Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray (Penguin £8.99)
Gray’s main argument is that unrealistic political aims should be abandoned and replaced by goals which are truly achievable. It is probably difficult to disagree with this as a general principle, but of course it all depends on what is regarded as realistic and unrealistic.
Quite a bit of Gray’s discussion is aimed at the impossibility of establishing a Socialist society. While Marx was an unrivalled analyst of capitalism, he says, his view of the future society was impractical. Central planning is bound to fail, since nobody can know enough to plan a modern economy; but this is based on the misconception that there will be an office somewhere that decides how many widgets will be produced and where. Other claims fare no better: it’s just not true that Lenin’s State and Revolution is rooted in Marx’s writings on the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin twisted Marx’s idea of a transitional form of state into a vicious repressive regime that ruled over workers. Gray’s view that Marx and Engels saw terror as part of the revolution is based on remarks made in a talk in 1850, rather than on any of their mature works. In any case, it deals with how workers should act if bourgeois democrats came to power (specifically in Germany) rather than with the aftermath of a Socialist revolution.
Furthermore, Gray claims that no trace has ever been found of ‘primitive communism’ (which is not true either — see the Socialist Standard for December 2006, on life before the Neolithic Revolution). A Socialist society is allegedly impossible because it would pursue harmony and so clash with ‘the diversity of human values’, since apparently a moneyless society would be a vision of hell to some people. To which we can only say that capitalists who yearn for a world where they are billionaires will just have to lump it in Socialism.
And what of the realism that ought to replace all this supposed utopianism? According to Gray, ‘The root of realist thinking is Machiavelli’s insight that governments exist, and must achieve all of their goals in a world of ceaseless conflict that is never far from a state of war’. The heart of realism is ‘its assertion of the innate defects of human beings’. In other words, we should accept capitalism with its violence and poverty, since people are too fierce and unreasonable to live in harmony. But the true realistic approach is to see through the pretensions of capitalism and its supporters and take the view that a society based on cooperation is a practical possibility.
Paul Bennett
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