Why Marx Was Right (25 page)

Those who are in search of
political emancipation cannot afford to be too choosy about the pedigree of
those who extend a hand to them. Fidel Castro did not turn his back on
socialist revolution because Marx was a German bourgeois. Asian and African
radicals have been stubbornly indifferent to the fact that Trotsky was a
Russian Jew. It is usually middle-class liberals who fret about
"patronising'' working people by, say, lecturing to them about
multiculturalism or William Morris. Working people themselves are generally
free of such privileged neuroses, and are glad to receive whatever political
support might seem useful. So it proved with those in the colonial world who
first learnt about political freedom from Marx. Marx was indeed a European; but
it was in Asia that his ideas first took root, and in the so-called Third World
that they flourished most vigorously. Most so-called Marxist societies have
been non-European. In any case, theories are never simply taken over and acted
out by great masses of people; they are actively remade in the process. This,
overwhelmingly, has been the story of Marxist anticolonialism.

Critics of Marx have
sometimes noted a so-called Promethean strain in his work—a belief in Man's
sovereignty over Nature, along with a faith in limitless human progress. There
is indeed such a current in his writings, as one might expect from a
nineteenth-century European intellectual. There was little concern with plastic
bags and carbon emissions around i860. Besides, Nature sometimes needs to be
subjugated. Unless we build a lot of seawalls pretty quickly, we are in danger
of losing Bangladesh. Typhoid jabs are an exercise of human sovereignty over
Nature. So are bridges and brain surgery. Milking cows and building cities mean
harnessing Nature to our own ends. The idea that we should never seek to get
the better of Nature is sentimental nonsense. Yet even if we do need to get the
better of it from time to time, we can do so only by that sensitive attunement
to its inner workings known as science.

Marx himself sees this
sentimentalism (''a childish attitude to nature,'' as he calls it) as
reflecting a superstitious stance to the natural world, in which we bow down
before it as a superior power; and this mystified relation to our surroundings
reappears in modern times as what he calls the fetishism of commodities. Once
again, our lives are determined by alien powers, dead bits of matter which have
been imbued with a tyrannical form of life. It is just that these natural
powers are no longer wood sprites and water nymphs but the movement of commodities
on the market, over which we have as little control as Odysseus did over the
god of the sea. In this sense as in others, Marx's critique of capitalist
economics is closely bound up with his concern for Nature.

As early as
The German
Ideology,
Marx is to be found including geographical and climatic factors
in social analysis. All historical analysis, he declares, ''must set out from
these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the
action of men.''
¹²
He writes in
Capital
of "socialised
man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their material interchange
with nature and bringing it under common control, instead of allowing it to
rule them as a blind force.''
¹³
''Interchange'' rather than
lordship, rational control rather than bullying dominion, is what is at stake.
In any case, Marx's Prometheus (he was his favourite classical character) is
less a bullish champion of technology than a political rebel. For Marx, as for
Dante, Milton, Goethe, Blake, Beethoven and Byron, Prometheus represents
revolution, creative energy and a revolt against the gods.
¹⁴

The charge that Marx is
just another Enlightenment rationalist out to plunder Nature in the name of Man
is quite false. Few Victorian thinkers have so strikingly prefigured modern
environmentalism. One modern-day commentator argues that Marx's work represents
''the most profound insight into the complex issues surrounding the mastery
over nature to be found anywhere in 19 th century social thought or a fortiori
in the contributions of earlier periods.''
¹⁵
Even Marx's most loyal
fans might find this claim a trifle overweening, though it contains a hefty
kernel of truth. The young Engels was close to Marx's own ecological opinions
when he wrote that ''to make the earth an object of huckstering—the earth which
is our one and all, the first condition of our existence—was the last step
towards making oneself an object of huckstering.''
¹⁶

That the earth is the
first condition of our existence— that if you want a foundation to human
affairs, you might do worse than look for it there—is Marx's own claim in his
Critique
of the Gotha Programme,
where he insists that it is Nature, not labour or
production taken in isolation, which lies at the root of human existence. The
older Engels writes in his
Dialectics of Nature
that ''we by no means
rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing
outside nature—but we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist
in its midst, and all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the
advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its
laws.''
¹⁷
It is true that Engels also speaks in
Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific
of humanity as the ''real, conscious lord of
nature.'' It is also true that he blotted his environmental copybook a little
as a keen member of a Cheshire hunt, but it is a tenet of Marx's materialism
that nothing and nobody is perfect.

''Even a whole society,''
Marx comments, ''a nation, or even all simultaneously existing societies
together, are not the owners of the globe. They are only its possessors, its
usufructuaries, and like
boni patres familias
[good fathers of families]
they must hand it down to succeeding generations in an improved condition.''
¹⁸
He is well aware of the conflict between the short-term capitalist exploitation
of natural resources and longer-term sustainable production. Economic advance,
he insists again and again, must occur without jeopardizing the natural, global
conditions on which the welfare of future generations depends. There is not the
slightest doubt that he would have been in the forefront of the
environmentalist movement were he alive today. As a protoecologist, he speaks
of capitalism as ''squandering the vitality of the soil'' and working to
undermine a ''rational'' agriculture.

