Notes from a module called 'modern ideologies', with an extra essay on Marxism from my second year.
Summary: The concept and term "ideology" arose during the Enlightenment, as political thinkers turned to reason to create systems of thought that would address every individual. The definition of the word is disputed, so it is difficult to say how an ideology differs from, say, Plato's Republic.
In Medieval times, society was based upon a functional heirachy. There was no place for individuals in political thought in the sense that they should be considered as political entities. Rather, as with Plato even, they were simply functional entities that, when part of the whole, benefit the whole, including themselves.
Ideas were governed by the church and the monarchy. Despite even the printing press, the state and church could use copyright, royal decrees and the Pope's stamp of approval, in combination with widespread illiteracy and poverty, to keep ideas strictly censored and in the domain of the powerful.
With the Enlightenment came rationalism, empiricism and natural philosophy. These developments suggested that society could be studied in a science in a similar way to other rational disciplines, rather than by appeal to tradition and mysticism. To overthrow the old intellectual order, advocates of the Enlightenment realised that individuals must be empowered, both intellectually and politically. So emerged the idea of a political science that study society based upon observation and reason.
Parallel to this intellectual development was a series of economic and social changes. Notably, merchants, guilds and other professionals began to emerge as a political class, as money and trade took on a bigger role. The new landowning bourgeoisie recognised the need to change the political order to give them legal rights to property, which requiring taking the exclusive right of property from the monarchy. And as the bourgeoisie began to assert themselves through thinkers like Locke, so socialist thinkers, notably in France, began to advocate universal franchise.
One could say that ideology emerged when philosophers began to develop systems of thought that touched upon philosophy, politics, economics, sociology and all other areas of thought. Of course most of the disciplines didn't yet exist, but philosophers nonetheless considered their subject matter. These systems were justified insofar as they were based on observation and reason, and insofar as they could improve society. If we accept this, then the 18th and 19th century revolutionary wars reinforced the impact of ideology both on political science as an academic discipline and on society. That the term "ideology" was first coined by an imprisoned French revolutionary seems to support this historical definition of the term.
However the ideas that we commonly associate with ideologies - liberal, communal or environmental, for example - often pre-existed ideology. So how did the use of ideas change with the advent of the term in the 1790s? According to the historical definition given above, it was that the systems of thought transcended academic disciplines. But Plato and Aristotle both did that. One alternative definition lies not in the ideologies themselves, but in their intentionality.
Pre-ideology, thinkers like Plato, Machiavelli and even Locke wrote their works to influence a powerful subsection of society. Even if the aimed to benefit the whole of society, they nonetheless intended to influence those who could implement the changes. Plato courted influential Athenian politicians, whilst Locke tried to persuade the monarchy to admit God-given rights to landowners. But ideologies aimed to address the whole of society, both in the effects of their system of thought and in the way they delivered it to make changes.
But is this true? Did Marx seek to influence the upper class, and even the bourgeoisie? Did Burke want to influence the working class? Or more crucially, did they need to influence these sectors of society for their ideology to have its impact? It would seem that throughout history, different political philosophies have transcended various academic disciplines, have addressed various sections of society, have sought to influence different sections of society. There is no sudden change here with the emergence of ideology.
An alternative definition that is more essentialist than those historical definitions would relate closely to what we today called framing. According to this definition ideologies seek to create an intellectual basis from which we analyse observations and arguments. In other words, ideologies frame our worldview. Depending on your disposition, this either makes ideologies a useful intellectual tool that makes us more discerning, or it makes them an irrational smokescreen.
An essay I wrote in a great hurry... it's quite muddled and doesn't really address many issues I had in mind. The most important difference that I never got around to analysing is that environmentalists generally propose extremely autocratic solutions to many ecological problems, such as the Kyoto Protocol, progressive taxation, making various environmentally damaging activities illegal, and so on. In other words, though environmentalism takes capitalism to task for the destructive heirarchies it creates and sustains, practitioners of the ideology also often support hierarchical solutions. Only those on the fringe of the movement, such as green anarchists and eco anarchists, maintain a principled opposition to such solutions.
The second interesting difference is that environmentalists, especially deep ecologists, place an emphasis on the values and virtues of ecological balance, and of life in all of its forms. Though environmentalism generally opposes hierarchy it does so not as an a priori principle, but because of the consequences of hierarchy. Anarchism, on the other hand, tends to assign the question of hierarchy a more central normative role.
That the anarchist and environmentalist critiques of capitalism are extremely similar is not a coincidence. Environmentalism as an ideology grew out of anarchism, and so shares many themes and much analysis with the classical anarchist critique of capitalism. However, environmentalists hold different normative values, and the solutions implied by the critiques of some of the more mainstream environmentalists are incompatible with anarchism.
The anarchist critique of capitalism begins with an attack on the division that is not dissimilar to Marxism. There are three main components to this critique: that property is theft, that wage labour is slavery and that profits are a form of exploitation. They rely on an understanding of the division of labour under capitalism that produces two distinct classes, the workers and the capitalists. Workers are those who are forced through economic necessity to sell their labour to the capitalists, whilst capitalists own and make money from their property, and their employment of the workers. They also rely on a labour-based theory of value, according to which objects only have value insofar as they are products of our labour
Proudhon, the first writer to provide a coherent account of anarchist political theory, famously wrote that “property ... is robbery†(Proudhon 1840). He distinguished between private property – that which the capitalists own and earn money from – and personal property – that which is occupied for its immediate utility. Anarchists acknowledge the right to personal property such as clothing and land upon which one can perform self-sustaining work, including the right to exclude others from the property, so long as one makes use of it personally. This is understood both as a natural right and a political necessity to avoid a tragedy of the commons, whereby too many people using common property may overuse it and thereby diminish its use value. Private property, on the other hand, is condemned because the owner contributes no labour to it, yet claims exclusive rights to it and to the money earned from it.
Property also creates coercive hierarchies that violate the positive values of freedom and equality. A worker who owns his house and the tools of his trade can perform his work freely, whereas a worker who rents his accommodation and uses tools owned by his employer is forced into a submissive relationship. The relationship is a microcosm of the coercive relationship between citizen and state. Furthermore, private property will tend to consolidate in the hands of a minority of owners, as they will be born into a society with an uneven distribution of resources and so will be able to exploit their advantage against those worse off. Without any political or financial equality, universal participation, ownership and franchise become impossible.
In an anarchist society, all would have the right to personal property, but private property would be abolished, leaving the means of production and public utilities in the commons, where society could collectively and equitably allocate its use without abridging individual liberty (Anarchist FAQ, section B.3).
An inevitable consequence of private property is that the division of labour will be characterised by wage labour relationships, which anarchists believe constitute slavery. Workers will sell their labour to capitalists and receive only a proportion of its market value in return leading to exploitation and alienation. The worker is exploited because the capitalist steals the product and then returns only a proportion in return, and is able to do so through coercion. Alienation is a far more complex issue, but it can be most succinctly described as an unhealthy relationship between the worker and his labour, his products, his fellow workers and his species essence. It constitutes a loss of reality, such that workers are unable to realise themselves through their labour as free, conscious, productive individuals in communities, a result of the coercive division of labour. It is an objective condition in the individual that produces subjective feelings of misery and lack of fulfilment (Marx 1992, Ollman 1980). Both exploitation and alienation can only be overcome when workers exchange products directly with each other in a market system, rather than selling their labour to capitalists. Artisanship would replace employment as the mode of production. Workers would keep control of the products and their labour, and would be able to direct their labour towards personal development as well as social needs.
