Constructing Marxist Ethics: Critique, Normativity, Praxis (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 74) 9789004254145, 9789004254152, 9004254145

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Constructing Marxist Ethics

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (Wayne State University) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Duke University) Chris Chase-Dunn (University of California-Riverside) William Carroll (University of Victoria) Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney) Kimberle W. Crenshaw (University of California la, and Columbia University) Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University) Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen) Mary Romero (Arizona State University) Alfredo Saad Filho (University of London) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)

VOLUME 74

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/scss

Constructing Marxist Ethics Critique, Normativity, Praxis Edited by

Michael J. Thompson

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: “The Memorial to the victims of Communism” is a series of statues in Prague commemorating the victims of the communist era between 1948 and 1989. It shows seven bronze figures descending a flight of stairs. The statues appear more “decayed” the further away they are from the spectator – losing limbs and their bodies breaking open. It symbolizes how political prisoners were affected by Communism. It was unveiled on the 22 May 2002, twelve years after the fall of communism, and is the work of Czech sculptor Olbram Zoubek and architects Jan Kerel and Zdeněk Holzel. Reproduced with kind permission of Olbram Zoubek. Photo taken by Michael J. Thompson. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Constructing Marxist ethics : critique, normativity, praxis / edited by Michael J. Thompson. pages cm. -- (Studies in critical social sciences, ISSN 1573-4234 ; v. 74) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-25414-5 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-25415-2 (e-book) 1. Communist ethics. 2. Humanism. 3. Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. I. Thompson, Michael, 1973- editor of compilation. BJ1390.C67 2015 171’.7--dc23 2015002689

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual ‘Brill’ typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1573–4234 isbn 978-90-04-25414-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-25415-2 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents Acknowledgments vii List of Contributors viii Introduction 1

Part 1 Marxist Humanism and Ethical Models 1

The Marxian Roots of Radical Humanism 9 Lawrence Wilde

2

The Idea of the “Struggle for Recognition” in the Ethical Thought of the Young Marx and its Relevance Today 33 Tony Burns

3

Political Economy and the Normative Marx on Human Nature and the Quest for Dignity 59 Lauren Langman and Dan Albanese

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Art as Ethics The Aesthetic Self 86 Ian Fraser

Part 2 Critical Perspectives on Rights and Justice 5

Reclaiming Marx 109 Principles of Justice as a Critical Foundation in Moral Realism 109 Wadood Y. Hamad

6

Marx as a Critic of Liberalism 144 Sean Sayers

7

Marx, Modernity and Human Rights 165 Bob Cannon

vi 8.

Contents 

Last of the Schoolmen Natural Law and Social Justice in Karl Marx 192 George E. McCarthy

Part 3 Toward a Theory of Marxist Ethics 9

Philosophical Foundations for a Marxian Ethics 235 Michael J. Thompson

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Political Economy with Perfectionist Premises Three Types of Criticism in Marx 266 Christoph Henning

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G.A. Cohen and the Limits of Analytical Marxism 288 Paul Blackledge

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On the Ethical Contours of Thin Aristotelian Marxism 313 Ruth Groff

13

The Ethical Implications of Marx’s Concept of a Post-Capitalist Society 336 Peter Hudis

Index 357

Acknowledgments Edited books are always difficult to put together and see to completion. This book, however, came together with ease and many people are to thank for this. First, David Fasenfest, editor of the Studies in Critical Social Sciences book series at Brill, for his interest in this project from the beginning and his help in realizing it. I would also like to thank the contributors for their dedication to the project and their enthusiasm for it. Rosanna Woensdregt at Brill also provided excellent assistance in getting the manuscript into production and Manjusha Chandrasekaran was meticulous in copy editing and finalizing the proofs. Finally, to Brian Sullivan for his excellent editorial assistance in preparing the manuscript and for compiling the index.

List of Contributors Dan Albanese is a graduate student in the Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago. Paul Blackledge is professor of political theory and branch secretary of the lecturers’ union ucu at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is the author of Marxism and Ethics (suny Press: 2012), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester University Press: 2006) and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (Merlin Press: 2004). He is a member of the editorial board of International Socialism. Tony Burns is Associate Professor in the School of Politics & International Relations, and a member and former co-director of the School’s Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (cssgj), at the University of Nottingham, uk. He is the author of Aristotle and Natural Law (Continuum, 2011); Political Theory and Science Fiction: Ursula K. Le Guin and The Dispossessed (Lexington, 2008); and Natural Law and Political Ideology in the Philosophy of Hegel (Avebury, 1996). He is co-editor, with Simon Thompson, of Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition (Palgrave, 2013); with James Connelly (University of Hull), of The Legacy of Leo Strauss (Imprint Academic, 2010); and with Ian Fraser (Loughborough University), of The Hegel-Marx Connection (Palgrave, 2000). Bob Cannon teaches in the School of Social Sciences, East London University and is author of Rethinking the Normative Content of Critical Theory: Marx, Habermas and Beyond (Palgrave 2001). His research interests include Marxism, human rights, modernity, postmodernism and the Holocaust. He is concerned to defend the normative content of modernity from its postmodern, neoAristotelian and Marxist detractors and place the critique of capitalism on an ethical foundation. Ian Fraser is Senior Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Politics, History and International Relations, Loughborough University, uk. He is currently writing his forthcoming book, Political Theory and Film: From Adorno to Žižek

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(Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). He is also the author of: Identity, Politics and the Novel: The Aesthetic Moment (University of Wales Press, 2013), Dialectics of the Self: Transcending Charles Taylor (Imprint Academic, 2007), Hegel and Marx: The Concept of Need (Edinburgh University Press, 1998), co-editor, with Tony Burns, of The Hegel-Marx Connection (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), and co-author, with Lawrence Wilde, of The Marx Dictionary (Continuum, 2011). Ruth Porter Groff (Associate Professor, Saint Louis University), who is delighted to be in such good company, mostly writes about the metaphysical infrastructure of social, political and moral thought. Her recent work includes: Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (Routledge, 2012); Powers and Capacities in Philosophy (ed., with John Greco; Routledge, 2012) and Subject & Object: Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology and Method (Bloomsbury, 2014). Wadood Y. Hamad is a scientist specializing in nanomaterials and nanotechnology, writer and activist. He holds a PhD in materials science from McGill University and ma in political theory from the University of Manchester. He currently lives with his wife and two sons and works in Vancouver, Canada. Christoph Henning is a German philosopher and sociologist who has taught at St. Gallen University in Switzerland since 2007 and, since 2014, at the Max-Weber-Kolleg in Erfurt, Germany. His PhD on Marxism (originally in German) appeared in English as Philosophy after Marx (Brill, 2014). At St. Gallen University he received his Habilitation for a book on the political philosophy of perfectionism. His main interests are in Critical Theory, political philosophy, aesthetics, and pragmatism. Peter Hudis is a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Oakton Community College. He has written on Marx, Hegel, and Fanon, as well as on political economy, ecology, and indigenous movements in Latin America. He is the author of Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (2012) and is the General Editor of Rosa Luxemburg’s Complete Works (in progress: Volume I appeared in Fall 2013). He is the coeditor of the Letters of Rosa Luxemburg (2011). With Kevin Anderson, he coedited The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (2004) and Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity (2002).

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Lauren Langman is Professor of Sociology at Loyola University of Chicago. He has been president of Marxist section of the American Sociological Association as well as the Alienation Research Committee of the International Sociological Society. He is the co-organizer of the annual Freudo-Marx symposium and the Global Studies Association. His recent publications include three collections on alienation. George E. McCarthy is Professor of Sociology at Kenyon College. He holds an m.a. and a Ph.D. in Sociology (New School for Social Research) and an m.a. and Ph.D. in Philosophy (Boston College). He has published nine books in social theory, including Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and 19th-Century Political Economy (Rowman & Littlefield), Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece (suny Press), and Dreams in Exile: Rediscovering Science and Ethics in 19th-Century Social Theory (suny Press). Sean Sayers is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Kent, Canterbury. He has written extensively on topics of Marxist and Hegelian philosophy. His most recent book is Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes (2011). He is the founder and Editor in Chief of the online Marx and Philosophy Review of Books. Michael J. Thompson is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at William Paterson University. His most recent books include The Politics of Inequality (Columbia, 2011) and Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays on Politics, Philosophy and Aesthetics (Continuum, 2011). His next book, The Republican Reinvention of Radicalism is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. He is also the Founding Editor of Logos: A Journal of Modern Society & Culture. Lawrence Wilde is Professor Emeritus of Political Theory at Nottingham Trent University in England. His most recent book is Global Solidarity, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2013. His other books are Erich Fromm and the Quest for Solidarity (2004), Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (1998), Modern European Socialism (1994) and Marx and Contradiction (1989). With Ian Fraser

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he is co-author the first dictionary of The Marx Dictionary (2011). In addition he has edited Marxism’s Ethical Thinkers (2001) and co-edited (with Mark Cowling) Approaches to Marx (1989), as well as publishing in top international journals. For many years he has been developing a radical humanist perspective on the concept of solidarity.

Introduction Michael J. Thompson Marxism’s relation to ethics has always been fraught with difficulty and with controversy. Did Marx not denigrate any discussion of moralism, of rights, of justice? Did he not displace questions of morality and ethics with a science of society grounded in materialism thereby negating normative questions? For many, this was (and in some cases remains) a satisfactory answer to the question. But for others, as a tradition of thought Marx’s ideas are clearly rooted in the great humanist traditions of western philosophy no less than the scientific movements of the nineteenth. From ancient Greek and Roman humanistic ideals through to those of the Enlightenment, there exists in Marx a consistent conviction that the ends of social life are to produce a common happiness, a concrete form of freedom, and an emphasis on personal development and selfrealization as opposed to human degradation and debasement. At the heart of this view can be found the notion that man’s creative, rational character was capable of controlling nature and society to allow for the expansion of freedom; that human labor could become creative and enhance public as well as individual life; that the domination of man by man would be overcome; and that a new horizon of culture would open up. The vision of society that nourished Marxian thought was always predicated on the idea of the perfection of man, of mitigating the degenerating forces of modern society that whittled away at the individual. At the core of the Marxian project lies an ethical drive that is decidedly humanist in nature and which gives shape to its scientific and political dimensions. Ethical themes in Marxism were initially suppressed largely because the political growth of socialist parties made the need for a normative justification of socialism seemingly unnecessary. Marxism’s political self-confidence during the early-twentieth century made the question of ethics almost entirely irrelevant as capital swelled in tandem with an urbanized proletariat. Marxist theory was dominated by the view that ethics was a mere “moralizing,” that it was a cant that withered in the face of the social forces internal to capitalist society. The increasing size of the proletariat in Europe filled the ranks of socialist and communist parties and movements. Questions of ethics held little place where the structural conditions of capital appeared to make them essentially irrelevant. Science was now privileged against ethical principles and values. The thesis was that science – a term virtually equated with Marxism itself – made evident the kinds of action needed for social transformation, for revolution. As Otto Bauer, one of the Austro-Marxists at the turn of the twentieth century, succinctly put the matter: © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_002

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Marx has scientifically demonstrated that, in capitalist society, the proletariat was bound to want socialism as the only possibility of escaping exploitation; that it can attain its goal because the concentration of property has made possible the appropriation of the instruments of labor as social property; that the working class will attain its goal, because it becomes the overwhelming majority of the population.1 This view was the expression of the reified conception of science that came to dominate the intellectual climate of the Second International, going hand in glove with the empirical political and economic realities of industrial society.2 There was no need of ethical discourse when the system appeared to be disintegrating under its own weight, creating the very preconditions needed for the transformation to socialism. But as the century progressed, the issue of ethics would become more crucial. Whereas orthodox Marxists continued to rely on the idea that capitalism would produce its own gravediggers, others were not as certain that structural conditions were required to justify the vision of a socialist society. Karl Vorländer’s Kant und Marx (1911) sought to provide a foundation for socialism along Kantian grounds arguing that Kant’s ethical philosophy could be adapted to the justification for socialism.3 Reliance on a materialist conception of society and science was not needed to justify socialism in an age of capitalism. But Max Adler’s Kantian Marxism pushed ethical concerns into the background once again and recast Marxism as a neutral science of society. His theory of science and knowledge eschewed Kant’s ethical philosophy by grafting Kant’s epistemology to Marx’s theory of socialized man. For Adler, in his impressive Kant und der Marxismus, Marx’s scientific investigations led him to see socialized man as the a priori precondition for any valid science of society, the very starting point for all knowledge of social facts. With this foundation, Marxism would be able to show how historical developments were leading human society toward socialism as an inevitable state.4 Whereas the Austro-Marxists 1 Otto Bauer, “Marxismus und Ethik,” Die Neue Zeit, XXIV, no. 2 (1905–06): 485–499, 492. 2 See the excellent discussion on this theme by Stephen Eric Bronner, Socialism Unbound (New York: Routledge, 1990), 31–52. 3 Karl Vorländer, Kant und Marx. Ein Beitrag zur Philosophie des Sozialismus. (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1911). For a more recent discussion along similar lines, see Harry van der Linden, Kantian Ethics and Socialism (Indianapolis, in: Hackett Publishing, 1988). 4 This position is also laid out by Karl Kautsky in his Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1909). Kautsky essentially dissolves the question of ethics back into the question of economics: “In scientific socialism the ethical ideal of class struggle is transformed into an economic one,” 69.

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sought to use a non-positivist conception of science against the vulgar materialists, they were still marked by the thesis that Marxism was a science, indeed the only true science, of society and it was therefore simply coincident that socialism as the outcome of capitalism was both scientifically certain and morally justified. Marxism had no need of ethics, Adler argued, because it was a science of those social tendencies that would, in and of itself, produce socialism: Marxism does not aim to be anything but the science of the laws of social life and its causal development. Consequently, it aims to deduce the development of socialism from capitalism as a matter of causal necessity. According to the Marxist conception, socialism does not come about because it is ethically justified, but because is causally produced.5 But as political defeats began to mount in western European countries, particularly after World War I, the mechanistic assumptions of scientific socialism and orthodox Marxism had to be questioned. Now, thinkers such as Georg Lukács were advocating the need for ethical consciousness, as well as conscience. Class-consciousness was now the criterion for ensuring the action of subjects in class struggle: “ethics relate to the individual and the necessary consequence of this relationship is that the individual’s conscience and sense of responsibility are confronted with the postulate that he must act as if on his action or inaction depended the changing of the world’s destiny.”6 Now, ethical questions and ideas began to emerge as a central concern within the general structure of Marxism. The question of critical consciousness and political praxis was enlarged by Lukács to reveal a role for consciousness as well as conscience. Ethics would increasingly become antagonistic to the orthodox adherents to scientific socialism.7 Much later, Louis Althusser would seek to give Marxist humanism a final blow by arguing that a coupure épistémologique divided the young, “humanistic” Marx from the mature, “scientific” Marx. For Althusser, not unlike the Analytic Marxists of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Marxism was a science and it needed to be purged of any philosophical-humanistic baggage. 5 Max Adler, Kant und der Marxismus (Berlin: E. Laub’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1925), 142. For a discussion of the scientism that dominated this period of Marxism, see Robert N. Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991), 121ff. 6 Georg Lukács, Tactics and Ethics: Political Essays, 1919–1929 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 8. 7 Lukács had to defend these views after the publication of History and Class Consciousness. See Georg Lukács, A Defence of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2000).

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Not only were humanism and ethics viewed as ineffectual, they were ideological as well.8 Once again, humanistic values were displaced as Marxism was equated with science. But the question of Marxism’s relation to humanism and indeed the thesis that Marxism is in fact a humanism, as Léopold Senghor had argued, became more important during the post World War II era.9 What began to attract attention was the unified nature of Marx’s thought; that at its root was an emancipatory vision of society, of a conception of human individuality and development that was negated by a modernity plagued by the administered industrial order. Yet another reason was the reaction of many to the realities of Soviet and Stalinist versions of Marxism-Leninism and its distortion of the impulses of Marx’s ideas. Another was the concern of many within communist countries to humanize and democratize the states of actually existing socialism. Tied to this was the renewed awareness of the injustices of advanced capitalist countries and the culture of social awareness motivated by the social movements of the 1960s. Because of all these different factors, the depths of Marxism’s moral and humanistic dimensions and sources was of increasing intellectual concern as the 1960s and 1970s progressed. It was only after the fall of communism in 1989 that interest in the ethical aspects of Marxism began to cede once again to a focus on political economy. Today, Marx is seen not as the prophet of a socialist humanism but rather as the critic of political economy: an analyst of the architectonics of capitalism and a theoretician of economic crisis. But there is a need once again for Marxist humanism, for an ethical Marxism to again be cultivated and developed in order to fill out this nascent revival of critical political economy. Even as capitalism spreads globally the sources for social critique have fragmented. The humanist Marx, the critic of alienation and of human decadence under capitalism, has been replaced by the political economist. The animating spirit of an ethical vision which was alternative to capitalist reality, which held fast to a culture of flourishing, human-centered life, has withered. Now, leftist movements – largely marginalized by the liberal-capitalist consensus in politics and culture – have been characterized by neo-anarchism, a renewed neo-orthodoxy and ideological rigidity, no less than by the politics of “identity.” Concepts of 8 Althusser argues that “in the framework of the Marxist conception, the concept ‘socialism’ is indeed a scientific concept, but the concept ‘humanism’ is no more than an ideological one.” For Marx (London: Verso, 1969), 223. 9 Léopold Senghor, “Socialism Is a Humanism,” in Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1965), 50–62. As Senghor puts the matter, “Humanism, the philosophy of humanism, rather than economics, is the basic character and positive contribution of Marxian thought,” 57.

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praxis have been pried from the moorings of Marx’s humanistic critique, and it has suffered as a result. The ideas needed for the foundation of an alternative vision of society, for a rational critique of the contemporary social order – one more humane, more liberated from the constraints of capitalist economic life and its hegemony over culture, politics and society – are perhaps more relevant now than even a century ago. Indeed, with the sociological transformation of industrial to post-industrial society and the move from the productivist paradigm to a consumption-­ oriented society, the forces of conformism, alienation, and anomie, have come to dominate. Capitalism continues to possess the basic features outlined by Marx. Unlike Eduard Bernstein’s move toward an ethical Marxism, it cannot be held that the critique of political economy Marx outlined is empirically false. Even though Bernstein was in essence correct about the ethical aims of Marx’s socialism, it remains crucial to find a way to unite the power of science with the evaluative powers of ethical value. Indeed, capitalism empirically still exhibits the flaws that Marx saw as essential to its nature. It remains prone to severe crises on a cyclical basis; it continues to generate massive economic inequalities; it consistently generates social waste; and the commodity form continues its dominance over culture and consciousness. It also continues to generate the social pathologies that characterize modern culture: of alienation, reification, exploitation and cultural degeneration. This, coupled with the breakdown of civil society and the lack of self-conscious working class movements in advanced capitalist societies, has paved the way to a neo-liberal social context wherein the economy is once again seen as “natural” and the struggle between social classes has been slowly erased from the political scene. Without the sociological prerequisites for organized labor movements, ethical ideas must once again enter the fray. Not as separate from the economic and social tendencies of capitalism, but as principles to elucidate what has become reified. The return to constructing a Marxist ethics is crucial, in this regard, because, as Lukács had seen as early as the 1920s, the social conditions for radical politics was but a necessary, and yet insufficient, condition. To make social science truly critical again by absorbing human values of social justice and transformation is equally important. The essays contained in this volume seek to reignite interest in a Marxist theory that is connected to these ethical, humanistic concerns. They are concerned with questions of Marx’s humanistic roots, the relation of science and values, of social justice, human rights, as well as ideas of the “good life,” dignity, as well as human flourishing and perfection – all echoing what Adam Schaff saw as the essential fiber of Marxist humanism: “man as the supreme good, and the struggle for the changing of the social relations that

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debase him.”10 These strong ideas from the traditions of political philosophy have been pushed asunder by the dominance of postmodern critics on the one hand who sought the destruction of what they viewed as “essentialist” and universalist concepts on the one hand, as well as the return in mainstream political philosophy to Kantianism and pragmatism as sources of ethical ideas and practice on the other. John Rawls’ assertion of Kantian liberalism and the Kantian pragmatism of Jürgen Habermas have been powerful in moving political philosophy and ethics away from the questions of human self-realization and social freedom, the core, animating concepts of Marxist thought. The essays that follow are united in the basic conviction that the humanistic and ethical foundations of Marxism are not only worth retrieving, but in some sense also constitute the central structure of Marxism and its contemporary salience. They see an inherent validity to tapping into what Ernst Bloch once referred to as Marxism’s “warm current” in order to rejuvenate the project of social transformation and emancipatory critique. Returning once again to the relation of Marxism and ethics, indeed, to the project of building a Marxian ethics, is taken here to be crucial for a more robust, more radical, and more compelling critical theory of society to emerge. These essays are therefore offered in the spirit of social critique and with an eye toward inspiring a renewed vigor to Marxist philosophy as well as new logics for radical political praxis. 10

Adam Schaff, Marxism and the Human Individual (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 169.

Part 1 Marxist Humanism and Ethical Models

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chapter 1

The Marxian Roots of Radical Humanism Lawrence Wilde The hostility that Marx displayed towards moral discourse after 18451 has not deterred commentators from assessing the moral content implicit in both his analysis of exploitation and his normative vision of human emancipation.2 This scholarship has helped to establish continuity between Marx’s early humanist writings and the later economic works as well as playing an important role in rescuing Marx’s philosophy from the distorted image projected by Soviet communism. Few writers, however, have gone beyond this heuristic exercise to construct an ethics consonant with the normative principles that are all too clearly displayed in his work. To do so, of course, involves breaking a proscription on moral theory initiated by Marx and affirmed in ‘orthodox’ Marxism by Karl Kautsky in his 1906 text, Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History, written with the clear intention of closing down further enquiry by arguing that all forms of moral argument are jejune when it comes to the task of overthrowing capitalism.3 In this chapter I argue that a radical humanist 1 Marx comments that ‘communists do not preach morality at all’, in The German Ideology in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 247 – hereafter cw, preceded by the volume number. In Capital he derides the ‘pompous catalogue of the inalienable rights of man, in Capital, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 416. 2 The list is exhaustive but I have found the following to be particularly helpful: Paul Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics: Freedom, Desire, and Revolution (Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 2012); George Brenkert, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979); Allen Buchanan, Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982); Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel and Thomas Scanlon (eds), Marx, Justice and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Norman Geras, Literature of Revolution: Essays on Marxism (London: Verso, 1986); Philip Kain, Marx and Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1985); Kai Nielsen, Marxism and the Moral Point of View (Boulder, Colarado: Westview Press, 1988); Rodney Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Robert T. Sweet, Marx, Morality, and the Virtue of Beneficence (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2002). 3 Karl Kautsky, Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History (Chicago: Charles Kerr and Co., 1911). Tony Burns has argued that it is possible to discern in Kautsky’s book the germ of a view of human nature similar to that of the young Marx, whose works were not available at that time – see Tony Burns, “Karl Kautsky: Ethics and Marxism,” in Lawrence Wilde (ed.), Marxism’s Ethical Thinkers, (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 15–50.

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ethics can be constructed that reflects the humanism which forms the framework for Marx’s early writings and which is abundantly in evidence in his later ones.4 I have argued elsewhere that this humanism closely resembles the eudaemonistic approach prevalent in ancient Greece, with its emphasis on human essence and human flourishing.5 Although Marx does not have a moral theory, it is possible to construct one compatible with his clearly stated views about the damage capitalism does to human beings and social relations, and his comments on what people could become in ‘the realm of freedom’.6 In the Manifesto, Marx and Engels, in response to a hypothetical argument that there are surely eternal truths such as freedom and justice, declare that communism abolishes all ‘eternal truths’ including ‘all morality’.7 This is consistent with a relativist position, that all moral concepts are products of a specific social formation, which he confirms in 1871 when commenting that ‘every form of property has “morals” of its own’.8 Again, in 1875, when opposing the proposed insertion of a claim for ‘just distribution of the proceeds of labour’ in the draft programme of the newly-united German Socialist Workers’, he argues that the bourgeoisie considers the existing system of distribution to be ‘just’, and, furthermore, that it was indeed the only ‘just’ system under capitalism.9 However, this evades the question of how those who oppose the existing system are to articulate their opposition to it; if exploitation is wrong, why is it wrong? Marx’s use of inverted commas around the word ‘just’ implies some form of alternative that is somehow ‘genuinely’ just. He clearly did not think that this was a worthwhile question to pursue, but the circumstances in which he formed that opinion are radically different to the ones that we face today. Marx, I contend, turned his back on moral discourse primarily because he considered it a diversion from the task of analysing the socio-economic conditions which would assist the working class to abolish capitalism. While other socialists and anarchists surpassed themselves in rhetorical denunciations of the status quo, Marx analysed the contradictions inherent in capitalist production with the skill of the ‘coldest 4 Marx and Engels identify their position as ‘real humanism’ in The Holy Family, published in 1845, where it is directed against ‘spiritualism’ and ‘speculative idealism’ – see 4 cw, 7. 5 Lawrence Wilde, Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 1–50. 6 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), 959. 7 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party in Karl Marx, Revolutions of 1848 (London: Verso, 2010), 86. 8 Karl Marx, First Draft of the Civil War in France in Karl Marx, The First International and After (London: Verso, 2010), 267. 9 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme in Karl Marx, The First International and After (London: Verso, 2010), 343–344.

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detective’, as Ernst Bloch once put it.10 As a tactical decision, valid only for the particular historical circumstances that prevailed at that time, and given that the ‘radical rupture’11 that he hoped for has not been accomplished, his proscription on moral discourse ought to be lifted.12 It should be recognised that the myriad problems of global injustice generated by capitalism need to be combatted not just by economic and political struggle, but also on moral grounds. As Bloch commented, the ‘cold stream’ of analysis needs to be supplemented by the ‘warm stream’ that fires the passion and imagination of millions,13 and that ‘warm stream’ should encompass a moral dimension. Marx provides occasional moral maxims, such as ‘we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’,14 and ‘from each according to ability, to each according to needs’,15 but these are only indicative of the general direction that an ethics consistent with his principles might look like. It is, therefore, necessary to go beyond Marx in constructing such an ethics. One commendable attempt to reconstruct a Marxian ethics is Rodney Peffer’s Marxism, Morality and Social Justice, which contains a powerful refutation of claims that Marx’s evaluative statements are incompatible with morality.16 Peffer’s reconstruction takes the form of an alternative version of Rawls’ moral philosophy, and although this has the potential advantage of bringing Marx back into mainstream liberal justice debates, it does so at the cost of losing sight of the ethical framework which is evident in his early writings. Marx’s early moral outlook is grounded in a view of human nature and human flourishing (eudaemonia) which flows from his immersion in the philosophy of Epicurus and Aristotle and provides a humanism implicit in his later development of a theory 10 11 12

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3 (Cambridge, ma.: mit Press, 1995), 1370. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, op. cit., 86. I argue this in Lawrence Wilde (ed.), Marxism’s Ethical Thinkers, op. cit., 1–8; Lawrence Wilde, “Marx, Morality, and the Global Justice Debate,” in Matthew Johnson (ed.), The Legacy of Marxism: Contemporary Challenges, Conflicts and Developments (London: Continuum, 2012), 118–121. 13 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 3, op. cit., 1369. 14 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party in Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848, op. cit., 87. 15 Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme in Karl Marx, The First International and After, op. cit., 347. 16 R.G. Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice, op.cit, 169–211. Peffer refutes the arguments of Allen Wood, Richard Miller, Anthony Skillen and Andrew Collier. In various ways these writers use ‘morality’ in a narrow sense that rules out eudaemonistic approaches a priori because happiness is not a moral good.

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of historical development and his analysis of exploitation.17 Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics offers the best example of the virtue ethics approach, later adapted to monotheistic religion in the late middle-ages.18 Alasdair MacIntyre outlines the structure of virtue ethics as triadic, with a conception of ‘untutored’ human nature, what that nature could be if its essence was realised, and the ethical principles needed to move from one condition to the other.19 In comparison with Kantian or utilitarian ethics, virtue ethics emphasises the character of the moral agent rather than appeals to duties or rights, or calculation of the consequences of particular actions.20 In this respect the work of Erich Fromm is invaluable, particularly his 1947 text, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, which contains an explicit view of human essence and a discussion of the qualities needed to achieve human flourishing.21 Although Fromm does not draw on Marx in this specific book, he goes on to link his own work explicitly with Marx’s concept of humanity in Marx’s Concept of Man and To Have or To Be?22 In outlining a radical humanist ethics in my book Global Solidarity I have drawn on both Marx and Fromm. On the basis of  a conceptualisation of human essence drawn from both theorists I  identify four key potentials – rationality, compassion, productiveness and 17

18 19 20

21 22

Lawrence Wilde, Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics, op. cit., 1–50. See also the chapters by Michael de Golyer, Richard Miller, Alan Gilbert in George McCarthy (ed), Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (Savage, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992). Rodney Peffer discusses arguments for similarities between the moral outlook of Aristotle and Marx presented by John Somerville, Alan Nasser, Hilliard Aronovitch and Richard Miller in Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990), 100–108. It is acknowledged by all contributors to this broad line of interpretation that there are considerable differences between Marx and Aristotle, in particular on equality and historical development. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1994), 165–180. Ibid., 52–53. Stan Van Hooft, Understanding Virtue Ethics (Chesham: Acumen, 2006), 7–48; Roger Crisp and Michael Slote, Introduction to Crisp and Slote, (eds.), Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 1–25. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (London: Routledge, 2003). Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Continuum, 1992), 24–42; Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Continuum, 2002), 93–97; see also Fromm, The Crisis of Psychoanalysis (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1970), 46–58. For a discussion of Fromm’s humanist ethics see Lawrence Wilde, Erich Fromm and the Quest for Solidarity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 37–56.

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cooperation – that need to be developed, individually and socially, to promote the normative goal of human solidarity, with solidarity defined as a feeling of sympathy shared by subjects within and between groups, impelling supportive action and pursuing social inclusion.23 I have used the concept of ‘potentials’ rather than virtues to avoid the various historical and cultural associations that attach to traditional virtues. It is also important to note that while these potentials are quintessentially human capacities, they are in practice under-­ developed and frustrated. Marxism emphasises the extent to which the social arrangements that flow from capitalism actively discourage the development of human potentials. The radical humanist ethic is humanist because of its stress on human nature and human potential, and it is radical in the sense described by the young Marx when he talked of ‘grasping the root of the ­matter’,24 recognizing that human flourishing is impossible without social transformation. In what follows I want to show how a radical humanist ethics can be developed on the basis of Marx’s philosophical views of the nature of what it is to be human and what an emancipated human existence would entail – the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of being human. I will then examine the normative content of Marx’s views in relation to the key human potentials identified above. The final section will outline the importance of applying such an ethic in order to contribute to a renewal of social political discourse.

Human Nature and Human Flourishing

The most succinct description of human essence supplied by Marx is made in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 when he asserts that ‘conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal activity’.25 In making this comparison with animals he was following the example of Aristotle, having just translated the latter’s De Anima (‘On the Soul’) into German.26 However, it should be noted that unlike Aristotle, Marx implies no inferiority to animals, despite the fact that English translations have 23 24 25 26

Lawrence Wilde, Global Solidarity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 1. Karl Marx, Introduction to a Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law in 3 cw, 182. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 3 cw, 276. This point is made by Scott Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Duckworth, 1985), 58. Meikle’s book is a landmark text in the scholarship on Aristotle’s influence on Marx, although his emphasis is on Marx’s method rather than the moral dimension.

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gratuitously ascribed words like ‘primitive’ and ‘mere’ to his description of animal activity where they do not exist in the original.27 Before enlarging on what he meant by ‘conscious life activity’ it should be noted that Marx had already asserted, again in accordance with Aristotle, that humans were essentially social beings. Marx had described human nature as ‘the true community of men’, but one from which workers were isolated and estranged because of the way that production was organised.28 This view of the social nature of humans becoming ruptured by the development of private property is then developed fully in the alienation thesis that is the leitmotif of the Manuscripts. Whereas animals are ‘immediately one’ with their life activity, humans make their life activity the object of their will and consciousness. This emphasis on rational planning in human ‘activity’ is followed by a sharper focus on the human capacity for social production, creating products for each other in a consciously planned way. It is this propensity for planned, social production that denotes the human ‘species-being’, according to Marx, a conscious being for whom life is an object and activity becomes free activity. By creating a world of objects, humans prove themselves to be conscious species-beings, or, in other words, they fulfil their essence. The production of other animals is to meet their immediate physical needs, but humans produce even when free from physical need. Marx remarks that truly free production occurs only after immediate needs have been taken care of, and humans have gained knowledge of how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species, developing in the process a sense of beauty.29 However, for the majority of producers, the reality of human production denies its inherent creativity. Marx bemoans the fact that work is experienced as deadening compulsion, with the worker feeling free only in functions such as eating, drinking and making love, which, taken abstractly, are animal functions.30 The fact that these functions are shared with animals does not mean that they are not also human needs which are being met, but clearly for Marx this falls well short of realising the quintessential human potentials of sociability and creativity.31 The centrality of social production as a defining feature of what it is to be human is affirmed in his later writings. In The German Ideology 27 28 29 30 31

Lawrence Wilde, “The Creatures too Must Become Free: Marx and the Animal/Human Distinction,” Capital and Class, vol. 72, Autumn (2000): 47. Karl Marx, Critical Marginal Notes on the Article by a Prussian in 3 cw, 204–205 and Comments on James Mill in 3 cw, 217. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 3 cw 276–277. Ibid., 275. Lawrence Wilde, Ethical Marxism and Its Radical Critics, op. cit., 10–30.

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he comments that although humans can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, religion, or ‘anything else you like’, they show themselves to be different when they ‘begin to produce their means of subsistence’.32 In Capital he argues that it is ‘the use and construction of instruments of labour’ that identifies the specifically human labour process, although he accepts that this is done in a limited way by some other species.33 Making the famous comparison between the work of the weaver and the spider, the architect and the bee, he argues that however perfectly the animals produce, they do not, as humans do, plan them in advance; only humans are realising a purpose when they produce.34 What Marx adds here is important, for he comments that such work requires a ‘purposeful will’, and the less attractive the task the less it becomes an expression of the worker’s ‘physical and mental powers’ and the more the worker is ‘forced’ to be attentive. The alienation thesis resurfaces here, for Marx’s view of human essence is not simply descriptive but normative, implying that humans feel oppressed when forced to work and therefore need to exert control of the productive process if they are to flourish. Marx presents us again with the paradox of modern production. As he states in the Manuscripts, industry reveals the ‘open book of humanity’s essential powers’, but although it represents the objective basis for human emancipation, the way that production is organised furthers the dehumanisation of human beings.35 References to ‘dehumanisation’ and the reduction of the worker to nothing more than a machine abound throughout Marx’s work, carrying the implication that only through the democratic control of the entire production process will human beings realise their essence as socially productive beings. How, then, does Marx conceive of human flourishing? In the early writings he describes this as ‘the real appropriation of the human essence’ and a ‘true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species’.36 Later the emphasis shifts to the political and economic class struggle, in which the producers are tasked with taking control of the productive system and creating a classless society. As he says in the third volume of Capital, freedom would involve the ‘associated producers’ governing production in a rational way, ‘bringing it under their collective control instead of being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of 32 33 34 35 36

Karl Marx, The German Ideology in 5 cw 31. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, op. cit., 286. Ibid., 284. Ibid., 302–303. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 3 cw, 296.

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energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature’.37 Here Marx reiterates the 1844 norm of bringing existence in line with essence. This picture of a classless and radical democratic society is invoked frequently by Marx, but what is unusual in this passage is that he admits that he is talking only about the organisation of what he calls the ‘realm of natural necessity’. Real freedom is beyond the necessary organisation of social production: The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it, though it can only flourish with this realm of necessity as its basis. The reduction of the working day is its prerequisite.38 Marx says little about how this freedom would be experienced in his writings after 1846, following his move away from moral discourse and abstract philosophising. What we are left with is a principle of generalised reciprocity that appears in the Manifesto as ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’.39 In the Grundrisse of 1857–58, an invaluable text for linking the themes of the early Marx with the published economic writings, he indicates in very general terms a notion of ‘wealth’ that could be ‘the universality of individual needs, capacities, pleasures, productive forces’ if the alienated bourgeois mode of production were to be overcome. He talks about the absolute working out of the worker’s ‘creative potentials’, but stresses that this would involve the development of all human powers as ‘an end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick’.40 In other words, prescribing the specific arrangements of a productive life would subvert the freedom he passionately supports, and which he contrasts with the ‘insipidity of the view that free competition is the ultimate development of human freedom’.41 Marx is more forthcoming about the values of emancipated life in his early writings. For example, towards the end of the Comments on James Mill he floats the idea of a reciprocal ‘love’ between producers and consumers in a society in which production is organised ‘as human beings’.42 The producers take pride in the goods they make, and feel valued by the pleasure which the consumers derive from them. The producers thus confirm their true human nature as a 37 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, op. cit., 959. 38 Ibid. 39 Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, op. cit., 87. 40 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 488. 41 Ibid., 652. 42 Karl Marx, Comments on James Mill in 3 cw, 228.

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communal nature, and the products ‘would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature’. This relationship is reciprocally generalised across society, with consumers also appreciating what their producers have done for them.43 Marx is projecting a community in which people confirm not only their mutual dependency but also affirm their true natures as creative and social beings. In the Manuscripts Marx again affirms that the individual is a social being, but that this sociability can be expressed directly only when humans develop a consciousness of their communal connections and develop the senses to appreciate the richness of their interactions.44 Alienated society gives a one-sided enjoyment of possessing, or having, as opposed to having a full understanding of the communal relations inherent in production. He states that private property ‘has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is ours only when we have it’. 45 He describes political economy as a true moral science based on self-renunciation, in which the enjoyment of living is sacrificed to saving and storing up one’s capital – ‘the less you are the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being’.46 This amounts to ‘the sheer estrangement’ of the senses, and the abolition of private property would be ‘the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities’, and he cites as examples a musical ear or an eye for beauty.47 Marx could have chosen to develop this line of thinking, but instead decisively turned away from it to concentrate instead on the analysis of the mode of production and the politics of the class struggle. However, a reconstruction of his view of human flourishing should take these early considerations into account, for it opens the way to discussions about how and why people develop certain attitudes and behaviours, or, indeed, how they continue to show truly human values despite the pressures of the market. In a footnote in the first volume of Capital Marx makes a withering attack on the inadequacy of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism, arguing that the principle of utility could be applied only if ‘human nature in general’ and ‘human nature 43

44 45 46 47

This passage is scrutinised in detail by David Brudney, “Community and Completion,” in A. Reath, B. Herman and C. Korsgaard (eds.), Reclaiming the History of Ethics: Essays for John Rawls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 388–415. Brudney goes on to argue that Marx’s model here is similar to that employed by John Rawls in his consideration of the activity of citizens in a well ordered society in A Theory of Justice. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 3 cw, 299. Ibid., 299–300. Marx had just translated Aristotle’s De Anima, in which he discusses the development of the senses. Ibid., 309. The emphasis is Marx’s. It is from these passages that Fromm develops the categories of the having and being modes in To Have or to Be? Ibid., 301–302.

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as historically modified in each epoch’ were specified. As Marx put it, ‘to know what is useful for a dog, one must investigate the nature of dogs’.48 While this appears to confirm that Marx still adhered to the idea of a distinct human essence, Fromm is right to point out that Marx’s commitment to human development (human nature as historically modified) made him reluctant to talk about the transhistorical aspect of human nature.49 Fromm’s response was to formulate a view of human essence in terms of cognitive and affective faculties that differentiate humans from other animals. This takes the form of an existential dilemma, for humans are aware of their past and their future, including the disturbing certainty that they will die. In Fromm’s formulation, humans are both part of nature and at the same transcending nature, and this self-­ awareness or reason, which threatens us with separateness, gives rise to a need to restore unity.50 The response to this need can be expressed in regressive or progressive forms. Regressive responses deny human self-awareness and reason by submitting to external authority of various sorts, a fatalism that falls back on the comfort of the unity offered in tribes, nations, authoritarian religions or other exclusive groups. The progressive response seeks a ‘new harmony’ through the full development of all human qualities, particularly love, reason, productive work and solidarity. Fromm’s identification of the human essence as an existential dilemma avoids the mistake of assuming human beings to be naturally good, but argues that it within their nature to choose to be good. Rejecting fatalism, it invites the possibility that human society can confront and overcome the sources of social antagonism. In the next section I identify four key potentials that would need to be developed before Marx’s conception of the realm of freedom could be glimpsed. I will try to show that Marx’s work, from both early and later writings, supports the unfolding of these potentials.

Key Human Potentials

Rationality Rationality or reason is normally seen as part of the definition of what it is to be human, as for example, in the case of Aristotle, for whom, the ‘rational

48 49 50

Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, op. cit., 758–759. Erich Fromm, The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 116n. Ibid., 115–150; also Man For Himself, op. cit., 27–36.

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principle within us’ is the capacity that makes humans unique.51 The cultivation of ‘good’ reason as a virtue is more usually conceptualised as ‘wisdom’, but this carries connotations of exceptional individuals who are able to rise above ‘merely’ instrumental thinking. For Aristotle, practical wisdom (phronesis), requires careful deliberation, through which a person can judge what is ‘good for themselves and good for people in general’,52 and he assumes that this is available only to a few. Spinoza, for example, ends his Ethics by contrasting the ‘freedom of the mind’ enjoyed by the wise person to the ‘agitated’ state of the ignorant person who fails to reflect on the wider context of life, but he adds that such wisdom is arduous to achieve and therefore rare.53 The highly reciprocal society envisioned by Marx invokes in the passages from Comments on James Mill discussed above shows a commitment to an idea of rationality in which people could judge what is good for themselves and for people in general. On the other hand, his analysis of capitalism reveals society as a whole to be impelled by the imperative of economic survival, whether of the capitalist or of the worker. The task is therefore to move from the myopia of instrumental rationality to something more like Aristotle’s practical wisdom for all, at both an individual and social level. Marx’s declaration that the free development of each should be the condition for the free development of all would require a radical deliberative process to arrive at social goals and ensure that the freedom of all sections of the community is enhanced. Such a conception may be understood in terms of Weber’s category of ‘substantive rationality’, in which actions are decided upon according to how efficiently they promote ‘ultimate ends’, although Weber restricts its scope to the sphere of economic action, where he contrasts it with formal rationality.54 In fact Marx had already expressed a clear distinction between forms of rationality in the second volume of Capital. Here he talks of a kind of ‘social rationality’ kicking in to bring a modicum of order only after 51 52 53 54

Aristotle, Ernest Barker (trans.), in Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 314. Aristotle, J.A.K. Thomson (trans.), in The Ethics of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 209–210. Baruch Spinoza, G.H.R. Parkinson (trans.), in Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 316. Max Weber, Economy and Society, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), Weber also contrasts value rationality to instrumental rationality, “the social sphere. See the stimulating discussion by Immanuel Wallerstein, “Social Sciences and Contemporary Society: The Vanishing Guarantees of Rationality,” in I. Wallerstein (ed.), The End of the World As We Know It: Social Science for the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis, mn: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 137–156.

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an economic crisis has wrought its damage,55 while referring to the way that political economists depicted the production process of capitalism as ‘simple and natural’ as ‘superficial rationality’.56 Throughout his work Marx sought to expose the self-serving nature of what was defended as rational action by the bourgeoisie and its ideological representatives. He expresses this clearly in The German Ideology when arguing that each new ruling class is compelled to present its own ideas ‘as the only rational, universally valid ones’.57 However, Marx was well aware that the development of modern industrial society brought with it the progress of reason over ignorance, as is clear from his passages on the history of the bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto.58 While this progress provided the material basis from which an emancipated society could emerge, the benefits of this progress were enjoyed only by the bourgeoisie itself, at the expense of the working class. Furthermore, Marx argued the development of the system of production was replete with contradictions which exposed its ultimate irrationality. He likens modern bourgeois society to ‘a sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the power of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells’. As evidence he cites economic crises, arriving as unintended consequences of the mass of individual decisions taken by capitalists, each pursuing his or her self-interest.59 This suppression of social rationality takes place at the same time as instrumental rationality through science delivers amazing results that promise so much. In a remarkable speech in 1856 Marx offers a judgement on the irrational outcome of the progress of rational science that anticipates Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment thesis by 90 years: At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force.60 55 Marx, Capital, vol. 2 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 390. 56 Ibid., 172. 57 Karl Marx in 5 cw, 60. 58 Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, op. cit., 70–73. 59 For a discussion of Marx in on crises see Lawrence Wilde, Marx and Contradiction (Aldershot: Avebury, 1989), 72–90. 60 Karl Marx, ‘Speech on the Anniversary of the People’s Paper’ in 14 cw, 655–656; cf. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso, 1986), introduction, xi–xvii, and 3–42.

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There are echoes here of the dehumanisation theme of the earlier writings, and his insight into the destructive short-sightedeness of ever increasing accumulation is also evident in his concern for the consequences of attempts to extract greater profit from agriculture. Marx argues that all progress in capitalist agriculture ‘is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil’, as fertilizers that increase short-term yields ruin the long-­ lasting sources of fertility.61 In this conception, the instrumentally rational pursuit of profit produces a socially irrational outcome, a process that is obviously at work today with the phenomenon of global warming. How then, is it possible to press the case for the sort of social rationality that Marx favoured? Marx thought that the working class, through the pursuit of its own class interest, would overcome the irrationality of the system as a whole, because he deemed the particular interests of the working class to coincide with the universal interests of humanity. Today, traditional appeals to the politics of class struggle have little leverage, but appeals to substantive rationality are articulated in struggles that are more readily associated with a wider demand for global justice. For example, support for a global financial transactions tax (Tobin tax) can be justified as a technical safeguard against reckless financial speculation, but such a tax could also enable a major attack against distributive injustice. Susan George has commented that such a tax would ‘amass enough to eliminate virtually every problem the world has ever known – hunger, environmental destruction, climate change, blatant inequalities’.62 Of course this is an exaggeration, but nevertheless it points to the real possibility of asserting radical change through rational agreement, and exposes the irrationality of the neoliberal determination to resist regulation of any kind. These demands are based on justice arguments, in the sense that those campaigning for them do so not out of immediate self-interest, but for the benefit of those who lack the power to exert any influence on the issue. There is a pressing need for explicit global justice arguments for a socially rational world to be organised for the welfare of its people rather than for the imperative of maximising profit.63 There are, of course formidable obstacles that prevent wider support for social regulation of production and exchange, not least a mass media supportive of the status quo as well as educational systems geared primarily to producing skilled trainees for the competitive world. In terms of 61 62 63

Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, op. cit., 638. Susan George, Whose Crisis, Whose Future? Towards a Greener, Fairer, Richer World (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 246; see also Wilde, Global Solidarity, op. cit., 225–237. Thomas Pogge is one of the few to do this in World Poverty and Human Rights, 2nd. Ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), Introduction, 1–32.

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the development of the capacity of individuals to widen the scope of our social choices, the educational arena becomes a vital site of struggle, with the need for schools and universities to foster a critical consciousness in the citizens of tomorrow.64 These are significant sites of contestation in which the struggle for substantive rationality has to be pursued. Compassion Although Marx clearly treated his own work as ‘scientific’, the accounts of the conditions faced by workers in nineteenth century Britain in the first volume of Capital reveal a strong empathy with their suffering. The literal meaning of compassion is ‘suffering with’, in other words feeling empathy with the undeserved pain experienced by others. He is at his most indignant when revealing the suffering of the working class, often showing his emotion by simply applying exclamation marks at the horror of the practices or the unctuous attempts to justify them. Marx goes to great lengths, particularly in Chapter 10, on the working day, and Chapter 15, on machinery and large scale industry, to expose the brutalities of working life, using a variety of official reports, collectively known as the Blue Books. In Chapter 15 he describes the exploitation of women and children as ‘sheer abuse’, condemns the ‘sheer robbery’ of every normal condition needed for working and living, and vituperates against the ‘sheer brutality’ of overwork and night-work.65 A few examples of the practices exposed by Marx reveal not only his compassion but also the contemporary relevance of his findings when considering the human cost involved in the unconstrained pursuit of profit. He refers to the Children’s Employment Commission, Second Report, 1864, which looked at conditions in the lacemaking industry.66 The lace was made by machines and then sub-contracted to relatively poor women who controlled ‘mistresses’ houses’ in which between ten and forty women and children ‘finished’ the lace. They worked between 10 and 16 hours a day in incredibly overcrowded rooms where the oxygen was further consumed by gas lights. As the children grew tired, a long cane was used to jolt them back to attention. The work is described as ‘monotonous, eye-straining and exhausting from the 64

65 66

This is explicitly recognised in the appeals for ‘an emancipatory school’ by Roberto Unger in Democracy Realized (London: Verso, 2001), 229–235, and a ‘school for the Subject’ by Alain Touraine in Can We Live Together? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 265–287. On the University sector, see Martha Nussbaum, Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, op. cit., 599. Ibid., 595–598.

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uniformity in the posture of the body’, and the Report concludes that ‘their work is like slavery’.67 The Report also showed an alarming increase in ‘consumption’ (tuberculosis) among almost 700 patients who were lace-­makers, mostly young women, from one in 45 in 1852 to one in 8 within ten years. Marx comments that ‘this advance in consumption ought to suffice for the most optimistic advocate of progress, or for the most mendacious free-trade bagman in Germany’.68 Here, as elsewhere, he condemns the ‘free trade dogma’ that argues that free competition furthers the common welfare.69 He cites a speaker at a public meeting in Nottingham in 1860 complaining of the ‘unmitigated slavery’ of child labour in the town, and condemning as a disgrace the fact that a public meeting had to be called to petition for the ­limitation of the working day to 18 hours.70 More often than not, Marx’s comments amount to short exclamations, as if the bare truth must be sufficiently shocking. For example, in reporting the case of William Wood, a child working in the potteries of Staffordshire, he exclaims ‘fifteen hours of labour for a child of 7!’71 At other times he resorts to a sarcastic aside, as when, in response to a boast from an employer that his machine was always stopped for dinner he comments ‘what generosity!’72 Often the barbed comments are delivered as short comments in parenthesis, as when describing the employer’s representative who insisted that women must keep their freedom to work in the mines as a ‘heart of stone!’73 Marx’s comments on the sufferings of the working class reveal not only his compassion but also his scorn for the lack of compassion displayed by so many defenders of the status quo. He describes the death of a hat maker, Mary Anne Walkley, aged 20, who was reported by a doctor to have died due to long hours of work in an overcrowded room while taking her rest in a small and badly ventilated bedroom.74 While making hats for a forthcoming royal ball she had worked uninterruptedly for over 26 hours, but the coroner’s court decided that she had died from apoplexy that had nothing do with her conditions of work. Marx adds that in this way the court gave the doctor ‘a lesson in good manners’75 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

Ibid., 597. Ibid., 595–596. Ibid., 611. Ibid., 353–354; Marx also talks of ‘ceaseless human sacrifices’ (ibid., 618). Ibid., 354. Ibid., 357. Ibid., 630. The Penguin translation renders Herz von Stein as ‘stony-hearted fellow!’ Ibid., 364–366. Ibid., 365.

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Marx clarifies the reason he devoted so much space to the experience of exploitation and the struggle for better conditions in the Preface to the first edition. He emphasises that his primary goal is to lay bare ‘the economic laws of motion of modern society’, but he wants the British experience to be detailed so that it may help other societies in the early stages of developing capitalist industry ‘to shorten and lessen the birth-pangs’ of the emerging system of production.76 He admits that he does not portray the owners in ‘rosy colours’ but makes it clear that the suffering is not caused by the callousness of individuals but by the systemic pressures that drive them.77 Nevertheless, in making this vitally important connection, Marx devotes enormous space to the sufferings of the working class and this constitutes a condemnation of the system based on compassion. The relevance for today is twofold. First, in an era of globalised production incidents of the sort depicted by Marx are a daily fact of life, too often reported as ‘accidents’ while the working conditions that gave rise to the fatalities are ignored. Second, the reactions of the employers to the demands for reduced working time and better conditions is strikingly similar to the strident advocacy of freedom from state control that is a feature of neoliberalism today. This is particularly evident in the dialogues between the workers and those representatives acting as examiners investigating precisely why the workers were demanding state regulations preventing child labour and the employment of women in mines.78 The examiner asks whether the worker thinks it fair that a child should not be free to earn a living if a parent is dead or ill, or whether it is right to prevent a widow from obtaining a livelihood by working at the mine. The examiner is incredulous that the workers think that employers are not obeying the law in respect of asking for school certificates for the over 10s they take on. The examiners try to persuade the men that deploying more mine inspectors would mean lowering the quality of the inspectorate, shifting the burden of responsibility for safety onto the government rather than the mine owners. In short, every conceivable argument is used to prevent the sort of regulation and enforcement that might give the workers a better life. ‘These are the beauties of “free” capitalist production!’ exclaims Marx.79 In our present circumstances it is necessary to bring forward the moral judgements from the margins of the punchy aside into a full-blown moral 76 Ibid., 92. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 627–634. 79 Ibid., 634.

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argument about the human and environmental costs of economic institutions and processes. The free-market dogma driving capitalism in Britain in the midnineteenth century prompted Marx to say that ‘the whole farce is too characteristic of the spirit of capital’ not to expose to public questioning,80 but he clearly believed that such a spirit could be defeated in the course of the class struggle. It is all too evident that this spirit of capital has re-emerged with a vengeance in neoliberalism, and it needs to be exposed for what it is, the negation of all compassion. Productiveness According to the eudaemonistic model of ethics adopted here, Marx’s emphasis on production as the quintessential capacity of the human species infers an entitlement for all human beings to experience the act of production as an expression of their essence. In production in a free society of the associated producers, the worker becomes ‘the totally developed individual’.81 However, within capitalism the word ‘productiveness’ has strong connotations of efficiency within capitalism, as with ‘productivity’, and its association with Marx is problematic because of his argument that a productive worker in capitalism is only one who creates surplus value.82 Marx is quite clear that labour with the same content can be either productive or unproductive, and he cites the example of a singer who sings like a bird becoming productive only when an entrepreneur makes her sing to make money.83 To be productive, in this view, is part of what Marx terms ‘the formal subsumption of labour under capital’,84 but this leaves us with the problem of how to conceptualise free production, not simply as something that may be realised beyond capitalism, but something that can be promoted within capitalism, despite the managerial proclivity to control all aspects of the labour process. This possibility of displaying creativity, cooperation and socially useful activity in and out of paid employment is more in line with Fromm’s appeal to develop productiveness, which he sees as the unfolding of human power, in which people, ‘guided by reason’, must be free and not dependent on someone who controls their 80 81 82

83 84

Ibid., 627. Ibid., 618. Karl Marx, ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, appendix to Capital, vol. I, op. cit., 1038; also Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 1 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969), 152. Karl Marx, ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’, appendix to Capital, vol. I, op. cit., 1044. Ibid., 1019.

