Sunday, September 19, 2004
The Algebra of Human Freedom: A Reply to Norman Geras. posted by Richard Seymour
1I promised that I would attempt an evaluation of Norman Geras' recent attempted overthrow of the Marxian non-state utopia. An insider coup attempt, Geras seeks to dispute the idea that the state will "wither away" on the basis of Marxian assumptions. This would seem to make it all the more urgent that I extirpate the heresy - although, as we shall see, I don't think the argument constitutes such a threat to classical Marxist thought on this issue.
Before going into the detail of Geras' argument, I want first to establish what Marxists generally mean by the state, and by its "withering away". And I shall do so, quite naturally, by consulting Lenin's The State and Revolution . Here is Lenin reading Engels:
Summing up his historical analysis, Engels says:
"The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it 'the reality of the ethical idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of 'order'; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state." (Pp.177-78, sixth edition)[1]
This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.
And again:
Engels gives a general summary of his views in the most popular of his works in the following words:
"The state, then, has not existed from all eternity. There have been societies that did without it, that had no idea of the state and state power. At a certain stage of economic development, which was necessarily bound up with the split of society into classes, the state became a necessity owing to this split. We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of production at which the existence of these classes not only will have ceased to be a necessity, but will become a positive hindrance to production. They will fall as they arose at an earlier stage. Along with them the state will inevitably fall. Society, which will reorganize production on the basis of a free and equal association of the producers, will put the whole machinery of state where it will then belong: into a museum of antiquities, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe."
Ignore, if you will, the inevitabilitarian strain in Engels' writing - or at least put it down to wish-fulfillment. What is of particular interest for the purposes of this argument is that the state is conceived rather narrowly, although variously, as an instrument of oppression, or as the embodiment of class conflict, or as an organ alienated from society but accruing to itself the power of that society in order to quell antagonisms in it. The antagonisms are not those of a polyglot society, but are fundamental. They cannot be reconciled at any length, or by any means. Only the decisive victory of the working class can do away with these fundamental antagonisms for good, since the working class is the universal class which has no interest in allowing the persistence of oppression and exploitation and every need for a socially just order.
The kind of antagonisms that Geras is interested in are those of a society in which class has gone the way of the spinning wheel and the bronze axe. They are rooted in differences of value, of desire, of rationality. These antagonisms will not merely be benign, as in Trotsky's vision of different individuals and collectivities competing for this project, that idea etc. As Geras argues, any y- that is proscribed at the behest of a majority may indeed continue to be practised by a small number of people. And, supposing that y- is generally considered abominable, the majority will want to coerce the minority into not doing it. Suppose y- was the sacrafice of virgins by vampire cultists. Clearly, this is not a y- that is rooted in class oppression as such (although you could doubtless trace intricate connections between the leechery of capitalism and the lechery of Dracula-worshippers). Nor is it a y- that most people would want to tolerate. Why not this y-? Because socialists demand the maximum freedom for individuals commensurable with the freedom of all. Murder, knee-capping, ritualistic sexual abuse, robbery - in general, socialists would rather this sort of thing was not allowed.
2
Many of the responses so far (see the comments box below) have focused on the extent to which this or that aspect of human venality could be done away with or minimised in a post-capitalist state. Attention is rightly drawn to the connection between certain kinds of deviant behaviour and social injustice, economic disadvantage, womens' oppression etc. I certainly agree that by eliminating the factors that contribute to such behaviour, it can be minimised - and perhaps the incidence of murder and rape etc. will dwindle away into such a minimal number as for each instance to be actually shocking. But noone has so far argued that the worst aspects of human behaviour will simply absent themselves. Marxists haven't thought this, or argued for it, and it is completely absent from Engels' or Lenin's conception of the "withering away" of the state.
Evidently, arrangements will have to be made. Coercion will be entailed for both the sane and the apparently insane. Quite how this should work, I leave to your imagination, although I hope noone is chuckling over private visions of vast grey prison complexes surrounded by barbed-wire fences, searchlights and snarling dobermans. But, mark how Engels' conceives of the "withering away" of the state in Anti-Duhring:
As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection, as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon the present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from this struggle, are removed, nothing more remains to be held in subjection — nothing necessitating a special coercive force, a state. The first act by which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society — the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society — is also its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies down of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not 'abolished'. It withers away. This gives the measure of the value of the phrase 'a free people's state', both as to its justifiable use for a long time from an agitational point of view, and as to its ultimate scientific insufficiency; and also of the so-called anarchists' demand that the state be abolished overnight."
