MARX's VISION OF FUTURE SOCIETY

...This occurs in The German Ideology and appears as almost a marginal comment in the course of a historical explanation about the origins and consequences of the division of labor...

...ANYONE who looks to Marx for clear-cut models for a socialist structure of society is apt to be frustrated...

...The bourgeois measurements will still remain in force...

...Stage I, which is the proximate future, is discussed in much greater detail than Stage II, which is already once removed from immediate experience...

...With their uncouth hands they will tear down all the marble statues of beauty...

...On the other hand, statements about the future, "systems" in his language, detailed schemes of future society, can be neither verified nor falsified...

...Since everyone is still a wage earner, the relationship of the worker to the process of labor has not basically changed...

...Nevertheless he makes a number of claims for it, and they merit a close investigation...

...The senses of social man differ from those of the unsocial...

...This model of future relations implied in sexual relations may also be the reason for Marx's virulent attack on the bourgeois concept of the family in The Communist Manifesto: Marx's anger—so much out of line with the cool language of the rest of the Manifesto—may have been triggered off by his realization that even sexual relations, which could serve as a pos sible model for future society, have been so totally stunted within capitalist society...

...Nothing could be further from Marx's mind, and the obscurity of the exact nexus between control and freedom should not lead one to overlook the existence of some sort of planning implied in this voluntaristic vision of future society...

...Similarly in The Civil War in France Marx suggests that the working class "has no ideas to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant...

...In the Critique of the Gotha Program Marx's language is slightly less philosophical...

...In fairness to Marx one should, however, add that he appears to be trying to look for possible paradigms in existing reality which, if universalized, could become the foundation for the kind of 'society enunciated in his writings as "fully developed communism...

...it is "the complete and conscious restoration of man to himself within the total wealth of previous development, the restoration of man as a social, that is, human being...

...It is the solution to the riddle of history, and knows itself to be this solution...

...their system-building, their attempt to construct "a science of society" have, according to Marx, no foundation in an adequate understanding of social reality...

...but there again appears the suggestion that the higher form of communist society will overcome the dichotomies between physical and mental labor, between labor as "mere means of life" and its being "life's prime want," between "the all-around development of the individual" and the increase of "all the springs of the cooperative level" —and, of course, in that society will disappear "the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor...

...In the German Ideology Marx's main contention about the utopians is that since they do not understand existing society, as a matter of fact do not even try to understand it, their pronouncements about the future cannot really grasp it...

...Marx's own attitude toward those whom he called utopian socialists is, on closer scrutiny, much more sophisticated and differentiated than this...

...and though, as we tried to show, these accounts are fraught with problems and unanswered questions, Marx's own awareness of their tentative nature makes him perhaps less of a utopian than he would have otherwise appeared...

...One of Marx's most intimate friends during his Paris period was Heinrich Heine, who came from a similar social and intellectual background and who was at that time one of the most eloquent communist writers of the younger German generation...

...Yet Heine resignedly concludes, "I see all this, but I cannot repudiate communism...

...Marx always accepted the historicity of the industrial revolution and had very little patience with the machine-smashers and their theoretical defenders...

...Now this is obviously a most ambitious claim to make for any social system: it is also, of course, a total transcendence of the "birth marks" that will characterize, according to Marx, the first stage of socialist society...

...But Engels's retrospective account glosses over, in this case as in other instances when Engels doubled as the official historian of Marxism, many of the more fruitful aspects of Marx's theory: when a theory begins to write its own history, it runs into some obvious difficulties...

...The utopian socialists still keep themselves busy imagining the future, "while in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, [the workers] no longer need to seek science in their minds...

...It is because the utopians concoct schemes at all that they are wrong...

...men are merely its instruments, and the human factor is limited to the cognitive function of reading the writing on the wall, deciphering the true meaning hidden behind the facade of external reality and attaining an understanding of the shape of things to come...

...Fourier's is a regimented system, meticulously worked out in its details, totalitarian in its aspects...

...To Marx the main trouble with the utopians is ultimately epistemological...

