Ends in Sight

Marx/Fukuyama/Hobsbawm/Anderson

Gregory Elliott

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780745327624
• eBook ISBN: 9781783719006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Following the disappearance of the Soviet Union, scholars across the political spectrum tackled the world-historical significance of the end of communism. This book addresses the balance-sheets of modern political history offered by three writers -- Francis Fukuyama, Eric Hobsbawm and Perry Anderson -- comparing them with the future projected by Marx in The Communist Manifesto. Gregory Elliott argues that Marx is central to all three accounts and that, along with the Manifesto, they form a quartet of analyses of the results and prospects of capitalism and socialism, which are of enduring significance for the Left. This book provides a readable survey of key historical and political thinkers that will appeal to anyone interested in modern political thought.

ONE

The Sorcerer and the Gravedigger: Karl Marx

‘The return of Marx’: thus the New Yorker of all places, as the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto approached, hailing its main author as prophet of a globalised capitalism and its distempers.¹ Seemingly dispelled, along with the ‘spectre of communism’ he had conjured up in the exordium to the Manifesto, the revenant had something to impart less than a decade after the collapse of states forged in his name. By 2005, he could comfortably win a contest staged by a BBC radio programme to choose the ‘greatest philosopher’, prompting a two-page anathema in the Daily Mail against ‘Marx the Monster’ that laid direct responsibility for no fewer than 150 million corpses at his door.²

For less overwrought commentators, wherein consisted the ‘actuality’ of Marx’s thought as epitomised by the Communist Manifesto? According to Eric Hobsbawm, introducing a re-edition of the text in 1998, it provided ‘a concise characterization of capitalism at the end of the twentieth century’ – a judgement seconded by Gareth Stedman Jones, for whom the Manifesto offered a ‘brief but still quite unsurpassed depiction of modern capitalism’.³ Uniquely prescient as regards capitalism, a certain consensus might be summarised, Marx had been singularly mistaken about communism. But if the former, how come the latter? For the one message that unmistakably emerges from the text is this: communism is inherent in capitalism. Consequently, to vindicate the contemporaneity of the Communist Manifesto by recasting it as a non-manifesto without the communism might be reckoned a prime example of praising with damn, faint or fulsome as you will.

CONTRARIES

At all events, no such plaudits had been forthcoming from any quarter when the 23-page Manifesto of the Communist Party was originally published in German in London, on the eve of the 1848 revolutions. While it scarcely fell dead-born from the press à la Hume, it was unquestionably a premature birth. Over the next half-century, however, it achieved canonical status in the working-class labour and socialist parties of the developed world. Anticipating its fiftieth anniversary, the leading Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Labriola opened his famous 1896 essay ‘In Memoria del Manifesto dei comunisti’ as follows:

All those in our ranks who have a desire or an occasion to possess a better understanding of their own work should bring to mind the causes and moving forces which determined the genesis of the Manifesto. … Only in this way will it be possible for us to find in the present social form the explanation of the tendency towards socialism, thus showing by its present necessity the inevitability of its triumph.

Is not that in fact the vital part of the Manifesto, its essence and its distinctive character?⁴

A résumé of Marx and Engels’s ‘materialist conception of history’, the Manifesto marked the ‘passage from utopia to science’.⁵

As a privileged correspondent of Engels, Labriola enjoyed a prestigious warrant for such claims. In 1880 Engels had issued Socialism: Utopian and Scientific – a pamphlet extracted from Anti-Dühring (1878), in which he systematised the dialectical and historical materialism of the ‘communist world outlook championed by Marx and myself’,⁶ thereby marking another fateful passage: the transition from Marx to Marxism, in the first of its authorised versions. ‘The socialism of earlier days’, Engels argued,

certainly criticised the existing capitalistic mode of production and its consequences. But it could not explain them, and, therefore, could not get the mastery of them. It could only simply reject them as bad. The more strongly this earlier socialism denounced the exploitation of the working class … the less able was it clearly to show in what this exploitation consisted and how it arose. But for this it was necessary – (1) to present the capitalistic method of production in its historical connection and its inevitableness during a particular historical period, and therefore, also, to present its inevitable downfall; and (2) to lay bare its essential character, which was still a secret. This was done by the discovery of surplus value. …

These two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries socialism became a science.⁷

Described by Labriola as an ‘obituary notice’ on the bourgeoisie and its mode of production, the Communist Manifesto was indivisibly the announcement of a birth: communism.

A later distinguished Italian historian of Marxist thought adjudged Engels’s pamphlet ‘not so much the best interpretation of [it] as the interpretation of it’.⁸ In one respect, this cannot be altogether accurate, since the second of the ‘great discoveries’ it attributes to Marx – the theory of surplus value, with its decisive differentiation between labour and labour power – had not been made by 1848 and was only fully elaborated in Volume 1 of Capital some twenty years later. The Manifesto’s account of capitalist exploitation is that of a Ricardian – not a Marxian – communist, involving a subsistence theory of wages. On the other hand, the materialist conception of history had, in its essentials, been formulated in the mid 1840s, in The German Ideology. Thus, Marx’s general theory of history, if not his special theory of capitalist society, did indeed underpin the depiction of historical trajectory contained in the Manifesto – something Marx himself effectively registered by opting to quote a key passage from it, on the ‘fall [of the bourgeoisie] and the victory of the proletariat’, in a closing footnote to Chapter 32 of Capital Volume 1 (‘The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation’).⁹ Moreover, in their joint Preface to the German Edition of 1872, Marx and Engels, sounding a leitmotif of Marxist commentary on the Manifesto, insisted that ‘[h]owever much the state of things may have altered during the last twenty-five years, the general principles laid down in the Manifesto are, on the whole, as correct today as ever’.¹⁰ Sixteen years later, prefacing an English edition, Engels cited this statement immediately after his précis of the ‘fundamental proposition’ – the materialist conception of history – that provided the Manifesto with its ‘nucleus’.¹¹

