It has hardly been a decade (as of
1998) since the statues of Lenin were toppled throughout the Soviet empire
and the head of Karl Marx was severed once and for all from any connection
to a body politic. Yet the lips of the severed head continue to move.
In the West leading intellectuals many
who would not allow themselves to be called Marxists profess to hear a
message they insist is relevant to our times. Thus the rush to celebrate
the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto, the
only text that most of the millions of soldiers in Marxist vanguards around
the world ever read.
The Manifesto was an incitement to totalitarian
ambitions whose results were far bloodier than those inspired by Mein Kampf.
In it Marx announced the doom of free market societies, declared the liberal
bourgeoisie to be a "ruling class" and the democratic state its puppet,
summoned proletarians and their intellectual vanguard to begin civil wars
in their own countries, and thereby launched the most destructive movement
in human history.
Yet this birthday celebration in the
commanding heights of our political culture is marked not by judgments
of its historical malevolence or even by cautionary admonitions to potential
disciples, but by fulsome praise for its brilliant analyses and even more
preposterously for its analytic profundity and prescience. Both the New
York Times and the Los Angeles Times, not to mention usual suspects like
The Nation, have embarrassed themselves by asserting the indispensability
of this tract for understanding the failings of the very system which brought
Marxism to its knees.
We might expect this of a former Communist
and present-day Marxist like Eric Hobsbawm, who contributed the egregious
introduction to an anniversary edition of the Manifesto published by the
New Left Review's Verso Press. But it is passing strange to be presented
with so historically unconscious a statement from the New York Times. Given
the current state of the intellectual culture, it is no doubt appropriate
that the Times would pick a professor of English literature for the task
(English departments being virtually the last redoubts of the Marxist faith
this side of Havana). But it is ironic that the professor, Steven Marcus,
should be a protégé of Lionel Trilling, one of the most perceptive
liberal critics of Marxism. For Marcus has written nothing less than a
birthday ode to the irascible and demonic genius from Trier, under the
title "Marx's Masterpiece at 150."
Degeneration of the Academic
Left
According to Marcus and the Times:
"The Manifesto was and is a
work of immense autonomous historical importance. It marks the accession
of social and intellectual consciousness to a new stage of inclusiveness.
It has become part of an integral modern sensibility . . . and it remains
so, after the demise of Soviet Communism and its satellite regimes, the
descent into moribundity of Marxist movements in the world and the end
of the cold war."
To be sure, on America's benighted college
campuses, unfortunately and deplorably, this description of Marxism's currency
is accurate. Marxism, or some kitsch version of it, has indeed become "part
of an integral modern sensibility." But what about the real world, outside
the ivory tower?
Of even more consequence is the Times's
endorsement of this degeneration of intellectual life what should properly
be regarded as a social disaster. Instead of digesting the lessons of the
Communist holocaust, closing the Marxist tent, throwing the Manifesto in
the intellectual garbage bin where it belongs, dusting off the volumes
by Von Mises and Hayek, which actually predicted the Communist fall and
for the first time in one's life thinking about how to make bourgeois democracy
work, the Times apparently would like its progressive readers to believe
that none of this sordid revolutionary history has any relevance to the
important and present task of continuing the civil war the Manifesto first
incited:
A decade after those world-historical
occurrences, the Manifesto continues to yield itself to our reading in
the new light that its enduring insights into social existence generate.
It emerges ever more distinctly as an unsurpassed dramatic representation,
diagnosis and prophetic array of visionary judgments on the modern world
. . . . A century and a half afterward, it remains a classic expression
of the society it anatomized and whose doom it prematurely announced.
Prematurely! Are we to understand by
this that the Times thinks the bloody apocalypse Marx gleefully hoped for
is yet to come? The answer is obviously yes if the Manifesto has "enduring
insights" into capitalist economy. And what exactly is it that the Manifesto
is alleged to have diagnosed? This, after all, is the decisive issue. Is
the Manifesto correct in what it says about "social existence"?
In fact the Manifesto is so self-evidently
wrong in its fundamental analyses and judgments that its author could not
begin to explain how the article praising his bankrupt and discredited
war cry could appear in the Times at all. How is it that the leading institution
of the "ruling class" press, in the principal bourgeois nation on the planet,
could feature such Marxist tripe? Nor is this question incidental to the
core problem of a text whose principal thesis claiming to analyze complex
societies on the basis of a single structure economic class is announced
in its very first line: "The history of all hitherto existing society is
the history of class struggle."
