INTRODUCTION: TWO COMPETING PERSPECTIVES
I will consider here some of the ways in which we might understand recent developments throughout Eastern Europe, including the former Soviet Union. I will explore whether we might more sensibly see these developments within the framework of a kind of Marxian analysis or within that of a classical-individualist one.
To put the matter briefly, it could be argued that what has occurred can be best understood as a result of a mistaken view of the role of the Soviet Union in the development of humanity. Leaders of the Soviet Union, starting with Lenin, claimed that their society was instantiating the course of human history predicted by Karl Marx. The Soviet Union was supposed to have been the vanguard of the proletariat on the historically necessitated march toward communism. A more refined Marxian analysis, however, might dispute this and claim that in fact, the Soviet Union instantiated simply a disguised feudal system and was by no means ready to play the role claimed for it by Soviet Marxists. Accordingly, now that the feudal system of greater Russia has reached its culmination, the time has come for that society to turn itself into a largely capitalist society. Once this capitalist phase has played itself out, the time will come to change into a bona fide socialist system, one that will have the benefit of the previous capitalist productive phase on which to base its political and economic developments.
That is one scenario. The other is that whether socialism follows feudalism or capitalism is irrelevant—it is a hopeless political economy. In fact, the assumptions of Marxian analysis are wrong—humanity is not an “organic whole,” as Marx claimed,1 and it is not on a historical march toward its alleged maturity, namely, communism. Efforts to direct it along such a path must of necessity fail and result in the kind of tyranny that the Soviet Union exhibited, not because the capitalist phase was skipped and socialism was tried prematurely, but because socialism in any of its incarnations is an unsuitable political economy for human community life.
There is some evidence—to the extent that one can speak of evidence within a historical discussion—for both ways of understanding current affairs in Eastern Europe. Nevertheless, this chapter will argue that the latter is the more rational perspective.
THE MARXIAN ANALYSIS OF EASTERN EUROPEAN DEVELOPMENTS In 1882 Karl Marx wrote a new preface to the Russian edition of The Communist Manifesto, in which he answered a question posed to him by some Russian revolutionaries. Here is the question and Marx’s answer to it:
Now the question is: Can the Russian obshchina [village community], though greatly undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to the possibility today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting-point for a communist development.2
This may seem at first a rather straightforward passage from Marx. Yet there is controversy about it. The late Sidney Hook, for one, held that it was of no great significance.3 Yet it seems that there is a great deal to this passage, and that possibility deserves some discussion.
Marx appears to be saying that a Russian revolution will not “serve as the starting- point for a communist development” unless it “becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West.” What may we understand by this? If we keep in mind that Marxian socialist revolutionary theory posited the need for an international revolutionary development—and if we also keep in mind Marx’s emphatic insistence that prior to moving on to any new historical phase, the previous stage of development must be fully realized—it becomes clear that Marx believed that the Russian revolution must be exported to be successful.
Clearly, given Marx’s own assessment that “the Russian obshchina [village community], though greatly undermined, [is] a form of the primeval common ownership of land,” Marx could not have believed that communism could be realized within the borders of greater Russia. Russia simply was not ready—it had no prior capitalist system, which Marx deemed absolutely necessary for future socialist and communist developments. As Marx noted, “the economists have been proving for fifty years and more that socialism cannot abolish poverty, which has its basis in nature,but can only make it general, distribute it simultaneously over the whole surface of society!”4 It is capitalism that abolishes poverty.
So unless Russia’s revolution were to spread to those lands where capitalism had gained a solid foothold, its socialism and communism would not materialize in the benign
fashion Marx had envisioned, as follow-up stages of capitalism. It is therefore clear that Marx did not see any justification for a Russian revolution that would attempt to introduce socialism without at the same time expanding the process throughout those portions of the globe that had already experienced substantial capitalist developments.
It is not so difficult now to see that once the attempt by the Soviet Union to spread its kind of political economy across the globe had not come to fruition—just witness the most recent failures in Africa, Latin America, and, especially, the West—the socialist experiment within its borders had to be construed as a failure in Marxian theory itself.
Thus current Eastern European developments need by no means strike a blow against a Marxian conception of human history. All they need to signify is that there really was no genuine Marxian revolution in the Soviet Union. Instead, what was labeled by Soviet Marxist wishful thinkers as Marxist-Leninist socialism has to be thought of, in authentic Marxian terms, as merely nominal. In fact, the Soviet Union amounted to only a somewhat modernized feudal system that, in Marx’s own terms, could at best attempt to “distribute [poverty] simultaneously over the whole surface of society” and at worst use the term “socialism” as a cover for a kind of (albeit modernized) feudal rule.