''The rational cultivation
of the soil as eternal communal property,'' Marx writes in
Capital,
is
''an inalienable condition of the existence and reproduction of a chain of
successive generations of the human race.''
¹⁹
Capitalist
agriculture, he considers, flourishes only by sapping the ''original sources of
all wealth . . . the soil and its labourers.'' As part of his critique of
industrial capitalism, Marx discusses waste disposal, the destruction of
forests, the pollution of rivers, environmental toxins and the quality of the
air. Ecological sustainability, he considered, would play a vital role in a
socialist agriculture.
²⁰

Behind this concern for
Nature lies a philosophical vision. Marx is a naturalist and materialist for
whom men and women are part of Nature, and forget their creatureliness at their
peril. He even writes in
Capital
of Nature as the ''body'' of humanity,
''with which [it] must remain in constant interchange.'' The instruments of production,
he comments, are ''extended bodily organs.'' The whole of civilisation, from
senates to submarines, is simply an extension of our bodily powers. Body and
world, subject and object, should exist in delicate equipoise, so that our
environment is as expressive of human meanings as a language. Marx calls the
opposite of this "alienation," in which we can find no reflection of
ourselves in a brute material world, and accordingly lose touch with our own
most vital being.

When this reciprocity of
self and Nature breaks down, we are left with the world of meaningless matter
of capitalism, in which Nature is just pliable stuff to be cuffed into whatever
shape we fancy. Civilisation becomes one vast cosmetic surgery. At the same
time, the self is divorced from Nature, its own body and the bodies of others.
Marx believes that even our physical senses have become ''commodified'' under
capitalism, as the body, converted into a mere abstract instrument of
production, is unable to savour its own sensuous life. Only through communism
could we come to feel our own bodies again. Only then, he argues, can we move
beyond a brutally instrumental reason and take delight in the spiritual and
aesthetic dimensions of the world. Indeed, his work is ''aesthetic'' through
and through. He complains in the
Grundrisse
that Nature under capitalism
has become purely an object of utility, and has ceased to be recognized as a
''power in itself.''

Through material
production, humanity in Marx's view mediates, regulates and controls the
''metabolism'' between itself and Nature, in a two-way traffic which is far
from some arrogant supremacy. And all this—Nature, labour, the suffering,
productive body and its needs—constitutes for Marx the abiding infrastructure
of human history. It is the narrative that runs through and beneath human
cultures, leaving its inescapable impress on them all. As a ''metabolic''
exchange between humanity and Nature, labour is in Marx's opinion an
''eternal'' condition which does not alter. What alters—what makes natural
beings historical—are the various ways we humans go to work upon Nature.
Humanity produces its means of subsistence in different ways. This is natural,
in the sense that it is necessary for the reproduction of the species. But it
is also cultural or historical, involving as it does specific kinds of
sovereignty, conflict and exploitation. There is no reason to suppose that
accepting the ''eternal'' nature of labour will deceive us into believing that
these social forms are eternal as well.

This ''everlasting
nature-imposed condition of human existence,'' as Marx calls it, can be
contrasted with the postmodern repression of the natural, material body, which
it seeks to dissolve into culture. The very word ''natural'' provokes a
politically correct shudder. All attention to our common biology becomes the
thought crime of ''biologism.'' Postmodernism is nervous of the unchanging,
which it falsely imagines to be everywhere on the side of political reaction.
So since the human body has altered little in the course of its evolution,
postmodern thought can cope with it only as a ''cultural construct.'' No
thinker, as it happens, was more conscious than Marx of how Nature and the body
are socially mediated. And that mediation is primarily known as labour, which
works Nature up into human meaning. Labour is a signifying activity. We never
bump into a brute piece of matter. Rather, the material world always comes to
us shot through with human significance, and even blankness is one such
signifier. The novels of Thomas Hardy illustrate this condition to superb
effect.

The history of human
society, Marx believes, is part of natural history. This means among other
things that sociality is built into the kind of animals we are. Social cooperation
is necessary for our material survival, but it is also part of our
self-fulfillment as a species. So if Nature is in some sense a social category,
society is also a natural one. Postmodernists are to be found insisting on the
former but suppressing the latter. For Marx, the relation between Nature and
humanity is not symmetrical. In the end, as he notes in
The German Ideology,
Nature has the upper hand. For the individual, this is known as death. The
Faustian dream of progress without limits in a material world magically
responsive to our touch overlooks ''the priority of external nature.'' Today,
this is known not as the Faustian dream but the American one. It is a vision
which secretly detests the material because it blocks our path to the infinite.
This is why the material world has either to be vanquished by force or
dissolved into culture. Postmodernism and the pioneer spirit are sides of the
same coin. Neither can accept that it is our limits that make us what we are,
quite as much as that perpetual transgression of them we know as human history.

Human beings for Marx are
part of Nature yet able to stand over against it; and this partial separation
from Nature is itself part of their nature.
²¹
The very technology
with which we set to work on Nature is fashioned from it. But though Marx sees
Nature and culture as forming a complex unity, he refuses to dissolve the one
into the other. In his alarmingly precocious early work, he dreams of an
ultimate unity between Nature and humanity; in his more mature years, he
recognizes that there will always be a tension or nonidentity between the two,
and one name for this conflict is labour. No doubt with a certain regret, he
rejects the beautiful fantasy, almost as old as humanity itself, in which an
all-bountiful Nature is courteously deferential to our desires:

What wondrous life is this
I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my
head.

The luscious clusters of
the vine

Upon my mouth do crush
their wine.

The nectarine and curious
peach