The distorted relations found under capitalism constitute a “perverted hierarchy of values... that places humanity below [private] property†(Anarchist FAQ, section B.1.3). By valuing everything only in terms of its capital potential, and ignoring use and interpersonal values, capitalism forces an unnatural hierarchy upon people that both directly represses individuals and gives coercive actors such as the state a mechanism to further repress them.
Bakunin, a contemporary of Marx, developed Proudhon's largely individualistic critique of capitalism, and its positive components, by adding a communal perspective. It is, he said, necessary to account for productive communities in order to protect liberty in a social context, because society will inevitably exist and revolve for the most part around relations of production (Wikipedia entry on Anarchism). So if capitalism creates unethical relationships of domination and exploitation, then anarchism must offer a positive alternative. He emphasised the critical role of workers engaging in self-managed organs of production and distribution that would be radically participative, decentralised and that would respect liberty and equality. This was in part a reflection on the capitalist state, which centralises coercive power and forces management upon workers.
The state is, according to anarchists, ultimately coercive and inegalitarian because its primary function is to protect private property and to enforce the will of a subset of the population upon the rest. Given that capitalism creates and exacerbates inequality, he said that the state is effectively a tool of the capitalists leveraged against the working class. The cause of anarchists, therefore, is to overthrow bourgeois as a means to dissolve the state and thereby dissolve the institution of private property.
Carter has criticised this theory for being overly simplistic, and in particular for failing to account both for why the state may not necessarily always be so despotic as Bakunin's description suggests, and for why state actors might be coerced or act so starkly in the interests of one subset of society against another. In contemporary democratic states, for example, governments rely on the electorate to re-elect them and accept constitutional limits to their power that, in some cases, give surprising liberties to society (Carter 1993: 41-42). Though liberal democratic capitalist states are far from their despotic or aristocratic predecessors, one can defend Bakunin by suggesting that the state and those behind its actions use capital flows to repress the working class, which they can control, without recourse to political repression. Where states have acted economically in the interests of the working class, for example by creating a welfare system and levying redistributive taxation on the rich, the states are simply working at odds with capitalism. One can either interpret this as a sign of weakness in the capitalist state, needing to bend to the needs of the working class to stay elected, or as a sign of strength, that it can give a little ground to the working class such that it remains electorally viable and can then otherwise repress them; the poor may have a small handout from the state when unemployed, but the gap between rich and poor continues to grow.
The fact that capitalism requires a state at all is seen as a sign of its unethical nature, according to anarchists. Capital flows need to be controlled, directed and regulated; failing industries that are nonetheless useful to capital overall, such as nuclear power, require state handouts; companies need state regulations to enshrine limited workers rights, and the strong arm of the state to enforce them where workers revolt. Even the most laissez-faire form of capitalism, which many so-called free market anarchists affirm would be coherent with anarchist values, private property requires protection, which requires coercive powers such as the police and army. These relations constitute an irrational authority that is based upon power rather than competence and consent (Anarchist FAQ, section B.1).
At times, capital can coerce states, a fact that backs up Bakunin's assertion of the state being an instrument of the rich. For example, states are unable to radically nationalise industries or promote non-capital based values for fear of capital flight. And through international institutions such as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund, poor states are forced to accept the laissez-faire prescriptions of rich states, which are themselves acting in the interest of capital growth and accumulation (Graeber 2002, Anarchist FAQ: section D.2.1).
There remains one more aspect of the anarchist critique of capitalism: that of the capitalist portrayal of man as essentially rational and self-interested. This narrow definition of the psychology of man is necessary to explain why society should operate on competitive relationships of production and consumption, and is framed by capitalists as an accurate portrayal of our natural state. The idea finds its most stark advocacy in Social Darwinism, which suggests that Darwin's theory of evolution gives a scientific basis for the evolutionary advantage of competition. Kropotkin, in response to this, wrote a theory of the evolutionary advantage of cooperation. He studies species such as bees and locusts, as well as instances of cooperation in his contemporary societies, to show that cooperation and mutual aid ought to be the basis of economic relations (Kropotkin 2003). This pseudo-scientific view gave weight to the normative claims that competition debases humans and creates relations of hierarchy, and that humans neither wholly self-interested nor wholly benevolent (Lux 1990).
So, to summarise, the classical anarchist critique of capitalism has various components. Anarchists point to the division of labour, which is based upon wage slavery, exploitative profits and a form of property that constitutes robbery. Capitalism centralises power, opposes self- and collective-management and debases workers. It does this based on an unethical normative claim about the value of capital, and on a dubious portrayal of human nature as essentially competitive and self-interested. Capitalist societies are monolithic, repressing opportunities for life to unfold freely (Gorz 1994: 11).
In the 1950s, Murray Bookchin first developed an environmental critique of capitalism from an anarchist standpoint. It can be argued that his work simply brought out the ecological implications of earlier anarchists' work, in particular that of Kropotkin whose theory of the evolutionary advantage of mutual aid and cooperation necessarily involved small self-sustainable communities that fit into the natural world. At the heart of the so-called “eco-anarchist†critique of capitalism is the assertion that a green or ecologically sustainable capitalism is logically impossible, since capitalism is based on the principle of continuous, unfettered growth in production and consumption (Anarchist FAQ, section E). This means that ecosystems will be exploited without consideration for the environmental impact, until that impact becomes a sufficiently significant externality for it to affect their capital value, which will usually be far too late to save the inherent value of the ecosystem. This thought is both a continuation of the anarchist critique of the normative and deterministic value of capital, and a recognition of the need of capital to expand into new lifeworlds. The important point here is that for anarchists, ecological crisis is not caused by overpopulation, unsustainable governance or corporate excess, but rather by deeper, “root†causes in capitalism itself. Only by destroying capitalism and creating an anarchist society, they say, can we hope to avoid future ecological crises.
The environmentalist critique of capitalism shares many themes and much analysis with the anarchists. This is unsurprising given that, as I have mentioned, early environmentalist theorists such as Bookchin were anarchists. The values with which the environmental critique begins parallel those in the anarchist school of thought. They value biodiversity, sustainable ecosystems and lifeworlds in which people can “realize their potentialities as members of the human community and the natural world†(Bookchin 1977: 370, Drengson 1999). Though the environmental movement is ideologically diverse, ranging from the eco-anarchists to the mainstream green political parties, all share these values, which necessarily oppose capitalism since they challenge the deterministic value of capital.
The most anarchistic branch of the environmentalist movement is of course eco-anarchism. Their critique of capitalism is based upon the classical anarchist critique I have described so far with one critical addition: that a hierarchy putting humans above the rest of the natural world is wrong, and that societies ought to fit in with the natural world rather than develop or heavily manage it for their own needs. The solution they propose is to destroy civilisation and revert to living in small “eco-villagesâ€, which they say would be compatible with the positive green values I explained above. As a philosophy to direct practical life matters it seems far fetched, especially given that so many people in capitalist societies would have to sacrifice so many material possessions and lifestyle choices. For anarchists, however, the idea of small communities are extremely attractive because of the hugely increased pragmatism of having no hierarchies, respecting individual liberty and of each individual realising their full potentialities.
