Why Marx Was Right (18 page)

Materialists, then, are
not soulless creatures. Or if they are, it is not necessarily because they are
materialists. Marx himself was a formidably cultivated man in the great central
European tradition, who longed to be finished with what he scathingly called
the ''economic crap'' of
Capital
in order to write his big book on
Balzac. Unluckily for him, but perhaps fortunately for us, he never did. He
once remarked that he had sacrificed his health, happiness and family to
writing
Capital,
but that he would have been an ''ox'' if he had turned
his back on the sufferings of humankind.
²⁰
He also observed that
nobody had written so much on money and had so little. As a man, he was
passionate, satirical and humorous, an indomitable spirit full of gusto, geniality
and ferocious polemic who stubbornly survived both dire poverty and chronic ill
health.
²¹
He was, of course, an atheist; but one does not need to be
religious to be spiritual, and some of the great themes of Judaism —justice,
emancipation, the reign of peace and plenty, the day of reckoning, history as a
narrative of liberation, the redemption not just of the individual but of a
whole dispossessed people—inform his work in suitably secularised form. He also
inherited the Jewish hostility to idols, fetishes and enslaving illusions.

As far as religion goes,
it is worth pointing out that there have been Jewish Marxists, Islamic
Marxists, and Christian Marxists who champion so-called liberation theology.
All of them are materialists in Marx's sense of the word. In fact, Eleanor
Marx, Marx's daughter, reports that Marx once told her mother that if she
wanted ''satisfaction of her metaphysical needs'' she should find them in the
Jewish prophets rather than in the Secular Society she sometimes attended.
²²
Marxist materialism is not a set of statements about the cosmos, such as
''Everything is made out of atoms'' or ''There is no God.'' It is a theory of
how historical animals function.

In line with his Judaic
legacy, Marx was a strenuously moral thinker. If he intended to write a book on
Balzac after finishing
Capital,
he also proposed to write one on ethics.
So much, then, for the prejudice that he was a bloodless amoralist whose
approach to society was purely scientific. It is hard to feel this of a man who
writes that capitalist society ''has torn up all genuine bonds between men and
replaced them by selfishness, selfish need, and dissolved the world of men into
a world of atomized individuals, hostile towards each other.''
²³
Marx
believed that the ethic that governs capitalist society— the idea that I will
only be of service to you if it is profitable for me to be so—was a detestable
way to live. We would not treat our friends or children in this way, so why
should we accept it as a perfectly natural way of dealing with others in the
public realm?

It is true that Marx quite
often denounces morality. By this, however, he meant the kind of historical
inquiry which ignores material factors in favour of moral ones. The proper term
for this is not morality but moralism. Moralism abstracts something called
''moral values'' from the whole historical context in which they are set, and
then generally proceeds to hand down absolute moral judgements. A truly moral
inquiry, by contrast, is one which investigates all the aspects of a human
situation. It refuses to divorce human values, behavior, relationships and
qualities of character from the social and historical forces which shape them.
It thus escapes the false distinction between moral judgement on the one hand
and scientific analysis on the other. A true moral judgement needs to examine
all the relevant facts as rigorously as possible. In this sense, Marx himself
was a true moralist in the tradition of Aristotle, though he did not always
know that he was.

Moreover, he belonged to
the great Aristotelian tradition for which morality was not primarily a
question of laws, obligations, codes and prohibitions, but a question of how to
live in the freest, fullest, most self-fulfilling way. Morality for Marx was in
the end all about enjoying yourself. But since nobody can live their lives in
isolation, ethics had to involve politics as well. Aristotle thought just the
same.

The spiritual is indeed
about the otherworldly. But it is not the otherworldly as the parsons conceive
of it. It is the other world which socialists hope to build in the future, in
place of one which is clearly past its sell-by date. Anyone who isn't
otherworldly in this sense has obviously not taken a good hard look around
them.

SEVEN

Nothing is more outdated
about Marxism than its tedious obsession with class. Marxists seem not to have
noticed that the landscape of social class has changed almost out of
recognition since the days when Marx himself was writing. In particular, the
working class which they fondly imagine will usher in socialism has disappeared
almost without trace. We live in a social world where class matters less and
less, where there is more and more social mobility, and where talk of class
struggle is as archaic as talk of burning heretics at the stake. The
revolutionary worker, like the wicked top-hatted capitalist, is a figment of
the Marxist imagination.

W
e have seen already that Marxists
have a problem with the idea of utopia. This is one reason why they reject the
illusion that, just because chief executives nowadays might sport sneakers,
listen to Rage Against the Machine and beseech their employees to call them
''Cuddlykins,'' social class has been swept from the face of the earth. Marxism
does not define class in terms of style, status, income, accent, occupation or
whether you have ducks or Degas on the wall. Socialist men and women have not
fought and sometimes died over the centuries simply to bring an end to
snobbery.

The quaint American
concept of ''classism'' would seem to suggest that class is mostly a question
of attitude. The middle class should stop feeling contemptuous of the working
class rather as whites should stop feeling superior to African-Americans. But
Marxism is not a question of attitude. Class for Marxism, rather like virtue
for Aristotle, is not a matter of how you are feeling but of what you are
doing. It is a question of where you stand within a particular mode of
production—whether as slave, self-employed peasant, agricultural tenant, owner
of capital, financier, seller of one's labour power, petty proprietor and so
on. Marxism has not been put out of business because Etonians have started to
drop their aitches, princes of the royal household puke in the gutter outside
nightclubs, or some more antique forms of class distinction have been blurred
by the universal solvent known as money. The fact that the European aristocracy
are honoured to hobnob with Mick Jagger has signally failed to usher in the
classless society.

