One would expect any socialist institution to have its fair share of chancers, toadies, bullies, cheats, loafers, scroungers, freeloaders, free riders and occasional psychopaths. Nothing in Marx's writing suggests that this would not be so. Besides, if communism is about everyone participating as fully as possible in social life, then one would expect there to be more conflicts rather than fewer, as more individuals get in on the act. Communism would not spell the end of human strife. Only the literal end of history would do that. Envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist. It is just that they could not take the forms they assume under capitalism—not because of some superior human virtue, but because of a change of institutions.
These vices would no longer be bound up with the exploitation of child labour, colonial violence, grotesque social inequalities and cutthroat economic competition. Instead, they would have to assume some other form. Tribal societies have their fair share of violence, rivalry and hunger for power, but these things cannot take the form of imperial warfare, free-market competition or mass unemployment, because such institutions do not exist among the Nuer or the Dinka. There are villains everywhere you look, but only some of these moral ruffians are so placed as to be able to steal pension funds or pump the media full of lying political propaganda. Most gangsters are not in a position to do so. Instead, they have to content themselves with hanging people from meat hooks. In a socialist society, nobody would be in a position to do so. This is not because they would be too saintly, but because there would be no private pension funds or privately owned media. Shakespeare's villains had to find outlets for their wickedness other than firing missiles at Palestinian refugees. You cannot be a bullying industrial magnate if there isn't any industry around. You just have to settle for bullying slaves, courtiers or your Neolithic workmates instead.
Or consider the practice of democracy. It is true that there are always monstrous egoists who try to browbeat others, as well as people who seek to bribe or smooth-talk their way to power. Democracy, however, is a set of built-in safeguards against such behavior. By devices such as one-person-one-vote, chairpersons, amendments, accountability, due procedure, the sovereignty of the majority and so on, you do your best to ensure that the bullies cannot win. From time to time they will succeed in doing just that. They might even manage to suborn the whole process. But having an established process means that most of the time they will be forced to submit to the democratic consensus. Virtue, so to speak, is built into the proceedings, not left to the vagaries of individual character. You do not need to make people physically incapable of violence in order to end a war. You just need negotiations, disarmament, peace treaties, monitoring and the like. This can be difficult. But it is not half as difficult as breeding a race of people who would vomit and swoon at the slightest sign of aggression.
So Marxism holds out no promise of human perfection. It does not even promise to abolish hard labour. Marx seems to believe that a certain amount of disagreeable work would continue to be essential even in conditions of plenty. The curse of Adam will linger on even in the realm of abundance. The promise Marxism does hold out is to resolve the contradictions which currently stop history proper from happening, in all its freedom and diversity.
The aims of Marxism, however, are not just material. For Marx, communism means an end to scarcity, along with an end to most oppressive labour. But the freedom and leisure which this would grant men and women can then provide the context for their fuller spiritual flourishing. It is true, as we have seen, that spiritual and material development by no means always march side by side. One has only to look at Keith Richards to recognize that. There are many kinds of material affluence which spell the death of the spirit. Yet it is also true that you cannot be free to become what you want when you are starving, sorely oppressed or stunted in your moral growth by a life of endless drudgery. Materialists are not those who deny the spiritual, but those who remind us that spiritual fulfillment requires certain material conditions. Those conditions do not guarantee such fulfillment. But it cannot be had without them.
Human beings are not at their best in conditions of scarcity, whether natural or artificial. Such scarcity breeds violence, fear, greed, anxiety, possessiveness, domination and deadly antagonism. One would expect, then, that if men and women were able to live in conditions of material abundance, released from these crippling pressures, they would tend to fare better as moral beings than they do now. We cannot be sure of this because we have never known such conditions. This is what Marx has in mind when he declares in the Communist Manifesto that the whole of history has been the history of class struggle. And even in conditions of abundance there would be plenty of other things for us to feel anxious, aggressive and possessive about. We would not be alchemized into angels. But some of the root causes of our moral deficiencies would have been removed. To that extent, it is indeed reasonable to claim that a communist society would tend by and large to produce finer human beings than we can muster at the moment. But they would still be fallible, prone to conflict and sometimes brutal and malevolent.
Cynics who doubt that such moral progress is possible should consider the difference between burning witches and pressing for equal pay for women. That is not to say that we have all become more delicate, sensitive and humanitarian than we were in medieval times. As far as that goes, we might also consider the difference between bows and arrows and Cruise missiles. The point is not that history as a whole has morally improved. It is simply that we have made major progress here and there. It is as soberly realistic to recognize this fact as it is reasonable to claim that in some ways we have deteriorated since the days of Robin Hood. There is no grand narrative of Progress, just as there is no fairy tale of Decline.