The dynamic movement away from state interference in social relations does not, as Geras acknowledges, necessarily imply that there will finally result a harmonious social order in which no coercion is applied. But Geras does believe that the expectation that one can replace coercion in the interests of a dominant class with "the administration of things" involves
an assumption that in the projected utopia everyone will voluntarily accept the rulings and decisions of the authoritative body (or bodies - since what has always been envisaged in the tradition of Marxist utopian thinking was a modern, complex and differentiated, type of society) without that compliance having to be secured through coercion or the threat of punitive sanctions. Hence, on some definitions of what a state is, there would still be a state in a Marxist-style utopia. There would still be a public institutional complex ruling authoritatively on the common affairs of the community. There would be a polity. But it would not be a state in the Marxian sense of a class-coercive body.
He goes on:
Of course, even thus clarified against the presumption of a spontaneous universal harmony (based on a putative uniformity of interests and beliefs), this vision leaves plenty for those who are sceptical towards the idea of a Marxist-style utopia to be sceptical about. If spontaneous general harmony is a very tall order, so will the always peaceable resolution of initial differences, with no need at all for legal compulsion or threat, be seen by many as being more than tall enough when viewed from anywhere humankind has ever previously stood.
3
And it is precisely the weight of historical evidence, the availability of human beings for involvement in all kinds of venality and horror ranging from petty theft to genocide, that raises Geras' sceptical eyebrow. Do Marxists really suppose that human beings, as we know them, will simply become civilised, peaceful democrats without any propensity for malice, pettiness, gross indifference? From the above - no, we don't.
Yet, from Lenin :
So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.
To which the response is "freedom to what?" We have already suggested that freedom to y- is right out. We aren't having any of that. I might add that freedom to a-, b- and c- is also a non-starter since, in this instance, they signify a) setting up a capitalist enterprise, b) forming a paramilitary organisation dedicated to promulgating facism and c) selling children into domestic slavery. Fortunately, people are still free to f-, perhaps even more often and with more p-ing. Indeed, such unfreedom is precisely part of the freedom envisaged by socialists, because I am only free insofar as I don't impinge on your freedom.
Does this necessitate a kind of coercion or not? Geras thinks that it does, and further suggests that Marxists who believe otherwise are evading something about human nature:
Marxism has drawn attention to the impulses there are within human beings to seize advantage over others and enjoy such advantage, and to a readiness to defend it brutally when it is challenged. Marxism has drawn attention, as well, to the mental skills humans are able to develop for disguising from themselves, in ways helpful to their own interests, facts about the lives and needs and sufferings of others that might be inconvenient to their own peace of mind. Marxists, in sum, are in as good a position as anyone to be familiar with the more negative characteristics and potentialities in the make-up of human beings.
At the same time, in so far as Marxists have tended to treat a future utopia as somehow beyond all these negative traits, the weight and significance of the latter as at least partly human-natural - partly due, that is, to inherent features of the human species - have generally been minimized, and sometimes even denied. They have been treated as if the social and political conditions which facilitate or encourage the expression of the negative human traits just wholly produced them; produced them, as it were, out of nothing.
This bears on an argument that Geras has made elsewhere in an essay entitled "Socialist Hope in the Shadow of Catastrophe", included in his book The Contract of Mutual Indifference. It is simply that, although human beings are conditioned by social circumstances into behaving in atrocious ways, those circumstances must have something to operate on. There must be a propensity - no more - in human beings for this kind of behaviour, otherwise it would not be so ubiquitous. Further, as long as this is the case, human beings can be expected to manifest these propensities even where there are no institutional enablements if there are no institutional constraints.
That syllogism is undone if you happen to subscribe to a different view of human nature, or even to the view that the born human is a blank slate. For my part, I think that there is no human nature that isn't human biology - and there is nothing inherently regressive or progressive in the fact that we are of material substance, have a freak ability to communicate by producing morphemes have certain needs, desires and capacities. We can be angels or devils without, it seems, a drastic re-working of our psychological wires: hence, Weimar Germany into Auschwitz. Human beings are quite as flexible in our propensities as we are in our desires.
But there is no need to delay ourselves too long in such matters, and not much point either - we don't know anywhere near enough to make judgements that are other than provisional. Suffice to say that it is conceivable (not inevitable), so long as you don't think human beings are essentially benign, that people will attempt to do y-, and perhaps also a-, b- and c-.
4
I noted, above, that even Lenin's most wildly anarchist fantasy excluded a great deal of human behaviour which is now particularly common. Indeed, he reaches for a new kind of person in the construction of the Higher Phase of Communism:
From the bourgeois point of view, it is easy to declare that such a social order is "sheer utopia" and to sneer at the socialists for promising everyone the right to receive from society, without any control over the labor of the individual citizen, any quantity of truffles, cars, pianos, etc. Even to this day, most bourgeois "savants" confine themselves to sneering in this way, thereby betraying both their ignorance and their selfish defence of capitalism.
Ignorance--for it has never entered the head of any socialist to "promise" that the higher phase of the development of communism will arrive; as for the greatest socialists' forecast that it will arrive, it presupposes not the present ordinary run of people, who, like the seminary students in Pomyalovsky's stories,[2] are capable of damaging the stocks of public wealth "just for fun", and of demanding the impossible.