In response, I would object that it would be extremely difficult to realise your full potential as a social being with productive and creativity capabilities in such a small scale society; your productive power would be extremely limited without a division of labour on a larger scale to provide the tools and materials you may need; your social circle would be small and may not cater for both your creative and social potentials, e.g. as a violinist who would like to play in a full orchestra or as somebody who likes to meet a lot of people. Though none of this would be made impossible in an eco-anarchist society, it would be far more difficult than in a society based around larger communities, a larger-scale division of labour and more ecologically exploitative practices. This seems to weaken the eco-anarchist critique of capitalism.
Alan Carter is one of many theorists who has tried to develop a green political theory that goes beyond the anarchist critique of capitalism. He proposed a model of capitalism that overcomes the problems with the anarchist critique – namely that it places too much emphasis on the power of capital over the state, and that it cannot account for instances where the relationship between capital and the state seems to be benign or at least less antagonistic towards the values of anarchism (Carter 1993: 41-43). According to his model, there are four primary forces in capitalist society, which, when appreciated as a whole, represent a self-sustaining and self-empowering structure that can only be opposed as a whole. In the first place you have the state, or to be more correct the actors that dominate and control political relations (a point I will return to later in this essay). The state manages relations of economic control, directing capital according to its interests. The more prosperous the economy, the greater the forces of production, since they are developed by relations of economic control directing themselves towards the goal of capital creation and accumulation. Strong forces of production can in turn support forces of defence, including the police and the army. And these forces of defence empower and, one might say, embolden the actors dominant within relations of political control (Carter 1993: 43-44).
I would add that strong forces of production also quell disquiet in the electorate, and in societies where repression is more stark, revolt. As can be seen in contemporary capitalist societies, consumerism pacifies voters by making them relatively content, or at least by giving them other worries and goals than liberty, self-realisation and ecologically sustainable lifestyles.
The crucial point about Carter's model is that it constitutes a dynamic circle that cannot be broken by attacking one point, one force. Attempts to temper capitalism by introducing legislation that creates ecological bias would, according to this model, fail because actors within relations of political control would simply revert or route around the legislation according to the dictates of capital. It is also important to recognise, as I mentioned earlier, that these actors are not simply “the state†understood as a monolithic entity serving the needs of capital. In the first place, states aren't so monolithic as anarchists suggests, constituting national governments, parliaments, local governments, the police, the army and other branches besides. Corporations, NGOs and people's associations may also figure prominently in political relations. Given this, it is easy to see how the legislature that lent towards more ecologically friendly legislation may be overruled or persuaded to change its mind.
Carter's model, however, can be interpreted in various different ways. On the one hand it seems to support the anarchist critique of capital, arguing for the negation of every force present in capitalist society and their replacement with ecologically benign forces. On another interpretation it can support mainstream green political parties, who seek to infiltrate the relations of political control whilst transforming forces of economic control, production and defence. Their emphasise on holistic solutions and on the values of biodiversity, liberty and decentralisation seem entirely compatible with Carter's model, but incompatible with the eco-anarchist solutions. Furthermore, many of their solutions, or rather their tactics to achieve long-term solutions, involve radical constraints on human liberty, usually in the form of laws that make illegal ecologically destructive lifestyle choices or modes of production.
In conclusion, then, the anarchist and environmentalist critiques of capitalism share many themes. They both oppose the deterministic value of capital and the forces and modes of production and hierarchy that they create. However, anarchists emphasise the affects on individual liberty more strongly, whilst environmentalists vary between a broadly anarchist critique to fairly establishment critiques that advocate transforming capitalism using capitalism's mechanisms. The implications of these more establishment ideologies are fundamentally incompatible with anarchism.
Author unknown (date unknown). Anarchist FAQ. http://www.spunk.org/library/intro/faq/sp001547/index.html, on file with author
Author unknown (date unknown). 'Anarchism'. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism, on file with author
M. Bookchin (1977). 'Anarchism and ecology'. In An anarchist reader, ed. Woodcock. London: Harvester Press
A. Carter (1993). 'Towards a Green Political Theory'. In The Politics of Nature, Explorations in green political theory. London: Routledge
A. Drengson (1999). 'Introduction and Background To The Trumpeter: Journal Of Ecosophy'. On The Trumpter website, http://web.archive.org/web/20010815150241/http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/hist.html, on file with author
D.Graeber (2002). 'The New Anarchists'. In New Left Review, no. 13, Jan-Feb.
P. Kropotkin (2003). 'Mutual Aid'. Project Gutenberg Website. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4341, on file with author.
K. Lux (1990). Adam Smith's mistake : how a moral philosopher invented economics & ended morality. London: Shambhala.
K. Marx (1992). 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844'. In Early Writings. London: Penguin Classics.
B. Ollman (1980). Alienation, Marx's conception of man in capitalist society, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
J. Proudhon (1840). 'What is Property?'. Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economics/proudhon/property/, on file with author
Some very sketchy notes on this ideology.
A modern principle
- only developed, and found, in societies where change is commonplace
- developed towards end of enlightenment; reaction against appeals to human nature, e.g. Locke, the Philosophes and Rousseau
- first really emerged in the writings of Burke:
--- An Irishman working in common law in England
--- Respected middle ages and saw a positive role in ritual and tradition
--- Came to this view from law, which is essentially the accumulation of centuries of tweaking traditions
--- Alarmed by French Revolution, 'Rights of Man' and attacks on tradition, e.g. the church and chivalry
--- Saw connections between Locke, the English Revolution of 1688 and the French Revolution of 1792
--- First book was 'Reflections on the Revolution in France'
Understanding of human nature and morality either:
- based upon history and contemporary society (functional, based in practice, rather than rationally justifiable)
- skeptical conservatism denies we can know of 'human nature', nor of morality
- if morality is knowable, it is discovered in common law, as an expression of natural and civil rights
Gradual reform of status quo, rather than radical reform according to some ideal
- G is a specialised skill, and therefore requires training and accumulation of others' part experiences
- unintended consequences of reform
- not dogmatic (e.g. few conservatives still defend slavery)
- intellectuals without property and other interests are dangerous, since they have nothing to lose; stupid aristocrats are therefore deemed better than intelligent academics, for example
Relationships based upon force
- in interest of weak to conceal this in social conventions, e.g. chivalry, attitudes towards women, etc.
- all social arrangements will cause evil to some - necessary evils - so we should accept them
From complexity
- G is very complex. Not one person, nor possibly a whole generation, can fully understand it
- If you don't understand something, you are naturally cautious in tweaking it, in case of unintended consequences
- Therefore only work for minimal changes where the affects can be better predicted
From tacit knowledge:
- tradition incorporates experience, and therefore good practice. As with common law, action should be based upon precedence
- tradition encapsulates the wisdom of all previous generations
- this does seem to justify aristocracy and elitism; Burke defended the elite, unelected, unaccountable judges
From respect for culture:
- Conservatism is pessimistic about human nature, and notes various natural inequalities (e.g. women are weaker)
- Seeks to redress natural inequalities, or soften them, through law, and through respect, chivalry, etc.
