Why Marx Was Right Read Online Free PDF Page B

prison.

 
    THREE
    Marxism is a form of
determinism. It sees men and women simply as the tools of history, and thus
strips them of their freedom and individuality. Marx believed in certain iron
laws of history, which wor\ themselves out with inexorable force and which no
human action can resist. Feudalism was fated to give birth to capitalism, and
capitalism will inevitably give way to socialism. As such, Marx's theory of
history is just a secular version of Providence or Destiny. It is offensive to
human freedom and dignity, just as Marxist states are.
    W e may begin by asking what is
distinctive about Marxism. What does Marxism have that no other political
theory does? It is clearly not the idea of revolution, which long predates
Marx's work. Nor is it the notion of communism, which is of ancient provenance.
Marx did not invent socialism or communism. The working-class movement in
Europe had already arrived at socialist ideas while Marx himself was still a
liberal. In fact, it is hard to think of any single political feature
that is unique to his thought. It is certainly not the idea of the
revolutionary party, which comes to us from the French Revolution. Marx has
precious little to say about it in any case.
    What about the concept of
social class? This won't do either, since Marx himself rightly denied that he
invented the idea. It is true that he importantly redefined the whole concept,
but it is not his own coinage. Nor did he think up the idea of the proletariat,
which was familiar to a number of nineteenth-century thinkers. His idea of
alienation was derived mostly from Hegel. It was also anticipated by the great
Irish socialist and feminist, William Thompson. We shall also see later that
Marx is not alone in giving such high priority to the economic in social life.
He believes in a cooperative society free of exploitation run by the producers
themselves, and holds that this could come about only by revolutionary means.
But so did the great twentieth-century socialist Raymond Williams, who did not
consider himself a Marxist. Plenty of anarchists, libertarian socialists and
others would endorse this social vision but vehemently reject Marxism.
    Two major doctrines lie at
the heart of Marx's thought. One of them is the primary role played by the
economic in social life; the other is the idea of a succession of modes of
production throughout history. We shall see later, however, that neither of
these notions was Marx's own innovation. Is what is peculiar to Marxism, then,
the concept not of class but of class struggle? This is certainly close
to the core of Marx's thought, but it is no more original to him than the idea
of class itself. Take this couplet about a wealthy landlord from Oliver
Goldsmith's poem ''The Deserted Village'':
    The robe that wraps his
limbs in silken sloth Has robbed the neighbouring fields of half their growth.
    The symmetry and economy
of the lines themselves, with their neatly balanced antithesis, contrast with
the waste and imbalance of the economy they describe. The couplet is clearly
about class struggle. What robes the landlord robs his tenants. Or take these
lines from John Milton's Comus:
    If every just man that now
pines with want
    Had but a moderate and
beseeming share
    Of that which lewdly
pampered luxury
    Now heaps upon some few
with vast excess,
    Nature's full blessings
would be well dispensed
    In unsuperfluous even
proportion . . .
    Much the same sentiment is
expressed by King Lear. In fact, Milton has quietly stolen this idea from
Shakespeare. Voltaire believed that the rich grew bloated on the blood of the
poor, and that property lay at the heart of social conflict. Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
as we shall see, argued much the same. The idea of class struggle is by no
means peculiar to Marx, as he himself was well aware.
    Even so, it is mightily
central to him. So central, in fact, that he sees it as nothing less than the
force that drives human history. It is the very motor or dynamic