But I think Geras' mistake is in imagining that the "stateless utopia" simply involves no coercion. In fact, the very grounding of that society is an unspoken coercion, as Lenin himself advertises it:
For when all have learned to administer and actually to independently administer social production, independently keep accounts and exercise control over the parasites, the sons of the wealthy, the swindlers and other "guardians of capitalist traditions", the escape from this popular accounting and control will inevitably become so incredibly difficult, such a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment (for the armed workers are practical men and not sentimental intellectuals, and they scarcely allow anyone to trifle with them), that the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of the community will very soon become a habit.
Then the door will be thrown wide open for the transition from the first phase of communist society to its higher phase, and with it to the complete withering away of the state.
This is crucial. Coercion is precisely what is entailed, in fact, by freedom. It is entailed by direct democracy itself, which is not merely the natural way in which human beings may exert control over their own lives, but is also the way that the common abuses of exploitation and oppression are to be overcome by day to day coercion. It is in the democratisation of coercion that Marxists have traditionally seen the "withering away" of the state. And here, I would guard this suggestion by adding that just as setting up a capitalist enterprise would be excluded from the many things that a democratic body might decide to get up to, so would even worse things such as ethnic cleansing, racial oppression, laws banning homosexuals from pubs etc.
Geras at one point suggests that I may be free to do something, and that this freedom is preserved in the confidence that I will not do it. Say, it is generally agreed that we mustn't y- and, although there isn't a law against it, I choose to comply with this agreed and approved but not enforced proscription. I could therefore be said to be free to y-, because there is no penalty against it. This is an abstraction. I am not free to do anything if the condition of my freedom is the certainty that I won't do it because, as soon as I fail those expectations and attempt to y- I will discover that I am actually unfree to do it.
As long as we persist in complex societies with even more complex technologies available to us, human beings will need to regulate our dealings with each other. We will need to assert rights, negotiate and proscribe. It seems sensible to assume that, for a while at any rate, this will involve the persistence of bodies whose role is to prevent or penalise certain kinds of behaviour. But they will be democratised, subjected to society and not superimposed on it; and, as we democratise more and more areas of life, bringing them under collective rational control, we can hope to dispense with just those aspects of law. Here is Alex Callinicos on this theme:
Lenin explicitly rejects the idea that the withering away of the state under communism is equivalent to "the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed". Marx draws a similar distinction when he predicts that under communism "the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another." Classical Marxism thus distinguishes between the state, which is a phenomenon of class society, and the 'public power' which exists even under communism, where it is governed by majority principle. The rationale for this contrast is provided by Marx's and Lenin's conception of the state as a specialized apparatus of coercion which is both a consequence of, and serves to perpetuate the existence of class antagonisms. Hence the significance of the emergence of forms of workers' power, beginning with the Commune, which, as Engels had put it, 'ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term'. Socialist democracy, a form of state involving, as we have seen, the systematic participation of the labouring majority in self-government, points toward a society in which no specialized apparatus of coercion is any longer necessary. ... It does not follow that mechanisms for resolving conflicts, and taking and enforcing decisions that are based on the democratic procedures developed during the long struggles for emancipation...". (Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the Eastern European Revolutions, 1991, pp 130-1).
It seems to me that there isn't a good reason to rule out the possibility of a wholly peacable society in which coercion remains unspoken and in which human beings are able, out of habit, to resolve disagreement without recourse to force. True, we may never see such a state of affairs, may always be saddled with at least a minimal kernel of law. The truth is, we don't have enough to go on. Like it or not, there has not been a single instance of a post-capitalist society which has persisted for long enough to overcome the problems of transition to even the 'Lower Phase of Communism'. And, if human beings are as malleable as I happen to think they are, it is just possible - no more than that - that coercion and violence may be dispensed with for good. I suggest we see this ideal as the guiding point which we may never quite reach but which it is as well to aim for. Civilisation, to borrow an idea from Norbert Elias, is a process that is always "under way".
In summary, I think Geras is right that as long as it is reasonable to expect atrocious behaviour from human beings, there will need to be means of coercion. And he is wrong to believe - as I think he does - that it is ruled out by the classical Marxist vision of the Higher Phase of Communism. Finally, I disagree with his conception of human nature, inasmuch as I don't believe the baleful features of human life that he refers to are "inherent features" of human nature. The fact that they reflect human capacities doesn't obviate the conclusion that a society without them is impossible. I put this aspect of Geras' argument down to a reasonable pessimism generated by a sober assessment of human history, but don't accept it as a conclusion with compulsory force, because it is not unreasonable to hope for the kind of society in which people will no longer wish to or feel compelled to a-, b-, c- or y-. Call it my ABCY of socialist utopia.