- Many prejudices are functional (e.g. chauvanism)
- Society is a contract to which all tacitly consent, embodied in its culture
Major objection: presupposes a relatively healthy society
- provides no guidance nor analysis for dysfunctional societies
- provides no way of ascertaining whether or not certain inequalities are functional
There is no single, coherent political philosophy that we can label as "feminist". Rather, there are a range of "feminisms" that begin with some common normative assertions and, for all but more libertarian and conservative feminisms, various descriptive assertions.
In the first place, all feminisms can unite around the principle that men and women are entitled to equal rights and respect. This may then be taken to mean that women and men should be formally equal (in law, a libertarian position), or that they ought to have equal opportunities (in practice, a liberal position) or that they ought to enjoy some kind of equality of outcome (requiring positive discrimination and redistribution, a socialist position).
Most feminists would also agree with the descriptive assertion that women are currently disadvantaged in terms of their rights and respect, compared to men. Libertarian, individualist and conservative feminists tend to disagree with this.
Feminisms that begin with both the normative and descriptive components can then be further divided by the focus of their attention. Where are women disadvantaged, for example? In their role in families? In the labour market? In their relations with men who tend towards sexual violence? In their biological role of reproduction? In discriminatory laws? In socially constructed gender roles backed up by social sanctions? Radical feminists, for example, tend to focus on social constructions and language.
The separation of "sex" (being biological) and "gender" (being a matter of identity) allowed feminists to argue for equality. However, some feminists have come to think of the emphasis on gender as misleading or overstated, emphasising instead the importance of race, age, ethnicity, class, religion and nationality as constituting an individual's or community's identity. Claims by the likes of Betty Friedan that women share a universal experience of their gender, that for example all housewives share their experience of domination, were criticised for speaking only to and about middle class white women in the West. Hence feminism has become subsumed into gender studies, which has in turn become part of a wider study of "identity politics".
Key questions that feminism addresses, then, are:
The evolution of these feminisms is often explained historically with the analogy of "waves", where each major development or shift in focus constituted a new wave. Briefly, the first wave supposedly concentrated on formal equality (e.g. suffrage, property rights, etc.); the second wave concentrated on equality of experience throughout life (e.g. in education, the workplace, and at home), incorporating radical critiques of gender construction; the third wave encapsulates a wide range of positions, each responding to some shortcoming of second wave feminism (e.g. Queer Theory, the girlie movement to assert the positive in femininity, post-colonialist and anti-racist feminism addressing the issues of race, nationality, etc.)
Radical feminists explored the notion that gender is socially constructed, rather than being something innate in our biology. Thus social circumstances that may vary in different contexts define the norms and expectations associated with gender. One is not born but becomes a woman, as Simone de Beauvoir famously said. Socialisation processes include gender roles assigned (e.g. girls play with dolls while boys play with action figures) and gender roles learned (e.g. children grow up with the mother as a housewife and the father as the breadwinner). Socially constructed gender roles can then account for gender characteristics, such as women being more caring and men being more competitive.
The notion of context being important here can be expanded to explain cultural and structural differences such as race, ethnicity, etc. It also provides the obvious account of how gender roles will adapt to new socialisation processes, e.g. where both mother and father take equal share of the childcare and breadwinning roles.
Some have criticised the centrality of social construction, however. They argue that social constructionists see the human mind as a neutral entity that has gender mapped onto it, whereas in fact sexual differences will affect gender development. Radical feminists can accommodate a weak form of this argument that discusses how sexual differences may affect learning processes, e.g. procreative functions. They cannot, however, accommodate the idea that we are born with (weak) gender roles, that females and males are inherently different.
The only response to this is that, though some aspects of gender may be innate, that doesn't justify all aspects of gender being determined by biology, and that women and men ought to be able to define more equal gender roles that may even be completely disconnected from biology (e.g. transexuals).
An alternative approach to gender roles is to look at actions that emerge in social situations. Though inextricably linked to social constructions, this theory emphasises how we "do gender" through actions like putting makeup on, wearing dresses and skirts, following competitive sports and so on. Note that masculine gender activities and signifiers are increasingly the domain of women as well as men, whilst most female activities and signifiers remain the exclusive domain of women. This difference leads to an inequality whereby women have to put in more effort to "do" their gender, where that gender is socially constructed, and where they may be ostracised for "doing" masculinity in certain ways.
Throughout his work, Marx's primary concern was the intellectual destruction of capitalism. Despite his belief in a progressive history, and in the inevitable downfall of capitalism, Marx thought that in destroying capitalism's intellectual support he could hasten its real demise and usher in a socialist era. Many of his works can be seen as reactions to the growing status of the relatively new field of political economy, pioneered by figures like Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, whose increasingly laissez-faire theories promoted an extension of exactly the features of capitalism that Marx thought were most defective. Hence his critique ranges from attacks on the complacent liberal bases of capitalism to complex analyses of the economics of the day and of leading theorists.
Though he certainly didn't tackle these themes in any particular chronological order, I will tackle them thematically and logically, from the liberal foundations, through his theories of alienation, commodification, fetishism, exploitation and immiseration, ending with his empirical economics. In doing this I hope to show that many aspects of his critique of capitalism were extremely successful, and still pose difficult challenges to the economic and political orthodoxy in the western tradition today, but that he also made many false or contradictory statements, and finally that he lacked a viable positive alternative and a "road map" of how we might get their from capitalism.
The most fundamental assumption of Marx's moral system is a kind of moral materialism; he asserts that "the nature of individuals ... depends on the material conditions determining their production" (Marx, 2001c : 176) He thus frames any consideration of individuals in terms of their economic and productive circumstances, a move not foreign to many of his critics, but one that would conflict with many of the more idealistic notions entertained by many liberals. In his early writings, Marx deliberately distanced himself from Hegel's idealism, which saw the material world as the phenomenal manifestation of Ideas; "According to Hegel... it is not their own life process that unites them to the state, it is the life-process of the idea that has distinguished them from itself" (Marx, 2001a : 33).
Marx's next move, based upon his materialism, was to describe the nature of the relationship between an individual and society. No doubt reacting to the common liberal belief that all individuals enter freely into all economic arrangements by means of a (hopefully mutually beneficial) contract, Marx commented that "men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production" (Marx, 2001b : 425); whilst liberals like Locke focus on what ought to be the case in an ideal society, Marx made an obvious observation of 19th century European society, and saw something that is true of today also, that it is not our choice to work - work is a matter of survival - and so to an extent it is a matter of necessity rather than freedom of will that we enter into economic contracts. In fact, one could say that it is only the comparatively wealthy that have any choice in the matter, whilst the poorer members of society must take what work they can get. So Marx saw that, if we are determined by our mode of production, then our nature is determined by society, or by those who guide it, not by our own volition.
One could object that it is always our choice to work, and that we could simply chose to live the life of a beggar, or try to live off the land in another less densely populated land, or, in contemporary developed countries, to live off the welfare system. But a Marxist would claim that in not working, such a person isn't contributing to any society and is dehumanising themselves, giving no materialist basis for their nature and no right to consider himself a member of the society that is supporting him. In other words, it is a false choice. Even a non-Marxist with compassion would have to reply that a choice between undesirable work and a life of destitution is a false choice.
