[For preceding instalments, see here, here, here and here.]
I return to my three schematic models of compliance with authoritative political decisions in a future Marxist-style utopia. My argument from this point will be that model (2) is strategic for the question posed at the beginning of this series regarding how free people might be in such a utopia. For model (3) obviously describes a state in the meaning in which classical Marxism looked forward to a condition of statelessness; and, while model (1) does not describe a state in that meaning, it is not intelligently foreseeable. I go on to substantiate the claims just made, though not in the order I made them.
(3) For present purposes there is no point in dwelling long on the third model, even though this is, in my view (and I would guess the view of a majority of other people), the most realistic of the possibilities outlined - for reasons I come to shortly in dealing with the first model. In the third model we have a society governed by a state. It would not be a class state because ex hypothesi there would no longer be classes in the Marxian sense. But there would be an institutional body (or plurality of connected bodies) which was not only authoritative in a normative sense, but also wielded decisive power, mobilizing sanctions and the means of enforcement against anyone who failed to comply with democratic policy and authentic law. Those wanting to y once a decision against y-ing had been enacted into law would be unfree to y. They would be coercively prevented from y-ing through intervention, or the threat of intervention, by others. Generalizing this: to the extent that there were laws against y-ing, x-ing, v-ing, t-ing, s-ing, n-ing, m-ing, and so on, people in this society would be unfree to do certain th-ings, and this in the relevant, that is, socially and politically constraining, sense, not merely in the physical way in which we are unfree to leap over high mountains.
(1) From some points of view it would be good to be able to believe in the possibility of the kind of utopia adumbrated in the first model: a society in which everyone could remain self-willed and autonomous, voluntarily falling in with the other members of their community when that community was divided by substantial differences of opinion, falling in with them via the acceptance of shared public procedures of deliberation and resolution. In defending the Marxist tradition (in earlier work) against the imputation to it of an unrealistic vision of future uniformity, I once wrote as if - or at least did not exclude the possibility that - the somewhat less unrealistic vision of a differentiated but freely, non-coercively, self-regulating society might one day come to exist. But if I did not exclude the possibility then, I would do so now, and for two kinds of reason.
The first of them I have argued for at greater length elsewhere, and I referred to in How Free? 3. It is that the entire historical record of humankind, and all sociological and psychological knowledge, as well as common day-to-day experience, tell against this benign expectation. The idea of a society without any delinquency generated by self-interest, malice, envy, greed, callousness, cruelty, anger, rage; without any major wrongdoing, never mind acts which deserve to be called evil; without any conflicts arising from misunderstanding, resentment, low- or high-level prejudice, from uncivil or inconsiderate behaviour, a sense (whether justified or not) of humiliation, or being spurned, insulted, dishonoured, rejected; without crimes of passion, culpable negligence, parental irresponsibility, harassment, bullies, fraudsters, free-riders, sexual offenders, nuisances, louts - this is, for all that we presently know, a mere phantasm. It is a world emptied of the daily realities of what it means to be human (the less salubrious realities, for obvious reasons, here - I am perfectly well aware that there is another side of the story). Marxists do not accept the hypothesis that, everything being explicable exclusively by reference to human nature, the future is bound to remain as dark, violent and bloody as the human past has been. There is just as little basis for saying that, nothing being explicable by reference to human nature, everything being wholly due to social and cultural influences, a world of unmixed light and good is feasible.
The second reason for excluding model (1) is the inevitability - especially in the conditions of flourishing individuality which Marxists envisage for a future classless utopia - of moral difference, moral change and moral error. People differ over social policy issues in entirely principled ways, and these differences can be of such importance to them that, even after there has been a political resolution via the authoritative public decision-making bodies which they support in common, there may be some who feel bound in conscience not to fall in line willingly; not to comply with a given decision, but to defy it. In other words, some of those who refuse to go along with democratic decisions may not be delinquents at all in the negative meaning this word suggests, but rather principled, conscientious, objectors and resisters. Others may go along with a collective decision on a given matter of great moral significance - a matter, say, of life and death - and then later change their minds, concluding that they have been in error. A one-time minority may grow. Even without becoming a majority, it may come to believe that there are those within the majority who are in moral error, and that others within that majority are disguising a purely sectional interest or motive by dressing it up as an ethical principle. And so on. These are further sources of possible conflict which, (again) for all that we presently know, it is implausible to think of as receding, much less evaporating. For that reason as well, model (1), in which coercion never has to be contemplated against anyone, is uncompelling as a vision of a future classless utopia.
(2) Unable realistically to look forward to a (1)-type society, are we then driven back on what is envisaged in model (3) - a society governed by a power-wielding state which uses sanctions as and when necessary against those who break the law? Not necessarily. For there is still model (2) to be reconsidered. This is the model in which, although people do not all go along with authoritative public decisions merely out of democratic commitment and their sense of social responsibility, they do all peaceably respect those decisions nonetheless, as embodied in the law. If the community's democratic and cultural values do not suffice by themselves to ensure universal compliance, they are effective in combination with the laws enacted and the sanctions threatening anyone who fails to comply. Nobody actually breaks any laws, and therefore the sanctions attached to them do not actually have to be called down. A law-abiding peace prevails.
