Why Marx Was Right (16 page)

In this way, we begin to
tell a story. In fact, we begin to
be
a story. Animals that are not
capable of desire, complex labour and elaborate forms of communication tend to
repeat themselves. Their lives are determined by natural cycles. They do not
shape a narrative for themselves, which is what Marx knows as freedom. The
irony in his view is that though this self-determination is of the essence of
humanity, the great majority of men and women throughout history have been
unable to exercise it. They have not been permitted to be fully human. Instead,
their lives have been for the most part determined by the dreary cycles of
class-society. Why this has been so, and how it can be put right, is what
Marx's work is all about. It is about how we might move from the kingdom of
necessity to the realm of freedom. This means becoming rather less like badgers
and rather more like ourselves. And having brought us to the threshold of that
freedom, Marx leaves us there to fend for ourselves. How could it be freedom
otherwise?

If you want to avoid the
dualisms of the philosophers, then, just look at how human beings actually
behave. A human body is in one sense a material object, part of Nature as well
as part of history. Yet it is a peculiar kind of object, quite unlike cabbages
and coal scuttles. For one thing, it has the capacity to change its situation.
It can also turn Nature into a kind of extension of itself, which is not true
of coal scuttles. Human labour works Nature up into that extension of our
bodies which we know as civilisation. All human institutions, from art
galleries and opium dens to casinos and the World Health Organisation, are
extensions of the productive body.

They are also embodiments
of human consciousness. ''Human industry,'' Marx writes, using the word
''industry'' in the broadest possible sense, ''is the open book of human
consciousness, human psychology perceived in sensory terms.''
⁶
The
body can do all this because it has the power to transcend itself—to transform
itself and its situation, as well as to enter into complex relationships with
other bodies of its kind, in that open-ended process we know as history. Human
bodies which cannot do this are known as corpses.

Cabbages cannot do this
either, but neither do they need to. They are purely natural entities, without
the sorts of needs we find in humans. Humans can make history because of the
kind of productive creatures they are; but they also need to do so, because in
conditions of scarcity they have to keep producing and reproducing their
material life. It is this which prods them into constant activity. They have a
history out of necessity. In a situation of material abundance, we would still
have a history, but in a different sense of the word from the one we have known
so far. We can fulfill our natural needs only by social means—by collectively
producing our means of production. And this then gives rise to other needs,
which in turn gives rise to others. But at the root of all this, which we know
as culture, history or civilisation, lies the needy human body and its material
conditions. This is just another way of saying that the economic is the
foundation of our life together. It is the vital link between the biological
and the social.

This, then, is how we come
to have history; but it is also what we mean by spirit. Spiritual matters are
not disembodied, otherworldly affairs. It is the prosperous bourgeois who tends
to see spiritual questions as a realm loftily remote from everyday life, since
he needs a hiding place from his own crass materialism. It comes as no surprise
that material girls like Madonna should be so fascinated by Kabbala. For

Marx, by contrast,
''spirit'' is a question of art, friendship, fun, compassion, laughter, sexual
love, rebellion, creativity, sensuous delight, righteous anger and abundance of
life. (He did, however, sometimes take the fun a bit too far: he once went on a
pub crawl from Oxford Street to Hampstead Road with a couple of friends,
stopping at every pub en route, and was chased by the police for throwing
paving stones at street lamps.
⁷
His theory of the repressive nature
of the state, so it would seem, was no mere abstract speculation). In
The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,
he discusses politics in terms of social
interests, as one might expect; but he also writes eloquently of politics as
expressing ''old memories, personal enmities, fears and hopes, prejudices and
illusions, sympathies and antipathies, convictions, articles of faith and
principles.'' And all this from the bloodlessly clinical thinker of
anti-Marxist fantasy.

