Marx, Modernity and the Idea of Progress
Introduction
With the decline of the left in advanced Western societies and the shattering of Stalinist bureaucracies in Eastern Europe, the notion of “post-modernity” has been used to describe the zeitgeist of the present. Certainly we seem to live in an era in which the idea of progress, militant Enlightenment, and rationality have been debilitated, if not jettisoned. So-called post-modernists have illuminated many of the problems facing the present, but, just as much, they have been trapped in problematics of their own making.
Academia has seemed to successfully swallow postmodern cultural “critics” (postmodern and critical often seem antithetical to one another), making the discussion they have begun overly professionalized — i.e., loaded with useless jargon — and often ahistorical and apolitical, due in many ways to the strong attachment to literary theory. Much of the implicit relativism and hyper-determinism (e.g., Lyotard’s combative discourse theory and Foucault at his Nietzschean worst) lead to a demoralized, status quo quietism and a jettisoning of the original impetus behind the left: democratic change towards social justice. And thus the much needed analysis of the present configuration of politics and culture — especially here in America — must lie elsewhere….
Theoretical trends within leftist thought — Marxism included, of course — caused much despair within democratic movements. The totalizing negativity of critical theory, structural Marxism, and Foucaultian analytics of power have posited systems that obliterate resistance and are insensitive, at best, to legitimate differences. On the other hand, theories of pure combativeness against the status quo have exhausted themselves in their own spectacular needs, ignoring the good and identifying purely with the bad. Both extremes need to be rethought in order to move critical thinking back into the future.
The impetus to write this particular paper on Marx cannot be separated from my present disillusionment with this contemporary political and intellectual situation. Much cynicism has been created by theoretical models not designed to apprehend a given social reality — when attempted they fail to cross the barrier the model was never intended to conceptualize. Marxism — in particular Marxism-Leninism — is especially salient in this regard. My goal here is to shed light on why Marxism has been a bad model for the left, irrespective of whatever insights it may have provided in the short-term.
“Constantly revolutionizing production, uninterrupted disturbance of social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and vulnerable prejudices and opinions, swept away, new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” — Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”
“But capital does not live only on labour. A lord, at once aristocratic and barbarous, it drags with it into the grave the corpses of its slaves, whole hecatombs of workers who perish in the crises.” — Marx, “Wage Labour and Capital”
It’s hard to escape the feeling that a thinly veiled appreciation for the dynamic quality of capitalism lies at the heart of the above passage from the Manifesto. Marx sounds as if he’s awe-struck by the power of this still-burgeoning beast. In the second quote we find no such enthrallment. Capitalism is unequivocally cast in the negative. Workers are equated with slaves, being lorded over by their simultaneously aristocratic and barbarous master, capital.
I deliberately contrasted these two quotations in hope of illuminating Marx’s ambivalent critique of capitalism, which, as we shall soon see, must remain ambivalent. It must remain ambivalent if it is to make sense. And making sense on Marx’s terms means staying on the right side of history.
I have always been struck by Marx’s apparent lack of mourning or remorse for the passing of premodernity. His critique of modernity was always done within the framework of his critique of capital, with an eye turneed towards the future, not the past. There appears to be very little in Marx’s writings that would indicate any sympathy at all for a way of life that was described by one writer as possibly being “morally and culturally superior to modern society (Whitebook, 83). In fact, it was impossible to locate a single reference in Marx that spoke to this issue. The same is true for Engels, depictor of some of the worst ravages of industrialism (tucker, 579–85).
Upon initial reflection, Marx’s and Engels’ unmitigated fondness for modernity appears innocent enough. But that innocence disappears once one examines the writings of their contemporaries. In the work of Marx and Engels’ colleagues, the move from premodern to modern society was not adopted so coolly. For example, Weber celebrated the liberating effects of science, but connected modern rationality to his famous “iron cage.” Durkheim believed man to be freer in a crowd than in a clique, but “anomie” was the price paid for that freedom. And finally, with Frued civilization was only obtained with its share of discontents. Thus, in the classic writings of Marx’s contemporaries, the individual and society paid an emotional oprice for their maturity. But with Marx and Engels, the only thing man had to lose was his chains.