But Marx went further, to claim that it is "the mode of production [that] constitutes the economic structure of society and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness" (Marx, 2001b : 425). To illustrate, a society that is predominantly based around farming will have an economy based on the seasons, markets, and definite social relations between farm owners and farm workers. If, as Marx claimed, it is the "social being [of men] that determines their consciousness", then it is the case that an individual's consciousness is determined by the forms of social consciousness, which are themselves determined by the modes of production in said society. In other words, Marx thought that it was in the economic superstructures that social and political strife have their origins, and so that political theory ought to concern itself with modes of production, rather than abstract ideas such as justice and liberty. And it was in the structures of capitalism that Marx found his major concern, and which he saw as both the source of all strife in the developed world, and as a necessary step in the development of society.
In fact, some Marxists claim that we should not criticise capitalism because it is unjust, but because "it crushes human potential, destroys fraternity, encourages the inhumane treatment of man by man, and has other grave defects generically different from justice" (Cohen : 139) Whether one accepts that interpretation or not, Marx's critique of capitalism can be seen as sidestepping the conventional debates that consume liberalism, conservatism and other political theories, and discussing not justice understood as individual liberty, but rather discussing social consciousness. It is the health of society that determines the efficacy of a given economic or political superstructure, irrespective of the justice of the superstructure.
Crucially though, despite his staunch attack on the assumptions of 19th century liberalism, he did share one foundational concept, that of the place of value in political theory, and in particular the concept of labour based value. Just as Locke thought that labour was the origin of property, where property can be understood as the currency of value upon which political superstructures are based, Marx constructed a labour theory of value, and went on to criticise capitalism based on its abuse of this value, and in particular of its commodification of labour, and its alienation and immiseration of the workers.
With this moral basis in mind, we come to Marx's critique of the productive and social conditions created by capitalism, the three key concepts of which are alienation, exploitation and immiseration, which I shall tackle in order.
Marx saw the productive process as one of the workers creating commodities, largely for the property owners. In an ideal society, he said that each ought to be able to produce according to their nature through "free, creative labour, self-regulated work" (Houghton: 233), and that through this process men could become fulfilled, they could exercise and achieve their humanity. This idea, similar to Aristotle's eudaimonic moral framework, places importance on the outcome of the productive process, and so in Marx's system judges the political and economic superstructures according to the labour based value of their social outcomes.
In Marx's time, under capitalism, there were two distinct classes - those who owned property, and those who worked for the property owners - and the working class was in a majority. Yet, as I have briefly mentioned before, the working classes weren't able to express their nature through free, self-regulated, creative labour; rather they were coerced by necessity of survival into working for the property owners, and their labour was controlled by the property owners. In fact, the property owners, who according to Marx do no socially necessary labour at all, employ workers with dead labour, what Marx called congealed labour; capitalism turns Marx's theory of value on its head, and promotes the subjugation of valuable labour to valueless trading of congealed labour in the form of money.
Marx called this situation faces by the working classes alienation. As we produce, we are changing the material nature of the world, and so through our labour we objectify our nature. If our labour is only understood in terms of the production of some good for the property owner, rather than for ourselves, then our objectified nature is removed from ourselves; in other words, our nature becomes alien to our actions, and thus we are alienated from our labour.
The process of alienation, however, is not specific to capitalism. Marx identified three stages of development in the history of society: "oriental despotism, ancient slave-holding society, and feudalism" (Buchanan: 37). In each of these we can find, to some extent, alienation taking place; under despotism, men are arbitrarily coerced by the ruling despot, and so their production will not be under their control; in a slave-holding society, slaves are wholly alienated, neither having control over their productive processes, nor ownership of their products; under feudalism the serf is given some land, but either the entirety or a portion of the proceeds are taken by coercion by the land owner. So one could object that Marx's theory of alienation seems not to be a specific criticism of capitalism, but a general criticism of economics, and that alienation is an unfortunate result of the productive process in general. But Marx thought that not only was alienation not a necessary component of the economic superstructure, but also that it was in capitalism that humanity suffered the most profound form of alienation, when the bourgeois consolidate control over our labour and commodify it, and when the product of our labour becomes the commodity of the capitalist.
The concept of commodification is unique to capitalism. Whereas in the former three stages of development, the products of labour are either enjoyed by the worker or taken directly by the property owner for their own use, in capitalism the products of all labour become commodities, traded on an open market. Once on the market, commodities only have value insofar as they are useful, and so their labour-based value is forgotten or annulled, and the new basis for value becomes their utility for the bourgeois who happen to buy the particular product. Not only are products not valued according to their labour on the market, they aren't even valued according to their social utility. Marx thus developed a theory of labour value and price value, the former based on a sound moral system and the latter based upon the market utility of commodities, congealed labour.
Marx further complicated his understanding of value by introducing the notion of exchange value, understood as the subsistence level wage offered by property owners to their workers in return for the workers' labour. To create profit, the property owner must pay the worker an exchange value lower than the price value, and the difference he called the surplus value. In producing more value than he/she benefits from, the worker is exploited, and since the worker is forced into a contract by necessity in the capitalist system, the working classes are necessarily exploited by the capitalist system. To compound this fraud, capitalism emphasises individualism, and so in working against solidarity amongst workers it makes them more vulnerable to exploitation.
And once on the market, commodities are governed by the supra-human laws of economics, effectively out of the control of society. And in the minds of individuals, commodities take on metaphysical significance:
"... with commodities. ... it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men's hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities." (Marx, Capital: 473-474)
In the marketplace, commodities can take on value that isn't even related to their utility to the bourgeois; the market works according to its own "mythical" laws, and despite our best efforts to guide it, fluctuations in the market can affect supply and demand even if, without those fluctuations, society still finds affected products necessary at the levels previous to the disruptions.
In the concepts of alienation, commodification and fetishism, Marx develops a profound sense of loss that is experienced in capitalism, more so than under any other economic superstructure in history. Add to that financial exploitation, and capitalism comes to be understood as an economic and political superstructure that systematically subjugates the working classes for the benefit of the bourgeois. The extent of the consumerism that the developed world has experienced since Marx's writings can in fact be seen as the consolidation and extension of the very things Marx noticed and criticised.
The success of his attacks on the liberal foundations and political reality of capitalism notwithstanding, it is in his critiques of the economics of capitalism, and his understanding of the role of the political economy in the downfall of capitalism, that has drawn most criticism.
Marx's first empirical economic claim was that the working classes would become poorer with time, a process known as immiseration. This theory was in fact first developed by the laissez-faire economist Malthus (in Essay on Population, 1798), who thought that the population would grow faster than production, and so increasing poverty would become inevitable. Marx held this theory in contempt, pointing out that technological innovation under capitalism allows production to grow very rapidly indeed. Instead, Marx suggested that technology would begin to replace workers leading to growing unemployment. And the unemployed, Marx suggested, were used by the capitalist as a tool to keep wages low, since the worker must always compete with someone who earns nothing, and to whom earning anything up to a subsistence wage would be an improvement. Thus, so long as unemployment remained and technology progressed, the working class would get poorer and poorer.
Of course, understood as a theory of absolute immiseration, time has shown Marx to be wrong. Wages have more or less continually increased, in parallel with the quality of life of the working classes. Moreover, there is no longer a clear class divide. One could move to say that in fact this has happened, but that the working class has been displaced into the third world, and so whilst wages in Britain, for example, have increased, the wages of those on the bottom of the economy have fallen in dramatic steps. But still, wages in most parts of the third world continue to rise on average. Immiseration is better understood as a relative phenomenon, since, relative to the wages of the richest, the wages of the poorest members of the global society have continually fallen, especially in periods of economic liberalisation.
