The question may prove more than academic. Suppose a handful of us were to crawl out of the other side of a nuclear or environmental cataclysm, and begin the daunting task of building civilisation again from scratch. Given what we knew of the causes of the catastrophe, would we not be well-advised to try it this time the socialist way?
FOUR
Marxism is a dream of utopia. It believes in the possibility of a perfect society, without hardship, suffering, violence or conflict. Under communism there will be no rivalry, selfishness, possessiveness, competition or inequality. Nobody will be superior or inferior to anyone else. Nobody will work, human beings will live in complete harmony with one another, and the flow of material goods will be endless. This astonishingly naive vision springs from a credulous faith in human nature. Human viciousness is simply set aside. The fact that we are naturally selfish, acquisitive, aggressive and competitive creatures, and that no amount of social engineering can alter this fact, is simply overlooked. Marx's dewy-eyed vision of the future reflects the absurd unreality of his politics as a whole.
So will there still be road accidents in this Marxist utopia of yours?" This is the kind of sardonic inquiry that Marxists have grown used to dealing with. In fact, the comment reveals more about the ignorance of the speaker than about the illusions of the Marxist. Because if utopia means a perfect society, then ''Marxist utopia'' is a contradiction in terms.
There are, as it happens, far more interesting uses of the word ''utopia'' in the Marxist tradition.1 One of the greatest of English Marxist revolutionaries, William Morris, produced an unforgettable work of utopia in News from Nowhere, which unlike almost every other utopian work actually showed in detail how the process of political change had come about. When it comes to the everyday use of the word, however, it should be said that Marx shows not the slightest interest in a future free of suffering, death, loss, failure, breakdown, conflict, tragedy or even labour. In fact, he doesn't show much interest in the future at all. It is a notorious fact about his work that he has very little to say in detail about what a socialist or communist society would look like. His critics may therefore accuse him of unpardonable vagueness; but they can hardly do that and at the same time accuse him of drawing up utopian blueprints. It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. In The German Ideology, he rejects the idea of communism as ''an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.'' Instead, he sees it in The German Ideology as ''the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.''2
Just as the Jews were traditionally forbidden to foretell the future, so Marx the secular Jew is mostly silent on what might lie ahead. We have seen that he probably thought socialism was inevitable, but he has strikingly little to say about what it would look like. There are several reasons for this reticence. For one thing, the future does not exist, so that to forge images of it is a kind of lie. To do so might also suggest that the future is predetermined—that it lies in some shadowy realm for us to discover. We have seen that there is a sense in which Marx held that the future was inevitable. But the inevitable is not necessarily the desirable. Death is inevitable, too, but not in most people's eyes desirable. The future may be predetermined, but that is no reason to assume that it is going to be an improvement on what we have at the moment. The inevitable, as we have seen, is usually pretty unpleasant. Marx himself needed to be more aware of this.
Foretelling the future, however, is not only pointless; it can actually be destructive. To have power even over the future is a way of giving ourselves a false sense of security. It is a tactic for shielding ourselves from the open-ended nature of the present, with all its precariousness and unpredictability. It is to use the future as a kind of fetish—as a comforting idol to cling to like a toddler to its blanket. It is an absolute value which will not let us down because (since it does not exist) it is as insulated from the winds of history as a phantom. You can also seek to monopolise the future as a way of dominating the present. The true soothsayers of our time are not hairy, howling outcasts luridly foretelling the death of capitalism, but the experts hired by the transnational corporations to peer into the entrails of the system and assure its rulers that their profits are safe for another ten years. The prophet, by contrast, is not a clairvoyant at all. It is a mistake to believe that the biblical prophets sought to predict the future. Rather, the prophet denounces the greed, corruption and power-mongering of the present, warning us that unless we change our ways we might well have no future at all. Marx was a prophet, not a fortune-teller.
There is another reason why Marx was wary of images of the future. This is because there were a lot of them about in his time—and they were almost all the work of hopelessly idealist radicals. The idea that history is moving onwards and upwards to a state of perfection is not a leftist one. It was a commonplace of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which was hardly renowned for its revolutionary socialism. It reflected the confidence of the European middle class in its early, exuberant phase. Reason was in the process of vanquishing despotism, science was routing superstition, and peace was putting warfare to flight. As a result, the whole of human history (by which most of these thinkers really meant Europe) would culminate in a state of liberty, harmony and commercial prosperity. It is hardly likely that history's most celebrated scourge of the middle classes would have signed on for this self-satisfied illusion. Marx, as we have seen, did indeed believe in progress and civilisation; but he considered that, so far at least, they had proved inseparable from barbarism and benightedness.