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powers.85 Productiveness in this sense has nothing to do with productivity in the technical economic sense. As a potential, it refers to the ability to develop skills and interests in ways that affirm our sociability, reaching out to others and fostering empathy. It can be developed in various activities in ‘free’ time, such as parenting, caring or a range of recreational activities. Even in the world of employed work it is also possible to develop productiveness, despite the antagonistic structures and processes that attend incessant appraisal and internal and external competition. This normative sense of productiveness is implicit in Marx’s conception of self-emancipation, not as simply something that will happen in the future, but something that is in development in daily life despite (and sometimes in subversion of) the capitalist urge to reduce activity to the priority of profit. The young Marx described communism as the ‘appropriation of human essence’ through the negation of private property.86 This goal necessarily involves the producers taking active control over the production process, and although Marx refuses to speculate on the details of how that would be organised, we know that he envisaged radical democracy, rational planning and greatly reduced working time.87 Only in the early philosophical writings does Marx talk about the ‘subjective aspect’ of the ‘complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities’.88 He differentiates between the senses of the social person and those of the non-social person, commenting that it will be possible to develop ‘the richness of human sensibility’ only when a society has been created that transcended ‘crude practical need’.89 He comments that the ‘care-burdened’ and ‘poverty-stricken’ individual can have no  sense for the finest play, while the jewel-dealer appreciates only the ­commercial value of the stones rather than their beauty. The development of industry demonstrates the objective development of human powers and prepares the way for human emancipation, but in its capitalist form it furthers 85 Fromm, Man For Himself, op. cit., 61–62. For Fromm on productiveness see Man for Himself, op. cit., 60–78 and To Have or To Be? op. cit., 87–97. Fromm was harshly criticised by Marcuse for adopting productiveness in a way that was compatible with capitalism, though this was never Fromm’s intention; see Herbert Marcuse, ‘Critique of Neo-Freudian Revisionism’ published as an appendix to Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (London: Routledge, 1998), 258–264. 86 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 3 cw, 313. 87 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, op. cit., 959; for his endorsement of the radical democracy adopted by the Paris commune see The Civil War in France in The First International and After, op. cit. 88 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 3 cw, 300–301. 89 Ibid., 301–302.

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‘dehumanisation’.90 This idea of the full development of the senses is very much consonant with the meaning of productiveness evoked by Fromm as a vital aspect of radical humanist ethics. However, this productiveness would need to be developed within capitalist society as a force capable of creating an alternative world. Marx glimpses this in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts when he talks about the meetings of French socialist workers that he had recently witnessed for the first time. It is not just smoking and drinking that brings them together but society and conversation with a purpose of creating a transformed association; as such ‘the brotherhood of man is no mere phrase with them, but a fact of life’.91 Communism, for Marx, always refers to a movement and process, with communist society as its goal.92 The development of free productive potential begins in working for the revolutionary transformation of society, in the course of which the working class succeeds ‘in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew’.93 For Marx, because production is a distinguishing feature of what it is to be human, it follows that the production process needs to be transformed into something satisfying and creative in order that humans could flourish. In the Grundrisse he is scathing of Adam Smith’s portrayal of labour as necessarily a sacrifice, something that detracted from a satisfying life. For Marx, work would always be a necessary component of such a life, and, undertaken is a society in which capitalism had been superseded, could be a ‘liberating activity’, especially when the worker controls the goals and processes of production. It then becomes ‘self-realization’ or ‘real freedom’, and, contrary to Fourier’s ‘fun’ vision of ‘attractive labour’, Marx emphasises that such freely undertaken work, such as composing, is ‘the most damned serious, the most intense exertion’.94 In the ‘realm of freedom’ passage referred to earlier Marx referred to the reorganisation of necessary work to make it as satisfying as possible, but he stipulated that it must not be too demanding in time and effort in order for people to pursue their truly free activity. Only then would we see the emergence of ‘the totally developed individual’ that he advocated in the first volume of Capital.95 Marx relied on the educative force of participating in trade unions and socialist parties to elicit the sort of consciousness that would eventually deliver 90 91 92 93 94 95

Ibid., 302–303. Ibid., 313. Karl Marx, The German Ideology in 5 cw, 49. Ibid., 53. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., 611. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, op. cit., 618.

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social control of production, but this transformation of consciousness did not develop in the way he hoped. All the more reason why we need to look at genuine productiveness, both in terms of how it is stifled in the modern economy, and how occasionally it shows itself in free cooperative endeavours in the economic and social sphere. Distinguishing this positive form of productiveness from the productivity that is central to capitalist production is an important task, and it should prompt a moral question, namely, what values are promoted, frustrated, or subverted in the course of organising the processes of work, school, or entertainment and recreation? Cooperation In his early writings Marx identified the human capacity to cooperate in productive endeavour as constitutive of their ‘species being’. This view is reiterated in Capital, where he declares that the productive power of social labour arises from cooperation itself: ‘when the worker cooperates in a planned way with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of the species’.96 However, most of the short Chapter 13 on cooperation is devoted to explaining that the cooperation of wage-labourers is ‘entirely brought about by the capital that employs them’.97 In other words, for the vast majority of participants in the cooperative labour process in capitalism, cooperation is not free but imposed, and so we have a similar ambiguity to that encountered in dealing with rationality and productiveness. Historically, Marx considered that cooperation originated among hunting peoples or in agriculture in Indian communities, both on the basis of the common ownership of the means of production. When cooperation developed in pre-capitalist times it was mainly on the basis of ‘domination and servitude’.98 Within capitalism, its form was not fixed but evolved, and this evolution held out the possibility of the emergence of free cooperation. As ever, Marx was reluctant to speculate freely on the social arrangements of the future, but in his Inaugural Address to the First International he speaks glowingly of the emergence of cooperative factories, seeing then as another example of the victory of the political economy of labour over the political economy of property and commenting that ‘the value of these great social experiments cannot be overrated’.99 In the third volume of Capital there are some remarks about the changing nature of ownership in capitalism, particularly the emergence of 96 97 98 99

Ibid., 447. Ibid., 449–451. Ibid., 452. Karl Marx, The First International and After, op. cit., 79–80.

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joint stock companies, opening the way for a ‘necessary point of transition towards the transformation of capital back into the property of the producers…as their property as associated producers’.100 The cooperative factory was the form that presented itself to Marx as the most likely candidate for demonstrating a new form of cooperation and abolishing the opposition between capital and labour, despite the fact that as long as they operated in capitalist markets they inevitably reflected ‘all the defects of the existing system’.101 Nevertheless, Marx remarks that in the cooperative factory the ‘antithetical character’ of the supervisory work disappears because the manager is paid by the workers instead of representing capital ‘in opposition to them’.102 Marx saw that the development of new forms of free cooperation amounted to ‘the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the capitalist mode of production itself’.103 This was to eventually produce a communist society in which ‘all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly’.104 However, free cooperative enterprises have not been able to compete with multinational corporations, and where social control of sectors of the economy has been established it rarely produced markedly more cooperative forms of organisation. Marx placed the emphasis on realising free cooperation in the ability of working people to come together in unions, parties, and other forms of organisation, to press not only their immediate demands but to oppose the capitalist system as a whole, to ‘convince the world at large that their efforts, far from being narrow and selfish, aim at the emancipation of the downtrodden millions’.105 Despite the successes of organised labour in certain countries in the twentieth century, it is difficult to sustain the argument that its progress opened up the vista of universal emancipation. In the twentieth century, when socialist governments took elements of production into public ownership, there were very few examples of the democratic control of those enterprises.106 Perhaps the most audacious attempt to subvert capitalism from within was the Wage Earner Fund scheme in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s, which promised to gradually shift ownership and investment to the organised workers, but this 100 101 102 103 104 105

Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, op. cit., 568. Ibid., 571. Ibid., 512. Ibid., 569. Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in The First International and After, op. cit., 347. Karl Marx, “Instructions for Delegates to the Geneva Congress,” in The First International and After, op. cit., 92. 106 The system of workers self-management in Yugoslavia is a notable exception, but this operated within a state that was not democratic. See Lawrence Wilde, Modern European Socialism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1989), 141–145.

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collapsed in the wake of the international economic crisis.107 It is clear that with the rise of neoliberalism as the driving ideology of globalization, it appears more difficult than ever to establish free cooperation in the economic sphere. Nevertheless, there continue to be successful cooperatives, bringing together producers, wholesalers and consumers, as well as participatory schemes in not-for- profit organisations. Indeed it is estimated that over 800 million people are involved in cooperatives in over 80 countries.108 Radical humanism demands that the scope of cooperation is widened beyond control over the means of production. It would see the widespread extension of cooperation as key to the historical advance of the human species, and as something that needs to be actively encouraged to develop solidarity. It would support one of the major arguments sustained by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in their impressive study, A Cooperative Species, in which they conclude that ‘people cooperate not only for self-interested reasons but also because they are genuinely concerned about the well-being of others, try to uphold social norms, and value behaving ethically for its own sake’.109 In their view, using the language of evolutionary biology, ‘altruistic social preferences supporting cooperation outcompete unmitigated and amoral selfinterest’.110 However, although it might be comforting to appreciate the defining historic significance of human cooperation, an ethical perspective that supports it must expose how free cooperation is actively discouraged or subverted in the accelerated competition promoted by neoliberalism. Richard Sennett rightly condemns the ‘feigned solidarity’ of managerially manipulated teamwork which masks heightened competition within workforces with profoundly divisive effects.111 The resistance to these pervasive alienating practices is central to the struggle for a change of direction to more cooperative ways of working together.

107 Ibid., 56–61. 108 John Restakis, Humanizing the Economy (Gabriola Island, bc Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2010); see also David Erdal, Beyond the Corporation: Humanity Working (London: Bodley Head, 2011). 109 Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, The Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 1. 110 Ibid., 4. 111 Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (London: Allen Lane Penguin, 2012), 168–169; see also Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: Norton, 1998), 116–117.

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Implications Radical humanism views human welfare as the chief criterion of ethical value,112 and it is clear that Marx saw the extension of capitalist free competition as inimical to that welfare. In the Grundrisse, when denouncing the idea that free competition is the ultimate development of human freedom, he insists instead that it was ‘the most complete suspension of all individual freedom, and the most complete subjugation of individuality’.113 He goes on to assert that the way to expose the illusion about competition as the ‘so-called absolute form of free individuality’ is by analysis of what free competition really is, as the only rational reply ‘to the middle-class prophets who laud it or to the socialists who damn it to hell’.114 Despite his best efforts, neither his cold analysis of free competition nor the struggles of organised labour have prevented the resurgence of the idea of equating individual freedom with free competition in neoliberalism. This suggests that those who agree with Marx need to supplement their analyses of the consequences of free competition with a measure of damnation, that is to say, to argue on moral grounds that the social arrangements promoted by neoliberalism are anathema to human flourishing. Moreover, radical humanist ethics also points to the need to specify the potentials needed for human flourishing and identify realistic proposals for promoting those potentials even in today’s inauspicious circumstances. Virtue ethics approaches are often distinguished by the question ‘what should I be?’, whereas ‘duty’ ethics focuses on the question ‘what should I do?’ 115 However, while this accurately reflects the emphasis on the moral agent rather than rules and procedures of conduct, it also gives a misleading impression that the scope of ethics is limited to inter-personal relations. Marx’s analyses of how the power of the mode of production conditions social, political and intellectual life116 shows that the majority of human beings are systematically denied the possibility of living their lives in conditions ‘most worthy and appropriate for their human nature’.117 Such an approach requires the question ‘what should I be?’ to be supplemented with the social question 112 Erich Fromm, Man for Himself, op. cit. 8. 113 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, op. cit., 652. 114 Ibid. 115 Stan Van Hooft, Understanding Virtue Ethics, op. cit, 11; Hursthouse suggests that virtue ethics asks ‘what sort of person should I be?’ as opposed to the duty ethics question of ‘what sort of action should I do?’ in Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25. 116 Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 29 cw, 263. 117 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3, op. cit., 959.

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‘what should we be?’ At every social level, including local community, nation state and the global, questions of social inclusion, social justice and global justice need to be raised, with two aims: first, to show how the social practices of late capitalism erode the development of positive human potentials and instead reproduce myriad injustices; second, to offer bold and imaginative ways to protect or even promote those potentials, despite the ruthless advance of neoliberal marketization.

chapter 2

The Idea of the “Struggle for Recognition” in the Ethical Thought of the Young Marx and Its Relevance Today Tony Burns Introduction There is a debate over the issue of whether Marx ever attempted to offer an ethical critique of existing (capitalist) society. Many commentators maintain that he did not. In their view Marx had no interest at all in questions of ethics. I shall by-pass this much discussed issue and assume that Marx did present such a critique – at least the young Marx did.1 An important source for our understanding of these views on ethics is Marx’s treatment of the concept of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.2 It is arguable that the most significant, immediate source for Marx’s thinking about alienation is the philosophy of Hegel, especially (but not only) the Phenomenology of Spirit.3 At the time when Marx was researching and writing the Manuscripts (1843–1844), he was extremely interested in Hegel’s philosophy. For example in 1843 he wrote a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, focusing on Part Three of that work, and in 1844, in what was to become one of the chapters of the Manuscripts when they were 1 See Lawrence Wilde, Ethical Marxism and Its Radical Critics (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Lawrence Wilde (ed.), Marxism’s Ethical Thinkers: From Kautsky to Heller (London: Palgrave, 2001). 2 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Martin Milligan (trans.) (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967 [1844]), 64–78. Hereafter all references to this text will be inserted into the text in brackets. E.g. (64–78). For secondary literature on Marx’s theory of alienation see Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, Frederick Neuhouser (ed.), Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation. (London: Merlin Press, 1972); Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971); Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes (London: Palgrave, 2011); Richard Schacht, Alienation (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971). Dan Swain, Alienation: An Introduction to Marx’s Theory (London: Bookmarks, 2012). 3 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1807]). For some earlier thoughts see Tony Burns, “Hegel, Identity Politics and the Problem of Slavery,” Culture, Theory & Critique, vol. 47, no. 1 (2006): 87–104.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_004

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finally published in 1932, he wrote a critical commentary on Hegel’s Phenom­ enology as a whole.4 What is significant here is the fact that Hegel’s views on ethics are formulated clearly and explicitly in terms of the notion of recognition.5 As is well known, the key source for understanding Hegel’s theory of recognition is the famous “master-slave” section of the Phenomenology.6 There Hegel argues that the “struggle for recognition” has a decisive part to play in the emergence of self-consciousness. For Hegel the politics of recognition is necessarily a politics of the self and its identity. It is what today would often be referred to as identity politics. Hegel suggests that it is, not class struggle, but rather the “struggle for recognition,” which he conceives of as an ethical struggle, which is the motor of history – a view which has been tremendously influential in the 20th Century among both Marxist and non-Marxist scholars alike.7 It is possible to consider Hegel’s theory of recognition as a contribution to sociology, either to historical sociology or to the sociology of morals, where the broad intention is to explain why something happens, or why something is the case. However, it is also possible to consider it as a contribution to ethics, where the intention is to consider the normative question of how things ought to be. In the present discussion it is the latter that I have specifically in mind. For Hegel the relationship between master and slave is unjust because it conflicts with the most fundamental principle of “abstract right” (“abstraktes Recht”) or of Right abstractly understood. That principle, as Hegel points out in the Philosophy of Right, enjoins us to “be a person and respect others as persons.”8 What the slave lacks, Hegel argues in his Shorter Logic, is “the recognition that he is a person.”9 4 Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State,” in Lucio Colletti (ed.), Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 [1843]), 57–198; Karl Marx, “Critique of the Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy as a Whole,” in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, 132–160. 5 See inter alia S.S. Anderson, Hegel’s Theory of Recognition: From Oppression to Ethical Liberal Modernity (London: Continuum, 2009); R.R. Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1997). 6 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§166–230, 104–138. 7 Alexandre Kojève, in Alan Bloom (ed.), Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, J.H. Nichols (trans.) (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1996 [1947]); Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man. (London: Penguin Books, 2012 [1992]); Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Struggles (Cambridge: Polity Press). 8 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox (trans.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979 [1821]), §37, 37. 9 G. W. F. Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, William Wallace (trans.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 [1830], §163 Zus, 227–28.

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The master “looks upon his slave not as a person, but as a selfless thing.” Slaves are regarded as inanimate objects – tools or instruments to be used by their masters for their own ends or purposes. Hegel argues that the personality of those who have been enslaved ought to be respected. This requires, amongst other things, that those individuals who are masters should be willing to set aside their “unequal particular individuality,” or their current status as masters, and acknowledge that those who have been enslaved are in fact their own equals. Both masters and slaves must recognize that they share a “common identity with each other,” precisely because they are free and equal human beings or persons.10 In Hegel’s opinion, if there is to be justice in society, if right is to be done, it is necessary that the institution of slavery, and the social roles of master and slave associated with it, are abolished. This is the starting point for understanding the young Marx’s views on ethics in the Manuscripts. When discussing this issue in the Manuscripts Marx suggests that there are four different ways of thinking about alienation. He refers to (1) alienation of the worker from the product of his or her labour (66–68); (2) alienation of the worker within the production process (68–70); (3) alienation of humanity generally (including both proletarians and capitalists) from their own species being (70–72); and (4) alienation of man from man (72–75). As a structure for the present discussion, it is tempting to also employ this schema. However, Marx’s exposition in the Manuscripts is far from satisfactory. He does not clearly separate these four things from one another and there is considerable overlap between what he says about them. Given this, it is better to think of them, not as four different things, but rather as four different aspects of the same thing. To get around these problems of exposition, rather than simply following Marx, I shall distinguish between the sociological, the aesthetic, the psychic and the more narrowly ethical dimensions of alienation. I shall say something about each of these in turn. My conclusion, which is based on this analysis of Marx’s theory of alienation, is that so far as questions of ethics are concerned, there is indeed a strong affinity between the views of the young Marx and those expressed by Hegel in the master–slave section of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Towards the end of the chapter, I also make some remarks about the contemporary relevance of these ideas, focusing on the current debate concerning the politics of distribution versus the politics of recognition, as represented, for example, in the writings of Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth.11 10 11

G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind: Part Three of The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. William Wallace (trans.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 [1830]), §436 Zus, 176–177. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003). See also Tony Burns, “Hegel, Cosmopolitanism and

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The Sociological Dimension of Alienation: Alienation of the Worker from the Product of His Labour

Here we should note the importance which the young Marx attaches to the idea of “objectification” in the Manuscripts (66–67). In a capitalist society proletarians are put to work producing commodities. In the first instance, Marx thinks of these as being physical things or objects. He suggests that these things can be thought of as objectified or “congealed” labour (66–67) “Labour’s realization” is, he says, “its objectification.” (66–67) At the same time, however, this realization of labour is also associated with the “loss of the object” (66–67). This object presents itself as being an “alien object” (66–67) Marx states that “the alienation of the worker” in the process of capitalist production “means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him” (66–67). In the first instance, then, this manifestation of alienation is associated simply with the separation of the producer from the thing or object produced. One aspect of this has to do with the issue of who owns the commodities which are produced by the worker. In pre-capitalist society this is the worker himself. In capitalist society it is, of course, the employer of labour. However, a second aspect has to do with the relationship in which the producer stands to the commodities which are produced. Marx notes that the purpose of producing commodities ought to be the satisfaction of human needs. Commodities ought, as it were, to be the servants of humanity in that regard. Marx also observes, however, that there is a tendency in capitalist society for the servant to become the master. From satisfying fundamental human needs, the drive to produce and consume commodities takes on a life of its own. Production and consumption of commodities is no longer a means to an end. Rather, it becomes an end in itself. Marx refers to the notion of “object-bondage” in this connection (66). The worker, he says, “becomes a slave of his object” (67). Marx insists that this first manifestation of alienation “means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence,” something which “exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him,” but more importantly that it also “becomes a power of its own confronting him.” The “life which he has conferred on” or given to the object, in the act of producing it, thereby “confronts him as something” which is both “hostile and alien” (67). Another aspect comes to the fore if we think of society itself, understood as a definite system of social relations, as if it is a “thing” which is produced by

Contemporary Recognition Theory,” in Tony Burns and Simon Thompson (eds.), Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition (London: Palgrave, 2013), 64–87.

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human labour: as the product of the ongoing social interaction of individual human beings who are engaged, collectively, in a process of social labour. Marx evidently thought that in certain circumstances society itself, and all of the social institutions which compose it, can take on a certain thing-like quality. Like the commodity, Marx thinks of social institutions as things which we have put ourselves into, or as an expression of ourselves, things which we have ourselves created in order to satisfy our own needs, but which have developed a life of their own. They are now for that reason, or in that sense, things which are purely external to or “other” than us, and therefore “alien.” Society and its institutions are “outside” of us. They have become things over which we have lost control. Indeed, they confront us and to a greater or lesser extent succeed in controlling us with an oppressive, coercive force. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels make this point by employing the simile of “the sorcerer’s apprentice.” Modern bourgeois society is, they say, “like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”12 This kind of thinking can be connected to the notion of reification, which may be thought of as a form of technomorphism. As such, it is the opposite of anthropomorphism. If those who are guilty of the latter treat inanimate or natural objects as if they were human, those who are guilty of the former treat that which is human, or the product of human activity, as if it were an inanimate or natural object with thing-like qualities. As Alex Honneth has suggested, the concept of reification “designates a cognitive occurrence in which something that doesn’t possess thing-like characteristics in itself (e.g. something human) comes to be regarded,” wrongly, “as a thing.”13 As such, reification is associated with the idea that society and social institutions present themselves to us, and are thought of by us, as possessing the same ontological status as natural, that is to say physical, objects. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels make the wellknown, but nonetheless striking, statement that in a capitalist society, because of the rapid rate of social change which the capitalist mode of production engenders, “all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.”14 They employ the language of energy and entropy, especially the concepts of “freezing” and 12 13 14

Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 39. Axel Honneth, in Martin Jay (ed.), Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 21. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party.

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“melting,” to capture the notions of social stability and change respectively. In effect, prefiguring the ideas which are usually associated with the sociology of Emile Durkheim, they associate reification with the idea of the arrestation of change: the freezing and consequent solidifying of social relations, or patterns of social interaction, into stable institutions which are external to us, which possess a reality sui generis, and which possess a coercive character in relation us. Marx and Engels suggest in this passage that it is precisely when social relations crystallize into social institutions and the differential social roles, subject-positions, or identities that are associated with them, that it becomes possible to think of the individuals who occupy those roles, not as individual human beings, but rather as being themselves nothing more than “things,” or as possessing a thing-like character. They are reduced to being nothing more than the exemplifiers or, as Marx would say, the “bearers” of those roles, identities and subject positions. This idea also has an important part to play in the ethical thought of the young Marx in the Manuscripts.

The Aesthetic Dimension: Alienation within the Process of Production

At one point in the Manuscripts Marx notes that “till now we have considered the estrangement, the alienation of the worker only in one of its aspects, i.e. the worker’s relationship to the products of his labour” (68). However, he goes on, estrangement “is manifested not only in the result but in the act of production – within the producing activity itself” (68). This has to do with the character of the labour process, or the activity of the worker as a producer. In another sense also, therefore, Marx thinks that “labour is external to the worker” (69). That is to say, it “does not belong to,” or is not a reflection of “his intrinsic nature” (69). Unlike the case of the medieval craftsman, the labour of the proletarian in a capitalist society is not a creative act, an expression of one’s own self or personality. On this view, work has become, rather, more of a “mechanical” activity. It is dull, boring, routine, repetitive, and so on. The phrase, “the hired hand,” captures this very well. One aspect of this manifestation of alienation has to do with technology or machinery. Marx argues in the Manuscripts that within the sphere capitalist production those involved come to be enslaved by the machines which they operate. In consequence, they too become “machine-like.” They are treated as if they are no different from the machines that are put to use by their employers as items of “fixed capital.” This is at least part of what Marx means when he talks about alienated labour. He argues in the Manuscripts that workers are

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“depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine” (26). Similarly, in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx and Engels say of the proletariat that “not only are they the slaves of the bourgeois class,” they are also “daily and hourly enslaved by the machine.”15 In the Manuscripts the young Marx suggests, then, not only that capitalist society can be thought of as being a machine, or “the Machine,” but also that, within it, individual human beings have been reduced to the status of robots, automata or, as the colloquial saying would have it, “cogs” in that machine. This idea is put very well by Engels, in his essay on authority, when he says that “if man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature,” using new machinery made possible by recent developments in the fields of science and technology, nevertheless it is also true that “the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism” which, Engels notes, interestingly, has nothing specifically to do with capitalism and is “independent of all social organisation.”16 After Engels, Lenin also refers at one point to “man’s enslavement by the machine” under the Taylor System of “scientific management” in the transformed capitalism of the early 20th Century.17 As a result, workers are of course dehumanized in the process – or by the process. So far as this second aspect of alienation is concerned, the young Marx insists that, unlike machines and other inanimate objects, and also non-human animals, human beings possess freedom of the will. As he puts it in the Manuscripts, man is “a universal and therefore a free being” (70). Thus, when the process of capitalist production, and the “estranged labour” with which it is associated, “makes man’s species-life a means to his physical existence” only, Marx thinks of this as “degrading” the “spontaneous, free activity” of the worker (72). The work performed by the producer does not possess the character it would possess if the worker were allowed to produce humanly. For the young Marx then, as for Hannah Arendt, man is by nature a spontaneous, creative, artistic being who through action is capable of bringing something new and different into the world.18 15 16 17 18

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in Selected Works in Two Volumes (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958 [1848]), I, 41. Frederick Engels, “On Authority,” Selected Works, I, 637. V.I. Lenin, “The Taylor System – Man’s Enslavement by the Machine,” in Collected Works (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1962–70 [1914]), 20, 152–154. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 1958), 177; Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 2, Willing (New York: Harcourt, 1978 [1971]), 28–34, 216–217; Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 321.

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Marx captures this way of thinking about alienation in different ways at different times in the Manuscripts. We have already seen that he thinks that capitalist social relations reduce human beings to the status of an object, thing, or machine. However, he also suggests that what is wrong with a capitalist society is the fact that within it human beings are treated as if they are nothing more than animals, that is to say, mere beasts of burden. For example at one point he states that the science of political economy “knows the worker only as a working-animal – as a beast reduced to the strictest bodily needs” (32). And elsewhere he states that political economy treats the proletarian “the same as any horse,” who “must get as much” sustenance, and no more, “as will enable him to work” (31). Thus, Marx continues, “from being a man,” the worker becomes nothing more than “an abstract activity and a stomach” (26). Marx accepts, of course, that human beings have stomachs. That is to say, there is an animal, a biological, and a physical dimension to human existence. However, a human being, in his view, is a rather distinctive kind of animal, in a number of ways. And attention must be paid to those characteristics which make us distinctively human if we to be able to live a life which is appropriate to our nature.19 Marx maintains in the Manuscripts that work or human labour ought to be an expression of man’s “human functions,” or his nature as a free, creative being. However in a capitalist society, in his work, man “no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal,” a beast of burden (69). Outside of work, on the other hand, when the worker has an opportunity to express himself or “be freely active,” he nevertheless confines himself to expressing his “animal functions” only – for example “eating, drinking, procreating,” or “in his dwelling and in dressing-up, etc.” (69). Thus, Marx concludes, “what is human becomes animal” and “what is animal becomes human” (69). In this situation, human labour ceases to be “the satisfaction of a need,” specifically the need that all human beings have to express themselves creatively in and through their work. Rather, “it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it,” that is to say the physical needs associated with the human body – needs which human beings have in common with other animals (69). “Its alien character,” in this regard, Marx observes, “emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other 19

Nothing that Marx says about the essential differences between human beings and other animals in the Manuscripts should be taken as implying that he thought non-human animals do not possess any ethical status. For this issue Ted Benton, “Humanism=Speciesism? Marx on Humans and Animals,” in Sean Sayers and Peter Osborne (eds.), Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader (London: Routledge, 1990), 235– 274; see Lawrence Wilde, “‘The Creatures, Too, Must Become Free’: Marx and the Animal/ Human Distinction,” Capital & Class, vol. 24, no. 3 (2000): 37–53.

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compulsion exists,” labour of this kind, though only labour of this particular kind, “is shunned like the plague” (69).

The Psychological Dimension of Alienation: Alienation of Man from His Own Species Being

The third aspect of alienation referred to by Marx in the Manuscripts is closely associated with the second and can be seen as an extension of it. Here the notion of species-being, in the case of human beings, is connected to that of human nature.20 To live a life in accordance with the requirements of one’s own species being, so far as human beings are concerned, is to live a fully human life: a life which is fit or appropriate to their essential nature as human beings. Such a life is an authentic expression of the self, or what might be termed one’s “true self.” To be alienated from one’s species being, on the other hand, is to live a life which is in some way inhuman, de-humanized or degrading, in which, far from being expressed, the self is on the contrary repressed or suppressed. Here it is convenient to make a tentative distinction between the aesthetic, the psychic and what might be termed the most overtly ethical aspect of alienation, or the ethical dimension narrowly understood. I have already referred to the aesthetic dimension. I shall consider the ethical dimension, narrowly understood, in the next section. Here I shall say something about Marx’s views regarding the psychic dimension of alienation. From this point of view, the ethical ideas developed in the Manuscripts have to do with the issue of selfexpression, or with the politics of the self, rather than with the issue of class struggle, as it is usually understood, that is to say, as a conflict over the just distribution of economic resources.21 In the Manuscripts Marx is keen to establish that alienation does possess a spiritual or psychic dimension. It can, he suggests, be associated with the idea of alienation from one’s own self – something which in his view is suffered 20

21

For this contentious issue see Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man: With a Translation of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (Martino Fine, 2011 [1961]); Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso, 1994 [1983]); Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature (London: Routledge, 1998). For this aspect of Marx’s thought see Honneth, “Domination and Moral Struggle: The Philosophical Heritage of Marxism Reviewed,” 9–10, 13. See also Ian Fraser, “Marx on the Self,” in Ian Fraser, Dialectics of the Self: Transcending Charles Taylor (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007), 13–18.

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by capitalist employers of labour as well as by their employees. We have seen that according to Marx in a capitalist society some human beings, namely those who are workers in factories, are reduced to the status of animals, or beasts of burden. So far as their employers are concerned, it is therefore only the physical aspect of their nature and their existence which is considered to be of any importance, not the mental or psychic aspect: or what may be termed the inner dimension of the self. It is true that, through payment of the wage, the worker receives remuneration which provide him with “means of subsistence” (67). However, Marx points out, this caters only for his external, bodily needs. It considers the worker to be a “physical subject” only, and therefore not a “subject” at all, in the strict sense of the term (67). Marx is very clear in the Manuscripts that, so far as employees are concerned, the nature of work in the capitalist mode of production involves psychic degradation – “self-estrangement,” or what he terms the “loss of the self” (69–70). The labour of the worker, he says, “is not his own, but someone else’s.” It does not belong to him. Consequently, in the production process “he belongs, not to himself, but to another” (69). When entering into a contract of employment, the worker “must sell himself and his human identity” (29). Similarly, when engaged in capitalist production within the factory, the worker is not only estranged and estranging himself from the products of his labour, he is also “estranging himself from himself?” (68). Estranged labour, Marx argues, “in which man alienates himself,” is therefore quite literally “a labour of selfsacrifice” (69). It involves “mortification,” not only of the flesh, or of the human body, but also of the human spirit, the mind or psyche of the individual worker (69). Marx argues that it is not the whole person, or “the whole man” (99), that is engaged in the act of production, but only a part of that person, which is thought of as being somehow detached from the rest of him (sic) – and indeed, according to Marx, in reality has in fact become so detached. As Marx puts it, “in his work” the employee “does not affirm himself,” but rather “denies himself.” He “does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind.” He “only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself” (99). Thus, “the more the worker spends himself” and “the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes” (67). In this situation, “the worker puts his life into the object,” in consequence of which “his life no longer belongs to him but to the object” (67). As long as he is working in this manner, Marx argues, the worker “does not feel content,” but rather “unhappy.” (67) The worker’s alienated labour, Marx says, is nothing but “a torment to him” (74). In short, to employ a well-chosen phrase of Axel

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Honneth’s, in Marx’s view the worker involved in the process of capitalist production is subjected to a form of “psychic immiseration.”22 There is therefore a psychological as well as aesthetic dimension to the young Marx’s critique of capitalist society, which is in part also an aspect of his ethical critique, broadly understood. According to the young Marx, capitalist social relations of production are inimical to the “well-being” of the workers who have to endure them. A life in which this psychic or spiritual aspect of our nature is suppressed or repressed is not a “happy,” fulfilling or flourishing life for any human being.23 Some commentators, focusing exclusively on this particular aspect of Marx’s thought, have concluded that so far as questions of ethics are concerned, Marx is best seen as some kind of consequentialist, or even a utilitarian thinker. Axel Honneth, for example, occasionally reads Marx in this way.24 In the Manuscripts, Marx associates this form of psychic immiseration with those who pursue money or wealth for its own sake. In their view money or wealth is not a means to an end, perhaps because it allows those who possess it to purchase those things which, when consumed (in moderation), can contribute towards a happy and flourishing life. Rather, it is an end in itself. Those who live in this way possess a certain attitude of mind. For whatever reason, they seek to own or possess more and more things, to “have” them, without actually consuming them.25 For them, ownership has nothing to do with consumption, or the happiness that moderate consumption can bring, and has everything to do with power, domination and control. According to Marx, 22 23

24 25

Axel Honneth, “Domination and Moral Struggle: The Philosophical Heritage of Marxism Reviewed,” 11. It is interesting to compare the views expressed by Marx and Marxists on this subject with the currently burgeoning literature on the notions of “happiness” and “well-being.” For the latter see Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin Books, 2011 [2005]); Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2008 [2003]); Martin Seligman, Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being and How to Achieve Them (London: Nicholas Brealey, 2011). For some suggestions as to how this kind of ideological thinking might be criticised from the standpoint of the young Marx see Herbert Marcuse, “On Hedonism,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory, J. Shapiro (trans.) (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1968 [1938]), 159–199; and Theodor Adorno, “Aldous Huxley and Utopia,” Prisms (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1988 [1967]), 95–118. Axel Honneth, “Traces of a Tradition in Social Philosophy Marx, Sorel and Sartre,” The Struggle for Recognition, 148–151. For a development of this aspect of Marx’s thought see Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (London: Continuum, 2005 [1976]).

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those who orient themselves towards the world (and towards other human beings) in this manner become thereby both spiritually impoverished and again unhappy. Marx associates this kind of thinking with the science of political economy or the “science of wealth,” which he maintains is also “the science of renunciation, of want, of saving” (110). It is the science of that unhappiness which occurs inevitably as a consequence of the renunciation of the self. It is also, therefore, “the science of asceticism” (110). Its “true ideal” is the creation of a world which contains not only “the ascetic but extortionate miser,” but also “the ascetic but productive slave” (110). As such political economy is, he says, a “true moral science” (110). Indeed, it is “the most moral of all the sciences,” because, “selfrenunciation,” that is to say, “the renunciation of life and of all human needs,” is “its principal thesis” (110). Consequently, “the less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence,” and “the more you save,” “the greater becomes your treasure,” which “neither moths nor rust will devour” (110). In short, “the less you are,” or “the less you express your own life,” then “the more you have” – “the greater is your alienated life” and “the store of your estranged being.” (110) Thus, Marx continues, “everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth,” and “all the things which you cannot do, your money can do” (110). The type of personality which is created and sustained by capitalist social relations, that of the miser, is not one which Marx thinks is conducive to a properly human life – a life in which the individual concerned flourishes as a human being. Marx insists that a properly human life “should not be conceived merely in the sense of immediate, one-sided enjoyment, merely in the sense of possessing, of having.” (99). There are several reasons for this, one of which is that Marx believes that in a capitalist society “the motive of those who engage in exchange,” and whose lives are committed solely to the pursuit of money or wealth, is not altruism but, rather, “egoism” (123). Such people isolate themselves. They cut themselves off from the rest of “humanity” (123). It is for this reason that, in Marx’s view, their alienated lives are associated with loneliness and unhappiness. It might be thought that this is a phenomenon which is of little ethical significance. After all, setting aside the issue of whether individual moral agents can have duties to themselves, if it were the case that the life of the miser affected only him or herself then there is no reason why students of ethics should be particularly concerned about it. According to the young Marx, however, the having mode, or the drive within certain individuals attempt to possess, to dominate and control the world around them, is a matter of ethical

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concern because it can and does also affect their relationships with other human beings. This brings us to the fourth dimension of alienation discussed by Marx – the alienation of man from man which is engendered by capitalism. This is the ethical dimension of alienation, more narrowly understood.

The Ethical Dimension of Alienation: Alienation of Man from Man

In the Manuscripts Marx records a fourth dimension of alienation. “An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life activity, from his species-being,” he says, “is the estrangement of man from man” (72). “When man confronts himself,” Marx continues, in so doing he also at the same time necessarily “confronts the other man” (72). Thus, “the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means,” in effect, “that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature” (73–74). One of the things that Marx has in mind here is the fact that the social relations of a capitalist society reduce human beings to the condition of being, not animals, but mere commodities. In capitalist society, he says, “the worker has become a commodity,” (24) or has sunk “to the level of commodities” (64). As such, human beings are again objectified. They are thought of as if they were merely inanimate objects or non-human “things,” items of property, which can be and are bought and sold in a market. To employ a term used by the anarchist science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, whose views on ethics are similar to those of the young Marx, capitalist society is inherently “propertarian.”26 Prefiguring at least one of the senses of the idea of “instrumental rationality,” later employed by the theorists of the Frankfurt School,27 the young Marx argues that workers are treated “instrumentally” by their employers. The classic example of a human being who is treated in such a way is of course that of the person who has been enslaved. Marx argues that workers are treated in just this way – as if they are nothing more than living instruments or tools whose 26 27

See Tony Burns, Political Theory, Science Fiction and Utopian Literature: Ursula K. Le Guin and The Dispossessed (Lanham, md: Lexington, 2008), 282–285. See Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (Herder and Herder, 1972), 188–243. See also David Held, “The Critique of Instrumental Reason: Critical Theory and the Philosophy of History,” in Introduction to Critical Theory: From Horkheimer to Habermas (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 148–174.

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sole function or purpose in life, insofar as they are workers and not human beings, is to be put to use to serve the interests of their masters. At one point, for example, Marx refers to the “decline” of the worker to the status, not of an animal, or of a machine, but of a “bond servant of capital” (27). It is arguable, then, that what Marx has in mind when discussing this fourth dimension of alienation, the alienation of man from man, is the existence, in capitalist society, of the drive to dominate, master, own and control others, to possess or own them, to subordinate them to one’s own end or purposes – in short, the drive to enslave them. It is for this reason, primarily, that a connection can be made between the theory of alienation advanced by Marx in the Manuscripts and the views on mastery-and-slavery expressed by Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit. In the Manuscripts, Marx follows Hegel by assuming that the emergence and continued identity of the self comes into existence only in and through certain relations of recognition. As he puts it there, “man’s relation to himself becomes for him objective and actual” only “through his relation to the other man” (74–75). Marx also states there that it is “through estranged, alienated labour” that “the worker produces the relationship to this labour of a man alien to labour and standing outside it” (75–76). Consequently, “the relationship of the worker” to his own labour also “creates the relation to it of the capitalist (or whatever one chooses to call the master of labour)” (75–76). These words clearly echo those of Hegel in the “master–slave” section of the Phenomenology. In both cases we find the view that the personal identity, or self-consciousness, of the individual worker who has been enslaved depends on the social relationship which exists between that individual and another, who is his master. The identity of the self, in each case, is created and sustained by and through an intersubjective relationship of mutual (if not reciprocal) recognition. For Hegel, reciprocal recognition is based on a shared commitment to the value of human equality. This is what Hegel refers to as “true recognition” in the Phenomenology. Hegel contrasts this with “false recognition,” in which at least one of the individuals doing the recognizing (and possibly both of them) does not acknowledge this fundamental principle of right. He does not accept that the other is a fellow human being. It is of course theoretically possible for both parties in such a relationship to freely recognize one another as being “master” and “slave,” and for them to act accordingly, without the need for coercion. In this case, Hegel suggests, the recognition in question, although freely given, and therefore evidently in a sense mutual, is not what it should be and could not be said to be reciprocal or true recognition.28 28 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§182–188, 112–114.

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There is an interesting contrast to be made between the views of Marx on this issue and those of another member of the Young Hegelian movement, Max Stirner, who also developed his own views regarding questions of ethics by way of a critical engagement with those of Hegel in the Phenomenology.29 According to Stirner, the urge to dominate, control and enslave others, alluded to by Hegel in the Phenomenology, is not a social phenomenon but, rather, a natural consequence of the egoism of human nature. It is an inevitable outcome of the human condition, a “law of life,” and as such is not something which is to be criticised on ethical grounds.30 Marx accepted that in a capitalist society “the motive of those who engage in exchange” is not altruism or “humanity” but, rather, again “egoism” (123). This is one of the young Marx’s reasons for thinking that life in a capitalist society is not and could not be an ethical life. Against Stirner, however, he argued that egoism, and therefore also the alienation of man from man attendant upon it, is a product of and endemic to the social relations of a capitalist society. Unlike Stirner, the young Marx thought that the historical transcendence of such a state of affairs was both sociologically possible and ethically desirable. In order to capture this fourth dimension of alienation, and to express his understanding of the plight of the worker within a capitalist society, Marx frequently employs the language and imagery of slavery, both in the Manuscripts and elsewhere. We have already seen that in the Manifesto of the Communist Party Marx and Engels refer to the proletariat as “the slaves of the bourgeois class.” Similarly, in the Manuscripts, Marx argues that “the worker becomes a slave of his object,” which is external to him and comes to control him (67), and that in the capitalist process of production the worker is nothing more than the “bond servant of capital” (27). However, he also makes similar remarks elsewhere. For example, at one point he cites favourably the words of Wilhelm Schultz, who claimed that, as a consequence of the technological innovations associated with the Industrial Revolution, “notwithstanding the time saved by the perfecting of machinery, the duration of the slave labour performed by a large population in the factories has only increased” (33). And he also records, favourably, Constantin Pecqueur’s assertion that “to hire out one’s labour” to a capitalist employer is, for the employee, “to begin one’s enslavement” (46). There are a number of things which, in Marx’s opinion, are associated with this condition of slavery. As we have seen, one of these is the fact that in 29 30

Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own: The Case of the Individual against Authority. Steven Byington (trans.). Intro. Sidney Parker (London: Rebel Press, 1982 [1845]), 9. For some particularly striking passages affirming this view, see Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, 139, 256, 311.

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capitalist society, the labour of the individual human beings who are engaged in the act of production is machine-like. It is monotonous, tedious, dull, boring and repetitive – and for human beings such a life can only lead to unhappiness. However another aspect of alienation, to which Marx attaches considerable importance, is the fact that this situation is not considered to be ethically indefensible. If individual workers are thought of in this way, as if they are machines, nothing more than items of property, or of productive capital, it follows that as such they can possess no ethical status or standing. Machines of course, because they are inanimate objects, do not feel pain, either mental or physical, nor do they have feelings or emotions. Machines cannot suffer or be unhappy. Machines have neither rights nor duties and no wrong or injustice can be done to them. There is no reason for anybody to be concerned about their wellbeing. For the employers of labour, so far as the treatment of their employees is concerned, ethical considerations simply do not apply. Another interesting feature of Marx’s argument at this point in the Manuscripts is that he does not always think about the enslavement of the worker in structural or impersonal terms. The worker is indeed enslaved, but not so much by “the system,” or by machinery, or by the objects produced. Rather, here, unlike in some of his later writings, Marx thinks of the enslavement of the worker as being more directly personal. It is a matter of an immediate or direct relationship between one individual and another. This is one reason why this relationship might be subjected to ethical evaluation. So, for example, Marx states at one point that “man’s relation to himself becomes for him objective and actual” only “through his relation to the other man” (75). Thus, “if the product of his labour” is “for him an alien, hostile, powerful object independent of him,” this can only be because “someone else,” that is to say another person, “is master of this object, someone who is alien, hostile, powerful, and independent of him” (75). If the activity of the worker is an “unfree activity,” this is because “it as an activity performed in the service, under the dominion, the coercion, and the yoke of another man” (75). Marx also observes that “if the worker’s activity” is a “torment to him,” nevertheless to the employer of labour it must be a “delight and his life’s joy” (75). This aspect of the alienation of man from man is exemplified by the fact that in the capitalist mode of production the worker is subjected to a regime of harsh labour discipline within the factory. Far from being freely chosen and a voluntary expression of his own personality, therefore, the labour associated with capitalist production is associated with the exercise of those forms power, coercion and domination which are traditionally associated with slavery.31 31

For this issue see also Karl Marx, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Volume I, Frederick Engels (ed.), Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (trans.) (London:

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As Marx puts it, in a critique of Adam Smith’s notion of the “free-contract,” as soon as the worker who engages in such a contract moves inside the gates of the factory (“abandon all hope, ye who enter here!”) and enters the sphere of production, his labour is not “voluntary, but coerced.” It is a specific form of “forced labour” (69). “Its alien character,” Marx claims, “emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists,” this particular form of labour “is shunned like the plague” (69). What Marx has in mind when he talks about this fourth dimension of alienation, the alienation of man from man, is not the only aspect of Marx’s theory of alienation as a whole that might be said to be “ethical.” Nevertheless, these ideas are necessary for any adequate understanding the young Marx’s views on ethics. Like Hegel, Marx possessed a view of human nature according to which by nature man is a social and political animal, that is to say an ethical being. One aspect of the species-being of human beings, is that a species-life, or a fully human life, is, amongst other things, also an ethical life. Marx argues that a situation in which two individuals do not relate to one another ethically, as human beings should, is a relationship in which one individual attempts, more or less successfully, to own, control, dominate, possess or enslave another. This is one of the things that Marx envisages when he states that capitalism tends to reduce human beings to the status of commodities or things, items of property. The young Marx argues that this is a reason for thinking the capitalist social relations are indefensible from the ethical point of view. Such a relationship is not an ethical relationship. It could not be defended on ethical grounds, or from the standpoint of what is right. Formulating the point in the language of justice, relationships of this kind are inherently unjust. The justice in question, however, is evidently recognitive rather than distributive justice. For the young Marx, then, an important aspect of the “loss of the self” which he associates with alienation is the fact that the worker is not treated in a manner which Marx considers appropriate for human beings, who rightly possess a sense of their own dignity or worth, and who are entitled just because they are human to be treated with respect. Elsewhere in the Manuscripts, when commenting on the limitations of trade unionism and the struggle for higher wages, Marx argues that such an increase would “be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labour their human status and dignity” (76–77). This is a clear indication that, in his view, there is more to life than class struggle. Or alternatively perhaps, as Axel Honneth has noted, it is an indication that for the young Marx the struggle for recognition is one important aspect of

Lawrence and Wishart 1970 [1867]), especially Marx’s discussion of ‘The Working Day,’ 233, 261–262, 283, 285, ‘Machinery and Modern Industry,’ 384–385, and ‘The Factory,’ 397–400.

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class struggle, which evidently embraces other issues in addition to that of the just distribution of economic resources.32

The Young Marx on the Politics of Distribution versus the Politics of Recognition

The interest which the young Marx took in questions of ethics can be associated with an ethical critique of capitalism which focuses on issues of a non-­ distributive nature, having to do with the notion of recognition or mis-­ recognition. The analysis above suggests that the young Marx can be seen as engaging in a form of identity politics, or the politics of recognition. He is concerned with justice, certainly. However, this is not distributive justice only. It is also the kind of recognitive justice that Hegel had in mind when he discusses “mastery-and-slavery” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. For Marx in the Manuscripts, one of the injustices associated with a capitalist society is not so much the fact that there is something wrong with the distribution of the social product but, rather, the fact that interpersonal relationships themselves are unjust – involving some human beings, the capitalist employers of labour, treating others, their employees, as if they were not human beings at all, but a means to their own ends – as mere “things,” “living instruments” or “slaves.” This dimension of the young Marx’s critique of capitalism is overlooked by Richard Sennett, who develops a critique of what he refers to as the “new capitalism” along similar lines to those of the young Marx, without ever appreciating that Marx himself objected to the “old” capitalism for the very same reasons. From the standpoint of Marxism such problems are not related to either “new” or “old” capitalism, but are in fact endemic to capitalism itself, in all of its forms. Sennett’s views on this subject are blinkered by his tendency to identify Marxism with the authoritarian practices of the Communist Party in the former Soviet Union, which not surprisingly he associates with the complete absence of a “politics of respect.”33 In his opinion, it is not Stalinism but rather 32 33

See again Honneth, “Domination and Moral Struggle: The Philosophical Heritage of Marxism Reviewed,” 9–10, 13. Richard Sennett, “The Politics of Respect,” in Respect: The Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality. (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 247–263; Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York & London: Norton, 1998); Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006); Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York and London: Norton).

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Marx and Marxism that have taken little or no interest in the idea of a politics of respect. One of the aims of the present chapter is to demonstrate the inadequacy of this view. The suggestion that the young Marx’s views on ethics owe a debt to Hegel, or that they are best understood by reference to the theory of recognition developed by the Hegel in the Phenomenology, has an interesting implication for the assessment of the significance of Marx and his ideas for an understanding of contemporary political issues. In the last ten to fifteen years or so a great deal has been said in the debate about “the politics of distribution versus the politics of recognition,” especially as we find the terms of this debate formulated in the writings of Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser.34 Although Honneth is a keen student of the philosophy of Hegel, nevertheless Hegel’s theory of recognition does not lie at the centre of the debate between him and Fraser. Indeed some of those who are interested in the politics of recognition, including Nancy Fraser, seem to think that it is possible to theorise about such issues without referring at all to Hegel. In their view, it would seem, Hegel and his ideas are an obstacle to an adequate understanding of the issues involved. 35 Not only do Honneth and Fraser say little about Hegel in their debate, they say even less about Marx.36 It seems fairly clear however that, no matter how much they disagree about other issues, they are in agreement about Marx, and about where Marx and his ideas fit in to their debate. According to them, Marx 34

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Nancy Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics: Redistribution, Recognition and Participation,” in Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange (London: Verso, 2003), 7–109; Nancy Fraser, “Distorted Beyond All Recognition: A Rejoinder to Axel Honneth,” in Fraser and Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition? 198–236; Axel Honneth, “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser,” in Fraser and Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition?110–197; Axel Honneth, “The Point of Recognition: A Rejoinder to the Rejoinder,” in Fraser and Honneth (eds.), Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, 237–268. See Tony Burns, “Hegel, Cosmopolitanism and Contemporary Recognition Theory,” in Tony Burns and Simon Thompson (eds.), Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition (London: Palgrave, 2013), 64–87; C. Lauer, “Multivalent Recognition: The Place of Hegel in the Fraser-Honneth Debate.” Contemporary Political Theory, vol. 11, no. (2012): 23–40; S.  Tobias, “Hegel and the Politics of Recognition,” The Owl of Minerva, vol. 38, nos. 1–2 (2006–2007): 101–126. Honneth does, however, discuss Marx in relation to the idea of the politics of recognition in some of his earlier writings. See Axel Honneth, “Traces of a Tradition in Social Philosophy: Marx, Sorel, Sartre,” in The Struggle for Recognition, 145–159; “Domination and Moral Struggle: The Philosophical Heritage of Marxism Reviewed,” in The Fragmented World of the Social, pp. 3–14; and “Work and Instrumental Action: On the Normative Basis of Critical Theory,” The Fragmented World of the Social, 15–49.

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is best seen as a theorist of distribution and not a theorist of recognition. Marx is to be associated with that old-style leftist, socialist or class-based politics, that is often associated with the industrial age and with the politics of modernity. Consequently, Marx and his ideas are of doubtful relevance today. In the light of contemporary economic, social, political and cultural developments, Marxism of any kind is now clearly out-of-date. Marxists have nothing at all to say about the great political issues of the present era, the most salient of which have to do, not with the issue of socio-economic distribution, but rather with questions of social and political identity – of recognition. In this respect both Fraser and the later Honneth reflect the commonly held view that Marx was a student of political economy. As such he was solely interested in developing a scientific understanding of how the economic system of a capitalist society, especially its mode of production, works and made no ethical judgments about that society at all. Those who have rejected this reading of Marx, and who have insisted that Marx did offer an ethical critique of that society, have on the whole tended to focus on the issue of distributive justice.37 However, by arguing in this way they have suggested that Marx was not at all interested in those questions of justice which are of a non-distributive nature – problems of recognitive justice. The interpretation of Marx’s theory of alienation offered above leads us in a different direction.

Marx as a Critic of the Abuse of Power in Social Institutions

Interestingly, the young Marx argues in the Manuscripts that an implication of the fact that in capitalist production the outer, physical or bodily needs are catered for, whilst the inner, psychic well-being of the worker is ignored completely, is that the individual concerned is thought of, not as a human being, nor indeed as an animal, a commodity, a machine or an object, but rather as nothing more than an exemplification, or a concrete instantiation, of a particular social role. He or she is the stereo-typical bearer of a particular subject position, or a determinate social identity. In Marx’s own words, this individual is thought of as being “nothing more than a worker” (79). He or she has no “existence as a 37

See Norman Geras, “The Controversy About Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, vol. 150 (1985): 47–85; Norman Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice: An Addendum and Rejoinder,” New Left Review, vol. 195 (1992): 37–69. For some earlier thoughts on this much discussed issue, with further references, see Tony Burns, “Whose Aristotle? Which Marx? Ethics, Law and Justice in Aristotle and Marx,” Imprints: Egalitarian Theory and Practice, vol. 8, no. 2 (2005): 125–155.

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human being but only as a worker” (79). Marx notes that by focusing exclusively on the physical dimension of human existence, the wage earned through employment does enable this individual to exist, but again only “as a worker” (67). The “extremity of this bondage,” Marx claims, is that “it is only as a worker that he continues to maintain himself as a physical subject, and that it is only as a physical subject that he is a worker.” (67). Elsewhere in the Manuscripts, Marx states that “it goes without saying that the proletarian” is “considered by political economy only as a worker”(31). Political economy, he says, “does not consider him when he is not working, as a human being” (31). There are two reasons why such stereo-typing might be thought to be dehumanizing and degrading for the individuals affected by it. The first, and more obvious of the two, is simply the fact that those who possess the social identity of a worker, or who occupy that particular social role, are indeed treated badly by their employers, the masters, in a manner which Marx considered to be demeaning, akin to a form of slavery. The social role that they occupy is one which is associated with an inferior status. It is thought that the fact that an individual is a mere worker, or only a worker, is a justification for treating them badly, as if being workers they are not human, and therefore not deserving of the ethical consideration that one human being owes to another. The second, and less obvious reason, has to do with the fact that, irrespective of the quality of their treatment, the individual who is a worker in a capitalist society, just like any other individual who occupies a particular social role in that society, or indeed in any other type of society, can be thought of as being trapped or enslaved by that position and the duties with which it is associated. This is true even when the position in question is a superior one in which those who occupy that role are treated well rather than badly. In other words, this aspect of enslavement is something which one finds also in the case of the employer who is master, as well as in that of the worker who is a slave. The employer of labour and the employee, Marx suggests, are each locked into a particular framework of social relations of production, within the social institution that is a factory. Moreover, in a manner of speaking, this is a situation which enslaves them both – even though the former is treated much better than the latter so far as the conditions of their respective employments are concerned. One is reminded at this point of a striking phrase of the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, who was a slave, and who said of the individuals who occupied the position of a senator in ancient Rome, that they too can be thought of as slaves. They are, Epictetus says, “slaves in purple.”38 In the 20th 38 Epictetus, The Moral Discourses of Epictetus, Elizabeth Carter (trans.) (London: Dent n.d.), IV, I, 232.