The Manifesto's
Message is: Civil War
This hypothesis is really the essence
and sum of the Manifesto which is not a call to thought, but --- and this
should never be forgotten --- a call to arms. The striking (and reprehensible)
thesis of the Manifesto is that democratic societies are not really different
in kind from the aristocratic and slave societies that required revolutions
to overthrow. Despite surface appearances, despite the fact that in contrast
to all previous societies, democracy makes the people "sovereign" democratic
capitalism is "unmasked" by Marx as an "oppressive" and tyrannical society
like all the rest, and therefore requires extra-legal and violent means
to liberate its victims from its yoke. That is why those who have been
inspired by the Manifesto have declared war on the liberal societies of
the West and have spilled so much blood and spread so much misery in our
time.
The meaning of the first sentence of
the Manifesto, then, is this: All (non-socialist) societies are divided
into classes that are "oppressed" and those who oppress them. Capitalism
is no different, even though its revolutions may have instituted democratic
political structures designed to enfranchise the "oppressed." For the very
idea of democracy in a society where private property exists, according
to the Manifesto, is an illusion: "The executive of the modern state is
but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie."
In other words, democratic elections
are a sham. Civil war is the political answer to humanity's problems: "Workers
of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains." The solution
to all fundamental social problems to war, to poverty, to economic inequality
lies in a conflict that will rip society apart and create a new revolutionary
world from its ruins. This is the enduring and poisonous message of the
Manifesto, and why its believers have left such a trail of human slaughter
in their path as they set about to create a progressive future.
Almost every important analytic thesis
of the Manifesto including its opening statement is patently false. History
is not the history of class struggle, as defined by Marx, i.e., the struggle
of economic oppressor and oppressed. Not even the historical event which
provided the basis for Marx's theoretical model, the French Revolution,
is explicable in these terms. Historians like Simon Schama and Francis
Furet have established, beyond any reasonable doubt, that capitalism was
already thriving under the monarchy, and it was the nobility, not the bourgeoisie,
that upended the ancien régime).
When we look at the twentieth century,
whose course has largely been determined by forces of nationalism and racism,
which Marx utterly discounted, the hopeless inadequacy of his theories
becomes impossible except for those blinded by faith to ignore.
According to Marx, the bourgeois epoch
possesses a distinctive feature: "It has simplified the class antagonisms:
Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile
camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie
and Proletariat." But, of course, it hasn't. Which is one reason why Marxism
has failed, as a program, in all the industrialized countries.
In fact, much of the Marxist critique
of capitalism reflects nothing so much as a romantic longing for a feudal
past in which social status was pre-ordained and irrevocable, and stamped
every individual with a destiny and a grace:
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its
halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent
awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet,
the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
Of course, it has not exactly done this
either. More likely it has turned physician, lawyer, scientist, and poet
into entrepreneurs themselves. In the open societies created by capitalist
revolutionaries, they can set up as independent contractors; they can incorporate
themselves; and they can move up the social and economic scale to heights
undreamed of when their status may have been "reverential" but where it
was also fixed by the immutable relations of an authentic "class society,"
which bourgeois society is not. The complexity and fluidity of class structure
in developed capitalist societies has made a mockery of the core principles
of Marxist belief.
The Manifesto's False
Vision of the Social Future
Marx was a first-rate intellect and
a brilliant writer, and his descriptions of the progressive economic expansion
of market societies under the leadership of the "bourgeoisie" are memorable
and provide most of the basis for claims that the Manifesto is an accurate
and "prescient" work. Marx famously extolled the capitalist class for constantly
"revolutionizing the forces of production," concluding: "The bourgeoisie,
during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and
more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together."
This sentence encapsulates both the
seductive power of Marx's writing and the sinister import of his theory.
The description would seem to be an endorsement of capitalism, indicating
the immense value to all members of society in the encouragement it has
provided to an entrepreneurial class to create more social wealth than
the world has ever known. It would hardly seem to provide an argument for
the permanent war that Marx goes on to advocate against the bourgeoisie
in the name of human progress. But even in the sentence quoted, one sees
how the theory is designed to cancel the praise. Marx identifies the creative
entrepreneurs as "rulers" in a sense designed to parallel that of absolutist
monarchs and slave-owners, and thus to detach them from the reality of
their achievement and from the fact that they earn the power they accumulate,
and thus to incite social resentment and hatred against them. The theory
further postulates that the productive forces these entrepreneurs have
created have "outgrown" them, and make it necessary to destroy their "rule."
In Marx's colorful prose:
"Modern bourgeois society .
. . is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of
the nether world whom he has called up by his spells."
Marx is referring here to the business cycle and its economic crises.
In these crises there breaks out an epidemic
that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity--- the epidemic
of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state
of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation
had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence.