This is not to say that Marx learnt nothing from utopian thinkers like Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen. If he could be rude about them, he could also commend their ideas, which were sometimes admirably progressive. (Not all of them, however. Fourier, who coined the term ''feminism,'' and whose ideal social unit was designed to contain exactly 1,620 people, believed that in the future society the sea would turn into lemonade. Marx himself would probably have preferred a fine Riesling.) What Marx objected to among other things was the utopianists' belief that they could win over their opponents purely through the power of argument. Society for them was a battle of ideas, not a clash of material interests. Marx, by contrast, took a sceptical view of this faith in intellectual dialogue. He was aware that the ideas which really grip men and women arise through their routine practice, not through the discourse of philosophers or debating societies. If you want to see what men and women really believe, look at what they do, not at what they say.
Utopian blueprints for Marx were a distraction from the political tasks of the present. The energy invested in them could be used more fruitfully in the service of political struggle. As a materialist, Marx was chary of ideas which were divorced from historical reality, and thought that there were usually good historical reasons for this separation. Anyone with time on their hands can hatch elaborate schemes for a better future, just as anyone can sketch endless plans for a magnificent novel they never get around to writing because they are endlessly sketching plans for it. The point for Marx is not to dream of an ideal future, but to resolve the contradictions in the present which prevent a better future from coming about. When this has been achieved, there will be no more need for people like himself.
In The Civil War in France, Marx writes that the revolutionary workers ''have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society is itself pregnant.''3 The hope for a better future cannot just be a wistful ''wouldn't it be nice if . . .'' If it is to be more than an idle fantasy, a radically different future must be not only desirable but feasible; and to be feasible, it has to be anchored in the realities of the present. It cannot just be dropped into the present from some political outer space. There must be a way of scanning or X-raying the present which shows up a certain future as a potential within it. Otherwise, you will simply succeed in making people desire fruitlessly; and for Freud, to desire fruitlessly is to fall ill of neurosis.
So there are forces in the present which point beyond it. Feminism, for example, is a political movement at work right now; but it works by reaching for a future which would leave much of the present a long way behind. For Marx, it is the working class—at once a present reality and the agent by which it may be transformed—which provides the link between present and future. Emancipatory politics inserts the thin end of the wedge of the future into the heart of the present. They represent a bridge between present and future, a point where the two intersect. And both present and future are fuelled by the resources of the past, in the sense of precious political traditions which one must fight to keep alive.
Some conservatives are utopianists, but their utopia lies in the past rather than the future. In their view, history has been one long, doleful decline from a golden age set in the age of Adam, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Jefferson, Disraeli, Margaret Thatcher or more or less anyone you care to mention. This is to treat the past as a kind of fetish, rather as some utopian thinkers do with the future. The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does. But there are also conservatives who reject this myth of the Fall on the grounds that every age has been just as dreadful as every other. The good news for them is that things are not getting worse; the bad news is that this is because they cannot deteriorate any further. What governs history is human nature, which is (a) in a state of shocking disrepair and (b) absolutely unalterable. The greatest folly—indeed, cruelty—is to dangle before men and women ideals that they are constitutionally incapable of achieving. Radicals just end up making people loathe themselves. They plunge them into guilt and despair in the act of cheering them on to higher things.
Starting from where we are may not sound the best recipe for political transformation. The present seems more an obstacle to such change than an occasion for it. As the stereotypically thick-headed Irishman remarked when asked the way to the railway station: ''Well, I wouldn't start from here." The comment is not as illogical as some might think, which is also true of the Irish. It means ''You'd get there quicker and more directly if you weren't starting from this awkward, out-of-the-way spot.'' Socialists today might well sympathise with the sentiment. One could imagine the proverbial Irishman surveying Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, about to embark on the task of building socialism in a besieged, isolated, semidestitute country, and remarking: ''Well, I wouldn't start from here.''
But there is, of course, nowhere else to start from. A different future has to be the future of this particular present. And most of the present is made up of the past. We have nothing with which to fashion a future other than the few, inadequate tools we have inherited from history. And these tools are tainted by the legacy of wretchedness and exploitation by which they descend to us. Marx writes in the Critique of the Gotha Programme of how the new society will be stamped with the birthmarks of the old order from whose womb it emerges. So there is no ''pure'' point from which to begin. To believe that there is is the illusion of so-called ultra-leftism (an ''infantile disorder,'' as Lenin called it), which in its revolutionary zeal refuses all truck with the compromised tools of the present: social reform, trade unions, political parties, parliamentary democracy and so on. It thus manages to end up as stainless as it is impotent.
