MARXISM AND ITS OPPOSITE

 

 

I remember an American television series from the 60’s that began each episode with a quotation adapted from Winston Churchill: “Democracy is a very bad form of government, but all the others are so much worse.”

     That was in the days when people spoke of ‘The Free World’: those countries, that is to say, not under the control of Communism.  The existence of the Berlin Wall seemed to give credence to this term: there were more East Berliners trying to head west – twenty thousand of them in one day, at the peak of things – than the other way round.  And the fact that a wall was needed to prevent your own citizens from escaping said something pretty damning about the society responsible for creating it.  Even admirers of the Communist paradise, like Anthony Blunt, didn’t want to actually live there.  When ordered by his Russian controllers to move to Moscow he refused, preferring London.

     I was young at the time, and much puzzled by the world.  Had anyone asked me to identify the opposite of Communism, I suppose I would have said ‘Democracy’, because the Western democratic states seemed ranged against the Communist states of the East.  On the other hand, there seemed to be places that were clearly Communist police states that called themselves ‘democratic republics’.  And the Nazis – who had been fascist, totalitarian etc – had called themselves socialists.  It was all very confusing.

     I realised later that I was quite wrong to see politics as the point of opposition.  Marx’s representative text, I came to understand, was Das Kapital, and so the opposite of Communism was Capitalism.  It was all about collective ownership versus private ownership, the planned economy versus the free market: that sort of thing. This Communist-Capitalist opposition is, I think, the understanding of most people in the West.  With the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 90’s, and the emergence of Russian oil barons as owners of English football clubs, Marxism’s influence in the world is seen as officially over. That is why there is genuine bafflement at the suggestion that Political Correctness is a new form of Marxism. How on earth can an economic theory have anything to do with being considerate to crippled people?  It all depends, of course, on how you define Marxism. 

     Complicating it all further was a third view that saw things in geo-political terms: the Cold War was simply a new version of an old power struggle. The ideologies were irrelevant: what mattered was location in the world, proximity to resources etc.  Thus two Eastern power blocks – Russia plus satellites and China – versus the US and Western Europe reenacted old enmities.  And in protecting their own political and economic interests, both sides behaved as unethically as one another.  

     This sort of view – that there is nothing, morally, to choose between East and West – seems to inform John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. 

     Alec Leamas, the spy of the title, has a memory of a traffic accident:  a station wagon with children smiling through the window, before it is crushed between two lorries. The later repetition of this image confirms that careless driving is not the point at issue.

     The plot is too intricate to deal with succinctly, but it is worth dwelling on Spy a little because of its insistence that the West – in the defence of its own interests – is as cruel and ruthless as the East.

     Leamas, it will be recalled, thinks his target is Mundt: an ex-Nazi high up in the East-German Secret Service.  Fiedler, Jewish and Mundt’s subordinate, believes that Mundt is actually a double agent, in the pay of the British.  Leamas’ task is to exploit this situation by pretending to defect, and to provide Fiedler with fake evidence – bank account payments – to enable him to eliminate Mundt.  But at the Tribunal, all goes awry with the arrival of Liz.

     Liz, Leamas’ work colleague and then lover, thinks she is taking part in a cultural exchange until she finds herself instead as a witness in the Tribunal.  She reveals – to Leamas’ astonishment, since he knows nothing about it – that George Smiley, Leamas’ superior, has paid the lease on Liz’s flat.  This puts Leamas in an impossible position, since it suggests that he is still working for Smiley, that his supposed defection is a fraud (as it is), and that his evidence is fabricated.  It’s like an undercover agent on a drugs bust suddenly having his identity exposed by his own side. Mundt is exonerated and Fiedler – now guilty of career envy and of sowing dissent – is shot.

     Piecing it all together, Leamas realises he has been deceived by his own superiors.  Fiedler was right: Mundt really is a double agent  The British target was Fiedler all along, not Mundt, and the East Germans have executed the loyal servant of the state who would have exposed the traitor in their midst.  Even the relationship between Leamas and Liz – which both believed at the time to have happened by accident – has come about as the result of Smiley’s manipulations. 

     But there is one further betrayal to go.  Innocent though Liz is, she now knows too much and – like Fiedler – must be eliminated.  As she and Leamas climb the Berlin Wall, the spotlights go on and Liz is shot.

