KARL MARX

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424 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
Marx shared the common nineteenth-century view that progress was
somehow inexorably written into the story of human development. There
would no doubt be setbacks and sufferings, but humanity, in its struggle
to dominate nature, would in the long run produce a society in which
human capacities were more extensively exercised and human needs more
fully met. But more recent developments in the productive forces, and
particularly atomic energy, have led many to wonder whether humanity's
efforts to dominate nature have not taken a fundamentally wrong turning.
We have lost our nerve and our own inventions have made us more
dubious about 'progress' than at any time for the last two hundred years.
Many, too, of Marx's expectations have remained unfulfilled. Two cases
are particularly striking. Firstly, there is the lack of revolutionary drive
among the working class in the West. Marx underestimated the later role
of Trade Unions and the possibilities of improvement in the position of
the proletariat without recourse to revolution. The two-class model he
began with and the consequent idea of class struggle have proved simplistic
with the persistence of the old middle classes and the emergence of
new classes such as technicians and managers. With the lack of support
for revolutionary politics among the mass of the working class, Marxist
leaders were faced with a dilemma: either they reflected the mood of the
workers and produced reformist policies which diluted Marxism, or they
preserved the revolutionary spirit of Marxism by setting themselves apart
from, and superior to, the views of those they claimed to represent.
Secondly, Marx underestimated the persistence and growth of nationalism.
Although sensitive to national sentiment in his own time, Marx considered
that class divisions would prove stronger than national ones. August 1914
is a crucial date here: the fact that the world's largest Marxist party - in
Germany - could be swept away on a nationalist tide led Marxists to
revise their strategy. In all Marxist revolutions, there has been a strong
nationalist element. Lenin himself was adept at co-opting the nationalism
of the non-Russian peoples in the Tsarist empire. The revolutions in
Yugoslavia, China, Cuba and Vietnam all had strong nationalist overtones.
With its emphasis on economic determinism and its confidence about
the inevitability of socialism, Marxism has often indulged in a shallow
optimism about the possibilities open to human nature. For Marxists have
usually just assumed that there existed, as an alternative to capitalism,
a morally superior and altogether more efficient method of organising
production. Marx himself was a real child of the Enlightenment in this
respect. After the pessimism of Nietzsche and Freud, the world is a great
deal darker and the light of reason often reduced to a faint glimmer. For
Marxism has been severely tarnished in practice - as, of course, has
Christianity by the Crusades and the Inquisition, and liberal values by