This second of our three models may be thought of as looking more like model (1) than it does like model (3); and in a certain respect it clearly is more like model (1). For, in both (2) and (1), those who would like to do what the decisions of the community forbid, those who would like to y, do not in fact y; and consequently no one ever has to be penalized - to be fined, imprisoned, etc. - for going against the community's decisions. I could now go on to argue the toss here and, repeating and developing arguments from a couple of paragraphs back, say why I think model (2) is less plausible than model (3); why there is likely to be at least some law-breaking (such as to call down sanctions), rather than no law-breaking at all. But it isn't worth the trouble. It isn't worth the trouble because, if in the respect just noted model (2) resembles model (1), in a respect decisive for the topic of this paper model (2) is more like model (3): it contains, as (3) does, an apparatus of law and for the enforcement of law, against the possibility that there may be non-compliers; even though, in the event, there aren't any non-compliers, because of the existence precisely of that legal apparatus. There are means for enforcement of the law, but enforcement turns out not to be necessary, since the threat of it (in conjunction with democratic and other moral commitments, and possibly social pressure as well) is enough to deter would-be law-breakers.
We may approach the same thing from another angle. The people of (2)topia, just like the people of (3)topia, and unlike the people of (1)topia, are not free to y. They live under laws against y-ing (as the people of (1)topia do not), so that were they to go ahead and y they would incur some significant penalty for doing so. That they do not in the event y doesn't affect this judgement. In Britain today I am not free to go around stealing people's belongings whether or not I do ever try to steal them; or - a more apposite example, perhaps, being of something I might actually be inclined to do if there were no law against it - I am not free to slander and defame those I hold in particular contempt, even if I desist from slandering and defaming them anyway because I prefer not to have to pay the price that might be legally exacted if I did so. Just so, the freedoms of the citizens of (2)topia are restricted by laws against y-ing, x-ing, v-ing, t-ing, s-ing, n-ing, m-ing, even if (2)topians never do any of these th-ings, on account (partly) of a wish to avoid the negative consequences to themselves were they to do them. Being to this extent unfree, and because of the legal enactments of the authoritative decision- and rule-making body (or bodies) of their polity, they are subject, just like the citizens of (3)topia, to the authority of a state in the Marxian sense. Although this is not any longer a class state, it is able, if need be, to deploy against (3)topians the means of coercion, even if it never does deploy these, because, knowing they are there, (3)topians do not bring the means of coercion down upon themselves.
It may be said that there is something anomalous in the picture I have sketched here of (2)topia: this picture of an apparatus for the application and enforcement of the law but which never has to be mobilized against law-breakers. Wouldn't the police all just sit around playing cards, stop turning up for work? Wouldn't the judges spend days on end in the library or on the golf course? Could either police or judges remain fit for their respective duties in these conditions of professional redundancy? Two opposing lines of thought flow out of the suggestion. One is that (2)topia might then evolve gradually into (1)topia, the (2)topian state verily withering away. I decline to mount an argument against the possibility of this happening, since it would be the same argument as I have already mounted. For all that we presently know, we have no basis for expecting this benign evolution. The opposite line of thought is that with the police and the judges going soft, or AWOL, (2)topia would backslide towards a situation in which there was a need once more for active policing and judging, as those wanting to y (and the rest), but hitherto deterred by the law, came to realize that the law was as good as dead now; it could just as well not exist. There would be a bumpy transition towards (3)topia and then, depending on further developments, a possible evolution back towards (2)topia. To put the whole thing otherwise, from the point of view which matters for the argument I have sought to make here, (2)topia and (3)topia are the same: both include a (somewhat) freedom-restricting state. (2)topia is just (3)topia at the furthest, or the pure, limit of compliance with the law. Not much is to be gained by speculating exactly where a future Marxian-style utopia might lie along the path of non-compliance. More important is an acceptance of the necessity of law and of the rule of law.
Afterword. Though I have not previously written at length on the theme, it has for some time been a thread within my work that Marxists need to see themselves as inheritors of some of the most central values and intellectual resources of liberalism, especially in areas where Marxism itself has been deficient.* The argument of this essay supports the same emphasis. No foreseeable socialist utopia could dispense with the political institutions and mechanisms of decent self-governance, except by recourse to non-decent ones. In this domain, liberalism (broadly-construed) is the most worthwhile historical starting point we have. A socialist utopia, if one is possible, will have to be a liberal utopia. Otherwise it risks being yet one more political monstrosity.
* See 'Classical Marxism and Proletarian Representation', New Left Review, 125, January-February 1981, pp. 87-8; 'Bringing Marx to Justice', New Left Review, 195, September-October 1992, p. 67; 'Democracy and the Ends of Marxism', New Left Review, 203, January-February 1994, pp. 95-9, 104-5; 'Minimum Utopia: Ten Theses', Leo Panitch and Colin Leys, eds, Socialist Register 2000, London: Merlin Press, pp. 47-8; 'Marxism, the Holocaust and September 11: An Interview with Norman Geras', Imprints, Vol. 6 No. 3, 2002-3, pp. 194-9.
[With this post the series is - strictly - concluded, though I hope to add a follow-up soon, with a few further observations. In respect of the paper on which the series was based, my thanks are due to Eve Garrard for a discussion which helped me to clarify my thoughts before writing, and then for reading the paper in draft; and to Hillel Steiner for a brief and helpful telephone conversation I had with him one day while I was on Leeds station.]
