Hope is central to the soul of a socialist. Thoughtful socialists such as Martin Luther King Jr. recognized that, and Marx himself long defended an elaborate, hopeful theory of history—“historical materialism.” Some may doubt the supposed hopefulness of Marx, as historical materialism is a famously realistic, even Machiavellian, theory to its very end. And yet, rather than undermining the case for hope, this severity is the very condition under which Marx’s historical optimism takes shape. Rather than ascribing noble motivations to human progress, the historical materialist sees in the long arc of history the replacement of one exploitative ruling class by another. This was true of the feudal period; it continued into the bourgeois era. Underneath the pieties about liberty, equality, and solidarity for all in the liberal-capitalist epoch of Europe, Marx detected the brutal continuation of class rule. His writings are filled to the breaking point with sneering and cynical observations about the roles that greed, fantasy, and illusion play throughout history. In Capital, volume 1, he lampoons those who describe the labor market as the “very Eden of the right of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham.” This reflected little more than their ideological inability to understand the real basis of the capitalist system. It is difficult not to diagnose similar illusions present in our own moment, in which many oblivious and self-assured pundits proclaim our day to be the peak of human civilization even as children still starve and billionaires rocket Katy Perry into space.
From the very beginning of his career, Marx theorized reasons to hope that in the end, history would turn out for the best. In this respect, there is a strange continuity between Marx’s historical materialism and the Christian attitude of hope. As the Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton points out, one of the absurd theses of Christianity is that underneath all the horrors that we humans bring about in a world stained by sin, the providence of God ordains that justice will prevail. In his early work, Marx anticipated that communism was the answer to history and, as he wrote in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, “knows itself to be this solution.” The young Marx developed deep moral and humanist arguments for why this transition would finally conclude, and even redeem, the saga of bloodshed and class exploitation. Much of his early life was spent searching for signs that a revolution was imminent. Marx would be chronically disappointed, but he never gave up hope.
Later in his career, Marx grew more skeptical that the long-awaited revolution was imminent. He became increasingly attentive to the ways that capitalism evolved and stabilized itself, emphasizing its remarkable and creative dynamism in his writings. Yet as late as Capital, his mature masterpiece, Marx predicted that the centralization of the means of production into fewer and fewer hands would lead to the systematic breakdown of capitalism. The “knell of capitalist private property” would sound and the expropriators would be expropriated by workers who, self-consciously ceasing to be separate and exploited individuals, would become a “class for itself.” Whether Marx thought this would require a violent or a peacefully reformist revolution is debated. But he rarely expresses doubt that change is coming and ought to be welcomed. Humanity would move to a society in which the free development of each would be a condition for the free development of all. The cooperative growth of human powers would become an end in itself for the first time, as Capital, volume 3, famously puts it.
More than just a theoretical flourish, the Marxist combination of hard-edged realism and utopian prophecy proved to be a historically transformative fusion. As the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor reminds us, the appeal of Marxism owes much to its radical—if ever tense—combination of rationalistic appeals of the Enlightenment with religious, eschatological aspirations. Such historically conscious aspirations led millions to march under the banner of so-called “scientific socialism,” which claimed to prove that one way or another, socialism was coming. The science of historical materialism showed it was inevitable—the providence of history itself. Perhaps socialism’s arrival could be delayed; perhaps history could be given a little jolt. But the outcome, it was believed, was inevitable regardless of human will.
In hindsight, it is very hard to accept the providential sensibility of the Marxist theory of history. Certainly, after the fall of the Soviet Union, it became very hard to believe that history bent towards a benevolent socialism, whether one wanted it to or not. In Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, the analytical Marxist G. A. Cohen disparaged this eschatological element as the “obstetric” vision of history. On this view, the goal of socialist thinkers and activists was neither to argue for the morality of socialism nor to compete in the democratic battle of ideologies. Rather, they were meant to act as midwives to the new society with which the old society was pregnant. But the collapse of the Soviet Union—first in the moral eyes of the world and then in reality—rendered the obstetric vision implausible to most thinking people.
It is easy to reprimand Marx and other socialists for buying into the providential theory of history, and many conservatives and liberals have done so. But this philosophy of history is not unique to Marx. Many of the Church Fathers, going back to Augustine, believed that there was a religious telos to history. Western conservative and liberal philosophers from Joseph de Maistre to Hegel to Comte developed parallel historicist prophecies about the destiny of humanity. De Maistre viewed history as the unfolding of God’s providential design, which by definition could never include an end to the aristocratic Ancien Régime and the holy fusion of church and throne. Hegel viewed history as the gradual maturation of spirit to ever greater complexity and freedom, and he heavily implied that the nineteenth-century Prussian state he defended represented the highest historical form achieved thus far. In a far more secular vein, Comte predicted that humankind had finally matured past its social need for religious mythology and could now manage itself scientifically. Most of these predictions and evaluations turned out to be far less accurate than many of Marx’s predictions about the transformation of European capitalism into a global system that permeates all corners of life, melting all that is solid into air.
Indeed, the providential view of history was hardly harmless. It contributed to Marxist intellectuals spending too little time on thinking through what a better society ought to look like and how it could avoid the exploitation and domination that—according to their own theory—had been the norm for human history up to that point. An excess of hope that things would come out “in the historical wash” meant that socialists often thought there was little point in writing “recipe books for the cookshops of the future,” as Marx himself once put it dismissively.
