[For preceding instalments, see here, here and here.]
As an intellectual and political tradition, Marxism is as well placed as any other to appreciate the difficulties which might stand in the way of a stateless utopia (stateless, here, in the sense of not needing institutions which rely on an apparatus of coercion). For not only has that tradition focused on the long historical record of human oppression and exploitation, and violence in defence of them, but further, by locating the source of much of this in class and related differentials, Marxism has drawn attention to the impulses there are within human beings to seize advantage over others and enjoy such advantage, and to a readiness to defend it brutally when it is challenged. Marxism has drawn attention, as well, to the mental skills humans are able to develop for disguising from themselves, in ways helpful to their own interests, facts about the lives and needs and sufferings of others that might be inconvenient to their own peace of mind. Marxists, in sum, are in as good a position as anyone to be familiar with the more negative characteristics and potentialities in the make-up of human beings.
At the same time, in so far as Marxists have tended to treat a future utopia as somehow beyond all these negative traits, the weight and significance of the latter as at least partly human-natural - partly due, that is, to inherent features of the human species - have generally been minimized, and sometimes even denied. They have been treated as if the social and political conditions which facilitate or encourage the expression of the negative human traits just wholly produced them; produced them, as it were, out of nothing. However, the assumption involved in this way of thinking, the assumption that social conditions and influences are as good as being all-powerful in the determination of human behaviour, is no more than precisely that, an assumption. And it is about as persuasive as the contrary assumption, namely, that in trying to understand human conduct - the totality of human conduct - we might confine ourselves to a few generalizations about human nature (since it is, rather, human nature that explains everything). Marxists have given this kind of outlook, sometimes referred to as 'biological reductionism', short shrift, and they were right to do so. Yet, those Marxists who are tempted to oppose the belief that human nature might explain everything with the belief that it can explain nothing base their outlook on as arbitrary, as sociologically ungrounded, and as uncompelling, a premise as the biologically reductionist premise which they reject. Practically and realistically, we have no sensible choice but to conceive institutions as though something of both human-natural and historically specific social determinants and influences will continue to be at work, even if we remain unsure of the exact weighting which the various factors in the two categories (natural and culturally specific) will carry. [See my 'Socialist Hope in the Shadow of Catastrophe', in Leo Panitch, ed., Socialist Register 1996, London: Merlin Press, pp. 239-63 - reprinted as chapter 2 of The Contract of Mutual Indifference; and 'Life Was Beautiful Even There', Imprints, Vol. 5 No. 1, Summer 2000, pp. 31-4.]
[Part 4 will be posted on Monday. Update: see here.]