2.1 The
Means to an End
In the instance of the American Civil War it isn’t
particularly difficult to take Marx and Engels as being on the ‘right side’ by
their own analysis of the world-historical situation. The pre-conditions for
socialism are generated by the capitalist system, in its creation of a material
surplus, as well as the development of democratic institutions and civil
liberties. Capitalism would develop to such an extent that it would further its
own demise, its crises would become more and more destructive each time. Yet
the destructive capacities of capitalism are what lead to the revolutionary
change, which is itself based upon the material advances made under
capitalism. It is this teleological
model which raises a troubling question of historical development as
constituted by a succession of stages, each one necessary and justifiable in
its own terms. As if the means necessary to bringing the end into fruition will
be justifiable in those terms. It would seem as though injustice now is
necessary for justice later, as Terry Eagleton puts it.
In the Communist
Manifesto Marx and Engels are sure to criticise the utopian socialists in
relying on claims of ‘justice’ and ‘morality’ to chastise the social order for
its ills. This is a current found elsewhere in Marx’s work, for instance, when
he scolds Karl Heinzen for appealing to ‘humanity’ in his vision for a
socialist republic.
As Hobsbawm notes, the point of these polemics was anti-utopian as part of the
overall project to develop a scientific socialism.
To this end Marx set out to demystify the economic system and its
inner-workings to release the socialist movement from its ensnarement and thereby
get beyond the petty moralistic rhetoric rather than theory. For
Marx the trouble with moralism, in Eagleton's words, is that “it abstracts ‘moral
values’ from the whole historical context in which they are set, and then
generally proceeds to hand down absolute moral judgements.”
This is far from irrelevant, as we will see, in
Marx’s analysis of British-ruled India.
In Marx’s eyes British rule in India was creating
the necessary pre-conditions for the colonial shackles they had imposed on the
country to be thrown-off.[5]
We find this when he writes “When a great social revolution shall have mastered
the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern
powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most
advanced peoples, then only will human progress cease to resemble that hideous
Pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”[6]
The hierarchy presupposed here – capitalism over pre-capitalist formations, communism
over capitalism – brings us back to the distinction between political
emancipation and human emancipation that was made in the Jewish Question. Marx recognises that the “misery inflicted by the
British on Hindustan is of an essentially different and infinitely more
intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before.”[7] He takes
this to be a revolutionary transformation of India, namely the huge costs to
bear, in ‘blowing up’ the material basis of its mode of production. The British
were only moved by the ‘vilest of interests’ to change India in this way and
Marx concludes that the British behaved as “the unconscious tool of history in
bringing about that revolution”.[8]
In this moment it would seem as though Marx finds
that the consequences of grotesque actions may be progressive. He goes on to
describe the Indian mission of the British as a duality: regenerative in one
way, destructive in another.[9]
Cohen makes the point that injustice can have extrinsic value even as it has
intrinsic disvalue.
He notes that the disvalue of slavery is to be abolished, while the pyramids
hold intrinsic value and should be preserved. Yet the latter may not have
emerged without the former. We find the same with capitalist class society, as Cohen
writes that Marx found socialism “necessary to preserve the fruits of
civilisation against the ravages of capitalism.”
Socialism is to be the advance upon the achievements of capitalist society, the
level of productive forces is not to be diminished nor is the process of wealth
creation to be abandoned. It’s to do with the technical distribution, ownership
and control of property and the means of production rather than a primitivist
rejection of all those elements. This might be a part of the reason that Marx
seems to use ‘civilisation’ as a synonym for capitalism, and ‘barbarism’ for
its less advanced predecessors: considering the British as ‘superior’ to all
previous conquerors whom he deems ‘barbarian’.