Marx also noted fluctuating unemployment, and saw periodic economic crises as symptoms of deep-seated flaws within the capitalist system. He thought that the accumulation of wealth would lead to falling profits, and that in time, as growing production levels outstrip consumption, markets would begin to fail, reliant as they are on continual growth. Again, when one looks at these predictions, central as they are to his critique of the capitalist system, it looks as though he was completely wrong. Markets have continued to appear and grow, and production has met demand, resulting in an increasingly wealthy society. With a few notable exceptions, economic crises have been controlled and economies have recovered. The welfare systems of the developed world have soaked up the damage wrought by these crises, and welfare systems, often combined with minimum wage schemes, have stopped unemployment leading to absolute immiseration.
But this success could still be the precursor to Marx's predicted decline. Markets have only been able to grow because of intense marketing, expansion into third world markets (which some Marxists, notably Antonio Negri in Empire, have described as "imperialist"), manufactured and socially engineered commodity obsolescence (e.g. the need for the new mobile phone model), and ever-increasing state and consumer debts. It may be that, once third world markets are saturated, marketing won't be able to push demand up as quickly as production increases, and so capitalism will begin to fail.
But Marx also related his empirical analysis back to his political and social analyses. Cox has noted that capital has taken on a "structural power" (Cox, 1997 : 160) that now determines relations between businesses, trade unions and governments. As capitalism has evolved, as world markets become ever more complex and less regulated by states, this structural power has been consolidated. "Finance has become decoupled from production" and "as the production of state revenue going into debt service rises governments have become more effectively accountable to external bond markets than to their own publics" (Cox, 1997 : 161).
So although many of Marx's empirical economic claims seem flawed, they do still seem to hold relevance today. The massive depth of contemporary literature on Marxist thought stands as testament to the fact that, even if, analysed as a whole, Marx's critique of capitalism seems flawed and riddled with contradictions, it is still a powerful critique. And his attacks on the liberal foundations of capitalism, and of the political and social material realities of capitalism, seem to be relevant in his time through to the present day. And so in conclusion, without the space and scope to discuss his lack of viable positive alternatives, I have to conclude that Marx's critique of capitalism is extremely convincing, and holds compelling questions that we have yet to answer today, and perhaps some that we won't be able to answer for decades to come.
Buchanan,
A. (1982), Marx and Justice, Methuen
Cohen, Nagel, Scanlon (1980), Marx, Justice and History, Princeton
Cox, R.W. (1997). Global Perestroika. In Crane, G. & Amawi, A. (eds). The Theoretical Evolution of International Political Economy A reader
Houghton, D (1996), Marx and Lenin on Communism. In Bellamy & Ross, A Textual Introduction to Social and Political Theory, Manchester
Marx, K. (2001a), Critique of Hegel's 'Philosophy of Right'. In McLellan, D, Karl Marx Selected Writings 2nd ed., Oxford
Marx, K. (2001b), Preface to A Critique of Political Economy. In McLellan, D, Karl Marx Selected Writings 2nd ed., Oxford
Marx, K. (2001c), The German Ideology. In McLellan, D, Karl Marx Selected Writings 2nd ed., Oxford
Marxist theories inherit from their namesake a range of criticisms of the state. In general, we can understand the project of Marxism as advocating at first the transformation of the state, and eventually the dissolution of the state altogether. In capitalist societies, the state is seen as the political manifestation of the demands of capital, defending its interests against the working class. So for Marxists, the state is something that first must be transformed and eventually overcome. This poses two problems: first, how can the state be transformed such that it will serve the working class, and then eventually disappear? And second, how can Marxists account for a society without state power?
First I wish to elaborate why the state is seen as a problem for Marxists. In a capitalist society, the state is seen as inherently bourgeois. The state is bourgeois in principle insofar as it embodies and enforces bourgeois laws, in particular those that protect private property. In so doing it secures inequality of production under the law of abstract equality (Bonefeld, 2002: 129). Marx made a critical distinction between political emancipation, involving universal suffrage (as we understand it in Britain, i.e. a vote in representative democracy for all), and real emancipation, which goes beyond mere political representation to include an account of alienation, exploitation and commodification. The distinctive achievement of the capitalist state, according to Marxism, is its mystification of equality, creating an “illusory community of equals†(Bonefeld, 2002: 130).
The state can be seen as bourgeois in practice as well. The centre of state power, according to Mandel (2004), is not the elected representatives but the civil servants, the police, the judicial system and all other servants of the state who are permanent. This permanency of centralised power serves the interests of the political class – the bourgeoisie – rather than the working class that is supposedly being represented. We can see this in Britain and the USA, where the vast majority of elected politicians are lawyers or other professionals. Even taxation, seen as an instrument of social justice by means of economic redistribution, becomes a form of political repression. Taxation is representation for taxpayers, and given that the bourgeois will pay more in taxes than the working class, and the latter are forced to pay taxes even when they are being exploited and perhaps even immiserated by the bourgeoisie, taxation becomes representation for the bourgeoisie (Mandel, 2004).
An important feature of the Marxist account of the state is that it “is the product of irreconcilable class conflict within the social structure, which it seeks to regulate on behalf of the ruling class†(Mandel, 2004). Rather than the state determining the social structure and the nature of the class conflict by supporting and protecting their origins, it is the material conditions of production that give rise to the nature of the state. “The principal factor in determining the character of the state is not its prevailing form of rule, which can vary greatly from time to time, but the type of property and productive relations that its institutions and prime beneficiaries protect and promote†(Mandel, 2004). This is important because it means that the modern capitalist state can be seen as impermanent and fallible, such that if the property relations – and the material conditions of production to which they give rise – can change, then so can the nature of the state. If, on the other hand, we assume that the state is theoretically independent from the prevailing property relations to any extent, then Marxists must (also) focus their attention on state mechanisms as a goal as much as the property relations themselves.
Given this brief account of the problem of the state, I shall look at how convincing accounts of Marx's solution, or alternative, are. As I wrote in the introduction, his project is one ultimately of the abolition of the state. But this would not happen immediately. He saw a transition to social democratic state that will manage the means of production not for the taxpayers but according to socialist principles. In time, this state would inevitably dissolve, leading to a “withering away of the state†to leave citizens engaged in direct democracy, and then in stateless communism.
How can we move to a stateless society? We must first overcome the “illusory community of equals†(Bonefeld, 2002: 130), created by an abstract, formal equality in law and democratic elections, to establish a socialist state concerned with material equality. To achieve this, the working class would have to overcome the division between the members of civil society and their political representatives. Marx saw a model for this transition in the Paris Commune of 1871, which was governed by councillors elected by universal suffrage who were subject to recall at short notice. The ideal socialist state, similar to the experiences of 1871, would need to consolidate executive and legislative powers to bridge the perceived and real gap between the impermanent and permanent branches of power; it would need every official, from politician to civil servant, from police officer to education supervisors, to be elected; and the elected officials must have salaries no higher than a skilled worker. With this set-up, the state would inevitably wither away because those in positions of power would no longer be privileged in relation to the rest of society (Mandel, 2004, Pierson, 1986: 23). I shall address this conclusion shortly.