All of the spiritual
activities I have just listed are bound up with the body, since that is the
kind of beings we are. Anything which doesn't involve my body doesn't involve
me. When I speak to you on the phone I am present to you bodily, though not
physically. If you want an image of the soul, remarked the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein, look at the human body. Happiness for Marx, as for Aristotle, was
a practical activity, not a state of mind. For the Judaic tradition of which he
was an unbelieving offspring, the ''spiritual'' is a question of feeding the
hungry, welcoming the immigrants and protecting the poor from the violence of
the rich. It is not the opposite of mundane, everyday existence. It is a
particular way of living it.

There is one activity of
the body in which ''spirit'' is made particularly manifest, and that is
language. Like the body as a whole, language is the material embodiment of
spirit or human consciousness. ''Language,'' Marx writes in
The German
Ideology,
"is as old as consciousness, language
is
practical,
real consciousness that exists for other men as well, and only therefore does
it exist for me; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the
necessity, of intercourse with other men.''
⁸
Consciousness is social
and practical through and through, which is why language is the supreme sign of
it. I can be said to have a mind only because I am born into a shared heritage
of meaning. Marx also speaks of language as ''the communal being speaking for
itself.'' The language of philosophy, he remarks, is a distorted version of the
language of the actual world. Thought and language, far from existing in a
sphere of their own, are manifestations of actual life. Even the most rarefied
concepts can be traced back eventually to our common existence.

Human consciousness, then,
requires a great deal of material stage-setting. And to start from human
consciousness, as so much philosophy does, is generally to ignore this fact. It
is to beg too many questions.
⁹
Conventional philosophy does not
start far back enough. It overlooks the social conditions which put ideas in
place, the passions with which they are involved, the power struggles with
which they are entangled, the material needs they serve. It does not typically
ask ''Where did this human subject come from?,'' or ''How did the object come
to be produced?'' Before we can think, we have to eat; and the word ''eat''
opens up the question of a whole mode of social production. We also have to be
born; and the word ''born'' opens up the whole domain of kinship, sexuality,
patriarchy, sexual reproduction and so on. Before we come to reflect on reality,
we are already bound up with it practically and emotionally, and our thinking
always goes on within this context. As the philosopher John Macmurray comments,
''Our knowledge of the world is primarily an aspect of our action in the
world.''
¹⁰
''Men,'' Marx writes in Heideggerian vein in his
Comments on Wagner,
"do not in any way begin by finding themselves in
a theoretical relationship to the things of the external world.''
¹¹
A lot has to be in place before we can start to reason.

Our thought is bound up
with the world in another sense, too. It is not just a ''reflection'' of
reality, but a material force in its own right. Marxist theory itself is not
just a commentary on the world, but an instrument for changing it. Marx himself
occasionally talks as though thought were a mere ''reflex'' of material
situations, but this fails to do justice to his own more subtle insights.
Certain kinds of theory— emancipatory theories, as they are generally known—can
act as a political force within the world, not just as a way of interpreting
it. And this lends them a peculiar sort of feature. It means that they form a
link between how things are and how they might be. They provide descriptions of
how the world is; but in doing so they can help change the way men and women
understand it, which in turn can play a part in changing reality. A slave knows
he is a slave, but knowing why he is a slave is the first step towards not
being one. So in portraying things as they are, such theories also offer a way
of moving beyond them to a more desirable state of affairs. They step from how
it is with them to how it ought to be. Theories of this kind allow men and
women to describe themselves and their situations in ways that put them into
question, and therefore eventually allow them to redescribe themselves. In this
sense, there is a close relationship between reason, knowledge and freedom.
Certain kinds of knowledge are vital for human freedom and happiness. And as
people act on such knowledge, they come to grasp it more deeply, which then
allows them to act on it more effectively. The more we can understand, the more
we can do; but in Marx's view the kind of understanding that really matters can
come about only through practical struggle. Just as playing the tuba is a form
of practical knowledge, so is political emancipation.

