Today, the value and limits of free speech are being tested and debated to a greater degree than they have been for many decades. Advances in communications technology have made the world a ‘global village’ where ideas and images are instantly transmitted across the planet, thereby increasing the possibility for offence and misunderstanding exponentially. This has led to calls for limits on freedom of expression. The controversies stirred by these clashes remind us that other values, such as social harmony, tolerance and respect, compete with liberty, which even Mill insisted should not be absolute. The belief in the supremacy of free expression is not self-evident to most of the world, which is not liberal. In this context, Mill’s celebrated essay is perhaps needed more than ever to make the case for liberty as the highest political value in the West, and perhaps the one most likely to promote human wellbeing. Moreover, his concerns about popular democracy, long dismissed as mere snobbery, are finding a new audience among those alarmed by the rise of populism and the electoral success of parties and politicians who see liberalism itself as the problem rather than the solution to the ills of our age.
21
Karl Marx: The Revolutionary
When Karl Marx arrived in London from France as a penniless exile in 1849, he moved to a dingy little two-room flat at 28 Dean Street, a former brothel and now a fashionable restaurant in Soho, then one of the most run-down parts of the crowded, polluted city, where he lived on the brink of destitution for six years with his young family. Although he and Mill cohabited in the same city for 24 years, they lived a world apart and never met. Marx knew about Mill and read his work, but Mill had never even heard of Marx, who was an obscure German revolutionary virtually unknown in Britain in his lifetime.
Marx was saved from abject poverty only by the generosity of his wealthy German friend and patron Friedrich Engels, whose family owned textile mills in Manchester. Even so, Marx was unable to prevent the early deaths of three of his children in their squalid, cramped new home. When his infant daughter Franziska died, Marx had to borrow money to hire an undertaker to bury her. His prospects for making a living in the London of Charles Dickens were severely limited by his imperfect command of English, which he never entirely mastered, despite spending most of his life in Britain.
Like Rousseau, who had lived briefly in exile in England a century before, Marx was no Anglophile and expressed no gratitude towards his adopted country for providing him with refuge from persecution on the Continent, where the authorities had hounded him out for his radical opinions. The impecunious Marx rarely left London after moving there and never visited an English factory, despite being an analyst of industrial capitalism, a champion of workers’ interests and an advocate of proletarian revolution: revolution by and for working men and women. Marx’s own background was thoroughly bourgeois, not working-class. His knowledge of the plight of working people and of the laws and effects of capitalism, as he saw them, was derived almost entirely from written accounts (by government inspectors, for example), which he voraciously consumed on his daily trips to the reading room of the British Museum, a short walk away from the two ‘evil, frightful rooms’ where he lived with his family and housekeeper. Indeed, he spent so many hours sitting on the hard, uncushioned chairs at the museum that he developed boils on his posterior. He blamed his anger at the bourgeoisie on the pain and discomfort caused by these uncomfortable seats. ‘I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day’, he fumed to Engels. ‘What swine they are!’
Marx’s studies were of early, unregulated industrial capitalism in Britain, France and Germany, a very raw and brutal form of production before the twentieth-century creation of the welfare state and enactment of labour laws and regulations to soften its excesses and protect the most vulnerable. It was described most vividly and movingly in literature by Charles Dickens, ‘whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together’, Marx wrote admiringly of the great Victorian novelist. He was convinced that capitalism must inevitably self-destruct, owing to the violent booms and busts of its business cycles and the increasingly barbaric condition of the working poor. He had carefully, if selectively, analysed its inner workings in books, reports and newspapers, and concluded that it was doomed to collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions, which made it inherently and increasingly unstable. This fate cannot be avoided, he believed. Like all class-based economic systems, capitalism rests, according to Marx, on the pitiless exploitation of the poor and powerless by the rich and powerful, and all such systems are destined to fail eventually when the lives of the impoverished majority become unbearable. That is why he said the bourgeoisie, mad with greed, are their own grave-diggers. Only after such a fall, he confidently predicted, can the positive work of establishing a communist society begin, a society free of classes, exploitation and violence.
For Marx, what he called the ‘bourgeoisie’, the ruling class in capitalism that owns and controls the ‘means of production’ (factories, money and resources), exploits the working class (the proletariat), whose sole ‘possession’ is their own physical ability to work (their ‘labour power’). Workers are free in principle to sell this power to the bourgeoisie in return for the best wage they can get, which in the vast majority of cases is barely enough to live on. Most then toil long and hard to produce goods that are owned and sold by others for their profit. It is a system of pure exploitation in which the vast majority are doomed to live desperate lives, while the privileged few enjoy conspicuous wealth and hoard all power. How do capitalists ensure that wages stay low? By creating a ‘reserve army of the unemployed’ ready to replace any worker who seeks higher wages. Over time, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer until the system explodes in revolutionary violence, Marx believed.