What was that ‘fundamental proposition’, ‘destined [so Engels ventured] to do for history what Darwin’s theory has done for biology’?¹² Its most compact statement is to be found in the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Introduced as the ‘general conclusion’ Marx had arrived at c. 1845, it comprises:

1.	a morphology of social structure as a combination of economic infrastructure (forces plus relations of productions) and a ‘corresponding’ superstructure (juridico-political institutions and ‘forms of social consciousness’), in which the economic has explanatory primacy;
2.	an account of the overall trajectory of human history, construing it as a succession of ‘progressive’ economic modes of production – Asiatic, ancient, feudal, capitalist – and the social formations rooted in them, terminating in communism;
3.	a theory of ‘epochal’ social change, identifying the intermittent non-correspondence (contradiction) between the forces and relations of production as the principal mechanism of the transition from one mode of production to another.

On this account, the relations of production constitute the economic structure of society – the distribution of the means of production to economic agents and the consequent distribution of those agents to antagonistic social classes – and condition the superstructure. They are transformed when they impede, rather than facilitate, the development of the productive forces. The ‘era of social revolution’ set in train by such ‘fettering’ ends with the installation of superior relations of production, now adequate to the productive forces; and the transformation of the superstructure, now duly equipped to secure the infrastructure. In this dialectic of the forces (content) and relations (form) of production, the growth of the former characterises the general course of history and ultimately explains it. Capitalism is the last ‘antagonistic’ socio-economic formation, because its productive forces ‘create … the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism’ – a supersession of capitalism by communism that will close the ‘pre-history of human society’.¹³

This is a ‘materialist’ philosophy of history in which history is directional, not cyclical; and progressive, not regressive. At the same time, however, the pattern of the progress it divines is not so much rectilinear as ‘dialectical’. As a result, history can progress by the ‘bad side’ – indeed, for the most part it has. In the properly Marxian perspective on capitalism, it is (in Fredric Jameson’s fine phrase) ‘at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst’.¹⁴ The grounds for such an assessment were incomparably laid out by Marx in a speech made in 1856:

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of … former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary. Machinery, gifted with the wonderful power of shortening and fructifying human labour, we behold starving and overworking it. The newfangled sources of wealth, by some strange weird spell, are turned into sources of want. The victories of art seem bought by the loss of character. At the same time that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers, and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.¹⁵

Any unilateral estimate, whether negative or positive, betrays the contradictoriness of capitalism as a historical phenomenon. To perceive only its negative aspects is to lapse into romanticism, hankering after an allegedly better past; to be oblivious of them is to indulge in the utilitarianism of the ‘bourgeois viewpoint’, transfiguring a supposedly untranscendable present.¹⁶ As Marshall Berman’s celebrated reading of the dialectic of modernity in the Manifesto demonstrates,¹⁷ what Marx seeks to do is overcome any such antithesis intellectually, while pointing to its transcendence practically. It contains an appreciation of the sense in which capitalism at once creates and frustrates the emancipatory promise of modernity, whose full potential can only be released and realised in the future by revolution, in the specifically modern sense of comprehensive political and social transformation. Thus, in Marx’s emphatic declaration in the Manifesto, ‘[i]n bourgeois society … the past dominates the present; in communist society, the present dominates the past’.¹⁸ Du passé faisons table rase!, as the Internationale has it. Communism is indeed the wave of the future. Humanity ‘only sets itself such tasks as it can solve’;¹⁹ and communism – a clean sweep of the past – is the solution to what, in the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Marx called the ‘riddle of history’.²⁰

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH – AND A BIRTH – FORETOLD

For our purposes, we may largely set to one side both section III of the Manifesto, where Marx demarcates his own text from previous ‘socialist and communist literature’, reproved in its generality for a ‘total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history’;²¹ and the cursory fourth and final section devoted to the ‘position of the communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties’. Instead, we shall be concerned with the ‘theoretical conclusions of the Communists’ adumbrated in the core of the Manifesto – i.e. the first two sections on ‘bourgeois and proletarians’ and ‘proletarians and communists’ – of which (echoing a passage in The German Ideology) it is asserted that they ‘are in no way based on ideal principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.’²²

Those conclusions might be encapsulated thus: capitalism, highest form of class society, generates the necessary and sufficient conditions, mat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. The Sorcerer and the Gravedigger: Karl Marx
• 2. Full Spectrum Dominance? Francis Fukuyama
• 3. In Extremis: Eric Hobsbawm
• 4. Ringing Out the Old: Perry Anderson
• Conclusion: Starting Over?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index