Had Marx been less foundationally optimistic, he might have recognized that his own materialist theory of history precluded putting much faith in his very own predictions. More than most thinkers, Marx’s ruthless anti-idealism and relentless attention to how economic power and systems evolved to inhibit new social transformations ought to have inoculated him against such theoretical and spiritual temptations to fancy. Marxist theory, shorn of its own indulgences, is the best antidote to Marxist fantasy.
Still, Marx’s hopeful utopianism suggests something enduring about the faith-aspect of socialism that cannot—and should not—be so easily dismissed. Socialists are unusually clear-eyed about the horrors human beings inflict upon one another, but they also refuse resignation. A socialist, to invoke Eagleton again, is always someone who observes with astonishment that most human lives have been spent in wretched, unremitting misery and then believes they must do something about that. Socialists must therefore be both realistic about human failure and aspirational in their commitments to create a better world. This is the productive tension of socialist hope. While it can lead to many errors, as it did for Marx, it can also help us imagine a better world that would otherwise seem impossibly far-off.
Socialist hope must, in other words, be a realist hope. A socialism focused on eliminating preventable human cruelty and suffering is the only kind of socialism worth the name. But a socialism that aims to perfect human beings, to eliminate their material and bodily vulnerability altogether wades into fantasy. Here, socialist realism finds an ally in Christianity’s unsparing account of human imperfection. One of the moral lessons of Christianity is that there is no perfecting irrevocably flawed souls like ourselves. The solidarity behind socialism must be one of recognizing our flaws and correcting—and forgiving—them as much as we can.
Given this realist commitment, the best form of socialism is not a utopian creed at all but a sober alternative to fantastical political visions, one that is instead full of restraint, solidarity, and care. Seen in this light, American conservatism reveals itself as even more utopian (the word literally means “no-place”), for it imagines, contrary to history, that we could ever design a society where the worthy and meritorious get what they deserve. What makes this utopianism especially striking is that it assigns to the market a role once reserved for God. The invisible hand of the market will do what only an omnipotent and omniscient God could: establish a world where each gives according to merit and receives according to just desserts. It is hard to imagine a much more utopian vision, but it sits uneasily with any Christian account of human fallibility and grace, despite conservatism’s frequent claim to occupy the moral high ground as the sole authentically Christian politics. Compared to it, the socialist aspiration to meet everyone’s needs is immensely humble.
This realism is also key to asserting a sensibility socialists share with liberals: awareness of the corrupting nature of power. The liberal tradition has long expressed great anxiety about the potential danger of allowing political elites too much power. Lord Acton’s famous dictum—that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts—absolutely is well taken. We know what happens when flawed beings like ourselves are allowed to become kings. But liberals have often not gone far enough. They have failed to recognize that economic power corrupts as well, and that political power often arises from economic power. Socialists hope for a society in which humankind’s darkest impulses, although still present, are tamed by limiting or taking away the corrupting power that one person assumes they are entitled to exercise over another.
At their worst, socialists confront an unbridgeable gap between what they wish for and what is. Rather than narrow the gap, or even understanding its expanse, they have tried to force it closed. The results have been tragic, as when the Bolshevik Revolutionaries violently reconstructed their society with little pity for those they victimized. After all, in the long sweep of history, who would complain about a few Kulaks being starved if the result were an ideal society? This kind of thinking is amongst the worst kinds of reification to which socialists are inclined. By conceiving history merely in terms of class dynamics and impersonal laws, we reduce human beings from active subjects to mere objects in manipulable social categories—means to an imagined future rather than neighbors whose suffering places immediate ethical claims upon us. The challenge that socialists face is in desperate need of the Christian perspective, which acknowledges an irrefutable dignity and fallibility of persons.
At their best, socialists have conceived and realized better societies precisely by resisting such temptations and by holding hope in tension with humility, refusing to sacrifice the present to an imagined future. This has been true from the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the Workers’ Party in Brazil, and so-called “Nordic Socialism.” In each case, socialists and their allies succeeded in making things better for ordinary people by limiting cruelty, restraining power, and extending solidarity to the vulnerable. The Civil Rights movement won basic freedoms for millions of Americans. The Workers Party lifted 23 million Brazilians out of food insecurity. Nordic Socialists, or the “Scandinavian variant of socialism” as historian Sejersted puts it in The Age of Social Democracy, have produced the most flourishing societies the world has seen by most metrics. Their successes reflect a moral sensibility that socialism shares with Christianity at its best: a refusal to resign oneself to injustice, paired with unsentimental recognition of human limits. Socialism, when faithful to this tension, is neither secular providence nor utopian fantasy. It is a disciplined hope of those who know that the world cannot be redeemed all at once, yet insist that it can be made more just here and now. It must always be the hopeful dream of those who live awake.
Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College and the author of The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism amongst other books.
This piece, along with other selected pieces from Issue #1: The Radical Hope is available to read for free online for a limited time. You can order the print or digital version of the magazine at the link here.
Image Credit: Félix Ziem, Tuna Fishing at Sunrise off the Coast near Marseilles, 1860s, watercolor with pen and brown ink and touches of gum arabic over graphite, on wove paper, 28.6 x 41 cm (11 1/4 x 16 1/8 in.), Gift of Joan and David Maxwell, Washington, D.C., https://www.nga.gov/artworks/161669-tuna-fishing-sunrise-coast-near-marseilles.