Marx argued that capitalists pretend to support competition but do everything they can to prevent it, since competition forces down prices and therefore profits. Even the classical economist Adam Smith, an admirer and defender of commercial society, had noted that whenever businessmen get together they conspire to create monopolies and cartels to drive out smaller firms ruthlessly. In addition, the relentless capitalist pressure to force down wages to inhuman levels to keep profits high is self-defeating in the long term, as workers cannot afford to buy the very goods they produce, causing a ‘crisis of overproduction’ that dooms capitalism. There are just too many goods chasing too few consumers, an unsustainable position over the long term.
In 1848, when a wave of uprisings swept across Europe, Marx thought that this might be the beginning of the end of capitalism, which he had predicted must eventually come. When it turned out to be a false dawn, he decided to wait for the inevitable revolution in the safe haven of London, which had a relatively relaxed attitude towards radicals and agitators, such as the members of the Communist League, whose headquarters was there and which had commissioned Marx and Engels to write their famous Communist Manifesto. After the League was disbanded, Marx became an active and prominent member of the International Workingmen’s Association, to whose General Council he was elected. In that role, he was one of the leaders of the international communist movement, and was regarded as its leading intellectual light. Even so, when he died in London in 1883, Marx was virtually unknown in England. He wrote exclusively in German, and only his Communist Manifesto had been translated into English in his lifetime. By the middle of the 1860s virtually nothing that he had written was any longer in print. Karl Marx died in relative obscurity in exile, waiting for the revolution that he was convinced must one day come. When it finally came, three decades later, it was in a place where he had never expected it: Russia.
Like Augustine and Hobbes, Marx saw the state entirely negatively. Government, he wrote, is just a weapon of the ruling class to keep the rest in line. He considered political power as merely ‘the organized power of one class for oppress
ing another’. The state is never really fair or just, despite its façade of formally impartial laws and procedures. It always acts in the interests of the dominant class, since that is its sole purpose, and never for the general good. Although the state relies heavily (and often brutally) on force to repress dissent and maintain order, capitalism also plays with our minds, distorting our perception of the awful reality in which most live under capitalism through ideology, which includes religion. This is necessary because the conditions in which the majority live and work are so oppressive and exploitative that, if they were viewed accurately, they would provoke spontaneous rebellions. Ideology acts like a camera obscura, turning our understanding of reality on its head so that we accept our exploitation as legitimate. For example, workers in capitalism are told that they are ‘free’ agents who may contract out their labour to the highest bidder for a wage. This fiction acts to reconcile them to what is really just a form of mass wage slavery, in which workers have no effective power to negotiate better conditions and higher wages. That is why Marx believed that capitalism is doomed since, while the rich continue to add to their own wealth and power, the condition of the vast majority gradually declines.
Marx believed that, after the inevitable revolution and with the abolition of class society, the state will eventually become unnecessary. But first there must be a transition period when the bourgeois state is seized by the proletariat after the fall of capitalism and used to crush the remnants of the old system to secure the total victory of the workers. Marx called this temporary stage on the road to communism the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, where the bourgeois state, now in the hands of the working class, forcibly dismantles the system of private property established under capitalism and classes disappear. The Soviet Union remained stuck in this stage for seven decades, waiting for the rest of the capitalist world to collapse so that it could move on to the next stage, communism. Instead, it was the Soviet Union that collapsed, and Russia reverted to capitalism.
In Marx’s theory, when this task of dismantling the capitalist system is complete, class conflict will cease, since classes will no longer exist. For him, competition, selfishness, violence and fraud are essential features of all class-based societies but are not inherent in our nature. So, under communism, which is classless, these evils will disappear and our spontaneously co-operative nature can finally emerge, making the coercive state redundant; it simply ‘withers away’, in Friedrich Engels’ words, as it is no longer needed. All of the goods and resources that are produced and distributed under communism will be allocated according to need, so that communist society works for all and everyone’s needs are equally satisfied. Citizens don’t keep what they make as their own private property, which was abolished with capitalism. Nor, under communism, would they want to.
Beyond these very sketchy and limited ideas about communism, Marx said surprisingly little about the shape of things to come following the demise of capitalism, in stark contrast to the many long, turgid volumes that he wrote explaining the inner workings of the capitalist system in immense detail, particularly the massive, unfinished multi-volume work Capital. This reticence about communism was no accident: Marx claimed that ‘anyone who writes about the future is a reactionary’. He derided utopian socialists for merely recreating medieval communalism when writing about the future. Marx wanted to leave the post-capitalist future open to its own unforeseeable developments. He was primarily an analyst and critic of early industrial capitalism with relatively little to say about the possible future of communist society, whose character he left deliberately vague.