...As Marx put it in the Grundrisse: "All our attempts to explode [the existing form of social organization] would be quixotic if one could not find embedded in society as it is today the material conditions of production and commercial relationships of the classless society...

...Though Heine's considerations appear to be mainly aesthetic, the basic nature of his doubts is similar enough to the context of Marx's notion of "crude communism" to merit attention...

...After all, wasn't it Engels who traced the development of socialism "from utopia to science" in his famous tract...

...The trouble is not really with them, Marx contends, but with their disciples who cling rather slavishly to the original views of their masters, overlooking the historical development that has taken place since these systems were developed...

...Furthermore, there never exists, strictly speaking, an "object" of art: for a piece of music to become an artistic experience it does not suffice that it has been "produced" by the composer...

...My own Book of Poems [Buch der Lieder] will find its way to the grocery store, where its pages will be used to wrap coffee and snuff-tobacco for the old women of the future...

...First: despite the appearance of postulating activity in future society as purely voluntary in its nature, this apparent free choice of doing one thing in the morning and another in the afternoon is most explicitly premised on the statement that "society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow...

...The problems remain, to be solved according to Marx, not on the level of theory in philosophy but on the level of social praxis...

...MARX'S VISION OF FUTURE SOCIETY 325 The theoretical problems raised by this passage are, of course, quite staggering...

...In his polemic against Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy Marx takes the utopians to task for looking to "abstract" systems as the models for future society...

...It thus indicates the extent to which man's natural behavior has become human or the extent to which his human essence has become a natural essence for him, the extent to which his human nature has become nature to him...

...But, if one may mix one's metaphors, this painting of gray on gray, by showing that a form of life has grown old, not only explains the world but also changes it...

...The other paradigm is that of sexual relations, and Marx has an extraordinary excursus on the subject in the manuscript "Private Property and Communism...

...Hunting, fishing, rearing cattle (for the sake of the argument one could overlook the "criticism after dinner" which is, after all, a joke at the expense of Bruno Bauer)— all these are fairly unsophisticated, wholly unmodern, totally preindustrial activities...

...All the artful imaginative plays of the poets will be destroyed by them...

...The eye," he says in the Paris Manuscripts, "has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object, derived from and for man...

...we shall therefore limit ourselves to only two of them...

...In both cases there is not only the suggestion that one has to envisage future society dynamically, i.e., in stages, but there appears also to be a very deep ambivalence on Marx's part about the nature of the first stage...

...For them "future history resolves itself into the propaganda and the practical carrying out of their social plans...

...Really free labor, the composing of music for example, is at the same time damned serious and demands the greatest effort...

...Marx thus sees his method as implying an understanding of existing reality as a key 324 to the future: true knowledge of the shape of things to come is a function of having an adequate understanding of existing social relations...

...Yet there is a fundamental difference: while for Heine this description is equivalent to communism per se, for Marx it is merely the first stage...

...As Marx says, "private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only if we have it, if it exists for us as capital, is immediately possessed by us, eaten, drunk, worn, lived in, etc., in short, used...

...330 SHLOMO AVINERI This may come as a surprise, but the language used here by Marx also points out that the sexual relationship can be a paradigm for future social relations because in it the same dichotomies are overcome which Marx envisaged as about to be overcome in Stage II...

...It may, however, be of some interest to our discussion that these occupational examples used by Marx are not entirely his own...

...This, after all, is the true implication of the XIth Thesis on Feuerbach...

...If one does not understand the present, or misunderstands it, how can one know anything about the future...

...The first instance is in one of the 1844 Paris Manuscripts entitled "Private Property and Communism" and the second is in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program...

...Marx discerns, however, that this society has not basically overcome alienation (and surplus value...

...He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood...

...LET us have a look at Marx's own account of his disagreement with the utopians as expressed by him at the time of his attempt to differentiate his own socialist theories from those of other socialist thinkers...

...Marx is much less specific, for reasons outlined earlier, about the exact institutional structures of this higher form of communism...