     With Smiley urging to him to jump to safety, Leamas climbs back down to die with Liz: his last image, the memory of the children laughing before the car is crushed between two lorries:  now, clearly, a representation of the political systems of East and West that crush innocence between them.

     That there may be an ideological difference between the two sides is, however, implied in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy through Irina: the Russian woman who warns agent Ricki Tarr of a traitor high up in British intelligence.  Enjoying temporary freedom as member of a trade delegation, Irina is drawn to the bibles and churches that are forbidden in her own society.  (Ricki Tarr, it must be said, is merely embarrassed by this tendency, and mocks her for it). 

     And the hostility towards religion of Marxist states was (and still is, where they still exist) not coincidence,  for it is in this area of ideas, more than in economics, that Marxism’s real opposite is to be found.  Ruthless as the USSR was towards Islam, the real venom was reserved for Christianity.  For Christianity and Marxism are polar opposites of one another: the spiritual versus the materialist, the individual versus the collectivist, and with two utterly incompatible versions of history.

     Whatever else it may be, Marxism must be seen first and foremost as a theory of history; for this drives the politics and the economics. It is a completely closed system; that is, there is nothing outside Nature to interfere with the unfolding of history according to the pattern laid down by Marxist theory. Everything is to be understood in terms of economics.  (Consider the question often asked by pet owners.  When an animal seems to love you, is it love, or simply an instinctive deference to its food supply?  By Marxist criteria, the question does not even exist.  Translate the formula into family terms, and you can see why two of Marx’s daughters committed suicide).  To reiterate the well-known mantra, all history has been the history of class struggles.  With industrialization, the final showdown is now approaching. The owners of the means of production will get richer and their workers will get poorer, until the financial gap precipitates the definitive revolution.  The expropriators are themselves expropriated. 

      What follows is the dictatorship of the proletariat.  However, the function of the State is to enable one class to oppress another.  There is thus no long-term need for the state, since with the bourgeoisie disposed of, what is left will be equal. The State will wither away, and humanity will at last have the opportunity to become truly human.

     It is an overarching vision – what Postmodernism calls a “grand narrative” – in imitation of, and conscious rejection of – the Christian narrative of Creation, Fall, Atonement, Judgment and New Heaven/New Earth. It is worth noting here in passing that Moses the Raven (the voice of religion) in Animal Farm envisages Sugar Candy Mountain as somewhere in the sky.  So, self-evidently, does the expression ‘pie in the sky’. In Revelation, however, a new Heaven comes down to a redeemed and remade Earth.  Voracious reader as Marx was, his youthful poetry reveals how much he absorbed from Revelation: apocalyptic stuff with himself as God.  The new world – post-state, post-revolution – of his adult theory is the New Earth of Revelation, served up in secular form.

     In Revelation, evil comes to an end when Death and the Devil are thrown into the Lake of Fire.  Evil, that is to say, is metaphysical/spiritual/supernatural as well as human: to be fought against consistently, but not to be defeated finally until the end of time.
     But if your explanation of things is purely material, then you must, of necessity, reject metaphysical evil along with your rejection of metaphysics.  But the danger of looking for the origins of evil within social structures is that you can then come to believe in a final solution to rid the world of evil once and for all.  The problem then is making sure that you have correctly identified your source. For Marx said evil was to be explained in economic terms, and could be solved by the extermination of a particular class; whereas Hitler said evil was to be explained biologically, and could be solved by the extermination of particular races.

     When two solutions disagree, they cannot both by right; although they can both be wrong.  And if you’re wrong in your diagnosis then not only have you killed a lot of people unnecessarily, but the problem you have set out to eliminate remains unsolved.     

      Be that as it may, Marx’s version of events is of necessity atheistic; for if there really were a life after death in which the innocent were compensated for their suffering, and if there really were a divine judge to call the wicked to account, then Communism would lose much of its force.  It is because there is no afterlife that time is of the essence.  The atheism gives the system its urgency and the urgency promotes the ruthlessness.  

     That atheism and political violence may be linked is raised – and rejected – as an issue in The God Delusion.  For Dawkins, of course, any human misery that is not caused by a natural disaster can generally be traced to religion.  But he cannot conceive war, torture etc arising from atheism.  Anticipating objection, he cites Hitler and Stalin as evidence. 

     Hitler is easily dealt with: Dawkins turns him into a religious believer; would love, if he could, to present him as a Christian.   Stalin, however, was unquestionably an atheist, and unquestionably killed a lot of people. He was, Dawkins concedes, a bad man.  But not, however, because he was an atheist.  “There is no evidence that his atheism motivated his brutality.”