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Century, thinking of this kind has an important part to play in the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, who like the young Marx was a keen student of the philosophy of Hegel, especially the master-slave section of the Phenomenology of Spirit.39 It is worth observing at this point that the notion of objectification or reification has an application within this context also. It is not only society in general that can be thought of as exemplifying the phenomenon of reification, but also the variety of different social institutions, and corresponding social roles, and determinate identities, with which it is associated. These too can be thought of as possessing a certain “thing-like” quality, which is what differentiates them from that which, in Marx’s view, is essentially human. For the young Marx, to be thought of as being nothing more than a worker, and to be treated as such, is to be objectified or reduced to the status of a thing, a tool or living instrument in the hands of an employer or a master. Such a person, in Marx’s opinion, just is in effect a slave. Here of course the focus of attention is on economic production under capitalism, the world of work and labour, especially the division of labour within the social institution that is a factory. What the young Marx did not see, or at least if he did see it then he had little interest in it, is the fact that a similar analysis might be offered of other social institutions also, for example asylums, hospitals, prisons and schools, all of which are of course not only places of employment. To a considerable extent the injustice associated with mis-recognition is thought of by Marx as also having to do with capitalism. It is a consequence of the dominance of social relations which are typical of, and which can be uniquely associated with, the capitalist mode of production. On the other hand, however, it is clear that the phenomenon of mis-recognition also has to do with the existence of other aspects of social life, some of which may not be at all modern, because they are to be found in all social institutions wherever they exist, and others of which, although they are indeed modern, are not things which are uniquely associated with capitalism, for example such things as industrialism, bureaucracy, technocracy and managerialism. With respect to these issues, the ethical critique of existing society laid out by the young Marx in the Manuscripts, inspired by the idea of the “struggle for recognition” discussed by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit, can be seen as converging with a critique of contemporary social institutions 39

Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Hazel E. Barnes (trans.) (London: Methuen, 1972 [1943]), 233, 235–8, 271, 363–64, 370, 380–81. Sartre’s reading of Hegel on mastery-and-slavery is akin to that of Max Stirner and of Stirner’s brand of anarchism. As such, it is significantly different from that of the young Marx.

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which is usually associated, not so much with Marxism, but rather with anarchism.40 In this respect, the ethical critique that is offered by both anarchists and Marxists can, intellectually speaking, be seen as emerging from a common source – the young Hegelian movement of the 1840s and its critical engagement with the philosophy of Hegel, especially Hegel’s discussion of masteryand-slavery in the Phenomenology.41 It should be remembered that it was not Marx, but another student of Hegel, the anarchist theoretician Michael Bakunin, who said that “a slave master is not a man but a master,” who “by ignoring his slave’s humanity” also “ignores his own.”42 Conclusion Chris Arthur has argued that in the Paris Manuscripts the young Marx has little interest in Hegel’s discussion of the master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology. According to Arthur, “it is dogmatically asserted in numerous books,” wrongly in his opinion, “that Marx was inspired by Hegel’s analysis of the labour of servitude.”43 Arthur insists that “this view,” which he associates with the writings of Alexander Kojève, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Hyppolite and Herbert Marcuse, “is completely false.”44 For in the Manuscripts, he argues, Marx “never refers to this section of the Phenomenology – never mind giving it any importance!.”45 As I noted earlier, Marx does refer directly to the Phenomenology later on in the Manuscripts, in a separate chapter devoted to a discussion of Hegel’s dialectical philosophy as a whole. However, when he does so it is far from clear that he 40

41

42 43 44 45

See, for example, Ivan Illich, Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution. Intro Erich Fromm. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971); Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971); Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973); Ivan Illich, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (London: Penguin Books, 1984 [1976]). For this general issue see William J. Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1970); Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians and the Origins of Radical Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); David McLellan, The Young Hegelians and Karl Marx (London: Macmillan, 1969); David McLellan, Marx Before Marxism (Harmondsworth; Penguin Books, 1970); Douglas Moggach, The New Hegelians: Politics and Philosophy in the Hegelian School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Michael Bakunin, Selected Writings, ed. A. Lehning (London: Cape, 1973), 147. Chris Arthur, “Hegel’s Master–Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology,” New Left Review, vol. 142 (1983): 67–75, 75. Arthur, “Hegel’s Master–Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology,” 75. Arthur, “Hegel’s Master–Slave Dialectic and a Myth of Marxology,” 69.

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was alluding to that section of Hegel’s text in which mastery and slavery are discussed. In Arthur’s view, then, the commentators referred to above have simply assumed, without supporting evidence, that Marx must have had Hegel’s discussion of mastery and slavery in mind when discussing the concept of alienation in the Manuscripts. In response to this, it might be argued that one should not attach too much significance to the fact that Marx’s allusions in the Manuscripts to Hegel’s views on mastery-and-slavery in the Phenomenology are implicit rather than explicit. Although it must be conceded that the young Marx does not refer explicitly either to Hegel’s theory of recognition or to his discussion of mastery-and-slavery, nevertheless his approach to questions of ethics in the Manuscripts is, like that of Hegel before him, undeniably a recognitive one. Moreover, we have seen that in the Manuscripts Marx does on a number of occasions refer explicitly to the theme of mastery-and-slavery, albeit without mentioning Hegel or the Phenomenology by name. It is of course possible that the source of inspiration for Marx’s view that capitalism can be criticised on ethical grounds, because it is associated with a peculiarly modern form of slavery, could have come from elsewhere. However, although this is possible, in my view it is unlikely. Given the dominance of the philosophy of Hegel in the social and intellectual milieu within which Marx was writing in 1844, the suggestion that the immediate source of inspiration for these ideas lies elsewhere seems to me to be improbable. Like the other members of the Young Hegelian movement, especially Ludwig Feuerbach and Max Stirner, in this phase of his intellectual development Marx was seeking to clarify his own ideas on a number of issues by engaging critically with those of Hegel. In my view, then, the claim that, so far as questions of ethics narrowly understood are concerned, the young Marx was a recognition theorist who held views striking similar to those espoused by Hegel in the “master-slave” section of the Phenomenology, has a great deal to be said for it. The suggestion that the young Marx’s ethical thought and his ethical critique of existing society are not only similar to, but also in all probability inspired by, his engagement with Hegel’s philosophy, especially Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, seems to me to be entirely credible. By developing a reading of Marx’s views on ethics which focuses on the notion of alienation, and on the associated concept of recognition, in something like the sense in which Hegel understands the term in the Phenomenology, I have attempted to defend the claim that, so far as questions of ethics narrowly understood are concerned, the young Marx was in fact, like Hegel, a recognition theorist. The notion of recognition, in much the same sense as the term is employed by Hegel, has an important part to play in the young Marx’s ethical critique of a capitalist society. Marx was therefore, in this period, just as much concerned with the politics of recognition as he was with the politics of distribution. This is,

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arguably, something which has been forgotten, and which ought to be remembered. It is this forgotten Marx who, some might think is of more relevance than the Marx that everybody remembers, for our understanding of contemporary political problems. In particular, it is this forgotten Marx who addresses issues of identity politics. According to this reading of the Manuscripts, this forgotten Marx held views which continue to be relevant for all students of politics today, whether or not they consider themselves to be Marxists. I hasten to add that I do not myself think that Marxist political economy has no contemporary relevance. Nor do I think that class-based politics are a thing of the past. I do think, however, that the basis for Marx’s commitment to that particular form of politics is a theory of justice which is comprehensive in its scope. That theory can and does help us to understand problems of distributive justice, which are of fundamental importance for the politics of contemporary society, which remains a capitalist society, in the sense in which Marx understood the term. However, it also allows us to address problems of justice which are of a non-distributive nature, including what might be termed problems of recognitive justice. It is for this reason that it is possible for Marxists writing today not to confine themselves solely to having an interest in questions of political economy, or the distribution of economic resources, and for them also to take an interest in issues having to do with identity politics. For example, the kind of thinking that is associated with the young Marx’s critique of the treatment of workers in factories in the 19th Century, which as we have seen relies heavily on Hegel’s idea of a “struggle for recognition” and on the ideas of “objectification” and “enslavement,” has an obvious relevance for those writing today about both the politics of race46 and the politics of gender.47 46

47

See, for example, Franz Fanon, “The Negro and Recognition,” Black Skins, White Masks (London: Grove Press, 1994 [1952]), 210–222; Richard Schmitt, “Racism and Objectification: Reflections on Themes from Fanon,” in Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting and R.T. White (eds.), Fanon: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 35–52; Lou Turner, “On the Difference Between the Hegelian and the Fanonian Dialectic of Lordship and Bondage,” in Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting and White (eds.), Fanon: A Critical Reader, 134–154. See Christopher J. Arthur, “Hegel as Lord and Master,” in Sean Sayers & Peter Osborne eds., Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy: A Radical Philosophy Reader (London: Routledge, 1990), 27–45; Susan M. Easton, “Hegel and Feminism,” in David Lamb ed., Hegel and Modern Philosophy (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 20–55; Kimberly Hutchings, Hegel and Feminist Philosophy (Cambridge: Polity, 2003); Kimberly Hutchings and Tuija Pulkkinen (eds.), Hegel’s Philosophy and Feminist Thought: Beyond Antigone? (London: Palgrave, 2010); Patricia Jagentowicz Mills (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of G.W.F. Hegel (Philadelphia: Penn State University Press, 1995). Genevieve Lloyd, “Masters, Slaves and Others,” in Roy Edgley & E. Osborne (eds.), Radical Philosophy Reader (London: Verso), 291–309.

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Of particular interest, here, are ongoing problems having to do with wellbeing and recognition in the work place. Any current manifestation of the critique of capitalism developed by the young Marx would need to focus on the activities of those involved in departments of “human resource management” in large corporations or business enterprises, or in any of the other bureaucratic institutions of contemporary society. The suggestion here is that those in such positions of authority in these institutions do not recognize the employees that they “manage” as human beings, but rather as nothing more than quantifiable and measurable units of human resource.48 This is one of a number of aspects of Marx’s ethical critique of 19th Century capitalism which retains its relevance for those who are seeking to resist the forces of bureaucracy, technocracy and managerialism today. From this point of view, managerialism is both a practice and a theory. Managerialism as a theory is a framework of ideas which provides the normative justification for the corresponding practice. That theory has, therefore, an ideological function. Ethically speaking, the ideology of “managerialism” is arguably just as insidious in its effects as that of “neo-liberalism.” It ought, therefore, to be taken far more seriously, not only by Marxists, but also by students of political ideologies more generally, who rarely discuss or even refer to it.49 For at least some of those who are interested in the politics of recognition today it is here, above all, that the contemporary significance of the ethical thought of the young Marx lies. 48

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For this issue see Axel Honneth, “Work and Recognition: A Redefinition,” in HansChristoph Schmidt am Busch and Christopher F. Zurn (eds.), The Philosophy of Recognition: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. (Lanham, md: Lexington, 2010), 223–240; Jean Deranty, Jean-Philippe Danielle Petherbridge, John Rundell and Robert Sinnerbrink (eds.), Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory (Leiden and Boston, 2007); Emmanuel Renault, “Taking on the Inheritance of Critical Theory: Saving Marx by Recognition?” in Schmidt am Busch and Zurn (eds.), The Philosophy of Recognition, 241–256; Nicholas Smith and Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Work and the Politics of Recognition.” ResPublica, vol. 18, no. 1 (2012): 53–64; Nicholas Smith and Jean-Philippe Deranty (eds.), New Philosophies of Labour: Work and the Social Bond (Leiden: Brill, 2012). Rare exceptions include Willard E. Enteman, Managerialism: The Emergence of a New Ideology (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993); Thomas Klikauer, Managerialism: A Critique of an Ideology (London: Palgrave, 2013); Judith A. Merkle, Management and Ideology: The Legacy of the International Scientific Movement (Berkeley, ca: University of California Press, 1980); Martin Parker, Against Management: Organization in the Age of Managerialism (Cambridge: Polity Press).

chapter 3

Political Economy and the Normative Marx on Human Nature and the Quest for Dignity Lauren Langman and Dan Albanese He who would criticize all human acts, movements, relations, etc., by the principle of utility, must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.1 1 Introduction One of the central issues of Western philosophy, and indeed the philosophies of most other cultures, has been the normative or ethical question. What are the standards of the good, the goals that govern behavior and tell us how we should live? Plato’s answer was the pursuit of “justice” achieved by “giving every man (sic) his due,” depending on his location in the social hierarchy of the Republic. Aristotle, seeing that men (sic) were political animals saw the “good life” as fulfillment in civic participation. However, Aristotle defended private property and indeed, defended both democracy and slavery. Yet both philosophers agreed that the polis was the place that not only enabled self-fulfillment that perhaps enabled happiness as the gratification from the good life. But neither philosopher saw that as a possibility for all, indeed, such participation in the political has typically been the prerogative of affluent male elites-till this day. For Marx, the critique of capitalism began with wage labor and alienation that robbed workers of their freedom, humanity and dignity. Less interest has been paid to the normative or ethical basis of those concerns, why is freeing workers from alienation and wage slavery a “good” while subordination, servitude, denigration have been justified. While Marx avoided discussions of ethics, he yet embraced an ethical position. Blackledge argued that Marx did consider issues of freedom and justice as part of his normative stance that we claim rests on Marx’s view of human nature and desire, but that nature is always expressed in historically particular forms.2 We will argue that, first, Marx’s had a tacit notion of “human nature,” and desire play a fundamental

1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Lawrence &Wishart, 1967), 571. 2 Paul Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics (Albany, ny; Suny Press, 2012).

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role in his theory of history while thwarted desires provided an ethical basis for his 1844 critique of wage labor as a source of misery, frustrations of “natural” desires and distortions of self. Second, Marx was quite clear how capitalism fostered the indignities, abasement and indignation of workers based on the contradiction of its human nature and the condition of its life.3 This would be overcome by socialism, but his observation needs to be grounded in basic life process rooted in human nature and desire. While basic affects may be “hardwired,” humans are subjected to socialization processes to dispose motives, actions and feelings. Uniquely human desires emerge, especially as will be argued, the need for dignity as both an emotionally based desire and a normative principle.4 Third and finally, we will therefore argue that Marx’s critique of alienated labor rests upon an ethical critique that saw human desires in general and capacities for self-realization and dignity in particular frustrated by political economy and sustained by ideology. Transcending the political economy, which depends on unmasking ideological distortions, was the precondition of emancipation and freedom, self-realization and dignity for all. But his notion of dignity was not based on some kind of disembodied “recognition” of selfhood that was independent of political economy.5 The ethical must be grounded in the ontological-which must consider human nature and an essential part of that nature is its emotional bedrock. 3 Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature (London: Verso, 1983), 62–63. 4 We must differentiate dignity from pride or self-esteem. Rousseau considered self-esteem as self-love, distinct from pride, that led people to compare themselves with others and take pleasure in being “better” and often enjoying the suffering others. Pride, like dignity,  requires recognition, typically through accomplishments whether prowess in war, business, academics or the arts, or simple decency in one’s everyday acts. This can be seen as a person’s “worth” based on effectiveness for a system or organization that may however well depend on exploitation and that may well foster inequality, degradation and alienation of others-e.g. business “leaders” who close plants, fire workers, cut wages/benefits and enhance corporate value, stock owner wealth and their own incomes (CF Bonefield and Psychopedis, 2005). Therefore, self-esteem, pride self-worth, are not only individualistic, but can come from acts without social benefit-or indeed, acts with horrendous impacts  on  others. Eichmann’s pride in doing a “good job” sending Jews to camps, Sta­ lin’s  pride in the extermination of the Kulaks or Bush’s pride in declaring “mission accomplished.” 5 More specifically, the notion of “recognition” has become the focus of recent Critical Theory, especially in the work of Axel Honneth. But his perspective has dismissed the historical context of capitalism as the material foundation of a class society based on private property that alienates labor, appropriates surplus value and whose ideologies and cultural distractions sustain domination.

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Arguments over concepts of human nature typically bring in highly selective historical evidence, for example consider the many attempts to justify contemporary behavior as “normal” and “inherent.” Are people naturally greedy? Indeed, someone go so far as to say that capitalist acquisitiveness is part of our dna; just look at all the apes and chimps on Wall Street/Silicon Valley (but not bonobos). There is very little evidence to suggest an evolutionary basis for a particular ideology/social system whether Social Darwinist claims that justify capitalism as “survival of fittest” nor others who see primate cooperation (if not copulation) as the basis of socialism. Sorry, the bonobos did not anticipate Marx. Similarly, to argue that human aggression is inherent means that war and conflict are inevitable which ignores the many societies where that is not the case, and indeed the existence of pacifist tendencies in some communities make it questionable. We would argue the histories of war, torture, genocide and cruelties can be better explained by social factors than appeals to genetics or “inherent aggression.” (The reasons groups go to war, i.e., for land (resources), wealth and power, are not the reasons individuals are willing to fight.) Nevertheless one might note that for most of pre-history, people lived as simple hunter gatherers or small horticultural societies where sharing, caring and cooperation, living in harmony with nature and each other were typical. In such societies the accumulation of goods was a hindrance-potlatch ceremonies redistributed goods. Moreover there was little hierarchical stratification and instead a great deal of equality – especially between men and women. But can we then say that human beings are socialist by nature? No! You cannot transpose a modern industrial political economy to a band of nomads, simple societies differ from those that are more differentiated. As societies were able to produce surplus food and in turn enable permanent settlements, classes of chieftains, warriors, and priests, all based on the ownership/control of land and concentrated wealth, then claimed political power and possessed force to sustain those claims. How a society has organized its sustenance and production impacts the ways people live and the qualities of a “human nature” are articulated, transformed or suppressed. Most history was been shaped by the need for fertile deltas, classes of landowners, warriors and priests to sacralize these arrangements. Norms governing social life are products of a specific historical period. Members of elite classes, literati/intellectuals, typically priests, articulated formal ethical systems that typically facilitated social behavior, regulated interaction and normalized the rule of elites as either Gods or chosen by Gods. Ethical codes typically attempted to regulate behavior and belief to both maintain social harmony and legitimate class domination. As societies produced greater surplus that might precondition a move from necessity to freedom, ruling class control of the State, dominant ideology, laws and instruments of coercion,

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limited the freedom of the majorities and obfuscated consciousness of inequality and possibilities of change. For Chomsky, following Rocker, a 20th-century anarchist, there is “a definite trend in the historic development of mankind” that strives for “the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.” Rocker was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in anarchosyndicalism – in European terms, a variety of “libertarian socialism.”6 2

Human Nature and the Ethical

Considerations of the ethical basis of the good life – for both the individual and his/her society must deal with three fundamental questions. Firstly, there is such a thing a thing human nature? Is it inherent or simply determined by society – or how do these moments interact? While many claim that in the 6th thesis on Feuerbach, that people were nothing more than “an ensemble of social relations,” Geras claims that Marx’s comments were specifically addressed to his critique of Feuerbach-which came after the 1844 Manuscripts. He shows that Marx had a conception of “human nature.” The critique of alienated labor required a philosophical anthropology of human desire, emotion and the possibility of dignity under conditions of freedom. But the expressions of that nature and the attainment of human dignity depended on historical contexts which might not only thwart that possibility, but foster its very opposites, degradation, indignity, submission to authority, hostility, and even harm to the Other. The key to elaborating Marx’s concept of human nature, and in turn, basing an ethical system on that nature rests on understanding human needs, desires or tendencies. Man is directly a natural being. As a natural being and as a living natural being he is on the one hand endowed with natural powers, vital powers – he is an active natural being. These forces exist in him as tendencies and abilities – as instincts. On the other hand, as a natural, corporeal, sensuous, objective being he is a suffering, conditioned, and limited creature, like animals and plants. That is to say, the objects of his instincts exist outside him, as objects independent of him; yet these objects are objects that he needs – essential objects, indispensable to the manifestation and confirmation of his essential powers.7 6 Noam Chomsky, “How Can We Escape the Curse of Economic Exploitation?” http://www .alternet.org/visions/chomsky-how-can-we-escape-curse-economic-exploitation-and -political-and-social-enslavement (accessed 24 June, 2014). 7 Karl Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy in General,” in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 in The Marx-Engels Reader, 115.

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Marx sees human nature in terms of ‘tendencies’, ‘drives’, ‘essential powers’, and ‘instincts’ to act in order to satisfy ‘needs’ for external objectives. But these were thwarted. For Marx, alienation, meant that social ties and bonds of community were frustrated and attenuated. Further, people, unlike animals, were “species beings,” aware of being a species with the capacity shape their own nature, constitute themselves though the free production and exchange of goods. But wage labor created a system that stood outside the worker acted as an alien force that denied their species being, as well as their creativity and agency to create (realize) themselves, life was simply reduced to survival. Thus workers were without the freedom to create and realize themselves and without recognition of their fundamental humanity and dignity. We will develop this point later, suffice to note that his critique of alienation rested on notion of a thwarted human nature and frustrations of desire that were not fully developed. Similarly, Tabak argues that the concept of human nature is the “Archimedean point” of Marx’s philosophy. “Marx’s concept of human nature, as the dialectical unity of essence and appearance in existence, envisions a being whose essential characteristics explain his or her own self-transformation.”8 This implies that there is a human nature in general (human essence) and human nature in particular that is a contingent, historically modified existence that, under conditions of domination and alienation, may be thwarted and distorted. Thus, we must interrogate Marx’s concept of human nature and desire which requires considerations of affects and emotions. So that the argument is clear: we will later argue that desire is the pursuit of, or avoidance of certain emotional states. But, this is not a simplistic hedonism. In The German Ideology, Marx considers worker’s needs and consequently their nature requires explaining people’s needs and how they act to satisfy those needs, and the proletarian were hardly in a positon satisfy their needs. Similarly in the Grundrisse, humans were seen as a totality of needs and drives which exerts a force upon men. Finally, Marx sees the importance of new, uniquely human needs arising when people are free of alienation/domination and might realize their potentials. They will have a richness of needs instead of a need for riches. But such needs depend on society and what it provides. For Geras people had needs, for other human beings, for sexual relations, for food, water, clothing, shelter, rest and, more generally, for circumstances that are conducive to health rather than disease. There is another one…the need of people for a breadth and diversity of pursuit and hence of personal 8 Mehmet Tabak, Dialectic of Human Nature in Marx’s Philosophy (New York, ny: Palgrave, 2012), 23.

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development, as Marx himself expresses these, ‘all-round activity’, ‘allround development of individuals’, ‘free development of individuals’, ‘the means of cultivating [one’s] gifts in all directions’… The German Ideology describes the proletariat similarly: as one who is not in position to satisfy even the needs and yet, with all human beings: one whose position is to not even allow him to satisfy the needs right directly from his human nature.9 Unfortunately, Marx would not live long enough to meet with or read the books of Freud to find a framework for understanding character, desire and emotion. That task would befall the Frankfurt School to which we will return. Secondly, an ethical system must ask if people are “basically” good, decent, empathic, caring creatures that get warped by society; especially a class society with hierarchies of wealth and power. As Rousseau would claim – and in ways that would influence Marx – people were basically good but became corrupted by class system with competition and hierarchies that led to jealousy and callous indifference toward the less fortunate. For Rousseau: The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.10 Conversely, for Hobbes, people were by nature selfish and competitive, in the “State of Nature” there was a “war of all against all,” bellum omnium contra omnes. Life was short, nasty and brutish. Only a social contract where people gave up some of their freedom could “tame” men’s violent ways. Freud similarly claimed humans were instinctively aggressive, evil predators, homo homini lupus. Without the constraints demanded by civilization, internalized as superego, people would easily fight, torture, battle, and kill each other. Even with such constraints one could look at most civilizations in terms of conquest, war, brutality and cruelty. It is all too easy to side with Hobbes, Kant, and 9 10

Norman Geras, Marx and Human Nature (London: Verso, 1983), 72 and 63. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 55.

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Freud and conclude that human beings are simply selfish, evil and aggressive, albeit suppressed by force, Reason and/or the internalization of repressive social norms within a harsh superego the mediates the social contract whereby “destructive” aspects of humanity are subdued for greater collective security. That view, embraced by most conservatives would suggest that progressives not waste their time seeking social amelioration. Freud himself suggested that communism would not eliminate human aggression that was rooted in “human nature,” not the individual or collective ownership of property. While history has focused on wars and destruction, and of late genocide, there are many societies that are peaceful and free of violence. Finally, for a Marxist critique, what is the relationship of human nature to the historically variable political economy of its context? Among pre-modern societies and contemporary hunter/gathers without full-time leadership there is more equality, less aggression, and less conflict. It was with class society in which some owned property and ruled and the many without were ruled that armies emerged for the conquest of others or defense against their armies. This rise of property owning classes, often ruled by earthly “gods” or those otherwise chose or blessed, meant that some few people would rule many others who would accept the domination of “superiors”-it was “normal.” As a consequence we saw the rise of authoritarianism, at first structurally as some classes claimed power, and subsequently characterologically as a set of internalized dispositions of submission within the individual, thereby thwarting their freedom and pleasurable self-fulfillment. All too often, exclusive focus on structure obscures Marx’s concerns with the subjective, where actual human beings suffer. A one-sided focus on the structure or system, whether it be Marxist or mainstream, elides subjectivity, feelings, agency and indeed reproduces the very alienation that Marxism aims to overcome. A great deal of Marxist critique ignores or underplays the role of culture, consciousness and character. As will be argued, an emancipatory ethic not only requires the critique of capitalist political economy that rests on alienation and is sustained by reifications and ideological agencies, but must consider the nature of the subject and his/her self-fulfillment as enabling human dignity. As we know, authoritarian societies become more prone to violence and aggression. This idea was captured by the Bachofen thesis of the overthrow of the Motheright (Mudderriech). Pre-modern people were thought to be not only kind, generous and egalitarian, but rather free about sexuality. With the rise of agriculture came civilization and patriarchy, the control of sexuality became the initial way repression was fostered, obedience instilled and compliance to oppressive work normalized. Thus we see that even today repressive, patriarchal societies indeed foster greater aggression, violence and abuse of

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the weak. Wilhelm Reich suggested that Freud conflated civilization with its capitalist form in which repressive norms, especially over sexuality were insinuated within the psyche; that was only the latest expression of patriarchy and sexual repression. Patriarchal repression may well foster compliant workers, whose compliance may be blessed by the priests-but it also produced distorted forms of subjectivity prone to both self-hatred and aggression to others. Such distortions of subjectivity then served to ‘justify’ the very repressions that mades this happen. What this suggests is that with Rousseau, Marx, Fromm and Reich, contra Hobbes, Freud, human nature is disposed to benevolence-but is easily thwarted by the demands of class society for subservient masses. To make our argument, it is necessary to note that Marx linked the objective conditions and the laws of political economy (capitalism) with culture (ideology), consciousness and subjectivity (character). This interlacing of capitalism, private property and its class structure along with its legitimating ideologies emerged from the historical conditions that led to alienated labor and the reification of social relationships constitutes the basis of Marx’s work and the keys to understanding the capitalist system. For Marx, socialism was an emancipatory ethic of freedom, democracy, community, self-fulfillment that collectively enabled dignity as the “good life” that took place within “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” But this ethic presupposed a particular view of human nature.11 We would like to argue that for Marx, there cannot be an a priori ethical system defining the good life outside of a historical context. But at the same time, his fundamental concerns with overcoming alienation/domination/reification, Aufhaben, and the “self-emancipation” of the working classes, and the universal capacity for self-fulfillment, rests on certain assumptions of an essential human nature which can be discerned throughout many of his writings; notwithstanding the lack of a systematic analysis. Thus as will be seen his critiques of alienation, capitalism and indeed most class systems presupposed frustrations of desires and the thwarting of self that in turn demanded a humanistic ethic that provides human beings with a sense of dignity.12 As we will conclude, for Marx, the richness of needs depends upon gaining dignity. 11

12

We must note that until we reach the stages of industrial capitalism, no political economy has produced the amounts of surplus such that the masses could be free from toiling to gain basic needs of food, water, shelter, clothing and have the time and energy to realize their potentials. Let us be clear at the outset that we do not see dignity as simply self-esteem based on recognition. As will be argued, we see it is both an affective state, a feeling of pride, but a condition in which the actions of each enhance the conditions of all.

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Critical Theory

Marx’s implicit concept of human nature informed the critical theoretical traditions of Lukacs, Reich, Fromm, Adorno, Horkhiemer and Marcuse that rejected the economism of the Second Internationals. They then synthesized Hegelian-Marxist critiques of domination with culture, consciousness and character. More specifically Weber’s understanding of purposive Reason, valorized by the Enlightenment, became a basis for reification of consciousness domination and dehumanization.13 Similarly, Freud’s theory of psychodynamics illuminated how desires became socialized, typically repressed by an internalized authority for the sake of civilization’s demands resulting in guilt, anxiety for the person but enabled collective adaptation and indeed, art, beauty, cleanliness and order. But Reich showed how this was the specific result of capitalist civilization that repressed “natural” human goodness and denied people the pleasures of sexuality in order to dispose authoritarian compliance. While he was not often cited for political reasons, he had a major influence. However diverse these thinkers might be, they illustrated a basic polarity between “humanistic” articulations of “human nature” as basically good versus the “authoritarian” expressions of a distorted, truncated repressed subject, constricted, compliant, yet hateful. Yet for many thinkers this abberation has been considered “human nature” But for us, the humanistic, the loving, caring, empathic “nature” is both historically and ontologically prior, yet, as a potential challenge to elite domination, it is also most typically suppressed by repressive social systems dominated by small classes of elites whose practices and ideologies thwart freedom and fulfillment and deny humanity of dignity. Authoritarianism typically emerged as a characterological adaptation disposing submission to class differentiation and elite class rule that then suppressed quests for freedom and autonomy. For Horkheimer, the family was an “obedience factory” that instilled compliance and submission to prepare children for alienated labor and compliance to authoritarian leadership. Fromm argued that Marx’s primary critique of the capitalist system was not simply its inability to smoothly operate over the long haul, but rather “the perversion of labor into forced, alienated, meaningless labor; hence, the transformation of man into a crippled monstrosity.”14 Humans are positively transformed through their labor and their self-conscious activity, and under the directing forces of 13

14

Georg Lukacs. History and Class Consciousness (1923; Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1971); Max Horkhiemer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Edmund Jephcott (Trans.) (Stanford: Stanford University Press [1944] 2002). Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Continuum, 1963), 42.

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capitalism these life-affirming moments are pushed to the side in favor of monotonous, inhumane practices. For Bonefield: Marx’s critical understanding of the human subject as a subject that exists in the mode of being denied in the form of capital, characterizes, following the critique of political economy as a negative ontology: although the social world subsists through and rests on human social practice, the human being obtains as a mere character-mask of social objectivity. The critique of political economy, then, amounts not only to a critique of capitalist forms on the basis of the constitutive essence of society that is the human being. It also contains the material basis for the demand that all relations have to be overthrown where humans exist as degraded, exploited, debased, forsaken and enslaved beings. Such a society is not worthy of Man. It is a society without human dignity. Paraphrasing Marcuse, the human being is a thinking being and if thought is the site of truth, then the human being has to possess the freedom, to be led by thought in order to realize what is recognized as truth, namely that the human being itself is the constitutive basis of a world which enslaves it.15 But as we have noted, repressive social systems, notwithstanding their being socially constructed, are typically dominated by a small class of elites whose practices and ideologies most often thwart the freedom and self-fulfillment of the masses and deny recognition of their fundamental human dignity. Is the “good life” based on the repression and control of inherent aggression while hopefully defenses will neutralize that aggression and utilize it to motivate “desirable” action via sublimation (work, art, beauty, order, and cleanliness) lest we live in the state of Nature? And just in case defenses fail, as they often do, societies have a variety of repressive institutions exist to surveille, discipline and punish.16 But why do people accept their alienation and denigration. Social conditions and wage labor fragment the social and evoke loneliness, powerlessness and anxiety that lead many to embrace dominant authoritarian ideologies that “normalize” these arrangements; they accept submission to authority that 15 16

Werner Bonefield, Social Form, Critique and Human Dignity (2005) https://libcom.org/ library/social-form-critique-and-human-dignity (accessed May 6, 2014). It might be noted that empirical research has shown that repressive measures to thwart or punish deviance, often foster the very deviance they would thwart. The brutal public tortures of Medieval Europe attracted large crowds, including pick pockets. More recently, death penalty countries/state have higher rates of homicide.

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undermine an ethic of freedom and self-fulfillment that enable the “good life.”17 Moreover, such societies, by thwarting basic desires, especially tendencies for self-realization, foster further social fragmentation and dispose aggression and hostility. As Fromm argued, anger, hate and destructiveness are not basic drives motivating action, but rather, the consequences of thwarted selffulfillment which is often the case for most folks living in authoritarian societies.18 Historically bas selfishness/aggression are then seen as “human nature,” the distorted, becomes the “normal” social character that is seen as inherent rather than a historical product. So notwithstanding Freud’s dismissal of the role of collective ownership, the aggression he described is not so much innate aggression, but a consequence of hierarchical class structures with repressive ideologies of which capitalism is just its latest incarnation. Conversely, an emancipatory ethic – the essence of Marxist humanism – envisions the good life in terms of freedom; creative self-realization within a democratic community where that fulfillment is available to all and all have dignity. For Gewirth the good life, a satisfying and worthwhile life well lived is to seek self-fulfillment which is grounded in the idea of human dignity, According to this conception, self-fulfillment consists in carrying to fruition one’s deepest desires or one’s worthiest capacities. It is a bringing of oneself to flourishing completion, an unfolding of what is strongest or best in oneself, so that it represents the successful culmination of one’s aspirations or potentialities. In this way self-fulfillment betokens a life well lived, a life that is deeply satisfying, fruitful, and worthwhile. It is diametrically opposed not only to such other reflexive relations as selfdefeat, self-frustration, self-alienation, and self-destruction, but also to invasions whereby such injuries are inflicted by forces external to the self. The struggle for self-fulfillment has figured centrally in our literary heritage as well as in much of the actual history of human beings.19 We would note Gewirth is not a Marxist and does not name these “external forces” that are typically aspects of capitalist societies. It is important to note that for Gewirth human rights, e.g. freedom, are essential for self-fulfillment which benefits both the person and their society. Self-esteem or pride based on

17 18 19

Fromm, Erich, Escape from Freedom (New York, ny: Holt & Company, 1941). Erich Fromm, Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York, ny McMillian,), 1973. Alan Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 3–5. e-book http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6413.pdf (accessed April, 22, 2014).

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recognition alone, the fulfillment of “sinners” cannot provide dignity which is a normative standard of the society as well as emotional state for the person. 4

Alienation and Desire

As was argued, of Marx’s view of alienation presupposed a an implicit view of human, people had needs and desires, from the most basic needs for food and shelter shared with other species to distinctively human needs for selffulfillment and recognition of their dignity, but under the conditions of domination, such desires were thwarted distorted and/or truncated. Alienation from species-being mean alienation from one’s self, one’s potentials and even the richness of one’s own emotional life. Similarly, people could create themselves in their work, but when labor became alienated, self-creation unlikely and selfhood became distorted, yet such subjectivities were “normalized” by ideologies that justified the repression of workers/subalterns that was required to sustain elite wealth, power and privilege. Insofar as the socialization of basic affects into socially “appropriate” emotions, and often feelings is typically mediated through ideologies, affects can and do, like ideologies, act as material forces. But, people are never fully socialized, repressed desires can turn against that repression. Psychoanalytic therapy often aims at freeing people from repressed desires, this understanding need to inform the Marxist critique. If and when basic desires were gratified, under conditions of freedom and democracy, people could attain various joys and pleasures through self-fulfillment in their work, in and through communities of mutual respect and recognition from others and when that happens, they can find dignity. 4.1 From an Affect System to the Normative The foundational study of emotion in animals and men was the work of Darwin (1859) that claimed humans, like most mammals were born with a hard-wired innate affect system that had long served communication functions within the group as well as motivated action. This perspective argues that we are born with certain fundamental affects such joy, interest, surprise, anger, disgust, dissmell, fear, or shame. Moreover, affects and emotions are tied to particular areas of the brain and various neuro-humors; i.e., opioid-like serotonin and dopamine are tied to joys and pleasure or epinephrine associated with fear/fight. Somewhere between bipedal locomotion, an opposed thumb and a more developed cortex, humans developed capacities for the symbolic e.g. consciousness and self-awareness an in turn, speech and thought. But humans, unlike other primates, go through a lengthy socialization process

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where basic affects are become socialized, turned into emotions, many of which may or may not be experienced as feelings. Thus, various cues arouse emotions and feelings, now subject to social rules, but these are to a great extent, cultural. But most important, the symbolic, enables socialization and development, much as selfhood is socialized, affects too become socialized, subjected to symbolic cues, social rules and norms of expressions, they become emotions and feelings. The ways the parents use affects and emotion, especially fears of punishment or providing joys of love and attention are the means by which affects are first transformed by society into socialized emotions. Thus what elicits emotions, how are they expressed, repressed and/or experienced, and how they regulate everyday life, is part and parcel of socialization into a culture. The particular ways desires are expressed, or even if they are salient, are thus shaped by the same historical factors that constitute the identities that mediate between desire and one’s choices of social action. People anticipate and reflect, they act to achieve, avoid or deal with certain emotions and feelings as they enact the routines of everyday life as well as negotiate the “strategic events” of the life cycle. The important point, long understood by many philosophers, surely for Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, is that emotions are essential aspects of morality. Think only of various foods, most Americans find eating insects disgusting, others a delicacy. More important are the emotional aspects of morals. Many people find gays disgusting-at a visceral level. Folks like us call them friends, relatives, colleagues, students or neighbors. Consider only the Christian ressentiment toward Roman hedonism sexuality that was, and in some quarters, is still an essential aspect of Christianity. Thus emotions as such are part of the human condition, but the ways they are expressed and/or experienced became essential for understanding human nature. Rather, insofar as people are predisposed to seek positive emotions like love and joy and avoid negative emotions like fear, anxiety or dissmell and disgust, every society utilizes these affects in the socialization of its young to foster particular patterns of selfhood and identity that impel certain behaviors and constrain others. These affective and cognitive qualities enable, but do not constitute, human nature as such, nor do they directly provide a basis for an ethical system.20 20

An ethical system cannot be reduced to individual feelings and emotions other than a tautological, individualistic hedonism that doing good, being good feels good, doing bad, feels bad). Hurting others cannot be justified by its “feeling good.” Nor is this a simple hedonism-especially when some people find pleasure at the cost of human suffering, i.e., sadists who directly inflict pain and/or elites often unaware of the pains they cause. This is psychopathy, not ethics.

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But neither can ethics can ignore desires emotions. Ethical systems, while based rooted in the political economy, arise through social interaction and negotiation-though not all the constructors and negotiators of the ethical have equal power to define the normative, transgressive and its sanctions. Yet to be effective, norm regulating behavior and/or ethical goals depends on emotional anchoring that renders most everyday life typical. We would like to propose an analytic model for theorizing the socio-emotional bases of desire as it shapes selfhood and identity, guides consciousness and action and becomes the foundation for dignity as an ethical goal. Surveying the traditions of psychology, sociology, and anthropology suggests that affects, as basic inborn systems, become socially transformed into emotions that form the basis of affects transformed into four universal desires that motivate social life, (people seek that which brings positive feelings of love and joy, and avoid what is unpleasant aversive.) These desires are ontological aspects of our bodies, inborn responses that are fundamental to all humans, yet their forms, expressions and gratifications vary. We have argued that Marx had an intuitive/empathic sense of emotions and desires since, as we have shown, his conception of alienation presupposed certain “inherent” desires, instinct or needs that were frustrated by wage labor, while his views of overcoming domination/alienation promised a satisfaction of those frustrated desires. Firstly, people seek attachments to others, friends, lovers, spouses, and memberships in communities, Secondly, they pursue recognition that provides positive feelings of self-worth and self-esteem. Thirdly, they seek agency, empowerment, self- determination and pleasurable aspects of self-realization. Finally, people would avoid/overcome fear, anxiety and meaninglessness-and thus they embrace meaning systems. Thus, whether attachments are based on church membership, shared adolescent initiation ceremonies, marital choices or joining a work, play or sports team, or even a political movement, people seek attachments. However, it may well be that aspects of social life make social bonds oppressive or conversely, quite attenuated for example, punishment by isolation in prisons or shunning. Similarly, while people may seek recognition and esteem, this may accrue from religious piety, business acumen or prowess in combat. The miracle of capitalism was to make honorific status contingent on economic gain (perhaps assuaging “salvation anxiety” for Protestants). But these expressions of and forms of gratification of these desires is not invariant, particular politicaleconomic, socio-historical conditions can deny or frustrate community, thwart self-esteem, limit agency and/or render life meaningless. This was essentially what Marx said in the 1844 Manuscripts using the language of Hegel since a systematic theory of emotion, desire character was still wanting.

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While desires can be analytically differentiated for theoretical purposes, in everyday life they are often closely intertwined. This model of socialize affects suggests that the positive emotions, love, joy, and pride, can only be achieved through relationships/social actions, while the negative affect states, fear, anxiety, sadness, and disgust can be assuaged through social relationships, “comforting ideologies” or in some cases, scapegoating if not sadism. The very emotional foundations of selfhood begin with attachments to caretakers.21 Subsequent group memberships provide identity(ies) or options where choices exist. It is in relationships that one finds direct recognition of his/her identity and often for what is outside of commodified labor. It is through groups that individuals assert agency or are constrained. Finally, interpersonal relationships and memberships group or community can assuage if not overcome fear and anxiety – or teach what to fear or what may be dangerous. Attachments to the group may be so strong, one gives his/her very life for the sake of the community – altruistic suicide. 4.2 Attachments and Community Human beings tend to be social, zoon politicon (Aristotle). As Fromm once noted, while there is no essential human nature outside of history, human beings do not exist outside of society. Membership in a community is an intrinsic aspect of human life. Social personhood requires the use of the language and symbols of a community to enable the assumption of a social constituted identity, normatively regulated behavior and the enactment of social rituals. The tendency for humans to seek out relationships with each other and form groups is so profound that a great deal of evidence suggests it is inherent. Recent developments in psychoanalysis (object relations theory) has argued that people form powerful bonds to caretakers, people seek attachments rather than drive gratifications, and people form strong attachments to each other and their.22 This has been conceptualized as “solidarity,” “aim-inhibited cathexes” or “primary ties,” and so forth. Family ties, friendship, collegiality, love, romantic or otherwise, filial devotion, esprit de corps, loyalty, and so forth, are some of the ways people show attachments to each other and their society. In every culture, children show positive emotions in the contexts of secure attachments to nurturing caretakers. (And often to punitive, rejecting ones as well.) Society uses these attachments and emotions to socialize its young and 21

22

Many important personages in history nevertheless grew up in cold distant families, broken families or even no stable family or community life. But a dominant theme among such people is a quest for community and attachments. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (New York, ny: Basic Books, 1969).

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maintain group ties. But the conditions of work often give people little time to maintain relationships. 4.3 Recognition and Self-Esteem Hegel claimed that through the active engagement in transforming nature through work, humans became self-conscious-yet through struggle. Work, as the transformation of nature initially enabled slaves to become self-conscious, yet the Master needed his recognition of his being as master, the selfconsciousness of each rested upon recognition of the other and there ensued a life or death struggle between the Master/Slave for recognition. The slave comes up “short on recognition” since the master recognizes the slave for his labor, not for his personhood, the struggle is left unresolved. Yes, the slave as the actor transforming nature gains a higher consciousness, but he then becomes more aware of the gap between his consciousness and the external world, and the struggle goes on. For Marx, this conflict was understood as a class conflict and again the (Slave) working classes came up short on recognition. Like Hegel, Marx saw work as the fundamental basis for humanity producing itself. Men can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence – their food, shelter and clothing a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.23 In the creative production of work people also produced themselves and thereby would gain recognition, fulfillment and dignity. But given that the social relations of capital rested upon alienated labor, without control over the products of their labor, workers were bereft of creative work, shorn of selffulfillment and denied recognition of their selfhood, dignity, and humanity. For Marx, the result of selling one’s labor power as a commodity was the warping of character and inner impoverishment of the worker now simply reduced to an abstraction, a cost of producing commodities. Marx: The more the worker spends himself, the more powerful the alien objective world becomes which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself – his inner world – becomes, the less belongs to him as his 23

Karl Marx, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), 42.

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own… The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater his activity, the greater is the worker’s lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labor is, he is not. Therefore the greater is this product, the less is he himself.24 In a system of wage labor, the worker gets a paycheck for selling his/her time, his/her labor power, not recognition of his/her unique selfhood and its embeddedness in production. This reification of the worker was reiterated in Weber’s understanding of the role of rationality which dehumanized all workers, not just those in factories, but in the factory offices, the sales rooms, the shipping centers etc. Moving from the epistemological and normative to the underlying social psychological, some anecdotal evidence as well as theoretical arguments suggest that the desire for recognition, the pursuit of pride and dignity, (avoidance of shame/humiliation) may be the most powerful of distinctly human desires. The early experiences of self-formation then establish the ends of desire as ambition and the ideals of self-esteem as recognized honor which impels the acts and qualities the society or subculture deems virtuous and worthy. The pursuit or crushing, of self-esteem thus becomes intertwined with the larger social community and its fate. Some recent psychoanalytic theory from both self-psychology and object relations perspective suggests the attainment of healthy selfhood in early development is dependent on empathic care and recognition. Various fragments of experience, distress and comfort, anger and joy occur along with a number of discreet perceptions and sensations none of which have any connection to each other. Caretakers provide for the infant’s needs and tensions which s/he cannot him/her self-assuage, to his/her comfort and to provide empathic treatment and recognition of emergent selfhood. Moreover, this empathic recognition enables the various fragments of perception and experience to cohere. But without empathy and recognition we see various narcissistic pathologies of the self and character disorders which are indeed quite functional for capitalist elites. But main point is that a similar process takes place when workers are not given recognition, their self-esteem and dignity are undermined and all that is left is an empty shell of subjectivity. The pursuit of recognition, the confirmation of one’s self as a valuable human being provides various joys, pleasures and relief from anxiety. Even pursuit of abusive, degrading relationships that nevertheless provide recognition 24

Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosopical Manuscripts of 1844,” in Robert Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, ny: Viking, 1972), 72.

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by the Other, can be seen as paradigmatic of a far more general process of subalterns actively reproducing their subordination if it provides recognition of self.25 Thus people will accept religiously based deprivation of the sensual and degradations of self as sinners if that bring recognitions of one’s virtue and honorific rewards and even promises of another life.26 In a classical sociological study of work and dignity, Sennett and Cobb argued that over and above exploitation, workers were not even recognized as people, as just there.27 He noted how one of the folks he interviewed had been a highly esteemed teacher in Greece, but was now a janitor. As he was cleaning an office during an executive meeting, he was ignored, “invisable” not even misrecognized. This is a microcosm of the loss of self and loss of dignity for workers in a capitalist society. We might note that contemporary capitalism reproduces itself by providing commodified identities mediated via mass culture and its idealized celebs that are closely intertwined with mass consumption that provide momentary, and typically ersatz forms, or should we say simulations or appearances of recognition and dignity. Many people, without even using the academic jargon, clearly see that their work is alienated, but it affords the purchase of alternative identities and sources of recognition through consumption of fashions and/or leisure based identities in fandoms or lifestyles. 28 Mass consumption insinuates “artificial needs” and “repressive de-sublimations” and provides compensatory, chimeric identities to gain recognition from equality fantasied audiences, imagined “generalized Others” as wish fulfillment that provide recognition of equally fantasized self-fulfillment.29 While these illusions may well compensate 25

26

27 28

29

It is important to emphasize that this formulation is quite different from Freud’s notion of submission to civilization through repression. In this case masochism is not based on sexual or aggressive instincts, rather, as Fromm put it, better to be in a relationship than to alone and better to be recognized as a victim/victimizer than not to be recognized at all. Consider how many folks have “willingly” endured the misery of subalterity of the caste system or the sexual frustrations brought by Puritanism in hopes that would bring about a better life next time around. People will volunteer their lives in combat for the “glorious causes” of their Church, Nation, or State and like academic scholars, strive for posthumous recognition. Sennett, Richard and Cobb, Jonathan, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, ny: Vintage Books, 1972). Recent research by Gallup suggest that 70% of American workers are not engaged with their work, in our language it is seen as alienating and not providing recognition. http:// www.gallup.com/strategicconsulting/163007/state-american-workplace.aspx (accessed May 14, 2014). Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Boston, ma: Beacon Press, 1964).

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for the lack of actual recognition/gratification in work, these mass produced commodity based identities prevent people from grasping the nature of capitalism and how it denies actual recognition, limits freedom and genuine selffulfillment and denies them dignity. 4.4 Agency and Empowerment Marx was quite clear how the production of commodities created an alien force that refluxed back upon the workers that disempowered them, frustrating a basic need for agency. Theorists of the modern forms of assertive subjectivity from Machiavelli to Nietzsche, and those so influenced such as Weber, see the “will” to power or striving for superiority as intrinsic to human nature. Rather than pose a drive, an instinct or even “will” to power, a more heuristic approach would see expressions of individual agency as social-historical derivatives of basic affective responses to overcome powerlessness and helplessness to enable survival. But these archaic motives now lead us to assert selfhood through mastery of ones environment. Acting to transform the world or influence other people – or even creating abstract symbols such as art, music, literature or political philosophy – leads to positive feelings rooted in archaic experiences of pride and joy. In more modern parlance, people are proactive; they do not passively respond to the world but actively engage the world, construct its meanings, much as Kant argued. They tend to actively explore, engage, and attempt to control of their surroundings as a way of gaining empowerment over the world that alleviated the anxiety of powerlessness and helplessness. Particular social conditions may foster expressions of creative agency and the forms they take, or conversely, authoritarian social conditions that limit freedom deny for agency. Agency, as a desire requires freedom that is as much an ontological category as a normative goal.30 4.5 Fear, Anxiety and Death In his early theorizing, Freud saw anxiety as a derivative of drives. When in 1926, following wwi he revised his theory of anxiety, he then saw it as a signal, a warning of impending danger to initiate self-preservation and the avoidance of harm. The avoidance of anxiety now had motivational powers that he had earlier given to the sexual and aggressive drives. Little did he notice that he thereby revised his entire theory of motivation by disregarding drive theory and moving toward a theory of emotions as motives. Anxiety could foster symptoms, defenses and/or a variety of actions to alleviate the experience. 30

Carol Gould, Marx’s Social Ontology (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1980).

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Neonates are without cognitive abilities. With symbolic capacities, people recognize their vulnerability, mortality, and finitude that are the ultimate bases of anxiety. Becker suggested that the fear of death lies behind various anxieties – loss of love (depression and mourning), fears of harm, powerlessness, or meaninglessness. With the awareness of the end of the unfolding of selfhood and realization of one’s possibilities, and ending of ties to other people, anxiety over death can become overwhelming. To alleviate this primordial fear, to deny the reality of death, humans choose two courses. On the personal level, selfhood can be seen as a defense against death, indeed a “lie” through which various actions and “heroic” identities might cheat death of its finality.31 Depending on the culture this may take such forms as the pursuit of wealth, fame, or power. Fromm suggested that destructiveness or hatred of others might also alleviate such anxieties. On the collective level, societies construct meaning systems with beliefs that promise some form of immortality that might assuage anxiety. The religions of antiquity devoted much concern with the passage to the underworld, crossing the Hades, and so forth. Perhaps the Pyramids remain the most stellar testimony to the next life. This belief takes almost as many forms as there are societies but one pattern becomes clear: In the complex societies that are most likely to have extremes of wealth and power, the acts of virtue that promise salvation in the next life tend to be those that sustain secular power relationships. But it should be noted that not all meaning systems are based on beliefs in an afterlife. This is especially true in societies that have been influenced by the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, meaning systems that tend to be articulated by elite intellectuals gain a certain allure if they provide emotional gratifications and/or alleviate anxiety. Meaning systems generally begin with a world view that explains reality by organizing chaos. Humans create systems of understanding that attempt to simplify complexity.32 From the earliest of myths to the latest forms of mythology called social theory with, just a few explanatory principles. While the explanatory frameworks of elite intellectuals, for example, philosophy may indeed be quite abstract, these same elites produce meaning systems that are widely distributed through schools, media, and so forth. It is thus not coincidental that the widely shared understandings that make elite interests appear as the common good and hierarchies of power seem “normal,” make life easier and less prone to anxiety.

31 32

Ernst Becker, The Denial of Death (New York, ny: Simon and Schuster, 1973). The need to reduce complexity is intrinsic to all complex adaptive systems. For Luhmann made this was central to his theory of society as a self reproducing system.

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Meaning systems are more than cognitive frameworks, they include ethical systems with norms of behavior that simplify choices and goals of conduct. The routines of everyday life, the various self-presentations and interactional rituals are not regulated by formal laws. But these realms of moral action sustain hegemony in three ways. In the first place, while such routines may involve negotiations and constructions of social reality, the frameworks of understanding and ranges of toleration have generally already been disseminated by moral arbiters such as priests, teachers, and more recently journalists and “experts.” Further, many of the realms of everyday life, commerce, family, friendship, leisure, and so forth, have been structured if not colonized in ways that certain outcomes are inevitable. But for Gramsci, everyday life was the site in which the ongoing social rituals reproduced social life and hierarchies of class based power. 5

Current Research on Morality

Just at the Critical Theorists drew upon then recent developments in sociology and psychology, we might note that some current academic research and theory. Darwin’s theory of emotions has been revived by various psychologists such as Tomkins, Ekman, Lakoff or Westen.33 We have been influenced by this research that noting how affective aspects of social life affect the political and economic. Westen for example has stressed how political positions, stances and actions, especially those that are moral, are based primarily on affective reactions in the paleo cortex and limbic regions, the affective “old brain” little impacted by the logic and reason located in the neo cortex. Conservatives have long known this. A similar view can be seen in Lakoff’s notion of two family based moral positions in which the morality of one’s own family can been seen as a model with moral standards for the society. First, the “nurturing parent” orientation emphasizes caring, connection and creative self-fulfillment, and sees the role of the State there to supporting people, enabling them to flourish. Secondly, the “strict-father” moral orientation values authority, obedience, hierarchy, and “toughness” to survive in a dangerous world where one is on one’s own. Here the role of the State is to enable competition, maintain a 33

Sylvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, and Consciousness (New York, ny: Springer Publishing Company, 2008); Paul Ekman, “Basic emotions,” in Dalgeish T. and Power M. (eds.), Handbook of Cognition and Emotion (New York, ny, 1999), 45–60; George Lakoff, The Political Mind (New York, ny: Viking, 2008); Drew Westen, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York, ny: PublicAffairs, 2008).

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military, pass laws and punish the guilty-not support the lazy poor. In many ways Lakoff views update and revise the understanding of hierarchical social arrangements and classical studies of authoritarianism that informed our earlier discussion. Finally, some recent cognitive science and neuroscience have shown the development of the complex connections between the various perceptual, emotive and cognitive regions of the brain – especially highlighting the role of ganglionic “mirror neurons” that brain cells that fire when a person ses someone else acting or doing something, most typically feeling empathy for the joys and sorrows of other people. Given how our brains work, by reference to own emotions, we are thus “naturally” endowed with the capacity for empathy. But at the same time, we have shown that certain kinds of political economy erodes that quality. This recent research helped us argue, much like Rousseau or Reich, that empathy, caring and sharing were both historically and developmental prior to authoritarianism, greed and aggression. Not only does a capitalist system attenuate empathy, but encourages disdain and indifference toward the very workers who have provided its wage labor.

Conclusion: Toward Freedom and Dignity for All

Domination and exploitation have been part of the human condition since classes first emerged. The priests, literati and intellectuals of the ruling/owning classes’ crafted religions (ideologies) that justified the social and property relations and created ethical and legal systems that sustained if not sacralized and celebrated the ruling elites and existing social. More recently, capitalist societies, have provided new ideologies that limit the understanding of the totality and class consciousness. They have fostered nationalism and by the late 19th C, consumerism/ mass culture that brings “one dimensional thought” and insinuates “artificial needs” and “repressive de-sublimations” to deflect consciousness away from the various contradictions of the political economy and mask the emotional frustrations of such systems that frustrate desires, and thwarting of self-realization.34 Thus, capitalism systematically denies people freedom and recognition that is the prelude to self-realization and attaining dignity. A fundamental contradiction of late capital has been its enormous productivity and unprecedented capacity to free people from alienated labor, while its ideologies and practices have fostered degradation, inequality and alienation for the bulk of humanity, most of whom accept, often begrudgingly, the status quo. The fundamental 34

Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston, ma: Beacon Press, 1964).