Marx is alleged to have written the following in 1849: “We say to the workers and petty bourgeois: It is better to suffer in modern bourgeois society, which by its industry creates the material means for the foundation of a new society that will liberate you, than to revert to a bygone form of society which, on the pretext of saving your classes, thrusts the entire nation back into medieval barbarism (Lasch, 150) In this passage the reasons for Marx’s ambivalent critique of capital are rendered obvious. We also see why Lasch’s characterization of Marxism as “the party of the future” is correct.
In his most recent book, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, Christopher Lasch has termed Marxism as “the party of the future” (Lasch, 148). In doing so, Lasch wants to claim that Marx and his followers were unwitting boosters — not only for but of the status quo, with the status quo being either an adherence to or an adherent of an unshakable faith in the future, an unswerving show of support for the idea of progress.
In the passage written in 1849 by Marx, and quoted at length by Lasch, Marx joins his own party of the future by virtue of his ambivalent critique of capitalism. Unblinking in his belief in the promise of progress, Marx is put in the awkward position of chiding skeptical workers and members of the lower middle-classes for not sharing his faith in capitalism’s ability to satisfy the material needs of life. As if this was all there was to ask out of life!
As strange as it may sound, Marx’s rally to the defense of capitalism makes perfect sense. As Lasch puts it, in the debate over progress, Marxists “sided with the future.” This meant that there was no real need to exaggerate the miseries that capitalism created, even if it did seem lucrative to play them up to the hilt. Since socialism’s material foundations were dependent upon capitalism, the suffering and misery were unavoidable. This is what the skeptics did not understand.
Lasch, in contradistinction to Marx, but like Weber, Durkheim and Freud, mentioned a little earlier, acknowledges the existence of what Adorno and Horkheimer have referred to as “the dialectic of enlightenment.” This dialectic is understood to comprise both the so-called positive elements and what might be termed enlightenment’s “dark side.” Horkheimer and Adorno have described this contradiction as follows:
“Mankind, whose versatility and knowledge become differentiated with the division of labor, is at the same time forced back to anthropologically more primitive stages, for with the technical easing of life the persistence of domination brings about a fixation of the instincts by means of heavier repression. Imagination atrophies. The disaster is not merely that individuals might remain behind society or its material production. Where the evolution of the machine has already turned into that of the machinery of domination (so that technical and social tendencies, always interwoven, converge in the schematization of men), untruth is not represented merely by the outdistanced. As against that, adaptation to the power of progress involves the progress of power, and each time anew brings about those degenerations which show not unsuccessful but successful progress to be its contrary. The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression” (Horkheimer and Adorno, 36).
And the signs of that regression are everywhere, and include but are by no means limited to “the decline of craftmanship, the fragmentation of the community, the loneliness of the metropolis, the subordination of spiritual life to the demands of the market” (Lasch, 151).
This dark side of the dialectic of the enlightenment, presented here so evocatively by Horkheimer and Adorno, is what the true believers of progress inevitably forget or neglect to stress. Instead, progress is more likely to be thought of, according to Lasch, in terms of a promise — a promise of steady improvement with no foreseeable ending:
“Instead of disparaging the tendency to want more than we need, liberals like Adam Smith argued that needs varied from one society to another, that civilized men and women needed more than savages to make them comfortable, and that a continual redefinition of their standards of comfort and convenience led to improvements in production and a general increase of wealth. There was no foreseeable end to the transformation of luxuries into necessities. The more comforts people enjoyed, the more they would expect” (Lasch, 14–5).
It is in this respect that Marx is also regarded as a liberal. What distinguished Marx from other liberals like Smith was his characterization of capitalism — not modernity, not progress. Marx believed that in the long run (hopefully sooner than later) capitalism would not live up to its claims and would evolve into crisis. Socialism was to complete the task, in other words, that capitalism began but could not finish. Socialism was understood as completing the project of modernity, of progress.