We may say that Marx overestimated the
‘revolutionary potential’ of capitalism to overturn all pre-existing forms of
hierarchy and domination. Britain is a good example of a capitalist society
where the remnants of the feudal past remain intact in the continuation of the
monarchy, lords and the state-church. Likewise the caste system of India has
survived the explosive development of capitalism in that country. Not all
pre-capitalist formations are strictly incompatible with capitalist
development. Far from it, some appear to be complimentary. It would appear
contradictions can be sustained for a long time in this way. It may be that in
his haste to throw-out the baggage of evaluative judgements (of claims to
morality and justice) it would seem as though Marx can’t help but bring on
board his own. The evaluative implications of these points on India seem to
place Marx among the ranks of liberal apologists for empire. What
differentiates Marx from this crowd is the awareness of the huge human costs of
historical development. The means and the ends are askew.
According to Alasdair MacIntyre, there are at least
two ways in which Marx uses morally evaluative language: to simply a) help
describe actions and institutions adequately as no words could rise to provide
an account of slavery without condemnatory tones, as well as to b) explicitly
criticise the system on its own standards, terms and values.
The first application is consistent with the precepts of Marx’s theory of
history, in that it takes events in a historic context. Slavery is taken as an
institution of a different time, pre-capitalist and transient it should be
superseded by the rising dynamism of capitalism. The second point seems more of
a tactical application to turn the standards of the period against itself
whenever possible. No doubt it is more about the maintenance of an oppositional
standpoint. This would take the historical modes of production to constitute
self-containing epochs wherein an array of values can be encapsulated. In
describing slavery there is no appeal to transcendent standards except insofar
as we are looking at slavery as part of a historic linear pattern.
MacIntyre argues that this is consistent if you
begin at the same point as Marx, e.g. that there is a class conflict situated
in material-historical conditions.
It doesn’t seem as though any appeals to social justice can be made within this
framework. As that would lose sight of the bourgeoisie as a class in its role
as incapable of moving beyond the system to which they belong. The appeal to
moral principles always presupposes a shared moral vocabulary within the
existing state of affairs. The moral values of the bourgeoisie make sense, for
they are values moulded to fit with the structures of class oppression and
exploitation, of which they are the beneficiaries. No amount of philanthropy
will suffice as it necessarily takes place internal to class hierarchy; it
requires the processes of accumulation and dispossession as its starting point.
By analogy we may look at social democratic reform as a means of taming the
system’s excesses, its answer is to conserve the system by improving it.
In the terms of the bourgeois period of
development, as Marx would insist, exploitation is not an unjust means to an end;
rather it is – apart of the means of production, distribution and exchange –
when held to the standards of its own historical epoch.
In this way Marx rejected the claims that the mode of exploitation was ‘unjust’
in that it is consistent on its own terms. In his lexicon ‘exploitation’
designates a technical aspect of the productive process, in that through the
extraction of minerals we exploit them. It carries little in the way of moral
connotations in this way. This is not the position of an amoralist or a
relativist, as we shall see. The ways in which the bourgeoisie have shaped the
world may have more than the intended consequences. The spread of the
nation-state model around the world through European colonialism created the
basis for national liberation movements to emerge. Perhaps it may be possible
to salvage Marx on India in this way. For there to be a resistance first to
colonialism and then to capitalism, there has to be the entity to resist
against in the first place. The opposition to ‘civilising missions’ may be found
to be dialectical: the process by which pre-capitalist modes are overcome
creates the basis for the emergence and eventual fall of capitalism.
This is not inherently anti-imperialist on its own,
though it is possible to shift to an oppositional position insofar as the
negation of certain conditions can't be accomplished without such an element.
We’d do better to scrutinise the language of historical inevitability and
necessity. It is in the conditions of the existing order wherein the future can
begin to emerge. In the actions undertaken to build socialism out of capitalist
crisis it is the bourgeois order that provides those actions with a
starting-point. On these grounds Marx found good reason to write “The bourgeois
period of history has to create the material basis of the new world.”[15]
The emphasis on ‘has to’ rather than ‘will lead to’ seems not to imply that the
stages of colonialism and capitalism will inevitably lead to emancipation.
Given that the period of bourgeois rule is transient rather than permanent ‘it
has’ to be superseded by an emancipatory epoch. The hope seems to be that the
advent of socialism can make up for the enormous suffering under the preceding
modes of exploitation.
