12.4 Marxism
So far we have glanced at two of the options open to traditional societies in an increasingly modern world: to try to carry on as if nothing had happened, or to attempt to adopt some version of the British model. That leaves the third: to seek a radical alternative to the brand of modernity initiated by Britain. This too is not an inherently foolish idea. It stands to reason that British modernity should in many ways be an idiosyncratic product of its local history, and even those who have adopted it have manifestly customized it in numerous respects. For example, the British were Christians, but East Asian modernization has shown conclusively that you do not have to be Christian to be modern; as one nineteenth-century Japanese scholar remarked dismissively before his country's modernization had even begun, "Christianity is Buddhism with hair on it." So to take the argument a stage further, might there not be other and quite different ways to live effectively in the modern world, or even to transform it altogether? The British, after all, had at best muddled through to a parochial modernity whose nature they could hardly be expected to grasp until they had attained it; given hindsight, surely the whole phenomenon called out for a profound rethinking that could then be translated into radical political action. The idea is plausible, but to date the experience of such attempts has not been encouraging.
By far the most sustained of these movements was Marxism, a theory of human society, and especially of industrial society, that was devised in the nineteenth century and extensively applied by the Communist parties of the twentieth. Its most stable component was its aversion to the market economy that had hitherto been the foundation of industrial society. As a political praxis it was originally intended to inform the politics of advanced industrial societies, deftly nudging them into a future of classless freedom and plenty through a process of political revolution. In fact, it turned out to work best as a technique for amassing political and economic power in underdeveloped countries, starting with the Russian revolution of October 1917. And amass power it did: the Soviet Union became a superpower, and Communist China a major player on the international scene. What Marxism did not do was deliver to the societies it ruled either freedom or plenty, and toward the end of the century it collapsed. At the beginning of the twenty- first century, in the countries that matter, Communists have either relinquished political power (as in Russia) or retained it only on the basis of renouncing their traditional hostility to the market (as in China).
One of the key strengths of Marxism lay in its commitment to understanding the future of the modern world, and to living in what would eventually be a transformed version of it. Thus the nightmare for the enemies of Marxism, though by the end of the twentieth century no one any longer remembered this, was that it had come up with a form of society more effective than their own. "We are advancing full steam ahead on the path of industrialization," as Stalin declared in 1929, anticipating that his country would soon leave the "esteemed capitalists" and their "civilization" behind; "we shall see which countries may then be 'classified' as backward and which as advanced" (compare the Irish air balloon). Those who clung to the disorganization of electoral democracy and the market economy would be the dinosaurs of social evolution, and the Marxists with their planned economies and ruthlessly centralized power structures would be its mammals. BrAe•same token, one of the key weaknesses of this futuristic doctrine was that it lacked roots in the inherited beliefs and cultures of ordinary people and had no place for them in its doctrinal system. Thus Marxism deemphasized identity—which may be why, once shown not to work, it disappeared almost without trace. And yet, ironically, some of its major successes in coming to power through revolution had been achieved where Marxists contrived to play the nationalist role as defenders of a country against foreign enemies, and did so better than the nationalists themselves—as in China and Vietnam, though not in Russia.