Anyone who has witnessed a small infant snatch a toy from its sibling with a bloodcurdling cry of ''Mine!'' needs no reminder of how deep in the mind the roots of rivalry and possessiveness sink. We are speaking of ingrained cultural, psychological and even evolutionary habits, which no mere change of institutions will alter in itself. But social change does not depend on everyone revolutionising their attitudes overnight. Take the example of Northern Ireland. Peace did not come to this tumultuous region because Catholics and Protestants finally abandoned their centuries-old antagonism and fell fondly into each others' arms. Far from it. Some of them will continue to detest each other as far into the future as one can see. Changes in sectarian consciousness are likely to be geologically slow. Yet in one sense this is not all that important. What was important was securing a political agreement which could be carefully policed and skillfully evolved, in the context of a general public weariness with thirty years of violence.
That, however, is only one side of the story. For the truth is that over long periods of time, changes of institution do indeed have profound effects on human attitudes. Almost every enlightened penal reform history has achieved was bitterly resisted in its day; but we now take these changes so much for granted that we would be revolted by the idea of breaking murderers on a wheel. Such reforms have become built into our psyches. What really alters our view of the world is not so much ideas, as ideas which are embedded in routine social practice. If we change that practice, which may be formidably difficult to do, we are likely in the end to alter our way of seeing.
Most of us do not have to be forcibly restrained from relieving ourselves on crowded streets. Because there is a law against it, and because it is socially frowned on, not to do so has become second nature to us. This is not to say that none of us ever do it, not least in city centres when the pubs have just closed. It is just that we are a lot less likely to do it than if it were considered the height of elegance. The British injunction to drive on the left does not have to struggle in the breasts of Britishers with a burning desire to drive on the right. Institutions shape our inner experience. They are instruments of reeducation. We shake hands on first meeting partly because it is the conventional thing to do, but also because, being the conventional
thing to do, we feel an impulse to do it.
These changes of habit take a long time. It took some centuries for capitalism to root out modes of feeling inherited from feudalism, and a tourist outside Buckingham Palace might well consider that some vital areas were carelessly overlooked. It would not, one hopes, take quite so long to produce a social order in which schoolchildren studying history would greet with utter incredulity the fact that once upon a time millions of people went hungry while a handful of others fed caviar to their poodles. It would seem as alien and repellent to them as the thought of disembowelling a man for heresy now seems to us.
To mention schoolchildren raises an important point. A great many children today are fervent environmentalists. They regard the clubbing to death of seals or the pollution of the atmosphere with horror and disgust. Some of them would even be appalled by the dropping of a piece of litter. And this is largely because of education—not just formal education, but the influence of new forms of thought and feeling on a generation in which old habits of feeling are less entrenched. No one is arguing that this will save the planet. And it is true that there are children who would cheerfully brain a badger. Even so, there is evidence here of how education can change attitudes and breed new forms of behavior.
Political education, then, is always possible. At a conference in Britain in the early 1970s, a discussion took place over whether there were certain universal features of human beings. One man stood up and announced ''Well, we've all got testicles.'' A woman in the audience shouted out ''No, we haven't!'' Feminism in Britain was still in its early days, and the remark was greeted by a good many men in the room as merely eccentric. Even some of the women looked embarrassed. Only a few years later, if a man had made such a fatuous statement in public, he might rapidly have become the only exception to his claim.
In medieval and early-modern Europe, avarice was regarded as the foulest of vices. From that to the Wall Street slogan ''greed is good!'' involved an intensive process of reeducation. What did the reeducating was not in the first place schoolteachers or propagandists but changes in our material forms of life. Aristotle thought slavery was natural, though some other ancient thinkers did not agree. But he also thought it contrary to human nature to gear economic production to profit, which is not quite the opinion of Donald Trump. (Aristotle held this view for an interesting reason. He thought that what Marx was later to call ''exchange-value''—the way that one commodity can be exchanged with another, and that with another, and so on ad infinitum—involves a kind of boundlessness which was foreign to the finite, creaturely nature of human beings.) There were medieval ideologues who viewed profit-making as unnatural, because human nature for them meant feudal nature. Hunter-gatherers probably took an equally dim view of the possibility of any social order but their own. Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, believed for much of his professional life that so-called free markets were rooted in human nature, a claim as absurd as holding that admiring Cliff Richard is rooted in human nature. Free markets are in fact a recent historical invention, and were confined for a long time to a minor region of the globe.
Similarly, those who speak of socialism as contrary to human nature do so because in their myopic way they identify that nature with capitalism. The Tuareg people of the central Sahara are really capitalist entrepreneurs at heart. They would secretly like nothing better than to start up an investment bank. The fact that they do not even have the concept of an investment bank is neither here nor there. But one cannot desire something of which one has no notion. I cannot hanker to become a stockbroker if I am an Athenian slave. I can be rapacious, acquisitive and religiously devoted to my own self-interest. But I cannot be a closet capitalist, just as I cannot aspire to be a brain surgeon if I am living in the eleventh century.