2.2
Historical Inevitability and Necessity
The necessity of particular conditions for the
advancement of material development does not amount to inevitability.
Contingency is not removed an impossibility in the transience of these epochs. For
the possibility of socialism arrives under conditions of a highly advanced
capitalist system, wherein contradictions and crises can coalesce with the
movements of the day to facilitate the construction of socialism. In this way
Marx claimed that each crisis of capitalism would be worse than the last and
this in turn makes socialism increasingly feasible.
The feasibility of the socialist project does not equate to its automatic
appearance upon the collapse of capitalism. Decades later, Rosa Luxemburg argue
that the capitalist system is limited as its own accumulative capacities run up
against the scarcity of plundered resources, its own death knell perhaps
contained in its inability to turn back from perpetual expansion.
Just as Rosa Luxemburg was not putting forward the case for a passive
proletariat neither were Marx and Engels. Whether or not socialism ‘has to’
happen matters not, history may still culminate in barbarism. Marx briefly
acknowledges this in the Manifesto
when he notes the plausibility of this process amounting to the ‘common
ruination of all classes’.
On these grounds we may say that Marx did not view
socialism as a strictly inevitable stage in history which would supersede
capitalism in automatic succession. This interpretation would fit much better
with the early emphasis on human agency and praxis against the determinism that
may be read into his work. It was a reasonable assumption that we may overthrow
capitalism before it exhausts the basis for its own perpetuation. In these
terms socialism seems more like a necessary step, rather than an inevitable one
in this understanding of history. It would appear that there was space for human
agency within Marx’s framework. In the Brumaire Marx famously writes
“Men make their own history, but not of their own free will; not under
circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited
circumstances with which they are directly confronted.”
The actions undertaken freely by a class-conscious proletariat are made in
accordance with particular circumstances, where the proper conditions may
facilitate a revolutionary leap. The system may have the potential to destroy
itself through a terminal crisis but that alone wouldn't bring on socialism
automatically. The development of the productive forces under capitalism may
prepare the ground for socialism, but it's up to the workers to take action.
In line with this emphasis on human agency there is
the possibility of applying a moral vocabulary which does not presuppose the
existing order we’re living in. MacIntyre speculates that it may be found in
the expression of wants and needs which cannot be satisfied within existing
society.
This would almost make moral values into a set of ‘transitional demands’ that
the market system cannot meet and thereby necessitate the establishment of a
new order.
Socialism enters here as a competing model able to meet the wants and needs of
the proletariat under capitalism. There seems to be a problem here, as a moral
vocabulary which does not presuppose the existing order may appeal to
non-relative standards and values as transcendent to the historical process. It
is a possibility that Marx rules out as a necessary part of his theory of
history. But if moral values cannot be taken as universal, in a trans-historical
or even ahistorical manner, then it would seem that the Marxist historiography
is at risk of collapsing into a form of descriptive relativism without much to
offer in normative terms.
By the 1870s Marx had attracted attention from
radicals far and away; one of them was the Narodnik theoretician Nikolai
Mikhailovsky who found fault with Marx’s thesis. In his nostalgia for primitive
communalism Mikhailovsky found Marx’s thesis of a historically inevitable shift
to capitalism untenable.
The Narodnik movement saw the peasant commune as a means of bypassing
capitalist development.
In response Marx emphasised that the path of capitalist emergence he laid out
in Capital was unique to European
history and not necessarily universal.
Historical materialism is not a historico-philosophical theory encompassing all
possible paths under all conceivable circumstances. The contours of Russian
historical development may differ enormously due to radically differing
conditions and variables. Marx clarifies the application of his thesis to
Russia:
…if
Russia tries to become a capitalist nation, in imitation of the nations of
western Europe, and in recent years she has taken a great deal of pains in this
respect, she will not succeed without first having transformed a good part of
her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once brought into the lap of
the capitalist regime, she will be subject to its inexorable laws, like other
profane nations.
