Neither is it possible to have a social order in which everyone is equal. The complaint that "socialism would make us all the same'' is baseless. Marx had no such intention. He was a sworn enemy of uniformity. In fact, he regarded equality as a bourgeois value. He saw it as a reflection in the political sphere of what he called exchange-value, in which one commodity is levelled in value with another. The commodity, he once commented, is ''realised equality.'' He speaks at one point of a kind of communism that involves a general social leveling, and denounces it in the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts as ''an abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilisation.'' Marx also associated the notion of equality with what he saw as the abstract equality of middle-class democracy, where our formal equality as voters and citizens serves to obscure real inequalities of wealth and class. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he also rejected the idea of an equality of income, since people have uniquely different needs: some do more dirty or dangerous work than others, some have more children to feed, and so on.
This is not to say that he dismissed the idea of equality out of hand. Marx was not in the habit of writing off ideas simply because they were of middle-class provenance. Far from contemptuously spurning the ideals of middle-class society, he was a doughty champion of its great revolutionary values of freedom, self-determination and self-development. Even abstract equality, he considered, was a welcome advance on the hierarchies of feudalism. It was just that he thought that these precious values had no chance of working for everyone as long as capitalism still existed. Even so, he lavished praise upon the middle class as the most revolutionary formation that history had ever witnessed, a fact that his middle-class opponents tend curiously to overlook. Perhaps they suspect that to be praised by Marx is the ultimate kiss of death.
In Marx's view, what was awry with the prevailing notion of equality was that it was too abstract. It did not pay sufficient attention to the individuality of things and people— what Marx called in the economic realm ''use-value.'' It was capitalism that standardised people, not socialism. This is one reason why Marx was rather chary of the notion of rights. ''Right,'' he comments, ''by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable by an equal standard only in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else is ignored.''10 So much, then, for the Marx who wants to reduce us all to the same dead level. So much also for the Marx who when he looks at people can see nothing but workers. Equality for socialism does not mean that everyone is just the same—an absurd proposition if ever there was one. Even Marx would have noticed that he was more intelligent than the Duke of Wellington. Nor does it mean that everyone will be granted exactly the same amount of wealth or resources.
Genuine equality means not treating everyone the same, but attending equally to everyone's different needs. And this is the kind of society which Marx looked forward to. Human needs are not all commensurate with one another. You cannot measure them all by the same yardstick. Everyone for Marx was to have an equal right to self-realisation, and to participate actively in the shaping of social life. Barriers of inequality would thus be broken down. But the result of this would be as far as possible to allow each person to flourish as the unique individual they were. In the end, equality for Marx exists for the sake of difference. Socialism is not about everyone wearing the same kind of boiler suit. It is consumer capitalism which decks out its citizens in uniforms known as tracksuits and trainers.
In Marx's view, socialism would thus constitute a far more pluralistic order than the one we have now. In class-society, the free self-development of the few is bought at the cost of the shackling of the many, who then come to share much the same monotonous narrative. Communism, precisely because everyone would be encouraged to develop their individual talents, would be a great deal more diffuse, diverse and unpredictable. It would be more like a modernist novel than a realist one. Critics of Marx may scorn this as a fantasy. But they cannot complain at the same time that Marx's preferred social order looks much like the one in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
A virulent form of utopianism has indeed afflicted the modern age, but its name is not Marxism. It is the crazed notion that a single global system known as the free market can impose itself on the most diverse cultures and economies and cure all their ills. The purveyors of this totalitarian fantasy are not to be found hiding scar-faced and sinisterly soft-spoken in underground bunkers like James Bond villains.
They are to be seen dining at upmarket Washington restaurants and strolling on Sussex estates.
Theodor Adorno's answer to the question of whether Marx was a utopian thinker is a decisive yes and no. He was, Adorno writes, an enemy of utopia for the sake of its realization.
FIVE
Marxism reduces everything to economics. It is a form of economic determinism. Art, religion, politics, law, war, morality, historical change: all these are seen in the crudest terms as nothing more than reflections of the economy or class struggle. The true complexity of human affairs is passed over for a monochrome vision of history. In his obsession with economics, Marx was simply an inverted image of the capitalist system he opposed. His thought is at odds with the pluralist outlook of modern societies, conscious as they are that the varied range of historical experience cannot be crammed into a single rigid framework.
In one sense, the claim that everything comes down to economics is surely a truism. In fact, it is so blindingly obvious that it is hard to see how anyone could doubt it. Before we can do anything else, we need to eat and drink. We also need clothing and shelter, at least if we are living in Sheffield rather than Samoa. The first historical act, Marx writes in The German Ideology, is the production of the means to satisfy our material needs. Only then can we learn to play the banjo, write erotic poetry or paint the front porch. The basis of culture is labour. There can be no civilisation without material production.
