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"obsolete verbal rubbish"; his socialism was not an "ideal to be real–
ized" but a question of what was already slumbering in the womb of
bourgeois society. Yet, his reaction to the misery, squalor, and op–
pression of capitalism can be only described as moral outrage . "It is
plain that Marx was fired by outrage and indignation and the burn–
ing desire for a better world that it is hard not to see as moral ." Why
did he load
Capital
with all those descriptions of overworked seam–
stresses , exhausted signalmen, expropriated smallholders , if not to
excite the same moral outrage in the reader? But, if morality is some–
how "prescientific," what was moral outrage doing there? How could
Marx simultaneously think that "morality" was nonsense and spend
forty years as the scathing moral critic he undoubtedly was?
It's an old question, and it leads to two others - how far has
Marxism lived up to its own standards in practice? And have the
cruelties and crimes of Stalinism and its heirs been partly caused by
the confusions bequeathed by Marx? Lukes's gloomy answer is that
even when we make all possible allowances for the way in which
communists have fought against fascism and have taken the lead in
opposing right-wing violations of human rights, the practical record
of Marxism is terrible . He is particularly scathing about the way
Merleau-Ponty and Sartre positively wallowed in the thought that
Stalin's brutalities might be warranted by history, but he has no time
for those who think of their opponents as historically dispensable.
Many critics have thought that it was Marx's utopianism which
caused this kind of moral damage - Popper's dictum, that all attempts
to create heaven on earth create hell on earth instead, sums up a whole
school of thought.
It
has often been said that a theory which expects
a brutalized working class to rise in violent revolt and create a society
free from coercion, deceit, and disorder is a millenarian fantasy, not
social science. Thirty years ago, Norman Cohn showed in
The Pursuit
of the Millennium
where such fantasies lead. Thomas Munzer's reign
of terror in sixteenth-century Munster was a prefiguring of Stalin's.
Marxism replaces religion only in the alarming sense that it feeds the
chiliastic longings that religion feeds.
Lukes only partly shares this view of the source of the trouble.
Mostly, he sides with anarchist critics of Marxism like Victor Serge
and with socialist contemporaries like Rudolf Bahro. What is wrong
with official Marxism is its brutal instrumentalism; the contempt for
human rights which Marxist regimes display in practice is based in a
theory which has been reduced to Plekhanov's slogan of "salus revo-
l