I claimed before that Marx, rather strangely, was both unusually pessimistic about the past and unusually optimistic about the future. There are several reasons for this, but one of them in particular bears on the issues we are examining. Marx was gloomy about much of the past because it seemed to represent one wretched form of oppression and exploitation after another. Theodor Adorno once remarked that pessimistic thinkers (he had Freud rather than Marx in mind) do more service to the cause of human emancipation than cal-lowly optimistic ones. This is because they bear witness to an injustice which cries out for redemption, and which we might otherwise forget. By reminding us of how bad things are, they prompt us to repair them. They urge us to do without opium.
If Marx also retained a good deal of hope for the future, however, it was because he recognized that this dismal record was not for the most part our fault. If history has been so bloody, it is not because most human beings are wicked. It is because of the material pressures to which they have been submitted. Marx can thus take a realistic measure of the past without succumbing to the myth of the darkness of men's hearts. And this is one reason why he can retain faith in the future. It is his materialism which permits him that hope. If wars, famines and genocide really did spring simply from some unchanging human depravity, then there is not the slightest reason to believe that the future will fare any better. If, however, these things have been partly the effect of unjust social systems, of which individuals are sometimes little more than functions, then it is reasonable to expect that changing that system may make for a better world. The bugbear of perfection, meanwhile, can be left to frighten fools.
This is not to suggest that men and women in class-society can be absolved of all blame for their actions, or that individual depravity has played no part in wars and genocides. Companies which consign hundreds or even thousands of workers to a life of enforced idleness can most certainly be blamed. But it is not as though they take such measures out of hatred, malice or aggression. They create unemployment because they want to safeguard their profits in a competitive system in which they fear they might otherwise go under. Those who order armies to war, where they may end up burning small children to death, may be the meekest of men. Even so, Nazism was not just a noxious political system; it also drew on the sadism, paranoia and pathological hatred of individuals who could genuinely be described as wicked. If Hitler was not wicked, then the term has no meaning. But their personal viciousness could only have the appalling results it did because it was yoked to the workings of a political system. It would be like putting Shakespeare's Iago in charge of a prisoner-of-war camp.
If there is indeed a human nature, then this is in some ways good news, whatever the postmodernists might think. This is because one fairly consistent feature of that nature has been a resistance to injustice. This is one reason why it is foolish to imagine that the idea of human nature must always work in conservative ways. Surveying the historical record, it is not hard to conclude that political oppression has almost always incited rebellion, however subdued or unsuccessful. There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power. It is true that power only really succeeds by winning the collusion of its underlings. The evidence, however, is that this collusion is usually partial, ambiguous and provisional. Ruling classes are generally more tolerated than admired. If our nature is purely cultural, then there is no reason why political regimes should not mould us into accepting their authority without question. That they often find this extraordinarily difficult to do testifies to sources of resistance which run deeper than local cultures.
So was Marx a utopian thinker? Yes, if by that one means that he envisaged a future which would be a vast improvement on the present. He believed in the end of material scarcity, private property, exploitation, social classes and the state as we know it. Yet many thinkers, casting an eye over the accumulated resources of the world today, would judge abolishing material scarcity to be perfectly reasonable in principle, however hard it is to achieve in practice. It is politics that stands in our way.
As we have seen, Marx also considered that this would involve the emancipation of human, spiritual wealth on a major scale. Fre
ed from former constraints, men and women would flourish as individuals in ways impossible to them before. But there is nothing in Marx's work to suggest that we would thereby arrive at any sort of perfection. It is a condition of exercising their freedom that human beings are able to abuse it. In fact, there cannot be such freedom, on any sizeable scale, without such abuses. So it is reasonable to believe that in communist society there would be plenty of problems, a host of conflicts and a number of irreparable tragedies. There would be child murders, road accidents, wretchedly bad novels, lethal jealousies, overweening ambitions, tasteless trousers and inconsolable grief. There might also be some cleaning of the latrines.
Communism is about the fulfillment of everyone's needs, but even in a society of abundance, this would need to be restricted. As Norman Geras points out, ''If by way of means of self-development (under communism) you need a violin and I need a racing bicycle, this, one may assume, will be all right. But if I need an enormously large area, say Australia, to wander around in or generally use it as I see fit undisturbed by the presence of other people, then this obviously will not be all right. No conceivable abundance could satisfy needs of self-development of this magnitude . . . and it is not difficult to think of needs much less excessive of which the same will be true.''9
Marx, as we have seen, treats the future not as a matter of idle speculation, but as a feasible extrapolation from the present. He is concerned not with poetic visions of peace and comradeship, but with the material conditions which might allow a truly human future to emerge. As a materialist, he was alert to the complex, recalcitrant, unfinished nature of reality; and such a world is incompatible with a vision of perfection. A perfect world would be one which had abolished all contingency—all of those random collisions, chance occurrences and tragically unforeseeable effects which make up the texture of our daily lives. It would also be one in which we could do justice to the dead as well as the living, undoing the crimes and repairing the horrors of the past. No such society is possible. Nor would it necessarily be desirable. A world without train crashes might also be one without the possibility of a cure for cancer.
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