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goal of a Marxian ethic is to organize economic relations in ways to satisfy fundamental human desires for many in ways that enable, community, agency, recognition and meaning that, in the context of freedom and democratically based self-determination, then enable self-fulfillment so that all may walk with dignity, integrity and human autonomy. Fundamental to the ethical critique of capitalism based on Marx’s concept of human nature and desire, the ethical goal of this essay, the realization of dignity, requires understanding the two fold nature of capital. Firstly, Capital is an objective system, a political economy based on class domination, private property, wage labor and the extraction of surplus value. It cloaked by ideologies and reified forms of consciousness that masks its social relationships resting upon domination, exploitation and immiseration. But exclusive focus on that side of capital can lead to economistic reductionism. Secondly, the other side of capitalism is its cultural/subjective moment that starts with alienation. As Marx made clear in the production of value, the workers lose their very humanity, their autonomy, self-determination, their potentiality and most of all, they were bereft of freedom and dignity. Moreover, as argued, Marx’s critique of alienation was based on a tacit theory of human nature and desires that grounds an ethic of dignity that was systematically thwarted by political economy and masked by ideology. The worker became a “thing” whose own labor created that which objectified and disempowered him/her. S/he was estranged from Nature, from others, and from even his/her own self-potentials. Fundamental human desires for community, agency, and recognition, meaning and self-creation, self- realization (as a species being) through his/her work were thwarted. Under such conditions, selfhood became impoverished, truncated without the possibility of self-fulfillment or attaining dignity. And these conditions lead to the real suffering of real people. But at the same time, the goal of Marxist critique of the indignities of selfhood aims for the emancipation of all and freedom to find their dignity. While Marx did not often use the term dignity as such, dignity (can be understood as the consequence of overcoming alienation and reification and as such), the basis for a Marxian critique and normative goal. It is a state of being that depends of the satisfactions (emotional gratifications) of other desires, e.g. community, agency (self-fulfillment), recognition and meaning, when freedom and democracy enable the realization of self in one’s accomplishments as well as goals of their lives.35 35

The fundamental flaw of Ernst LaClau and Chantal Mouffe (Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London, uk, 1986) was to focus on identities, to be celebrated and valorized, but their attempt to fuse Gramsci with identity politics separated subjectivity (identity) from the very political economy that fostered particular identity formations.

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But this also depends on a post capitalist, democratic community that provides freedom for all to realize themselves and find human dignity. Furthermore, as we have tried to argue, insofar as dignity is a normative stance and emotional state that rests on certain emotions and feeling, it presupposes a concept of human nature. Marx’s ethical stance, based on his view of human nature was expressed in all of his writings, but at the same time, never developed in in single place. Human dignity demands social relations in which people recognize themselves as a purpose and therefore as the subjects of their own social worlds.36 The demand for social relations based on realizing human dignity demands a Critical Theory that disdains all relations where people exist as a mere resource or means. Under conditions of freedom, when people find their needs for community, agency, recognition and meaning gratified, and possible, they then experience dignity-which is tied to “the self-realization of all.” As Fromm (1947) stated, “all organisms have a tendency to actualize their specific potentialities. The aim of man’s life is to be understood and the unfolding of his powers according to the laws of his nature.”37 The fundamental premise and goal of a Marxian ethic is to organize economic and social relations in ways to satisfy the human desires of all and allow people democratically based selfdetermination and pleasurable self-fulfillment so that all may to walk in dignity, integrity and human autonomy. For Fromm’s humanism, man’s freedom is not only from, but his freedom to – to develop his own human potentialities, the tradition of human dignity and brotherhood. Dignity is an ethical goal and standard for the evaluation of one’s worth and the emotion that goes along with attaining that standard. Dignity, as we use the term, depends not simply on one’s self love and his/her own selfrealization, but on the self-realization of all. The ‘categorical imperative’ is not simply to act as a model for all to emulate, but to encourage and enable the fulfillment of all-and that ultimately means to critique, confront and transform capitalist domination, its political economy and ideologies that limit the selfrealization and dignified humanity of others. Similarly, for Eagleton: 36

37

Samuel Friedman notes that for workers, “Dignity seems to have several interrelated characteristics. Perhaps central are the ideas of self-autonomy, of being a subject (rather than an object), of being able to make one’s own decisions. In addition, dignity includes not having a burden of shame due to what one does for a living, to one’s sex, race, nationality, or sexual orientation. The quality of dignity, then, can be contrasted with the common image of the child; and, indeed, workers often complain that they are treated like children (“Alienated Labor and Dignity Denial in Capitalist Society,” in Berch Berberoglu (ed.) Critical Perspectives in Sociology (Dubuque, ia: Kendall Hunt Pub Co, 1991)). Fromm, Erich, Man for Himself (New York, ny: Holt, 1947), 20.

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to achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings for Marx must find it in and through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others. That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one’s own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one’s own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism.38 And for our notion of the normative/affective, this becomes dignity. As we have noted, the need for dignity is an essential aspect of the richness of needs rather than the need for riches. O’Meara put it quite clearly: To treat things, money, or capital as the real wealth that human beings should seek is to make a fetish of these commodities; it is to endow these things with a quality of being worthwhile for their own sake whereas they are or should be only means useful for the development of human rationality and freedom… Marx’s evaluation of the fetishism of commodities comes from Kant’s understanding of the different kinds of ends of human action. He quotes Kant: In the realm of ends, everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has dignity. That which is related to general human inclinations and needs has a market price. …But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., a price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., dignity. Now morality is the condition under which alone a rational being can be an end in itself, because only through it is it possible to be a legislative member in the realm of ends…. The wealthy person is one whose deepest need has become the need for the enhancement of the rationality and creativity of others. The only way in which a person can have this true inner dignity of being a rational and creative being is that the person treat all other persons as having the same dignity in their rationality and freedom. Unless an individual adopts the Kantian universal community of all persons as intrinsically worthwhile for their own sakes, the individual’s own worth and the worth of other selves become mere commodities, to be bought and sold in the marketplace. Capitalism has harmed human dignity and reduced the human person to a 38

Terry Eagleton, “In Praise of Marx,” The Chronicle Review, April 10, 2011. http://chronicle. com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027/ (accessed March 16, 20014).

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commodity, and by his ideal of self-realization, Marx affirms that the inherent dignity of the human person needs to be fully activated through the comprehensive development of the person’s rational understanding aof and creativity in productive labor and social relationships.39 Similarly, for Bonefield: True wealth, true dignity that which is beyond any price and for which the market has no equivalent is that which is worth seeking for its own sake. What is worth seeking for its own sake is not the value of the self for its own sake, nor the value of the social other or community for its own sake, but the universal value of the human self in every rational and free being. The universal valuation of every human self in moral consciousness is the only condition under which a human individual can be truly valuable for the self’s own sake….. Similarly, the emphasis on human social practice disavows not only the bourgeois concept of humanity and rationality but it also reveals that the objective character of the forms of capital subsists through the denial of its essence. Yet, however denied, the world of things is a world made by humans and dependent upon human transformative power. The denial of human dignity and the possibility of human dignity – better: the category of possibility is that the notion of essence in the mode of being denied, or Adorno’s characterization of Marx’s critique as a negative ontology, summons – is intrinsic to Marx’s work. The critique of fetishism reveals that the constituted forms of capital are, in fact, forms in and through which human practice ‘exists’: ‘in-itself’ as relations between things whose constituted form is the separation of social practice from its conditions and ‘for-itself’ because human social relations subsist in and through the relations between things – better: these relations acquire a livelihood as perverted forms of existence of capitalistically constituted human social relations – a world of things that is reproduced by ‘active humanity’ in and through her classdivided social practice…. Instead of deriving human social relations from presupposed economic forms, Marx’s critique political economy engages in a ‘reductio ad hominem’. As Marx put it, critique has to demonstrate ‘ad hominem’, and it demonstrates ad hominem as soon as it becomes radical. To be radical is to grasp the root of the matter. But for Man the

39

William O’Meara, “Marx’s Atheism and the Ideal of Self-Realization.” Cultural Logic, vol. 3, no. 1, Fall (1999) http://clogic.eserver.org/3-1&2/3-1%262.html (accessed April 24, 2014).

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root is Man himself’ and ‘Man is the highest being for Man’. Marx’s critique focuses on human dignity as dignity denied, and this entails the critique of the forms of capital as perverted (verrickte) forms of human social relations. [Emphasis ours.] His critique then has to show that the denial of human dignity in capitalist society is a necessary denial and that is, a mode of existence of human purposeful practice alienated from its conditions in the form of capital. The standard of critique is the human being whose dignity which obtains in the mode of being denied, has to be realized through the overthrow of all relations ‘in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being’ Critique, then, has to return (zurckfhren) the world of things to its human basis to show its social constitution. This ‘return’ of social forms – their conceptualization as forms of human social practice – does not entail the human being as an ‘abstract individual’ but as a member of a definite form of society… The critique of the predominant form of labor, that is abstract labor, entails, as Marcuse argued, the prerequisite for its abolition. According to Marcuse, Marx’s critique is both negative and positive: it shows the negative human condition in the light of its positive suspension. Marx’s critique deciphers the appearance of independence that the capitalist forms posit, leaving the respectful forms of bourgeois purposeful activity naked by showing what it really is: a pumping machine of surplus value. Yet, as such a pumping machine, it remains a form of human relations. For humans to enter into relationships with one another, not as personifications ruled by their selfimposed abstractions which they reproduce through their own labor, but as social individuals, as human dignities who are in control of their social conditions, the economic ‘mastery of capital over man’ has to be abolished so that Man’s social reproduction is ‘controlled by him’.40 As Marx and Engels said in the Communist Manifesto, “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” And, within such a free, democratic society, all can find community, recognition, agency and meaning that in turn enable self-fulfillment and dignity.

40

Bonefield, Werner, “Social Form, Critique, and Human Dignity” (2005). https://libcom. org/library/social-form-critique-and-human-dignity.

chapter 4

Art as Ethics

The Aesthetic Self Ian Fraser

Marx did not leave behind a coherent theory of aesthetics but art in its many forms appear throughout his writings serving two main purposes: to affirm his understanding of the creative powers of human beings and to make us think more critically about society. Marx’s interest in all art is not simply aesthetic, art is not just for art’s sake, but is a resource for the development of human beings that allows them to take a critical stance against an oppressive society. My concern is to construct an ethics that develops from Marx’s understanding of humans as artists with my notion of the aesthetic self that I first developed in the final chapter of my book, Dialectics of the Self: Transcending Charles Taylor1 and which I used as a basis for examining contemporary fiction in Identity, Politics and the Novel: The Aesthetic Moment.2 The aesthetic self emanates from understanding identity dialectically as abstract and concrete, universal and particular, in an alternating movement through which the world is constituted. This understanding of identity implies that the self is a social self, engaging in self-interpretation, language, dialogue and affirming life in our social relations and responsibilities with each other, contradictory though that may be. Out of these contradictions, the aesthetic self refers to the many ways in which those of us who want to challenge the status quo of capitalism do so politically, economically and culturally. Nevertheless, the aesthetic self can also be negated when attempting to affirm the human spirit due to the alienating effects of capitalism. Indeed, the aesthetic self moves dialectically between moments of alienation and disalienation in the search for epiphanic moments of insight on the path to a transcendence of the self and the forging of an enhanced or different identity. I do this by first outlining Marx’s views on art and then exploring them in relation to a novel, an artwork itself, which has the role of art and the artist as one of its main themes: Michel Houellebecq’s critically acclaimed The Map 1 Ian Fraser, Dialectics of the Self: Transcending Charles Taylor (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2007). 2 Ian Fraser, Identity, Politics and the Novel: The Aesthetic Moment (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_006

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and the Territory.3 The book was awarded the Prix Goncourt in 2010, France’s highest literary accolade, and so established Houellebecq as one of the foremost writers of contemporary fiction in the world today.4 It centres on an artist, Jed Martin, who attains international success with his exhibition of photographs of Michelin roadmaps that allows him to join the elite of the art world. He is embarking on another exhibition but this time the focus is on painting people in various forms of work. He asks Michel Houellebecq, the author starring in his own novel, to write the exhibition catalogue. In return, Jed will paint Houellebecq’s portrait while also paying him a considerable sum of money. A murder takes place and the novel becomes a crime thriller but the “key themes are the great ones: art, death, cultural decline.”5 Jed is an aesthetic self who moves between alienation and disalienation mediated by epiphanic moments that allows him to transcend his identity and forge a new one albeit within the constraints of capitalism. The ethical dimension that emerges from Jed’s journey is that art as ethics becomes undermined when it is done for exchange-value rather than use-value, the need for artistic expression and the appreciation of beauty for a transcendence of the self and an increased critical awareness of society. The novel ends in despair both for him and humanity but the dialectical development of Jed, both positively and negatively, displays the antagonism that besets aesthetic selves as they attempt to affirm their creative powers and think more critically about the world they are in. I begin by outlining Marx’s views on art.

Marx on Art

Marx sees human beings as artists when they engage in an affirmation of their creative and productive powers. In his early writings, he relates how humans assert their species-being in the form of intellectual and spiritual endeavours that manifest themselves in culture.6 He argues that non-human animals 3 Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory (London: William Heinemann, 2011). Page References to this text will appear in parentheses throughout. 4 For my own work on Houellebecq analysing two of his previous novels, Atomised and Platform, see my Identity, Politics and the Novel, Chapters 5 and 6. 5 Judith Shulevitz, “Michel Houellebecq’s Version of the American Thriller,” The New York Times, 13 January, 2012. Availbale at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/books/review/michel-houellebecqs -version-of-the-american-thriller.html?_r=2& (accessed 17 January, 2014). 6 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Karl Marx, Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 327–328.

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remain tied to their instincts and produce only for what they materially need. Humans, on the other hand, produce beyond basic needs, in the form of intellectual and spiritual endeavours. Indeed, Marx contends that individuals could become creatively multifaceted in communist society where we can “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner…without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” The examples are somewhat dated now but the sentiment remains the same. As Marx contends in his subsequent writings, achieving this depends on a reduction in necessary labour time to a minimum to allow the “artistic, scientific, etc. development of the individuals in the time set free.”7 The “true realm of freedom” is where “the development of human powers” is an end in itself and lies beyond the realm of natural necessity.8 As aesthetic selves this is a future that awaits us, a hope for the “Not-Yet,” as Ernst Bloch states, but moments of which exist in the present.9 These aesthetic moments carry with them a tremendous ethical import by saying that ourselves and the world can and should be other than what it is. Against this affirmation of our aesthetic selves, Marx asserts that a society based on the division of labour severely limits spontaneous and diverse creative activity, and instead forces people into a single task that they must perfect in order to maintain their livelihood.10 Such activity “becomes an alien power” from which they cannot escape. So all art is shaped by the productive practices prevailing at the time, but as active subjects humans relate in a complex and vibrant manner to these often alienating situations, which arise in particular from the division of labour in society. The negative effects of the division of labour even extend to artistic talent itself, which becomes concentrated in particular individuals while being generally suppressed in the masses. Even within these artistic individuals, the division of labour forces their creative activity into one aspect of artistic endeavour, as a painter or a sculptor for example. Similarly, the demand for their work and the conditions of human culture of the society they are in, also determines the extent to which they will successfully develop their talents. Again, though, the hope here is that aesthetic selves try to resist these restrictions and in doing so develop an art as ethics that is in, against and potentially beyond capital.

7 8 9 10

Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 706. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 959. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 9. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (eds.), Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 47.

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In a critique of Max Stirner, Marx considers Stirner’s suggestion that human work can only be done by others whereas other work is egoistical because it is part of the work of a “unique individual.”11 Stirner offers the example of the painter Raphael, arguing that only he can do his work. Marx rejects this and mentions that Raphael only finished “an insignificant part of his own frescoes,” adding that even the majority of Mozart’s Requiem was composed and completed by someone else.12 Moreover, Marx maintains that it is impossible to dislocate this work from the division of labour prevalent at any particular historical period. He suggests that if Stirner was to “compare Raphael with Leonardo da Vinci and Titian, he would see how greatly Raphael’s works of art depended on the flourishing of Rome at that time, which occurred under Florentine influence.” Similarly, “the works of Leonardo depended on the state of things in Florence, and the works of Titian, at a later period, depended on the totally different development of Venice.” For Marx, Raphael, like all artists, “was determined by the technical advances in art made before him, by the organisation of society and the division of labour in his locality, and, finally, by the division of labour in all the countries with which his locality had intercourse.” For a Raphael to develop his talent, “depends wholly on demand, which in turn depends on the division of labour and the conditions of human culture resulting from it.” Marx also notes how Stirner is in an inferior position compared to the bourgeoisie in his claim for the uniqueness of art.13 Marx cites how the supposedly unique activity of the French painter of battle scenes, Horace Vernet, would not have been able to produce a fraction of his pictures if he thought only he, as a unique person, could produce them. Additionally, Marx mentions that in Paris even novels and vaudevilles needed the organisation of work for their production in contrast with their unique competitors in Germany. Marx observes that it is obvious that any organisation based on the division of labour will produce “extremely limited results, and they represent a step forward only compared with the previous narrow isolation.” For Marx, the “exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of the division of labour.” He proposes that even where everyone could be an excellent painter that would not rule out the possibility of each of them being original, rendering Stirner’s distinction between human and unique labour as “sheer nonsense.” Marx then prophesies that in a communist society the restrictions 11 12 13

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 391. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 393. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 394.

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imposed by the division of labour that subordinate the artist to “local and national narrowness” is overcome. Moreover, the subjection of individuals to a definite art that makes them exclusively a painter or sculptor, for example, is a reflection of the narrowness of their professional development and their dependence on the division of labour. This is transcended in communist society because there will be “no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities.” Stirner does not realise that the “division of labour, material production and material intercourse” all “make individuals subordinate to definite relations and modes of activity.”14 There is therefore a democratisation of the aesthetic that Marx is arguing for here and an emphasis on understanding the work of the artist as part of the society he or she is in to grasp properly the determinants that govern the creation of the artwork. For Marx, while recognising that some degree of specialisation is needed for individual development; within capitalism this occurs in a dehumanising process for the worker by rapidly producing more commodities to increase the accumulation of capital for a capitalist.15 This “appears historically as an advance and a necessary aspect of the economic process of the formation of society,” but it also “appears as a more refined and civilised means of exploitation.” Marx contrasts this emphasis on “quantity and exchange-value” with the “writers of classical antiquity, who are exclusively concerned with quality and use-value.” Consequently, the division of labour in ancient society means that “commodities are better made” and people’s “various inclinations and talents select suitable fields of action.”16 So “without some restriction no important results can be obtained anywhere.” In a footnote, Marx quotes Homer’s Odyssey to illustrate his points with the statement that “for different men take joy in different works”17 and “he could do many works, but all of them badly.”18 The outcome is that “both product and producer are improved by the division of labour” when it is conducted in this manner. Marx also observes that the “growth of the quantity produced” is barely mentioned and when it is only “with reference to the greater abundance of use-values” rather than “exchangevalue, or…the cheapening of commodities.”19 In a world of quality over quantity, of use-value over exchange-value there is little surprise that great advances 14 15

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 395. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 486. Cf. Mikhail Lifshitz, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx (London: Pluto), 88. 16 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 487. 17 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 487, n. 55. 18 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 487, n. 56. 19 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 487.

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were made in artistic production but this of course was on the back of a slave society and the enjoyment of it by a ruling minority.20 Aesthetic selves, then, must resist this tendency for capital to reduce everything to exchange-value and assert the aesthetic use-value inherent in an art as ethics in the affirmation of their identities. The role of the division of labour also forces Marx to consider how art is related to the technology pertaining to past and future societies. He contemplates how the technologically advanced society that emerged from the industrial revolution could still be charmed by Greek art, given the social conditions that created it, had dissipated.21 He asks how, for example, Greek mythology and the Greek imagination can still be pertinent in a world with “self-acting mule spindles and railways and locomotives and electrical telegraphs?” He evocatively continues, “what chance has Vulcan,” the Greek god of metalwork and craftsmanship, “against Roberts & Co,” Jupiter, the god responsible for lightning and rain, “against the lightening-rod and Hermes,” deity of thieves and merchants, “against the Crédit Mobilier” or “Fama,” goddess of rumour and gossip, “alongside Printing House Square?” Similarly, is the great fighter “Achilles possible with powder and lead? Or the Iliad with the printing press” and “printing machine?”22 Marx’s response is that Greek art as in all art, from whatever epoch, teaches us about the material production and development of our societies and also shows us how artistic and economic production develops, albeit unevenly rather than in parallel. Greek art itself was, for Marx, an expression of the highest of human values and still gives us “artistic pleasure.” “The charm of their art for us” is the “result” of the “undeveloped stage of society on which it grew” and is “inextricably bound up” with the “fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose, and could alone arise, can never return.” As aesthetic selves, then, we should be aware of the history of art as a history of human existence that gives us an insight into how the world was and could be while also satiating our desire for beauty on the path to transcendence. In relation to the consumption of art, Marx makes a comparison between consuming champagne and listening to music in relation to productive and unproductive labour.23 He notes how if the music is good and comprehended by the listener then its consumption can be “more sublime than the consumption of champagne” even though the production of champagne is a ­“productive 20 Lifshitz, The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx, 88–89. 21 Marx, Grundrisse, 110. 22 Marx, Grundrisse, 111. 23 Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part One (London: Lawrence and Wishart), 298.

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labour” and the production of music is not. Marx contends that designating labour as productive labour is irrelevant for the content of the labour, utility or use-value” and even the “same kind of labour may be productive or “unproductive.”24 He gives the example of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a form of unproductive labour because the reason he produced it was the “same reason that a silk worm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.” Even though he sold the book later for £5, it is still not productive labour because to be so it has to be “subsumed under capital” from the beginning and only exists “for the purpose of increasing capital.” Consequently, a writer who churns out books for a “publisher in factory style, is a productive labourer” just as a singer who is commissioned to sing is, as she is making money for her sponsor. The singer engages in unproductive labour when she “sells her song for her own account” as she is not producing capital. Similarly, “an actor’s relation to the public is that of an artist, but in relation to his employer he is a productive labourer.”25 For aesthetic selves, the practice and creation of art is an activity of nature which only becomes subordinate to capital as productive labour if from the beginning the aim was to accumulate capital. The aesthetic moment of art as ethics is in resisting this imposition and affirming our species-being. With the main ideas on Marx’s understanding of art and my construction of an art as ethics from the aesthetic self, I now want to explore these themes by considering Houellebecq’s novel and the artist Jed Martin.

Humans as Artists

Jed’s affirmation of his species-being began as a child drawing flowers with coloured pencils (17). By the time of his adolescence he was using watercolours and painted a picture entitled “Haymaking in Germany,” despite knowing nothing of either Germany or haymaking (18–19). The painting “was as beautiful as a Cézanne or indeed anything” and depicted peasants pitchforking the hay onto their carts that had donkeys harnessed to them (19). Summer was intimated by the use of light but “snow-clad mountains closed the scene.” The narrator then proclaims that beauty is of secondary importance in a painting. Painters in the past were only revered as great by painting similarly, using comparable methods and procedures to render objects pictorially that was specific to their style and unprecedented in the history of art. The great painters advanced a “world view that was both coherent and innovative” and this 24 Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part One, 401. 25 Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part One, 411.

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“­ classical vision of painting,” based on “figuration,” was what Jed took up initially while at high-school. He would return to it at the end of his career, bringing him much fame and fortune, but it is solely quality that he is interested in rather than any notion of market value and quantity, as he affirms his aesthetic self. His “seriousness” impressed his teachers who had to examine his application, entitled “Three Hundred Photos of Hardware,” to enter the Beaux-Arts and they realised they had a candidate that was “original,” “cultivated” and “hard-working” (27). He eschewed any focus on the shininess of the metals in favour of photographing them in neutral light against a backdrop of mild-grey velvet, allowing the nuts and bolts to appear “like so many jewels, gleaming discreetly.” Writing about his work, however, did not come easy to him then or for the rest of his life. Instead, he just talked factually about the objects and the metals that constituted them. He concludes that the “history of mankind could in large part be linked to the history of the use of metals,” with “polymers and plastics” not really producing “any real transformation” as of yet. When art historians commented later on this, Jed’s first real creation, they designated it the same as all his others: “a homage to human labour.” The “sole project” of Jed’s artistic career “was to give an objective description of the real world – a goal whose illusory nature he rarely sensed” (28). The art historians have interpreted Jed’s work as being a detached assessment of the state of the world and see him as a successor to the great conceptual artists of the last century (35). Just as Marx said that we look at art of the past, in his example Greek art, to give us an insight into the nature of production in societies, so too is Jed’s mission here to capture aesthetically the development of human labour in capitalism. For Jed, though, there seems no ethical import for why he is doing this but constructing a Marxist art as ethics approach we can identify a flourishing, albeit unconsciously, of his aesthetic self, which moves between moments of alienation and disalienation and an increasing class-conscious understanding of society. Jed devotes the whole of his life to art and the “production of representations of the world, in which people were never meant to live” (1920). In doing so, he offered “critical representations” to a “certain extent” because in his youth he was enthusiastic and accepting about the world but it was still “nuanced with irony,” and it is this irony that will grow into a sceptical understanding of capitalism. Jed moves away from painting and into photography when he enters the “Beaux-Art de Paris”(20). The impetus was the discovery of his grandfather’s “ancient and prehistoric” camera, a “Linhof Master Technika Classic” that still had “exceptional production quality” that Jed mastered for his next artistic phase which was to systematically photograph the “world’s manufactured

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objects.” His main aim was to “constitute an exhaustive catalogue of the objects of human manufacturing in the industrial age.” So even though he changes his artistic practice from painting to photography, his link with the humanist nature of his project is clear. Marx noted how capitalism and the division of labour process tends to force individuals to specialise in one artistic endeavour, but Jed seems to undermine that by his move into photographic art, opening up a new moment to assert his aesthetic self in a different form, at this stage in his life at least. The project’s “grandiose,” “maniacal” and “demented…character” gained his teachers’ respect but kept him apart from groups that had a “common aesthetic ambition” or any possibility of “collectively entering the art market.” He lives relatively alone and realises that his life was to be a solitary one (20–21). He moves back to live with his father but even this proved “both easy and empty.” His father’s extensive working hours meant Jed saw little of him which intensified his isolation (21). This sense of an alienated aesthetic self will be present throughout his life but it is important to notice at this stage that his art is not marketable and it is use-value over exchange-value that seems to be governing his work. One evening, his father asks Jed if he plans to “pursue an artistic career” to which Jed concurs (23). His father assumes that Jed is earning little money but he has been employed by two photographic agencies, taking pictures of commodities such as a mountain bike or food. Jed’s pictures retained a “certain style of pure photography” that the agencies modified due to their own “commercial or advertising imperatives” much to his disdain. It is the aesthetic aspect rather than the commercial that is the driving force for Jed and by implication his aesthetic self. He is developing a critical stance to capitalism’s commodification of artistic products. His father is pleased that Jed is autonomous and not reliant on him as artists who normally depend on their parents never really break onto the art scene. According to his father, the “need to express yourself, to leave a trace in the world, is a powerful one, yet in general that’s not enough.” What fires people instead, he proclaims, is the “pure and simple need for money.” His father is therefore suggesting to Jed to negate his aesthetic self and the affirmation of his species-being in the pursuit of exchange-value just, as we find out later, that the father sold out on his architectural dreams, much to his regret. Jed realises he cannot do this and his aesthetic self suddenly has an epiphany reinforcing that fact. He moves into a new flat and spends most of his time responding to orders for his photographs of objects but now rejects this type of work for artistic reasons (28). He reflects that photographing “these objects for a purely

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­ rofessional and commercial aim invalidated any possibility of using them in p a creative project.” This rupturing of his consciousness was “as brutal as it was unexpected” and he descends into depression and the viewing of daytime television. Jed’s realisation of the instrumentalism of capitalism and how it commodifies art has the negative effect initially of plunging him into a moment of deep alienation but it is out of this crisis that he moves into a moment of disalienation. Jed’s “second great aesthetic revelation” occurs when he is being driven by his father to his grandmother’s funeral and they stop at a service station (29). Jed buys a Michelin road map of the Creuse and Haute-Vienne region and he has an epiphany while unfolding it. He is “overcome” and begins to “tremble” as he realises that the map is “sublime” and that he had never “contemplated an object as magnificent, as rich in emotion and meaning as this.” He sees the map as the “essence of modernity, of scientific and technical apprehension of the world…combined with the essence of animal life.” He appreciates its complexity, beauty and clarity, utilising only a limited number of colours. He detects in each of the villages and hamlets the “thrill, the appeal, of human lives, of dozens and hundreds of souls – some destined for damnation, others for eternal life” (29–30). Jed’s aesthetic epiphany creates a moment of transcendence in his identity so he buys over a hundred and fifty Michelin maps: Michelin Regions that covered most of Europe and Michelin Departments that were specific to France (35). He was now “turning away from purely moneymaking photography” and for six months goes out only to visit the hypermarket, while seeing students from the Beaux-Arts only intermittently. However, his reclusiveness had aroused curiosity in them and they invite him to participate in an exhibition entitled “Let’s Remain Courteous,” which he accepts. He exhibits part of the Michelin map of Creuse that contained part of his dead grandmother’s village (36–37). While there, he meets a glamourous Russian woman, Olga, who says she finds the map very beautiful and tells him that she is a public relations officer for Michelin France (37). They arrange to dine together and eventually become lovers (41). At dinner, she discusses her work and states, “I’m sorry, I only talk about business, while you’re an artist,” implying that art and business should be separate which causes the development of Jed’s aesthetic self in alienating him from capitalism (39). This happens early in Jed’s artistic career when he was hardly known (42). He had never exhibited on his own; no one had written about his work and explained its importance to the world (42). Nevertheless, he gets invited to more and more vernissages, premieres and literary cocktail parties (42–43). His reluctance to talk about his own work is interpreted as him being a real hardworking artist.

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Jed obtains his first exhibition due to Olga as she asks her director at Michelin to sponsor it, occurring on the firm’s premises in a “vast but quite sad” space whose barrenness Jed liked (45). He modifies the area by having an extra panel at the entrance and by giving precise instructions about the lighting, which he ensured they followed meticulously. The exhibition is entitled “THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY” and is attended by many people (48). As Marx observed, artists such as Leonardo, Titian and Raphael are dependent on demand, the division of labour in society, technical advances that preceded them and the flourishing of the societies they are in. Jed’s situation is similar but this showing of his work will undermine the ethics informing his aesthetic self because of the commodification of art and its subordination to exchange-value that awaits him. Jed becomes “a very young mini-celeb” and adopts a detached attitude that suited his new status (50). He receives unanimous praise from the critics (53). The French countryside seemed to have become fashionable again and this is conveyed in the major daily papers and magazine after Jed’s vernissage (54). The Michelin map which was a previously “unnoticed utilitarian object” was now the “privileged vehicle for initiation into what Libération was to shamelessly call the “magic of the terroir.” Jed has turned a use-value into an aesthetic value with an emphasis on quality over quantity but this will soon be subverted as he has unwittingly promotes the Michelin map in its normal guise as a commodity. Consequently, Jed meets Patrick Forestier, the director of communications for Michelin France, who explains that the maps have increased in their sales since Jed has turned them into artworks (54). He informs Jed that other firms would raise their prices but not Michelin and leaves Jed to “appreciate the lofty considerations behind this commercial decision.” Yet Forestier adds that even the old maps have been auctioned on the internet and are selling well but laments that previously they had been pulping them and so squandering a “heritage whose value no one in-house suspected,” until Jed’s photos appeared that is (54–55). Forestier mentions heritage but he sinks momentarily into a depression because of the lost money and the “destruction of value” (55). Again it is the exchange-value that is the concern here rather than the use-value of the object as a map to help us find our way or its artistic representation that Jed has created in affirming his aesthetic self. Forestier discusses how Jed’s “works,” he struggles for the right word, can be distributed. After consulting Olga, he suggests that it cannot be done through Michelin directly as this may undermine Jed’s “artistic independence.” Forestier realises that galleries normally do this but as Jed does not have one, he proposes an Internet site instead. Here they can be sold directly with no mention of Michelin and under Jed’s jurisdiction. Jed agrees and Forestier declares this

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to be a “win-win situation,” while Jed realises that he has just “reached a new turning point in his life” (55–56). Marx’s discussion of productive and unproductive labour is of importance here. Just as Milton produced Paradise Lost as part of his artistic nature, Jed has photographed the Michelin maps as part of the affirmation of his aesthetic self and his human essence. He is engaged in unproductive labour because he is producing and selling his artworks himself. He realises that the new turning point was not just the development of his art but also that he had never before had to “meditate on the capitalist mystery par excellence: that of price formation” (57). As Marx indicates, if the origin of the artwork was not from the beginning subsumed under capital nor about increasing it, the labour is still unproductive and related to the affirmation of our human essence and development of our aesthetic selves. Jed initially charges two hundred euros because the prints cost him thirty euros but his first series sells out in three hours. So he ups the price to two thousand euros for one print and finds his “market price.” Unsurprisingly, selling his work himself, he quickly becomes wealthy but his love for Olga sets off another bout of his alienated self. Olga decides to return to Russia to strengthen Michelin’s presence which ends their relationship (64–65). He considers begging her to stay but his lack of faith in human relations stops him, a decision he will regret (65). He only really knew his father but even that was limited. As far as Jed could see, people’s lives were “organised around work, which occupied most of life, and took place in organisations of variable dimension.” So Jed recognises, as Marx emphasises, the delimiting nature of the division of labour on people’s lives. Additionally, his lack of faith in humanity is undermined by his love for Olga and it is only by losing her that he comes to realise this and affirm his aesthetic self. Once Olga leaves, he returns home and senses a new chapter in his life beginning because everything that mattered to him previously now seems empty (66). All his road maps are spread on the floor and suddenly mean nothing to him, despite representing years of work, so he buys waste bags and packs them up ready for disposal. Years later when he was very famous, he was often asked what it meant to be an “artist.” His answer was to be someone who was “submissive” as you need to submit yourself to “mysterious, unpredictable messages” that could best be referred to as “intuitions.” Obeying these messages was essential to retain one’s integrity or self-respect even if it involved destroying your work to go in a new direction or no direction at all. Consequently, the artist’s condition was “difficult” which demarcates itself from other professions and trades that Jed would paint in the second part of his career (66–67). Jed’s aesthetic self falls into a further bout of disalienation due to his love for Olga and makes him reflect further on his life and work as an artist. His musings on what it means to be an artist in relation to submitting to your intuitions

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is part of the affirmation of our creative and productive powers, our speciesbeing, in the development of our aesthetic selves. Jed sees this as peculiar to the artist and not present in the other professions or trades that he will paint but as Marx points out in his discussion of Stirner, this is because the division of labour restricts all individuals in developing their intuitions in this way. Artistic talent becomes concentrated in particular individuals and suppressed in the broad mass of people and it is only in communist society that this narrowness can be overcome. Then we can have a world, as Marx explains, where we have no painters but only people who engage in painting among other activities as they affirm their aesthetic selves. The destruction of his own work might be the realisation that this is a shallow art form and subject matter compared to what he will soon take up with painting and his professions project. As Marx indicates, the division of labour and demand for an artist’s work determines the extent of how successful they will be in developing their talents. Jed’s was determined via the Michelin organisation which was parasitic on them and thereby increased demand. It could be, as Marx also rebukes Stirner for, that Jed perceived that his art was not unique due to this dependency on the division of labour in society. This reliance, however, is inevitable in capitalism and will also be present after another epiphany that encourages Jed to return to painting. Once he disposes of the photos, Jed rings Forestier and notifies him of his decision, which he receives phlegmatically but asks him for a meeting the following morning (67). Once there, Forestier informs Jed that Michelin will put a message on the internet site saying this phase of his work is over but some prints are still for sale, despite Jed’s intervention that there were not many left (68). Forestier then adds, on an optimistic note, that they will always publicise the Michelin maps for being critically acclaimed as part of an artwork, to which Jed concurs. Forestier repeats his early refrain that it was always a “winwin” between them in terms of Jed pursuing aesthetic value and accruing exchange-value indirectly, while the Michelin brand was re-invented and prospered by these means. Such are the contradictions of affirming your aesthetic self in capitalism.

A Series of Simple Professions

After a few weeks of inactivity, Jed meets Franz Teller, a gallery owner who has been following Jed’s work almost from the beginning (69). Franz is educated and resembles a “Belgian situationist, or a proletarian intellectual” and his “strong worn hands” reveal a background in manual labour. Returning to

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Franz’s gallery, they visit a cafe that they will frequent repeatedly in the future and from where that Jed got the idea for his “Series of Simple Professions” paintings. The place serves cheap wine and food for the final “working class” pensioners of the 13th arrondissement who were dying off and not being replaced by a new clientele. Franz compliments Jed on how differently he sees things and how interesting he found his work on the Michelin maps but confesses that he would not have taken him in his gallery then because he seemed overconfident. When he read that Jed had stopped doing the maps, he decided to meet and represent him. Jed is unsure he wants to continue with art but Franz is resolved. He informs Jed that he is interested in “personality, a view of the artistic gesture, of its situation in society” rather than a “particular art form or manner.” For Franz, even if Jed wrote on a piece of paper that he refused to do art again, he would exhibit it in his gallery because he interests him. Franz confesses that he is not an intellectual but tries to appear to be one because it is useful in his milieu. He has had luck in picking his artists but always does so from his intuition and this links to Jed’s definition of an artist. Jed suggests that only artists have this capacity but Franz, from an apparently proletarian background, also has it and has used it to develop his aesthetic self in terms of the appreciation of art. Jed’s alienated state continues after a visit to Franz’s gallery (71). He wanders around Paris, getting lost twice before finally reaching home. This pattern continues weekly and he often needs to consult a map to get back. Ironically, the map is now in the form of a use-value as a guide for a journey rather than Jed’s aestheticisation of it in his photography. His walks were “robotic” with no intuitions formulating in his brain and no new artistic project occupying him; fatigue was the result (73). One day, he finds himself outside Olga’s old flat, an inevitable occurrence due to the automatic nature of his ramblings but it still shocks him (73). He reaches the Jardin de Luxembourg and slumps on a bench next to the “redbrick pavilion, adorned with mosaics, which occupies one of the corners of the  garden.” The sun is setting in the distance and its glow is enveloping the chestnut trees creating “an extraordinary orangey warm shade” like “an Indian yellow,” which causes Jed to remember the words of the song “Jardin de Luxembourg” that describes a life without love. He recalls how Olga worshipped the melancholic songs of Joe Dassin. Jed shivers at the thought and feels an “irrepressible crisis coming on” and another song, “Hello Lovers” comes to his mind and makes him weep. The words convey the love of his relationship with Olga and its demise: “Of farewells that come a little too easy” (74). An epiphany is working through his consciousness that will offer a transcendence of his alienated self.

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Jed enters a cafe and orders a bourbon. The alcohol comforts him but his melancholy returns and he starts crying again. The place is full with law students but they ignore him so he weeps in peace. When he leaves, he takes a wrong turning and in a “state of numb semi-consciousness” arrives by accident at the Sennelier Frère art shop. The display in the window has brushes, canvases and tubes of colour. Jed enters and “without thinking” buys a basic oil painting kit in a wooden box. It was these circumstances that led Jed to “return to painting” and caused such a stir in the art world (74). He has had another epiphany in the transcendence and reconstitution of his aesthetic self, which seems to have been triggered by Olga, his lost love. In his resumption of painting the first canvases were Ferdinand Desroches, Horse Butcher and then Claude Vorilhon, Bar-Tabac Manager, both professions in decline (75). Art historians later indicated that Jed’s choice here could seem to be nostalgic for a previous age in French history but this was not his intention. Rather, he realises that these occupations were “going to disappear soon” so “it was important to fix their images on canvas while there was still time.” Indeed, his third painting, Maya Dubois, Remote Maintenance Assistant, was related to “just-in-time production” that dominated economic manufacturing in the West. So Jed is developing an aesthetic archive of the relations of production in his depictions of the division of labour in its various forms in the history of capitalism. The first monograph devoted to Jed’s work by Wong Fu Xin, interpreted his painting by an “analogy based on colorimetry” where the colours of the objects in the world are presented by a minimum number of primary colours (75–76). A realistic representation can be achieved by using three colours but more could be used to make the representation “more extensive and subtle” (76). Xin also relates this to a certain number of typical professions, between ten and twenty, who recreate the productive conditions of a society. In Jed’s work, the part devoted to the “Simple Professions” as art historians have called it, numbers forty-two and offers a “spectrum of analysis that is particularly extensive and rich” of the productive conditions of his society. His next output, twentytwo paintings as part of the “Series of Business Compositions,” attempts to “give a relational and dialectical image of the functioning of the economy as a whole.” Jed’s affirmation of his aesthetic self was to aesthetically preserve the history of capitalism with the depiction of labour and capital. Just as Marx said that we look back on previous art to understand the nature of the world they originate in and appreciate their beauty, Jed is doing a similar task in his homage to human labour. Jed isolates himself and takes seven years to complete the “Simple Professions” series, culminating in his masterpiece, “Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the

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Future of Information Technology, subtitled The Conversation at Palo Alto” (76–77). Jed made the twenty-two paintings of the “Series of Business Compositions” in just eighteen months, a remarkable accomplishment given their complexity and wide format. Surprisingly, Jed could not complete the painting Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing up the Art Market, which would have corresponded to his portrait of Gates and Jobs. Xin sees Jed’s failure here as the reason for his return to his “Series of Simple Professions” for his sixty-fifth and final painting as Jed decided he wanted to give an “exhaustive view of the productive sector of society of his time.” He resolves to paint an artist, which will be Houellebecq, who he goes to visit in Shannon to ask him to write the catalogue for his new exhibition and where they begin to discuss the nature of Jed’s art. Jed considers his move from photography to painting (90). He contends that photography is just portraying objects but once you decide to have human beings as your subject then they must be painted although he cannot say exactly why (92). Jed continues this theme by considering the landscape outside Houellebecq’s house which he would photograph despite realising how beautiful the Impressionists would capture this scene with their watercolours. Nevertheless, Jed suggests that if there was a human being in the scene, however seemingly inconsequential such as a peasant working in the distance, then he would choose to paint it. He knows that this sounds preposterous because some people say the subject is not important and it is ludicrous to make the “treatment depend on the subject being treated.” Yet that is Jed’s conclusion and Houellebecq sympathises by proclaiming that this rejection of the subject is the “formalist point of view” that is “present in writers too” but is “even more widespread in the visual arts.” Jed argues that “from one painting to another” he has tried to “construct an artificial, symbolic space” to “depict situations that have a meaning for the group” and why his work is “situated entirely in the social.” Whereas others may be returning to painting for commercial reasons, he clearly is not and despite slipping into moments of disalienation his aesthetic self is embedded in the social and what it means for the group, adding an ethical dimension to his artistic endeavours. This becomes even clearer once we consider his portrait of Hirst and Koons. Hence, there is a deep humanist ethics operating in Jed’s aesthetic self despite his continued disenchantment with people and the world in general.

Dividing up the Art Market

The “dividing up the art market” in the title of the painting indicates the contempt that Jed has for their art, which becomes clear as they pose for him. Both

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are wearing black suits, Koons’ is pin-striped, and symbolic of businessmen rather than artists (1). Jed reflects on depicting them and concludes that Hirst was easy to portray because you could make him “brutal, cynical in an ‘I shit on you from the top of my pile of dosh’ kind of way.” Jed also regards Hirst as a “rebel artist (but rich all the same) pursuing an anguished work on death.” His face was “ruddy and heavy, typically English, which made him resemble a rankand-file Arsenal supporter” and a “British artist typical of his generation.” Jed, of course, has attained richness himself, first in his photography which he now denigrates, but then in his more authentic aesthetic self with his painting. It seems that for Jed, Hirst’s work or that of the generation of British artists was not really art. Jed also ridicules Koons who he sees as having a dual character: “an insurmountable contradiction between the basic cunning of the technical sales rep and the exaltation of the ascetic.” Jed muses that depicting Koons “was as difficult as painting a Mormon pornographer,” so contradictory is his character (2). Additionally, Koons has the “appearance of a Chevrolet convertible salesman” that “he had decided to display to the world.” The implication is that both Koons and Hirst are interested in art more for its exchange-value than anything else. He takes the picture back to his studio, awakes in the middle of the night and, “a little despite himself,” examines it and is filled with deep dissatisfaction (12). He looks “morosely at his failed painting” and deduces that Koons with his “pinstriped suit and salesman’s smile” resembles Silvio Berlusconi (12–13). Jed then reflects that Koons was number 2 on the ArtPrice ranking of the richest artists consistently whereas Jed was 593 ten years ago but 17 in France (13). Scrutinising the picture again, he concludes that he has used the wrong colours and “was making a truly shit painting.” He seizes a palette knife and cuts open Hirst’s eye, forcing the gash as wide as possible. Stamping on the canvas, he falls back and bangs his head, realising in the process that this cycle of his work was over. As Xin deduced earlier, Jed’s failure to complete this painting was incredible because it would have complimented perfectly the Gates and Jobs one, but that is precisely why Jed cannot do it. He sees Hirst and Koons as two artistic capitalists and a mirror image of the real capitalists Gates and Jobs. Hirst and Koons are a negation of their aesthetic selves because they have allowed themselves to be ruled by exchange-value rather than aesthetic use-value, despite the rebelliousness of Hirst and the asceticism of Koons. With Gates and Jobs, however, Jed wants to aesthetically preserve them as representations of capitalism and we can see why with Houellebecq’s analysis of that picture for the catalogue.

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A Brief History of Capitalism

Houellebecq’s catalogue is considered an “historical curiosity” but it still has “some interesting intuitions” about Jed’s work (122). Houellebecq detects a “unity” to Jed’s art deriving from the first phase of his life that identified the “essence of the world’s manufactured products,” whereas the second period focused on the producers of these products. For Houellebecq, Jed is not a committed political artist but rather an ethnologist of the society of his time. He depicts people with a form of detachment in a “simple and direct way.” Even his rendering of the traders in his painting of The Stock Exchange Flotation of Shares in Beate Uhse is not overtly derogatory. He shows them just as they are in their trainers and hooded sweatshirts, as “direct descendants of the suited bourgeois who meet endlessly in the receptions directed by Fritz Lang in the Mabuse films.” Houellebecq notes how Jed rarely allows himself “a poetic notation or a subtitle serving as commentary” except in one of his “most successful works, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology, which he subtitled The Conversation at Palo Alto” (122–123). Jed is offering a work of autonomous art because it is political without being political and lacks tendentiousness leaving the viewer to make their own mind up on the meaning of the paintings.26 Jed is certainly expressing his aesthetic self but as in all great artworks in a subliminal, probing fashion that impacts on the consciousness of the viewer. Houellebecq analyses this painting focusing first on Gates who is sitting relaxed and happy in a wicker chair clothed in canvas trousers, khaki shortsleeved shirt and wearing flip-flops as though he is on holiday (123). “Only his metal-framed glasses, with their strongly magnifying lenses, recalled his past as a nerd.” Houellebecq designates this image of him as the “intermediary Bill Gates” between his initial success as Microsoft began to dominate the globe and he became the world’s richest man resplendent in a “sea-blue suit,” and his second as a philanthropist and defender of the poor in Sri Lanka or West Africa. Jed captures aesthetically in his image of Gates, this intense technological phase of capitalism and the riches that he has accrued to allow him to be a philanthropist. Such a trait is common to capitalists in a neoliberal age to show that they are a force for good and disguise the exploitative nature of their enterprises. Jed’s affirmation of his creative powers and assertion of his species-being is as an aesthetic self that is in opposition to capitalism as depicted in the subliminal messages of the painting. 26

Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 93.

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Houellebecq then surveys Jed’s image of Jobs, cross-legged on the white leather sofa “paradoxically an embodiment of austerity, of the Sorge traditionally associated with Protestant capitalism.” In contrast to Gates, there is nothing Californian about Jobs with his uncertain look and holding his jaw as if he was pondering on some difficulty. Jed had made Jobs wear an Hawaiian shirt but this could not disguise the “general sadness produced by his slightly slumped position, and by the expressing of disarray” on his face. The meeting occurred in Steve Jobs’ home which is bedecked in “coolly designed white furniture and brightly coloured ethnic draperies” that constituted the “aesthetic universe of the founder of Apple,” contrasting starkly with the home of Bill Gates in the Seattle suburbs with its “high-tech gadgets, at the limit of science fiction.” Focusing back on the painting, there is a chess board with “handcrafted wooden pieces sat on a coffee table.” The game was interrupted at a stage that was unfavourable to Jobs who was playing the blacks (124). Jed’s depiction of the chess set is important here as part of affirming his aesthetic self as a critique of capitalism, which to them is nothing more than a game of chess between their competing corporations of Microsoft and Apple. The chess pieces are symbolic of the workers that create their products and who they exploit. Moreover, these are “hand-crafted” chess pieces and symbolically represent the expression of human labour in their creation which Jed’s art gives homage to. Houellebecq refers to Bill Gates’ autobiography, The Road Ahead, where occasionally the façade of his work is exposed by “total cynicism,” especially when he maintains that offering an innovative product is not necessarily of benefit to a business. Instead, the advice is to watch your competitors, by which implicitly he means Apple, let them produce their products, see how they deal with any innovative problems, copy them and flood the market with cheaper versions. Such cynicism is not part of Gates’ nature, rather it is present in the “almost touching passages” where he reaffirms “his faith in capitalism, in the mysterious ‘invisible hand’” and his “absolute unshakeable conviction,” irrespective of the problems that may occur, that “the market is always right” and “identical to the general good.” Here the “fundamental truth about Bill Gates appears” because he is a “creature of faith, and it is this faith, this candour of the sincere capitalist” that Jed portrayed in him, with his “arms open wide, warm and friendly, his glasses gleaming in the last rays of the sun setting on the Pacific Ocean.” In contrast, the other face of capitalism, Steve Jobs riddled with illness, with a dishevelled and stubble-haired face, leaning on his right hand as if in sorrow, resembled one of those travelling evangelists who has preached persistently to a tiny and “indifferent” audience and is now endowed with doubt.

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Ironically, Houellebecq deduces that it was Jobs, “motionless, weakened, in losing position, who gave impression of being master of the game,” which was the “profound paradox” of the painting. Jobs’ eyes still contained the passion indicative of “preachers and prophets” but also of those inventors created by Jules Verne. Houellebecq’s close analysis of the chess pieces that Jed has depicted indicate that Jobs could win if he played certain moves (124–125). Additionally, it could be inferred that Jobs could “impose new norms on the market” with his “brilliant intuition” of developing a new product (125). Houellebecq notes that beyond the initial scene, in the distance is the Pacific Ocean with its endless golden-brown waves and on the lawn there were young girls playing Frisbee. The sun was setting and Jed had tried to capture it in its “improbable…orangey magnificence.” The evening “was falling on the most advanced part of the world” as was the “indefinite sadness of farewells, which could be read in Jobs’ eyes.” The mention “orangey” relates back to Jed’s epiphany in the Jardin de Luxembourg that made him return to painting. It is here now as a symbol for the end of capitalism. Houellebecq concludes that these two “convinced supporters of the market economy” and “resolute supporters of the Democratic Party” where ultimately “two opposing facets of capitalism.” They were as “different as a banker in Balzac could be from Verne’s engineer.” Houellebecq’s summation is that the subtitle of the painting was far too modest because instead of being called The Conversation at Palo Alto, it should have been named A Brief History of Capitalism. Jed has covered the different stages of capitalism aesthetically with his professions’ paintings from industrial labour to post-Fordist production, and with his portrayals of the high priests of an incessant technological capitalism. He has asserted his aesthetic self in his homage to human labour and portrayed a critical stance against those who attempt to control and exploit it. His art as ethics has been part of his own life and reproduced in his work. Ironically, the Gates and Jobs picture is offered for purchase at around one and a half million euros by an American broker who works for Jobs (133). Franz explains to Jed that the art market has been dominated by the richest businessmen in the world but for the first time they not only buy “what is the most avant-garde in the aesthetic domain” but can also “buy a painting that portrays themselves.” Franz tells him that he has been inundated from businessmen and industrialists who all want Jed to paint a picture of them, concluding that we have “returned to the time of Ancien Régime court painting.” Yet in Jed’s case he is, in the Gates and Jobs painting, undermining their grandiose images of themselves symbolically as Houellebecq’s and my analysis has shown. His initial impulse for asserting his aesthetic self was not a concern for exchangevalue but the aesthetic use-value of the artwork as an ethical affirmation of the

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importance of human labour and as a critical stance against those who throughout history have attempted to exploit it. The narrator concludes that one interpretation of the work that constituted the last thirty years of Jed’s life was a “nostalgic meditation on the end of the industrial age in Europe and, more generally, on the perishable and transitory nature of any human history” (291). Yet this was now an “ideologically strange period” because people in Western Europe realised that capitalism was “doomed” and was “living through its very last years,” albeit without any of the “ultra-left parties” being able to attract anyone to their cause except “their usual clientele of spiteful masochists” (270). It was as though a “veil of ashes” was now “spread over people’s minds,” Jed among them. Even the portraits of the human beings he had painted now fragment under the impact of bad weather and then “decompose and disappear,” which in his last work on videos seems to symbolise “the generalised annihilation of the human species.” Against humanity all that is left is the total victory of vegetation. Conclusion Starting with Marx’s views on art, I have attempted to construct an art as ethics that shows humans to be creative beings that try to affirm their human essence under the constraints of the division of labour and the subordination of all our relationships and activities to the rule of exchange value that capitalism imposes on us. The movement between alienation and disalienation and the epiphanic rupturing to our consciousness that forces us to re-evaluate our lives on the path to a transcendence of our identity creates a crucible of normative deliberation. I have explored this aesthetically in Houellebecq’s novel and Jed’s contradictory affirmation of his aesthetic self that acts as a critique of capitalism from a standpoint of art as ethics. The ending of the novel is one of despair for humanity and such a theme is a familiar trait in Houellebecq’s work. Yet it is Jed’s journey with the dialectical development of his aesthetic self that is of importance here because against the pessimistic ending is the hope that humanity does not need to be this way. As Marx envisages in communist society, moments of which are present in our struggles in the here and now, the minimisation of the negative effects of the division of labour and the affirmation of use-value over exchange-value can lead us to the “true realm of freedom” where art as ethics forges the affirmation of our aesthetic selves.