The future, then, is not just to be tacked on to the present, any more than adolescence is just tacked on to childhood. It must somehow be detectable within it. This is not to say that this possible future is bound to come about, any more than a child will necessarily arrive at adolescence. It might always die of leukaemia before it does. It is rather to recognize that, given a particular present, not any old future is possible. The future is open, but it is not totally open. Not just any old thing could happen. Where I might be in ten minutes' time depends among other things on where I am now. To see the future as a potential within the present is not like seeing an egg as a potential chicken. Short of being smashed to smithereens or boiled for a picnic, the egg will turn into a chicken by a law of Nature; but Nature does not guarantee that socialism will follow on the heels of capitalism. There are many different futures implicit in the present, some of them a lot less attractive than others.
Seeing the future like this is among other things a safeguard against false images of it. It rejects, for example, the complacent ''evolutionist'' view of the future which regards it simply as more of the present. It is simply the present writ large. This, by and large, is the way our rulers like to view the future—as better than the present, but comfortably continuous with it. Disagreeable surprises will be kept to the minimum. There will be no traumas or cataclysms, just a steady improvement on what we have already. This view was known until recently as the End of History, before radical Islamists inconveniently broke History open again. You might also call it the goldfish theory of history, given that it dreams of an existence which is secure but monotonous, as the life of a goldfish appears to be. It pays for its freedom from dramatic shake-ups in the coinage of utter tedium. It thus fails to see that though the future may turn out to be a great deal worse than the present, the one sure thing about it is that it will be very different. One reason why the financial markets blew up a few years ago was because they relied on models that assumed the future would be very like the present.
Socialism, by contrast, represents in one sense a decisive break with the present. History has to be broken and remade —not because socialists arbitrarily prefer revolution to reform, being bloodthirsty beasts deaf to the voice of moderation, but because of the depth of the sickness that has to be cured. I say ''history,'' but in fact Marx is reluctant to dignify everything that has happened so far with that title. For him, all we have known so far is ''prehistory''—which is to say, one variation after another on human oppression and exploitation. The only truly historic act would be to break from this dreary narrative into history proper. As a socialist, you have to be prepared to spell out in some detail how this would be achieved, and what institutions it would involve. But if the new social order is to be genuinely transformative, it follows that there is a strict limit on how much you can say about it right now. We can, after all, describe the future only in terms drawn from the past or present; and a future which broke radically with the present would have us straining at the limits of our language. As Marx himself comments in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "There [in the socialist future] the content goes beyond the form.'' Raymond Williams makes essentially the same point in Culture and Society 1780-1950, when he writes: ''We have to plan what can be planned, according to our common decision. But the emphasis of the idea of culture is right when it reminds us that a culture, essentially, is unplannable. We have to ensure the means of life, and the means of community. But what will then, by these means, be lived, we cannot know or say.''4
One can put the point in another way. If all that has happened so far is ''prehistory,'' then it is rather more predictable than what Marx would regard as history proper. If we slice through past history at any point and inspect a cross-section of it, we know before we have even come to look something of what we will find there. We will find, for example, that the great majority of men and women at this period are living lives of largely fruitless toil for the benefit of a ruling elite. We will find that the political state, whatever form it takes, is prepared to use violence from time to time to maintain this situation. We will find that quite a lot of the myth, culture and thought of the period provides some kind of legitimation of this situation. We will also probably find some form of resistance to this injustice among those who are exploited.
Once these shackles on human flourishing have been removed, however, it is far harder to say what will happen. For men and women are then a lot more free to behave as they wish, within the confines of their responsibility for one another. If they are able to spend more of their time in what we now call leisure activities rather than hard at work, their behavior becomes even harder to predict. I say ''what we now call leis
ure'' because if we really did use the resources accumulated by capitalism to release large numbers of people from work, we would not call what they did instead ''leisure.'' This is because the idea of leisure depends on the existence of its opposite (labour), rather as you could not define warfare without some conception of peace. We should also remember that so-called leisure activities can be even more strenuous and exacting than coal mining. Marx himself makes this point. Some leftists will be disappointed to hear that not having to work does not necessarily mean lounging around the place all day smoking dope.
Take, as an analogy, the behavior of people in prison. It is fairly easy to say what prisoners get up to throughout the day because their activities are strictly regulated. The warders can predict with some certainty where they will be at five o'clock on a Wednesday, and if they cannot do so they might find themselves up before the Governor. Once convicts are released back into society, however, it is much harder to keep tabs on them, unless the tabs are of an electronic kind. They have moved, so to speak, from the ''prehistory'' of their incarceration to history proper, meaning that they are now at liberty to determine their own existence, rather than to have it determined for them by external forces. For Marx, socialism is the point where we begin collectively to determine our own destinies. It is democracy taken with full seriousness, rather than democracy as (for the most part) a political charade. And the fact that people are more free means that it will be harder to say what they will be doing at five o'clock on Wednesday.
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