Read Why Marx Was Right for Free Online

of human
development, which is not an idea that would have occurred to John Milton.
Whereas many social thinkers have seen human society as an organic unity, what
constitutes it in Marx's view is division. It is made up of mutually
incompatible interests. Its logic is one of conflict rather than cohesion. For
example, it is in the interest of the capitalist class to keep wages low, and
in the interests of wage earners to push them higher.
    Marx famously declares in
the Communist Manifesto that ''the history of all previously existing
society is the history of class struggles.'' He can't of course mean this
literally. If brushing my teeth last Wednesday counts as part of history, then
it is hard to see that this is a matter of class struggle. Bowling a leg break
in cricket or being pathologically obsessed with penguins is not burningly
relevant to class struggle. Perhaps ''history'' refers to public events, not
private ones like brushing one's teeth. But that brawl in the bar last night
was public enough. So perhaps history is confined to major public
events. But by whose definition? Anyway, how was the Great Fire of London a
product of class struggle? It might count as an instance of class struggle if
Che Guevara had been run over by a truck, but only if a CIA agent was at the
wheel. Otherwise it would have just been an accident. The story of women's
oppression interlocks with the history of class struggle, but it is not just an
aspect of it. The same goes for the poetry of Wordsworth or Seamus Heaney.
Class struggle can't cover everything.
    Maybe Marx did not take
his own claim literally. The Communist Manifesto, after all, is intended
as a piece of political propaganda, and as such is full of rhetorical
flourishes. Even so, there is an important question about how much Marxist
thought does in fact include. Some Marxists seem to have treated it as a Theory
of Everything, but this is surely not so. The fact that Marxism has nothing
very interesting to say about malt whiskies or the nature of the unconscious,
the haunting fragrance of a rose or why there is something rather than nothing,
is not to its discredit. It is not intended to be a total philosophy. It does
not give us accounts of beauty or the erotic, or of how the poet Yeats achieves
the curious resonance of his verse. It has been mostly silent on questions of
love, death and the meaning of life. It has, to be sure, a very grand narrative
to deliver, which stretches all the way from the dawning of civilisation to the
present and future. But there are other grand narratives besides Marxism, such
as the history of science or religion or sexuality, which interact with the
story of class struggle but cannot be reduced to it. (Postmodernists tend to
assume that there is either one grand narrative or just a lot of
mini-narratives. But this is not the case.) So whatever Marx himself may have
thought, ''all history has been the history of class struggle'' should not be
taken to mean that everything that has ever happened is a matter of class
struggle. It means, rather, that class struggle is what is most fundamental to human history.
    Fundamental in what sense,
though? How, for example, is it more fundamental than the history of religion,
science or sexual oppression? Class is not necessarily fundamental in the sense
of providing the strongest motive for political action. Think of the role of
ethnic identity in that respect, to which Marxism has paid too little regard.
Anthony Giddens claims that interstate conflicts, along with racial and sexual
inequalities, ''are of equal importance to class exploitation.'' 1 But equally important for what? Of equal moral and political importance, or
equally important for the achievement of socialism? We sometimes call a thing
fundamental if it is the necessary basis for something else; but it is hard to
see that class struggle is the necessary basis of religious faith, scientific
discovery or women's oppression, much involved with it