Part 2 Critical Perspectives on Rights and Justice

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chapter 5

Reclaiming Marx

Principles of Justice as a Critical Foundation in Moral Realism Wadood Y. Hamad

1

Preliminary Discourse

More than ever before, Marxism—if only in the process of its abandonment— has unassumingly given rise to a stark choice between abstract determinism and abstract indeterminacy. Nevertheless, it can be argued that there is a simple flaw reflected in all such interpretations of Marx and Marxism, namely the violence of the principles of abstraction that are fundamental to Marxist theory. For Marx’s social analysis is first and foremost a form of historical analysis. Although Marx argues that in the study of society the “force of abstraction” must substitute for controlled inductive research, he does not make the mistake of reifying his concepts and giving them precedence over the real object of analysis: the historically specific social process arising out of distinct human practices. Moreover, Marx’s theory is always based on clear assumptions about the historically conditioned practices of class actors, from which the more abstract, or theoretical, understanding of concrete historical processes is derived. If these conditions or practices change, then the more abstract laws—which are never more than tendencies—must necessarily change as well. By one-sidedly embracing certain theoretical abstractions and making these abstractions the main focus of analysis, numerous interpreters of Marx have lost sight of the one thing that his critical efforts were designed to eliminate: the complex dialectic of freedom and determination as it is revealed in specific historical contexts. Paul Sweezy has aptly remarked, to take just one example, that the results achieved in Volume I of Capital were considered by Marx to be only provisional: The tendencies or laws Marx described were not intended to be direct predictions about the future. “In many cases, though not necessarily in all,” Sweezy writes, these laws “undergo a more or less extensive modification on a lower level of abstraction, that is to say, when more aspects of reality are taken into account.” It follows, then, that “their validity is relative to the level of abstraction on which they are derived and to the extent of the modifications which they must undergo when the analysis is brought to a more concrete level.”1 In 1 Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (ny: Monthly Review Press, 1942), 18. On the concept of abstraction, see Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_007

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order to derive laws of the capitalist formation,2 Marx made various assumptions: he created a pure model of capitalist society from which to make deductions. Moreover, Marx in Capital, Georg Lukàcs reminds us, has created an intellectual model where capitalist economic forms could exist in their purest form by positing a society “corresponding to the theory,” i.e., capitalist through and through, consisting of only capitalists and proletarians.3 Marx posited this hypothetical society for methodological reasons—to serve him “as a springboard for an assault on the real problem.”4 However Sweezy argues that not only does Marx’s method of abstraction consider capitalist society in its pure form to consist of only capitalists and workers, but it also reduces the relation between the two contending classes to its pure form, isolating it “to enable it to be subjected to the most painstaking analysis, free of all unrelated disturbances.”5 To do so presupposes at least two steps. In the first place, Marx provisionally had to assume away “all social relations except that between capital and labor,” leaving them “to be reintroduced, one at a time, [ ] at a later stage of the analysis.” As a second step, the capital-labor relation itself had to “be reduced to its most significant form or forms”—in modern capitalist society, those that arise in the sphere of industrial production. Furthermore, capitalist and worker alike were “reduced to certain standard types, from which all characteristics irrelevant to the relation under examination are removed.” As in the preface to Capital, individuals were dealt with only insofar as they were “the personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class relations and class interests.”6 Once he had laid “the necessary foundation with the analysis of commodities,” Marx proceeded to his main task, dedicating “[a]lmost the entire remainder of the first volume of Capital [ ] to the capital-labor relation in its ‘isolated’ and ‘purified’ forms. In other words, Volume I begins and remains on a high level of abstraction.”7 Abstraction, in Marx’s sense, does not leave the real world behind but rather isolates “certain aspects of the real world for intensive 2 Marx did not fall into the bourgeois economists’ error of trying to analyze society as such, he rather sought to investigate a particular society, viz., capitalist society. 3 Georg Lukàcs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1979), 8, 31; and Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (London: Chapman and Hall, 1938), 78–80. 4 Georg Lukàcs, op. cit., 31. See also L. Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin: Studies in Ideology and Society (ny and London: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 16, and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (ny: Oxford University Press, 1977), 101–2. 5 Paul M. Sweezy, op. cit., 16–17. 6 Ibid., p. 17; see also Raymond Williams, op. cit., 101, 102. 7 Sweezy, op. cit., 18; emphasis in original. See also L. Colletti, op. cit., 7–9, 28–29.

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investigation.” As a result, when we “say that we are operating on a high level of abstraction we mean that we are dealing with a relatively small number of aspects of reality.” Rather than implying “that those aspects with which we are dealing are not capable of historical investigation and factual illustration,” Marx has constant recourse to historical data to illustrate and verify deductions. “[T]he great bulk of the factual material introduced by Marx in Volume I” related directly to the capital-labor relation “constitutes [ ] a confirmation rather than a contradiction of the statement that Volume I begins and remains on a high level of abstraction.”8 “Any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture,” says Raymond Williams, “must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure. From a strictly theoretical point of view this is not, in fact, where we might choose to begin. It would be in many ways preferable if we would begin from a proposition which originally was equally central, equally authentic: namely, the proposition that social being determines social consciousness.”9 Indeed, it is not only preferable to start with the latter proposition, but that the latter must always be kept in mind as the foundation of historical materialism: All of Marx’s life work depends upon the relationship between consciousness and being. It is to be noted that in the afterword to Capital, Marx considered himself to be a materialist, defining this not in the sense of traditional materialism, but against the idealism of Hegel. In other words, Marx (as well as Engels) is an epistemological materialist, holding that one’s knowledge depends on reality and not the reverse.10 In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels are very clear that primacy in historical development does not go to the forces of production. For these two thinkers, at this stage in their intellectual development, “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” and the result has either been “a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or . . . the common ruin of the contending classes.”11 Progressive improvements in the productive 8 9 10

11

Sweezy, ibid. Raymond Williams, op. cit., 75. While Hegel transformed the Idea “into an independent subject” and reduced the real world to “the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’,” for Marx—as he puts in Capital— “the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.” (p. 19). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works in One Volume (London: Lawrence and Wishart), 35–36.

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forces were a necessary condition for the rise and eventual hegemony of the bourgoisie.12 Thence, the primary moving force in history—or at least in modern history—was not the productive forces, in spite of their importance, but greed and the class conflict that it bred. The productive forces nonetheless were a necessary condition, or instrumental cause, for the fulfilment of the conscious purposes of social class.13 Basing their interpretation both on Marx and on an understanding of the requirements of historical class analysis, Paul Baran and E.J. Hobsbawm explain that, Neither “forces of production” nor “relations of production” are simple notions. The former encompasses the existing state of rationality, science and technology, the mode of organization of production, and the degree of development of man himself, that “most important productive force of all” (Marx). The latter refers to the mode of appropriation of the products of human labour, the social condition under which production takes place, the principles of distribution, the modes of thought, the ideology, the Weltanschauung which constitute the “general ether” (Marx) within which society functions at any given time.14

12 13

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Ibid., 42. My arguments throughout this chapter stand in clear opposition to any deterministic interpretation of Marx’s (and Engels’) work. For instance, G.A. Cohen, in his Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defense (Princeton, nj: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), fails to understand that the ultimate object of Marx’s thought is to conceive the multi-faceted determinateness of human beings as complex historical actors, together with the changing circumstances of social development. It is because he had no interest in closing off historical inquiry through rigid formulae that Marx was so careful to characterize the provisional conclusions embodied in the 1859 Preface to his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as mere “guiding thread” to his studies. By attributing universal apodictic value to the base/superstructure framework interpreted in a static, frozen form, Cohen clearly demonstrated his misunderstanding of Marx’s method.  Furthermore, Marx—as alluded to above—was primarily interested in investigating or analyzing a particular society, the capitalist one (Refer, for example, to Karl Korsch, op. cit., 24, 26, 78–80; and L. Colletti, op. cit., 3, 4.). It should therefore become clear that Marx not only uses the relationship between the forces of production and between the base and superstructure as the guiding threads of his investigation, but he also makes deductions based on pure forms or typical ideas: The deductions only apply to the model used. Just as Marx wrote in Capital, Paul Sweezy reminds us: if the conditions are altered, so is the corresponding law (Paul M. Sweezy, op. cit., 19). E.J. Hobsbawm and Paul A. Baran, “A Non-Communist Manifesto,” in Baran (ed.), The Longer View (ny: Monthly Review Press, 1969), 59–60.

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By examining the totality of opposing tendencies, by reducing them to precisely definable conditions of life and production of the various classes of society, by discarding subjectivism and arbitrariness in the choice of a particular dominant idea or in its interpretation, and by revealing that the conditions of the material forces of production contribute remarkably to explaining ideas and various tendencies, Marxism indicates the way to a comprehensive study of the process of the rise, development, and decline of socio-economic systems.15 People make their own history, but what determines the motives of people, of the mass of people, i.e., what gives rise to the clash of conflicting ideas and strivings? What is the sum total of all these clashes in the mass of human societies? What are the objective conditions of production of material life that form the basis of all of man’s historical activity? What is the law of development of these conditions? To all these, Marxism draws attention and offers a methodological analysis for a scientific study of history. The overarching objective of this chapter is to highlight the theoretical underpinnings for the foundation of ethics in Marx’s thought and the rationale for (and scope of) the institution of Marxian principles of justice. In accordance with the analytical framework discussed above, we will seek to present a systematic treatment principally of the interaction and interdependence of the following four aspects. i.

ii.

15

16

Marx did not attempt construct a philosophy of history but was looking for a theoretical basis derived from empirical investigation that would serve as a guiding thread to show the way for liberation of the proletariat: “‘Liberation’ is a historical and not a mental act,”16 and it can only be brought about on the basis of certain historical conditions. Marxism is not based on an ideological concept of humankind, in the Althusserian sense, but rather supposes a scientific conception of human

It is important to appreciate the milieu within which theories (or methodologies) are propounded; however, this should not detract from the essence and applicability of the theory (or methodology) itself. For instance, Marx shared the excessive optimism of his time—the industrial revolution and burgeoning capitalist expansion. He believed that the latter was irresistible and that it would rapidly suppress all vestiges of earlier modes of production, as well as the social, cultural, and political forms associated with them. His vision in a speedy socialist transition to a classless society (communism) proved, needless to say, incorrect. The strength and utility of his methodological framework, with appropriate modification/ updating, remains resolutely plausible as I should aim to show in this chapter. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, Collected Works, vol. 5 (ny: International Publishers, 1976), 38.

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nature, empirically verifiable, as being a social and economic entity with physical and intellectual, or spiritual, needs that must be satisfied. iii. The recourse to humanism throws up the fundamental problems of capitalism and the need to search for a specific solution. The moral protest— that is, the humanism proposed by Marx in Capital—is completely necessary if there is to be a revolution, since the same humanism ought to form an integral part of class consciousness, so that the proletariat can grow in rebelliousness and discipline.17 iv. Marx’s humanist descriptions demonstrate the necessity of not accepting exploitation of the system and, consequently, of the need to institute principles of justice for the ‘communist’ society of tomorrow. 2

The Materialist Conception of History and Ethics

Marx’s employment of essentialist (Feuerbachian) language, on the one hand, and his textual practice unequivocally engaging in something quite different from talking about a static “human essence” or “human nature,” on the other, primarily stems from his struggle to express theoretic terms and concerns within a philosophic language—a language in which the essential/accidental distinction is central. This struggle is clearly epitomized in Marx’s attempt to embed ethical elements within particular theories of political economy, including his own: (i) he clearly shows the particular moral element within theoretic formulations; and (ii) in his own (then embryonic) theory, Marx talks about the moral elements in philosophic, i.e., essentialist, language, even though he understood the language in a dynamic, social way.18 Marx admirably strives to resolve this tension in his Theses on Feuerbach (written in March, 1845), which has been regarded by some Marxist thinkers as a turning point in the history of philosophy: This text represents Marx’s realization that the commitment to the vision of philosophy as the quest for certainty and search 17 18

Karl Marx, Capital (New York: Vintage, 1976), 648. Norman Geras’ Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983), has elegantly and conclusively resolved that “Marx did not reject the idea of a human nature.” This understanding has been adopted throughout this work. My task, throughout this chapter, focuses on highlighting the evolution of Marx’s thought and his moral conviction of the flowering of individuality under democratic socioeconomic and political conditions and his commitment to explaining scientifically the dynamics and tendencies of profit-driven capitalist societies that foster a narrow individualism and a truncated political democracy.

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for foundations represents a failure of nerve, a lack of courage, in that the relativist preoccupation with an unattainable objectivity precludes the universalization of the ethical judgements which come from particular groups, cultures or societies. His rejection of the vision of philosophy as the quest for philosophic certainty and of the search for philosophic foundations is reached by overcoming the fundamental distinctions of objectivism/relativism, necessary/arbitrary, essential/accidental, universality/particularity, etc., through an understanding that these positions are but alternate sides of the same coin, that both positions are tied to a common picture of what philosophy is and ought to be, that both positions become credible alternatives only by freezing the historical process or by selecting a particular time slice in a specific culture and society.19 Philosophic criteria, grounds or foundations are in this context taken to mean those that carry the weight of rational necessity and/or universal obligation, i.e., that we are compelled to accept by some kind of philosophic rationality, or that we are obliged to endorse by some overarching law or rule. Marx’s approach calls into question the very possibility of an ethic (e.g., Kantian ethics) that claims to rest upon philosophic notions of rational necessity and/or universal obligations. Two reasons may be put forward for this claim: (i) Marx sees the dynamic historical processes as subjecting all criteria, grounds and foundations to revision and modification. Whereas notions such as “rational necessity” and “universal obligation” are employed by philosophers precisely in order to secure immunity from revision and modification. By rejecting these notions, Marx is precluding the possibility of timeless criteria, necessary grounds or universal foundations for ethics. (ii) For Marx, the only plausible candidates for the criteria, grounds or foundations in question would be the contingent, community-specific agreements people make in relation to particular norms, aims and objectives. These agreements, owing to their dynamic character, do not carry the weight of rational necessity or universal obligation. By calling into question the possibility of securing timeless criteria, necessary grounds or universal foundations for moral principles, Marx’s approach seeks to probe a particular conception of objectivity in ethics. Without 19

This may be referred to as the radical historicist approach to ethics. For a detailed treatment of the subject of radical historicism vis-à-vis moral relativism refer, amongst others, to: Nicholas L. Sturgeon, “Moral Explanations,” in James Rachels (ed.), Ethical Theory (oup, 1998), 198–227; Jonathan Dancy, “Two Conceptions of Moral Realism,” in ibid., 245–262; Peter Railton, “Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality,” in ibid., 470–503; and William K. Frankena, Ethics, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973).

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such criteria, ground or foundations to serve as a last court of appeal for adjudicating between rival moral principles, objectivity in ethics or valid justification of moral principles becomes but a dream, a philosopher’s dream which results from an obsession with philosophic certainty and security in the flux of historical change and development. Marx’s approach to ethics, as prescribed below, holds that people make ethical judgements in light of moral principles, employ criteria to undergird such principles and give reasons to justify their criteria, principles and judgements; i.e., instead of focusing on the status (objective or subjective, necessary or contingent, universal or particular) of moral principles, he stresses the role and function these (or any) principles play in various cultures and societies. Furthermore, instead of accenting the validity or objectivity of the justification of moral principles, the Marxian approach highlights the plausible descriptions and explanations of the emergence, dominance and decline of particular moral principles under specific conditions in the historical process. And instead of philosophic notions such as status, validity, objectivity, the approach adheres to theoretic notions such as role, function, description and explanation.20 Let us now examine, in some detail, the consolidation of Marx’s approach to ethics. The first thesis, in Theses on Feuerbach, makes two separate claims.21 First, all materialists—presumably from Democritus to Feuerbach—have hitherto failed to take seriously the activity or practices of human beings. Second, that this activity or practice consists of agreed upon social conventions erected by people in order to principally facilitate the satisfaction of certain perceived needs and interests. Feuerbach’s main fault, according to Marx, was that he overlooked this activity or practice. Materialists have tended to ignore the 20

21

My objective is to highlight the methodology that in essence underlies the most important premise guiding social inquiry, namely, society both is changing and, within limits, can be changed. I therefore discern no clash between the radical historicist approach to ethics, as defined above, and the endeavor to ground Marx’s basic historical theories (hence his political values) in an understanding based on, or consistent with, a transhistorical theory of distributive justice or moral rights. My arguments herein go hand in hand, for example, with the fact that “Marx did indeed condemn capitalism, as opposed just to analyzing, describing, explaining its nature and tendencies” (Norman Geras, “The Controversy About Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, vol. 150 (March–April, 1985), p. 47). They further strive to incorporate and elucidate the notion that Marx did condemn capitalism in the light of humanist considerations and principles of justice—without eliding the necessity of employing theoretic (scientific) tools for the realization of his goal (For a contradictory view, see Jeffrey Vogel, “The Tragedy of History,” New Left Review, no. 220 (November–December, 1996), 36–61.). Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (mecw), vol. 5 (New York, 1976), 6.

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activity or practices of human beings because their mechanistic (and often deterministic) models of causation assumed the human mind to be merely passive, to be solely the receptor of outside stimuli. It was left to idealists like Kant, Fichte, Reinhold, Hegel, to stress the activity of the mind, the human contribution to knowing. Armed with its own set of anticipations, assumptions, categories and aims, the mind, for the idealist, transforms and transcends that which is ‘given’ to it or that which it confronts.22 Knowing is a struggle between the obstinate object and active subject. But the idealists conceive human beings solely as subjects of knowing, mere bearers of self-consciousness. They ignore the material side of people, their natural needs and social interests. Feuerbach’s contribution—according to Marx—was to expose the material content of idealism, to point out that the activity of the subject (or self-consciousness) in idealism is but the activity of actual people; his mistake was to view the activity of actual people in an abstract way, unrelated to the broad mix of natural needs, social interests and political power. Marx holds at arm’s length the traditional theories of truth in philosophy, namely, the correspondence and coherence theories of truth.23 The doctrine of an idea corresponding or agreeing with its object presupposes a clear understanding of correspondence, or what it means for an idea to correspond or agree with an object. The doctrine of ideas cohering with other ideas, e.g., being logically consistent, theoretically intelligible, makes sense but surely such coherence could hold with it being unrelated to reality, or independent of empirical evidence. For Marx, the question of whether human thinking can reach objective truth is a practical question for two basic reasons. First, it is a practical question in the trivial sense, namely, that whatever “objective truth” is, it is arrived at by particular social practices and human activities, e.g., “scientific” practices and activities. Second, it is a practical question in a deep sense, namely, that “objective truth” should not be associated with copying the world, but rather with coping in the world, that “objective truth” should not be associated with representations agreeing with objects in the world, but rather with people transforming circumstances and conditions in the world. In short, truth-searching is not a quest for necessary and universal forms, essences, substances, categories or grounds, but rather a perennial activity of solving problems, responding to dilemmas, or overcoming quagmires. The third thesis24 is a criticism of abstract moralism, and especially of Utopian socialists, who adhere to a materialist view of nature yet remain tied to 22 23 24

Sebastiano Timpanaro, On Materialism (London: Verso, 1980), 39–51. The second thesis, mecw, op. cit., 6. Ibid., 7.

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moral idealism. Despite similar goals, Marx differs sharply with Utopian socialists in regard to their views of history and the status of their ideals. For Marx, the Utopian socialists have an inadequate understanding of history, which is best reflected in their failure to account for the sources and status of their own moral and political stances. They ignore the antecedent social realities that, in some sense, determine their own ideals and circumstances. Consequently, they come to believe that they, unlike other people whose ideals are determined by history and society, are above such determinants and hence objective, rational, viewing things sub specie aeternitatis. This view of themselves and their ideals leads them away from realistic conceptions of political power and historical possibilities for structural social change. Ideals unrelated to such conceptions and possibilities are, for Marx, mere abstract moral claims, beliefs or formulae. Ethical considerations, he avers, or deliberations independent of an adequate theory of history and society constitute either misguided strategies or barren academicism. Marx’s celebrated rejection of the doctrine of essentialism is further constituted in his sixth and seventh theses.25 The mistake Feuerbach makes in his use of essentialist language, Marx propounds, is to substitute one essence for another: the religious essence for the human essence. Marx views “essence making” as elevating particular human characteristics within a specific social arrangement to an abstraction with transhistorical status. In short, the idea of a particular essence of humankind results from a historical expression of a human trait and the notion of the abstract individual to whom this essence is attributed is a product of a certain kind of society. Just as for Feuerbach theological reflections about the religious essence of people are transformed into philosophic formulations about the human essence of people, for Marx these philosophic formulations are dissolved into theoretic ones which probe the socioeconomic circumstances out of which the theological and philosophic claims come. For Feuerbach, anthropology or philosophy of abstract man is the secret of theology; for Marx, a theory of history and a social analysis is the secret of anthropology. The six and seventh theses poignantly express Marx’s approach to ethics: No longer will one be concerned with arriving at the timeless criteria, necessary grounds or universal foundations for philosophic objectivity, necessity or essentiality. Instead, any talk about objectivity, necessity or essentiality must be historically located, socially situated and “a product” of revisable, agreed-upon human conventions which reflect particular personal needs, social interests and political powers at a specific moment in history. The task at hand then becomes a theoretic one, namely, providing a concrete social 25

Ibid., 7–8.

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analysis which indicates how these needs, interests and powers shape and hold particular human conventions and in which ways these conventions can be transformed. Marx’s eleventh thesis, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it,”26 signifies the metaphilosophical implications of Marx’s ethical viewpoint, that is, it designates the consequences for the task of philosophy. In this thesis, Marx explicitly separates himself from the dominant philosophical tradition in the West—the tradition from Plato to Hegel, which embarks on quests for philosophic certainty and searches for philosophic foundations. The crucial role of social practices and conventions revealed to Marx by his political activism and the importance of historical consciousness—hence stressing the dynamic character of these practices and conventions (derived from Hegel’s dialectic)—leads Marx to go beyond the dominant tradition in Western philosophy, to transgress its boundaries and step over its limits. Marx’s viewpoint assumes that the heightened awareness of the limitations of traditional philosophy will soon render it barren; in its place will thrive a theory of history and society, able to account for its own appearance and status, aware of the paradoxes it cannot solve, grounded in ever changing personal needs and social interests, and beckoning for action in order to overcome certain conditions and realize new ones. It is further imperative to note that Marx’s viewpoint is not a rejection of rational dialogue, discourse or discussion, nor is it a call for blind activism. Rather, it is recognition of a much-needed transformation of philosophy, a transformation required by the theoretic activity philosophy itself made possible, especially historic and social theoretic activity.27 Marx begins the preface to The German Ideology by claiming that the common denominator of contemporary German philosophy (as exemplified by the works of Feuerbach, Bauer and Stirner) is the belief in the power of ideas to change the world, the ability of concepts to transform reality. This belief has produced, for Marx, misguided theories about who human beings are and misconceptions of what they should become. And, more importantly, this belief precludes attempts to overcome such misguided theories and misconceptions 26 27

Ibid., 8. It is perhaps apposite to note the following: For a radical historicist—be it Pascal, Kierkegaard, Marx or Wittgenstein—the aim of philosophy is not to interpret the world but to change it. However, a philosophically inclined radical historicist, like Wittgenstein, shies away from theoretic activity—since the primary interest is to first and foremost change the dominant conception of philosophy, i.e., to change philosophy by making clear where and how it goes wrong. For a highly theoretically inclined radical historicist, like Marx, this means to leave the confines of philosophic discourse and the reform of philosophy and delve eagerly into full-fledged theory construction.

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of moral ideas because it leaves out the only hope for rescue—the real world of human needs and interests, of social life and material production.28 Marx’s aim is to transform philosophy into a theory of history. He wants to view the discipline of philosophy—its concern with philosophic notions of justification and interpretation—as a set of conventions or social practices included in the variety of viewpoints, modes of rationality, sensibilities, norms and values that are permitted, promoted or given prominence in complex ways by requirements of the existing system of production.29 For Marx, the aim of a science of history or, even better, a theory of history, is to describe, explain and project the active life-process of evolving productive systems and cultural formations. Where speculation ends, where real life starts, there consequently begins real, positive science, the expounding of the practical activity, of the practical process of development of men. Empty phrases about consciousness end, and real knowledge has to take their place. When reality is described, a self-sufficient philosophy loses its medium of existence. At the best its place can only be taken by a summing up of the most general results, abstractions which are derived from the observation of the historical development of men. These abstractions in themselves, divorced from real history, have no value whatsoever. They can only serve to facilitate the arrangement of historical material, to indicate the sequence of its separate strata. But they by no means afford a recipe or schema, as does philosophy, for neatly trimming the epochs of history.30 In the preceding passage, Marx’s shift from any philosophic aims or language to theoretic ones is illustrated in a succinct manner.31 The important point to note here is that this philosophic to theoretic shift results from taking history seriously, or more specifically, from focusing on the dynamic character of social practices and human agreements in evolving situations and circumstances. 3

The Epistemology of Ethics

One may contend that the chief enabling factor behind Marx’s approach to ethics is his view of science and epistemology. By calling into question the idea 28 29 30 31

mecw, op. cit., 23. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 37. Marx’s explanation for this shift will be presented when examining his theoretic formulations, especially the notion of ideology.

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of philosophic foundations, grounds or bases, he was simultaneously calling into question the philosophic foundations, grounds or bases of science and knowledge. Indeed to summarize Marx’s critique of political economy, he sees the bourgeois economists as mistaking the contingent features of the capitalist system of production for necessary, inevitable and unavoidable characteristics, while they mistake a system that is historically transient for one that is ahistorically external. But the important question confronting us now is how does Marx understand the status of his own critique of political economy? Marx thus believes his theory of history and capitalist society refers to realities of past societies and realities of the capitalist societies of his day. This crucial query leads us directly to Marx’s distinction between science and ideology and why he believes his theoretic formulations are not merely ideological formulations. Let us first be clear that Marx understands ideology not (as do many modern Marxists influenced by Louis Althusser) as ideas which reflect class interests, but rather as a set of ideas which distort reality, impede a clear understanding of reality, and conceal the biases and prejudices of its proponents.32 For Marx, to be scientific is to pierce the veil of appearance, to disclose, unearth, and reveal what has hitherto been concealed: For all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided.33 The significance of this distinction between appearance and reality, between what seems to be and what is, is theoretic rather than philosophic. Marx is not concerned with the philosophic foundations, grounds or bases for this distinction; rather, he is concerned with the concrete problems that promote such discrepancies between what people perceive about societies and what is missing from their perceptions. For Marx, the motivating factor for highlighting appearance/reality is to distinguish criticism and transformation of existing reality. Since his viewpoint leads him to acknowledge and accent the dynamic character of reality, the critical issue for Marx is how inevitable crises can best be responded to, or how stages of development can best be dealt with. As he states in his preface to the first German edition of Capital, And even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement—and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society—it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs.34 32 33 34

Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991). See especially pp. 63–123. Karl Marx, Capital, Frederick Engels (ed.), vol. 3 (New York, 1976), 817. Ibid., vol. 1, 10.

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For Marx, the task of the scientific theorist is to overcome appearance/reality or seems/is distinctions, because his basic analytic approach, namely, the dialectical approach,  . . . includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.35 As noted earlier, Marx’s theoretic concerns are motivated by concrete problems, impending crises and degenerating social forms of life. Marx’s dialectical approach insists that there is something deeply wrong with any theorist who defends a state of affairs either by rendering it difficult to call this state of affairs into question or by refusing to acknowledge that this state of affairs is being called into question. Marx believes this lack of a genuinely critical posture holds for bourgeois economists principally because the very nature of capitalist society itself is deceptive owing to the mystical character of its basic units—namely, commodities. A commodity appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it . . . but, as soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent . . .  A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because of the producers of the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation, not between themselves, but between the products of their labour.36 Therefore Marx believes that capitalist society can be understood only by an analytical approach which embodies a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” that is, a dialectical approach whose aim is primarily that of demystification. This 35 36

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 17, 72.

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analytical act of demystification is carried out best by scrutinizing capitalist society in its most developed form. In this work I have examined the capitalist mode of production, and the conditions of production and exchange corresponding to that mode. Up to the present time, their classic ground is England. That is the reason why England is used as the chief illustration in the development of my theoretical ideas.37 The idea of focusing on the most advanced industrial capitalist society of the day is noteworthy in that it acknowledges the importance of historical timing (and geographical setting) in regard to theoretic formulations. Historical timing is important for Marx’s theoretic formulations because, coming after the formulations of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Marx is able to benefit from these pioneers of political economy as well as grasp retrospectively why they perceived what they did and why they may have been mystified in regard to certain aspects of capitalist society. This advantage of retrospection, of reflecting back on the beginnings of political economy (as a developing discipline) and capitalist society, should not be overlooked, for it enables Marx to put forward his understanding of capitalist society in light of the dynamic changes in the discipline and society. Coming as he does after Smith and Ricardo and after the accumulation of capital and the intensification of labor in highly industrial England, Marx must now incorporate and account for the dynamic changes in the discipline and society: It is precisely Marx’s historical consciousness and his political concern for the exploited working class—along with his mastery of his discipline—which leads him to call into question crucial assumptions of political economy and to open a new arena of self-criticism for the discipline. In fact, this augmenting or enlarging of the conversation among political economists, coupled with an augmenting or enlarging of the awareness of concrete problems or impending crises, signifies that this theory as scientific and not mere ideology. For Marx the scientific or objective status of theories is not linked to philosophic notions of verification or of correct correspondence relations (e.g., idea/object, words/things, propositions/states of affairs); rather, the status of the theories depends on the sensitivity expressed towards pressing problems, the solutions offered for urgent dilemmas, and openings made into new areas of self-criticism. Note carefully how Marx closely relates “objective understanding” to self-criticism in the following passage from the renowned section on “The Method of Political Economy” in the introduction to the Grundrisse: 37

Ibid., 8.

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The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself—leaving aside, of course, the historical periods which appear to themselves as times of decadence—it always conceives them one-sidedly. The Christian religion was able to be of assistance in reaching an objective understanding of earlier mythologies only when its own self-criticism had been accomplished to a certain desire, so to speak, ‘potentially’.† Likewise, bourgeois political economy arrived at an [objective] understanding of feudal, ancient, oriental economics only after the self-criticism of bourgeois society had begun.38 Marx’s understanding of the “scientific” or “objective” status of theories informs his theoretic understanding of ethics, and specifically the status of moral notions such as “right” or “just.” His theoretic understanding of ethics focuses on explaining and describing the role and function of ethical principles, beliefs, judgements and practices in the actual history of society. He is interested in how such principles, beliefs and practices relate to power in society. In this sense, he stresses the political status of ethics in society. Therefore, an adequate theoretic account of ethical notions, e.g., “just” or “right,” must understand them as human conventional attempts to regulate social practices in accordance with the requirements of a specific system of production. These dynamic requirements set the limits wherein the content of ethical notions such as “just” or “right” is ever changing. The question as to what is a just distribution of goods and services is thus not a philosophic one; that is, it should not solicit an answer which puts forward philosophic foundations, bases or grounds which justify a particular distribution of goods and services in an abstract manner. Rather, this question demands a theoretical response, namely, an attempt to understand the specific needs and requirements of the existing system of production, how these needs and requirements set the boundaries in which current realizable “just” distributions are articulated, why moral justifications of “just” distributions often hide and conceal these boundaries, and what the possibilities are for overcoming these boundaries and transgressing these limits, not in an abstract philosophic way but rather a concrete practical way. 38

Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Penguin Books, 1973), 106.†The word in quotation marks appears in the original manuscript as a footnote to the Greek equivalent used in the main text. Emphasis added.

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The Essence of Marxian Principles of Justice

Marx, in exemplary exposition of his irreconcilable opposition to rigid and reified formulations, wrote in Theories of Surplus Value, in a clearly humanistic and dialectical vein, that Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of any other production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which affect man, the subject of production, more or less modify all his functions and activities, and therefore too his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this respect it can in fact be shown that all human relations and functions, however and in whatever form they may appear, influence material production and have a more or less decisive influence upon it.39 Of course, human beings at the more abstract level of Marx’s analysis make their appearance on stage not as individuals living out the full wealth of their human connections in this sense, but rather as the personifications of definite classes, from which the general theoretical understanding of an entire social system is derived. At all times Marx’s method emphasized the “historicity of concepts”—even at the most abstract level of analysis. Real history was the final arbiter for questions of theory: If Marx’s analysis of capitalist society in its pure form is his greatest achievement, it was not because this theory transcends history, but rather because it abstracts from everything but the most essential elements in the capitalist historical process. Hence, Marx’s achievement in this respect was his discovery of the essence of capitalism in the capitalist’s desire to accumulate at any cost to society as a whole. For Marx, basing his analysis on an abstract concept of the capitalist as an accumulator, “the driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the selfvalorization of capital to the greatest possible extent, i.e., the greatest possible production of surplus-value, hence the greatest possible exploitation of laborpower by the capitalist.”40 It is this understanding of the motive-force of capitalism that guides the modus operandi for the main arguments of this chapter: What are the rational bases for, and in what manner could they serve to promulgate, Marxian 39 40

Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part I (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1963), 288. Emphasis in original. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1976), 449. See, too, Karl Korsch, Karl Marx (New York: Chapman and Hall, 1938), 24–44.

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­ rinciples of justice? It is, of course, taken as the cornerstone of our argument p that Marx had condemned capitalism as unjust;41 and that Marx’s economic critique was fundamentally based on a concept of humankind, i.e., an analysis not based on an ideological concept of humankind, but rather supposes a scientific conception of human nature, empirically verifiable, as being a social and economic entity with physical and spiritual or intellectual needs that must be satisfied.42 Ex hypothesi, our approach will essentially focus on two considerations.43 Firstly, it is deemed pertinent that, in order to enunciate the fundamentals, and, thus, applicability, of the notion of justice to a (putative) ‘communist society’, an analysis of the issue of Marxist attitude towards justice be addressed by considering the logic of Marx’s core concepts—the idea that human needs and capacities develop historically in relation to the development of the forces of production. Secondly, if a conception of justice is proven integral per the logic of historical materialism, then is there a rational foundation for this purportedly ‘just society’, or is it chimerical? For Marx, the emphasis on the dynamic character of social practices and the groundlessness of philosophic claims, entail an enquiry into the beginnings of certain social practices and, for our purposes, into the emergence of the conception of the autonomy of philosophy. Marx’s theoretic formulations amount 41

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The debate whether Marx’s condemnation of capitalism was in the light of any principle of justice had been intense, particularly in the aftermath to Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (oup, 1972). Norman Geras’s “The Controversy About Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, vol. 150, March/April (1985): 47–85 provides an exquisitely lucid analysis of both sides of the debate—i.e., those who ascribe to the notion that Marx’s critique was grounded in principles of justice, and those whose views oppose the aforesaid—and further propounds a reading of Marx inherently (without eschewing paradoxical elements in Marx’s writings) indicative of his commitment to principles of justice. These arguments will not be repeated here, however, reference will be made as deemed necessary. The crux of the argument I am attempting to present in this chapter stands against the Althusserian conception of ideological humanism—that not all humanism is ideological and that science itself does not exist in a pure form, i.e., without ideological uses. Accordingly, if humans were pure spirits, Marx could not have written Capital. There are two other important, and intellectually exigent, considerations, viz.: the interdependence between freedom, self-realization and justice in the context of formulating a Marxian theory of justice; and the (seemingly irreconcilable) conflict between human progress and human rights when studying Marx’s basic historical theories as being consistent with a transhistorical theory of distributive justice and moral rights. The latter consideration is, of course, not limited to Marxian analyses, but applies to all progenies of the Enlightenment. In the discussions to follow, I shall endeavor to present exiguous reference as necessary, particularly in relation to the interdependence between freedom, selfrealization and justice.

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roughly to a theory of historical limits: On the one hand, he is concerned with circumscribing the boundaries within which each new generation must struggle to survive. This includes acknowledging the particular kind of system of production each new generation inherits (and at what stage of development it is), and it includes acknowledging the evolving beliefs, views and sensibilities crystallized in the existing cultural lifestyles and political and social institutions. On the other hand, Marx’s aim is to point out how these boundaries are transient, the results of human activities and social practices which can be transformed. History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other, modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity.44 Marx’s particular theory of historical limits is a materialist theory in that it begins with the productive activity of people, with how people produce their means of subsistence and create systems of production to insure their survival. But human productive activity is not only the starting point of Marx’s materialist theory of history; it is also the major factor in comprehending, explaining, describing and tracing (these are all theoretic activities) the links to evolving beliefs, values and sensibilities crystallized in the existing cultural lifestyles and political and social institutions. Since Marx includes philosophy (and ethics) in this evolution of beliefs, values and sensibilities, it can be expected that his theoretic formulations will provide an explanation and description of the perceived status of philosophy in different epochs. In his most lucid and succinct summary of his theory of history—and for this reason I quote at length— Marx writes, This conception of history thus relies on expounding the real process of production—starting from the material production of life itself—and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production, i.e., civil society in its various stages, as the basis of all history; describing it in its action as the state, and also explaining how all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, 44

Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 50.

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religion, philosophy, morality, etc., arise from it, and tracing the process of their formation from that basis, thus the whole thing can, of course, be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the idealist view of history, to look for a category in every period, but remains constantly on the real ground of history: it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice, and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that all forms and products of consciousness cannot be dissolved by mental criticism . . . [b]ut only by the practical overthrow of the actual social relations which gave rise to this idealistic humbug; that not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy, and all kinds of theory.45 Marx’s materialist conception of history is supported by his ethical viewpoint in that both focus on the dynamic social practices of people. The materialist theory holds that a certain kind of social practices (i.e., those directly linked to material production for sustenance) serves as the ground for history (i.e., the dominant factor in historical explanation and description); and the ethical perspective claims that these (as well as other) dynamic social practices are revisable human conventions which cannot serve as immutable, invariable grounds, criteria or foundations for philosophic validity or objectivity. Marx’s attempt to replace philosophic grounds with dynamic and social practices, or to replace philosophic concerns with historical, explanatory (i.e., theoretic) aims, is illustrated rhetorically in the following passage: This sum of productive forces, capital funds and social forms of intercourse, which every individual and every generation finds in existence as something given, is the real basis of what the philosophers have conceived as “substance” and “essence of man,” and what they have deified and attacked: a real basis which is not in the least disturbed, in its effect and influence on the development of men, by the fact that these philosophers revolt against it as “self-consciousness” and the “unique.” These conditions of life, which different generations find in existence, determine also whether or not the revolutionary convulsion periodically recurring in history will be strong enough to overthrow the basis of everything that exists.46

45 46

Ibid., 53–54. Ibid., 54.

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Marx thus suggests that philosophy is viewed as self-sufficient and autonomous (or bound-to-certainty, tied-to-necessity or linked-to-universality), primarily owing to its role and function in specific societies. The autonomy of philosophy is mainly assumed to promote a particular cultural description of truth, reality and knowledge which appears unrelated to or independent of the social practices (or conventions) of people. The function of this assumption is to hide and conceal the particularity of this cultural description and hence to blind people to the possible ulterior aims or sinister motives (conscious or unconscious) of its proponents. Marx further propounds that conceptions of the autonomy of philosophy constitute illusory ideas in the sense that such conceptions signify attempts by philosophers to make their cultural viewpoints appear objective and valid from sub specie aeternitatis. These conceptions are illusory (i.e., demonstrably worthy of rejection) because the march of history reveals them to be neither timeless nor immutable. And theoretic concerns show that these conceptions perform particular roles and functions in regard to the existing system of production, political and social institutions, and cultural lifestyles. These particular roles and functions are ideological ones, that is, the primary role and function of the dominant ideas, values, beliefs or sensibilities presented in the form of universality, necessity or eternity is primarily to preserve and perpetuate, justify and legitimate the existing system of production, social and political arrangements, and cultural ways of life. This ideological function of such ideas, beliefs, values or sensibilities cloaks particular interests behind the claim for universal interests, hides the contingency of conditions behind the claim for necessary conditions, conceals changeable circumstances behind the claim for unavoidable circumstances.47 The illusory idea of philosophy’s autonomy is promoted and encouraged by historians who uncritically accept what past ruling class thinkers imagined themselves to be saying and claiming. This uncritical acceptance of each ruling class’s self-conception and self-image leads historians to believe in the autonomy of ideas, values, beliefs and sensibilities—and of philosophy—and to understand them as existing in a realm of their own. By accepting the illusions of past epochs, these historians preoccupied with the realm of ideas, values and sensibilities come to share the illusion of their own epoch.48 Marx’s materialist conception of history is able to reveal this deception, for two basic reasons. First, it stresses the ideological function of past and present ideas, values, beliefs and sensibilities. This emphasis permits his theory to locate and situate the real ground or basis of history, namely, the dynamic social practices and 47 48

Ibid., 60. Ibid., 61.

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the constellation of institutions erected thereon by human beings. Second, Marx’s materialist conception of history has no interest in perpetuating the illusion of its own (capitalist) epoch. Its theoretic aim is to unmask the deception concealed by current historians and philosophers. The important implication for ethics of Marx’s materialist conception of history is a radical distinction between moral practices and moral ideals. Moral ideals are to be treated like any other idea, namely, in terms of their ideological role and function, while moral practices are to be understood like any other social practice, namely, in light of the particular limits circumscribed by the existing system of production, social and political institutions, and cultural way of life. For Marx, the demythologizing of the autonomy of ethics consists first, roughly, of disclosing the ideological function of moral ideals, and hence their conventional status; and second, the demythologizing consists of the discrepancy between moral ideals and moral practices, a discrepancy resulting primarily from the requirements of the existing system of production—which precludes overcoming the discrepancy.49 Marx regards moral language as the means by which human beings articulate and legitimate either their struggle to preserve the existing order, hence control and contain oppositional values, beliefs and sensibilities in culture and society, or their struggle to overcome the existing order, hence negate and undermine the dominant values, beliefs and sensibilities in culture and society. When Marx claims that “communists do not preach morality at all” he does not mean that communists do not employ moral language. Rather he means that this employment is unavoidable but never a sufficient means for social change. Therefore, it is crucial not to confuse changing people’s moral ideals—sometimes a result of employing moral language—with changing societal circumstances, or even patterns of moral practices. If there is a fundamental problem in ethics for Marx, it consists of the discrepancy of moral ideals and moral practices—or more specifically, the way in which systems of production have hitherto seemed to require a discrepancy between particular interests of a specific class and the claims of universal interests by ideologues of that class. Hitherto, ideology has been required to hide the discrepancy. Marx believes quite optimistically that communists have a solution to this problem—for it is a problem that must be understood in a historical way and resolved only in a practical way. In other words, the problem should be viewed as the many manifestations of the discrepancy between the rhetoric of universal interests and the reality of particular class interests within the limits circumscribed by particular systems of production 49

Ibid., 432.

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and the boundaries of the concomitant social and political institutions and cultural ways of life. The problem can be solved only when the rhetoric/reality discrepancy is overcome, that is, when a particular system of production is established which permits the coincidence of the universal interests of society with the particular interests of class, and when the concomitant social and political institutions and cultural lifestyles promote and encourage this coincidence. This coincidence results, for Marx, in the self-realization and selfdevelopment of all individuals within a society: this outcome has truly become the common good.50 Conditions of abundance, primarily owing to technological innovation, and the maldistribution of the abundance, due to the private ownership of production and private appropriation of profits, become so destructive of human lives that the producers, united as a class, are compelled to abolish private property and the class division of labor. This abolition constitutes proletarian revolution. This revolution can usher in a new society that permits and makes possible the self-realization and self-development of individuals, since private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them in free manifestations of their lives.51 Proletarian abolition of private property can produce a society in which nobody has an exclusive sphere of activity, a society in which everyone can develop in a many-sided way, a society thereby creative of harmonious personalities and lives of wholeness. This society, Marx claims, is communist society.52 As noted above, Marx insists upon the practical overcoming of the rhetoric/reality discrepancy in history, an overcoming which will ultimately render ideology useless and permit the realization of the coincidence and transparency, i.e., publicity, of particular class interests and universal societal interests. Therefore, to employ moral language without understanding the rhetoric/reality discrepancy in history and hence to preclude any practical way of overcoming this discrepancy is, in essence, to engage in rhetoric, to fall prey to ideology, and ultimately to impede the practical overcoming of this discrepancy. So Marx states, 50 Ibid., 247. 51 Ibid., 439. 52 Ibid.

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Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality (will) have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.53 The communist movement—for Marx—was thus privileged in the sense that only it has the potential of overcoming the rhetoric/reality discrepancy in history. This is not because of the moral ideals, e.g., self-realization, selfdevelopment, that it espouses—for many movements in the past and present espouse these ideals—but rather because of the historical timing of the movement. That is to say, when it appears in history, what it has at its disposal (e.g., technology, values of freedom and equality) due to this appearance, and how it intends to put to use what it has at its disposal (i.e., to promote and permit individuality within community under conditions of abundance and participatory democracy).54 5

Marxian Principles of Justice: A Critical Foundation in Moral Realism

It is deemed essential that we quote at length from the well-known paragraph of Marx’s 1859 Preface: In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the existing material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or—what is but a legal expression for the same thing—with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into 53 54

Ibid., 49. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 81.

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their fetters. Thus begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed.55 The entire passage, with its suggestion of definite sites and structures,56 is of course an architectural metaphor—an economic foundation on which rests a political and legal superstructure. It is worth noting, therefore, that Marx made no attempt to exclude cultural factors from his understanding of “the economic structure of society.” Thus he referred in Capital to “relations of production” and “forms of intercourse” (the latter relating broadly to the realm of intersubjective communication) as interconnected and inseparable elements in the social constitution of human practice.57 Furthermore, the opening quote in the previous section from Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value may shed some light on the perceived continual historical process of formation and transformation of human needs in the course of productive activity. The satisfying of our present needs is necessarily curtailed by our limited understanding of the whys and wherefores these needs are perhaps liable to conflict with each other, owing to the very process of their evolving development. Moreover, what is needed is some notion of needs in which self-realization and community do not appear as two independent standards, but rather constitute a single complex conception of the good. This will then facilitate our attempt to proffer an adequate comprehension of how the primary values of self-realization and community are interconnected. It thus follows that people, according to Marx, not only have different needs in different historical epochs but also that needs develop organically with human activity and, in historical terms, expand in conjunction with the development of the forces of production (the development of human capacities to command the forces of nature).58 And so on dialectically. 55

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 182–183. 56 The reference to “the economic foundations of society” must of course be understood not in the contemporary sense of “economic” as envisioned in the establishment of neoclassical economics—in which the concept of “class” is nonexistent—but rather in the classical sense in which the economy was thought to be a product of class relationships: that it may be best described, in today’s terms, as socioeconomic than economic determinism. Our attempts here are solely to show the relevance to the subject matter: how the logic of historical materialism necessitates, or otherwise makes superfluous, a conception of justice. 57 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 90. For an analysis of the relation of culture to history and to historical materialism see, Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (ny: oup, 1977) and Politics and Letters (London: Verso, 1979). 58 Karl Marx and F. Engles, Collected Works, vol. 5, 42.

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Let us now move to address the question concerning the basis upon which the distribution of labor between the different individual members of a (putative) ‘communist society’ is effected. The question may best be resolved if one could invoke a distribution of capacities corresponding to the requirements of production for social need. However, according to historical materialism, needs and capacities change and evolve: new capacities develop through our activity, new inventions arouse latent capacities, new possibilities for enjoyment propose new needs. But needs and capacities are related to production; albeit this connection does not necessarily indicate a process of evolution between the two that is harmonious and proportionate. What would a Marxian response to the problematic of the distribution of labor thence be? To this end, the two primary values of community and self-realization form the basis of a coherent response. If the needs of the community are taken as fundamental in determining the distribution of labor, is one then to deduce that individuals will exhibit indifference to the nature of the work they perform? This situation would clearly be akin to the relations of capitalist machine industry as diagnosed by Marx,59 and suggest that ‘communist society’ seemingly functions analogously to capitalism. This is hardly what Marx had in mind. The notion, therefore, that the satisfaction of working to meet social needs derives from a sense of “serving the people” rather than from the intrinsic nature of the activities performed does not square too well with Marx’s putative characterization of ‘communist society’ members—individuals possessing autonomous needs for self-activity and self-realization. This is not to infer that those members would be indifferent to the needs of the community; merely that they are interested in the full exercise of their capacities. Moreover, acknowledging, as Marx did, that the means of material production (i.e., means of self-realization) are a prerequisite for the (unfettered) engagement of human creative capacities, to wholly satisfy the needs for productive labor would strain resources (of even a communist society of abundance, as it were). Thereupon, the unfettered development of the productive forces could serve to supply a resolution of potential conflicts between the needs for self-realization; however, this development supposedly, but not necessarily, entails the concentration of the means of production and a corresponding increase in the resources

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Marx showed how the introduction of machinery simplified the skills required by workers, thereby allowing their being moved from one industry to another as dictated by capital: concrete labor, productive of particular use-values, is subordinated to abstract labor, productive of universal value. See Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 520ff.

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consumed in productive activity.60 Consequently, growth of the forces of production, to whatever scale, would not necessarily ensure the dissolution of the problem of distributing the means of self-realization. In conclusion to this argument, it need clearly be enunciated that the aforesaid does not imply the impossibility of harmonizing communist needs; rather their character and the requisite means for self-realization—owing to the very fact that needs are individually and historically transformed in the course of human activity— cannot precisely be sketched out in advance. Simply stated, there is neither, nor there can ever be, a blueprint for human needs and self-realization. The logic of the Marxian idea of historical development of human needs redounds to the conclusion that it is beyond the realm of possibility the construction of a society in which individual and social needs, as well as the means of satisfying them, are known. Implied in the aforesaid is that potential disagreements as to the distribution of resources cannot be ruled out; and, thus, some principles of justice are needed, even in a ‘communist society’ to provide for the resolution of such disputes.61 With that thought, we move to address the second consideration posed at the beginning of the previous section, viz.: Since a conception of justice is integral to the logic of historical materialism, then is there a rational foundation for this purportedly ‘just society’, or is it chimerical? 60

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To the extent that needs are intrinsically associated with the perceived feasibility of their satisfaction, the transformation of a profit-seeking society into one dedicated to fulfilling aspiring human needs and capacities is likely to follow similar tendencies. How these tendencies may be resolved is not at all clear: no particular form of their development is inherent in Marx’s conception of a communist society. For further discussions on reflections of motley aspects of these issues, refer to: Norman Geras, Discourses of Extremity (London: Verso, 1990), especially Part II, also Marx and Human Nature: Refutation of a Legend (London: Verso, 1983); Immanuel Wallerstein, After Liberalism (ny: The New Press, 1995). It is implicit in this argument that social relations in a genuine ‘communist society’ would not necessarily be more harmonious than in contemporary capitalist society; however, with the proper application of ‘justice principles’, analysis indicates that tension would potentially be far less frequent in the former than in the latter. For further support of this argument refer to G.A. Cohen, “Freedom, Justice and Capitalism,” New Left Review, vol. 126, March/April (1981): 3–16, and his Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), especially Chapters 2–6 and 8. For an opposing argument, which contends that such disagreements would not be serious enough to invoke principles of justice in a ‘communist society’, see Allen E. Buchanan, Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982); also Allen W. Wood, “The Marxian Critique of Justice,” in Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel and Thomas Scanlon (eds.), Marx, Justice and History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), 3–41.

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Capitalist exploitation, in Marxist vernacular, principally emanates from the fact that workers are, owing to their state of propertylessness, constrained to sell their labor power to capitalists, who own all means of production. Workers, whilst of course keeping only part of what they produce, are thus forced to yield the remainder to the capitalists (the surplus product) for no return. That is to say: (i) Workers are at the short end of an unequal distribution of the means of production. (ii) They are subject to the directives of their capitalist employers. (iii) They are forced to yield surplus product to those capitalists. As enunciated above, it is a principal premise of ours that Marx regarded capitalist exploitation as unjust; what we are about to discuss is where Marx thought the injustice of capitalist exploitation lay. Jerry Cohen62 offers cogent reasoning in response to the aforementioned, the gist of which is given below.63 [B]oth, that the extraction is unjust because it reflects an unjust distribution and that the asset distribution is unjust because it generates that unjust extraction . . . [T]he correct things to say about exploitation in Marxism are as follows. First, forced extraction of a surplus is wrong because of what it is, and not because it inherits the wrong of something else. Second, on our reasonable assumption that the sole purpose of means of production is to make product, a distribution of means of production is unjust only if and because it enables an unjust transfer of product. Finally [ ] the fact that the transfer of product is unjust when and because it is enabled by maldistribution of (this time) means of production does not make the maldistribution normatively fundamental. To think so is to confuse causal and normative fundamentality. A transfer of product is unjust if and only if it occurs for the wrong reason. If an unreciprocated product transfer reflects nothing but different (unmanipulated) preferences in a straightforward way, the transfer is 62 63

See “Exploitation in Marx: What Makes It Unjust?” in Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, 195–208. There is of course the pertinent, and interesting, issue of self-ownership, which is not being addressed here. On the relation between the Marxist account of capitalist exploitation and the thesis of self-ownership, Cohen persuasively argues that exploitation cannot be represented as unjust without rejecting that thesis (ibid., 116–143). He further indicates (pp. 144–164) that some Marxists implicitly affirm the thesis of self-ownership in their account of exploitation: He is particularly critical of Allen Wood’s writings—e.g., Karl Marx (London, 1981)—and the self-styled post-Marxists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. A particularly penetrating critique of the latter is given by Norman Geras, “PostMarxism?” in his Discourses of Extremity, 61–125; and Ellen Meiksens Wood in her Retreat from Class (London: Verso, 1986).

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not unjust. But it is unjust when and because it is caused by an unequal asset endowment, an unequal asset endowment which is unjust because it induces a wrongful, because forced, and not, for example, preferencebased, flow. So we can say both that the extraction is unjust because it comes from an unequal (and therefore unjust) asset distribution, and that the latter is unjust because it generates an unjust extraction. The flow is unjust because it reflects an unjust division of resources which is unjust because it tends to produce precisely such a flow.64 The above is deemed, we hope, useful for the purpose of clarifying, consolidating and analyzing the crux of the concepts contributing to recognizing the rational values in the critique of just society, and whether a society can exist beyond justice. On now to a reading of Marx’s views on justice, notwithstanding their exiguity, particularly his well-known Critique of the Gotha Programme.65 Marx challenged the notion of “distributive justice” from two distinct, albeit interconnected, standpoints: (i) The mode of distribution is embedded in, and dependent on, the mode of production. (ii) The notion of “just distribution” is a little more than a figure of speech, a pithy reference to a new criterion of distribution. Marx’s first standpoint may, in accordance with his own thoughts, be expanded upon, in current lexicon, as follows. Any, even a relative, equalization of income and wages is illusory under the conditions of a capitalist mode of production. He suggestively asks: “What is a ‘fair distribution’?” and “Do not the bourgeois assert the present-day distribution is ‘fair’? And is it not, in fact, the only ‘fair’ distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production?”66 It is apparent therein that Marx is principally dealing within the formal and political spheres of the concepts of justice—not the ethical dimension per se. Distribution, ex hypothesi, is just if the rules of distribution operative in a social cluster are applied to each and every member of the cluster. However, Marx’s axiomatic statement that distribution depends on production, and the further statement which derives from this, i.e., just distribution is defined, however not exclusively, by production, are both already within the realm of the political concept of distributive justice. But to argue that Marx had viewed production to be the sole criterion of just distribution would not only be wrong, but in pellucid contravention of what he pronounced elsewhere.67 64 Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, 199. Emphasis in original. 65 Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Moscow: Progress Publ., 1969–70), 16–19. 66 Ibid. 67 Refer to the excerpted piece, above, from the 1859 Preface and ensuing discussion.

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Therefore, one need be particularly careful not to elide an important connotation, viz.: ‘distributive justice’ cannot be analyzed as a separate case of justice, since distribution is always embedded in the sociopolitical reproduction of society as a whole. Thus, along with the mode of production, and not solely relying on it, the dominant values of a society can provide further norms and criteria that may apply to all and sundry within a society. In totality, they can provide a criterion (or criteria) of justice, which may differ from the rules of commodity production.68 Furthermore, Marx, in his criticism of the authors of The Gotha Programme, unequivocated that “equal rights” were a “right to inequality” since they simply served to equalize unequals.69 In light of the aforesaid, the first stage of communism would still bear the birth mark of the offspring of capitalism. Following on with Marx’s train of thoughts that the Programme authors’ emphasis was (wrongly, as he perceived it) on distribution rather than production, is highlighted by the latter’s calls for the return to the workers, with equal rights as stated above, of the undiminished proceeds of their labor.70 Marx’s view regarding distribution vis-à-vis production, in essence, forms his idea of the perceived communist society. Let us examine it in more detail. Marx’s objection to what was enunciated by the Gotha Programme authors stems from the perception that the total product of communist society must avail the means for the continuation and expansion of production and for provision against accidents and natural calamities before consumption could be assured. He thus asserted the need for further deductions from the social product to cover the costs of administration, necessary provision of the needs for education, health services, etc., and such matters as maintenance for those unable to work. In addition, Marx argued that, in a communist society, where products are not subject to exchange and “individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labour,” the

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Agnes Heller in her “Marx, Justice, Freedom: The Libertarian Prophet,” Philosophica, vol. 33, no. 1 (1984): 87–105, erroneously, in my opinion, attributes, in parts of her essay, to Marx the omission to criticize the Gotha Programme authors on no grounds other than the ‘mode of production’. But, as evinced from the discussion throughout this section, Marx’s writings, when objectively examined in their totality, reveal a different reality. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 3, 16–19. It seems apt to refer to E.P. Thompson’s scholarly work The Making of the English Working Class (ny: Vintage Books, 1966). See particularly Chapter 16, 778–829—for a confirmation in parallel. Thompson therein offers some insight on an issue that was common at that time in radical working-class circles, viz.: the product of labor should belong fully to the workers who had produced it.