...Heine never developed a theoretical concept of communism comparable to that of Marx, but at that time, when Marx was still totally unknown, Heine's articles about French communism were one of the main sources about socialist ideas in Germany...

...For this reason Marx spends quite an amount of time in trying to show that Proudhon, for example, is wrong in every and any statement he makes about present society...

...This is a serious lapse in Marx, and by suggesting that it is the only time when such romantic nonsense crept into his writing one is not trying to take him off the hook...

...To Marx this devolves unto the proletariat and becomes its praxis...

...There is also, one should add, a 4:00 P.M...

...The Fourierist origin of Marx's examples may explain (though not excuse) their pastoralism...

...If he is so much in the dark about the present, how can he have anything illuminating to say about the future...

...Be that as it may, one should be very careful in using this passage by Marx as an illustration of an anarchist paradise involving no control or planning...

...The artist may be in the thralldom of an inner necessity to create...

...as I have in mind...

...But there is one crucial difference that may shed some light on the difference * See N. Riasanowsky, ed., The Teachings o) Charles Fourier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 50...

...If the description of Stage I in the Paris Manuscripts can sometimes be likened to a society reminiscent of the Soviet Union, what are Marx's guarantees that one may not be stuck in Stage I? Marx's historical understanding led him to his contention that capitalism cannot continue expanding without undermining its own foundation, "digging its own grave...

...As Marx says, in crude communism the domination of material property bulks so large that it wants to destroy everything which cannot be possessed by everyone as private property...

...In the Paris Manuscripts, these "birthmarks" are spelled out in more detail...

...The two instances in which Marx goes into some details about the two stages are both to be found in manuscripts never published by Marx himself...

...It is the true solution of the struggle between existence and essence, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species...

...While in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.* * This has recently been slightly improved upon by Jerry Rubin in the last paragraph of Do It...

...Actually, they are literally taken over from Fourier...

...He is filled with revulsion at bourgeois society, yet he has his doubts about communism and the fate of culture under proletarian rule: I am filled with horror about these dark destroyers coming to power...

...It has to be "reproduced" by an orchestra or an individual performer and "reproduced" again by the listener: otherwise it is merely a piece of dead wood...

...A close look at the list of antagonisms that will be overcome by fully developed communism clearly suggests what they are: they are the traditional problems of Western philosophy...

...How little this overcoming of private property is an actual appropriation is shown precisely by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, the reversion to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and wantless man who has not gone beyond private property, has not yet even achieved it...

...According to Buber, the prophetic mode is expressed within the socialist tradition by the utopian socialists, whereas Marx's thought falls into the apocalyptic category...

...but the one activity added there does not need to detain us for the moment...

...As such "communism as fully developed naturalism is humanism [and] as fully developed humanism it is naturalism...

...After all, this is the major problem involved, yet this socialist version of Renaissance man is ultimately left hanging in the air...

...everyone is employed by society, and there is an equality of wages...

...They have only to take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece...

...Just as in the Critique of the Gotha Program, Stage I involves the successful nationalization of the means of production...

...The paradigmatic nature of sexual relations arises from the fact that Marx claims that these antagonisms are already overcome in them just as, in a way, they have been shown by Marx to disappear in artistic production...

...Marx's position about this seems to be quite straightforward: statements about the past and the present may be verifiable or falsifiable...

...In the Communist Manifesto Marx gives the "originators of utopian systems," as he calls Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen, their due: he credits them with having critical insights into the class struggle and considers them "in many respects revolutionary...

...The passage is well-known, yet it still merits quotation at length: For as soon as there occurs a division of labor, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape...

...The modern division of labor is so much more complex to overcome than that implied in Marx's almost Rousseauean account...

...This seems to me to be the major flaw in his acMARX'S VISION OF FUTURE SOCIETY count: for given his own criticism of the utopian socialists, one could very easily turn Marx's critique against himself...

...Let us now turn our attention to the problems involved in Marx's discussion of future society in the Paris Manuscripts and the Critique of the Gotha Program...

...It is for this reason that Marx likens social man to a person whose senses have been fully awakened and developed...