Marxism, however, wants to claim more than this. It wants to argue that material production is fundamental not only in the sense that there could be no civilisation without it, but that it is what ultimately determines the nature of that civilisation. There is a difference between saying that a pen or computer is indispensable to writing a novel, and claiming that it somehow determines the content of the novel. The latter case is by no means blindingly obvious, even though the Marxist equivalent of it has the support of some anti-Marxist thinkers as well. The philosopher John Gray, who is scarcely an apologist for Marxism, writes that ''in market societies . . . not only is economic activity distinct from the rest of social life, but it conditions, and sometimes dominates, the whole of society.''1 What Gray confines to market societies, Marx generalizes to human history as such.
Critics of Marx regard the stronger of the two claims as a form of reductionism. It boils everything down to the same factor. And this seems clearly wrongheaded. How could the stunning variety of human history be straitjacketed in this way? Surely there is a plurality of forces at work in history, which can never be reduced to a single, unchanging principle? We might wonder, however, how far this kind of pluralism is prepared to go. Is there never any single factor in historical situations which is more important than the others? This is surely hard to swallow. We might argue till Doomsday about the causes of the French Revolution, but nobody thinks that it broke out because of biochemical changes in the French brain brought about by too much cheese-eating. Only a seriously weird minority claims that it happened because Aries was in the ascendant. Everyone agrees that some historical factors are more weighty than others. This does not prevent them from being pluralists, at least in one sense of the word. They might still accept that every major historical event is the upshot of a multiplicity of forces. It is just that they
are reluctant to assign all these forces the same importance.
Friedrich Engels was a pluralist in just this sense. He vehemently denied that he and Marx ever meant to suggest that economic forces were the sole determinant of history. That, he considered, was a ''meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.''2 The truth is that nobody is a pluralist in the sense of holding that in any given situation, any factor is as vital as any other. Everyone believes in hierarchies, even the most fervent of egalitarians. In fact, almost everyone believes in absolute, unchanging hierarchies. It is hard to find anyone who thinks that tickling the starving is ever preferable to feeding them. Nobody contends that the length of Charles I's fingernails was a more decisive factor than religion in the English Civil War. There were lots of reasons for my holding your head underwater for twenty minutes (sadism, scientific curiosity, that appalling flowery shirt you were wearing, the fact that there was only a boring old documentary on television), but the overriding reason was to get my hands on the stable of prize-winning horses you had bequeathed me in your will. Why should public events not have overriding motives too?
Some pluralists agree that such events may result from a single predominant cause. It is just that they do not see why the same cause should be operative in every case. Surely what is implausible about the so-called economic theory of history is the idea that everything, everywhere, is conditioned in just the same way. Doesn't this suggest that history is a single phenomenon, as miraculously uniform all the way through as a stick of rock? It makes sense to suppose that the cause of my headache was that ridiculously tight Marilyn Monroe wig I insisted on wearing to the party; but history is not a single thing like a headache. As the man complained, it is just one damn thing after another. It does not have the consistency of a fairy tale, or form a coherent narrative. There is no unbroken thread of meaning running all the way through it.
We have seen already that scarcely anybody imagines that there are no intelligible patterns in history at all. It is rare to find someone who sees history as simply one shambolic heap of chaos, chance, accident and contingency, though Friedrich Nietzsche and his disciple Michel Foucault sail close to this view at times. Most people accept that there are chains of cause and effect in history, however complex or hard to fathom, and that this lends it some rough kind of pattern. It is hard to believe, for example, that various nations began to collect colonies at a certain historical point for reasons that had nothing whatsoever in common. African slaves were not transported to America for no reason at all. That fascism emerged at more or less the same time in various twentieth-century nations was not just a copycat affair. People do not suddenly hurl themselves on open fires just for the hell of it. There is a remarkably uniform pattern across the globe of people pointedly not doing so.
The question, surely, is not whether there are patterns in history, but whether there is one predominant pattern. You can believe the former without crediting the latter. Why not just a set of overlapping designs that never merge into a whole? How on earth could something as diverse as human history form a unified story? To contend that material interests have been the prime mover all the way from the cave dwellers to capitalism is a lot more plausible than believing that diet, altruism, Great Men, pole-vaulting or the conjunction of the planets has been. But it still seems too singular an answer to be satisfying.
