[This post begins the series trailed here.]
This series of posts is a critique of the Marxian idea of a future stateless utopia. It is an immanent critique. Were one to start from non-Marxist assumptions, detailed argument would scarcely be necessary. Non-Marxists just take it for granted that any organized modern society foreseeable from the present world must necessarily involve state-type institutions of governance. My aim here is to show that, even thinking from within the Marxist tradition, the idea of a stateless utopia is not sustainable, unless as a blind act of faith.
On the assumption that some sort of broadly Marxist-style utopia were possible, how free might people be in it? In what follows I do not attempt to give a comprehensive answer to this difficult question. I am interested, rather, in exploring how relatively compelling are three different types of schematic 'vision' which answer the question in different ways.
I shall bypass here the rather large question of what it means to say that a person is 'free to' do something, and just lay down at the outset one dimension of what I shall mean by saying this. I am free to y if, and only if, I will not be forcibly prevented from y-ing by the coercive intervention of others should I try to y; or, failing their timely intervention, if I do not suffer some severe (enough) negative consequence through the action of others for having y-d. On certain definitions of being 'free to', I would be accounted free to y even in the latter of these two cases, merely becoming unfree to do a bundle of other things as a result of having y-d. For I can y and then face the consequences. I shall avoid the complication of formulating things more long-windedly to fall in with this hard-nosed construal of the meaning of 'free to', and go with my rough-and-ready notion as just specified. It corresponds to a common sense and, I think, reasonable usage - according to which, for example, I might be said to be unfree, where laws prevail, to kill people or burgle their houses. I also do not linger unnecessarily over the parenthetical 'enough' a few lines above, except to explain that should the consequence I suffer for having y-d be too mild, then it would not count as inhibiting my freedom. Thus, if the penalty for robbing you blind were only that I must say sorry, then I would be free to rob you blind.
According to my assumption, then, I am not free to y in a society in which there are laws, backed by serious punitive sanctions, against y-ing, even in the case that I do not want to y and therefore would not ever attempt to y or embark upon y-ing. Conversely, I am free to do a great many things which I have no desire to do and so don't do. As things currently stand where I live, I am free to take an interest in golf and to lavish praise upon George Galloway, but I choose not to do either of these things.
In a paper I wrote 15 years ago I defended the tradition of Marxism from - amongst other groundless calumnies against it - the notion that in a post-capitalist, classless utopia everybody could be expected to agree about all issues, and that consequently there would be no conflicts about anything. This absurd notion has been thought by some to be implicit in the Marxian idea of the withering away of the state. I argued: (a) that there are no grounds for ascribing this expectation of future universal harmony to Marx or other serious thinkers in the tradition he inaugurated; (b) that there are grounds for not ascribing it to him and to them; and (c) that most of those who do ascribe it to him or to them ignore in doing so the specifically Marxian construal of what a 'state' is: to wit, a body coercively imposing law and policy in the interests of a dominant class upon those who might otherwise be less than fully willing to comply with such law and policy. It is the state in that sense that Marxists have thought of as withering away in a communist future. But the idea of withering away is compatible with the expectation, indeed the requirement, that there would continue to be in the communist future an authoritative public decision-making body which would aggregate, deliberate, resolve differences and so forth, as between the plurality of social and political beliefs, values and preferences which must sometimes compete and conflict. [See my 'Seven Types of Obloquy: Travesties of Marxism', in Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch, eds, Socialist Register 1990, London: Merlin Press, sections III and VI. Also 'The Controversy about Marx and Justice', New Left Review, 150, March-April 1985, pp. 81-4 (section on 'Communist Abundance').]
The key to the intelligibility of this expectation has got to be an assumption that in the projected utopia everyone will voluntarily accept the rulings and decisions of the authoritative body (or bodies - since what has always been envisaged in the tradition of Marxist utopian thinking was a modern, complex and differentiated, type of society) without that compliance having to be secured through coercion or the threat of punitive sanctions. Hence, on some definitions of what a state is, there would still be a state in a Marxist-style utopia. There would still be a public institutional complex ruling authoritatively on the common affairs of the community. There would be a polity. But it would not be a state in the Marxian sense of a class-coercive body. Of course, even thus clarified against the presumption of a spontaneous universal harmony (based on a putative uniformity of interests and beliefs), this vision leaves plenty for those who are sceptical towards the idea of a Marxist-style utopia to be sceptical about. If spontaneous general harmony is a very tall order, so will the always peaceable resolution of initial differences, with no need at all for legal compulsion or threat, be seen by many as being more than tall enough when viewed from anywhere humankind has ever previously stood.
In any case, suppose now (just like that) the existence of a post-capitalist and classless society with a polity: in the sense of possessing a decision-making body, or plurality of such bodies linked up within an institutional complex of somewhat dispersed but interlocking competences. Suppose, too, a populace deeply imbued with democratic values and with cultural attitudes tending to reinforce these. It is a society, let us assume further, in which all problems of transition in moving from the less good earlier state of affairs to the ex-hypothesi-utopian one have been overcome; they have long ago been left behind. This is a society, all the same, of human beings as we are familiar with them: they are not uniform in what they think; they have differing wants and interests; they disagree about various issues, could potentially come into conflict about some of them; and so on. Yet they are people well-versed in resolving their differences via the shared public institutions of deliberation and decision, up to and including the highest, most authoritative, one.
So far as we have got with the argument to this point, that highest, most authoritative instance may be a state, in the sense of having sometimes to rely upon coercion, or it may not be one. Is it?
[Part 2 will be posted tomorrow. Control yourselves. It's not that long to wait. Update: See here.]