Why has Marxism never worked in Practice?
Tension between Utopia and Reality
In his various works, Marx gradually establishes a vision of a society that transcends the capitalist system that existed throughout his life. This was for the most part a utopian 'vision'; the reader of Marx will not that less attempt is made to detail the exact steps needed to progress towards this vision, or moreover, the likelihood of those steps succeeding. This is one of the reasons for the development of Marxist thought by other theorists such as Lenin, Trotsky, Mao &c. But the upshot of this was that all Marxist ideology was essentially utopian, and bore little relation to the realities of societies (such as the USSR) in which socialist Marxism was allegedly 'being built'. This gap between the utopian ideal and the reality was bridged by two basic means: firstly, under the banner of the 'construction of socialism', reality was forcibly accommodated to the requirements of ideology; secondly, this backward reality was mythologised or 'utopianised' in such a way as to present it as the process of the true realisation of the socialist idea (see e.g. USSR, China, Cambodia etc.). It could also be said that the urge to universalise the ideology and to extend it into every sphere of life, stems to a large degree from the need, understood consciously or not, to have the mythologised representation accepted as widely as possible as the true and actually prevailing reality.
What about Marx's break with utopianism in the
Communist Manifesto, in which he claimed that his socialist vision was grounded in real trends of social development? This can be answered by saying that to a large extent, Marx's analysis was achieved by a systematic overstatement of prevailing economic and social conditions of the day; early capitalism was 'utopianised' (in that Marx sought to portray
his conception of the utopianised bourgeois society) in order to transcend his own socialist utopianism. At its very birth, Marxism took over and reworked the utopian impulse and transposed it from the future vision to the lived capitalist reality (which, in the end, developed very differently to how Marx had envisaged), an idea which was not consonant with actually existing social conditions nor the expectations of those people who were themselves expected to take part in the social reengineering he proposed. Meanwhile, Marx's pure socialist utopian vision remained an unachievable endpoint in socialist socieities, and is commonly invoked by those who claim that hitherto 'socialist' societies did not represent Marx's true vision; as Roger Scruton noted cogently in his recent book
The Uses of Pessimism:
The ideal remains forever on the horizon of our experience, unsullied and untried in its entirety, casting judgement on all that is actual, like a sun that cannot be looked at but which creates a dark side to everything on which it shines.
Human Malleability and Perfectability
From the beginning, a core and fateful element of Marxism was its extraordinary belief in the malleability of both social institutions and the human personality. Here, the ideology's characteristic one-sidedness blended with a dubious legacy of the Enlightenment. Marx's linear dialectic of social development was interpreted by later theorists in such a way as to privilege social forms (i.e. the structures of society), amounting to a denial of the continuities of history and civilisation, and their replacement by a series of sudden, sharp 'upheavals'. Social relations, usually interpreted in shallow, oversimplified class terms, have been viewed as all-determining, which is a theoretical position that also underpinned the utopian socialist endeavour. In addition, Marxist thought was fundamentally underpinned by an Enlightenment belief as humans as essentially perfectable; in this respect, Rousseau has been as influential as Marx. In countries such as the USSR, this brew undoubtedly contributed to an instrumentalist view of the individual. It was as if an enlightened aristocracy of 'architects' viewed the mass of citizens as mere 'bees' in the hive of collectivist society, or perhaps more accurately, little screws in the rational, machine-like structure of society. The practical upshot of Marxist ideology was therefore that humans were reduced to individually-insignificant bearers of labour power.
Economics and the Enlightenment
Marx was, perhaps, responsible for the 'original sin' which has blighted all forms of socialism since. Subsequent theorists followed Marx in his belief that commodity production was a notion alien to 'true' socialism, and this non-market conception of socialist ideology became an integral component of the world's most notable Communist societies. But why did this understanding of socialism come to predominate as it did? My belief is that it was fundamentally due to Marx's unswerving commitment to Enlightenment rationalism, therefore making the free market (in Marx's mind) the ultimate expression of spontaneous forces beyond human control. To have economic life shaped by the blind forces of nature was considered by Marx to be incompatible with humankind's attainment of the true realm of freedom. Just as nature was to be conquered by human endeavour, so were the natural forces within society destined to be conquered.
Marxist Societies in Historical Context and the Search for a 'Reasonable' Marxism
It is almost universally accepted that Stalinism and similar theories, while purporting to be Marxist, were a corruption of the Marxist ideal. This in itself does not disprove Marxist theory, however; indeed, the Marxist will likely say that the theory is still capable of producing the intended outcome,
provided that is not perverted by power-seeking, or inadequate economic development, or international conflict, or whatever. But consider another case, where the failure of the 'Marxist' society lies not in totalitarian terror, but pervasive squalor and stagnation (Brezhnevite Russia comes to mind). If we picture 'Marxism' as a big circle, we can see that two slices of this circle have been removed as not applicable to the actual Marxist ideal. One slice is that of socialism perverted by Stalinist terror, and the other is that of Brezhnevite corruption and ineffectiveness.
Now that these two forms of Marxism in practice are disregarded, we can see that is is not Marxism
per se that promises utopia, it is what
differentiates 'good' socialism from the failures of Marxism previously mentioned. It is no longer Marxist tenets such as the socialisation of property which represent the ideal (as socialisation of property also occurred in Stalinist/Khmer Rouge-type regimes that were Marxist failures), but is the special and
unidentified characteristics of the 'good' Marxism which separate it from the failures. The power to create utopia has really shifted from the Marxist idea to some unidentified variable, X (or Y or Z), which characterises a successful Marxist society, and whose identity and characteristics are themselves in doubt. So there is a possible society which is devoid of private property
and has additional unspecified characteristics x, y and z...
and it is 'good'.
The upshot of all this is that it is quite obvious that all hitherto-existing Marxist societies have been devoid of x, y and z, and moreover, nobody has any clue what those variables might be. The idea that a successful Marxist society might be constructed on the back of x, y and z is, for me, too incredulous to take seriously. There may be some order which is desirable, but actually finding out what x, y and z are is evidently so difficult that it strains one's belief that the right outcome might occur at all.
Those are the reasons, in my mind, why Marxism has never worked.