If it is satisfying to Marx, it is because he considers that history has been by no means as varied and colourful as it may appear. It has been a much more monotonous story than meets the eye. There is indeed a kind of unity to it; but it is not one that should yield us any pleasure, as the unity of Bleak House or High Noon might. For the most part, the threads that leash it together have been scarcity, hard labour, violence and exploitation. And though these things have taken very different forms, they have so far laid the foundation of every civilisation on record. It is this dull, mind-numbing recurrence that has lent human history a good deal more consistency than we might desire. There is indeed a grand narrative here, and more's the pity. As Theodor Adorno observes, "The One and All that keeps rolling on to this day—with occasional breathing spells—would teleologically be the absolute of suffering.'' The grand narrative of history is not one of Progress, Reason or Enlightenment. It is a melancholic tale which leads in Adorno's words ''from the slingshot to the atomic bomb.''3
It is possible to agree that violence, hard labour and exploitation bulk large in human history without accepting that they are the foundation of it. For Marxists, one reason why they are so fundamental is that they are bound up with our physical survival. They have been abiding features of the way we maintain our material existence. They are not just random events. We are not speaking of scattered acts of savagery or aggression. If there has been a certain necessity to these things, it is because they are built into the structures by which we produce and reproduce our material life. Even so, no Marxist imagines that these forces shape absolutely everything. If they did, then typhoid, ponytails, convulsive laughter, Sufism, the Saint Matthew Passion and painting your toenails an exotic purple would all be the reflex of economic forces. Any battle not fought for directly economic motives, or any work of art which is silent on the class struggle, would be inconceivable.
Marx himself occasionally writes as though the political is simply the reflex of the economic. Yet he also often investigates the social, political or military motives behind historical events, without the faintest suggestion that these motives are just the surface manifestations of deeper economic ones. Material forces do sometimes leave their mark quite directly on politics, art and social life. But their influence is generally more long-term and subterranean than this. There are times when this influence is only very partial, and other times when it scarcely makes sense to speak in these terms at all. How is the capitalist mode of production the cause of my taste in neckties? In what sense does it determine hang-gliding or the twelve-bar blues?
So there is no reductionism at work here. Politics, culture, science, ideas and social existence are not just economics in disguise, as some neuroscientists hold that the mind is just the brain in disguise. They have their own reality, evolve their own histories and operate by their own inner logic. They are not just the pale reflection of something else. They also powerfully shape the mode of production itself. The traffic between economic ''base'' and social ''superstructure,'' as we shall see later, is not just one way. So if we are not speaking here of some mechanistic determinism, what kind of claim is being made? Is it one so fuzzy and generalized as to be politically toothless?
The claim is in the first place a negative one. It is that the way men and women produce their material life sets limits to the kind of cultural, legal, political and social institutions they construct. The word ''determine'' literally means ''to set limits to.'' Modes of production do not dictate a specific kind of politics, culture or set of ideas. Capitalism was not the cause of John Locke's philosophy or Jane Austen's fiction. It is rather a context in which both can be illuminated. Nor do modes of production throw up only those ideas or institutions which serve their purposes. If this were true, then Marxism itself would be impossible. It would be a mystery where anarchist street theatre comes from, or how Tom Paine came to write one of the best-selling books of all time—the revolutionary Rights of Man —at the heart of the repressive police state that was the England of his day. Even so, we would be astonished to discover that English culture contained nothing but Tom Paines and anarchist theatre groups. Most novelists, scholars, advertisers, newspapers, teachers and television stations do not produce work that is dramatically subversive of the status quo. This is so glaringly obvious that it generally fails to strike us as significant. Marx's point is simply that it is not an accident. And it is here that we can formulate the more positive aspect of his claim. Broadly speaking, the culture, law and politics of class-society are bound up with the interests of the dominant social classes. As Marx himself puts it in The German Ideology, "The class that is the ruling materi
al force of society is at the same time the ruling intellectual force.''
Most people, if they pause to think about it, would probably accept that the business of material production has loomed so large in human history, absorbed such boundless resources of time and energy, provoked such internecine conflicts, engrossed so many human beings from cradle to grave and confronted so many of them as a matter of life or death, that it would be amazing if it were not to leave its mark on a good many other aspects of our existence. Other social institutions find themselves inexorably dragged into its orbit. It bends politics, law, culture and ideas out of true by demanding that rather than just flourish as themselves, they spend much of their time legitimating the prevailing social order. Think of contemporary capitalism, in which the commodity form has left its grubby thumbprints on everything from sport to sexuality, from how best to swing oneself a front-row seat in heaven to the ear-shattering tones in which U.S. television reporters hope to seize the viewer's attention for the sake of the advertisers. The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which his case is becoming truer as time passes. It is capitalism, not Marxism, which is economically reductionist. It is capitalism which believes in production for production's sake, in the narrower sense of the word ''production.''
Marx, by contrast, believes in production for its own sake in a more generous sense of the word. He argues that human self-realisation is to be valued as an end in itself, rather than reduced to the instrument of some other goal. This, he thought, would prove impossible as long as the narrower sense of production for production's sake prevailed— for then most of our creative energy would be invested in producing the means of living rather than savouring life itself. Much of the meaning of Marxism can be found in the contrast between these two uses of the phrase "production for production's sake''—one of them economic, the other creative or artistic. Far from being an economic reductionist, Marx is a stern critic of reducing human production to tractors and turbines. The production that mattered to him was closer to art than it was to assembling transistor radios or slaughtering sheep. We shall be returning to this subject in a moment.
Why Marx Was Right Page 9