Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America Page 7
Hobbes creates a false choice between polar opposites. Either live in anarchy or live under despotism. He assumes most will choose despotism. Furthermore, once he surrenders his rights and liberties to the Sovereign, the individual has no way out unless his life is threatened. Is the Sovereign, who threatens the individual’s life, going to be amenable to his disobedience or departure? Individuals are not drones. Hobbes acknowledges the obvious—that people reason, think, and learn. But in Leviathan he forbids even mild dissent. If tormented and abused by the all-powerful Sovereign, but without effective civil recourse, is it not possible—if not probable—that some portion of the population, dissatisfied and disaffected with their circumstances, will become radicalized, resist the Sovereign’s rule, and even resort to violence in hopes of overthrowing him? If so, the peace and stability Hobbes promised would give way to the discord and conflicts he feared. In Leviathan, the Sovereign would be obliged to unleash all force necessary to protect the Commonwealth. Compromise or accommodation would seem out of the question, for the diminution of the Sovereign’s absolute power would, in Hobbes’s formulation, diminish the tranquility and survivability of the Commonwealth. As in the Republic and Utopia, absolute power over the individual requires a far-reaching police state.
For the individual, liberty exists only to the extent the Sovereign permits and only in those areas the Sovereign has not preempted with his own exercise of authority. “[A] free man is he that in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do is not hindered to do what he has a will to do” (136). As in most tyrannies, the individual’s liberty will undoubtedly and steadily constrict and erode. Such is the nature of absolute power in the hands of one man or a relative handful of men. For Hobbes, the individual must not be generally free to live his life as he sees fit, for his egoism knows no limits. In this regard, Hobbes shares More’s mind-set in Utopia, in which More argues that the individual’s pride deserves scorn and must be controlled by the central authority. But what of the individual’s enlightened self-interest and ethical egoism—where, acting on his own behalf and in his own interest, he also benefits the greater society? Indeed, is this dynamic not vital to the functioning of a free and prosperous society?
Although Hobbes’s discussion of economics and private property rights is not well developed, his relentless attack on individual self-interest, which he believes leads to greed and undermines the Commonwealth, combined with the assertion in Leviathan that the Subject has “the liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own abode, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute their children as they themselves think fit, and the like” only to the extent the Sovereign allows, suggests the Sovereign will have the authority to control and appropriate whatever property he believes necessary and freely intervene in the individual’s life decisions to ostensibly maintain the Commonwealth. Therefore, although the individual surrenders his rights and liberties to the Sovereign in exchange for protection and security, the Sovereign’s priority is to safeguard himself. Obviously, throughout history unspeakable misery and violence have been perpetrated by tyrants in the name of the greater and common good.
Hobbes, like Plato and More, strips the individual of human qualities that contribute to the essence of life—motivation, inquisitiveness, competition, exploration, inventiveness, accomplishment, etc. Is not a society that cultivates individual initiative, independence, and self-sufficiency rather than discourages, suppresses, and punishes them likely to be a humane society? Conversely, rather than alleviating man’s “continual fear and danger of violent death” and the miserable conditions that result in “the life of man” being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” does not Hobbes design such a society? (76)
Hobbes also contends there cannot be morality or what he calls moral virtue—justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy, etc.—in the state of nature, where man is in a constant state of war (100). Moral virtue can only exist in the framework of covenants among men as enforced in the broader social contract with the Sovereign. But it is inaccurate to argue that only covenants enforced by an all-powerful Sovereign promote or define moral virtue. Moral virtue, whether intuitive, learned, or reasoned, has preexisted the Commonwealth (or government). It has existed within families and among friends since the beginning of man. It has existed among the earliest trading partners and among native tribes. But just as immorality also preexisted the Commonwealth, men can covenant to do immoral things and governments can establish laws that lack moral justification or are executed in ways that promote immorality. It is simply inaccurate to insist that moral virtue is only possible and more likely under an all-powerful Sovereign.
From Leviathan springs not a virtuous government protective of the civil society but a totalitarian regime. As in Plato’s Republic and More’s Utopia, in Leviathan Hobbes rejects self-government because, he believes, the individual and man generally cannot be trusted to govern themselves. Hobbes designs another inhuman utopian structure that devours the individual.