It was in his study of the Paris Commune that Marx came up with his problematic term, “the dictatorship of the proletariatâ€. Interpretations of this phrase are as varied as any term in the Marxist canon, but one of the most influential interpretations came from Lenin, who was concerned with the mechanisms of a working class revolution. The Paris Commune failed because it couldn't overcome the bloody hand of state power. Marxists have since recognised that the proletariat doesn't wield any real political power, whilst all previous changes in the political power structure have been preceded by changes in economic, intellectual and moral “power†(Mandel, 2004). To transform the state, many Marxists argue, the working class must seize control of the state. Lenin took this to mean that the working class must take over the state and use it to advance the cause of socialism, in a dictatorship of the proletariat (over the bourgeoisie).
The object of revolutionary socialism, according to Lenin, was therefore to seize control of bourgeois state power. His strategy was plain: “by educating a workers' party, Marxism educates an advance-guard of the proletariat, capable of assuming power and of leading the whole community to Socialism†(Lenin, 1960: 170). This capability would inevitably entail a violent element, as witnessed in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. Only by developing an advance guard of the Marxist bloc could Lenin foresee socialists overcoming the permanency of the centre of state power.
Of course this leads to a question of legitimacy. Though it may be an incorrect interpretation of the less radical, or less violent, Marxists who were more interested in the experiences of the Paris Commune, it seems fair to ask whether such an advance guard could be credited with working – and fighting – in the interests of the working class. A central part of the Marxist critique of the bourgeois state seems to be that it is self-serving, given no connexion – in terms of its material conditions – to the working class that it claims to represent. The importance of universal suffrage and elections for all public officials, and of the economic status of public officials, are disregarded in Lenin's account, which is informed by a somewhat patronising but possibly realistic assessment of the fact that the working class will not, by itself, rise up in situ against the oppressive bourgeois state. Only the merging of civil and political power can be preserved in his account, if we assume that Marx's “dictatorship of the proletariat†could be taken to legitimise a limited cadre of Marxists wielding total state power.
Lenin believed that once state power had been seized, the cadre could decentralise power into a system of Soviets, which would be drawn up along radically democratic lines. Taking cue in part from Marx's conception of alienation as regarding, in part, the lack of social management of work, the Soviets could begin to transform the type and relations of property to favour the working class. For some Marxists, this transformation should also involve the (relative) punishment of the bourgeoisie, though whether Marx intended for them to be brought down or even to below the material conditions of the working class is unsure.
Lenin's Soviets would begin to manage the nation according to his interpretation of the principles of socialism. This would have two main features: first, the class divide would transform into one single class, the working class. This is contentious, because some Marxists argue that by classless society Marx intended for there to be no homogenising class identity, for emancipation to entail a personal freedom of identity, allowing a society of heterogeneous identities to develop within the context of homogeneous material conditions. For Lenin, a classless society would be a wholly working class society, organised to produce according to socially managed goals. Such a society, Lenin suggested, would develop habits that would gradually made political representation unnecessary, as the radically democratic nature of the Soviets would lead citizens to come to agree with the representatives' style of management. Only in this environment, Lenin suggested, could the state wither away, ushering in a period of stateless communism.
It is this feature of communism – the non-totalitarian state managed communism that we recognise in the early years of the Russian experience – that most disgusts many Western observers. Lenin's habit-forming regime would amount to little more than a “capitalist factory discipline†imposed on the whole of society (Bonefeld, 2002: 131), leading not to emancipation but to a kind of self-imposed class slavery. Lenin's system thus constitutes a generalisation of the misfortunes felt by the working class under capitalism to the whole of society under communism (Bonefeld, 2002: 129). State nationalisation merely changes the political class such that only one exists, and it is subsumed by the same means of production as under capitalism. Anti-Leninists have convincingly argued that one must change the worker's relation to the means of production to emancipate society, rather than trying to change the state as a vehicle for a change in property and productive relations.
As happened in Russia, it is unlikely that those wielding power would truly represent the interests of the working class, whether because they begin to govern in their own interests whilst deceiving the working class into thinking otherwise, or because they promote an ideologically driven, and mistaken, conception of (broadly speaking) material and (narrowly speaking) political progress. It seems doubtful that either Lenin's (1960) or Mandel's (2004) accounts of the ruling bodies' allegiance to the working class would last long. Or at least there is little in the way of precedent to give Marxists hope on this point.
But even if we assume that the state will disappear as a result of revolutionary changes in property and productive relations, we must still account for certain features, or functions, of the state that seem necessary. To begin with, a revolution could not remove a state overnight, since there would still be a partial scarcity of goods, poverty and massive material inequality. Only a state can regulate social conflicts, making Marx's transitionary state absolutely necessary (Mandel, 2004).
The socialist state is also necessary to “exercise state power against all those who might wrest power from it†(Mandel, 2004). We can see this, for example, in Chavez's revolutionary government in Venezuela and in Castro's socialist Cuban state, both of which has been subjected to attempted coups and intense financial pressure. In the case of Venezuela, was a counter-coup led by loyal armed forces, with the support of the proletariat, that kept Chavez in power. Without the full power of the state, both of these revolutions would have come to abrupt halts.
A feature of this is that the socialist state is necessary to protect a communist society from outside threats, particularly other capitalist states who find themselves threatened by the expansionist tendencies of Marxist politics, or by the economic consequences of the nationalisation of key industries (such as the oil industry in Venezuela, or the sugar beet industry in Cuba). This of course raises a further question of how the state can best defend itself, and how such a strategy would fit into Marx's internationalist theory. The main competing theories advocate permanent (expansionist) revolution (Trotsky), or the hand of a strong isolationist state (Stalin). While I won't analyse either of these theories, their existence serves to demonstrate the theoretical problems created by international relations; unless Marxism were to sweep over the entire population of the world, so that there were no antagonists, there would always remain the need for a Marxist state.
To get to the crux of the problem, then, Marxists need to account for the transitionary state, both to regulate social conflicts, reshape the material and political conditions of society to be more conducive to socialist principles, and to protect nascent communist states from their antagonists. But in any revolutionary account, the state either seems to lose many of the key principles and consequences of Marx's elusive emancipation, or it seems fragile and unequipped to meet the aforementioned challenges. And given that Marx's deterministic historical materialism has fallen short, insofar as nations like Germany and Britain haven't undergone revolutions, Marxists can find little comfort in Marx's confident tone when discussing the transition from capitalism through social democracy to communism.
Another move open to Marxists is a reformist compromise. Keane, for example, has advocated a gradual transition to a socialist state through the decentralisation of power to a plurality of public spheres, to make public life increasingly autonomous (Pierson, 1986: 147-148). The reformist approaches vary from the radical – such as Keane's – to the pragmatic, such as those found in mainstream left wing parties in Europe. They advocate a gradual reform of capitalist states, transforming them over time according to socialist principles. For some, the goal is simply to achieve some of the features of emancipation that Marx discussed, whilst the goal of stateless communism is dismissed or put aside as being utopian. Habermas and Offe, members of the Frankfurt School, have gone so far as to suggest that the rise of the welfare state has made it more important than relations of production in determining the material conditions of people's lives, and so Marxists should be concerned with reforming and extending the welfare state, rather than seeking a revolution in the relations of production.
Of course both approaches still ultimately concern relations of production, and should, if true to Marx, advocate the elimination of private property altogether. There arises a tension then in reformist Marxism between the pragmatic and the ideologically sound. For many Marxists, such reformism is ideologically unsound, conceding too much ground to the bourgeoisie in the name of political expediency.
