besides, Pat Devine reminds us of just how much time is currently consumed by capitalist administration and organisation.9 There is no obvious reason why the amount of time taken up by a socialist alternative should be greater.

  Some advocates of the participatory model hold that everyone should be remunerated equally for the same amount of work, despite differences of talent, training and occupation. As Michael Albert puts it, "The doctor working in a plush setting with comfortable and fulfilling circumstances earns more than the assembly worker working in a horrible din, risking life and limb, and enduring boredom and denigration, regardless of how long or how hard each works.''10 There is, in fact, a strong case for paying those who engage in boring, heavy, dirty or dangerous work more than, say, medics or academics whose labours are considerably more rewarding. Much of this dirty and dangerous work could perhaps be carried out by former members of the royal family. We need to reverse our priorities.

  Since I have just mentioned the media as ripe for public ownership, let us take this as an exemplary case. Over half a century ago, in an excellent little book entitled Communications,11 Raymond Williams outlined a socialist plan for the arts and media which rejected state control of its content on the one hand and the sovereignty of the profit motive on the other. Instead, the active contributors in this field would have control of their own means of expression and communication. The actual ''plant'' of the arts and media—radio stations, concert halls, TV networks, theatres, newspaper offices and so on—would be taken into public ownership (of which there are a variety of forms), and their management invested in democratically elected bodies. These would include both members of the public and representatives of media or artistic bodies.

  These commissions, which would be strictly independent of the state, would then be responsible for awarding public resources and ''leasing'' the socially owned facilities either to individual practitioners or to independent, democratically self-governing companies of actors, journalists, musicians and the like. These men and women could then produce work free of both state regulation and the distorting pressures of the market. Among other things, we would be free of the situation in which a bunch of power-crazed, avaricious bullies dictate through their privately owned media outlets what the public should believe—which is to say, their own self-interested opinions and the system they support. We will know that socialism has established itself when we are able to look back with utter incredulity on the idea that a handful of commercial thugs were given free rein to corrupt the minds of the public with Neanderthal political views convenient for their own bank balances but for little else.

  Much of the media under capitalism avoid difficult, controversial or innovative work because it is bad for profits. Instead, they settle for banality, sensationalism and gut prejudice. Socialist media, by contrast, would not ban everything but Schoenberg, Racine and endless dramatized versions of Marx's Capital. There would be popular theatre, TV and newspapers galore. ''Popular'' does not necessarily mean ''in-ferior.'' Nelson Mandela is popular but not inferior. Plenty of ordinary people read highly specialist journals littered with jargon unintelligible to outsiders. It is just that these journals tend to be about angling, farm equipment or dog breeding rather than aesthetics or endocrinology. The popular becomes junk and kitsch when the media feel the need to hijack as large a slice of the market as quickly and painlessly as possible. And this need is for the most part commercially driven.

  Socialists will no doubt continue to argue about the detail of a postcapitalist economy. There is no flawless model currently on offer. One can contrast this imperfection with the capitalist economy, which is in impeccable working order and which has never been responsible for the mildest touch of poverty, waste or slump. It has admittedly been responsible for some extravagant levels of unemployment, but the world's leading capitalist nation has hit on an i
ngenious solution to this defect. In the United States today, over a million more people would be seeking work if they were not in prison.

  THREE

  Marxism is a form of determinism. It sees men and women simply as the tools of history, and thus strips them of their freedom and individuality. Marx believed in certain iron laws of history, which wor themselves out with inexorable force and which no human action can resist. Feudalism was fated to give birth to capitalism, and capitalism will inevitably give way to socialism. As such, Marx's theory of history is just a secular version of Providence or Destiny. It is offensive to human freedom and dignity, just as Marxist states are.

  W e may begin by asking what is distinctive about Marxism. What does Marxism have that no other political theory does? It is clearly not the idea of revolution, which long predates Marx's work. Nor is it the notion of communism, which is of ancient provenance. Marx did not invent socialism or communism. The working-class movement in Europe had already arrived at socialist ideas while Marx himself was still a liberal. In fact, it is hard to think of any single political feature that is unique to his thought. It is certainly not the idea of the revolutionary party, which comes to us from the French Revolution. Marx has precious little to say about it in any case.

  What about the concept of social class? This won't do either, since Marx himself rightly denied that he invented the idea. It is true that he importantly redefined the whole concept, but it is not his own coinage. Nor did he think up the idea of the proletariat, which was familiar to a number of nineteenth-century thinkers. His idea of alienation was derived mostly from Hegel. It was also anticipated by the great Irish socialist and feminist, William Thompson. We shall also see later that Marx is not alone in giving such high priority to the economic in social life. He believes in a cooperative society free of exploitation run by the producers themselves, and holds that this could come about only by revolutionary means. But so did the great twentieth-century socialist Raymond Williams, who did not consider himself a Marxist. Plenty of anarchists, libertarian socialists and others would endorse this social vision but vehemently reject Marxism.

  Two major doctrines lie at the heart of Marx's thought. One of them is the primary role played by the economic in social life; the other is the idea of a succession of modes of production throughout history. We shall see later, however, that neither of these notions was Marx's own innovation. Is what is peculiar to Marxism, then, the concept not of class but of class struggle? This is certainly close to the core of Marx's thought, but it is no more original to him than the idea of class itself. Take this couplet about a wealthy landlord from Oliver Goldsmith's poem ''The Deserted Village'':

  The robe that wraps his limbs in silken sloth Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth.