CHAPTER FIVE
KARL MARX’S COMMUNIST MANIFESTO AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE
THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO1 was written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in 1848 on behalf of the Communist League (although the final draft was Marx’s). It set forth the historical and analytical bases for the international communist movement. The first sentence reads, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” But unlike past class struggles, with their gradated class systems, “the modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society, … has established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.…” Marx and Engels write, “Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeois, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie [capitalists] and Proletariat [laborers]” (19).
For Marx and Engels, the market system may have destroyed feudalism, but it “left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous ‘cash payment.’ … It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, unveiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers. The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation” (20, 21).
What of economic advancement? Marx and Engels argue it is not advancement at all. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered forms, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere” (21).
Therefore, the only just course is to eliminate the material wealth of the bourgeoisie. “In this sense the theory of Commun
ists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is alleged to be the ground work of all personal freedom, activity and independence” (36). Yet, in wiping out the bourgeoisie’s property are you not also eliminating that of the laborer? “But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage labor, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labor” (36).
For Marx and Engels, it is crucial to sever all ties with the past, for the past is nothing more than a history of domination, in one form or another, over the proletariat. “In bourgeois society … the past dominates the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past” (36). Unlike bourgeois society, where “living labor is but a means to increase accumulated labor, in Communist society accumulated labor is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer” (37).
Marx and Engels argue that the accumulation of private property is unjust for it is nothing more than the taking of labor from those who earned it. “You’re horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society. In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend” (37, 38).
They also reject completely natural law and right reason as nothing more than the perpetuation of bourgeois control over the proletariat. “The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property—historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production—the misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own bourgeois form of property” (39).
Moreover, the family structure grew out of bourgeois material needs and must be dissolved for the good of the greater community. “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty” (39).
Breaking from the past and family means breaking from tradition, customs, institutions, religion, and therefore requires that communist indoctrination replace education. “But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social. And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by social conditions under which you educate, by the intervention, direct or indirect, of society by means of schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child become all the more disgusting, as, by the action of modern industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labor” (39, 40). “What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class” (41).
Marx and Engels could not be clearer. “There are besides, eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice, etc., that are common to all states of society. But Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience … The history of all past society has consisted in the development of class antagonisms that assumed different forms at different epochs” (41, 42).
All history, therefore, is the history of class struggle. “But whatever form they may have taken, one fact is common to all past ages—the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all the multiplicity and variety it displays, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class antagonisms. The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas” (42).
The proletariat will rise up in a working-class revolution and replace the bourgeois as the ruling class. It will “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois; to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible” (42).
Marx and Engels argue, almost as an aside, that “of course, in the beginning this cannot be effected except by despotic inroads on the rights of property and the conditions of bourgeois production.” And they acknowledge that at least initially, there will be societal dislocation and misery. “[B]y means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production” (42).
Once the state is under the control of the proletariat, its objectives will generally include the following ten tenets (42, 43):
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance
4. Centralization of the property of all emigrants and rebels
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common play
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, but a more equable distribution of the population over the country
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
After all remnants of bourgeois society are eliminated, having been replaced with a classless workers’ paradise, the centralized, all-powerful state shall wither away. “When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely organized power o
f one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeois is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself in a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms, and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society with its classes and class antagonisms we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (43, 44).
For Marx and Engels, their divination—that is, communism and the workers’ paradise—is preordained. The history of man is a history of class struggle over materialism, where the feudal lords, landowners, and finally capitalists rule over the working class. Communism is the natural and final endpoint resulting from the motion of modern society. It is not an invention, discovery, or reform; its ultimate certainty cannot be obstructed by law or politics. It is the truth (35). Not only would Marx and Engels denounce any attempt to label their fantasy a utopia, but in The Communist Manifesto they are extremely critical of what they call Utopian Socialism and Communism. “[A]s the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this phantastic standing apart from the contest, these phantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification.… They therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of their experimental realization of their social Utopias … they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary socialists.…” (57) As such, only a complete break from the past and a cleansing of modern society can set the stage for the classless state, where there would be no need for politics or government. They insist there can be no compromise with bourgeois history or standards. There can be no remnants of what was and is.