Two centuries after the birth of Marx, the historian of socialism Gregory Claeys looks back at the intellectual formation of the thinker and his multifaceted posterity, from the October Revolution to the renewed interest he has aroused since the 2008 crisis.
La Vie des Idées: The recent biographies of Marx by Jonathan Sperber and Gareth Stedman Jones have attempted to rediscover the “historical” man, far from the Marx of politicians and ideologues. On the contrary, you are returning to the history of Marx’s ideas. As a historian of socialism, what is the specificity of your approach?
Gregory Claeys: I wanted to reaffirm Marx’s place in a well-established socialist context. It was necessary to take into account the previous failure of communitarian socialism (Fourierism, but especially Owenism, for which Engels had a certain sympathy), which explains why by 1848 the perspective of an overthrow of capitalism by revolutionary means had gained credibility. Just as the Owenists and other socialists of the early 19th century XIXe century, Marx believed in the need to imagine the future in order to propose a critique of capitalism. This vision of the future essentially contained the idea, rather ill-defined, of the advent of a communist society. As for his critique of capitalism, it first developed, around 1843-1844, around the concept of “species being” (Gattungswesen) borrowed from Feuerbach, before being embodied in an “ethics of becoming”. According to the latter, the workers’ movement and the feeling of shared purpose induced by the division of labor prefigure these pillars of the future society that are solidarity and sociability.
In my view, Marx’s project remains utopian in many respects. In particular, he supports the idea of total development, and rejects specialization and the division of labor between manual and intellectual activities. Marx is often studied as a philosopher, as a political economist, and as a revolutionary. Far be it from me to minimize these aspects of his career; however, it seems to me that his work is less distant from other forms of socialism than one might think.
La Vie des Idées: You therefore reaffirm the need to abandon the distinction between “utopian” socialism and “scientific” socialism. How can a redefinition of the idea of utopia shed new light on Marx’s thought?
Gregory Claeys: Marx, and even more so Engels and then Lenin, always maintained that the “materialist conception of history” had nothing in common with the chimera of the “(dulvo) editions of the New Jerusalem” which, according to them, characterized the thought of the first socialists. Marx had a more rigorous formulation of historical analysis than most of the socialists who had preceded him. However, in one of my previous works, Machinery, Money and the MillenniumI showed that the Owenites in particular were on this point the heirs of the great thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, sources which were also central to Marx’s thought and his renewed vision of socialism.
Around 1845-1846, Marx developed his determinist theory, which postulated the inevitability of the proletarian revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat and finally, through it, the advent of communist society. Given the failure of this theory, the term “scientific socialism” now appears confused and obsolete. If I see Marx as a utopian, it is therefore first of all in the positive sense of the term: the ability to envisage a distant future, in order to question a possible evolution of capitalism. Secondly, it is a question of utopia in more neutral senses: a set of hypotheses as to the forms that the path towards the future society would take, and this society itself. These assumptions concern, for example, the improvement of human behavior after the abolition of private property, the possibility of abolishing politics and the state (once workers would receive a decent wage, and form the class of administrators), the absence of conflict between the revolutionary party and the other branches of proletarian power, which would make the need for a separation of powers obsolete, etc.
Marx is thus a utopian in a plurality of senses. This is clear when he imagines a world where machines would do most of the work, to allow human beings to flourish in the free time thus created. This vision, which contrasts with the solutions he offers to the problem of alienation in 1844, dominates Marx’s late writings. It echoes the writings of the early socialists, Robert Owen in particular. In this vision, the most basic forms of exploitation of man by man have been abolished. This is a goal that remains of immense nobility.
La Vie des Idées: Marx has often been described as a difficult author, which seems to contradict the very wide diffusion of his thought, to the point that some of his concepts (the dictatorship of the proletariat, religion as the “opium of the people”) have entered everyday language. How do you explain this paradox?