This is the reason why appeals to universal
principles of justice and morality were to be resisted. It seems consistent
with the self-contained view of history, which MacIntyre elaborates, as well as
open to a multi-linear conception of historical development. Yet if the
materialist conception of history amounted to a relativisation of epochs then
it might only be descriptive and lack any capacity to advocate a position. This
seems to be contradictory. As the Marxist project is an analysis directed towards
certain political ends it cannot be cut-off and read just as a theory of
capitalism. Towards the end of his life Marx would correspond with another
Russian radical Vera Zasulich, this time directly on the question of the model
of the peasant commune. Once again Marx would emphasise that ‘historical
inevitability’ only really applied in Western Europe where the transition from
feudalism and slavery had been made much earlier than in Russia.
And that the transition to capitalism was undertaken through the transformation
of common property into private property. He notes that it may be possible
through the peasant commune to acquire “a new skin without beginning by its
suicide.”
By developing the land as commonly owned it can lay the basis for future
development without privatisation and the ‘capitalist regime’ may be bypassed,
albeit with the use of resources which can hardly be taken to be socialist. In
this we may see a less rigid framework, as Marx seems to open to the
possibility of synchronous rather than sequential development. Marx seemed to
adjust to particular developments in the world-historical situation.
It
may be argued that Marxism doesn’t have a moral approach to history, but it
does have a historical approach to moral questions. As Sean Sayers argues, the
problem may be the dichotomy of relativism and universalism.
Marx's position fits neither in his commitment to moral realism at the
normative level and historical relativism at the descriptive level of analysis.
Sayers argues that the existing social order holds within it the forces which
not only sustain it but the forces that oppose it.
Society is contradictory, its changes are driven by these contradictions and it
seems possible that the moral critique of society can come about within that
society. This understanding of morality as historical is the basis on which a
moral and political position may be predicated.
As the class struggle is historically situated we might adapt Trotsky’s point
that the means may be justified by the end, but the end in its turn has to be
justified in turn.
It is the historical interests of the proletariat which are the criteria in
such case. The presupposition being a rejection
of the rigid fact-value distinction to hold that the objective and the
subjective cannot be disentangled with ease. In this way the Marxist tradition
may be taken as a kind of naturalism, it is not simply ‘confusing’ judgements
of facts with those of evaluative content – it is that there is no strict
separation of values from facts.
In similar spirit Trotsky writes Marxism “does not
know dualism between means and end. The end flows naturally from the historical
movement. Organically the means are subordinated to the end. The immediate end
becomes the means for a further end.”
There
is no need for transcendent standards, or even trans-historical principles, as
the objectivity of moral values cannot be separated from historical contours
which are relative and contingent.
Yet the capitalist system may be an advance upon its predecessors in relative
terms, the historical approach must hold some normativity for one mode of
production to be seen as a progression on another. Socialism is inseparable
from the conditions created by capitalism, its objectivity is rooted in the
critical-historical analysis of political economy. Capitalism can be criticised
from a post-capitalist standpoint, with the objective claims as a necessary
part of the analysis.
Moral criticism is not merely immanent or tactical then, it is almost
prefigurative. In that the analysis of the capitalist system necessarily leads
to longstanding goals and the alternative. The Marxist critique of capitalism
is neither ahistorical nor relativist, as Marxism is not welded to the capitalist
system nor is it transcendent in absolutist fashion. Once capitalism has been superseded and the
socialist transition accomplished Marxism may hold little relevance in its
analysis of the existing order.
With
all of this in mind there is another distinction worth making. Marx may view
moral claims as ideological, but he accepts the moral claims of emancipation.
Perhaps this is because such claims may lead towards a post-capitalist
morality. After all it is the case that the Marxist project is to overcome the
conditions of subjugation which hold women and men in constant toil for the
enrichment of others in a denial of their species-being. As Terry Eagleton
writes that Marx's moral inquiry “refuses to divorce human values, behaviour,
relationships and qualities from the social and historical forces which shape
them.”
Before going on to add that Marx “belonged to the great Aristotelian tradition
for which morality was not primarily a question of laws, obligations, codes and
prohibitions, but a question of how to live in the freest, fullest, most
self-fulfilling way.”
