There is a reason why the issue of culture is addressed poorly in Marxism. According to Marxist dynamics, culture is considered a reminder of bourgeois rule and subsequently has no place in proletarian society (Welch 2013b). An individual is not viewed “as the bearer of a dignity beyond the roles he inhabits or the ends he may pursue”, and so becomes a gear in a mechanism (Femia 1993, p. 3). To understand this totalitarian nature of Marxism better, we should research it alongside the history and cultural development of the countries where it manifested itself.
Twentieth-century Marxism was presented by three basic groups: the “libertarians”, the “pluralists”, and the “orthodox” (Held 2006, p. 116). What soon followed after World War II was a rapid replacement of scientism with humanism among Marxists. There were two significant movements: the Frankfurt School, with members like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer; and the Yugoslav School, most notably presented by the journal Praxis, and Rudi Supek and Mihailo Marković. The Frankfurters were trying to prove that mass society was slowly decaying, drowning in consumerism and disregarding spiritual and cultural elements of life. They were also decidedly against treating technology as a subject of worship. To the Yugoslavs, the alienation of politics and economics under capitalism was a good enough reason for a democracy where every worker had the right to decide the course and details of production and distribution, and not merely be a living manufacturing tool. This idea of worker independence was frowned upon by orthodox Marxists, who imagined the economy as a well-calibrated mechanism, where every member of society had his or her place in its works, becoming a part of the whole for the objectives of the whole.
Marx, however, wanted economic democracy to spread wider, dreaming of overcoming the gap between civility and policy (Welch 2013a). For this purpose, there needed to be a society combining personal and communal lives within itself, “the internalized identity of each person with the social totality, so as to eliminate tensions between his personal aspirations and his social loyalties or obligations” (Femia 1993, p. 42). If an individual is completely dissolved in a society, the society will approach the state of completeness and be ready to produce wholesome, assimilated people. In Marx’s opinion, a perfect society should consist of individuals absolutely devoid of personal interests and fully concentrated on communal solidarity (Marx & Engels 1848). The planned use of resources, democratic rule, detachment from traditional politics, efficient production, and the “greater leisure” had to provide this society with everything it needed (Held 2006, p. 116). Such was supposed to be the model of the Commune. The problem was that the compatibility of public and common life seemed to be questionable in this regard, as different values and interests were normal traits of any modern social construct. This meant that democratic regulation did not correspond to planning. Many questions were raised. There were also doubts about compatibility between efficient production and decreasing division of labour.
Marx wanted a moral revolution; he sided with Hegel and tried to prove the “wholeness” of a Greek civic life model, although he believed that a community of perfectly integrated individuals, who would live in an indistinguishable blend of what a collective wants and what an individual wants, could be established anew in a more developed society (Faulks 2000). Marx thought that labour distribution, along with commitment to individual independence, could create a good groundwork for such a project (Elster 1986). He also expected “free and equal” workers to participate in the practice of direct democracy, but there was never a guarantee that such system would work. Even if people were equal in terms of working conditions, there were still differences in age, gender, religion, etc. that could slow down the processes and stall the system for a long time, before the true model Marx desired might emerge. After all, reforming people’s minds is much harder than planning their lives out without paying attention to the particular traits of every individual. Every society has minorities; nobody is created equal. This is why Marxist revolution failed in the Soviet Union: those ideas were introduced into a country characterized by drastic inequality, and the rich were overthrown by the poor who did not have any explicit idea of what they were overthrowing the rich for (Shapiro 2002, p. 118; Cohen 2009).
Of course, to strive for change and abandon the previous model of existing, people should eventually start a revolution: “we must destroy the very ‘structure’ of reality so that people can develop their needs in freedom” (Kolakowski 1978, p. 411). Development or obtaining of new technology to unify art, science, and ethics was also a part of the plan to liberate people. According to this scheme, in order to create a new culture, one must destroy the chains of the previous one. Destruction implies violence, and violence is almost an inevitable element of any revolution. According to the Marxist scheme, revolutionaries are allowed to use violence, as they portray a higher justice in their attempts to reform society, which, in turn, has become a manifestation of social and political violence itself. Revolution’s cause is to destroy and rebuild a flawed or malfunctioning system.
The system that works adequately does not need any reformation. Thus we can say that, according to Marxist ideology, violence is necessary and fully justified if it is used for this purpose. In fact, in a society where the ideas of “false consciousness” prevail, it is inevitable. The capitalistic system digests all kinds of culture, and can deal with any form of critique by turning it into a part of its structure. Violence, however, is a form of criticism that cannot be argued with. Cultural and spiritual weapons of capitalism were stated to be “freedom of speech and assembly, tolerance, and democratic institutions” (Kolakowski 1978, p. 412). As we can see, these values have moderated our society for a long time now, and the system has never ceased to function. This means that the rejection of basic democratic culture and freedoms was not sustainable in the long run, as we do not see any perfectly implemented (and working) Marxist systems today.
The analysis of negative freedom in Marxism does not seem completely faulty, however. The actions performed by an individual always leave an imprint on a bigger picture of everybody’s initial goals. One person always contributes to the whole. Thus, we absolutely should not ignore cultural and environmental attributes, as they play a crucial role in forming individual choice. They are, in other words, the interest definers.
Marx expected that workers, being an exploited class that could, nevertheless, organize its own production without the surveillance of the superior capitalist vendors, would be the engine of the revolution. According to Marx’s view of working class history, labourers are forced to compete under capitalism unless they form a class. Developing class interest is important, because workers should realize their interests as a group, not as individuals, or else it would not be so different from the competitive system (as, initially, workers do tend to compete). Class interest is not supposed to correspond with the interest of every particular class member; rather, it keeps the collective interests in place and always visible, establishes discipline, and smooths down the differences.
Another important reason why workers should acknowledge and pursue their interests as a collective was the fact that it “was necessary to prevent the integration of workers as individuals into bourgeois society” (Przeworski 1986, p. 21). Bourgeois norms formed the notion of “individual” as it was. The idea of this notion was in equality that did not depend on the standing of an individual in the society, be he or she a labourer or a consumer of labour. The main aspiration of bourgeois ideology was the creation of the harmonious individualistic society. This ideology was strictly denied by the supporters of the class structure. According to them, workers were not considered individuals by the bourgeois, and therefore were exploited as a distinct social group with its own purpose.
Only by separating themselves from other groups, could the working class gain some leverage in the conflict of interests imposed on different classes by bourgeois society (Przeworski 1986, p. 22; Wolin 2006). As I mentioned before, since arts and other cultural manifestations were strongly associated with bourgeois society and regarded as its tool by the workers, these became massively ignored in the classic Marxist theory of democratic society. A worker “expresses himself in his labour, by progressively transforming nature to suit his ever-expanding needs” (Femia 1993, p. 80): to him, his work is art. That meant that social, political, and cultural lives were a direct result of productive activities and everything that upheld the industrial growth of society. In other words, culture in Marx’s works was always narrowed down to labour, and therefore diminished to the outcomes of manual or mechanical actions rather than imaginative mind work.
Reference List
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Faulks, K 2000, Political Sociology: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Femia, J 1993, Marxism and Democracy. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
Held, D 1993. Prospects for Democracy. Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Kolakowski, L 1981, Main Currents of Marxism, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Marx, K & Engels, F 2002 (1848), The Communist Manifesto, Penguin Classics, London.
Przeworski, A 1986, Capitalism and Social Democracy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Shapiro, I 2002, ‘Why the Poor Don’t Soak the Rich?’, Daedalus, vol. 131, no. 1, pp. 118-128.
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