Evidence of this distinction can be gleaned from Marx’s treatment of guild, utopian or simply non-liberal-minded socialists. Lasch cites a few places in Marx’s work where Marx sided with progress against so-called “backward-looking” socialists (a reference to the socialist-utopian novel by Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward), who “conceived of socialism more as a restoration of precapitalist solidarity’ (Lasch, 150–1). Christian socialists, shopkeepers, artisans, and peasants — no matter how radical or atheistic — were all ridiculed for their naivete. The simple market society being advocated in these instances, according to Marx, would only have assured “the reign of ‘universal mediocrity’” (Lasch, 150–1).
Of course underpinning and motivating these criticism leveled by Marx was his theory of history. According to the logic of “historical materialism,” capitalism must not merely create conditions that were favorable to socialism’s development; the theory required that early stages of the mode of production tend “irresistibly” toward later ones, making capitalism an inevitable precursor to socialism. This was the hidden telos of history:
“Thus the social relations within which individuals produce, the social relations of production, change, are transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, the productive forces. The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society, and, specifically, a society at the definite stage of historical development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois society are such totalities of production relations, each of which at times denotes a special stage of development in the history of mankind “(Tucker, 207).
Historical materialism, according to Roger Scruton, posits that “history is the product not of conscious decisions and ideas, but of ‘material’ processes and conditions which can be identified and described without references to the mental states of those who participate in them. It is the changes in these material conditions which make necessary and bring about those changes in social, political and institutional superstructures [e.g., families, elections, schools] which in aggregate form the substance of history’ (Scruton, 203).
The same sense of determinism that lies implicitly at the heart of Lasch’s understanding of progress is rendered more overtly here in Marx. Just as progress appears as a sort of automatic process that one has to merely place his trust in, so goes history. It is here where Marxism collapses vis-a-vis its claim to be a radical critique of society.
Debate based on the contrast (or lack thereof) between the early Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts and the later Marx of Das Kapital has seldom been in short supply (see, for example, E. Fromm’s Marx’s Concept of Man). Those more favorable to the early Marx (e.g., Marxist-humanists) insist that there is more continuity than discontinuity in Marx’s thinking, as he moved from the Manuscripts, to the Grundrisse, and finally to his magnum opus, Capital. The early Marx’s appreciation of the labor process, his hopes for individuation, and his insistence that social theory be premised on real individuals in society are present in Capital, it is held by this view, but just elaborated in a different form. The second view, generally that of so-called “orthodox” Marxists, dismiss the earlier writings and inclines toward stressing the scientific or positivist side of Marx’s writings, allegedly developed in Capital.
In my view both sides contain kernels of truth in them. There is most certainly a discernible turn from the writings of the 1844 Manuscripts to Capital; and while I tend to favor his earlier writings, I don’t believe Marx should be exonerated from responsibility for the lapses of his later writings, which do exist. It is in his later work, after all, where Marx advocates a deterministic science, as well as his notion of historic necessity. The key question is whether or not either idea was maintained at the expense of subjectivity, or the subject’s creative volition — both central to Marx’s earlier work. In other words, is Marxism, understood as a worldview, potentially inimical to subjectivity and individuality? And does it minimize the role of self-conscious human agency?
As already noted, in his writings Marx moved away from the early philosophical concerns of his relative youth towards historical science:
“The a prioris of philosophical anthropology still represented (however covertly) a set of universal moral imperatives; the image of the whole man fueled a denunciation of all social situations in which men led a degraded and marginal existence. But Marx persistently strove to harness such indignation with insight into objective circumstances only science seemed to afford. In place of universal imperatives arose an historically specific sense of real possibilities for a better way of life” (Miller, 65).
Unfortunately the implications were not so positive. As Miller puts it,
“Having shunned philosophical reason incarnate in history [German idealist philosophy, e.g. Kant, Fichte, Hegel] as an adequate basis for anticipating socialism, Marx swung to another extreme, by seeming to declare social individuation within communism the preordained outcome of economic and technical development. In the Grundrisse and Capital, history was occasionally portrayed as a movement wherein individuals did not (actively) emancipate themselves, but instead were passively emancipated. Historical necessity threatened to liquidate human freedom” (Miller, 65 — emphasis VTF).
