7.
Marx's failed plan to rescue modernity.
In his youth Marx fell
under the spell of the philosophy of G.
W. F. Hegel.
He later turned away from the notion of World-Spirit
that centrally defined Hegel's concept of history.
But he remained Hegelian in a fundamental way: he
continued to believe that human experience occurred
through time according to an inner process,
essentially dialectical. Hegel's philosophy of
history sought to identify the process by which human
beings attained consciousness of the idea of their
freedom. This was for Hegel the ultimate goal of
human history. He sought its faint flicker in the dim
and distant far east and followed its
ever-brightening flame through Persia, Greece, and
Rome. He described its completed glow in the
Protestantized citizen of the Germanic state of the
nineteenth century.
Hegel was one of many
minds of Europe that expressed the idea of progress
at the heart of modernity. It was the essence of the
eighteenth century Enlightenment: through the
exercise of rationality, civilization would
progressively remove the barbarities of superstitious
belief and advance humanity toward conditions in
which individuals could fulfill themselves in a
condition of freedom.
An essential feature
of modern progress was the material welfare of
people. The truths of rationalistic science and its
technological applications were to be instruments in
the march of modernity. It was this belief that
persuaded so many to affirm the industrialization of
European nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. And it was the strength of their faith in
progress that enabled the leadership of government
and industry to rationalize the abominable human
waste created in the factories. Somehow, their faith
told them, the degradation of workers was a
short-term price to be paid for long-term social
gain--indeed,for the realization of Western
civilization's destiny.
Marx's studies of
historical process made him think otherwise. His was
to be the dissenting voice of modernity. He thought
he saw a fatal flaw in the script that European
thinkers had written for the pursuit of modern human
fulfillment. That script assigned to the emerging
industrial order the essential role of developing
nature's resources for the good of humans. But
history showed Marx that modern industrial activity
owed its very existence to the fundamental
exploitation of a whole class of human beings, the
laborers. If modern industry was pursuing the
betterment of human beings, it was doing so only by
destroying the lives of the laborers on whom it
absolutely depended.
Marx thus announced
to the world a tragic flaw at the very heart of
modern European life. Modernity was tragic
in that its vision was attainable only by the
destruction of what it believed its outcome ought to
be--universal consciousness of human freedom. Pressed
to its logical end, this double bind was certain, in
Marx's mind, to lead to disaster for the modern
project as it emerged out of the eighteenth century.
Moreover, the tragic
vision of modernity developed in Marx further
deepened because the society's leaders failed to
understand what they were doing. The bourgeoisie, the
class that governed and managed, lacked the
historical understanding required to see the
contradiction inherent in the modern project, of
which they were the stewards. Their role in the
historical process entrapped them.
But the ultimate
tragedy arose out of Marx's determination to save
European civilization from the tragic condition into
which he saw it sinking. Drawing on
Hegel's dialectical approach to historical process,
Marx devised an alternative grand narrative. It
pitted social classes in a contest for power that
would finally eliminate the tragic blindness of the
bourgeoisie. It would install the laboring class in
the position of power and thereby eliminate further
call for the clash of classes. In Marx's narrative,
modernity would avert the tragic contradiction at its
core. The revolution in class control would set
European (indeed, world) civilization back on course
toward the universal consciousness of human freedom,
Hegel's original goal.
But Marx's grand
narrative had its own inner tragic flaw. And in the
fullness of time it would doubly fail in its own
right. First, it would not eliminate the established
nineteenth century version of Enlightenment
fulfillment; capitalism, energized by colonial
materials and markets around the world, continued
flourishing. Second, when Marx's theories finally did
become political actualities in revolutionary Soviet
form in the twentieth century, the human degradation
that they caused exceeded anything he ever attributed
to capitalistic England in the nineteenth century.
The political program
of Marxism, as expressed in The
Communist Manifesto of 1848,
romantically envisioned a new society. It would come
into being after the destruction of bourgeois
capitalism and the implementation of a single-class
society based on that of the victorious proletarian
class:
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.
In place
of the old bourgeois society, with its classes
and class antagonisms, we shall have an
association in which the free development of each
is the condition for the free development of all.
Here was the Marxian
vision of arrival at a state of individual freedom
like that toward which history, in Hegel's
philosophy, tended. Marx believed that his program
would rescue modernity from its tragically flawed
process of material progress in capitalist terms. It
would turn the course of progress into the correct
path of development; it would retrieve the early hope
of modernity and enable its realization. To juxtapose
this vision with the actual terroristic Soviet state
of the twentieth century is to illustrate the tragedy
of Marxism itself. The Soviet society based on Marx
was more hellish, on balance, than the outrageous
factories of Victorian England.
Marx's moral outrage
demanded a total overturning of the modernist program
as it had evolved under capitalism; but his
prescribed substitute program did not measure up to
the demands of his outrage. It came to rival the
capitalist mode as a producer of human bondage. In
the midst of World War II, an analysis of political
economy appeared that presented the reason to oppose
Marxist-based political economy. Friedrich
A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom argued that "the
unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist
planning create a state of affairs in which, if the
policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get
the upper hand." It took another thirty years
before Hayek's counter-argument to the Marxist
solution would gain ascendancy. His was the voice of
a different solution to a differently formulated
tragedy of modernity.
End of 7. Marx's failed
plan to rescue modernity.
Go to 8. From tragedy to
comedy.
1. The meaning of
"Marx." 2.
Das
Kapital. 3.
The
protagonists.
4. The
antagonists. 5. The machinery.
6. The
original injustice.
7. Marx's
failed plan to rescure modernity.
8. From
tragedy to comedy.
9. An
Enlightenment legacy in waiting.
NAVITSKY'S MARX, AT LAST