Marxism and Difference: A Response

In my undergrad, I took an introductory course in political ideologies. An oversimplified rubric was provided to us, which took the French revolutionary slogan as its model. All modern ideologies, we were told, respect and uphold “liberty, equality, and fraternity”, but liberalism emphasizes the first, socialism the second, and conservatism the third. Now, this is an enormous oversimplification, and comes close to a mystification - is conservatism’s emphasis on the “natural” order and insistence on a respect for “natural” social differences really fraternity? - but it also reflects a mischaracterization of the socialist emphasis on equality. It has long been pointed out that the fear of the faceless, undifferentiated mass of automatons the capitalist world ascribed to socialism - most clearly expressed in 1984 - simply projected the homogenization of commodity culture onto the “enemy of Western civilization”. Anyone who reads any of the accounts of the Soviet union, both fiction and non-fiction, understands that individuality and difference remained prominent within the USSR. It is an odd paradox that the country which was ostensibly based on the erasure of individuality also gave rise not only to the “cult of personality” around Stalin, but particularly well-known individuals like Shostakovich, Solzhenitsyn, or Andrei Sakharov.

Anyway, I think there is a way in which that oversimplified schema contains a kernel of truth. In a class society, social equality can and must be a tactical objective. The overcoming of inequality - especially in terms of wealth and access to services, etc - is an important plank in the socialist platform. However, this does not mean that socialists erase the notion of difference.

On Friday, I gave the keynote at the annual Forum for Information Professionals conference put on by the University of Alberta’s School of Library and Information Studies. In that talk, I emphasized the respect for individual difference that I see as inscribed within Marxism at least since the 1960s. I used this quote from Audre Lorde to argue that it is in fact liberalism which flattens out and erases difference, precisely out of a “pluralist” respect for difference.

advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. It is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.

Audre Lorde “The Master’s Tools will never Dismantle the Master’s House”. In Sister Outsider, 110-113 (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984): 111.

I concluded by saying that an exultation of difference is necessary if we are to achieve a more just society:

The idea of structural determinations, of the necessary relations into which we are born, is the kind of interdependency that strikes fear into the hearts of those committed to an individualistic society where solidarity and collective action – society itself, really – is impossible. Intellectual Freedom would become, like all other kinds of freedom – and here I’m thinking specifically of anti-vaccination and anti-mask “freedom” – not an individual phenomenon at all, but a social one. It would require that we get over our liberal aversion to positive liberty and embrace the wellbeing and flourishing of human beings in all their radical difference. Neutrality and negative liberty cannot give us that; only positive liberty with a full acceptance of historical necessity can put us on the road to a social and collective freedom in which, as the old book has it, the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all.

In the question period following my talk, one of the attendees posed the following question, which I don’t actually think I answered properly: “Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program proposed ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’, do you believe that the principal ‘all individuals are created equal and should be allowed an equal opportunity under the law to pursue happiness and prosper based on individual merit’ is very similar to Marx’s theory and will really become true?”

The quoted line beginning “all individuals are created equal…” is from Donald Trump’s executive order banning Critical Race Theory in September 2020, one of the documents I was criticizing in my talk.

When I answered the question, I said that we need to historicize questions of equality, happiness, and inviduality, and we need to fully understand what we mean by individuals being “created”. In the founding documents of the United States, “creation” means creation by God; for more structurally-minded Marxists, creation means individuals formed by history and the social contexts into which they are born.

But I think I actually didn’t get to the heart of the question. For me, the motto from the Critique of the Gotha Programme inscribes difference at the heart of the communist project. Far from the homogenized faceless equality and erasure of all individual difference projected onto the Communist bogeyman, Marx’s motto recognizes that individuals have both unequal abilities and unequal needs, and that a communist society would not just tolerate but exult in these differences. The inequality of needs and abilities forming the basis of a future society, to my mind, fits perfectly with Lorde’s incredibly suggestive and inspiring formulation: “Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”

One of the great things about the way Lorde puts it is that difference and equality are not portrayed as opposites, or mutually exclusive, but as engaged in a common human project: “different strengths, acknowledged and equal”. Our differences may make us, in some sense, unequal; but we are equal in the sense that we are all different.

So, to answer the question, no - I don’t think Marx’s motto lines up with the perspective put forward by the American Constitution or Trump’s executive order. There, individualism is pure and unalloyed - the individual is the bearer of rights, the owner of property (including people), and the legal entity engaged in contract. That is a bourgeois concept of individualism which owes nothing to difference; indeed, it owes nothing to human social relations at all. It rejects society, preferring the “cash nexus” of contract and exchange; preferring ownership to relationality; preferring a fictitious insistence on individuality even as it reduces everyone to the numbers in a bank account.