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phrase “proceeds of labour” will have lost its meaning71: An expression, par excellence, of the problematic of the distribution of means of consumption amongst individual producers in “a communist society . . . as it has developed on its own foundations,” where those individuals “receive back from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly what [they give] to it . . . The same amount of labour which [they have] given to society in one form [they receive] back in another.”72 Marx further notes that this principle is the same as that governing the exchange of commodities “as far as this is exchange of equal values” and hence, “while the principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads . . . equal right here is in principle—bourgeois right, [ ] constantly stigmatized by a bourgeois limitation.”73 What does this say? Marx’s communist vision is hampered by the realization of the labor theory of value in the early days of communist society, which is well away from embodying a Marxist conception of justice. The following excerpt sheds further light on the limitations of bourgeois right: The right of the producer is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour. But . . . equal right is unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment and thus productive capacity as natural privileges. It is, therefore, a right of inequality in its content, like every right. Right by its very nature can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard in so far as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only, for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else is ignored. Further, one worker is married, another not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right instead of being equal would have to be unequal.74 71 72 73 74

Karl Marx, in T.B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (eds.) Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy (Penguin Books, 1990 ed.), 249–257. The Marx-Engels Reader, R.W. Tucker (ed.) (ny: Norton, 2nd ed., 1978), 529–530. Ibid., 530. Emphasis in original. Ibid., 530–531. Emphasis in original.

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Does the above passage not indicate that justice, as an “application of an equal standard”, is “by its very nature” inadequate to overcome the bourgeois limitations of the first phase of communist society”? The answer is a resounding yes. Moreover, it is implicitly suggested that a society in which endowments of individuals effectively function as a standard in ranking them as human beings is profoundly defective. This underlies Marx’s paradoxical view that individuals are unequal inasmuch as they are different individuals, and that equality of condition appears as the promise and measure of formal equality. Posed thus, it seems that the question of equality or inequality of human beings is an artifact of class society. Marx’s bold, far-sighted realism envisaged a society wherein individual differences of endowment cease to make a fundamental difference, rather they elaborate a multiplicity of standards of excellence; and, moreover, while believing that “a classless society should not combine collective control over the conditions of production with sheer moral arbitrariness in the distribution of welfare,” he upheld “the principle of collective control over resources with the clear expectation that its implementation will have a certain kind of further distributive consequence and will not have a certain other kind of distributive consequence for the enjoyment of basic human goods.”75 Such a society, Marx believed, would develop so as to see the liberation of the individual from “an enslaving subordination to the division of labour” and, therewith, the suppression of “the antithesis between mental and physical labour”; the transformation of labor from a mere means to the satisfaction of other needs into “life’s prime want”; the all-round development of the individual and a corresponding flowering of the productive forces and “all the springs of co-operative wealth.”76 Only with the growth of these tendencies “can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”77 So what, if any, is “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” a principle of? It is clearly a principle of distributive justice, “even if its attainment is envisaged together with the death of the state.”78 Norman Geras, with precision and eloquence, enunciates the essence of the principle; let us excerpt at length: Marx retains a notion of rights even for the higher phase of communism . . . The general rule, indeed, marked down for this higher stage is 75 Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” op. cit., 78–79. 76 The Marx-Engels Reader, 531. 77 Ibid. 78 Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” op. cit., 60.

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the fulfilment of individual needs, and the right that it generalizes a right, amongst other things, to the means of personal development or self-realization. Its complement (expressed in the first half of the famous slogan) is that each person makes an effort commensurate with her or his abilities, in taking on a share of the common tasks. If they succeed, these standards, in making good the defects of the principle they supplant— which, sensitive only to the magnitude of labour contribution, gives out larger rewards to greater capabilities and talents—this is not because they free of either the generality or the prescriptive force characteristic of rights. It is only because Marx obviously regards need and effort as morally more appropriate, in a word fairer, criteria of distribution than individual endowment . . . The element of plain good fortune in the possession of great or exceptional abilities he clearly does not see as meriting any larger reward than is inherent in the very exercise and enjoyment of them. That Marx himself thinks of the needs principle as less formalistic, or more concrete, than the one it supplants, more exactly attuned, morally speaking, to the specific individuality of each person, does not for all that undo its generality as a normative principle.79 Does it not follow, then, that the aforementioned principle is, indeed, integral to Marx’s notion of a just society? And is not this principle clearly a standard of equality? The answers to both questions have to be in the affirmative, particularly in light of another passage, this time in The German Ideology, which criticizes the view that the “possession” and “enjoyment” of each could correspond to his/her “labour”: But one of the most vital principles of communism, a principle which distinguishes it from all reactionary socialism, is . . . that differences of brain and of intellectual ability do not imply any differences whatsoever in the nature of the stomach and of physical needs; therefore the false tenet, based upon existing circumstances, “to each according to his abilities,” must be changed, in so far as it relates to enjoyment in its narrower sense, into the tenet, “to each according to his need”; in other words, a different form of activity, of labor, does not justify inequality, confers no privileges in respect of possession and enjoyment.80 Marx’s notion of ‘communist society’ is one in which human needs, and particularly needs of individual self-realization, flourish and expand. He refers to 79 80

Ibid., 60–61. Emphasis in original. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5, 537–538. Emphasis in original.

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a mode of production in which the worker satisfies these needs and values, as opposed to the inverse situation, in which objective wealth is there to satisfy the worker’s own need for development.81 Thus, his characterization of ‘communist society’ as “an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all”82 is all-encompassing and must therefore be understood in no minimalist sense.83 6

Concluding Remarks

Historical materialism, by virtue of its emphasis on human productive practices and historical specificity, holds out the prospect of perceiving the present as history. Human beings can know the human world, despite its complexity, because they have made it. Hence, the principle of praxis or making—which is at the root of a materialist conception of history—unites ontology, epistemology, and history around a single premise of struggle. Once asked by a reporter, “What is?” Marx replied without hesitation, “Struggle.” Understood in this way, historical materialism defines an approach to the investigation of the historical world and a general guide to the future development of human praxis. Those seeking a theory of history so “strong” that it can easily dispense with the complexities of real history should not therefore confuse their own quest for abstract philosophical certainty with the role of the materialist conception of history as understood by Marx (and Engels). The latter, since it takes real history as its object, demands continual study and re-assessment, both at the theoretical and empirical levels. An open-ended historical materialism, conscious of its humanistic commitments, aware of the full complexity of history, and willing to learn from revolutionary vernaculars whenever and wherever they may appear, is a historical materialism that lacks the ultradeterminacy of a one-sided theoretical edifice, choosing instead to take its stance with the many-sided determinateness of human beings and the human world. It is as strong a theoretical guide to the social world as one can hope to forge without closing off precisely those questions that each generation in each historically specific set of circumstances will have to solve for themselves. 81 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 772. 82 Ibid., 739. 83 The ontological bases of Marx and Engels’ thought are discussed in C.J. Arthur, Dialectics of Labour (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). The fact that historical materialism is connected to a Vichian conception of history in its “making” is emphasized by E.P. Thompson in The Poverty of Theory (ny: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 84–89.

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Viewed in this way, Marxism cannot possibly be monolithic. There will be many Marxisms and many vernaculars of social liberation. It is in this historical/dialectical, and ultimately revolutionary sense, and not in some abstract, idealized manner that one must understand Marx’s favorite maxim: “Nothing human is alien to me.” The historical materialist conception of the transformation of human needs applies to a purported ‘communist society’ no less than to any other, and it implies that even such a society will need principles of justice, sui generis. This chapter sought to offer a reading that richly identifies the applicability of the notion of justice to the current critique, and presented the relevance of this notion of justice via a combinatorial approach of self-realization and community in a conception of human nature. But did our analysis offer a blueprint for a set of principles that could (or would) operate in such a society? Without a shadow of a doubt, it did not, and should not; for blueprints are irrelevant to any meaningful social analysis. However, the discussion in this chapter—one hopes—attested to the eminence of a rational foundation, deeply grounded in the logic of historical materialism, able to formulate ‘guidelines’ for establishing the nature and the limits of variation of the essential ideas and practices of justice by accounting for social cohesion in a purported ‘communist society’ through an intricate nexus of relational interdependence between primary objective values—viz., needs, self-realization and community—unwaveringly resting upon a humanist conception of the nature of social needs.

chapter 6

Marx as a Critic of Liberalism Sean Sayers Marx is well known to be a critic of liberalism, but you would hardly suspect this from much of what is written about his philosophy. In the spate of recent writing about his moral and political thought, Marx’s divergence from liberal ideas is almost invariably minimized or set aside altogether.1 The criticisms of liberalism that are implied in his philosophy are passed over and his theories are reinterpreted so as to assimilate them to some form of radical liberalism. It is time to rescue Marx from this misappropriation and defend him as a critic of liberalism. That is my purpose here. By Liberalism, I mean the political philosophy founded on the values of liberty and equality that has been predominant in the Western world in the modern era. It has most often taken the form either of a philosophy of justice and rights or a variety of utilitarian naturalism. In what follows I am going to focus on Marx’s treatment of rights and justice – I have discussed the naturalist aspect of Marx’s philosophy at length elsewhere.2 In its classic, enlightenment form the fundamental values of liberalism are embodied in a number of supposedly universal and timeless ‘natural’ or ‘human’ rights. These are listed in some of the major constitutional documents of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century, such as the us ‘Declaration of Independence’ and the various ‘Declarations of Rights of Man and Citizen’ of the French Revolution. The rights claimed in these documents vary somewhat, but usually include the rights to liberty, equality and private property. These are supposed to be the basic principles of a just society. Philosophical justifications for this approach are set out by a succession of thinkers, from Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, down to Rawls in modern times. I

The Historical Materialist Approach

Marx’s approach is entirely different. Appeals to principles of justice and right play little if any part in his analysis of bourgeois society or in his ideas about 1 This is true of writing not only in the analytic but also in the continental tradition, see Paul Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics (Albany, ny: suny Press, 2012). 2 Sean Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature (London: Routledge, 1998).

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the society that will succeed it. Partly this is because his primary aim is to understand and explain bourgeois society rather than to pass moral or political judgement on it or to advocate an alternative; but it is also because his critique takes an historical form and does not invoke supposedly universal standards. The fundamental principles that guide his thought – the basic ideas of historical materialism – are clearly set out by him in a number of places and are familiar.3 Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man’s ideas, views, and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life? What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed?… When people speak of the ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express that fact that within the old society the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.4 The implications of these views for the notions of justice and right are clear enough. These – like other kinds of moral principles – are social and historical products. They arise out of, and express, the norms governing the social relations of particular societies, they are (in that sense) ‘ideological’.5 Different kinds of society give rise to different values and principles of right. Hence, there are no universal moral principles, no timeless principles of right. Consistently with this, Marx is scornful of his socialist contemporaries who appealed to supposedly eternal principles of ‘justice’ and ‘fairness’,6 and he worked strenuously to try to keep such ideas out of those statements of socialist principles with which he was associated.7 3 Their best known expression is in Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd edn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 3–6. 4 Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 489. 5 This is the neutral as contrasted with the pejorative sense of the term ‘ideology’, see Sean Sayers “Philosophy and Ideology: Marxism and the Role of Religion in Contemporary Politics,” in David Bates (ed.), Marxism, Intellectuals and Politics (London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007), 152–168. 6 Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 525–541. 7 See Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), and Geras, ‘The Controversy About Marx and Justice’, 50.

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However, it is also evident that this is not the only way in which moral values figure in Marx’s thought. For, of course, it is also the case that Marx is critical of bourgeois society. Political and ethical commitments to its abolition and to its replacement by a new and different kind of society are an essential aspect of his position. Moreover, these commitments are sometimes expressed in terms that appeal to ideas of justice and right. For example, Marx at times criticizes capitalism for involving the unjust appropriation (‘theft’, ‘robbery’) by capital of the surplus value created by labour,8 and he praises the principles of distribution governing communist society as constituting an ‘advance’ in equality.9 Such views, it is often said, cannot be reconciled with the relativist account implied by a social and historical conception of right, and, indeed, that they are symptomatic of a fundamental contradiction in Marx’s thought. According to Geras, for example, ‘Marx did condemn capitalism as unjust in the light of transhistorical norms, albeit inconsistently with his own emphatic disavowals’.10 If the notions of justice and right are the products of established social and economic relations, so it is argued, they must reflect and endorse them, and this would include Marx’s own values. In so far as he criticizes bourgeois society, therefore, his criticisms must rely on an appeal to transhistorical standards whatever he may say to the contrary.11 This argument is very questionable. It assumes that the only possible source of critical values is one that transcends the existing order. This is not the case. Existing society is not a harmonious unity. There are conflicts and contradictions within it. Critical and contradictory tendencies do not need to come from outside, they are already present within existing conditions. The Marxist critique of bourgeois society does not need to rely on transcendent principles, it arises out of forces that are present within bourgeois society itself, it is immanent in form.12 As Marx puts it: Nothing prevents us…from entering into real struggles and identifying ourselves with them. This does not mean that we shall confront the world 8 9

10 11

12

Geras, “The Controversy About Marx and Justice,” 56–58. Karl Marx and Friederich Engels, The German Ideology: Part I, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 146–200. For further references see Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, I, no. 150 (1985): 47–85; and “Bringing Marx to Justice: An Addendum and a Rejoinder,” New Left Review, I, no. 195 (1992): 37–69. Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice: An Addendum and a Rejoinder,” 37. See G.A. Cohen, “Freedom, Justice, and Capitalism,” New Left Review, I, no. 126 (1981): 3–16; and “Review of A.W. Wood, Karl Marx,” Mind, vol. 92 (1983); and Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice: An Addendum and a Rejoinder.” See Sayers, Marxism and Human Nature, Chapters 7–8.

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with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: ‘Here is the truth, on your knees before it!’ It means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world.13 Hegelian Roots The roots of these ideas are in Hegel’s philosophy. This forms a bridge between the enlightenment universalism about natural rights of thinkers like Hobbes, Locke and Kant, and Marx’s historical and materialist approach. Hegel’s philosophy arises out of the Enlightenment liberal tradition, and he retains important aspects of it as we shall see; and yet his philosophy also puts forward a social and historical account of ethical and political values that points beyond it and which Marx draws upon. On the one hand, Hegel retains the enlightenment idea of universal and timeless values. This is embodied in the notion of ‘abstract right’ which is the starting point for the Philosophy of Right. According to Hegel, this is the form of right which human beings possess simply in virtue of being ‘persons’ – free and rational beings – not mere ‘things’. It is the right to exercise our wills as free agents, particularly to appropriate things.14 Hegel’s abstract right is universal to all human beings and timeless. It is closely related to the liberal enlightenment idea of the natural rights of property and liberty. However, it is too simple to say tout court with Benhabib that, ‘“Abstract right” is… Hegel’s term for the traditional concept of “natural right”’.15 Hegel is reluctant to adopt the term ‘natural right’ because it is usually taken to imply that right exists ‘ready-formed in nature’ and even perhaps in a fictional ‘state of nature’. By contrast Hegel insists that: the whole law and its every article are based free personality alone – on self-determination and autonomy, which is the very contrary of determination by nature. The law of nature – strictly so-called – is for that reason the predominance of the strong and the reign of force… The social state, on the other hand, is the condition in which alone right has its actuality.16 13 14 15

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Karl Marx, “Marx to Arnold Ruge, September 1843,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 14. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, H.B. Nisbet (trans.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§41–53, 73–84. Seyla Benhabib, “Obligation, Contract and Exchange: On the Significance of Hegel’s Abstract Right,” in Z.A. Pelczynski (ed.), The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 160. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, W. Wallace and A.V. Miller (trans.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §502, 248.

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Hegel criticizes the main liberal enlightenment philosophers – and particularly Kant – for holding that morality consists of universal rational principles by which actions and institutions can be judged. Ethical norms, he argues, are not abstract propositions that are applied externally to particular social relations. Principles of right that are detached from social relations are abstract and empty. To have life they must be embodied in concrete social relations and be recognized. They must express the norms and principles of concrete and particular social roles and institutions. Right for Hegel thus exists concretely only when it takes the form of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit), the social relations and practices of an ethical community, and not of mere abstract moral principles (‘Moralität’). Thus, on the one hand, Hegel retains the idea of a universal and timeless ‘abstract right’; and yet he also develops a social and historical account of right as Sittlichkeit. There is tension between these two aspects of Hegel’s philosophy. Some of the problems of fitting these two aspects together can be seen in his account of pre-modern – ancient and feudal – forms of society that were based on slavery and serfdom. On the one hand, Hegel insists that freedom is a universal right, which all – including slaves and serfs – have simply as persons. ‘The slave has an absolute right to free himself’.17 However, in ancient Greek and Roman society this right was not recognised, even by most slaves, it had no social or historical reality or ‘validity’.18 Indeed, Hegel maintains that ‘Slavery and tyranny are…in the history of nations a necessary stage hence relatively justified’.19 In this way, freedom is an abstract and hence universal right according to Hegel; and yet purely as such it has no social reality, it is a mere abstract principle – a mere ‘ought’ – of the sort that he criticizes so effectively in Kant. As Steven Smith says, Hegel’s abstract right seems ‘every bit as formal and abstract as the deontological ethic Hegel often claims to attack. The idea of personhood is itself based on an abstraction from all the empirical characteristics and attachments we develop in the course of our lives and histories’.20 Thus there appears to be a conflict between these two aspects of Hegel’s philosophy – his notion of abstract right and the social account of rights embodied in the notion of Sittlichkeit. Hegel attempts to resolve this problem 17 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §66A, 97. 18 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §57A, 88. 19 Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, §435A, 175, cf. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, J. Sibree (trans.) (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 99. 20 Steven B. Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 125.

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in his philosophy of history. He sees history as a teleological process of the realization of freedom through the development of right. In ancient society, only some are free: the abstract right of freedom is realized only partially, it is to a degree still implicit and merely in-itself. But this implicit right is in the process of being realized and becoming explicit. Freedom is first explicitly recognized as a universal right by Christianity; it then develops gradually as a concrete reality in the ‘Christian world’. It is fully realized only in modern liberal society.21 Marx As I observed at the outset, many recent accounts try to interpret Marxism as a version of enlightenment liberal moral thought, but Marx’s account of justice and right, and his notion of ideology, are in fact more directly developed from aspects of these Hegelian ideas and are better seen in this context. In particular, the two strands of Hegel’s philosophy that I have just described provide the appropriate background against which to interpret Marx’s thought. For Marx criticizes and rejects the Hegelian notion of abstract right and with it the remaining vestiges of the enlightenment idea of natural rights. Marx’s social and historical account of rights is a development of the other aspect of Hegel’s theory that I have been pointing to: the idea of right as socially embodied in ethical life (Sittlichkeit). Like Hegel, he holds that ethical norms are not abstract and separate theoretical principles, they express the norms of concrete social relations and practices, they are integral to our social life. In this way, Marx’s account of right is fully and consistently social and historical. Of course, Marx’s account also differs in some fundamental ways from Hegel’s. Hegel’s notion of abstract right is based on the idea that human beings, just as such, are free ‘persons’, ontologically distinct from mere ‘things’. This is a metaphysical idea which Marxism, as a form of materialism, must reject. We are natural beings, not ultimately distinct from the rest of natural creation. Our very capacity for free activity develops as our material powers and abilities develop – it does not pre-exist them as an abstract potentiality which transcends them. Marx also rejects the Hegelian teleological idea that history is the realization of freedom and right. For Hegel, the life process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of “the Idea,” is the creator of the

21

Steven B. Smith, “Hegel on Slavery and Domination,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 46, no. 1 (1992), 105–109.

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real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.22 Marx thus ‘inverts’ Hegel’s philosophy.23 History is not the product of the ‘Idea’ realizing itself; rather, the ideas of universal freedom and right are the products of history. Moral values – indeed, ideas and ideology more generally – arise out of and depend upon social relations, not vice-versa. Marx makes this point in ‘Notes on Adolph Wagner’ [1879–80] when he writes, ‘With him [Wagner] there is first right and then intercourse; in reality it is the other way round: first there is intercourse then a legal order [Rechtsordnung] develops out of it’.24 The principles governing the legal order are then formulated in abstract and general terms that come to have a ‘relatively’ autonomous development.25 However, the idea that values and ideas have an existence on their own, prior to and independent of social relations, is ultimately an illusion. ‘Consciousness is consciousness of existing practice’, according to Marx and Engels – the thought that it is something separate arises only subsequently.26 From this moment onwards consciousness can really flatter itself that it is something other than consciousness of existing practice, that it really represents something without representing something real; from now on consciousness is in a position to emancipate itself from the world and to proceed to the formation of “pure” theory, theology, philosophy, ethics, etc.27 In this way, Marx agrees with the central idea of the Hegelian concept of Sittlichkeit, that ethical norms and social relations are necessarily related, even though Marx is a materialist and ‘inverts’ Hegel’s idealist account of this relation. 22 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 102. 23 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 106. 24 Karl Marx, “Notes on Adolph Wagner (1879–80),” in Texts on Method (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975), 210. 25 Friederich Engels, “Letters on Historical Materialism,” in The Marx-Engels Reader and Sean Sayers and Richard Norman, Hegel, Marx and Dialectic: A Debate (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), 93–94; Igor Shoikhedbrod, 2013. “Karl Marx’s Radical Critique of Liberalism and the Future of Right.” Paper presented at the Marx and Philosophy Society 10th Annual Conference, London (http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/assets/files/society/word-docs/ shoikhedbrod2013.docx). 26 With the historical development of the divi­sion between mental and manual labour. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 159. 27 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 159.

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Marx expresses his materialism using the metaphor of base and superstructure.28 Although this serves well enough to emphasize the priority he gives to material factors, it is misleading in other respects. The image of ideology as something that belongs to the superstructure all too readily suggests that it is somehow detached from and ‘above’ the material basis of society. This is not the case, as I have argued, nor is it Marx’s considered view. The Hegelian idea that values are concretely embodied in the practices of ‘ethical life’ provides a better way to understand Marx’s views and gives a more satisfactory account of the nature of ethical values. Norms are embedded in the roles, relations and institutions of society, and are an essential aspect of their functioning. They are concrete, lived aspects of our daily social lives. This social and historical account of ethical values is an essential part of Marx’s critique of the enlightenment form of liberalism.29 Attitudes to Liberalism Apart from his materialism, a second important respect in which Marx differs from Hegel concerns their attitudes to liberal society. Even though Hegel’s social conception of ethics seems to conflict with the universalism of enlightenment liberalism, he is ultimately a liberal himself. This may seem a surprising claim. Hegel’s liberalism has been systematically obscured for many years by the cold war rhetoric of writers like Popper who lump his political philosophy together with Marxism and fascism as a form of ‘totalitarianism’, and portray them all as the ‘enemies’ of liberalism and the ‘open society’.30 This is a tendentious and inaccurate view of Hegel’s political 28 29

30

Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” Others have also criticized the base/superstructure metaphor and interpreted Marx’s account of values along similar lines. For example, Althusser stresses the ways in which ideology is embodied and lived out in social practices. However, he develops his account from an entirely different – anti-Hegelian – perspective, and his work has had the unfor­ tunate effect of obscuring the source of Marx’s ideas in the Hegelian concept of Sittlichkeit. See his Lenin and Philosophy (London: Verso, 1971). Still others have pointed out significant similarities between Marx’s ideas and Aristotle’s way of grounding virtues in social prac­tices. See Alasdair MacIntyre “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken,” in Kelvin Knight (ed.), The Macintyre Reader (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 223–234; Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics. This too has helped to counteract the view of morality as a set of abstract and timeless principles. Nevertheless, the primary source of Marx’s ideas is clearly Hegel, as he himself acknowledges, and his account of justice and right as ideology is best seen in this context. See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5th edn, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

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philosophy and of Marxism too, as Smith and Rawls (2000, 349–371) have persuasively argued.31 To be sure, Hegel makes fundamental criticisms of some of the central tenets of enlightenment liberalism; but he makes these from what is ultimately a liberal position. In particular, as Beiser puts it, Hegel could not accept the common liberal doctrine that the purpose of the state is only to protect natural rights and the freedoms of the market place. Such a doctrine seemed to sanction the dissolution of society into a multitude of isolated and self-seeking atoms, having no sense of belonging or responsibility for the common good.32 To counter the fragmenting effects of the market in modern society, Hegel argues, the state and the institutions of civil society must actively foster communal allegiances and the common welfare. In his wish to temper free market liberalism in this way, and in his communitarian concerns, Hegel can be interpreted as criticising modern liberal society and even as harking back to the premodern ideal of the ancient Greek polis. Alternatively, these aspects of his philosophy can be seen as looking forward, and anticipating the social or welfare state liberalism of later Hegelians such as T.H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet. In any case, Hegel is absolutely insistent that individuality and liberty are the essential and distinctive characteristics of the modern world. He has no thought of actually returning to premodern conditions with their uncritical acceptance of customary ways and established authority. Individual liberty and ‘the right of subjective freedom’ are, he insists, definitive of modernity and inescapable features of the modern world.33 In short, not only does Hegel believe in the universal applicability of the principles of abstract right – the liberal principles of individual freedom and justice – he also maintains that modern bourgeois liberal society has created the social and political conditions within which they can at last be realized, and in which the contradictions between individual and community can be resolved within the framework of a stable state. In these important respects at least, Hegel is a liberal. 31 Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism; and John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 2000), 349–371. See Frederick Beiser, Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 229–233, for a similar account but with a more sceptical emphasis as regards Hegel’s liberalism. 32 Beiser, Hegel, 230. 33 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §124R, 51–52.

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Marx is not. He questions Hegel’s position on precisely these points. Although, as we shall see shortly, Marx does not reject liberal values outright, he nevertheless denies the central liberal claim that they can be realized in a satisfactory form in bourgeois society founded on liberal principles of right. In particular, Marx denies that the values of individual liberty and equality can be realized in a society based upon the private ownership of the means of production and the predominance of commodity exchange. The contradictions of bourgeois society, he insists, are an inherent and ineliminable feature of it. The realization of the ideals of liberty, equality and individuality requires a fundamental social and political transformation – a transformation that will be impelled by these contradictions themselves. For Marx maintains that these will give rise ultimately to the emergence of a new social order in which the conflicts of liberal society can be resolved and in which the liberal ideals of freedom and justice can at last be realized. II

Marx on Rights and Justice

So far I have focused on the formal theoretical framework within which Marx’s views about rights and justice need to be interpreted. I will turn now to what he has to say about the content of liberal values. Marx wrote little explicitly on this topic. The two most extensive discussions are from either end of his working life. Both accord with the account of Marx’s thought that I have been giving. From them it is clear that although his ideas evolve and develop, the basic form of his thought – the historical approach – remains a feature of it throughout. On the Jewish Question Marx’s most extensive discussion of liberal ideas of human or natural rights occurs in ‘On the Jewish Question’. This is a very early article, written in 1843, before Marx thought of himself as a communist. It is a young Hegelian piece criticizing Bruno Bauer, a fellow young Hegelian, for his views on the topic of Jewish emancipation. It includes detailed analysis of the ideas of natural or human rights enshrined in a number of eighteenth century us and French constitutional documents and Declarations of Rights. Marx argues that the ‘rights of man’ asserted in these documents are not the universal and eternal principles that these documents claim them to be. Rather they express the principles of the atomistic individualism of bourgeois society. ‘The so-called rights of man…are simply the rights of a member of civil society,

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that is, of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community’.34 Marx shows that a number of the specific ‘natural rights’ claimed in these documents – including the rights to liberty, equality, security, and private property – each has this character. As regards the right of property, for example, Marx maintains, The right of property is…the right to enjoy one’s fortune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest. This individual liberty, and its application, forms the basis of civil society. It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty.35 As Leopold says, it has become an ‘interpretative commonplace’ to treat Marx, in passages like this, as simply condemning the liberal idea of human rights outright as illusory – as mere ‘ideology’ in the pejorative sense that uncritically endorses bourgeois society.36 However, as Leopold rightly argues, there is no basis for this interpretation. In relating the idea of human rights to the forms of civil society and showing it to be characteristically bourgeois, Marx is not simply dismissing it. Rather his main purpose is to understand the notion of human rights in the context of the social relations that give rise to it. In short, he is taking an historical view of it. He is arguing that these rights are not the universal and eternal moral principles they are claimed to be; rather, they express the norms of a particular sort of society at particular stage of its development. They express the social and economic relations of bourgeois civil society, a society of atomistic individualism and private property. ‘The so-called rights of man…are nothing but the rights of the member of civil society, that is of egoistic man, separated from other men and from the community’.37 34 35 36 37

Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 42. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 42. David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 150. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 42. Cf: ‘None of the so-called rights of man…go beyond egoistic man, beyond man as a member of civil society – that is, an individual withdrawn into himself, into the confines of his private interests and private caprice, and separated from the community. In the rights of man, he is far from being conceived as a species-being; on the contrary, species-life itself, society, appears as a framework external to the individuals, as a restriction of their original independence’. Ibid.

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Marx is, of course, critical of bourgeois society. But his critique of it does not appeal to supposedly universal or timeless principles, it is not a moral and absolute one, as so many recent writers have maintained, it does not condemn bourgeois society in a purely negative way. On the contrary, Marx’s approach is historical and relative.38 In ‘On the Jewish Question’, Marx contrasts the ‘political freedoms’ proclaimed by the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century with a fuller ‘human’ notion of freedom. However, his purpose is not to dismiss these bourgeois freedoms. On the contrary, he acknowledges that, ‘Political emancipation is…a big step forward. True, it is not the final form of human emancipation in general, but it is the final form of human emancipation within the hitherto existing world order’.39 Relative to the restrictions and restraints that had existed previously, in feudal society, the political freedoms introduced by the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century constituted a real advance; but a higher social order and, with it, a more developed, ‘human’ form of freedom will eventually be possible. Of course, part of Marx’s purpose here is to criticize liberalism and the bourgeois social order of private property and atomistic individualism upon which it is founded. It is quite wrong to gloss over this and try to rewrite Marxism as a form of radical liberalism as do many recent writers (Cohen, Geras, etc.). And yet Marx does not reject liberal rights and liberal values outright. His philosophy should not be interpreted as an abstract or absolute negation of the liberal tradition, but rather as, in some important respects, a continuation and completion of it. The notion of ‘human’ emancipation that Marx invokes here is a development and a realization of the limited, ‘political’ form of emancipation achieved in liberal society. His position implies that the central liberal value of liberty can be achieved only partially in liberal society. It can be fully realized only after a radical change in the social order. This is the point of view from which he responds to Bauer on the issue of religious emancipation. Bauer argues that Judaism involves particularistic allegiances and commitments that are incompatible with the universalist demands of a liberal state. Full citizenship and political participation in a liberal society therefore requires the repudiation of such religious affiliations. 38

39

See Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), Ch. 6, cf. Igor, Shoikhedbrod, “Karl Marx’s Radical Critique of Liberalism and the Future of Right.” Paper presented at the Marx and Philosophy Society 10th Annual Conference, London, 2013 (http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/assets/ files/society/word-docs/shoikhedbrod2013.docx). Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 35.

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In arguing thus, Marx objects, Bauer is confusing ‘political’ with ‘human’ emancipation. The emancipation of religion from political restraints brought about by the modern liberal state grants the freedom of religion. The state no longer seeks to control religious beliefs and practices, religion is treated as a purely private matter, citizens are free to believe and worship as they will. Marx argues that Bauer is wrong to think that this sort of political emancipation requires freedom from religion. Only full ‘human’ emancipation in a society of the future will lead to the complete transcendence of religion, and freedom from religion altogether. Even so, Marx maintains, the liberal freedom of belief and worship constitutes ‘a big step forward’40 in freedom for the Jews and other non-conformist religious groups. Likewise, with other liberal rights, such as the rights to equality, property, security, and the legal institutions that embody them. Although these are characteristic of bourgeois society, they too must be judged relatively and historically. For example, the liberal right to property, Marx says, guarantees to all41 the ‘freedom to own property’ (a right that was restricted in feudal society), but not yet the ‘freedom from property’.42 Thus, relative to previous social conditions, bourgeois liberal society – and the rights and liberties it creates – constitutes a genuine advance. However, the kind of freedoms it makes possible – bourgeois freedoms, merely ‘political’ freedoms – remain limited and imperfect. A higher ‘human’ form of emancipation is possible; but this will require the advent of a different form of society, a new ‘world order’.43 Critique of the Gotha Programme In ‘On the Jewish Question’, in 1843, Marx says nothing about what shape this new social order might take. Within a year, however, he has declared himself to be a communist; and his ideas about the nature of a future society begin to develop.44 Marx’s fullest account of his conception of future communist society is given in ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme’, written towards end of his life 40 41 42 43

44

Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 35. All white men at least, at the time that Marx was writing. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 45. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 35. For a well worked out account of Marx’s position along similar lines, see Igor Shoikhedbrod, “Karl Marx’s Radical Critique of Liberalism and the Future of Right”, in Marx and Philosophy Society 10th Annual Conference, London, 2013 (http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/society/events). Karl Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in The Marx-Engels Reader; Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1978); and Marx and Engels, “Marx to Arnold Ruge, September 1843,” in The Marx-Engels Reader.

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(1875). This work also contains a detailed discussion of the principles of property right and distributive justice that Marx believes will apply in such a society. From the late 1840s onwards, Marx had argued that there will need to be a first ‘transitional’ stage of communism between capitalism and the creation of a fully communist society. In this first stage of communism, private ownership of the means of production (capital) will be abolished; but private property will continue to exist in the sphere of consumption. Distribution of the products of labour to individual workers (after deductions have been made centrally for necessary social expenditures) will be according to the quantity of work they do. As Marx observes, this will involve a principle of exchange of equal values similar to the economic principle governing bourgeois society (indeed, Marx calls it the principle of ‘bourgeois right’), although, in such a society, unlike in bourgeois society, individuals will no longer be able to gain an income simply through the ownership of capital. A communist society of this sort will be governed by the principle that individual workers have the right to the proceeds of their own labour (once deductions have been made for communal expenditures). A principle of this sort is often thought to provide the basis for socialist criticism of capitalism since, in it, some of the proceeds of labour are extracted by capital in the form of profit. Geras, for example, criticizes capitalism in this way when he writes that ‘it violates a principle of moral equality if the efforts of some people go unrewarded whilst others enjoy benefits without having to expend any effort’.45 And Geras treats this as a timeless moral principle and imputes it to Marx. That is a misinterpretation. Marx’s point is that this principle is one that governs economic distribution at a particular historical stage, the first stage of communism. In so far as it can be used to criticize the present capitalist system, this is because ‘elements of the new society’ already exist within it, and the real possibility of creating such a society has come onto the agenda.46 Principles of right, including this one, are historical and relative: ‘Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby’.47 A first-stage communist society of this sort, Marx suggests, will constitute an ‘advance’ in equality over bourgeois society in that individual income will be strictly related to work done, and it will no longer be possible to gain an income simply by owning capital. Even so, the retention of the principle of bourgeois right means that such a society will continue to be ‘encumbered by 45 46 47

Geras, “Bringing Marx to Justice: An Addendum and a Rejoinder,” 60. Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 489. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 531.

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a bourgeois limitation’.48 Distribution according the amount of work done will inevitably give rise to economic inequalities due to individual differences of circumstance and ability: some will work more than others, some will have more dependents than others, etc.49 Eventually this limited form of right and these inequalities too will be superseded. ‘In a higher phase of communist society’ in which the conditions of abundance have been realized, in Marx’s well known words, ‘only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’50 Such a society, in which distribution is according to need, will no longer be governed by the quantitative principle of distribution of equal values embodied in the principle of bourgeois right. Those with many needs will receive a greater share of the social product than those with few needs; and, because there will be abundant means to satisfy all needs, no attempt need be made to equalize these differences. In that sense the liberal concern for equality in the sphere of distribution will have been superseded. For this reason, one might say that a communist society of this sort is ‘beyond equality’. This is what I argued in Marx and Alienation. However, this suggests that the principle of right in full communism is a mere negation of the liberal idea of equality. I have now come to question this.51 For communist society can also be looked upon as embodying a less limited – a qualitative and not merely quantitative – form of equality; hence that such a society will not simply negate the value of equality, but on the contrary realize it more fully. That is more in line with the account of Marxism that I am developing here, and it is the interpretation that I am now inclined to think better expresses its philosophy. Similar issues arise with respect to the norms of justice that operate in a full communist society. It is often argued that such a society will be ‘beyond justice’ in the sense that principles of justice and right will no longer operate in it. There are various ways in which this point can be made. Most are variations on the theme that norms of justice and right are required only when there are conflicts that need to be resolved. However, communism, as Marx envisages it, is supposed to be a society in which the abolition of private property has eliminated the basis of social divisions and conflicts, and material abundance has eliminated the sources of material inequality and conflict – thus removing the need for principles of justice. In other words, what Marx foresees, it is argued, 48 49 50 51

Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 530. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 530–531. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 531. Particularly through discussion with David Marjoribanks.

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is the complete transcendence of justice. Summarising these arguments (which he does not share), Reiman writes: The very ideal of justice assumes that people will be pressing conflicting claims on one another, that they will stand in antagonistic rather than cooperative relations to one another. Communism, by contrast, is held to be an ideal of communal solidarity in which antagonistic relations have been overcome and people need no rights or justice to persuade others to cooperate with them.52 Many commentators attribute such views to Marx, and some also defend them.53 However, it is doubtful that such a society could ever exist, and doubtful also that Marx’s account of communism should be interpreted in this way. Even if all the causes of material and social antagonism could be entirely eliminated, disputes between individuals will surely still arise. For this reason alone, some standards by which to deal with them will continue to be needed. Moreover, there are other and more philosophical grounds to believe that norms of justice will continue to be a feature of even the most harmonious of societies: indeed, that they are required in all societies. This is Rawls’ position, for example; and he asserts it against what he takes to be Marx’s view that communism will be ‘beyond justice’. ‘The absence of concern with justice is undesirable as such, because having a sense of justice is…part of understanding other people and of recognizing their claims’.54 Rawls, like many recent commentators, treats Marx as following in the footsteps of Hume in holding that rules of justice serve the utilitarian purpose of maintaining the conditions necessary for social order and economic prosperity. They are needed only in certain ‘circumstances of justice’ in which peoples’ ‘limited altruism’ combines with conditions of ‘moderate scarcity’ to give rise to social conflict. There are no grounds for attributing this utilitarian sort of account of justice to Marx. Marx, as I have argued, is in the Hegelian tradition; 52

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Jeffrey Reiman, “Moral Philosophy: The Critique of Capitalism and the Problem of Ideology,” in Terrell Carver (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 153. For good accounts of these arguments see Robert C. Tucker, “Marx and Distributive Justice,” in The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970), 33–53; Evgenii B. Pashukanis, Law and Marxism: A General Theory (London: Ink Links, 1978); Reiman, “Moral Philosophy: The Critique of Capitalism and the Problem of Ideology,” 153–156. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy (Cambridge ma: Belknap Press, 2001), 372.

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and this brings him closer to Rawls’s view than he – Rawls – appreciates. For Marx, like Hegel, regards social relations as ethical relations (Sittlichkeit): ethical norms are constitutive of them. All social relations thus involve ethical norms, including those of communist society. Concern for justice and right will not therefore be abolished in it.55 Distribution in communist society will be according to ‘need’. This is an all-toovague phrase about which there has been a great deal of debate; but those arguments are for the most part irrelevant here. For the notion of distribution according to need – if it means anything determinate – implies the operation of certain norms. There are limits to what is needed, and things that are not needed by individuals cannot legitimately be appropriated by them. Thus, for example, products of social labour should not be squandered, wasted, or wantonly destroyed. In short, a system of property right continues to exist even in communist society – a system of communal not individual and private property to be sure, but a system of property nonetheless – with its attendant norms of justice and right.56 In the first stage of communism, in which distribution is according work done, due to the inevitable inequalities just noted, some degree of injustice will continue, though this will be less than results from the huge inequalities created by the capitalist system. Some people will receive more than they need whereas the needs of some others will not be fully met. Full communism will eliminate these inequalities. But it will not eliminate norms of justice and right altogether, it will not be ‘beyond justice’. Communism will transcend the limitations of bourgeois and earlier forms of property and justice in order to realize them more fully, rather than as an absolute negation of them. This implies again that Marx’s critique of liberalism does not entail the mere negation of liberal values – it points rather to their true fulfilment in a future society. III

Relativism and the Justification of Values

I have been arguing that Marx puts forward a social and historical account of values, and this provides the framework for his account of the values that will govern a communist society of the future. But now the question arises: why prefer the norms and values of a future communist society to those of the present or past? How can they be justified? As far as I am aware, Marx himself did 55

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Cf. Andrew Chitty’s interesting analysis of relations of production as relations of recognition which implies this too, I think. “Recognition and Social Relations of Production,” Historical Materialism, vol. 2, no. 1: 57–97. I argue this case more fully in my Marx and Alienation, Ch. 7.

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not explicitly address this question. However it has been much debated by subsequent Marxists. If communist values continue and complete liberal principles of justice and right, as I have been arguing, it might be thought that some of the justifications that are given for liberalism can be adopted by Marxism too; but things are not so straightforward. Liberal values of justice and right are supposed to be universal and timeless. Their justification has posed great problems for liberal political philosophy.57 It is sometimes said that claims to human rights are ‘self-evident’.58 Clearly this is not tenable. What seems self-evident is susceptible to large social and historical variation. To the authors of the us Declaration of Independence it seemed self-evident that ‘all men are created equal’. To many of their contemporaries, not to mention Plato, Aristotle and others in ancient world, it seemed equally evident that men – and women – were created different and unequal. The claim to ‘self-evidence’ cannot provide a workable basis on which to justify principles of justice. Others like Rawls maintain, in a Kantian fashion, that there is the possibility of forming a rational consensus about basic moral principles. That too is questionable.59 It seems clear, at least, that no such consensus actually exists in modern society, and it is doubtful whether it can be created.60 Indeed, Rawls himself came to accept this in his later work. He argues instead for a ‘political’ conception of justice, and he settles for the claim that there can, at best, be an ‘overlapping consensus’ about basic moral principles.61 Marx gives good reasons to think that even such a looser sort of consensus is ultimately unattainable in bourgeois liberal society. For this kind of society cannot create a harmonious order, it cannot provide the necessary conditions for a moral consensus. The system of the private ownership of the means of production inevitably generates irresolvable conflicts which give rise to contradictory perspectives and values. In the present form of society, according to Marxism, there cannot be an enduring and universally agreed consensus on moral matters. Moreover Marxism, unlike liberalism, does not claim to command such a consensus. It recognizes that it, too, is a product of divided and 57 58 59 60 61

These problems have been a main reason for scepticism about the idea of natural rights and support of the alternative naturalist and consequentialist approach. E.g. in the us ‘Declaration of Independence’. See Perry Anderson, “Review of John Rawls, Political Liberalism,” in Dissent (Winter, 1994), 140–141. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn. (London: Duckworth, 1985). John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 134–149.

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contradictory conditions. It does not claim to be a perspective that is universally endorsed by all rational beings. Rather it recognizes that it is only the outlook of a particular class of modern industrial society. Why then should it have any wider appeal or rational authority? We are led back to the issue of relativism. How can the values of Marxism and its critique of liberalism be justified? Various ways of answering this question have been proposed within the Marxist tradition. One approach is advocated in the work of Sandra Harding. Writing from a feminist perspective, she accepts the Marxist view that values are social and historical products and that they always represent a particular and partial perspective. However, she maintains, not all perspectives are epistemologically equal: ‘some…social locations are better than others’.62 The exploited, the marginalized and the oppressed have no interest in defending the existing order, unlike those in more privileged positions. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, they have ‘Nothing to lose but their chains’. Their perspective is not deformed by particular attachments, hence it is in a position to claim universal validity. This is reminiscent of Kant’s argument, in Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, that the ‘disinterested’ character of aesthetic judgements is the basis for their claim to universal validity.63 Even with such an illustrious pedigree, however, this is unpersuasive. The fact that a perspective arises from a marginalized position shows, at best, only that it may be less liable to distortion through attachment to the existing order. However, it is still a particular and partial perspective, and cannot claim to be universal. Moreover, the exploited and the oppressed are not a homogeneous group, they do not speak with a single voice. Even among the marginalized, there are different social positions, and these give rise to different and conflicting perspectives. The working class in Marx’s sense (those who do not own the means of production and who must therefore sell their labour) are the great majority in the developed capitalist world. This fact points towards another way of justifying communist ideas of right. By establishing a state that rules in their interests, communism claims to be more democratic than capitalist society ruled by a 62

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Sandra Harding, “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology: What Is ‘Strong Objectivity’?” in Feminist Epistemologies, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds) (New York: Routledge, 1993), 56. ‘If someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked that holds for everyone’. Kant, Critique of Judgment: Including the First Introduction, Werner S. Pluhar (trans.) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 54.

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liberal state in the interests of the bourgeoisie. In the words of the Manifesto, communism will ‘win the battle of democracy’.64 Its governing principles will thus, it can be claimed, enjoy a far greater popular legitimacy than those of bourgeois liberal society. They will be in a better position to gain a ‘political consensus’ than the liberal principles advocated by Rawls. A more ambitious argument is put forward by Georg Lukács. He acknowledges that Marxism is the outlook of the working class, and that they are only a particular class in modern society. However, like Marx he maintains that the working class has the possibility of creating a classless society that is no longer characterized by fundamental class divisions and antagonisms. Its struggle is thus not simply for its own particular class interests; for these can ultimately be achieved only through the overcoming of all class divisions, and hence by the abolition of itself as a particular class. Its aim is thus its own overcoming. ‘The proletariat only perfects itself by annihilating and transcending itself, by creating the classless society through the successful conclusion of its own class struggle’.65 This society will be one in which for the first time the notion of human universality will have a genuine social and historical basis. In that sense, the modern working class is what Lukács calls the ‘universal class’, and an ethic based on its perspective can have a genuinely universal character.66 What Lukács here presents is in effect a historicized version of the Kantian idea of a rational consensus discussed earlier. For although he accepts that no such consensus is achievable in bourgeois liberal society because of its inherent class divisions, he argues that this will be possible in a future communist society. Moreover, he maintains, the forces that will create this society exist already in capitalist society, and this provides a real and present basis for communist values. This way of justifying the Marxist moral outlook stands or falls with its account of history; and this raises a host of new problems. These should not be allowed to obscure the importance of Marx’s critique of liberalism, and in particular, the social and historical account of values on which it is based. Nevertheless, it is clear that Marx’s account of historical development is relevant to his moral outlook and cannot be ignored. Marxism is not an a priori theory of history, it gives no teleological guarantee that society will develop beyond capitalism. Economic and political conditions have changed enormously since Marx wrote. There is no doubt that his 64 65 66

Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 530. Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1971), 80. Lukács makes a vital distinction between the actual and the ‘imputed’ outlook of the working class which I do not have the space to go into here.

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analysis of capitalism needs to be modified in the light of these changes; but to discuss how is way beyond my scope here. However, this much at least should be said: if it should turn out, as some say, that capitalism and liberal society constitute the ‘end of history’ and there is no future beyond them, then Marx will be proven to be mistaken, and his critique of liberalism will be refuted. But there are no good reasons to take this view. The present liberal capitalist world order is riven with divisions and conflicts, it is volatile and unstable. The aspiration to create a less divided society, founded on communal principles, as Marxism envisages, is still alive and at work all over the world. And although it is not clear how or by whom this project will be taken forward, there are these historical grounds to believe that it remains valid and that it may yet prevail. If this seems a low key and uncertain note on which to end, I can only say that this reflects the difficult and uncertain times for the left in which we now live.67 67

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Marx and Philosophy Society 10th Annual Conference, London, 15 June, 2013. I am grateful for helpful feedback from participants, and particularly from Jan Kandiyali.

chapter 7

Marx, Modernity and Human Rights Bob Cannon While Marxists are critical of postmodernists there is a crucial issue on which many agree with the latter. This concerns the identification of modernity with oppressive social practices.1 While postmodernists identify modernity with racism, colonialism and in extremis genocide2 (Goldberg 1993), Marxists such as Alex Callinicos argue that ‘…the actually existing form taken by modernity is capitalism’.3 In the process, Marxists discredit modernity’s normative content (such as, human rights) by rendering it complicit in capitalist oppression.4 In support of this approach, Zoltan Zigedy argues: …declarations and codifications of human rights are inseparable from their role in bourgeois society, their place in the social fabric of capitalism. Human rights doctrine serves as a secure and compatible foundation for morality, law, and politics in the ascendency and maturation of the capitalist mode of production. zoltan zigedy, ‘Human Rights: A Marxian Perspective’, 2013 http://philosophersforchange.org/2013/07/09/human-rights-a-marxian-perspective/

For this reason, Steven Lukes argues that: …a Marxist cannot…believe in human rights. Those many non-hypocritical and non-self-deceiving Marxists who do so can only, therefore, be 1 Moishe Postone, Time, Labor and Social Domination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 4. 2 David Goldberg, Racist Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). 3 Alex Callinicos, The Resources of Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). Similarly, Moishe Postone argues capitalism “…provides an excellent point of departure for an attempt to ground socially the systemic characteristics of modernity…,” 4, while Fredric Jameson argues that “… for Marx modernity is simply capitalism…,” in A Singular Modernity (London: Verso, 2002), 80. 4 Frederick Engels argues that with the bourgeois epoch, “…superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man…” We know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal Right found its realization in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equality before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man… “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific,” in Lawrence and Wishart (eds.), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 395. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_009

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revisionists who have discarded or abandoned those central tenets of the Marxist canon which are incompatible with such a belief.5 In fact, Marx’s approach to human rights is less consistent and more complex than this.6 Nevertheless, there are many passages in which Marx denounces morality in general and human rights in particular.7 In a much cited letter to Engels, Marx writes that: I wrote An Address to the Working Class… My proposals were all accepted by the subcommittee. Only I was obliged to insert two phrases about ‘duty’ and ‘right’ into the Preamble to the Statutes, ditto ‘truth, morality, and justice’, but these are placed in such a way that they can do no harm.8 But if Marx believes it harmful to ground the critique of capitalism in ‘right’, ‘morality’ and ‘justice’, then in what does he ground his critique? Over the years, Marxists have provided a number of responses to this question. Many argue Marx eschewed morality in favour of a scientific critique of capitalism grounded in a labour theory of value (Murray 1988).9 Others argue that Marx’s labour theory of value retains a moral dimension, insofar as it presumes human beings are essentially self-determining.10 A smaller number argue that Marx’s 5

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Steven Lukes, “Can a Marxist Believe in Human Rights?” Praxis International, No. 4, 344. Claude Lefort argues that: “The spread of Marxism…has long gone hand in hand with a devaluation of rights in general and with the vehement, ironic or ‘scientific’ condemnation of the bourgeois notion of human rights.” “Politics and Human Rights,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 239. Paul Blackledge typifies Marxists that argue for Marx, “…the Rights of Man and the Rights of the Citizen…reified the empty egoistical nature of humanity in bourgeois society, and therefore obscure the way that ‘individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association’.” Subsequent revolutionary movements from below, by challenging the social framework which underpin these theories, necessarily act in “flagrant contradiction” to the theories themselves’ Marxism and Ethics (Albany, ny: suny Press, 2012), 77. Werner Sombart (1892) argues that: “Marxism is distinguished from all other socialist systems by its anti-ethical tendency. In all of Marxism from beginning to end, there is not a grain of ethics, and consequently no more of an ethical judgment than an ethical postulate,” cited in Robert Tucker Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 12. Karl Marx, “Marx to Engels in Manchester,” (London, 4 November 1864), http://www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/letters/64_11_04.htm. Patrick Murray, Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (London: Humanities Press, 1988). See Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics.

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condemnation of capitalism is Aristotelian in origin.11 While some argue Marx re-appropriates bourgeois norms for socialist ends.12 In contrast to these approaches I shall argue that Marx’s critique of capitalism is grounded in modernity’s normative content: above all, the modern norm of self-determination.13 However, rather than providing an (overtly) ethical critique of capitalism, Marx renders self-determination an ontological property of (self-objectifying) labour. Under capitalism this finds expression in labour’s value-creating powers. Blackledge is therefore right to argue that Marx’s critique of capitalism rests upon an essentialist conception of freedom; but wrong to endorse it. An essentialist conception of freedom is not only a contradiction in terms it also falls foul of Marx’ own critique of ‘true socialism’. Having (covertly) appropriated the modern right of self-determination for labour, Marx then (overtly) treats modern norms (such as human rights) as a bourgeois phenomenon. Having equipped himself with a scientific critique of capitalism – grounded in the objective exploitation of labour – Marx eschews a moral critique of capitalism. However, as many commentators have noted, this does not exhaust Marx’s approach to modern norms. On the contrary, there are many passages in which Marx expresses moral outrage at the way capitalism compels workers to sell themselves into slavery and death.14 To this extent, Marx’s writings present defenders and detractors alike with a conundrum. Having overtly repudiated morality, Marx condemns capitalism as immoral. As Norman Geras notes: Disowning, when he is not actively ridiculing, any attachment to ideals or values, he is nevertheless quite free in making critical normative judgments, author of a discourse that is replete with the signs of an intense moral commitment.15

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Andrew N. Carpenter, “The Aristotelian Heart of Marx’s Condemnation of Capitalism,” 41–64, Studia Philosophica Wratislaviensia. David Harvey, “The Right to the City,” New Left Review, no. 2/53, 2011. Robert Antonio is rare in arguing that for Marx, “…advanced capitalism was still a class society, and thus the epochal rupture and promise of modernity would not be complete until the new social powers were decoupled from the bourgeoisie and capitalism.” Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 78. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 416. Geras argues that “Marx did think capitalism was unjust but he did not think he thought so. This is because…he expressed himself as subscribing to an extremely narrow conception of [justice]. The conception was narrow in two respects: associating justice, firstly, in more or less legal positivist fashion, with prevailing or conventional juridical norms…and

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To correct this, I propose to retrieve the modern normative resources upon which Marx’s critique of capitalism rests. In the process, I argue that far from colluding in capitalism, human rights partake of a wider revolution in moral thinking that invalidates capitalism. Marx channels this moral revolution through (self-objectifying) labour to render capitalism an alienated product of the latter. This however renders Marx vulnerable to his critique of ‘true socialism’. In The German Ideology Marx and Engels take issue with true socialists for assuming that a subject can exercise self-determination despite being immured within a compulsory economic system. Yet this is precisely what Marx assumes in order to ground his critique of capitalism in a labour theory of value. If however we accept that labour is absorbed into capital – and capital comprises a self-valorizing subject. Then labour cannot exercise self-determination – and cannot therefore be the source, substance and subject of value. On the contrary, labour can only exercise self-determination via an opposing form of sociality (such as trade unions). Rather than comprising an (ontological) attribute of labour I argue that self-determination comprises an (ethical) attribute of labour movement struggles. Herein resides the importance of human rights to working class struggle.16 They may have begun life as a bourgeois phenomenon but human rights embody a modern mode of ethical self-determination, which is capable of rendering capitalism unjust. In rendering human rights a bourgeois phenomenon (restricted to exchange), Marxists risk colluding with capitalism’s defenders in thwarting the critical potential of human rights. Capitalism’s defenders often appear more aware of the potential of human rights to facilitate working class ends and invalidate capitalism than Marxists. This is evident in Isaiah Berlin’s repudiation of positive in favour of negative liberty. Berlin recognizes the danger posed by the modern right of self-determination to the legitimacy of capitalism and seeks to neutralize its normative potential by restricting it to negative freedom. There is a parallel here to modern science. Although capitalism plays a crucial role in the generation of modern science, this does not render it a bourgeois phenomenon. On the contrary, Marx (overtly) grounds his critique of capitalism in a modern scientific perspective. We should view modern norms in a similar fashion. Although capitalism plays a crucial role in their generation, this does not render them a bourgeois

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associating it, secondly, with…focus upon the process of exchange in the market”, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” in Alex Callinicos (ed.), Marxist Theory (London: Open University Press, 1989), 245. See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Penguin, 1963).