...In Fourier, on the other hand, this is "an average day": it is planned for you and it is good for you and you should—and would—follow it...

...Marx appears to suggest here that the proletariat is the true inheritor of philosophy: to Hegel, "To comprehend what is, is the task of philosophy...

...In his account of the average life of the man of the future, Fourier maps out in nauseating detail—which we may by now associate with utopian social engineering in general—the various activities involved...

...This is not just a technicality...

...When we substitute the capitalist "I own" by the "we own" of crude communism, nothing fundamental has changed...

...It is not the content of sexual relations that interests Marx but (if one can make the distinction) their structure...

...It can be very easily romanticized and trivialized, and one should be careful not to be carried away by what might appear to some as trendy implications...

...In this relationship the extent to which the human essence has become nature for man or nature has become the human essence of man is sensuously manifested, reduced to an observable fact...

...The model of man in fully developed socialist society is thus viewed in terms that have an explicit aesthetic quality: "It is apparent how the rich man and wide human need appear in place of economic wealth and poverty...

...The parallel with artistic creation lies somewhere else: in the fact that what the artist creates for himself is being created at the same time for others as well...

...The first sphere is that of artistic creativity...

...but one may see why Marx did not care for that one...

...It is not that their schemes are unrealizable, impractical, or rooted in never-never land...

...Because of historical reasons one tends to identify the utopians with voluntarism and Marxism with a regulated society: it is, however, the other way round...

...It is for these reasons that Marx's discussions of future society are few and far between...

...at 9:30 P.M., cours des arts (concerts, balls, theater...

...It seems to me that on this Buber was wrong...

...in this it did injustice both to the utopian socialists as well as to Marx...

...what one person gains in creative experience is not at the expense of another person, in other words, there exists no zero-sum relationship between the artist's enjoyment of his creativity and that of the public...

...It wants to abstract from talent, etc., by force...

...In the prophetic mode, the central theme is the preparation of humanity for the hour of redemption...

...This fully developed communism is, according to Marx, the genuine solution of the antagonism 328 SHLOMO AVINERI between man and nature and man and man...

...One would wish Marx had been more specific about how exactly one regulates production in such a way as to allow each individual a maximum of choice and versatility...

...And though there is no systematic attempt on his part to link these elements to the overall social system of Stage II, the potentialities inherent in the spheres of human relations involved are of considerable interest...

...and later, at 6:30 P.M., a session in a cattle-rearing group...

...The condition of the laborer is not MARX'S VISION OF FUTURE SOCIETY overcome but extended to all men...

...By this he does not mean that work will become play: quite the contrary—in the Grundrisse he suggests that emancipating work from alienation "does not mean that labor can be made merely a joke, or amusement, as Fourier naively expressed it in shopgirl terms...

...Where laurels grew, potatoes will be cultivated...

...It involves getting up at 3:30 in the morning, and then one finds, in this order: at 5:30 A.M., a session in a hunting group...

...MARX HAS NOT, of course, been the only socialist thinker to be aware of the fact that the road to salvation may lead, as in a Judaic tradition that was of course wholly unknown to him, through Forty-nine Gates of Impurity...

...The community is only a community of labor and an equality of wages paid out by the communal capital, the community as universal capitalist...

...The relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being...

...In his article on "Utopianism" in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, Mannheim appears to be missing the point completely when he says that "in branding these antibourgeois reformers with the epithet Utopian, Engels meant to rebuke them for their addiction to the sentimental delusions of the eighteenth-century philosophers...

...The structure of sexual relations is such that it shows that in his most intimate, individual moment, man (Mensch, not Mann) is a social, cooperative being—a species-being (Gattungswesen, to use Marx's language...

...One has only to read the contradictory, detailed plans of various utopian socialists with their minute and meticulous coverage of every aspect of human life to realize what it was in utopian socialism that put Marx off...

...If Marx feels that he may risk a number of positive statements about Stage I because it is the direct outcome of the dialectical tensions of present society, there is very little to base oneself on when discussing Stage II, and hence Marx is much more tentative about it...