If
we accept that there is no inevitable link between capitalism and socialism.
That isn’t to say that post-capitalist society is not external to the
historical process, the lower phase of communism develops from capitalism as
its starting-point. Communism is not a ‘moral ideal’ but the product of the
same historical line. It is the abolition of the present state of things to
paraphrase Marx in the Manifesto.
It constitutes the break with ‘pre-historic’ modes of exploitation after which
history proper can begin. But it must begin then with premises set within
capitalism, as Marx reassures us in
the German Ideology “Communism is for
us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality
will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes
the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the
premises now in existence.”
Conclusion
Overall
there is no one implication to be taken away from all of this. What we have
looked at is still far removed from the recent developments in discourse around
interventionism. Rather the implications of Marx’s historiography may hold more
sway in the analysis of the world-historical situation. There may be no
definitive answer on interventionism yet, and certainly not to be uncovered in
a project such as this. Nevertheless, I think we may take a few modest points
from all this.
We
saw in the first section that taking capitalism as a historical mode of
production can have positive implications with regard to conflict. This invokes
evaluative claims that take capitalism as an advance on feudalism and slavery.
The language of human rights and civil liberties may well serve as a means of
progression from conditions of pre-capitalist servitude, or even
authoritarianism, but it shouldn’t be taken as the end itself. Human
emancipation won’t be hastened just by granting rights and freedoms to
individuals, it requires a major transformation of the means of production and
the relations within those means in order to move towards a more meaningful
form of emancipation. In this way the progressive leap from one imperfect form
of society to a more perfect form, in that the barriers to greater self-realisation
are circumvented.
In
the second section we looked at Marx’s more controversial writing on the
consequences of British colonial rule in India. Here we find Marx taking a
similar position to the liberals of his day, except for different reasons; he
doesn’t take the British Empire to be
munificent to its colonial subjects. Rather it is a case of unintended
consequences arising from grotesque actions. Progress as achieved by its ‘bad
side’, with the flaws of ‘Asiatic society’ swept away for capitalism to take
hold Marx sees the chance for India to move not just beyond British rule but
beyond capitalism as well. The more nuanced positions may be to acknowledge the
advances possibly achieved via colonialism, while retaining an oppositional
stance. By comparison, Lenin was right to oppose the First World War, and yet
he acted upon the basis of the coordinates defined by that war to achieve his
ends. It is dialectical to at once oppose the very coordinates by which advance
might later be attained.
If
we are going to go ahead with these presuppositions we may move to the third
section. The multi-linear conception of historical development may well mean
that we have reason to shed a great deal of doubt on Marx’s position regarding
India. It may be right to insist upon a multi-linear account to address this
issue in order to analyse societies outside of Europe’s
own shift from feudalism to capitalism in terms of their own developing path.
In the recognition of the possibility of socialism in Russia Marx acknowledged
that the stages of development may be leaped or compressed. The resources of
capitalist production could be used to supplement the shortcomings of the
peasant commune. In that sense then we may say that there are possibilities for
synchronous modes of production rather than sequential epochs. Consistently
Hegelian the universal is to be reached through the particular.
In
contrast to the directionality of linear stages it may be possible for an
open-ended conception of historical development to be constructed. The
certainty of a closed teleological sequence would be diminished in this way;
leaving open a much greater account for the possibility that history may
culminate in barbarism. In synoptic terms we may still maintain the view of
capitalism as an advance upon feudalism, yet the communist project still stands
as a necessity rather than a strict inevitability. This isn’t inconsistent with
the position that it may be best to try and establish socialism on the basis of
a massive surplus leftover by capitalism. That’s even if it is not the case in
every society.
Hobsbawm, E; On the Communist
Manifesto (How to Change the World | Little Brown, 2011) pg.109
Macintyre, A; A Short History of
Ethics (Routledge, 1991) pg.210-214
Kolakowski, L; Main Currents of Marxism (Norton, 2005) pg.407-415