  The symmetry and economy of the lines themselves, with their neatly balanced antithesis, contrast with the waste and imbalance of the economy they describe. The couplet is clearly about class struggle. What robes the landlord robs his tenants. Or take these lines from John Milton's Comus:

  If every just man that now pines with want

  Had but a moderate and beseeming share

  Of that which lewdly pampered luxury

  Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,

  Nature's full blessings would be well dispensed

  In unsuperfluous even proportion . . .

  Much the same sentiment is expressed by King Lear. In fact, Milton has quietly stolen this idea from Shakespeare. Voltaire believed that the rich grew bloated on the blood of the poor, and that property lay at the heart of social conflict. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as we shall see, argued much the same. The idea of class struggle is by no means peculiar to Marx, as he himself was well aware.

  Even so, it is mightily central to him. So central, in fact, that he sees it as nothing less than the force that drives human history. It is the very motor or dynamic of human development, which is not an idea that would have occurred to John Milton. Whereas many social thinkers have seen human society as an organic unity, what constitutes it in Marx's view is division. It is made up of mutually incompatible interests. Its logic is one of conflict rather than cohesion. For example, it is in the interest of the capitalist class to keep wages low, and in the interests of wage earners to push them higher.

  Marx famously declares in the Communist Manifesto that ''the history of all previously existing society is the history of class struggles.'' He can't of course mean this literally. If brushing my teeth last Wednesday counts as part of history, then it is hard to see that this is a matter of class struggle. Bowling a leg break in cricket or being pathologically obsessed with penguins is not burningly relevant to class struggle. Perhaps ''history'' refers to public events, not private ones like brushing one's teeth. But that brawl in the bar last night was public enough. So perhaps history is confined to major public events. But by whose definition? Anyway, how was the Great Fire of London a product of class struggle? It might count as an instance of class struggle if Che Guevara had been run over by a truck, but only if a CIA agent was at the wheel. Otherwise it would have just been an accident. The story of women's oppression interlocks with the history of class struggle, but it is not just an aspect of it. The same goes for the poetry of Wordsworth or Seamus Heaney. Class struggle can't cover everything.

  Maybe Marx did not take his own claim literally. The Communist Manifesto, after all, is intended as a piece of political propaganda, and as such is full of rhetorical flourishes. Even so, there is an important question about how much Marxist thought does in fact include. Some Marxists seem to have treated it as a Theory of Everything, but this is surely not so. The fact that Marxism has nothing very interesting to say about malt whiskies or the nature of the unconscious, the haunting fragrance of a rose or why there is something rather than nothing, is not to its discredit. It is not intended to be a total philosophy. It does not give us accounts of beauty or the erotic, or of how the poet Yeats achieves the curious resonance of his verse. It has been mostly silent on questions of love, death and the meaning of life. It has, to be sure, a very grand narrative to deliver, which stretches all the way from the dawning of civilisation to the present and future. But there are other grand narratives besides Marxism, such as the history of science or religion or sexuality, which interact with the story of class struggle but cannot be reduced to it. (Postmodernists tend to assume that there is either one grand narrative or just a lot of mini-narratives. But this is not the case.) So whatever Marx himself may have thought, ''all history has been the history of class struggle'' should not be taken to mean that everything that has ever happened is a matter of class struggle. It means, rather, that class struggle is what is most fundamental to human history.

  Fundamental in what sense, though? How, for example, is it more fundamental than the history of religion, science or sexual oppression? Class is not necessarily fundamental in the sense of providing the strongest motive for political action. Think of the role of ethnic identity in that respect, to which Marxism has paid too little regard. Anthony Giddens claims that interstate conflicts, along with racial and sexual inequalities, ''are of equal importance to class exploitation.''1 But equally important for what? Of equal moral and political importance, or equally important for the achievement of socialism? We sometimes call a thing fundamental if it is the necessary basis for something else; but it is hard to see that class struggle is the necessary basis of religious faith, scientific discovery or women's oppression, much involved with it though these things are. It does not seem true that if we kicked this foundation away, Buddhism, astrophysics and the Miss World contest would come tumbling down. They have relatively independent histories of their own.

  So what is class struggle fundamental to? Marx's answer would seem to be twofold. It shapes a great many events, institutions and forms of thought which seem at first glance to be innocent of it; and it plays a decisive role in the turbulent transition from one epoch of history to another. By history, Marx means not
''everything that has ever happened,'' but a specific trajectory underlying it. He is using ''history'' in the sense of the significant course of events, not as a synonym for the whole of human existence to date.

  So is the idea of class struggle what distinguishes Marx's thought from other social theories? Not quite. We have seen that this notion is not original to him, any more than the concept of a mode of production is. What is unique about his thought is that he locks these two ideas—class struggle and mode of production—together, to provide a historical scenario which is indeed genuinely new. Quite how the two ideas go together has been a subject of debate among Marxists, and Marx himself hardly waxes eloquent on the point. But if we are in search of what is peculiar to his work, we could do worse than call a halt here. In essence, Marxism is a theory and practice of long-term historical change. The trouble, as we shall see, is that what is most peculiar to Marxism is also what is most problematic.

  Broadly speaking, a mode of production for Marx means the combination of certain forces of production with certain relations of production. A force of production means any instrument by which we go to work on the world in order to reproduce our material life. The idea covers everything that promotes human mastery or control over Nature for productive purposes. Computers are a productive force if they play a part in material production as a whole, rather than just being used for chatting to serial killers disguised as friendly strangers. Donkeys in nineteenth-century Ireland were a productive force. Human labour power is a productive force. But these forces never exist in the raw. They are always bound up with certain social relations, by which Marx means relations between social classes. One social class, for example, may own and control the means of production, while another may find itself exploited by it.