According to Marx the bourgeoisie is
at war with the very forces of production that it has called into being
("The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground
are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself.") And there is more. The
forces of production called into being by the bourgeoisie have also created
a class, the proletariat, which is its victim and its antagonist. The proletariat
has no property itself, and therefore is in a position to abolish private
property which is the "condition" of bourgeois production and bourgeois
oppression, to remove the bourgeois "rulers" from their corporate thrones
and to create a cooperative society in which the economy can be organized
according to a "social plan." This development emanating from the logic
of History that Marx has discovered, has all the inevitability of a natural
force:
The advance of industry, whose involuntary
promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due
to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association.
The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet
the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates
products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its
own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally
inevitable.
Well, not really.
The Manifesto's Poisonous
Legacy
Under the spell of prose like this,
whole generations of "progressives" have been blinded to the obvious bounties
of democratic capitalist societies and encouraged to make war on them,
and with a nihilistic fury inspired by illusions of "social justice" producing
human tragedy beyond measure. The heirs of Marx are still at it. In the
wake of the Communist catastrophe, they are willing to acknowledge only
that Marx's economic categories are too narrow and that the proletariat
has failed to make the revolution. But the core Marxist model, the model
which proposes that democratic societies are oppressive and tyrannical,
that they deserve not fundamental allegiance and constructive attention
but venomous scorn and nihilistic rejection, that democratic processes
and institutions are a sham, that the just solution to social problems
lies along the path of civil confrontation and political warfare this model
is alive and well among radical feminists, racial separatists, queer nationalists,
and the rag-tag intellectual army of post-modernists, critical theorists,
and kitsch Marxists that inhabit our universities and evidently our editorial
rooms as well.
Contrary to the Times, and other institutions
of the "bourgeois" media that have followed its lead, what needs to be
emphasized on this 150th anniversary of The Communist Manifesto is that
Marx was totally, tragically, destructively wrong. He was wrong about the
oppressive nature of the bourgeoisie and the outmoded nature of capitalist
production, wrong about the increasing misery of the working class, and
wrong about its liberating powers, wrong about the increasing concentration
of wealth and the increasing polarization of class under capitalism, wrong
about the labor theory of value and the falling rate of profit, and wrong
about the possibility of creating an advanced and democratic industrial
society by abolishing private property and the market in order to adopt
a "social plan."
If Marx's economics were already outdated
and false when he wrote the Manifesto, even worse was his political ignorance.
He was, in particular, disastrously deaf to all the resonances of the Anglo-American
constitutional tradition and the accumulated democratic wisdom ascending
from the Magna Carta to the American Constitution. Here in its implacable
arrogance is how the "visionary" prophet who wrote the Manifesto actually
saw the political future:
When, in the course of development,
class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated
in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power
will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called,
is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the
proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the
force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class, if, by means of
a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away
by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these
conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms
and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy
as a class.
One billion people have been impounded
in totalitarian states and gulags, and one hundred million people have
been murdered in our lifetime by Marxists acting on these false premises.
That they should be endorsed today by anyone at all is a moral disgrace.
This is what we should remember on the 150th anniversary of Marx's destructive
work. Political power is not "merely the organized power of one class for
oppressing another." In democratic market societies, where social mobility
is fluid, the people are sovereign and the rule of law prevails, classes
do not "oppress" one another, and those who inflame the passions of revolution
are inciting their followers to criminal acts. Period.
Conclusion
Private property may be the basis of
class divisions, as Marxists claim, but private property has been proven
by all history to be the indispensable bulwark of human liberty, the only
basis for producing general economic prosperity and social wealth that
human beings have yet discovered. There are no democratic societies, or
industrial societies or post-industrial societies that are not based on
private property and economic markets. Those who make war on private property,
make war on human liberty and human well-being.
As noted above, the writer of the Times
review is a professor of English literature. At any other moment in our
intellectual history his choice for an assignment of this importance might
be dismissed as mere happenstance. But Marcus's views reflect the appalling
state of literary studies in American colleges, which under the aegis of
tenured radicals have become a pretext for teaching Marxist kitsch under
rubrics like "post-modernism," "post-structuralism," and "critical" and
"cultural" studies. These pseudo-Marxists share Marx's hatred of all bourgeois
societies like our own. As the professor, himself, put it in the Times:
"Whether it is regarded as capitalist democracy as civil society, as the
welfare state in transition or as the modern social contract, bourgeois
society remains alive and well which means of course, as it always has,
that it is in a hell of a state."
The sub-text is that American society
is a society to be rejected and despised as a social hell, that its institutions
are institutions to be subverted and destroyed. This is the curriculum
in all too many college classrooms today. This is the real meaning of The
Communist Manifesto on its 150th anniversary, and of the celebrations of
the Manifesto by an intellectual class whose own record in this bloodiest
of centuries, is a sordid and sorry one of apology and support for the
totalitarian enemies of America both abroad and within. |