Gregory Claeys: It is questionable whether the majority of Marxists have actually read Marx… Most of the texts we have today have in reality only been widely disseminated since the second half of the 19th century. XXe century. The popularity of Marx’s thought therefore rests above all on the summaries made of it by Engels later (notably in Utopian Socialism and Scientific Socialism in 1880), and on the Manifesto of the Communist Partya work that is certainly programmatic, but very easy to access. Intellectuals and the most educated have tended to insist on the difficulty of Marx by linking him as much as possible to Hegel, partly in order to ensure their own dominant position in the sphere of ideas. Marx’s system can however be summed up in a set of relatively simple propositions; in the course of history, most Marxists have then reduced this system to a single principle: the end of exploitation, either by the disappearance of landed property, in countries where the peasantry was predominant, or by that of the capitalists in countries that were more industrialized.
La Vie des Idées: How did the October Revolution constitute a turning point in the history of Marxism?
Gregory Claeys: At the end of the XIXe century, Marxism had gained ground in Western Europe, particularly in Germany, where the prospect of a peaceful transformation of capitalism (an option that Marx and Engels had accepted, under certain conditions) had become a rather realistic alternative. In the evening of his life, Marx’s Russian admirers had encouraged him to consider the possibility of a revolution in a country where capitalism was only in its infancy, where the proletariat was almost non-existent, and where a long process of industrialization would be necessary to ensure the development of the economic base, an effort indispensable when it comes to freeing up both free time and wealth. Lenin, as we know, had proclaimed himself a Marxist, in order to reinterpret Marx from an anti-imperialist angle. Thanks to the victory of the Bolsheviks, Marxism imposed itself in the XXe century as the great reference for any critical discourse of capitalism, imperialism and exploitation in general.
But of course, Lenin also fundamentally altered Marxism. In particular, he added to it the idea of democratic centralism, in other words, the dictatorship of the party before that of the proletariat, and that of the nomenclature on the rest of the population – aspects that Marx had never considered. Never did his ideals prescribe the formation of a police state in times of revolution and civil war, nor the elimination or neutralization of the so-called enemies of the regime or the proletariat. Animosity toward the bourgeoisie and the kulaks (wealthy peasants) led to their near disappearance as a class.
La Vie des Idées: Marx’s posterity has suffered from his historical association with Soviet totalitarianism. Consequently, the desire to re-evaluate his thought can lead to rewritings of history, or even to the adoption of a counterfactual stance. How can historians avoid this pitfall?
Gregory Claeys: In my view, a historian must tell the truth first. Building political capital from what is true or not should come second. The opening of the Soviet archives in 1991 confirmed Solzhenitsyn’s personal experience on an even larger scale. Around 2010, other information, also previously censored, revealed the extent of mass executions and waves of famine in China. The same is true of the disaster that was the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. I discussed these terrible events at length in Dystopia: A Natural History (2016), and this gave me material to rethink Marx. I wanted to revisit his myth without ever losing sight of the errors of Marxism-Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism in XXe century, and consequently, without ever refusing to confront it with this posterity. I have long felt that the relative defeat of left-wing discourses after 1991, particularly in the face of the rise of neo-liberal ideologies, comes partly from an inability to fully confront this totalitarian baggage, and to recognize that the latter stems partly from Marx. Accepting this, on the contrary, allows us to identify what, within his thought, can be preserved.
La Vie des Idées: Since the economic crisis of 2007-2008, Marx has experienced a rather unexpected resurgence of interest. How does this rediscovery differ from older forms of Marxism? Is Marx still relevant today?
Gregory Claeys: It has been nearly 20 years since Marxism was a mass current of thought, except in China and a few other countries, such as Cuba, Belarus, and North Korea. The lingering effects of the 2007-2008 economic crisis have now been aggregated or integrated with three other developments characteristic of the early 20th century. XXIe century: robotization and the prospect of a life “outside of work”, the massive increase in economic inequality, and environmental degradation, on a scale such that some predict that the end of humanity could well take place during this same century. Marx has much to teach us about these first two factors, but very little about the third. Using his thinking is also problematic at a time when the proletariat, this classic actor of the revolution, is now a class in decline. Marx had, however, proposed a vision of existence in which the masses would no longer be totally dependent on the social necessity of working, since machines would have largely taken over, and in which oppression, coercion and exploitation would have been more or less eliminated. It is this vision that remains worthy of interest today.