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phenomenon. On the contrary, Marx (covertly) grounds his critique of capitalism in a modern normative perspective. Human rights were forged in a revolutionary struggle that rendered human freedom the only legitimate basis for social order.17 This revolution imbues modernity with sufficient normative resources to invalidate capitalism (as Marx’s appropriation of them for labour attests). It is therefore vital not to collapse modernity into capitalism and thereby discredit modern norms. In the next section, I shall outline the moral revolution that modernity inaugurates and how it was incorporated into Marx’s labour theory of value.

Modernity’s Moral Revolution

Prior to modernity, moral laws were granted the status of natural laws. They transcended human beings and acquired their legitimacy from a combination of natural and supernatural force of which they were an expression.18 In contrast, modernity detaches morality from natural and supernatural forces and grounds its legitimacy in the uncoerced agreement of those to whom it applies.19 As Robert Pippin notes: The inauguration of modernity cannot then be understood as the discovery that human beings are self-determining and not naturally or theologically dependent or finite in ways previously thought. And this is the beginning of an extremely complex claim in Kant: that his own assertions about human freedom are not matters of fact, or substantial metaphysical claims. A self-determining freedom is a condition for making any claims about the world or our own actions’.20 The modern norm of freedom finds expression in a set of ‘universal human rights’, which in the first instance establish the right to take part in law-making; the right not to be accused, arrested or detained except in cases determined by law; the right to be presumed innocent until declared guilty; the right to do anything that does not harm others; and the right to speak, write and publish 17

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The modern concept of “revolution” renders modernity a self-grounding epoch, which “… has to create its normativity out of itself” (Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 7; emphasis omitted). Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1985). See Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Robert Pippin, 49.

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freely. These rights find their earliest comprehensive expression in the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ (1789). The modern norm of freedom – unleashed by the French Revolution – was enthusiastically adopted by German idealism: beginning with Immanuel Kant’s attempt to reground epistemology, ethics and aesthetics in a modern ‘self-active subject’.21 Kant portrays the transition to modernity as a transition from ‘heteronomy’ (in which moral laws are externally imposed), to ‘autonomy’ (in which agents agree their own moral laws). For Kant, modernity is a work in progress by means of which humans acquire the ‘maturity’ to make their own decisions.22 At the heart of Kant’s moral philosophy resides the distinction between: (1) ‘things’ (Sachen) that are means to an end, and (2) ‘persons’ (Personen) that are ends in themselves.23 From this Kant derives ‘a supreme practical principle’ (or ‘categorical imperative’ in respect to the human will), which obliges ‘rational creatures’ to treat one another as ends in themselves rather than mere means to an end (ibid.). From this perspective, the only legitimate laws are ones that people give themselves. ‘To test whether any particular measure can be agreed upon as a law for a people, we need only ask whether a people could well impose such a law upon itself’.24 Nevertheless, Hegel argues that Kant fails to adequately identify the social conditions that render modern freedom possible. According to Hegel, the advent of modernity makes a qualitative difference to the struggle for freedom: nor least, because it generates a distinctive form of subjective freedom. ‘The principle of the modern world at large is freedom of subjectivity, according to which all essential aspects present in the spiritual totality develop and enter into their right’.25 Hegel attributes the advent of modern subjective freedom to ‘civil (bourgeois) society’ (Burgerliche Gesellschaft). He then highlights the way individuals relate to each other in exchange as bearers of rights: such as the right to freely dispose of one’s own property.26 Nevertheless, Hegel is wary of allowing modern subjects to exercise 21

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1929), 151–152. According to Kant’s “law of freedom,” “…right comprehends the whole of the conditions under which the will of any one person can be harmonized in reality with the will of every other person…” The Science of Right (London: Forgotten Books, 2008), 3 (translation modified). 22 Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?’” in Kant: Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). 23 Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals (New York: Prometheus Books, 1987), 57. 24 Kant, “What Is Enlightenment,” 57. 25 G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 312. 26 See Richard Dien Winfield, The Just Economy (New York: Routledge, 1990).

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ethical self-determination. He argues this caused ‘the terror’ that consumed the French Revolution.27 In opposition to modern subjective freedom Hegel evokes an objective conception of freedom, which derives from a supra-human Spirit and finds expression in the modern state. The state in and by itself is the ethical whole, the actualization of freedom, and it is the absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual. The state is the spirit [Geist] which is present in the world and which consciously realizes itself therein… The state consists in the march of God in the world….28 However, in attributing freedom to an objective Spirit, Hegel negates his own principle of subjective freedom. Any discussion of freedom must begin not with individuality (Einzelheit) of the individual self-consciousness, but only with the essence of selfconsciousness; for whether human beings know it or not, this essence realizes itself as a self-sufficient power of which single individuals (die einzelnen Individuen) are only moments.29 Having championed modern freedom, Hegel now opposes it in the name of a pre-modern Spirit, which governs humanity in a god-like fashion. For this reason, Ludwig Feuerbach (1848) argues that Hegel’s Spirit – like the Christian God upon which it is modelled – comprises an alienated expression of humanity’s own self-determining powers. The divine essence is nothing other than the human essence; abstracted from the limits of the individual, the real, corporeal human, and objectified. Regarded and revered as another essence, distinct from our own. All determinations of the divine essence are, therefore, determinations of the human essence.30 This leads Marx to argue that Spirit is merely a distorted form of human labour by means of which humanity creates itself. He then congratulates Hegel for 27

G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 355–363. 28 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 279. 29 Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 258. 30 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 1841, Introduction and Part I.

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conceiving ‘…the self-creation of man as a process…he therefore grasps the nature of labour and comprehends objective man – true, because real man – as the result of his own labour’.31 On this basis, Marx assigns to human labour the self-determining (self-objectifying) powers that Hegel assigns to Spirit. It is in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being. Such production is his active species-life. Through it, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labour is, therefore, the objectification of the species-life of man: for man produces himself not only intellectually, in his consciousness, but actively and actually, and he can therefore contemplate himself in a world he himself has created.32 Nevertheless, Marx still remains within the orbit of German idealism insofar as he renders freedom an essential attribute of human labour. This presumes that freedom can be exercised in abstraction from the social and historical conditions that render it possible. Marx makes the final leap into a fully modern conception of freedom in the Sixth ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’, in which he argues that ‘Feuerbach dissolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations’.33 To this end, Marx transfers opposition to capitalism from (a) the essential powers of humanity to (b) the selfemancipation of the working class. In a critique that also applies to Marx’s own early writings, Marx and Engels take issue with ‘true socialists’ for grounding opposition to capitalism in the philosophical categories of German idealism rather than the struggles of the working class.34 In positing a ‘free-subject’ that (covertly) creates the ‘external compulsion’ of capitalism, Marx and Engels argue true socialists forget that humans are social and historical beings, whose ‘inner’ nature is constituted by their ‘external’ social relations. 31 Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Early Writings: Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 386. 32 Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” 329. 33 Karl Marx, “Thesis on Feuerbach,” in Lawrence and Wishart (ed.), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 29. 34 Marx and Engels criticize true socialists for writing “…their philosophical nonsense beneath the French original. For instance, beneath the French criticism of the economic functions of money, they wrote ‘Alienation of Humanity’…” (Marx and Engels, 1968a, 56–57).

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The [true] socialist opposes to present-day society, which is ‘based upon external compulsion’, the ideal of true society, which is based upon the ‘consciousness of man’s inward nature, i.e., upon reason’. It is based, that is, upon the consciousness of consciousness, upon the thought of thought. The true socialist does not differ from the philosophers even in his choice of terms. He forgets that the ‘inward nature’ of men, as well as their ‘consciousness’; of it, ‘i.e’., their ‘reason’, has at all times been an historical product and that even when, as he believes, the society of men was based ‘upon external compulsion’, their ‘inward nature’ corresponded to this ‘external compulsion’.35 Rather than counter posing capitalism to a transcendental subject that epitomizes (modern) freedom, Marx and Engels counter pose it to the social and historical struggles of the proletariat to free itself from capitalism.36 Unfor­ tunately, Marx fails to sustain an immanent critique of capitalism. After the 1848 revolutionary uprisings were defeated, Marx retreats to a form of true socialism, which renders capitalism an alienated expression of labour’s selfdetermining (self-objectifying) powers.37 This finds expression in Marx’s labour theory of value. Labour’s capacity to objectify itself in value under capitalism, has its source in humanity’s transhistorical capacity for self-objectification.38 From this perspective, labour comprises a self-determining subject in its own right, whose value-creating powers cannot be alienated to capital. Although capital appears to be self-valorizing, in reality labour remains the true source, substance and subject of valorization. To this end, Marx grounds exchangerelations between commodity owners in the labour of workers in production. …[T]he labour of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appears as what they are, i.e., they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their 35 36 37 38

Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 167. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 167. Sydney Hook, “Marx’s Criticism of ‘True Socialism’,” New International, vol. 2, no. 1, 1935. George E. Brenkert, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 91–93.

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work, but rather as objectified relations between persons and social relations between objects.39 In keeping with true socialism, Marx argues that the ‘external compulsion’ of capital is only apparent. In reality, capital is the product of a self-objectifying subject, which determines itself through the alien mediation of value. Having bestowed upon humanity the capacity to create itself through labour, Marx can then afford to dismiss human rights as a mere bourgeois phenomenon.

Human Rights and Bourgeois Rights

Following Hegel, Marx identifies human rights with the atomized, egoistic and instrumental individuals of civil (bourgeois) society. But whereas as Hegel contrasts the subjective freedom of selfish individuals with the objective freedom of Spirit; Marx contrasts the former with our species-being. …[N]ot one of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man, man as a member of civil [bourgeois] society, namely an individual withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private desires and separated from the community. In the rights of man it is not man who appears as a species-being; on the contrary, species life itself, society, appears as a framework extraneous to the individual, as a limitation of their original independence.40 Although Marx views (bourgeois) human rights as an advance on feudalism, he views them as complicit in the ‘wage-slavery’ of capitalism. In the modern world each person is at the same time a member of slave society and of the public commonweal. Precisely the slavery of civil society is in appearance the greatest freedom because it is in appearance the fully developed independence of the individual, who considers as his own freedom the uncurbed movement, no longer bound by a common bond or by man, of the estranged elements of his life, such as property,

39 Marx, Capital, vol. I, 165–166. 40 Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Early Writings: Marx (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 230.

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industry, religion, etc., whereas actually this is his fully developed slavery and inhumanity.41 While Marx supports the ‘political emancipation’, which capitalism enables. It falls short of the ‘human emancipation’, which Marx envisages. For this reason, he stresses ‘…the opposition of communism to…the rights of man’.42 Although Marx does not consistently oppose human rights, his opposition to them spans the length of his intellectual career.43 In his mature writings this takes the form of contrasting the freedom of exchange with the coercion of production. To this end, Marx argues that exchange comprises an ‘Eden of the innate rights of man’ in which freedom, equality, property and Bentham rule. Freedom because both buyer and seller of a commodity…are determined only by their own free will…. Equality because each enters into relations with the other as with a simple owner of commodities and they exchange equivalent with equivalent. Property because each disposes only what is his own. And Bentham because each looks only to his own advantage.44 But for Marx this is an illusionary state of affairs, which obscures the fact that workers were forced by economic compulsion to sell their labour, whereupon it is absorbed within and exploited by capital. In the market he stood as owner of the commodity ‘labour-power’ face to face with other owners of commodities, dealer against dealer. The contract by which he sold to the capitalist his labour-power proved, so to say, in black and white that he disposed of himself freely. The bargain concluded, it is discovered that he was no ‘free agent’, that the time for which he is free to sell his labour-power is the time for which he is forced to sell 41

Karl Marx, “The Jewish Question No. 3,” in The Holy Family (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1956), 144. In the same article, Marx argues that “…the recognition of the rights of man by the modern state has no other meaning than the recognition of slavery by the state of antiquity had. In other words, just as the ancient state had slavery as its natural basis, the modern state has as its natural basis civil society and the man of civil society…,” 140. 42 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 225. 43 In 1875 Marx criticized the German Socialist Workers Party for adopting “…ideological rights and other twisted nonsense so common amongst the democrats and French socialists.” “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in Lawrence and Wishart (eds.), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 321 (translation modified). 44 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 280.

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it, that in fact the vampire will not lose its hold on him ‘so long as there is a muscle, a nerve, a drop of blood to be exploited’.45 The rights that arise in and facilitate the ‘free’ exchange of labour merely serve to obscure the underlying exploitation upon which capitalism is founded. Consequently, human rights have only a limited role to play in advancing working class interests. To illustrate this point, Marx contrasts human rights with the power of the working class to legally limit the length of the working day.46 From the perspective of exchange, argues Marx, labour and capital are endowed with opposed but equal rights. Having purchased a day’s labour, capitalists are entitled to make workers work as long as humanly possible. Similarly, workers are entitled to make the working day as short as reasonably possible. From this Marx concludes that: There is here therefore an antinomy, of right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchange. Between equal rights, force decides. Hence, in the history of capitalist production, the establishment of a norm for the working day presents itself as a struggle over the limits of that day, a struggle between collective capital, i.e. the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e. the working-class.47 Given that ‘right’ resides on both sides of the class divide, Marx argues it cannot determine the appropriate length of the working day. This can only be determined by the relative strengths of labour and capital. To this end, Marx contrasts the ‘pompous catalogue’ of human rights with ‘the modest Magna Carta of the legally limited working-day…’.48 Marx’s identification of human rights with bourgeois rights finds support from contemporary Marxists (Miéville 2004, Žižek 2005, Callinicos 2006).49 However, as we shall see in the next section, this fails to do justice to the role human rights play in promoting working class interests.50 45 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 415–416. 46 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, Ch. 10. 47 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 344. 48 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 416. 49 See China Miéville, Between Equal Rights (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Slavoj Žižek, “Against Human Rights,” New Left Review, no. 2/34, 2005; Alex Callinicos, The Resources of Critique (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006). 50 Although having denounced human rights as “…the right of white, male property-owners to exchange freely on the market, exploit workers and women, and exert political domination”; Žižek approvingly cites Etienne Balibar’s contention that human rights can always be reappropriated for progressive ends (Žižek, “Against human Rights,” 129).

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Expanding Human Rights Beyond Bourgeois Rights

In opposition to Marx, the historian E.P. Thompson argues that Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791/2) was ‘a foundation-text of the English working-class movement’ (Thompson 1963, p.90). In support of this claim, Thompson argues the French revolution inspired a wave of working class struggle in England that culminated in Chartism. Although these struggles failed to win the right to vote for workers, they played a key role in establishing the right to assembly, the right to form trade unions and the right to freedom of expression. Rather than comprising a ‘pompous catalogue’, Thompson argues these rights were crucial to the collective organization of labour. Evidence for this can also be found in Marx’s writings. In the Chapter on ‘The Working Day’, Marx cites a Factory Inspector Report that argues capital’s objection to legal restrictions ‘…must succumb before the broad principle of the rights of labour’. Marx also cites a pamphlet from the Working Men of Dunkirk that calls opponents of such reforms, enemies of the ‘rights of the labourer’.51 Human rights played a crucial role in creating the normative context in which the labour movement struggled for worker’s rights. This included the interrelated struggle to prohibit British involvement in the slave trade, which culminated in the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. Although the anti-slavery movement often expressed itself in Christian terms, the modern conception of human rights underwrote its emancipatory principles.52 To this extent, the anti-slavery movement shared with the labour movement a set of modern norms, which finds expression in the identification of wage-labour with wage-slavery.53 This was more than a rhetorical device. By rendering capitalism analogous to slavery, socialists sought to channel the widespread sense of injustice felt about slaves to workers. Marx is no exception, as the following passage from The Manifesto of the Communist Party demonstrates. Masses of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soldiers… Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.54 51 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, footnotes 414 and 415. 52 Jenny Martinez, The Slave Trade and the Origins of International Human Rights Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 134. 53 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 54 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 41–42, my emphasis.

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It is indicative of the moral context that informed working class struggle in Britain that Marx’s chapter on the ‘The Working Day’ contains nearly forty references to slavery – including one that complains of British workers being ‘toiled into the grave’ like ‘white slaves’.55 As such, Marx’s relationship to the values that animated progressive social movements in his day is an ambiguous one. On the one hand, he is imbedded in them and employs modern norms to render capitalism unjust. On the other hand, he is dismissive of them and employs a labour theory of value to render capitalism objectively unjust. Marx undoubtedly feared that human rights were limited to achieving ‘political emancipation’ under capitalism rather than ‘human emancipation’ via its overthrow. Thompson corroborates these fears. He notes Paine believed that: In political society every man must have equal rights as a citizen: in economic society he must naturally remain employer or employed, and the State should not interfere with the capital of the one or the wages of the other. The Rights of Man and the Wealth of Nations should supplement and nourish each other. And in this also the main tradition of 19thcentury working class radicalism took its cast from Paine. There were times, at the Owenite and Chartist climaxes, when other traditions became dominant. But after each relapse, the substratum of Painite assumptions remained intact.56 However, Marx’s limitation of human rights to the political sphere risks colluding in their containment. It renders Marxism disdainful of the actual form taken by working class struggle and underestimates the emancipatory power of human rights. As Claude Lefort notes: From the legal recognition of strikes or trade unions, to rights relative to work or to social security, there has developed on the basis of the rights of man a whole history that transgressed the boundaries within which the state claimed to define itself, a history that remains open.57 During the 20th Century the burgeoning strength of the labour movement in Britain finds expression in an expanded conception of rights. This is charted by 55 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 365. 56 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 96. 57 Claude Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights,” in The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 245.

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T.H. Marshall in his 1950 essay ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, in which he details three stages through which citizenship rights develop.58 In the first stage, argues Marshall, citizenship rights take the form of civil rights (such as the right to free speech, religion and a fair trial). Like Marx, Marshall argues that civil rights are individualistic and at their inception harmonize with capitalism.59 Nevertheless, they provide the springboard for political rights (such as the right to vote, assembly and form political parties), which make possible the formation of trade unions and working class parties. Through their collective struggle the latter are able to make significant incursions into capitalism’s market mechanisms. This then provides the basis for a third stage of social rights, which makes possible the partial suspension of market values in favour of social values.60 This confers upon citizens the right to certain goods and services (such as health care, education and housing), which are vital to a humane existence. Social rights reduce the commodity status of labour and with it the dependency of workers on the vagaries of the market. In the post-war years, the struggle for social rights was accompanied by the struggle for economic rights. This finds expression in the charters of the European Union and the United Nations.61 Article 23 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) states that: ‘Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests’. These rights are further elaborated in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Optional Protocol 2008) and the European Social Charter (revised 1996). Given these developments, Lefort argues that human rights can no longer be dismissed as a bourgeois phenomenon. …[Human Rights] go beyond any particular formulation which has been given of them; and this means that their formulation contains the demand for their reformulation, or that acquired rights are not necessarily called upon to support new rights. Lastly, for the same reason, they cannot be assigned to a particular period, as if their meaning were 58 59 60 61

T.H. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” in Citizenship and Social Class (London: Pluto Press, 1992). Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 26. Marshall, “Citizenship and Social Class,” 28. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Capitalism and Social Rights,” Solidarity, May/June, No. 14, http:// www.solidarity-us.org/site.

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exhausted by the historical function they were called upon to fulfil in the service of the rising bourgeoisie, and they cannot be circumscribed within society, as if their effects could be localised and controlled.62 Nevertheless, as Bill Bowring notes, social and economic rights remain the poor cousin of civil and political rights (both in their ratification and implementation) precisely because they have the power to challenge the legitimacy of capital (Bowring 2008).63 It would be wrong however to view the relative weakness of social and economic rights as intrinsic to rights themselves. It is more a symptom of the weakness of the labour movement vis-à-vis capital. If this is the case today, it was even more so in Marx’s day. It is therefore understandable why he sought to repudiate capitalism property rights in favour of the right of workers to the products they produced. However, as we shall see in the next section, Marx can only achieve this by conferring self-determining powers upon labour per se, which belies its determination by capital.

Rethinking Marx’s Labour-Theoretic Critique of Capitalism

The distinction between exchange and production is central to Marx’s critique of capitalism. This is because exchange lends capitalism a free, fair and equal appearance in which human rights are respected. Wages are a case in point. They appear to fairly compensate workers for the value that their labour produces. In contrast, Marx argues that wages only compensate workers for the value of their labour-power (which is determined by the value of the goods/services required to replenish it). Capitalists then set labour-power to work for longer than is required to produce goods and services equivalent to the value of labour-power.64 The difference between the two comprises the (secret) source of surplus value. In this way, Marx provides scientific proof that capitalism is objectively unjust. As Gary Young perceptively notes, for Marx: 62 63

Lefort, “Politics and Human Rights,” 256. Bill Bowring, The Degradation of the International Legal Order (London: Routledge, 2008). Many are still unwilling to grant labour rights the status of human rights, see Virginia Mantouvalou, “The Case for Social Rights,” in Conor Gearty (ed.), Debating Social Rights (Georgetown: Hart Publishing, 2012). 64 Marx, Capital, vol. 1.

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…the extraction of surplus value makes the exchange between working and capitalist classes a merely apparent exchange, a false appearance. [Marx] challenges not the fairness of that exchange, but its reality. If the exchange were real, it would be fair. But it is not real.65 Consequently, Marx has no need of normative categories to render capitalism unjust. Injustice is built into the very structure of capitalism. All Marx needs to do is reveal its truth/reality. Unfortunately, Marx’s own conception of capital as self-valorizing value disproves this claim. According to Marx, ‘The driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital…’.66 The more capital takes command of the production process the more labour is absorbed into and set to work by, as and for capital. On entering that process, they become incorporated with capital. As cooperators, as members of a working organism, they merely form a particular mode of existence of capital. Hence, the productive power developed by the worker socially is the productive power of capital.67 Once capital takes command of production, Marx acknowledges that: …the entire development of the productive forces of socialized labour (in contrast to the more or less isolated labour of individuals)…takes the form of the productive power of capital. It does not appear as the productive power of labour… And least of all does it appear as the productive power either of the individual worker or of the workers joined together in the process of production.68 In this and similar passages, Marx recognizes the ‘absurdity’ of attributing selfdetermining powers to labour in abstraction from and defiance of capital’s 65

Gary Young, “Justice and Capitalist Production: Marx and Bourgeois Ideology,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol. viii, no. 3, 454.  For this reason, Marx argues that workers “…have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant,” Karl Marx, “The Civil War in France,” in Karl Marx: The First International and After (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 213. 66 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 449. 67 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 451. 68 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1024.

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domination of production.69 This would negate labour’s ‘real subordination’ to capital and capital’s self-valorizing powers.70 Marx can only maintain a labour theory of value by rendering the subject of self-objectifying labour impervious to and independent of capital. To this end, he argues that: Labour as a social and natural force does not develop within the valorisation process as such, but within the actual labour process… Productive labour – as something productive of value – continues to confront capital as the labour of the individual workers, irrespective of the social combinations these workers may enter into in the process of production.71 By this means, Marx protects the integrity of value-creating labour from the pervasive compulsion of capital. In this regard, Marx’s concept of selfdetermining labour remains enthral to the German idealism of true socialism. Like Kant’s ‘self-active subject’, (self-objectifying) labour both produces the phenomenological world (of exchange-value) and is rendered invisible by it.72 This however renders Marx vulnerable to the charge Hegel levels at Kant and Marx levels at the true socialists: namely, of positing a subject that can exercise freedom despite being immured in a compulsory world. In this regard, Marx fails to take capital seriously.73 Taking capital seriously means taking seriously its self-valorizing powers. If capital is self-valorizing then labour cannot be the secret source, substance and subject of value. As a social activity, labour is absorbed into capital and implements its purposes. It follows that labour can only act in a selfdetermining fashion through appropriate social institutions such as trade unions. In the process, workers not only create the organizational means to exercise a measure of self-determination, they also help curb capital’s capacity of valorize itself by compelling capital to recognize certain labour rights. In 69

In the Grundrisse Marx writes that “…the question whether capital is productive or not is absurd. Labour itself is productive only if absorbed into capital, where capital forms the basis of production, and where the capitalist is therefore in command of production… Labour, such as it exists for itself in the worker in opposition to capital, that is, labour in its immediate being separated from capital, is not productive.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 308. 70 Marx, Capital, vol. 1. 71 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1056. 72 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 148. 73 See Bob Cannon, Rethinking the Normative Content of Marxism: Marx, Habermas and Beyond (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001).

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which case, Marxists are doubly wrong to dismiss human rights as bourgeois rights. They not only facilitate the self-emancipation of the working class they also share the same normative source as Marx’s labour theory of value. The opposition that Marx constructs between human rights and a labour theory of value obscures the degree to which they both rest upon a modern conception of (ethical) self-determination. Once this is acknowledged it is possible to place Marx’s critique of capitalism on an (overtly) ethical foundation. Or more precisely, it is possible to retrieve the ethical foundations upon which Marx’s critique of capitalism (covertly) rests.

Reclaiming Modern Freedom

Not all Marx’s comments on modern rights are negative (and not all Marxists reject modern rights as bourgeois). In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx argues it is possible to appropriate ‘bourgeois (civil) liberties’ (bürgerlichen Freiheiten) for socialist ends. The bourgeoisie correctly perceives that all the weapons, which it forged against feudalism, turn their blades against it; that all the means of education, which it brought forth, rebel against its own civilization… It understands that all its so-called civil liberties and progressive organs attack and threaten its class rule, both in its social base and its political superstructure and have therefore become ‘socialistic’.74 Unfortunately, this is not Marx’s primary position on human rights. On the contrary, he calls French socialists foolish for depicting ‘…socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois society articulated by the French 74

Karl Marx, “The 18th Brummaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Lawrence and Wishart (eds.), Marx and Engels Selected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 130, translation modified. Engels goes even further arguing that: “The bourgeoisie cannot gain political supremacy and express this in the form of constitution and laws without at the same time, arming the proletariat. On its banner it must inscribe human rights in place of the old system of social position based on birth, freedom to pursue trades and commerce in place of the guild system, freedom and self-government in place of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Therefore, for consistency’s sake, it must demand universal and direct suffrage, freedom of the press, association and assembly… The result will be that the proletariat will lay its hands on all the weapons which it needs for its final victory” (Friederich Engels, “The Prussian Military Question,” in Karl Marx: The First International and After, 144).

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revolution…’.75 This however not only obscures the revolutionary potential of modern norms it also obscures Marx’s debt to them. This can be seen from Marx’s critique of social contract theories. As developed by Hobbes and Locke, social contract theory depicts modern (capitalist) society emerging from the agreement of its individual constituents.76 From this perspective, capitalism is a legitimate economic system whose social interactions arise from and are grounded in mutual consent. In contrast, Marx argues that social contract theory conceals the coercive character of capitalism.77 But while the myth of capitalism’s emergence from mutual consent is as misleading as it is self-serving, it also generates norms capable of invaliding capitalism. What is more, these norms inform Marx’s critique of capitalism. In opposition to the freedom that exchange manifests, Marx argues that coercion is constitutive of capitalist production: beginning with the force that brought capitalism into being by detaching workers (peasants) from the means of production (land). Once established, capitalism reproduces its own conditions of possibility by means of its economic laws. The silent compulsion of economic relations sets the seal on the domination of capitalist over the worker. Direct extra-economic force is still of course used, but only in exceptional cases. In the ordinary run of things, the labourer can be left to the ‘natural laws of production’, i.e. it is possible to rely on his dependence on capital, which springs from the conditions of production themselves, and is guaranteed in perpetuity by them.78 Occasionally, Marx argues that the contractual norms established in exchange render capitalism just. The use-value of labour-power, in other words labour, belongs just as little to its seller as the value of oil after it has been sold belongs to the dealer who sold it. The owner of the money has paid the value of a day’s labour-power; he therefore has the use of it for a day, a day’s labour belongs to him.79 75 Marx, Grundrisse, 248. 76 See C.B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1962). 77 Marx, Grundrisse, 83. 78 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 899. 79 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 301.

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However, Marx regards labour as quite different from oil. As the immanent measure of value, the use-value of labour-power has no value itself.80 As such, it can no more be bought by the capitalist than it can be sold by the worker. Labour-power surpasses and subverts the freedom, equality and consent established in exchange and exposes its exploitative underbelly. Nevertheless, Marx’s labour theory of value fails to effectively address capitalist compulsion. Despite labour’s apparent incorporation into capital, Marx argues labour comprises a self-determining subject, which objectifies itself in value. Rather than indicting capitalism for thwarting the (modern) right of self-determination (on normative grounds), Marx indicts it for distorting the (transhistorical) capacity of labour to determine itself (on scientific grounds). To this extent, labour remains perfectly free in the midst of capitalist compulsion. There are also passages in which Marx condemns capitalism for violating the modern norm of consent. To this end, he argues autonomy, freedom and choice have only a restricted remit under capitalism, beyond which heteronomy, compulsion and coercion rule. This enables Marx to argue that: Even if…equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, the whole thing still remains the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has stolen from them.81 In this and other passages, the compulsion of capital is not contrasted with the essential freedom of labour, but the modern right of self-determination, which social contract theory exemplifies. To this extent, capitalism is incapable of redeeming the modern norm of freedom upon which its claim to legitimacy rests. These passages attest to a third modality of ethics, which serves to both reconcile and repudiate the dichotomy that Marx erects between a labour theory of value and modern human rights. This places self-determination on a modern normative foundation: first in support of capitalism but then in opposition to it. This third modality of ethics informs Marx’s moral condemnation of capitalism as a blood-sucking monster that daily increases the misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation of the working class.82 Marx’s claim that the instigator of working class subjugation is ‘really’ an alienated form of human labour, counts for little beside capital’s capacity to ride roughshod over the modern right of self-determination. From this perspective, depicting 80 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 677. 81 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 728. 82 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 929.

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socialism as the realization of the ideals of the French revolution appears less ‘foolish’ than Marx’s treatment of them as bourgeois. Given that Marx’s moral condemnation of capitalism is suffused with modern humanistic norms, it makes no sense to treat them as capitalist. Capitalism is no more entitled to monopolize modern norms than it has to monopolize modern science.83 If, as Carol Gould argues, ‘…human rights are the fundamental conditions for the exercise of agency and…the principle of equal positive freedom…’ it is counterproductive to restrict them to exchange and reject them as bourgeoise.84 While exchange may facilitate consent-based interactions, the quasiautopoietic imperatives of capital prevent social agents from consenting to the economic laws that govern them. In which case, human rights do not collude in capitalism’s coercive structures; so much as render them unjust. Ironically, capitalism’s defenders appear more aware of the threat posed to the legitimacy of capitalism by modern norms than Marx(ists). This is evident in Isaiah Berlin’s influential essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. Published at the height of the Cold War, Berlin identifies two forms of liberty: (1) a negative one that protects individuals from oppressive collective forces (such as the state), and (2) a positive one that harnesses collective social forces (such as the state) to achieve ‘self-mastery’.85 Although positive liberty promises a more comprehensive form of collective freedom than negative liberty, Berlin identifies it with the ‘totalitarianism’ of communism. Instead, he advocates its less ambitious but more ‘pluralistic’ alter ego. Pluralism, with the measure of ‘negative’ liberty that it entails, seems to me a truer and more humane ideal than the goals of those who seek in the great disciplined, authoritarian structures the ideal of ‘positive’ selfmastery by classes, or peoples, or the whole of mankind.86 Having restricted modern freedom to negative freedom, Berlin argues it is best served by capitalism, because it devolves power from the state and promotes individual choice. ‘It may be that the ideal of freedom to choose ends without 83

As Žižek notes, while it is possible to regard human rights as an “…illusory expression of a concrete social reality of exploitation and class domination,” it is also possible to regard them as a normative promise, which its inability to redeem renders capitalism unjust (Žižek, “Against Human Rights,” 130). 84 Carol Gould, Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 128–129. 85 Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 8. 86 Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 31.

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claiming eternal validity for them, and the pluralism of values connected with this, is only the late fruit of our declining capitalist civilisation’.87 However, Berlin can only render modern freedom compatible with capitalism by limiting its scope; to the point of denying there is a ‘necessary connection’ between negative freedom and democracy.88 Nevertheless, he finds it difficult to suppress the appeal of positive liberty, as the following encomium indicates. The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for, selfdirected and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realising them.89 This gives expression to a modern conception of freedom as self-determination, which animates the critique of slavery and wage-slavery. But whereas Berlin tends to view the ‘external forces’ that preclude modern freedom in personal terms (as the acts of another’s will) Marx views them in impersonal structural terms. Capital…takes no account of the health and the length of life of the worker, unless society forces it to do so. Its answer to the outcry about the physical and mental degradation, the premature death, the torture of over-work, is this: Should that pain trouble us, since it increases our pleasure (profit)? But looking at this thing as a whole, it is evident that this does not depend on the will, either good or bad, of the individual capitalist. Under free competition, the immanent laws of capitalist production confront the individual capitalist as a coercive force external to him.90 87 88

Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 32. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 7. For a contemporary reformulation of Berlin’s argument see Aryeh Neier’s rejection of social and economic rights (as authoritarian) in favour of (more capitalist friendly) civil and political rights (“Social and Economic Rights: A Critique,” http://www.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/13/2neier.pdf, 2005). 89 Belrin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 8. 90 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 381.

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For Marx, the ‘external forces’ bearing down upon humanity do not originate in individual capitalists, but the self-valorizing imperatives they personify. Nevertheless, Berlin realizes that modern norms are sufficient to invalidate capitalism – hence his restriction of them to negative freedom. By colluding in this process, Marxists not only obscure the role played by modern norms in underpinning working class struggles, but also Marx’s own labour theory of value.91 Yet Marx’s indebtedness to a modern concept of freedom – as fostered by German idealism – is widely acknowledged: not least, by Marx himself in the first ‘Thesis on Feuerbach’.92 This is the basis upon which he indicts capitalism for assuming ‘…mastery over man, instead of the opposite’.93 It is also the basis upon which Jean-Paul Jouary renders capitalism immoral. ‘If Kant laid down the prerequisite for all morality as being the necessity always to consider man as an end and never as a means only, then capitalism is immoral in its very principle…’.94 It took the radical events of the 1960s to seriously challenge the scientific pretentions of the social sciences. But while this helped foster ‘Marxist humanism’ (on the basis of Marx’s early writings). It did not foster an adequate understanding of humanism’s modern (normative) origins. This means acknowledging the modern norm of ethical self-determination upon which Marx’s scientific critique of capitalism (covertly) rests. Rather than treating workers as self-determining subjects in their own right, which unknowingly produce the (self-valorizing) shackles of their servitude. This means arguing that the injustice of capitalism resides in its capacity to preclude self-determination. The vestiges of true socialism that cling to Marx’s critique of capitalism, leads him to render self-valorizing value false. Acknowledging the truth of self-valorizing value allows us to render it unjust. Conclusion One of the most significant but least acknowledged ideological successes of neo-liberalism over the past thirsty years has been the identification of 91

R.G. Peffer, Marxism, Morality and Social Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 119–120. 92 Marx, These on Feuerbach, 29. 93 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 175. 94 Jean-Paul Jouary, “A Short Philosophy of the Crisis: Why Is Capitalism Immoral in Its Very Principle?” L’Humanité in English, 18 November.

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modernization with the marketization of economic activities.95 This was greatly aided by the collapse on the Soviet Union and the opening of China and India to capitalism in the early 1990s. Prior to this it had been widely thought that history was progressing in a socialistic direction, with state regulation increasingly remedying market failures.96 Under the auspices of globalization, neo-liberalism reversed this trajectory and re-connected free-market capitalism with modernity.97 This found its most hubristic expression in Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis, in which modernity is pictured as culminating in liberal capitalism.98 In the process, socialism is consigned to the dustbin of history along with the working class and the labour movement. With the triumph of global capitalism, Adam Smith’s vision of self-regulating markets and self-interested individuals is finally realized. However, rather than challenging the identification of capitalism and modernity, many Marxists merely reversed the arrow of legitimation to discredit modernity.99 But a discredited modernity – as postmodernists came to realize – detaches progressive social movements from the norms that render them progressive.100 This helps explain why many of its leading figures came to renounce postmodernism in favour of a rapprochement with modernity.101 Because Marxists can fall back upon a labour theory of value (which renders capitalism objectively unjust) they do not feel the same pressure to affirm the normative legitimacy of modernity. But this disregards the degree to which Marx’s labour theory of value is (covertly) grounded in the modern right of selfdetermination. By subordinating an ethical to a scientific critique of capitalism, Marxists not only detach themselves from the normative resources upon which this critique rests they also ground it in an unworkable theory of value. 95

It is no coincidence that one of the key pieces of legislation, which helped de-regulate the financial sector in the usa, was called “The Commodity Futures Modernization Act” (2000). 96 Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (London: New Left Books, 1979), 386–387. 97 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 98 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London: Penguin Books, 1992). 99 Having identified modernity with capitalism Perry Anderson argues that: “The vocation of a socialist revolution…would be neither to prolong nor to fulfil modernity, but to abolish it.” “Modernity and Revolution,” New Left Review I/144, March–April (96–113), 1984, 113. 100 Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment,” in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (London: Penguin Books, 1984). 101 In addition to Foucault, also see Zygmunt Bauman and Keith Tester, Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001); and Rciahrd Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999).

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The capacity for self-determination that Marx attributes to labour cannot be reconciled with the capacity of value to valorize itself.102 For this reason, I have sought to retrieve the modern norm of self-determination from the transhistorical capacity of self-objectifying labour, and apply it to the struggles of the labour movement to enhance the wellbeing of workers. In order to achieve the latter, the labour movement must enhance its capacity for self-determination at the expense of capital’s capacity for self-valorization. This however does not undermine Marx’s critique of capitalism. On the contrary, it places the latter on a social and historical foundation. Having relinquished the view that humanity (via labour) is always already a self-determining subject, it renders capitalism unjust for preventing social agents from exercising their right to self-determination. This means rethinking Marx’s tendency to discredit modern norms by rendering them a bourgeois phenomenon. To this end, I have sought to distinguish capitalism from the revolution in moral thinking that modernity inaugurates. Both Marx’s labour theory of value and human rights are products  of this moral revolution. Each is grounded in the modern right of selfdetermination and each renders capitalism unjust accordingly. This common ancestry explains why Marx’s avowedly scientific critique of capitalism is imbued with a powerful sense of moral outrage. Rather than feeling discomforted by the latter, Marxists should embrace Marx’s commitment to modern humanism. Rather than rejecting human rights as a bourgeois phenomenon, Marxists should view them as allies in the fight to humanize economic decision-making. This not only helps to heal the rift between Marxism and human rights but also Marxism and the labour movement, insofar as it employs human rights to enhance the wellbeing of labour. As Thompson reminds us: …the working-class ideology which matured in the [Eighteen] Thirties (and which has endured, through various translations, ever since) put an exceptionally high value upon the rights of the press, of speech, of meeting and of personal liberty…But the notion to be found in some late ‘Marxist’ interpretations, by which these claims appear as a heritage of ‘bourgeois individualism’ will scarcely do.103 Rather than criticizing the labour movement for adopting human rights, Marxists should be in the vanguard of expanding their capacity to invalidate capitalism. 102 See Bob Cannon, “Retrieving the Normative Content of Marxism: From a Transhistorical to a Modern Conception of Self-constitution,” Historical Materialism, vol. 13, no. 3, 2005. 103 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 732.

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If Marxism is to remain relevant in the twenty first century, it must forego the positivism of its founder and openly embrace an ethical critique of capitalism grounded in the moral revolution that modernity inaugurates. Herein resides the social and historical basis of Marx’s condemnation of capitalism for obtaining ‘mastery over man, instead of the opposite’.104 I therefore agree with Geras when he argues that: Marxists should not any longer continue to propagate the aboriginal selfcontradiction and confusion in this area, but must openly take responsibility for their own ethical positions, spell them out, defend and refine them. A properly elaborated Marxist conception of justice…would not be at all premature.105 At the heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism reside two opposed forms of selfdetermination: an autopoietic (monetary) one that imposes its self-valorizing values on humanity and a modern (moral) one that affirms the right of social agents to agree their own value(s). Rather than identifying modernity with capitalism and treating human rights as a bourgeois phenomenon, Marxists should ground the critique of capitalism in its capacity to usurp, preclude and violate the modern right of self-determination. 104 Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 175. 105 Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” 266–267.

chapter 8

Last of the Schoolmen

Natural Law and Social Justice in Karl Marx George E. McCarthy

In this essay, we will examine the influence of natural law theory on the early and later writings of Karl Marx in order to show the continuity between his nineteenth-century critical social theory and the classical and medieval traditions. In his 1926 work, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Richard Tawney wrote in a relatively obscure and largely forgotten comment that Marx was the “last of the Schoolmen,”1 that is, last of the medieval natural law theorists following in the footsteps from the twelfth to the fourteenth century of Pierre 1 Richard Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London: J. Murray, 1927). By characterizing Marx as the “last of the Schoolmen,” Tawney was referring to Thomas Aquinas’ labor theory of value and the continuity of traditions between Marx and neo-Aristotelian medieval Scholasticism. Tawney argued that Marx was the end of a long tradition of theorists that included the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, the 14th-century scholastic Henry of Langenstein, and the 16th-century Protestant reformer Martin Luther who made the point that the appropriate and “reasonable remuneration” of wages for a worker or merchant should be based on their labor and contribution to the common good. “The medieval theorist condemned as a sin precisely that effort to achieve a continuous and unlimited increase in material wealth which modern societies applaud as a quality, and the vices for which he reserved his most merciless denunciations were the more refined and subtle of the economic virtues” (pp. 35–36). The Scholastics considered economic speculation, avarice, and exploitation as “unpardonable sins” as they stressed “the just price and prohibition of usury.” Usury was condemned because it was living without labor (p. 43). This natural law became part of ecclesiastical doctrine and cannon law of medieval Christianity. This was their economic ethic and, according to Tawney, Marx was part of this tradition (pp. 39–55). Tawney recognized the utopian element of medieval economic ethics in the face of the transformation of the market economy, agricultural productivity, and the industrial and financial explosion of the sixteenth century. However, in spite of this movement of history, he writes: “When all is said, the fact remains that, on the small scale involved, the problem of moralizing economic life was faced and not abandoned. The experiment may have been impracticable…but it had in it something of the heroic, and to ignore the nobility of the conception is not less absurd than to idealize its practical results” (p. 62). The same is true for Marx. Tawney was an Anglican social theorist who, like John Locke earlier in the seventeenth century, was also influenced by another Anglican theologian and neo-Aristotelian, Richard Hooker. Tawney was insightful in placing Marx within the natural law tradition but undoubtedly incorrect in describing him as the “last” of the Schoolmen.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_010

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The purpose of this essay is not to definitively establish specific connections between Marx and Aquinas or the medieval Schoolmen, but rather, to tie the logic and framework of Marx’s overall theory of justice in ethics, politics, and economics back to the ancient and medieval traditions of Aristotelian social theory and political economy; this is how he defined his view of economic ethics and social justice. Unlike the modern Enlightenment theories of justice, the breadth and depth of Marx’s theory reflect the profound influence of these pre-modern theories. Aristotle’s theory of justice included issues of character, virtue (arete), happiness (eudaimonia), human need (chreia), knowledge, wisdom (phronesis), law, constitutions, economic or particular justice, political or universal justice, best societies, and ideal polity, that is, what today would be considered under moral philosophy, social ethics, political philosophy, social theory, history, and political economy. For Marx, social justice is a moral and intellectual virtue promoting individual freedom, self-development, and self-realization of human rationality and creativity in productive, aesthetic, and practical activity (praxis) and a social ethics for the general welfare and common good within a political and economic democracy; it represents moral norms grounded in social ethics, democratic socialism, and a critique of political economy; and, finally, it refers to fairness, friendship (brotherhood of man), and compassion (human need) in the rational organization of production, distribution, and consumption of the natural and social wealth of the community. That is, justice promotes the creative development of human powers and capacities within an egalitarian and democratic polity. And, as in the case of Aristotle, it provides for a synthesis of ethics and politics – virtue and the structures of politics and the economy. This definition of social justice integrates Aristotle’s theory of virtue, the good life, human needs, and justice with Kant’s theory of subjectivity, freedom, creativity, and human dignity. The contemporary debate within Analytical Marxism about the nature of justice in Marx’s social thought does not take this range of issues into consideration. It limits the discussion of justice to its juridical and contractual meaning between labor and capital in the workplace outside of ethical and social theory. See Allen Buchanan, Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 50–85, Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 48–70, and George Brenkert, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 15–21. On the other hand, both Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 52–62, 152–164, 172, 195, and 258–259 and A Short History of Ethics (New York, ny: The Macmillan Company, 1966), 199–214, and Agnes Heller, Beyond Justice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 74–115 recognize that, with the birth of modern Enlightenment liberalism and individualism, moral philosophy and its questions of virtue, character, intelligence, and morality have been separated from traditional socio-political justice and its concerns for the nature of the law, friendship, political community, and moral economy; ethics has been separated from social and political theory; modern individualism from the virtuous good life; and, finally, moral philosophy from sociology and social justice (MacIntyre, p. 23). These forms of separation are expressions of the theoretical incoherence and prejudice of liberalism. Kant, too, had unintentionally expressed this underlying contradiction of modern moral philosophy in his separation of practical reason and justice (law). The objective spirit or substance of morality has been lost to practical reason and conscience. According to Heller, the tradition of Hegel and Marx sought to end this ethical dualism: “Modernity threw itself back into antiquity to keep the ethico-political concept of

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Abélard and Anselm of Canterbury to Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Occam.2 By stressing the influence of the natural law tradition on Marx, this essay will assume the general landscape of these great traditions from the Ancient Greeks with Aristotle’s theory of grace, reciprocity, and distributive justice, the Ancient Hebrews with the Torah’s view of covenant, human needs, economic redistribution, and critique of idolatry, and the medieval Scholastics with their emphasis on natural reason, community, just price, economic equality, common need, labor theory of value, and the condemnation of usury and economic exploitation of the public good. Although these traditions are essential components of Marx’s own theory of social justice and justice intact for and against modernity” (p. 92). Thus, Marx’s theory of social justice must be examined within its historical and theoretical context and not be viewed through the prism of Enlightenment moral philosophy. MacIntyre sees this conflict between the Ancients and the Moderns best represented as a conflict between Aristotle and Nietzsche. 2 Schools of Medieval and Modern Natural Law: God, Nature, and Community: The natural law theologians of the Middle Ages may be grouped around three broad headings: (1) Platonists (9th–12th century) who included John Scotus Erigena, Anselm, and Peter Abélard; (2) Aristotelians or Golden Age of Scholasticism (13th–14th century) Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, John Bonaventure, and John Duns Scotus; and (3) the Nominalists (14th–17th century) William Occam, John Buridan, and Francois Suarez (School of Salamanca). Mention should be made of the cathedral School of Chartres (11th–12th century) which was the center of classical renewal and renaissance in Europe and included Bishop Fulbert, Bernard Sylvester, William of Conches, and John of Salisbury, and the Victorines or Augustinian School of St. Victor (part of University of Paris, 11th–12th century) whose members included William of Champeaux, Hugh of St. Victor, Richard of St. Victor, Walter of St. Victor, Godfrey of St. Victor, and Thomas Gallus. Modern Natural Law Theory: In the seventeenth century four major natural law theorists were born in the same year, 1632: Samuel Pufendorf, John Locke, Richard Cumberland, and Benedict Spinoza. Interestingly, they all read Hugo Grotius’ writings. See Aaron Garrett, “Was Spinoza a Natural Lawyer?” Cardozo Law Review, vol. 25, no. 2 (December 2003): 627–641. Natural law theory contends that through the rule or light of reason we are capable of knowing the laws of nature (metaphysics and physics) and the laws of humanity (ethics and politics) as a product of God’s creation (Ancients and Scholastics) or the creation of nature itself (Modern natural law). Lloyd Weinreb in his work Natural Law and Justice (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1987) argues that the objective conditions and moral foundations of natural law lie in “the bare human nature, or the purpose of a divine Creator, or the general will” (p. 89). In the history of the Western tradition, nature (Aristotle), God (Aquinas), or the community (Aristotle and Rousseau) have provided the moral foundation of nature law and the objective normative order of justice (pp. 248–251). Weinreb applies this view of natural law to his understanding of neo-Aristotelian communalism, specifically Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Michael Walzer. But Marx, following Aristotle, has also based his natural law and social justice principles on human nature and the community.

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are thus the presuppositions of a more comprehensive study, this essay will examine only a few of his key writings from his early and later periods that contribute to his theory of natural law and social justice.3 In order to accomplish this end and to present Marx’s arguments within a broader theoretical framework, we will begin with a brief exposition of John Locke, because, like Marx, he was concerned with the relationship between 3 Ancients and Moderns on Ethics and Justice: The concept of “justice” in Marx has received a number of different definitions, thereby precipitating debates within the academic community and within Analytical Marxism in particular. See Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” New Left Review, 150 (March–April 1985), 5–6; R.G. Peffer, Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1990), 169–211; and Thomas Mayer, Analytical Marxism (Thousand Oaks, ca: Sage Publications, 1994). The term justice has been used narrowly by some to define the market and legal relationship of equivalency exchange between the sale of labor power and the wages acquired; justice has been reduced to a set of juridical principles of equivalency exchange. Also some have juxtaposed universal justice to other more historically specific moral values, such as freedom, self-realization, well-being, and community which are by implication not part of the universal norms of justice (Geras, p. 6 and Peffer, p. 170). However, in this essay the concept of justice will be used to describe a very broad range of moral, ethical, political, and economic issues. Marx’s theory of justice parallels closely the use of the term “justice” found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and The Politics. Justice refers to issues of the moral character and development of the individual toward a life of virtue, happiness, and rationality and also refers to the macro-structures of society in the economy and polity which nurture and encourage such a life. This distinction and integration of ethics and virtue in the Nicomachean Ethics with the economy and polity in The Politics is also found in German Idealism and the movement from Kantian morality to Hegelian social ethics or Moralität to Sittlichkeit (Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979], 84–95). Thus the key to understanding the nature of justice is its core components of ethics and politics. One can only be impressed by the range of questions Aristotle discusses under the nature of a good and just society: the function of man or human nature, ethics, moral virtues (courage, moderation, truthfulness, nobility, honor, friendship, and justice) and intellectual virtues (technical knowledge, universal knowledge, and practical wisdom), distributive justice (fair distribution of public and private wealth and power), reciprocal justice (reciprocity of grace and fairness, proportionality, friendship, mutual sharing, and human need [chreia] in economic exchange), restitutive justice (repairing damages created by economic and legal transgressions), political or universal justice (political participation, practical wisdom [phronesis], deliberative rationality and discursive judgment, and best constitutions of kingship, aristocracy, and polity), ideal polity (democratic polity, equality, freedom, and popular sovereignty), rationality as political participation and rational discourse, and a just economy based on household management and a moral economy (oikonomike) as opposed to the distortions of virtue and democracy in a market economy (chrematistike). The very nature of Aristotle’s description of individual virtue and happiness binds the citizen to the constitution, law, economy, and polity since virtue and happiness are ultimately political categories and cannot be

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natural law and natural rights. In 1690 at the very end of the scholastic movement, Locke in his Second Treatise of Government attempted to integrate the older communal and ancient traditions of the Greek philosophers and medieval theologians with the modern institutions and values of a capitalist economy based on commerce, banking, large estates, wage labor, individual liberties, and private profits. Locke stood as a bridge between the natural law tradition of the medieval Scholastics and the natural rights theory of possessive individualism and private property, that is, he stood between Richard Hooker and Thomas Hobbes. Although Locke began his treatise by grounding the natural rights to life, liberty, health, and property in the ethical principles of natural law, he would eventually drop the latter in favor of the former; he used the Ancients to justify the Moderns, natural law to justify natural rights, but then dissolved the connection quickly. His justification for this was that the market economy by the unlimited exercise of commerce and property resolved all the issues and reservations initially mentioned by natural law theorists. Perhaps the real reason was that natural law and natural rights ultimately were theoretically and logically incompatible.4 Since Locke’s view of individual freedom and liberty was so radically new in the seventeenth century, he needed the rule of right reason and the natural order of God and nature to provide the philosophical and theological foundations for modernity. It is here that the conflict between the Ancients and Moderns and their corresponding views of the individual and society begins. It is this very clash of perspectives which invited Marx one hundred and fifty years later to respond with his essay, On the Jewish Question (1843). In fact, Locke’s initial statement of the relationship between natural law and natural rights provides us a better understanding of the alternative direction Marx takes in the nineteenth century. Whereas realized in an isolated social vacuum. Marx’s theory closely resembles Aristotle in that he, too, views justice from the perspective of individual freedom, equality, self-realization and rationality of the species being, friendship, citizenship, political rights and participation, human emancipation, economic democracy, the ideal polity and best constitution of democratic socialism in the Paris Commune, and macro-political economy and critique of chrematistics or a market economy in the Grundrisse and Capital. For more on the connection between Marx and Aristotle, see George E. McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients: Classical Ethics, Social Justice, and Nineteenth-Century Political Economy (Savage, md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1990) and Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotelian Social Democracy,” in R. Bruce Douglas, Gerald Mara, and Henry Richardson (eds.), Liberalism and the Good Life (New York, ny: Routledge, 1990), 203–252. 4 C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 194–277.

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Locke ends his work on the side of natural rights with the ethical and economic principles of natural law abandoned and forgotten,5 Marx will respond with a defense of the older and richer natural law tradition that he articulates in his concepts of the rights of a citizen and political and human emancipation. Taking a position in opposition to Locke, Marx instead returns to the Greek and medieval traditions with his criticisms of natural, legal, and civil rights and defense of political rights, human emancipation, and polis democracy. Locke begins The Second Treatise of Government with an analysis of natural law, which is the eternal law of nature, ethics, and politics created by God, but immanent in the world, which can be read in scripture, the Christian tradition, and right reason.6 Through an interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, the natural law tradition, and the writings of Richard Hooker, the sixteenthcentury neo-Aristotelian, Locke is able to uncover the mind of God in human and physical nature. In the medieval tradition of Aquinas, natural laws represented a synthesis of metaphysics (God, reality, and being), physics (nature, matter, and motion), and ethics (natural inclinations, reason, and the telos of humankind); they manifested the human essence and potentiality of individuals as social beings. Humanity is part of the divine order created by God. Locke will adapt this view of natural law into his political theory of the state of nature, social contract, and natural rights theory.7 The ethical values of natural law in his work are initially reflected in ethical principles of the community and practical 5 Ibid., 199. 6 Weinreb, Natural Law and Justice, 2–3. 7 Ibid., 77–78. Weinreb writes “the main significance that Locke drew from the idea of natural law is not that reason leads us to God but that reason enables us to order our affairs correctly.” This transformation of natural law is developed in Jürgen Habermas, in John Viertel (trans.), Theory and Practice (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 41–81. Habermas contends that the Aristo­ telian notion of practical wisdom or phronesis had been replaced by liberalism with the concept of techne or technical knowledge. Knowledge becomes the technical engineering of the correct social order of the state based on natural rights rather than the search for social ethics and the justice of natural law. Deliberative rationality, virtue, prudence, and political discourse are replaced by a science of domination (Herrschaftswissen) based on the universal principles of the correct order of society: political wisdom is replaced by political technology, natural law by science and natural rights; social ethics by the physics of human nature; praxis by techne; and the public sphere by civil society. Habermas writes, “The engineers of the correct order can disregard the categories of ethical social intercourse and confine themselves to the construction of conditions under which human beings, just like objects within nature, will necessarily behave in a calculable manner. This separation of politics from morality replaces instruction in leading a good and just life with making possible a life of well-being within a correctly instituted order” (p. 43).