Current developments in the former Soviet Union, involving substantial transformation toward a relatively free market economy, can thus be seen in Marxian terms as no more than the natural and necessary advance from feudalism to bourgeois capitalism. When Abel Aganbegyan, president of the Soviet Academy of National Economy, claims, “The old system was a bad system. Everyone knows that,”5it need by no means be taken as a rejection of Marxism. Quite the contrary. It can be taken as a realization that the past seventy years of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric had been wishful thinking, at best, or a hoax, more probably. Kings, caesars, pharaohs, czars, dictators, and similar tyrants have always needed some kind of ploy for deceiving the public. The “big lie” theory of tyrannical leadership had been spelled out and indeed rationalized by Plato, and it would be no major amendment of Marxian analysis to allow for it in recent Soviet history. Once religious calls for submission to tyranny had lost their plausibility, the more secular message and promise of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric would naturally come in handy to win some support from the peoples of the diverse Soviet republics in the effort to uphold the unity of imperial Russia.
But of course, this had to come to an end, as Marx could foresee very well, since without capitalism, socialism simply socializes poverty. And in the absence of a successful internationalization of the purported revolution, the Bolsheviks could ultimately lay claim to nothing much more than a putsch, a violent change of the ruling group in greater Russia. There was very little that was genuinely revolutionary about the change—that is, it did not fundamentally alter the principles of political economy.
Furthermore, the willingness of the Soviet ruling elite to rid itself of its Eastern European satellites can also be understood in Marxian terms. This would be little more than a replay of the decolonization of many other world powers in the wake of bourgeois developments. Eastern Europe has experienced a bourgeois revolution—a turn toward democracy and away from the modern rendition of feudal rule. Its subsequent confusion, leaning toward a substantially market economy and parliamentary or constitutional
democracy, parallels what occurred over a century ago in Western Europe. With the realization that the Soviet Union could not engineer a worldwide socialist revolution without a substantial capitalist development, there was no need to hang on to Eastern Europe in any political sense. Market developments will establish the kind of interdependence that characterizes the “world market,” or economy of “civil societies,” with their oppressive “world-historical activity.”6
Finally, it could also be argued from a Marxian framework that the true “overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution…and the abolition of private property which is identical with it”7 are right on course. There is little doubt that the Marxian analysis has serious plausibility when one considers that most Western capitalist societies are transforming themselves into democratic socialist states; when it is recognized that the institution of the right to private property is nowhere intact any longer (what with all the regulations, at municipal, county, state, and federal levels); and when one understands that the law of contract has been nearly abolished and courts have usurped the authority of individuals and companies with doctrines of unconscionability, workers’ rights, affirmative action, and environmental protection provisions—even as Eastern Europe is turning toward capitalism and privatization. Marx argued, in a speech given in Amsterdam on 8 September 1872, that in “America, England, and if I were more familiar with your institutions, I would perhaps also add Holland…the workers can attain their goal by peaceful means.”8Certainly, there is not much in recent North American and Western European history that would count against the Marxian analysis.
Are we, then, to settle for the conclusion that Marx was, after all, correct, and that recent developments bode much less well for the ideas of classical liberalism than many today seem to believe?
THE INDIVIDUALIST ALTERNATIVE
If we consider the issue of political economy from a more philosophical than historical perspective, the individualist alternative becomes theoretically and practically much more attractive. The first matter to be touched on has to be the question of whether human individuals are in fact, as Marx believed, essentially “specie-beings.” Marx held that the “human essence is the true collectivity of man.”9 His entire historical-materialist account of humanity’s development is predicated on this conception of human nature. What this amounts to is the view that human beings are actually mere parts of what Marx saw as the “organic whole” of humanity.
In his collectivism, Karl Marx was not original. The idea that humanity is an organic whole, a concrete being, had its first major exposition in the writings of Plato. Plato’s metaphysics posits two realms of reality: one ideal, the other visible (natural, actual, material). Those entities that occupy the ideal realm are superior in every way to those within the visible realm, although they are closely related. In particular, human individuals participate as copies in the ideal realm, where their perfect rendition exists.
That perfect rendition in Plato is, of course, a universal intellectual entity, not something physical, as are all human individuals. And this concrete universal entity is far more important than all the individuals that participate in it and gain their imperfect identity through such participation.