Of course the state isn't the only problem that Marxism faces. The failure of historical materialism, as I have already eluded to, undermines Marxism's deterministic presentation of history and the social sciences. And related to this failure is the inaccuracy of Marx's empirical economic claims, such as absolute immiseration. Finally, the total failure of any state to make the transition to a Marxist state without lapsing into totalitarianism or economic ruin has left Marxists with the question of whether or not their canon is realistic or even based upon an accurate assessment of the social psychology of society. But each of these problems can be more easily circumvented. The determinism of historical materialism isn't a necessary component of a Marxist – or Marxian – theory, since one can retain the notion that the material conditions and relations of production and property determine the nature of political and economic systems; one can reject the mechanical interpretations and inherit the critical techniques that historical materialism provides. Likewise one can simply replace absolute immiseration with a theory of relative immiseration. These problems can be overcome without losing the essence of Marx's work: the emancipation of the working class.
The state, on the other hand, seems an intractable problem. One cannot, it would seem, preserve the project of emancipation as Marx conceived it without accounting for a permanent state that would resolve and regulate social conflicts and protect the nascent state from antagonists. Nor can one give any wholly convincing account of how such a state would wither away leaving society with stateless communism. Therefore the state is the most intractable problem for Marxism, with no convincing solutions forthcoming.
Bonefeld, W (2002). 'State, Revolution and Self-Determination, in What is to the Done? Leninism, Anti-Leninist Marxism and the question of revolution today, ed. Bonefeld and Tischler, London: Ashgate
Lenin (1960). 'The State and Revolution', in The Essential Left: Four Classic Texts on the Principles of Socialism, London: Unwin Books
Mandel, E (2004). Marxist theory of the state, Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1969/xx/state.htm
Pierson, C (1986). Marxist Theory and Democratic Politics, Oxford: Polity Press
The nation state as a legal entity emerged with the Peace of Westphalia treaty signed in 1648. In reaction to the religious wars of the Reformation, absolutist nation states emerged around the authority of the church, who in turn bestowed legitimacy on monarchs. The nation was primarily a tool of stability for monarchies.
Nationalism emerged out of the Enlightenment in Europe. The Enlightenment, driven forward by the Philosophes, questioned the authority of the Church. As advances in mathematics and natural philosophy (science) began to develop a mechanistic understanding of the world as opposed to the mythical, magical and archaic cultures that preceded it, so enlightenment thinkers tried to systematise and mechanise other areas of philosophy, including what we know now as political philosophy and political science. Reason would determine how societies ought to be constituted and governed, not the divine right of monarchs. Rousseau suggested that sovereignty ought to lie in a "virtuous and united people" who could exercise their general will rationally to decide their own fate. Others, such as the German philosopher Herder, saw the nation as a grouping bound by a common cultural background, and opposed the imposition of political solutions that transcended cultural differences.
These ideas were picked up by the French revolutionaries, who saw the opportunity to establish a political nation that transcended regional, corporate and religious barriers. By overthrowing the Ancien Regime (comprised of the Church, monarchy and aristocracy) they established a nation where every man was equal and existing institutions (including the Church) owed their allegiance to the nation. By placing the nation at the centre of their system of politics, the French nationalists guaranteed their self-determination and the triumph of reason over myth.
Inspired by their success, the French revolutionaries turned their attention to other monarchical governments in Europe. Their interest was prompted both by a belief in a mission to rid Europe of remaining Ancien Regimes and the flight of nobles to neighbouring nations, particularly the Netherlands, Austria and neighbouring Germanic states. A joint Prussian-Austrian army attempted to invade France in 1792 but were repelled by a French army that then made incursions into the Netherlands. Despite the execution of King Louis and Marie Antoinette in 1793, and a brief alliance of monarchical powers, by 1795 only Britain and Austria opposed the French. Thus began the revolutionary wars, led eventually by Napoleon, which brought an era of cultural, political and economic domination over much of the European continent.
Though the revolutionary ideas of the French inspired many other Europeans, their clear domination of Europe gave rise to a reactionary anti-French nationalism. Led in particular by German intellectuals who resented the dominance of the French language in German high society, nationalism drove a mass politics forward, sparking many unsuccessful but important revolutions. The key, as with the French revolution, was a desire for self-determination and self-control, for nations to be defined around common languages, historical backgrounds and national identities. The ideology was crucial to the eventual formation of the unified nation states of Germany and Italy.
Nationalism in Europe led to increasingly assertive nation states, and with the discovery and exploration of the Americas, Africa and South East Asia, the more powerful states expanded into seizing colonies. Again, this sparked a wave of reactionary nationalist movements. In the South East Asian colonies, the end of the Second World War, and the removal of Japanese rule, led to nationalist revolutions in all but Vietnam, where it took until the withdrawl of US forces in 1977 to establish a nationally self-determined government (of sorts). In Vietnam, as with China, communists led nationalist movements that sought to both re-establish native rule, radically alter the social, economic and political structures that preceded them and forge alliances with other communist states.
In South America, where the Spanish presence was pervasive but militarily weak, Simon Bolivar - "The Liberator" - led uprisings in New Grenada, Peru and Bolivia towards the end of the 19th Century. They inspired many similar uprisings throughout the 20th Century, up to and including Chavez's nationalist movement in Venezuela. In South America, however, many revolutionaries such as Bolivar and Che Guevara saw the entire southern continent as constituting one Indo-American nation, sharing a language (Spanish), a religion (Catholicism), a history (struggle against colonialism, slavery), a social structure (largely racial & heirarchical) and transcending the shifting territorial boundaries grafted and reshaped by centuries of colonial strife. Colonial imperialism led to many South Americans sharing common experiences and aspirations, further confusing the notion of a nation state as comprising a liberated people in existing territories. Though the continuity of the continent as a single nation is disputed (see this paper, for example), on the level of ideology the notion continues to hold currency.
And across the former Caliphate, Islamic nationalists have fought the encroaching liberal consensus and argued for a united Islamic nation state. The movement towards national self-determination after the First World War called for the creation of nations that transcended and confused existing territories, around languages and cultural/historical backgrounds.
In other words, as nationalism spread from France, so the motivations and character of the movements changed according to the context, which encapsulates existing territorial divisions, political and cultural history, languages and present economic and political realities.
Stalin suggested that a nation must have a combination of the following factors:
Each is required since some factors may be held in common between different nations, e.g. language and economic life. Where the factors are weakened, we can say that the importance or relevance of the nation is weakened, so globalisation makes the shared economic life increasingly irrelevant, for example. Where one or more factors are missing, there is a state but not a nation.
So nationalism is an ideology that seeks to establish a nation. This will involve the development of a collective, stable unity around a common historical background and territory, through language, economic life and eventually a national character. Nation states may be formed by changing territorial boundaries to better reflect linguistic, cultural, economic and historical realities, e.g. the movement towards national self-determination after the First World War. They may also be formed as a reaction against some form of domination, e.g. the cultural imperialism of the French in 19th Century Europe. The nation must be in control of itself, i.e. of those factors Stalin described.
Given that it transcends factors that divide people, it is a universal ideology. That is to say that every grouping of people around some common factor can desire autonomy, and so every group who can share all of the factors Stalin described may desire their own nation.