'Consciousness, Not Utopia: In Defence of Historical Materialism' - Alex Beard

'Consciousness, Not Utopia: In Defence of Historical Materialism' - Alex Beard

Those who hasten to the barricades in defence of utopia when confronted with a critique such as Friedrich Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific tend to rather radically miss the point. This may sound perverse. It is not as though Marx and Engels were not preoccupied with dressing down those they took to be utopian ideologues – not least in an entire section of the Communist Manifesto dedicated to non-Marxian socialism – nor is it the case that they did not establish a cordon sanitaire between their post-Hegelian materialist analysis and that of earlier thinkers. Yet the incompatibility that they emphasize is not so much between Marxian socialism and utopia as it is between Marxian socialism and utopian socialism. The distinction is, as we will establish, paramount.

The great Marxian innovation was to situate the social phenomenon that is detailed in The Condition of the Working Class in England, that is to say the birth of the industrial proletariat, within its historical context. The observations made in the crucible of Manchester capitalism were married to a Hegelian dialectic which had been turned by the young Marx, in the words of Engels, “on its head”. As the historical process unfolded, so too did its contradictions. The conquest of the bourgeois subject whose revolutions heralded a new era in world history had produced in equal measure an unpropertied gargantuan: the “part of no part” which undermined bourgeois claims to universal subjecthood.

Most latter-day broadsides on Marx and Engels, particularly from those who consider themselves to be on the left, emphasize their ‘historicism’. Post-structuralist and postcolonial intellectuals, particularly, express a pronounced scepticism towards the idea that there can be such thing as universal history. They claim that the conditions to which Marxian theory pertains are specific either to Europe or to the past, often both. This is to fail to abstract from the nineteenth-century literature, and indeed from subsequent applications of materialist analysis to the cultural sphere. Few could reasonably dispute that we live, now more than ever, in a world in which the relations of production (that is to say capitalism) are universal, and little else (the rights that people enjoy, the wealth that people own, the access to resources that they have) is. Capitalist production being universal, so too is the proletariat on which it relies. And since the interests of this class are diametrically opposed to those of the bourgeois institutions which expropriate its labour, it represents the sole means to universal emancipation.

The proletariat is historically unique: it is the first popular class capable of being conscious of itself as a class, owing to the profoundly naked exploitation to which it is subjected and to its profound material poverty (in the sense of a lack of property). Representing as it does a numerical majority, it needs only to gain consciousness in a moment of crisis in order that it can affect revolution and leave capitalist productive relations dead and buried, once and for all. There are, in other words, historical conditions for its victory. In hindsight, Marx and Engels were almost comically optimistic in their predictions of when exactly this might happen. Nevertheless, it remains one of the vanishingly few things that almost all self-described Marxists can agree on. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the question of what the much-problematised “dictatorship of the proletariat” might look like, and how exactly it might come about. When it comes to this, only the most hardcore of Leninists tend to come to the same conclusion.

If we are to believe Guy Debord, author of The Society of the Spectacle, then this academic discord might be less a defect of socialist scholarship than a necessary precondition of proletarian revolution. Debord rejects ‘representation’ of all kinds; the idea that, as in the Leninist instance, the revolution might be ‘represented’ to the popular masses by an intellectual vanguard represents an alienation of power which can only result in the betrayal of the proletarian cause. The only means to socialism is class consciousness. And class consciousness can only be just that: a reflection by the working classes on their own material circumstances and the extrapolation of an analysis of the structure which governs them. This can, and is, aided by theory. But proletarians must never be mobilised in service of a cause which is not their own, for this is not a means to class power but rather a form of false consciousness.

And so we return to utopia. The Marxian objection to a utopian socialist like Robert Owen is that he disavows everything that is central to their cause. This is the case that Engels makes in Socialism: Utopian And Scientific. Not only Owenite society an intellectual abstraction rather than an extrapolation of historical reality, it obscures the role of proletarian as revolutionary subject altogether. In its guilt-laden pursuit of harmonious universality, it fails to recognize the universality of the proletariat, which is the only historical agent capable of envisioning (in the process of its becoming) a truly rational society. Even then, though – and this is absolutely crucial – it is important to remember that history is contingent. The envisioning of utopia might prove a means to revolutionary consciousness, but it must ultimately be subordinated by the proletariat itself to class power, which will look different depending on the specificities of the historical circumstances.

Utopian socialism offers a similar problem to Marxists as does anarchism to Guy Debord. A fetishistic obsession with the ‘truth’ of a society free of alienation and oppression, distracts both from the reality of really existing class relations and from the way that these relations are transformed in the historical context of revolution. Thus Debord: “From the historical thought of modern class struggles collectivist anarchism retains only the conclusion, and its exclusive insistence on this conclusion is accompanied by deliberate contempt for method. Thus its critique of the political struggle has remained abstract, while its choice of economic struggle is affirmed only as a function of the illusion of a definitive solution brought about by one single blow on this terrain–on the day of the general strike or the insurrection. The anarchists have an ideal to realize.”

There is no suggestion that the envisaging of post-capitalist societies must be entirely disregarded. Such a vision. must, however, only ever be viewed as one of many means to a concrete end. It is useful to socialists insofar as it helps cultivate the revolutionary class consciousness which is a prerequisite of class power. This is the project of materialist (or scientific), as opposed to utopian socialism. For this is the reality of socialist struggle, and one which Marx and Engels were instrumental in discerning: proletarian revolution represents the rational conquest of a universalising class over a system which produces profoundly irrational outcomes, and is sustained so as to benefit a small minority. After all, it is, as Slavoj Zizek reminds us, the capitalists who are the true utopians; there is no other explanation for the idea that their system can function without resulting in periodic collapse, vast amounts waste, and mammoth inequality.

[Alex Beard is a second-year History and German student at University College. He served as OULC’s Publications Officer in Hilary Term]