Marx did not accept Plato’s dualistic metaphysics, but he did retain the idea that humanity is a collective being and as such the locus of value. He said something very early in his life that seems never to have left his philosophy:
When we have chosen the vocation in which we can contribute most to humanity, burdens cannot bend us because they are sacrifices for all. Then we experience no meager, limited egoistic joy, but our happiness belongs to millions, our deeds live on quietly but eternally effective, and glowing tears of noble men will fall on our ashes.10
The collectivism we find in Marx shows, of course, the influence of Hegel and Feuerbach, the first providing the progressivist (dialectical) component, the latter the materialist (or naturalist). In short, Marx saw humanity as an organic whole on the march toward ultimate self-fulfillment, self-realization. This is what is unique in his philosophy and political economy. This is why he found the kind of bourgeois individualism evident in classical liberals such as Locke, Smith, Ricardo, and the American founding fathers a shallow worldview. To conceive of humanity as consisting in the individuals who comprise the human species instead of the whole species simply did not, for Marx, sufficiently comprehend the depths of the human condition. And the kind of individual liberty that came from such an “insipid” doctrine could not do justice to what humanity required in the way of political development and emancipation. Marx held that the classical liberals’ version of “individual liberty is thus at the same time the most complete suppression of all individual liberty and total subjugation of individuality to social conditions which take the form of material forces.”11
So before we can judge whether the Marxian analysis laid out earlier is sound, we need to ask whether this most fundamental aspect of Marxism is sound, for it is on this that the rest of Marxism rests. There is not much to the idea of the historical march of humanity toward communism, with capitalism and socialism as mere transitory stages, unless we can confidently hold with Marx that humanity is indeed the kind of organic whole that can be involved in a developmental process, somewhat as an individual living being can be said to be so involved, moving from infancy through childhood and adolescence, to young adulthood and maturity. Is humanity, in short, the collective whole that Marx thought it is?
I have examined this issue elsewhere and can only touch on it briefly in this chapter.12
There are three main problems with the Marxian metaphysics.13First, the abolition of the
human individual as an active choosing agent is unjustified and leads to results that are self-defeating even for Marxism itself. Marx was, after all, a very creative and original thinker who has managed to exert tremendous impact on the world. Even if we
acknowledge that Marxism is not a sound worldview, we cannot deny that many human beings have read and been influenced by Marx’s works and have gone on to make an impact on their world guided accordingly. Marx and his more inventive followers cannot be explained away solely by reference to economic determinants; they must be credited with individual initiative, the very capacity Marx denies to people when he sees them as captives of class consciousness and the forces of material production. It is interesting in this connection that most Marxists have tended to be intellectuals, not the workers who were supposed to be propelled to revolutionary action by their material circumstances. While Marx has never acknowledged entrepreneurial initiative in his political economy, in fact he himself—as well as many of his students—must be identified as perhaps one of the most brilliant political entrepreneurs.
Second, the metaphysical principle of the dialectic—even if applied only to human history rather than, as Engels would have wanted, to all of reality—is a species of that long hoped for but entirely elusive philosopher’s dream, the philosopher’s stone, the one key with which the secrets of the world may be unlocked. While it is undeniable that some major clashes in human history, such as the bourgeois revolutions and the ancient slave rebellions, have propelled subsequent generations of human beings in fruitful directions, to construe the principle of progress-through-dire-conflict as the sole motive force in human history is entirely unjustified. Many other principles—including many involving no conflict but negotiation and cooperation—have accomplished worthwhile goals for human beings. In short, the reductionism involved in Marxian dialectical analysis is not a sound methodology. History has shown that its assumptions about early human societies are not to be taken very seriously—for example, not even most early societies were ordered in economies of common ownership. Tribalism is by no means uniform throughout prehistoric human societies.
Third, the kind of materialism we find in Marxism is not justified as a satisfactory account of the nature of reality. Marx did not recognize that some natural beings had the capacity to cause their own actions. He saw human individuals as altogether too passive and thus could not imagine developments that did not follow a predictable course. Karl Popper was right to construe Marx’s laws of history as invalid.14 Human beings are not moved around by impersonal forces; they have the unique capacity to move themselves around, to judge and to fail to judge well, and to guide their conduct accordingly. This way, also, the progressivist bias in Marx’s historical materialism has to be abandoned—it is, indeed, evident enough that human beings can have lives much worse than those of their forefathers, that human history does not always lead to improvements in the human condition.
It does appear that for at least the last three hundred or so years, human history has conformed closely enough to what Marx would have claimed and predicted. Does this mean that socialism is the wave of the future, that the developments in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union do not at all contradict the Marxian analysis, even if we grant that the philosophical base of that analysis is unsound? This is just what some analytic Marxists—such as Jon Elster, John Roemer, and G.A.Cohen—might wish to say to those who believe that with recent global developments, Marxism must be consigned to the
dustbin of defunct worldviews.
WHAT WE MAY SAY ABOUT THE FUTURE
A central feature of bourgeois philosophy, or “classical individualism,” is that human life