It is for this reason that
one must take Marx's celebrated eleventh thesis on Feuerbach with a pinch of
salt. The philosophers, he writes there, have only interpreted the world; the
point is to change it. But how could you change the world without interpreting
it? And isn't the power to interpret it in a particular light the beginnings of
political change?

''It is social being,''
Marx writes in
The German Ideology,
''which determines consciousness.''
Or as Ludwig Wittgenstein put the point in his work
On Certainty:
"It is what we do which lies at the bottom of our language games.''
¹²
This has important political consequences. It means, for example, that if we
want to change the way we think and feel radically enough, we have to change
what we do. Education or a change of heart are not enough. Our social being
sets limits to our thought. And we could only break beyond these limits by
changing that social being—which is to say, our material form of life. We could
not get beyond the limits of our thought simply by taking thought.

But doesn't this involve a
false dichotomy? If by ''social being'' we mean the kinds of things we do, then
this must already involve consciousness. It is not as though consciousness lies
on one side of a divide, and our social activities on the other. You cannot
vote, kiss, shake hands or exploit migrant labour without meanings and
intentions. We would not call a piece of behavior from which these things were
absent a human action, any more than we would call tripping over a step or a
rumbling in the gut a purposeful project. Marx would not, I think, deny this
fact. As we have seen, he sees human consciousness as
embodied
—as
incarnate in our practical behavior. Even so, he still holds that material
existence is in some sense more fundamental than meanings and ideas, and that
meanings and ideas can be explained in terms of it. How are we to make sense of
this claim?

One answer, as we have
seen already, is that thinking for humans is a material necessity, as it is in
a more rudimentary way for beavers and hedgehogs. We need to think because of
the kind of material animals we are. We are cognitive beings because we are
corporeal ones. Cognitive procedures for Marx grow hand in hand with labour,
industry and experiment. ''The production of ideas, of conceptions, of
consciousness," he writes in
The German Ideology,
"is at first
directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of
men, the language of real life.''
¹³
If Nature simply dropped its
luscious treasures into our gratefully gaping mouths, or if (perish the
thought) we only needed to eat once in a lifetime, we might not have to do much
thinking at all. Instead, we could just lie back and enjoy ourselves. But Nature,
alas, is a good deal more niggardly than this, and the human body is racked by
wants it must perpetually satisfy.

To begin with, then, it is
our bodily needs which shape our way of thinking. And this is one sense in
which thought is not paramount, even though a lot of thought likes to think it
is. At a later stage of human development, Marx argues, ideas become much more
independent of these needs, and this is what we know as culture. We can begin
to relish ideas for their own sake, not for their survival value. Thought, as
Bertolt Brecht once remarked, can become a real sensuous pleasure. Even so, it
remains true that reasoning, however elevated, has its humble origins in
biological need. As Friedrich Nietzsche taught, it is bound up with our exercise
of power over Nature.
¹⁴
The drive to practical control of our
environment, which is a life-or-death affair, underlies all our more abstract
intellectual activity.

In this sense, there is
something carnivalesque about the thought of Marx, as there is about the ideas
of Nietzsche and Freud. The low is always a shadowy presence lurking within the
high. As the critic William Empson remarks, ''The most refined desires are
inherent in the plainest, and would be false if they weren't.''
¹⁵
At
the root of our most lofty conceptions lie violence, lack, desire, appetite,
scarcity and aggression. It is this which is the secret underside of what we
call civilisation. Theodor Adorno speaks in graphic phrase of ''the horror
teeming under the stone of culture.''
¹⁶
''The class struggle,''
writes Walter Benjamin, '' . . . is a fight for the crude and material things
without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.''
¹⁷
We
should note that Benjamin is not out to deny the value of ''refined and
spiritual things,'' any more than Marx is. He is concerned to put them in
historical context. Like many a carnivalesque philosopher, Marx is a giant of a
thinker with a heartfelt distrust of exalted ideas. Conventional politicians,
by contrast, tend to speak publicly in earnestly idealist terms and talk
privately in cynically materialist ones.