The history and eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, the world’s first officially Marxist state, has done much to discredit Marx’s ideas, just as the Jacobin appropriation of Rousseau’s thought during the French Revolution tarnished his reputation in the eyes of many. Likewise, the Nazi embrace of the German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche tarnished his reputation for a generation, as we shall soon see. This is unfortunate, given how little the Soviet system had to do in practice with the ideas of Karl Marx. In 1917 Russia was still a feudal society that attempted to jump directly into communism without ever having passed through capitalism, thus violating Marx’s theory of historical development through a sequence of stages. The gradual evolution of capitalism into a post-industrial form in the West, rather than its apocalyptic collapse, has refuted Marx’s analysis, as have the rise of the welfare state and the expansion of the middle class, neither of which he predicted. Ironically, the development of fiscal and monetary stabilizing policies in the twentieth century, designed to limit the destructiveness of the business cycle of boom and bust, was partly inspired by Marx; as a result, his thought has been described as a ‘self-defeating prophecy’ that helped to save capitalism.
Nevertheless, the financial crisis that began in the West in 2008 has stimulated much interest in Marx’s portrait of capitalism as a system prone to increasing inequality, instability and unfairness. Political scientists are now describing the American political system as more plutocratic, rule by the wealthy, than democratic, and some economists have recently argued that capitalism in the long run does create wealth faster for the rich than for the rest. Meanwhile, conditions in developing capitalist economies in our time, such as China and India, remain very similar to those of the nineteenth-century West that Marx analysed and reviled. This shows that, as long as capitalism exists, in whatever form, Marx’s work will almost certainly be needed to diagnose its illnesses and ultimately, perhaps, one day to stand as its obituary.
22
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Psychologist
The curse of mental illness stalked Friedrich Nietzsche for his entire life. His father died of ‘softening of the brain’ when his son was just five. The crippling headaches, loss of vision, violent mood swings, depression and vomiting that were the main symptoms of his own mental problems first struck him when he was a teenager and continued, with increasing severity, for the next three decades. Finally he collapsed into complete madness, from which he never recovered. Thereafter, he lived on for another decade as a total invalid until his death in 1900. The affliction that cost him his sanity had earlier cost him his career as a professor at the University of Basel, from which he retired on a modest pension at the age of just 35. He then led the life of a lonely wanderer in the years that followed, writing the works for which he is now so famous, none of which was successful in his own lifetime. The nature of Nietzsche’s illness has never been conclusively diagnosed.
Nietzsche insisted that pain and illness are blessings, since they stimulate the imagination and give the afflicted a depth that is lacking among the healthy. ‘Great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit’, he declared. He believed that his most intellectually productive moments coincided with his worst suffering. He also used the language of disease in his ‘diagnosis’ of modern civilization. He wanted to replace the language of good and evil, virtue and vice, with the language of sickness and health, weakness and strength. It is a ‘madman’ that is Nietzsche’s prophet of a new age who announces the ‘death of God’ to the uncomprehending masses in his book The Gay Science. The nihilism that he believed must follow in the wake of the West’s loss of faith in the Christian God was something that he thought could and should be overcome. The antidote that he prescribed for this condition was the ‘supermen’, exceptional geniuses whose overflowing creativity and will-to-power only flourish when released from the straitjacket of morality, which he saw as a kind of sickness. Now that belief in all gods is dead, Nietzsche claimed that Western civilization finds itself on an open sea unbounded by traditional moral constraints, where great and terrible things are again possible. If he had not struggled with mental illness, he might never have come to this important insight, or so he was convinced.
It is perhaps because Nietzsche struggled with his own inner demons that he often described himself as a psychologist with a special talent in ‘the art of psychological analysis’, as he cal
led it. Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung agreed, so much so that the great Viennese psychoanalyst deliberately avoided any systematic study of Nietzsche’s works; he knew just enough about them to sense that many of his own theories had already been anticipated by Nietzsche, something that threatened his claims to originality. Nietzsche was also drawn to psychology as a substitute for traditional philosophy, with which he had grown bitterly disillusioned. He preferred to ‘refute’ ideas by psychologizing them. In his hands psychology was a method (or weapon) for exposing the often perverse and unseemly motives (as he saw them) behind the lofty ideas of thinkers he disagreed with, such as Plato, Rousseau and Kant. Nietzsche treated their views as symptoms of underlying mental pathologies. ‘A thinker cannot do other than convert his physical condition into the most highly intellectual of forms’, he wrote. ‘This act of transformation is philosophy’. However unfair this method might be, his writings abound with penetrating psychological insights and brilliant, often witty, analyses of people and their psychological relationship to their own ideas, as Nietzsche saw them, a technique that works very effectively in his own case too, as he was the first to admit.
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