...Before, however, going into the details of these relatively extensive accounts, attention should be given to another text, perhaps the most poetic evocation on Marx's part of the promise of future, unalienated society...

...M arx does not, however, discuss the mechanisms of change immanent in Stage I that would transform it into Stage II...

...The writings of most utopian socialists centered around their visions of future society and blueprints for the future, while Marx spent his lifetime writing (and never finishing) Das Kapital...

...Something of this can be gleaned from the way Karl Mannheim viewed the Marxian attitude toward the utopians...

...The assertion that there will be a Stage II appears, in this context, to be as arbitrary as the glowing optimism of the utopians which Marx was otherwise so quick in criticizing as being without foundation in reality...

...Immediate, physical possession is for it the sole aim of life and existence...

...In this relationship is also apparent the extent to which man's need has become human, thus the extent to which the other human being, as human being, has become a need for him, the extent to which in his most individual existence he is at the same time a social being...

...SHLOMO AVINERI between Marx and the utopians: we have seen that Marx's voluntarism in this passage is enigmatically linked with some sort of overall planning and control...

...It is their lack of understanding of existing conditions which pushes the utopians to develop "scientific" theories that "exist only in the head of the thinker...

...After describing this stage in the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx adds: "What we have to deal with here is a communist society not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges" (my italics...

...Indeed, we find that, popular beliefs to the contrary notwithstanding, Marx has very little to say about the structure of the future socialist society precisely because of these self-imposed limitations...

...the purification of the spirit and the opening of hearts toward the moment of future salvation and emancipation...

...In the Preface to his work Lutetia, Heine proclaims his attachment to the proletarian revolution...

...Marx's vision is, on the contrary, that of free human activity...

...Marx mentions on several occasions that work activity in future society will be much more like art than like labor...

...We recall that these were the antagonisms of man/man, man/nature, existence/ essence, objectification/self-afFirmation, freedom/necessity and individual/species...

...The lilies of the field, that never toil and never spin, but even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of them, will be given looms and told to produce...

...but by expressing this urge he is becoming truly free...

...Furthermore, we find that when Marx does venture to discuss future society he usually views it in "stages": the temporal dimension, so crucial to his theory in general, does not evaporate into a timeless future...

...Nor has surplus value disappeared, though the surplus does not accrue to the individual capitalist but goes to the state that uses it for social purposes: yet from the worker's subjective point of view, this has not changed the "external" nature of his work as far as his consciousness is concerned...

...hence they are ultimately useless...

...Marx's text is slightly repetitive but nonetheless clear: The immediate, natural, and necessary relationship of human being to human being is the relationship of man to woman...

...The ultimate stage for Marx is something else: it is "the complete emancipation of all human senses and aptitudes...

...Marx's earlier critique of the Hegelian system maintains that the Hegelian solution is a false and merely apparent one...

...Moreover, his distinction between utopian socialism and Marx seems to follow too closely the orthodox lines of demarcation between the two traditions, set down abstractly by the Marxian tradition itself...

...To Marx these defects "are inevitable in the first phase of communist society," but his ambivalence is quite outspoken, and there are no facile suggestions in his acount of an easy breakthrough...

...The terminology itself is deeply Hegelian: these are the dichotomies Hegel claimed to have overcome in his philosophy...

...In his own way Marx was painting his "gray on gray" by writing Das Kapital rather than a nonexistent work called Der Sozialismus...

...This is the same kind of society that Marx characterizes in the Critique of the Gotha Program as "still constantly stigmatized by bourgeois limitation...

...at 7:00 A.M., a session in a fishing group...

...session of a group for exotic plants...

...If the transition from capitalism to Socialism I is shown by Marx in numerous writings to be the dialectical outcome of the internal tensions and contradictions of capitalism, there is nothing in the Marxian texts to suggest the dynamics which would transform Socialism I into Socialism II...

...No comparable claim is made about Stage I and the frightening possibility of being stuck in Stage I cannot be overlooked, given the premises of Marx himself...

...The relationship of private property remains the relationship of the community to the world of things...

...There is no private property in the means of produc tion...