We have heard a good deal
about the supposed disappearance of the working class. Before we turn to that
topic, however, what of the less-heralded passing of the traditional haute
bourgeoisie or upper-middle class? As Perry Anderson has noted, the kind of men
and women unforgettably portrayed by novelists such as Marcel Proust and Thomas
Mann are now all but extinct. ''By and large,'' Anderson writes, ''the
bourgeoisie as Baudelaire or Marx, Ibsen or Rimbaud, Groz or Brecht—or even
Sartre or O'Hara—knew it, is a thing of the past.'' Socialists, however, should
not get too excited by this obituary notice. For as Anderson goes on to remark,
''In place of that solid amphitheatre is an aquarium of floating, evanescent
forms—the projectors and managers, auditors and janitors, administrators and
speculators of contemporary capital: functions of a monetary universe that
knows no social fixities or stable identities.''
¹
Class changes its
composition all the time. But this does not mean that it vanishes without
trace.

It is in the nature of
capitalism to confound distinctions, collapse hierarchies and mix the most
diverse forms of life promiscuously together. No form of life is more hybrid
and pluralistic. When it comes to who exactly should be exploited, the system
is admirably egalitarian. It is as antihierarchical as the most pious
postmodernist, and as generously inclusivist as the most earnest Anglican
vicar. It is anxious to leave absolutely nobody out. Where there is profit to
be made, black and white, women and men, toddlers and senior citizens,
neighbourhoods in Wakefield and rural villages in Sumatra are all grist to its
mill, to be treated with impeccable evenhanded-ness. It is the commodity form,
not socialism, that is the great leveller. The commodity does not check up on
where its potential consumer went to school, or whether she pronounces ''basin''
to rhyme with ''bison.'' It imposes just the kind of uniformity that, as we
have seen, Marx sets his face against.

We should not be
surprised, then, that advanced capitalism breeds delusions of classlessness.
This is not just a façade behind which the system conceals its true inequities;
it is in the nature of the beast. Even so, there is a telling contrast between
the dressed-down matiness of the modern office and a global system in which
distinctions of wealth and power yawn wider than ever. Old-style hierarchies
may have yielded in some sectors of the economy to decentralised,
network-based, team-oriented, information-rich, first-name, open-neck-shirted
forms of organisation. But capital remains concentrated in fewer hands than
ever before, and the ranks of the destitute and dispossessed swell by the hour.
While the chief executive smoothes his jeans over his sneakers, over one
billion on the planet go hungry every day. Most of the mega-cities in the south
of the globe are stinking slums rife with disease and overcrowding, and slum
dwellers represent one-third of the global urban population. The urban poor
more generally constitute at least one-half of the world's population.
²
Meanwhile, some in the West seek in their evangelical fervor to spread liberal
democracy to the rest of the globe, at the very point that the world's destiny
is being determined by a handful of Western-based corporations answerable to
nobody but their shareholders.

Even so, Marxists are not
simply ''against'' the capitalist class, as one might be against hunting or
smoking. We have seen already that no one admired their magnificent
achievements more than Marx himself. It was on these achievements—a resolute
opposition to political tyranny, a massive accumulation of wealth which brought
with it the prospect of universal prosperity, respect for the individual, civil
liberties, democratic rights, a truly international community and so on—that
socialism itself would need to build. Class-history was to be used, not simply
discarded. Capitalism, as we have noted, had proved an emancipatory force as
well as a catastrophic one; and it is Marxism, more than any other political
theory, which seeks to deliver a judicious account of it, in contrast with
mindless celebration on the one hand and blanket condemnation on the other.
Among the mighty gifts that capitalism bestowed on the world, however
unintentionally, was the working class—a social force which it reared up for
its own self-interested purposes to the point where it became in principle
capable of taking it over. This is one reason why irony lies at the heart of
Marx's vision of history. There is a dark humour in the vision of the
capitalist order giving birth to its own gravedigger.

Marxism does not focus on
the working class because it sees some resplendent virtue in labour. Burglars
and bankers toil away too, but Marx was not notable for his championship of
them. (He did, however, once write about housebreaking, in a splendid parody of
his own economic theory.) Marxism, as we have seen, wants to abolish labour as
far as possible. Nor does it assign such political importance to the working
class because it is supposedly the most downtrodden of social groups. There are
many such groups—vagrants, students, refugees, the elderly, the unemployed and
chronically unemploy-able—who are often more needy than the average worker. The
working class does not cease to interest Marxists the moment it acquires indoor
bathrooms or colour television. It is its place within the capitalist mode of
production which is most decisive. Only those within that system, familiar with
its workings, organised by it into a skilled, politically conscious collective
force, indispensable to its successful running yet with a material interest in
bringing it low, can feasibly take it over and run it instead for the benefit
of all. No well-meaning paternalist or bunch of outside agitators can do it for
them— which is to say that Marx's attention to the working class (by far the
majority of the population of his time) is inseparable from his deep respect
for democracy.

If Marx assigns the
working class such importance, it is among other things because he sees them as
the bearers of a universal emancipation:

A class must be formed
which has
radical chains,
a class in civil society which is not a class
of civil society, a class which is the dissolution of all classes, a sphere of
society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal,
and which does not claim a
particular redress
because the wrong which is
done to it is not a
particular wrong
but
wrong in general.
There
must be formed a sphere of society which claims no
traditional
status
but only a human status . . . which is, in short, a
total loss
of
humanity and which can only redeem itself by a
total redemption of humanity.
This dissolution of society, as a particular class, is the
proletariat
.
. .
³