Lasch expresses similar disquieting concerns. But he focuses on the moral implications that lied behind this move by Marx. “Confident that history worked on the side of enlightenment, equality, and individual freedom, Marx and Engels did not have to give much thought to the morality of means and ends….” (Lasch, 153). For Marxists, conventional understandings of morality had no place in this equation because there was no need for them.
“Hypocrisy aside, the bourgeoisie had done the world a service, with the worst of motives, by destroying the old patriarchal regime, seizing the common lands, consolidating production, introducing modern machinery, and subordinating sentimental considerations to the overriding goal of greater productivity. Thanks to the bourgeois revolution, the workers now had only to take over the existing system of production, at least in countries already industrialized, and to operate it in the interest of mankind as a whole” (Lasch, 153).
Underlying the Marxist understanding of history was an assertion that certain things had to transpire in a particular order. And whether these things occurred under bourgeois or proletarian (read: state socialist) auspices seemed almost beside the point. Such things included:
“….the destruction of the old landed aristocracy; the rise of a new ruling class in its place; the ‘annihilation’ of small-scale production; the transformation of peasants and artisans into wage workers; the replacement of communal, patriarchal, and ‘idyllic’ arrangements by contractual arrangements; a new individualism in personal life; the collapse of religion and the spread of scientific habits of thought; the demystification of authority” (Lasch, 154).
Echoing what Miller had said, Lasch follows Jon Elster’s understanding of Marx’s theory of history by asserting that it was “strangely disembodied.’’ Paraphrasing Elster, Lasch notes that Marx’s theory, “by ‘working backward from end result to preconditions,’” could dispense “‘with actors and their intentions.’” And in dispensing with actors, Lasch adds, Marxism “could reduce questions of morality to the justification of means by the end decreed by ‘history’” (Lasch, 154).
Marxism’s neglect of human agency not only debased morality but made for some very bad crystal-ball-gazing. “By denying any capacity for historical understanding or autonomous action on the part of his opponents, Marx assumed that capitalists and workers would carry out their prescribed assignments to the bitter end, the capitalists resisting demands for reform, the workers forced into more and more desperate and revolutionary measures of self-defense” (Lasch, 154). But even during Marx’s time there were signs that history had already “deviated from ‘iron necessity.’” As Lasch reminds us, the English government had begun to institute political reforms that eventually allowed workers to have greater power. And the so-called “bourgeois revolution” had not brought the bourgeoisie to power in either France or Britain, in contrast to Marx’s predictions that were to the contrary (Lasch, 154).
Conclusion
One can hardly fault Marx for failing to gaze deep enough into his crystal ball and thus failing to predict the true course of history. Only one Nostradamus is allowed per millennium. Nonetheless, I think I’d have to agree with Lasch: that the more Marxism has to be modified to account for so-called “exceptions,” the less it explains. As a result, Lasch’s alternative understanding of history — whereby history “is governed not by some overarching set of ‘natural laws’ but by particular events, by specific conflicts over the distribution of wealth and power, and by decisions made in the heat of the moment, often with inadequate information, that often turn out to have quite unexpected results” — seems much more plausible to me (Lasch, 154). And as one communist regime after the other find their way into the “dustbin of history,” it seems to have won the day.
There is no denying that Marxism’s characterization of capitalism has found historic resonance, even in this country. The “Pullman strike” of the late 1800’s seemed to mirror virtually every aspect of Marx’s critique of capital. Nonetheless, such times are too few and far between. The aporias of historical materialism are too many to recommend it as an adequate apprehender of, in particular, today’s social reality. The futility of doing so can still be found in the pages of the newspapers of the miscellaneous Marxist and socialist sects still running around these days. We need to break the chains of revolution, not wrap ourselves up in them.
Bibliography:
Elster, J. Making Sense of Marx. New York: 1985.
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: 1944.
Lasch, C. True and Only Heaven, The. New York: 1991.
Miller, J. History and Human Existence: From Marx to Merleau-Ponty. New York: 1981.
Tucker, R.C. (ed.) Marx-Engels Reader, The. New York: 1978.
Whitebook, J. “Saving the Subject: Modernity and the Problem of the Autonomous Individual.” Telos, Winter 1981–2.