     Is Dawkins right?  That is a question.   Stalin undoubtedly saw that the level playing field of Marxist theory was not as level as Marx had predicted it would be.  Some humps and dips still remained – the Kulaks, for instance – that still needed levelling out. Then there were the counter-revolutionaries: anyone, that is to say, uneasy about the way things were going.  They also needed flattening. After all, if you know you are right, then whatever disagrees with you must be wrong.  So kill, kill, and keep killing; until there is no one left to dissent.  Then you really will have the level playing field.  The urgency of the killing was dictated by the urgency of the system, and the urgency of the system was determined by the urgency of the atheism.  When eternity is not in the frame, there is no time to hang around.  Get on with the shooting!

      Dawkins is part of a long tradition of Western intellectuals wanting to think well of the Soviet experiment, but troubled by its actual record.  The generally-agreed solution seems to have been that a good system was hijacked by a bad practioner.  Nobody will defend Stalin.  Lenin, however, is another matter.  This seems to be the line taken, say, in Robert Bolt’s State of Revolution.  Lenin would have held things together, if he hadn’t died young.  (Trotsky claimed Lenin had been poisoned by Stalin, but I’m not sure if that has ever been proved.)

     Writing at the height of Western adulation over the Soviet experiment, Bertrand Russell, after meeting Lenin, wrote of his impression of “Mongolian cruelty”, and of a laugh that made Russell’s  blood run cold.  Russell’s was a rare dissenting voice, but as new revelations have come to light, particularly since the end of the Cold War, his impressions have been confirmed.  Hagiography of Lenin by his Western admirers has become increasingly difficult to justify.

     Lenin, the ostensible champion of the workers, probably never did a day’s manual labour in his life.  As an aristocrat who accepted Marx’s version of the dialectic of history, he saw that the secret of dealing with the inevitable revolution was to grab it by the throat before it could grab him. If you can’t beat it, run it.  The State and Revolution – Lenin’s blueprint for the revolutionary process. – asserts that that revolution must be violent: and he made sure that it was.  It can thus be argued that Lenin killed fewer people than Stalin only because illness (or Stalin) got him before he could complete the tally.  

     All right, still a good system hijacked by Lenin, and then by Stalin.  But against them there was Trotsky...

     Added to the Marxist version of Marxism, and the Leninist, and the Stalinist, and the Maoist, there is also the Trotskyist.   Whereas Marx had argued that that the revolution would be driven by the industrial proletariat, Trotsky argued that the revolution could also be agrarian, and be driven by the peasants.

     But that is not why Trotsky is revered by urban Western intellectuals.  Trotsky is revered for falling out with Stalin and for killing – relatively speaking – so few people.  We see this sort of attitude in  Orwell’s depiction of Snowball.  Snowball (Trotsky) is not blameless, but he is a lot better than the Napoleon (Stalin) who expels him from Animal Farm.

     Did Trotsky refrain from killing more people than he did because he was humane, or was it because Stalin had him eliminated before he got the chance?   We can never know for sure; although Trotsky’s willingness to commit the Red Army against imagined enemies, as much as real ones, may give us a clue.  

     Is Marxism, then, an inherently flawed system with a built-in tendency towards totalitarianism?  Or is it a good system, that just had the misfortune to be subverted by, for example, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Zhdanov, Bela Kun, Ceauşescu, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and Robert Mugabe?      

      The death toll of Communism – sixty million, a hundred million: who knows? – is not its only aspect to trouble its Western admirers. Marx said class solidarity would be stronger than national solidarity: in the First World War, it wasn’t.   Marx said the gap between rich and poor would widen to provoke revolution: it didn’t.  The rich got richer, certainly, but so did the poor: thanks to new scientific methods of production, the standard of living rose for everyone.  Marx said the state would wither away.   It didn’t.  It survived, and – in its Marxist incarnation – became ever more despotic.

      Western Marxist theorists have been honest enough to confront these issues and to come up with  solutions.  That is why it is wrong to assume that Marxism is now dead; in its new incarnation of Political Correctness,  it is alive and well. 

     The solutions of the new Marxists.  Nationalism had proved an obstacle to the advance of Communism, certainly: nationalism, therefore, must be destroyed.  One line of attack is a process of cultural pessimism.  Keep chipping away at morale.  Over time, the nation loses belief in itself until national self-doubt reaches the point at which it will turn itself into multiculturalism.