...he would also be classified by Marx himself among the utopians who have "science in their mind...

...and inevitably, at 10:30 P.M., everybody goes to bed, presumably totally exhausted and happy...

...Moreover, Buber's book grew out of a series of lectures he gave in the 1940s to kibbutz audiences (the original Hebrew version of Paths in Utopia was published in Israel in 1947 by the Histadruth book guild), and it appears that Buber was not yet well acquainted at that time with Marx's early writings, especially the 1844 Paris Manuscripts...

...Second, and perhaps even more serious, is the basic irrelevance of the examples given by Marx as instances of unalienated activity after the division of labor will be abolished...

...This is what you will do, in a way, for the rest of your life...

...It may come as a surprise to many that Marx criticizes the utopians for trying to be "scientific...

...Socialism hence calls not for visionaries but for a dialectical understanding of "that which is...

...In his Paths in Utopia, Martin Buber distinguished between two modes of what he called eschatological thinking: the prophetic and the apocalyptic...

...It is a long and tiresome list, and not all of it need be repeated here...

...One merely 326 has to substitute three or four modern in dustrial occupations for the pastoral ones used by Marx to realize that it would be extremely difficult to imagine a person be ing an atomic physicist in the morning, a population expert in the afternoon, and a telephone maintenance man in the evening...

...This critique of utopianism obviously leaves Marx with a difficult dilemma in another quarter: if there are epistemological limitations on the ability to say anything sensible about the future, these would apply, after all, to Marx himself as well...

...Hence they try to push the proletariat into a Procrustean bed of "an organization of society specially contrived by these inventors...

...Similarly, in the Communist Manifesto, Marx criticizes the utopian socialists for not understanding that existing circumstances in capitalist society create the conditions for a socialist transformation...

...As scarcity will still exist in this first stage, the maximum that society will be able to offer to its members will be "to each according to his work...

...He himself admits that in his Civil War in France, Marx reverts to a more "utopian," i.e., prophetic mode...

...But the main postulate of Marx's passage is that this sort of planning—and its consequent overcoming of scarcity—will make it possible for me "to do one thing today and another tomorrow...

...In the apocalyptic mode, the process of redemption is already predetermined in all its details...

...Sexual relations are, on one hand, determined by man's natural organization: but they are sustained by an element of will...

...in them, human beings discover that they need the other human being—not as an object, but as a complement to themselves...

...Since they do not understand this, they "search after a new social science, after new social laws, that are to create these conditions...

...All one would be able to say would be that looking at capitalist society and its internal tensions one could see that the socialization of the means of production is the immanent tendency of its development...

...Marx calls this stage "crude communism," and though he is obviously also referring to communist theories other than his own, the language of the manuscript as well as the parallels with the Critique of the Gotha Program make it clear that he is talking about what he considers also a historical stage in future development...

...The nightingale will be banished to foreign lands, since its song is unproductive...

...In this natural species-relationship man's relationship to nature is immediately his relationship to man as his relationship to man is immediately his relationship to nature, to his own natural condition...

...To Marx the sexual nexus presents a structure of human relations totally different from that of the zero-sum relations of the market...

...This "crude communism" is still related to the whole world of production and goods in the old way of viewing everything under the rubric of private property: the fact that property is not owned individually but collectively does not change the basic notions of bourgeois society ("bourgeois right" is still dominant, as he points out in the Critique of the Gotha Program...

...As a matter of fact, he always premised his vision of socialism upon the potentialities inherent in industrial development: it is therefore quite surprising to find him using an imagery that is so idyllically bucolic and pastoral...

...SHLOMO AVINERI Like latter-day social engineering, its blend of arrogance and ignorance was its most detestable feature...

...Suddenly, in the midst of this historical account, Marx switches tenses and postulates what the abolition of the division of labor would imply in a future communist society...

...The rich man is simultaneously one who needs a totality of human manifestations of life and in whom his own realization exists as inner necessity, as need...

...Nonetheless, despite Marx's self-denying ordinance about schemes of future society, he allowed himself several glimpses into future alternatives...