I remember with sadness my father’s query to me shortly before his death, would socialism come back again? I told him, not in the short run, though as long as capitalism existed there would be some kind of socialist opposition.
But just as the reality of the Soviet Union did not diminish the ideal of a more egalitarian, socially just, and participatory social order beyond “actually-existing democracy,” so its disappearance did not scour the political landscape of alternatives or bring history to an end. America had not changed as we had wanted in the 1960s, and the post-Soviet Union metamorphosed into something more like what we hoped to avoid. But the optimism and security of family and children, of satisfying work, prevented political despair. Indeed, my marriage to Armena Marderosian (an Armenian to be sure!) kept me afloat, even when tragedy—the death of our first child, Grikor—nearly drowned us. For a decade, I shifted identities slightly, from Soviet and Armenian historian to Soviet and post-Soviet political scientist (at the University of Chicago), interested in nations and nationalisms, and then back to history (returning to Michigan). I continue to search for new places from which to observe. I remain a foreigner, an odar, in my native land, but that distance seems to be a propitious place to look beyond the political limits that the present offers us, and explore how I and my colleagues in Soviet history have understood the country we seek to explain.
So, What Is Left of Marx and Socialism?
Historians of my generation grew up in the Cold War decades in a world divided between (what Marxists call) bourgeois democracy, on one side, and statist socialism, on the other, and the dichotomy between a utopia of exclusively political rights versus a utopia of social and economic rights. We learned from the Soviet and East European experiments the bitter lesson that there is no real socialism without political democracy, and some of us concluded from our own political experience in countries polarized between the very wealthy and the rest that there is no real democracy without some kind of socialism. Perhaps not for most of those in the Soviet historical profession, but for a minority of practitioners Marx remained an inspiration, a provider of questions rather than a priori answers.
Marx himself was many things in his life—a post-Hegelian radical searching for the source of the expected German revolution; an Enlightenment rationalist who believed in naturalistic explanations of social and natural phenomena, rather than in supernatural or religious causes; a social scientist with a deep faith in empirical research; a moral philosopher, a secular humanist, who thought he could provide a factual, real-world basis for such normative categories as exploitation, inequality, and emancipation; a historical sociologist avant la lettre who believed he had discovered the laws of social motion in the class struggle as well as the instrument of human liberation from capital, the proletariat. Here one might argue that science was superseded by eschatology, and that in its futurism, Marxism became a religion done up in scientific drag.3 For scholars today, Marx is most importantly a poser of questions, the formulator of a vast research program that he himself had too little time to realize. His questions, his critiques, his values, and his moral vision remain part of a legacy that encompasses a powerful specter still haunting global capitalism and bourgeois democracy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Those questions, critiques, and values continue to inspire people in many parts of the world who without them would be even more disempowered before the onslaught of global capitalism and American hegemony.
Whether or not they were Marxist in orientation themselves, the generation of historians that was educated in the 1960s and entered the Soviet studies profession in the 1970s had a particularly intense engagement with Marx and Marxist historiography. Theirs was a moment of exploration of the new social history that came out of Britain and France, some of it overtly socialist history, the replacement of the older emphasis on structure with a gravitation toward appreciation of human agency, experience, culture, and later of discourse and the problem of meaning. All those influences—whether Eric Hobsbawm’s revealing study of primitive rebels, E. P. Thompson’s concern with experience, the feminists’ radical deconstruction of naturalized identities, the scholars of nationalism’s constructivist assault on primordialized communities—had the cumulative effect of historicizing what had been taken for granted, undermining what common sense told us had always been the way it was now. They gave one a sense that intellectual work was more than academic, and could have real effects on the real world; that scholarship, even in its need to be apolitical or extra-political, as neutral, objective, and evidence-based as possible, had a politics that could not be denied. Our generation rejected a Marxism that reduced ideas and politics to economics, dismissed the base/superstructure model of determination, and echoed Engels who in his last letters repeatedly denied that he and Marx were economic determinists.
This generation puzzled over the “relative autonomy” of politics and the state, was infatuated at first with the young Marx and the problem of alienation and the fulfillment of human potential. From the notion of an early and late Marx, many tried to integrate the humanist utopianism of the 1844 manuscripts with the materialist structural analysis of Capital; we trudged through the Grundrisse with Hobsbawm’s assistance, looked to Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci and György Lukács for aid (and comfort), and tried to find substitute proletariats—African-Americans, women, Chinese or Vietnamese peasants—when the White working class of America put on their hard hats and joined Richard Nixon and his racist “Southern Strategy.” Perhaps the moment of realization for me that the American Left was in trouble was when at the University of California, Berkeley, I heard the writer Imamu Amear Baraka, the former LeRoi Jones, reduced to quoting from the selected works of Enver Hoxha and the Albanian Communist newspaper Zëri i Popullit. It was an exhilarating journey that ended up with becoming a tenured radical (first at Oberlin and later at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago) just as the “revolution” turned into Reaganism. Disappointment, yes; discouragement and disillusionment, no—at least not for many of us. Marx, if he gives you anything, provides an appreciation of contradictions and a sense of historical progression (not necessarily progress, as it turned out) that guards against mistaking the present for the future, within a radical historicist sense that all that seems natural is historically constructed, constantly changing and being replaced. “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
Marx’s view of history, unlike liberal modernization theory, did not end with capitalism or legitimize the present as the best of all possible worlds. Even in his appreciation of the power and productivity of capitalism, he aimed to subvert and supersede bourgeois society in the interest of a more egalitarian, socially just, and democratic form of society. This vision certainly contains within it a utopia, as does any politics except conservative acceptance of the way the world exists at any one time. That utopia, that different and better future which the overwhelming one-dimensionality of the liberal political imagination renders ridiculous, retains enormous power, even for those who would not think to align themselves with Marx, as an immanent critique of the limits, mystifications, apologetics, and deceptions of bourgeois democracy and market capitalism. Utopia, in other words, might be thought of not in the usual sense of an impossible dream, but rather as a far-off goal toward which one directs one’s political desires, even if the ultimate objective might never be reached. My personal goal, for instance, might be perfect health, immortality. Even though I know neither is possible, that does not stop me from going to the gym for a workout.
For those who embrace its positive meaning, socialism is a utopia—not in the sense of an unattainable goal but rather in the sense of a direction toward which people might point their political desires. The political goal, whether reachable or not, is the empowerment of all the people, social justice, and equality (not only of opportunity, as liberals believe, but of reward, as much as is practically possible). Socialism stands opposed to the proposition so central to classical liberal (now conservative) economic ideology, that individual greed will magically produce the greatest good for the greatest number and that capitalism is the end of history. Moreover, by resurrecting a politics aimed at the common good, socialism—in contrast to liberalism but closer to some forms of conservatism, religion, and nationalism—seeks the restoration of a social solidarity fractured by the individualizing effects of competitive market relations.