      The other attack on the nation must be the assault on the family.

     Since Marx saw everything in economic terms, it was inevitable that Timon of Athens – about buying friends and making and losing money – should have been his favourite Shakespeare play.  It was also inevitable that he should have seen marriage as a financial contract, and the capitalist’s wife as one of his possessions, like his machinery.  That raises an interesting question, once you have eliminated the capitalist and taken over his factory.  Once you own the industrial means of production in common, does the same apply to the biological means of production?  Should the women be owned in common,  as well as the factories?

     After all, if you  allow the family to survive, you  are allowing something private, and the next thing you know you’ll be back to private ownership.  It’s not for nothing, that the citizens of Brave New World are denied all privacy by their rulers, and are forbidden any sexual relationship lasting longer than a fortnight or so.  Rousseau saw it all: the one who started the rot was the one who first said, “This is mine!”   One moment you have trees to hang out in; and food, women, kids and everything else in common.  Paradise.    Next moment, you have a bit of land with a fence round it, then you have a hut, then a woman in the hut, then a family; and the whole sorry process that leads to civilization has been set in train.  (Rousseau was right about the evil of civilization in one sense: if there hadn’t been civilization, there wouldn’t have been Rousseau.). 

     Who owns a nation’s children – the parents, or the State? – is an issue that has been around since Plato’s Republic.  The new Russian regime seems to have started with a radical anti-family line, but then to have done  a u-turn.   Perhaps there was too much opposition.  The problem remained  though: could parents be trusted to bring up their own children?  Who could tell what sort of nonsense might be secretly imparted to impressionable young minds?  (Dawkins, in The God Delusion, expresses exactly the same sort of unease).   A solution was found via socially-engineered rates of pay.  Since a family could not survive on a  single wage, both parents were forced out to work.  The children, in state crèches, could then be introduced to appropriate politically-correct attitudes from an early age. 

      Marcuse, the definitive voice of the 60’s counter-culture, saw clearly that Marx’s capitalist versus proletarian was not applicable to what he defined as postindustrial America.  The oppressor versus oppressed was still a good way of defining society – it is, after all, the defining distinction used in Political Correctness – but a new sort of proletariat had to be found.   Hence, on the one hand, the hegemonic – wonderful word! – white heterosexual male.  On the other, the various oppressed groups in need of empowerment: women, children, students, ethnic minorities, homosexuals, criminals etc. 

     All this has been immensely influential on both sides of the Atlantic – it is as a result of this sort of thinking that British householders have found themselves in trouble for harming burglars on their premises – and the culture war it has generated will presumably go on until, with the extermination of the patriarchal white-male hegemony, the good society is finally achieved. 

 

Marx called his method scientific, but it wasn’t scientific the way a scientific theory is scientific.  The problem with a social theory is that you can’t test it out the way you can often test out a hypothesis in a laboratory.  You have to trial it on real people to find out whether or not you are right.  Marx couldn’t know that the State would wither away; he simply hoped it would.  He presented as fact what was nothing more than faith. 

     Christianity, in some respects, suffers from the same difficulty; so does any system that places some of its belief in the future.  After all, the future cannot be proved right or wrong as long as it is still the future. 

     Christianity, however, in its view of justice, does – it seems to me – have an enormous superiority to Marxism.  Suppose the last law-abiding, white, heterosexual male is successfully exterminated by, say, 2050.  Even if that then brings in the good society – and what if it doesn’t? – what about all the suffering up until that moment in time?  It doesn’t help the victims, through the long course of history, of poverty, of lifelong bullying, of  horrible natural disasters, or of diseases beyond the expertise of medicine. 

     Christianity does, because it if it is true then all history is to be redeemed.  I personally find it a great comfort that those who have cheated or tormented their fellow humans and escaped human justice will be called to account, and that those who have had a wretched time on it on Earth may have another chance when they are made anew.  

 

Marx has been seen as a Hebrew prophet, born out of his time.  There may be something in that.  Within all the rage and hatred of The Communist Manifesto there may also be a prophetic longing for justice.  Marx himself would have cited history as his own judge.  Those of us who believe in a higher court than history may have the hope that he will be judged fairly.

     Which is more than can be said for the millions who died at the hands of his followers.