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restraints on certain types of economic activity, individualism, and property accumulation that negatively affect these laws of nature and reason. These are the moral standards by which individuals and society should be judged; they are the frameworks in which political theory of the Ancients and the Moderns is to be grounded; and, finally, according to Locke, they are the foundations upon which our natural rights to personal freedom and individual liberty are to be built. Property is validated since it is a product of human life and labor. However, in Locke’s theory of value, life and labor become defined as forms of possession. In his theory of the state of nature, the natural rights to life, liberty, health, and property are to be judged and justified as reflections of the eternal laws of God and nature. In this original state of nature, “men” were free and equal to “dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave or depending on the will of any other man.”8 It was not a state of arbitrary license to do whatever fit the whimsy of each individual since human action was always limited by reason, nature, and God to strengthen the community and common good. In addition to these ethical principles, there also existed in the state of nature economic moderation and structural restraints against unnatural property accumulation and arbitrary exercise of natural rights: these included the spoilage (para. 31), labor (para. 32), and sufficiency (para. 33–34) limitations. Property and its products could not be accumulated in an unlimited fashion since they would spoil, were not worked upon by the owners themselves, or would endanger the other members of the community if not enough was left for the common good of others. These ethical and economic restraints on natural rights provided the community with a protective barrier to unnatural accumulation of property and an unbridled market economy which could harm others by wasteful production, unjustified non-labor accumulation, unlimited appropriation and unnatural private ownership of property, and a depletion of the resources of the common stock of property. It is clear from paragraphs 5 and 15 of the text, which are direct quotations from Hooker’s Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593), that Locke initially feared an acquisitive economic system that would transgress the deeper obligations to love others, to treat others equally and with dignity, friendship, charity, and justice, and, finally, to satisfy our basic human needs. His theory of rights and property were well grounded in Christian ethics and medieval ecclesiastical doctrine. Locke was obviously caught between two different worlds which 8 John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis, in: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1952), para. 4, 4.

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required different sets of ethical principles and economic structures. His solution to the apparent incoherence of liberalism was to transform natural law because of the invention of money and a market economy by tacit agreement among men: Locke maintains that agricultural production increases ten times under enclosed and cultivated property, thereby protecting the sufficiency of the commons and turning waste into value and useful products (para. 37); surplus no longer spoils when accumulated as capital in the form of gold and silver but only increases commerce, industry, market profits, and general prosperity (para. 46–48); and value-creating labor may be increased through the use of agricultural employment and wage labor (para. 28, 50, and 85). Natural law is abandoned in favor of both natural rights and the course opened by the rise of modern economic and political institutions, including commerce and banking (para. 45, 47, and 48). Locke concludes his analysis of the transition from laws to rights by contending that by hoarding gold and silver others are not harmed because money will not spoil, productivity and efficiency will increase the general supply of goods, and wage labor permits others to work naturally and expand one’s private property. Expedience and utility have won over community and the common good; market values have supplanted the traditional moral community and ethical laws of nature. Property has surpassed the law of God itself since the market is superior to reason and nature. C.B. Macpherson has summarized Locke’s theory of property and elimination of its natural law limits when he writes: …it [property] provides the moral foundation for bourgeois appropriation. With the removal of the two initial limitations which Locke had explicitly recognized, the whole theory of property is a justification of the natural right not only to unequal property but to unlimited individual appropriation…The traditional view that property and labour were social functions, and that ownership of property involved social obligations, is thereby undermined.9 9 Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 221. The impact of Locke’s position is clear to Macpherson as he writes about the Levellers; this could also be said about most followers of liberalism: “They did not see that if you make individual freedom a function of possession, you must accept the full market society. If you insist a man is human only as a sole proprietor of himself, only in so far as he is free from all, but market relations, you must convert all moral values into market values” (p. 266). Macpherson concludes that Locke “has justified the specifically capitalist appropriation of land and money” (p. 208), although he did originally intend that the greater capitalist concentration of property and productivity in a market economy would lead to a wider distribution of production to benefit those without property: “Private appropriation, in this way, actually increases the amount that is left to

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What began as a defense of equality and freedom in the state of nature ended with a proclamation of inequality and power in the market. Modernity was uncomfortably squeezed between the horizons of two competing philosophical traditions which are ultimately incompatible – there are the values of God, common property, and the community on one side, and the institutions of a market economy – private property, commerce, banking, and wage labor on the other. Originally the right to private property was justified on the basis of God, natural reason, and labor. As stated in Genesis, God had given humanity all property in common. He did, however, provide humans with the ability to reason and thus to “make use of it to the best advantage of life and convenience.”10 And since every man had a right to his own body and the products of his body, the private appropriation of property was further justified, reintegrating the Ancients and the Moderns once again. However, with the invention of money, commerce, and banking, these limits to self-interest and property were no longer seen as barriers to private accumulation since private property aided the community and its common stock with increased agricultural production and economic efficiency. By temporarily integrating the two traditions on the basis of market efficiency and productivity, Locke failed to appreciate their others” resulting in a “better living…for others.” (p. 221). The natural right to property is transformed into a natural right of subsistence through wage labor. In the end, Macpher­ son concludes that Locke did not recognize that the continued alienation of labor as commodity and subsistence wage labor meant “the alienation of life and liberty” and the undermining of the foundations of Locke’s own theory of natural rights by turning his moral values and natural law into market values of possessive individualism and property rights. (pp. 220 and 266). It will be left to Marx to make this connection between natural law and natural rights explicit as he argues that they are contradictory moral principles: natural law cannot survive under natural rights but even the principles of equality and freedom, the cornerstones of liberalism and Locke’s political theory, cannot survive the right to unlimited property in a market economy. And at the level of ethics and social institutions, democracy is incompatible with the economic imperatives of liberalism and capitalism. Recognizing that the seventeenth century was a watershed of ideas rejecting an objective and universal standard of natural justice and economic equity, Tawney in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism writes: “The law of nature had been invoked by medieval writers as a moral restraint upon economic self-interest. By the seventeenth century, a significant revolution had taken place. ‘Nature’ had come to connote, not divine ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free play” (pp. 179–180). Tawney then proceeds to historically follow the dissolution by state policy of these medieval ideas based on scripture and natural law. 10 Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, para. 26, 17.

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internal contradictions which will lead Marx a century and a half later to rethink their relationship. Throughout his writings Marx responds to Locke in a variety of ways by transforming the priorities and relationships between natural law and natural rights.11 Marx abandons natural rights as contradictory to the imperatives of species being, community, and human rights. Natural law for him framed the discussion about the universal ethical and moral foundations of human beings 11

The Tucker-Wood Thesis and Its Critics: This essay presupposes the debates in the 1970s and 1980s over the famous Tucker-Wood thesis which claimed that Marx did not develop a moral critique of capitalism or a corresponding theory of social ethics or social justice. Some of the key works representative of this thesis include the following: Robert Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) and The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969) and Allen Wood, “The Marxian Critique of Justice,” in Marshall Cohen, Thomas Nagel, and Thomas Scanlon (ed.), Marx, Justice, and History (Princeton, nj: Princeton University Press, 1980), “Marx on Right and Justice,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1978–79), and Karl Marx (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). The thesis was criticized and rejected by a number of theorists including: Ziyad Husami, “Marx on Distributive Justice,” in Cohen, Nagel, Scanlon and Kai Nielsen (eds.), Marx, Justice, and History and Kai Nielsen, “Marx on Justice: The Tucker-Wood Thesis Revisited,” in Marxism and the Moral Point of View: Morality, Ideology, and Historical Materialism (Boulder, co.: Westview Press, 1989), 155–192. An overview and summary of this debate may be found in Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” New Left Review 150 (March– April 1985), 47–85; Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 48–70; Kai Nielsen, “Marx, Engels and Lenin on Justice: The Critique of the Gotha Program,” Studies in Soviet Thought 32 (1986), note 2, 59–60; and Robert Sweet, Marx, Morality and the Virtue of Beneficence (Lanham, md: University Press of America, 2002). Both Nielsen and Peffer view the Tucker-Wood thesis mainly as a debate within Analytical Marxism over the issues of moralism and anti-moralism in Marx, that is, over whether Marx has a theory of justice or not. The anti-moralist position stresses issues of scientific socialism, positivism, historical materialism, technological determinism, economic predictions, and the rejection of moralism or idealism: this perspective is represented by Robert Tucker, Allen Wood, Derek Allen, Andrew Collier, Allen Buchanan, and Anthony Skillen. The other perspective stresses Marx’s theory of alienation, distribution, moral philosophy, social ethics, fairness, equality, and freedom, and his theory of social justice: this tradition is represented by Ziyad Husami, Gary Young, Norman Geras, G.A. Cohen, Jon Elster, William Shaw, and Nancy Holmstrom. Taking a different position, Geras examines the same literature but from a narrower perspective of whether Marx condemns capitalism from the principles of justice or another normative position. Geras contends that as Marxists they all agree that Marx offered a moral condemnation of capitalism. (Geras, “The Controversy over Marx and Justice,” 1–2). Others who are outside of this debate within analytic philosophy and science and who have taken a moral, ethical, or Hegelian view of Marx’s social theory include Eugene Kamenka, Douglas Kellner, Shlomo Avineri, and Philip Kain.

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and society – the order of nature and species beings; like Hegel before him, he integrated a concern for individual moral self-development and creativity (practical reason) with social ethics and justice (Sittlichkeit) within the framework of economic, social, workplace, and cultural institutions. Natural law is inherent in human beings, while its manifestation in history in the form of natural rights is a product of social conflict. In his essay On the Jewish Question, Marx’s social and political theory of natural law is framed by four different theoretical and intellectual traditions: (1) the development of his own social theory from his early writings on democracy, alienation, and private property to his later writings on the ethics and institutions of the Paris Commune and the Gotha Program; (2) the history of political theory articulated in the great Summarizing the Tucker-Wood Thesis, Nielsen in the introduction to Marx and Morality writes: “For Marx and Engels, as Tucker and Wood read them, justice is not and cannot be an abstract general standard by which human reason, in or out of reflective equilibrium, assesses social practices, institutions, whole socio-economic formulations such as capitalism or socialism or ways of life…Marx does, of course, condemn capitalism for its exploitation of people, its economic instability, its creating and sustaining of servitude and for its failure…to satisfy as fully as possible human wants and needs. But he does not, Tucker and Wood paradoxically claim, condemn it morally or condemn it on the basis of even some implicit normative ethical theory” (p. 8). Leszek Kolakowski in his essay, “Marxism and Human Rights,” Daedalus, 112, 4 (Fall 1983), argues for a historicist and relativist interpretation of Marx and rejects any idea that Marx held to a theory of natural law: “Within his [a Marxist] conceptual framework, he is not only bound to take the historicist’s standpoint, dismissing all the claims of natural law theory, all the beliefs in everlasting moral order or in immutable rights, but to be consistent, he must positively oppose the concept of human rights even in its historically relative form” (p. 84). Kolakowski, who writes in the tradition of the German Social Democratic Movement and Scientific Marxism (Karl Kautsky and Rudolf Hilferding), rejects the philosophical moralizing of capitalism on the basis of social justice and recognizes the ideological form of the Enlightenment and French Revolution in bourgeois natural rights in On the Jewish Question. However, he fails to consider the other elements of political emancipation – human rights, rights of the citizen, political rights, and human emancipation mentioned in this essay and expanded throughout Marx’s life’s work. In fact, Kolakowski uses terms such as “human rights” and “civil liberties” too loosely. Scientific and Analytical Marxism add interesting elements to the discussion about Marx and justice, but they do so at the danger of losing the broader philosophical context and content of his writings and his indebtedness to ancient Greek philosophy, medieval Scholasticism, and German Idealism, that is, to Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. Exploitation, instability, servitude, and human needs are fundamentally ethical concepts at the foundation of Marx’s theory of social justice. The main problem facing those who defend the Tucker-Wood thesis is that they limit their concept of “justice” to distributive justice and a particular form of distributive justice at that – an exchange of equivalents.

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documents and objective spirit of Western liberalism in the United States and France from the American Revolution, French Revolution, American Civil War, and the French Paris Commune of 1871;12 (3) the consideration of modern natural law theory in the writings of Hegel and Spinoza;13 and (4) the reappropriation of the natural law tradition from the ancient Greeks and Hebrews through the medieval Scholastics. Marx begins his theory of justice and natural law in the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1843), On the Jewish Question (1843), and Early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 with his analysis of democracy, freedom, and political and economic alienation. However, these ideas will continue to permeate the whole of his thinking even into his more developed economic theory in the Grundrisse (1857), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), and Capital (1867–1894). In this way, his later economic theory is not a form of positivist inquiry but a structural and 12

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Phenomenology of the Objective Spirit and Social Ethics: Marx’s theory of natural law is framed by the development of American and French political theory in their historical documents: Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776), French Revolution Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793), Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863), and the socialist ideals of the Paris Commune (1871) and the Gotha Program (1875). To this list of modern documents influential on Marx could be added the funeral oration of Pericles in Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War. See George E. McCarthy, “In Praise of Classical Democracy: The Funeral Orations of Pericles and Marx,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 27, 2 (November 2, 2006): 205–227. Natural Law in Hegel and Spinoza: Marx is also influenced by the theory of natural law, Objective Spirit, and Social Ethics (Sittlichkeit) of Hegel: Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law (1802–03), Early Theological Writings (“The Positivity of the Christian Religion,” 1793–96 and “The Spirit of Christianity,” 1798–99), System of Ethical Life (1803–04), Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences: Part III: The Philosophy of Spirit: Section Two: Objective Spirit (1817), and Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821). Benedict Spinoza on natural law and democracy: Tractatus TheologicoPoliticus (1670) and The Ethics (1677). For more on Marx and Hegel, see Eugene Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1969); Robert Fine, Political Investigations: Hegel, Marx, and Arendt (London: Routledge, 2001); Norman Levine, Marx’s Discourse with Hegel (Palgrave Macmillan, March 2012); and Steven Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism: Rights in Context (Chicago, il: The University of Chicago Press, 1989). For more on Marx and Spinoza, see Etienne Balibar, in Peter Snowdon (trans.), Spinoza and Politics (London: Verso, 1998); Julia Klein, “Etienne Balibar’s Marxist Spinoza,” Philosophy Today (January 2000): 41–50; Allan Arkush, “Judaism as Egoism: From Spinoza to Feuerbach to Marx,” Modern Judaism, vol. 11 (1991): 211–223; Eugene Holland,“Spinoza and Marx,” Cultural Logic, vol. 2, no. 1 (Fall 1998); and for an overview of the literature, see George E. McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients, note 71, 318–319.

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logical analysis based on empirical and historical research of the social relations of production. Because of the Hegelian heritage in these works which emphasize the internal structural and logical contradictions of capitalism, they must be considered part of his overall theory of ethics and social justice. In his essay on Jewish civil rights, Marx begins his analysis of natural rights and political emancipation by turning to the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793). He wishes to develop a theory of modern politics by making the distinction between political and human emancipation, political rights of the state (ideal) and economic rights of civil society (real), and natural law and human rights. In the process of responding to Bruno Bauer, Marx begins his essay On the Jewish Question with the same dualism and ambiguity between rights and nature as found in Locke but with the addition of Rousseau’s distinction between the rights of man and citizen, economic rights and political rights.14 Although his essay on Jewish civil rights ostensibly begins with a summary of 14

Natural Law and Karl Marx: Ernst Bloch also places Marx within the theoretical orbit of natural law theory. See Ernst Bloch, in Dennis Schmidt (trans.), Natural Law and Human Dignity (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1986), 63, 177–178, and 187–188. See also Philip Kain, Marx and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) who argues that Marx does have a theory of natural law grounded in the essence of humanity, that is, grounded in his ideas of freedom, essence or function of man, species being, creative self-determination, human dignity, and human needs (pp. 29–33). Morality represents the fullest development of human nature and freedom, not as individual license, but as “the unhindered development of what is the essence of the thing” (p. 21). According to Kain’s interpretation of Marx, the essence of humanity is its morality (p. 32). C.B. Macpherson, in his essay “The Maximiza­ tion of Democracy,” in Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), 3–23, places Marx in the tradition of natural law since his ethical theory is grounded in nature – human essence, ethical maximization of human capacities and powers, species being, praxis, creativity, and human needs. The crucial questions are whether natural rights are grounded in human nature and the state of nature (natural rights theorists), social convention (Protestant radicals), labor (socialists), or the greatest happiness of the largest number (utilitarians); and whether natural law is grounded in reason (Greeks), God (scholastics), scripture, tradition, and reason (natural rights theorists), laws of practical reason (Kant), or the community and nature (socialists). In Locke’s theory of natural law, property initially served the common good, health and well-being of the individual and community, economic sufficiency and life of the community, the merit of individual labor and industry; in the end natural law was sacrificed on the altar of commerce, banking, finance, and wage labor. Thus, there is a central question around which revolve natural rights and natural law: are life, liberty, and freedom rights necessary to protect property or is property a way to ultimately ensure life, liberty, and freedom? Is private or productive property an end in itself or simply a

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Bauer’s original essay on the same topic and his response to the issues of civil liberties, political prejudice, and religious privilege, Marx speculates whether the original question itself limits the intellectual debate since it automatically assumes a universal validity to civil liberties and natural rights within society.15 For Bauer, the real question is simply a clarification of the manner in which Jews were to be assimilated as citizens into German society: did this involve

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means to provide for the common good? The former produces a society of possessive individualism, competition, inequality, and servitude, while the latter is oriented toward the community, egalitarianism, and democracy. Do rights protect aristocracy and power or do rights ensure conscience and moral self-determination? On this point, Staughton Lynd in his work Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism (New York, ny: Vintage Books, 1969) refers to the thoughts of Langdon Byllesby, a Phil­ adelphia printer, who in Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal Wealth (1826) wrote, “to speak of inalienable rights of life and liberty without providing material means to sustain them would be like saying that ‘an ox has an inalienable right to fly, or a fish to walk’” (p. 89). Without providing wings or feet to these animals, these rights are meaningless and absurd – or in Marx’s language these rights are moral abstractions and utopian concepts. Without an egalitarian society and communal property, there are no rights to life, liberty, or democracy (pp. 83–84); without Sittlichkeit there is no Moralität. The seventeenth-century Levellers accepted Locke’s labor theory of value as they argued for a “dismantling of economic privileges and the equalization of property”; they fought for the radical egalitarianism of rights and social reality along with political democracy. On the other side of the debate, Alexis de Tocqueville in the eighteenth century, while defending democracy, sought to protect property against equality and the tyranny of the majority. Thomas Jefferson also engaged the issue when he changed the basic natural rights of Locke to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the Declaration of Independence. He, too, was concerned about the violation of equality and liberty by the abuse of property rights and wanted to limit property acquisition through progressive taxation, tax remittance for the poor, redistribution of wealth, and extension of common property (Richard Schlatter, Private Property: The History of an Idea (New York, ny: Russell & Russell, 1973), 132–134, 195–199, and 236–237). Natural Law among English and American Radicals: Although Locke uses natural law to justify natural rights, and then proceeds to exclude reference to the former in favor of the latter, later social and political theorists will reappropriate selected parts of his theory of natural law that will call into question the essential natural right of property and its exclusive power of defining the very nature of life, liberty, and freedom. These theorists include the seventeenth-century English Levellers and radical democrats (John Lilburne, Richard Overton, and William Rainborough), eighteenth-century French Romantics (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), eighteenth-century English Dissenters (James Burgh, Richard Price, Joseph Priestly, John Wilkes, John Cartwright, and Catharine Macaulay), eighteenth-­century American Radicals (Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine), and the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Socialists (John Stuart Mill, Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Joseph Proudhon). See Lynd, Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism;

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having the Jewish community give up its religion or require the broader society to give up its public claims to Christianity; did Jews have to “sacrifice the ‘privilege of faith’ in order to acquire the general rights of man?”16 Marx takes this initial formulation of the question of rights, religion, and citizenship and turns it into an essay on the reality and limits of natural rights. He does this by reviving an older natural law tradition with its focus on issues of social responsibility, community, and social justice. Marx immediately changes the contours of the discussion by asking about the nature of political emancipation and civil rights. He begins to broaden the horizons of discourse by focusing on the role and purpose of political ideals and social institutions in German society, as well as the conflicting relationships between religion and the state, economic and political rights, and civil society and the state. These conflicting institutional relationships also continue to be expressed at the level of ideas with the conflict between private and general interests, individual and the species life of humanity, the rights of man and the rights of the citizen (terrestrial and the celestial), economic rights/ liberties and political freedom, and political and human emancipation. Marx’s purpose beneath the confusing juxtapositioning of social and philosophical categories is to outline an alternative to liberalism and its theory of natural rights. He is critical of this tradition because it constrains our understanding of humanity, political life, and the community and limits human development to the scope of possessive egoism, competition, and market categories. Marx stresses his main point that natural rights limit human potentiality to the historical moment of liberalism. As an alternative, he is beginning to explore the potential of a human society defined in terms of the ideals of citizenship, community participation, and self-determination. Moving beyond Bauer, Marx explores the empirical basis and purpose of both religion and politics in modern society. Once he sees the role they play in functionally stabilizing and legitimizing society, he is able to move beyond the debate over natural rights to a broader understanding of humanity and social justice. He does this by characterizing natural rights theory as a form of political

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Lloyd Weinreb, Natural Law and Justice; and Schlatter, Private Property. In summarizing the position of James Madison and the Federalists, Lynd said of the American view of humanity: “The result was in significant respects a closed society, which held the meagerest hopes for human nature and foreclosed in advance the possibility that a community might be both free and fraternal” (p. 12). Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in T.B. Bottomore (trans. and ed.), Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York, ny: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), 22 and Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels Werke (mew) (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1961), Band 1, 362.

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alienation, cultural ideology, inherent contradiction, and a phenomenal and historical stage in the development of the human spirit and individual freedom. According to Marx, the role of both religion and politics is to act as “a theologian ex professo.” So long as a general discussion of rights, whether religious civil liberties or political natural rights, remains at such a high level of philosophical abstraction, the participants fail to realize that they are “always in the domain of theology.”17 Marx wants to adopt a new attitude toward religion and rights: he wishes to treat them both as real, historical phenomena and not theological or political abstractions. As conceptual abstractions their actual substantive content is repressed, resulting in a deflection and diffusion of the real issues of political freedom and human rights within capitalism. When viewed critically, both religion and natural rights are seen as forms of ideological distortion which keep us from recognizing the underlying structures of society and conceptual forms which confine all possibilities of human freedom. Religion is simply the recognition of man in a roundabout fashion: that is, through an intermediary. The state is the intermediary between man and human liberty. Just as Christ is the intermediary to whom man attributes all his own divinity and all his religious bonds, so the state is the intermediary to which man confides all his non-divinity and all his human freedom.18 According to Marx, religion has played the role of keeping humanity from seeing its own divinity and creativity in the workplace and history; now politics is similarly preserving that theological instinct of religion by hiding and suppressing awareness of the economic reality behind politics – behind natural rights are the institutions of liberalism and capitalism; behind religion is humanity. The ideal and the real are in contradiction with each other and thus are hidden from public view. Religion and politics are both the spirit of civil society because they blind us to the reality of the true social conditions of the economy: “They are religious in the sense that man treats political life, which is remote from his own individual existence, as if it were his true life.”19 In reality, the ideals of politics and a moral economy only conceal the reality of a competitive market economy antithetical to its ethical principles. It is the role of politics to create the ideal that acts as an “illusory phenomenon” or cultural ideology. “The political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as is heaven in relation to earth. It stands in the same opposition to civil society, and

17 18 19

Ibid., 8 and mew, 1, 351. Ibid., 11 and mew, 1, 353. Ibid., 20 and mew, 1, 360.

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overcomes it in the same manner as religion overcomes the narrowness of the profane world.”20 The secret of the modern state is civil society which is its essence and profane reality; the state provides society with a religious world of hopeful ideals and spiritual illusions that conceal the reality of the bellum omnium contra omnes which is the true spirit of a market economy and civil society – differentiation, egoism, and the separation of human beings from themselves, others, and community.21 The purpose of the ideal or false consciousness is to hide the economic reality from critical self-reflection and, therefore, to hide the true nature of natural rights. This is the function of abstractionism which, by an artificial division of conceptual labor, separates politics from economics. Locke had initially used natural law to shield and protect society against the blinding reality of natural rights since the latter were the truth of the former; the lost secret of Locke is that rights protect property, not human life or liberty.22 But this is the very thing Marx rejects. His goal is to disconnect and reveal the relationship between rights and laws, in effect, to reveal the reality hidden by Locke. Natural rights and political emancipation are only stages in the development toward a fuller and more complete form of human emancipation.23 They are difficult forms to grasp since they represent the unfulfilled moral ideals and the obscuring ideology of empirical reality. That is, natural rights are the ideals of a limited view of humanity and of a specific historical mode of production. This awareness forces Marx to consider the underlying assumptions of natural rights theory in his theory of humanity as a species being. These rights of possessive individualism reflect deeper levels of economic alienation that he articulates in his essay “Alienated Labor” the following year. His analysis of the alienation of Jewish and civil rights presupposes this form of alienated market economy and industrial production where individuals are not protected in their equality and freedom but joined together as degraded commodities. Their “rights” are just forms of political and legal alienation since they presuppose not an ideal civil society, but an alien form of production and distribution in which humanity’s social being is objectified and deformed. The very idea of rights in this essay is complex since, on the one hand, rights 20 21 22

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Ibid., 13 and mew, 1, 355. Ibid., 15 and mew, 1, 356. Macpherson, “Natural Rights in Hobbes and Locke,” in Democratic Theory, 228–233. Macpherson stresses that the negation of natural law limits on unlimited property acquisition ends in undermining the natural rights also. One can legitimately argue that this discussion about natural rights and political emancipation is simply the first step in Marx’s career toward the development of a more sophisticated theory of natural law and social justice.

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are themselves reflections of the inner contradictions and private, class interests of civil society (“rights of man”), while, on the other, they express a progressive yearning for the community and political participation (“rights of the citizen”); rights are the normative manifestations of the conflict between the individual and community, ideology and idealism, liberalism and democracy. They are an oppressive defense of the egoism and idolatry of a market economy at the same time that they represent the hopes and dreams of political democracy.24 Marx’s goal is to make sense of this incoherence of the natural rights tradition by placing it within a framework of historical materialism and a broader and more comprehensive theory of justice. This discussion has been an important prelude to Marx’s real intention in this essay, which is to set the foundations for an alternative to natural rights, possessive individuals, and a functionally repressive state apparatus – he moves from a critique of the ideology of politics to an affirmation of the ideals of politics. His goal now is to outline the possibilities of an alternative political theory based on natural law principles of law, reason, democracy, emancipation, and social freedom.25 He begins to engage the main question by inquiring into the nature of political emancipation itself and thereby, into the nature of rights, by distinguishing between the natural rights of man in civil society and the

24 Kamenka, Marxism and Ethics, 23–24. Reflecting on the nature of natural rights, Kamenka writes: “The moral dignity of man requires something other than principles of arbitration between competing interests and demands, something other than principles which assume the existence of conflict and evil” (p. 24). Discussion about rights and duties in moral theory is, according to Kamenka, an articulation of the “incoherence of civil society based on private property and ‘abstract’ individualism” (p. 42). 25 The Five Traditions of Social Justice in Marx: Ancient Hebrews, Ancient Hellenes, Ancient Hellenists, German Romantics, and German Idealists: Marx is influenced by these five traditions from which he explicitly and implicitly borrows the spirit of his ideas: (1) Torah and the Hebrew Prophets: covenant, community, love, righteousness and justice (sedakah), compassion and loving kindness (hesed), charity (mishpat), fairness, moral economy, critique of idolatry, and the restoration of unity (tikkun olam) in the Jubilee (fair prices, principle of release of property, right of redemption of property and homes, return of property to original owner, and release from servitude in Leviticus 25) and the Sabbath (loans, credit, fallow land, rejection of usury, right of the poor to eat, and release of slaves and debt in Exodus 21–23 and Deuteronomy 15); (2) Aristotle and Ancient Greeks: moral economy, grace, reciprocity, mutual sharing, forms of justice, friendship, citizenship, moral and intellectual virtue, reason as phronesis (practical wisdom), love (philia), political democracy, economic equality, and the critique of chrematistics and a market economy; (3) Luke, Acts, and the New Testament: community, equality, common property, human need, and love; (4) German Romanticism of Goethe, Schiller, and Winckelmann:

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­ atural rights of the citizen as a species being in the state; this, in turn, helps n him articulate a new theory of human rights based on a commitment to the community, public action, political participation, and human emancipation. Toward this end, he turns to an analysis of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793). This document is central to his argument because it incorporates the ideals of Jean Jacques Rousseau into the objective spirit of beauty, creativity, art, harmony, simplicity, and integration of mind and body; and (5) German Idealism of Kant and Hegel: love, self-realization, the practical reason of individual freedom and moral autonomy, self-determination and self-legislation, and creativity (subjectivity) and the social ethics of human activity or praxis, political community, human needs, moral economy, and human dignity (ends). Marx’s theory of social justice is universal in scope but historical in practice which reduces it neither to relativism nor historicism. It encompasses justice as politics and human rights, praxis and self-determination, economics and worker democracy, ecology and natural symbiosis, economic redistribution, fairness, and human needs, and industrial production and the logic and structure of capital. But with the development of the historical modes of production, the structures of political economy are more able to accommodate the social ethics of Marx. The ethical and structural possibilities of equal rights, individual freedom, and human emancipation are only expanded from his earlier to his later writings as he becomes more aware of the institutional potentialities of democratic socialism as the ideal becomes more real and the imagination becomes more rational and actual. Note that Marx’s theories of natural law and social justice are not treated as abstract universal ideas or categorical moral imperatives, but as concepts and ideals imbedded in social institutions, that is, as morality made concrete and real in history and society (social ethics); like Hegel he blended together the thought of Kant and Aristotle (Philip Kain, Marx and Ethics [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988], 15–82 and Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism, 6, 12–13, and 130–131). Thus natural law is contextualized, but not historicized and relativized; it is also placed within a context of theory and practice. It is viewed as an historical and phenomenological development that realizes itself over time within a transformed political and economic system. Marx creates a new Phenomenology of Spirit as Natural Law as he awakens with the Paris Commune to a new dawn of human consciousness rooted in the political and economic democracy of the communal movement, the natural law tradition of the Ancient Greeks, Hebrews, and medieval Scholastics, and the evolution of more inclusive human rights within liberalism itself from the American Declaration of Independence, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and the French Manifesto of the Paris Commune (April 19, 1871). Natural law is not a universal moral order given for all times as it was for the Ancients and Scholastics, but a “representation” (Vorstellung) or “concept” (Begriff) of social justice that evolves in history and society. Marx thus filters his theory of natural law through the German Idealism of Kant’s and Hegel’s theory of representations, phenomenology, and social ethics. Following upon his rejection of an objective reality or thing-in-itself, Kant’s argument that the objects of perception and thought are constructions of the categories

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the French Revolution.26 By beginning with the distinction between the “rights of man” and the “rights of the citizen,” Marx is able to distinguish between economic and political rights and their implications. He applies a critical method in his examination of natural rights and political emancipation, along with their ethical principles (concept) and social institutions (structures). This is the heart of his argument in this essay, since it reveals universal natural rights as a product of history and political compromise rather than as due to innate reason or God. The focus of Marx’s attention in this essay was on the ideological and repressive character of natural rights. Thus, he spends most of his time deconstructing natural rights in order to get access to the “rights of man”; he spends much less time examining the “rights of the citizen” since they contradicted the ethical values of economic rights of civil society and were viewed as the basis for his theory of human emancipation. The rights of the economic and bourgeois man are the rights of liberalism and a market economy: equality, liberty,

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of the understanding (substance and causality) and the intuitions of the mind (time and space) is applied to both cognition and consciousness and to moral precepts by Hegel and Marx. The latter continues this critical method when he maintains that social justice is something that is mediated, expanded, and historically developed through the economic and social relations of production and through cultural self-consciousness. See Nielsen, “Marx, Engels, and Lenin on Justice,” 25–26. For more on the relation between Judaism and Marx, see Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man (New York, ny: Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1969), 44, 61, and 63, José Miranda, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, John Eagleson (trans.) (Maryknoll, ny: Orbis Books, 1974) and Marx Against the Marxists: The Christian Humanism of Karl Marx, John Drury (trans.) (Maryknoll, ny: Orbis Books, 1980), and George E. McCarthy, Dialectics and Decadence: Echoes of Antiquity in Marx and Nietzsche (Lanham, md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1994), especially Chapter 3, “Marx and the Hebrew Prophets,” 125–154 and Endnote 3, 337–338. For more on the topic of Marx and the Greeks, see Horst Mewes David Depew, Steven Smith, Michael DeGolyer, Laurence Baronovitch, Martha Nussbaum, Philip Kain, William James Booth, Richard Miller, Alan Gilbert, Joseph Margolis, and Tom Rockmore, in George E. McCarthy (ed.), Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth-Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (Savage, md: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1992) and J.P. Sullivan (ed.), Marxism and the Classics, Arethusa, vol. 8 (Spring 1975), 1. Jean Jacques Rousseau distinguishes between the civil liberty of the bourgeois and the General Will of the citizen in The Social Contract and Discourses (New York, ny: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1950). The first draft of this revolutionary document on the rights of man and of the citizen was written by the Marquis de Lafayette and adopted on August 23, 1789. It is the second and final draft of the document in 1793 that provided the foundation for the French Constitution and which was later the focus of Marx’s attention in On the Jewish Question (1843).

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s­ ecurity, and property, while the rights of the public citizen as a species being are the rights of political participation, peaceful assembly, expression of ideas, and freedom of the press. The economic rights of civil society are grounded in the market and in egoistic men with their liberty of private conscience and religious practice, materialist orientation, and bourgeois self-interests (Article 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, and 16), while the political rights of the citizen are based on the individual concern for participation in the common good, general welfare, and public spirit of the community (Article 1, 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 25). Marx characterizes these latter rights of political liberty and civil rights as “participation in the community life, in the political life of the community, the life of the state.”27 Thus, he sees a progressive element in this historical document with its liberal theory of rights and egoism.28 However, in modern liberalism the rights of the citizen conceal the reality of the rights of man and, in fact, reduce politics to a mere means of protecting civil society and possessive individualism. Marx does not inquire into these rights at this time since, like God and religion, they are historical illusions which concealed an underlying reality. He is aware of their potential as liberating ideals but their critical examination is not the focus of this essay. In the case of political rights, they concealed the reality of the power, class, and inequality of a market economy and economic rights. The latter are “simply the rights of a member of civil society, that is, of egoistic man, of man separated from other men and from the community.”29 These are the Hobbesian rights to inner isolation, loneliness, despair, private license, and personal convenience – liberty; they are less rights then forms of estrangement and homelessness. Marx contends that these values of liberalism – equality, liberty, security, and property – undermine the true values of natural law and the community: equality limits and undermines others, liberty divides and isolates human beings, security protects persons, property, and egoism, and property encourages self-interest by limiting self-realization and self-actualization. What at first glance appear to be universal rights and unquestionable and unassailable liberties look quite different when they are viewed simply as means to preserve a market economy. The highest aspirations of human development in Western thought for equality and freedom are reduced to market categories of consumerism, hedonism, and materialism. What is lost are the higher values of public discourse, political participation, citizenship, identity within the community, concern for the common good, and the rights of a species being; these are the 27 28 29

Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 23 and mew, 1, 362. Paul Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics: Freedom, Desire, and Revolution (Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 2012), 77–78. Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” 24 and mew, 1, 364.

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goals, according to Marx, of “the true and authentic man.”30 Instead, debates about the nature and applicability of rights have been reduced to the egoistic rights of economic animals whose goals are utilitarian material satisfaction and individual self-preservation; the political Enlightenment has the responsibility of recognizing and preserving capitalism. The state’s purpose is simply to ensure the protections of these rights of man – protecting the reality behind the ideal – rather than realizing the ideal itself in a transformed world and moral economy. And, according to Marx, when these political rights threaten the rights of capitalism, they will be abandoned since they are ultimately not real. Means and ends have been inverted and distorted. This is the new theology of the state which only reaffirms the reality of material life and economic activity and keeps the two realms of the state and civil society separate from each other. Marx’s conclusion is that if the Jews were afforded a constitutional change by enlightened politicians in Germany in return for surrendering their religious principles and prejudices, they would only be replacing one religion for another – Jehovah would be replaced by the illusory economy and economic idolatry. “Thus man was not liberated from religion; he received religious liberty. He was not liberated from property; he received the liberty to own property.”31 The truth of both religion and property is the market economy; the state is the servant of civil society. But there is still light at the end of this essay since Marx does call for the liberation of the political sphere from the market imperatives of civil society and the restoration of the primacy of political emancipation and the rights of the citizen. It is here that the kernel of truth about natural law is contained in Marx’s earliest writings in the brief nod he gives to the search for the “real and authentic” human being who is the abstract citizen made historically real and concrete. It is Hegel’s critique of Kant again. Marx’s work on the Jewish question, religious and civil liberties, and natural rights, although only a whisper at this early stage, frames his next discussion of ethics and social justice found in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. In this work, he expands his theory to include new questions about economic alienation and human emancipation in work, human needs, species being, community, freedom, friendship and brotherhood, kingdom of ends, self-determination, moral sovereignty, emancipation of the senses and nature, and economic democracy. In anticipation of his writings toward the end of his career, it would be useful at this point to outline his more complete theory of

30 31

Ibid., 26 and mew, 1, 366. Ibid., 29 and mew, 1, 369.

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social justice: his theory of political economy and capitalism is comprehensively organized by deeper concerns for the ethical principles and institutions of social justice in the state, work, nature, economy, consumption, and production. Injustice is characterized as the state oppression of political rights, ideology of politics, alienation and dehumanization of work, repression of human creativity and potential, centralized state power and tyranny, extraction of forced labor, and economic exploitation, contradictions, and crises. This is the ethic of the ancient traditions made relevant for the moderns. Consideration of the nature of human emancipation and the rights of political participation and the public sphere is just the beginning of Marx’s attempts to pull together a comprehensive theory of social justice and democracy. These ideas will only become clearer as he develops throughout his middle and later periods. When taken together in the context of his full corpus of work, and when we move beyond discussions of the early and later Marx, philosophical and scientific Marx, we see that he has expanded his theory of social justice to include society as a social totality or integrated social system. The following is only an outline of the major themes of social justice in his writings. The goal here is not to detail his complete theory but to indicate the potential range and form of that theory. (1) Legal and Civil Justice: Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Human Eman­ cipation: discussion of the nature of the modern state, democracy, will of the people, and self-determination in Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right; reflections on the political dualism and practical incoherence of the economy (ideology) and politics (ideal), religion and civil rights, and the rights of man and the rights of the citizen; inquiry into the nature of religion, state, and civil society as forms of political alienation and inquiry into politics, natural rights, and religion as ideals, illusions, and ideologies that conceal class, power, property, and the inequality of a civil society and market economy; and, finally, analysis of the communal nature of human beings, political emancipation and rights, and democracy as political participation, discourse, citizenship, individual freedom, fulfillment of the true authentic human being, and hope for the future and human emancipation in On the Jewish Question; (2) Workplace Justice: Ethics, Virtue, Aesthetics, and Human Nature: examination of the ethical theory of the nature, essence, and potentiality of humanity as species being (Gattungswesen and Naturwesen), freedom, and goodness (virtue); critique of economic alienation and the use of human life as a technical means for the accumulation of property and profits; creation of life through self-realization, communal self-determination, and self-conscious activity (praxis) in meaningful and fulfilling work; and

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consideration of the following ethical issues: end (telos) of life as freedom and creativity according to the “laws of beauty” and practical (ethics, law, and community) and theoretical (morals and ideals) universality; relationships among a repressive workplace, private property, and the potentialities of human labor; and inquiry into private property and the class system of capitalism as the domination and distortion of human life in the Paris Manuscripts;32

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Problems in Defining Social Justice: Drucilla Cornell in her essay “Should a Marxist Believe in Rights?” Praxis International, vol. 1 (April 1984), argues that questions of equality, freedom, self-determination, praxis, species being, and human creativity are fundamental issues of justice (pp. 45–56). Kain in Marx and Ethics refers to these same categories as the “moral good” (p. 21). Although Kain sees Marx as reconciling Aristotle (essence) and Kant (universalization of the categorical imperative) in his ethical theory of species being, freedom, self-actualization of human potentiality, and moral obligation (pp. 64 and 71), he later separates these issues of ethics and justice (p. 98). He also contends that Marx’s early ethical theory is incompatible with his later historical materialism; ethical theory is abandoned beginning with the German Ideology in 1845–46 (pp. 1–6, 103, 106, and 199) as a form of ideology and bourgeois thought. He argues that, according to Marx, issues of the state, law, morals, and rights are ultimately manifestations of class and property interests (pp. 77, 83, 97–98, 111–112, 106, and 125–126). Here Kain is clearly following Jürgen Habermas, Albrecht Wellmer, and Alvin Gouldner who have also articulated this separation and contradiction between ethics and science within Marx’s theory. In the third or dialectical phase of his writings in the Grundrisse and Capital, he returns to integrate ethics back into his social theory by means of a “transcendence of morality” and the “full and free development of every individual” (p. 153). However, by focusing on Aristotle’s influence in his early period with his questions of human nature, essence, freedom, and creativity, Kain unfortunately misses the broader impact of Aristotle on Marx, especially the importance of the former’s theory of ethics (virtue, knowledge, and justice), politics (best constitutions and ideal state), and economics (chrematistics and economics) on Marx’s later writings. On these issues, also see Brenkert, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom, pp. 85–130. Brenkert distinguishes between an ethics and virtue of freedom (“character, disposition, and ways of being”) and self-development (praxis) grounded in the mode and form of production (forces and relations of production) and a theory of justice based upon distribution, exchange, and consumption (p. 157). Capitalist production undermines human freedom, but at the same time is not unjust because there is an exchange of equivalents in the purchase and reproduction of labor power. Brenkert fails to see that this distinction between production and distribution, as well as virtue and justice, is a false and arbitrary distinction that conceals the breadth of Aristotle’s and Marx’s theory of social justice. Buchanan working within a critical variation of the Tucker-Wood thesis in Marx and Justice argues that justice is a derivative and ideological concept of capitalism (historical

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(3) Ecological Justice: Integration of Nature and Humanity in a Moral Economy: a critical moral ecology and economy (Aristotle’s Oikonomia) involve an investigation into the following areas: alienation of nature in its intellectual form of natural science, practical form of technology, and its social form of capitalist industry; science, technology, and industry, in turn, become forms of false consciousness, ideology, domination, and legitimation of capitalism; on the positive side, there is a human need for freedom, self-realization, and creativity in work within a moral community which changes the relationship between humanity and nature; a call for the emancipation of physical, spiritual, and social needs and integration of humanism and naturalism; emancipation of consciousness, perception, and cognition, that is, emancipation of nature as cognitive objectivity; emancipation and dialectic of nature itself as a natural, social, and historical process, that is, nature as a physical reality, objectification, labor (praxis), and human need within a “brotherhood of man” and moral materialism) and would be irrelevant as a regulatory idea or institution in a socialist or communist society. He writes that Marx “never so much as suggests that production will be regulated by principles of justice” (p. 59). Buchanan then proceeds in Chapter 4 of his work to examine Marx’s critique of civil and political rights of man and of the citizen which he argues had been neglected by Tucker and Wood. His conclusion is that Marx believed that communism will so dismantle the structures of power and conflict that there will be no need for any form of juridical or distributive justice; justice is a defective bourgeois concept reflective of both a “defective society” and of “the egoistic, isolated individual.” In a post-capitalist world, justice, as well as the state, would be irrelevant and unnecessary. Buchanan concludes with the comment: “Hence, he (Marx) must conclude, both the rights of man and the rights of the citizen will have no value and hence no place in communism…” (pp. 64–65). For the analytic philosophers, justice reflects the legal, civil, and political rights that compensate and correct for the deficiencies of the capitalist social system; for the Ancients and Marx, justice, on the other hand, represents the social institutions, structures, and cultural ideals that further the self-development and self-realization of the human being. That is, they provide the structural foundations for their social dreams. Justice provides the social, political, and historical form within which ethical principles are made real and relevant – the integration of philosophy and sociology, ethics and politics. The ethical dualism of analytic theorists found in their concept of justice between production and distribution is just a further articulation of the political incoherence within their moral philosophy with its separation of morality and social ethics, ethics and social justice, moral philosophy (virtue, character, and happiness) and political economy (structures, institutions, and history), and the individual and community. See endnote number one above containing MacIntyre’s similar reflections on the dilemma of Enlight­ enment moral philosophy in After Virtue.

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ecology; integration of materialism and sensualism in Feuerbach and Marx and the philosophy of nature (Naturphilosophie) in Epicurus, Schelling and Marx; critique of the logic of capital and the concept of value (Wertbegriff) which dominate and destroy nature; and the realization of the potentiality of objectivity and nature in subjectivity, aesthetic praxis, and democracy in the Paris Manuscripts and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy;33 33

Marx, Nature, and Moral Ecology: For an examination of Marx’s theory of nature and implications for a critical theory of ecology in its broadest sense, see Leszek Kolakowski, “Karl Marx and the Classical Definition of Truth,” in Marxism and Beyond, J.Z. Peel (trans.) (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), 58–86; István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (New York, ny: Harper & Row Publishers, 1970), 100–119 and The Power of Ideology (New York, ny: Zed Books, 2005), Chapter 4, 175–202; Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (London: nlb, 1973); David-Hillel Ruben, Marxism and Materialism: A Study in Marxist Theory of Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, nj: Humanities Press, 1979); Wolfgang Methe, Ökologie und Marxismus (Hannover: soak Verlag, 1981); Patrick Murray, “The Frankfurt School Critique of Technology.” Philosophy & Technology, vol. 5 (1982): 223–248; Trent Schroyer, “Critique of the Instrumental Interest in Nature,” Social Research, vol. 50, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 158–184; Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, Das dialektische Verhältnis des Menschen zur Natur. Philosophiegeschichtliche Studien zur Naturproblematik bei Karl Marx (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1984), 61–116 and Hans Immler and Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik (eds.), Natur und Marxistische Werttheorie (Kassel: Kasseler Philoso­ phische Schriften, 23, 1986), 25–34; Kain, Marx and Ethics, 65–66 and 70–71; and John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York, ny: Monthly Review Press, 2000). Kain writes that “morality is the perfection of our nature” as a free, rational, and creative species being (p. 66) but he could just as well have written that morality is a perfection of nature itself; nature within a moral economy and democratic socialism would become a moral ecology. For a deeper analysis of the relationship among nature, consciousness, and objectification, the relationship between nature and aesthetics (simplicity, harmony, and balance) in Schiller, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, and the idea that the fullest development of nature and humanity occurs within a democratic polity, see Philip Kain, Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1982), 89–91 and 98–103. Nature, Science, Technology, and Industry are socially mediated, defined, and constructed and are various social manifestations of the historical process of alienation within capitalist society. This position is summarized in Schmied-Kowarzik’s Das dialektische Verhältnis des Menschen zur Natur, 77–84. Nature has a number of different meanings in Marx: nature is viewed as an object of perception and consciousness (epistemology), means for the satisfaction of human needs (consumption and material basis for an ethical and virtuous life), external reality, object of beauty and sensuousness (aesthetics), objectification and praxis (production and work), natural reality and social form of production

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(4) Political Justice: Ethics, Politics, and the Good Life of Democratic Socialism: economic freedom and democracy in the Paris Commune of 1871 entail the emancipation of labor, freedom from racial, social, and wage slavery, equality, workplace democracy as the ideal polity, decentralized workers’ councils and cooperatives, expropriation of the expropriators, the dissolution of class inequality, private property, and centralized state power, collective ownership of property, economic self-government, universal suffrage and recall, popular sovereignty, and a phenomenology and history of the spirit (Geist) of the self-consciousness of freedom and political liberalism from John Locke (1690), Thomas Jefferson (1776), Marquis de Lafayette (1789), and Abraham Lincoln (1863) to Ferdinand Lassalle (1871) in The Civil War in France;34 (5) Distributive Justice: Justice of Consumption, Redistribution, Reciprocity, and Human Need: clarification of the Lassallean socialist concepts of common property, proceeds of labor, fairness, equality, freedom, equal rights, and fair distribution from the original document of the Gotha Program. Marx proceeds to amend and expand this theory of distributive justice by first considering issues of fairness, equality, and justice in relation to labor value, merit, contribution, human emancipation, and the satisfaction of human needs; he then proceeds to outline the three distinct social forms of distributive justice – bourgeois, socialist, and communist justice – by tracing the historical evolution of distributive justice from the bourgeois ethical principle of commodity equivalency and market exchange, the socialist ethical principle of individual and equal contribution (work, effort, and time), and the communist ethical principle of reciprocity and human need in the Critique of the Gotha Program; and (6) Economic Justice: Justice of Production and the Structures and Logic of Political Economy: justice based on a theory of exploitation, labor theory

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(historical materialism), nature and the law of value and concept of capital (critique of political economy), nature as the unity of the dialectic of history and nature, the unity of humanity and nature (Naturphilosophie), and, finally, nature as the physical reality of the environment transformed by social praxis and democratic socialism (ethics and moral ecology). Marx’s theory of nature is a unique combination of the Naturphilosophie of Schelling and Hegel and the Naturrecht of Spinoza and Hegel. Schmied-Kowarzik stresses the importance of Marx’s early writings for the development of the rudimentary foundations of a philosophy of nature and the later expansion of these ideas in the works of Ernst Bloch (returning to Schelling) and Alfred Sohn-Rethel (returning to Kant) (Ibid., 16–17 and 125–129). Robin Blackburn, “Introduction,” in Robin Blackburn (ed.), An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (London: Verso Books, 2011), 1–100.

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of value, surplus value, abstract and forced labor (production, profits, and property), industrial expansion, and the economic structure in the Grundrisse, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, and Capital. These works are central to Marx’s theory of social justice and the dialectic of capital since they are an important part of his theory of chrematistics: the structural limits, internal logic, contradictions, and irrationalities of capitalist social relations of production through a critique of the production process, capital accumulation, organic composition of capital, tendential fall in the rate of profit, and economic crises that undermine the possibility of a fair, rational economy and democratic polity.35 These 35

Ethics, Production, Labor Theory of Value, Contradictions, and Exploitation: In his work, Marxism and Ethics, Kamenka writes that conflict and contradictions, history and structure, are “the marks of that inadequacy, one-sidedness, incompleteness which produces a necessary instability.” He concludes this idea by saying “Thus ‘contradictions’ (practical and theoretical incoherence, conflict, instability) become for Marx moral criteria. The ‘contradictions’ of capitalism are not mere signs of impending collapse, but also symptoms of its inhumanity, of its (historically conditioned) failure to make the free man, consciously controlling his fate, the basis of the whole system…Marx, on the other hand, insists that ethical deficiency and logical ‘contradiction’ are necessarily connected” (pp. 12–13). Critique (political economy) and Ethics (morals philosophy) are integrated into a critical social theory. To remove ethics from Marx’s historical materialism and economic crisis theory is to abstract, objectify, and alienate his ideas (pp. 12–13). See also Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 35–36. Both Hans Immler and Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik in their essays in Natur und Marxistische Werttheorie make the clear connection between Marx’s critique of political economy and theory of socialism with Aristotle’s theories of Chrematistik and Oikonomia, respectively (pp. 35 and 50). Immler and Schmied-Kowarzik continue their analysis of Marx and Aristotle in Marx und die Naturfrage. Ein Wissenschaftsstreit um die Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Kassel: Kassel University Press, 2011), 163–166, 177–179, 184– 189, 193–194, and 200–201. Schmied-Kowarzik views Aristotle’s theory of Oikonomia as a moral ecology, while he see Aristotle’s Chrematistik as the basis for Marx’s critique of political economy, value theory, and structural contradictions of the concept of capital (p. 184). Chrematistik joins together the critique of political economy (Kant), the contradictory concept and logic of capital (Hegel), and the theory of value (Locke and Ricardo) into an economic crisis theory. When speaking about Marx’s theory of socialism, SchmiedKowarzik refers to it as “eine solidarische und ökologische Oiko­nomia,” that is, as a communal and ecological economy with direct reference to Aristotle (pp. 16–17). Breaking with the traditional dogmatic interpretations of Marx as a “propagandist for the unlimited development of the industrial productive forces and domination of nature,” SchmiedKowarzik writes, “Marx was the first philosopher and social theorist, who in anticipation of the ecological crisis…had thought through the problem of the alienation of the capitalist industrial mode of production in relation to living nature in order to lay the foundations for its revolutionary overcoming” (p. 25).

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structures constitute an immanent “natural law” of production since they represent the internal concept (Begriff) and logic (Logik) of capital toward contradiction (Widerspruch) and crisis – critique (Kritik) of political economy – but also because they are based on the moral exploitation and alienation of labor.36 In his theory of economic justice Marx has integrated ethics, structure (history), and critique (logic and contradictions). This form of justice considers the broadest framework – the formal logic and historical structure and mechanism of economic relations – in which the other forms of social justice are located and realize themselves. Marx’s theory expresses the structural limits to human potentiality, freedom, and self-realization, on the one hand, and the limits to the ideals of a democratic polity within a capitalist society on the other.37 36

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Karl Marx, “Capital”, in Frederick Engels (ed.), The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, vol. 3 (New York, ny: International Publishers, 1975), 225 and 245 and mew, 25, 235 and 255. It is at this point that justice and critique, morals and method are connected in Marx’s social theory. Marx and Aristotle On Social Justice: Marx’s overall theory of social justice strikingly reflects the logic and structure of Aristotle’s theory in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics. It encompasses the following areas: Ethics: morality, virtue, human nature, freedom, action, reason, and knowledge; Economics: production, distribution, consumption, and exchange; Politics: law, rights, constitutions, political and human emancipation, and the ideal polity of democratic socialism; and Nature: consciousness and nature, objectification, praxis, labor, and nature, and aesthetics, creativity, human self-realization, and nature. The areas of ethics, economics, politics, and nature are all integrated into a comprehensive theory of social justice. Compare the two traditions of the Moderns and Ancients – Marx::Aristotle: (1)  Legal Justice: natural and juridical rights, political freedoms, citizenship, democracy, and human emancipation::Politics: political chrematistics or the distortion of virtue, reason, and democracy in a market economy; (2)  Workplace Justice: virtue, freedom, species being, and goodness::Ethics and Virtue: ethics, function and potentiality of humanity, public reason, and happiness in a democratic polity; (3)  Ecological Justice: nature and humanity in a moral ecology::Physis, Nature, and Know­ledge: nature as an organic living whole with a reciprocal relationship to ethics and humanity in Aristotle’s theory of Metaphysics and Physics; (4)  Political Justice: popular sovereignty, self-determination, and self-government within democratic socialism::Politics, Democracy, and Universal Justice: political justice, nature of democracy, public discourse, practical wisdom or phronesis, and best and ideal political constitutions; (5)  Distributive Justice: fair distribution, reciprocity, and human needs::Politics, Oiko­ nomike, and Particular Justice: distributive and reciprocal justice in a moral economy or oikonomike; and

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Central to Marx’s theory of justice is his rejection of political and economic alienation, liberalism, natural rights, and individualism; capitalism, worker exploitation, and economic irrationality; tyranny and oppression; and the logic (Begriff) and contradictions (Widersprüche) of capitalism (dialectic of capital). To understand the possibilities of democratic socialism, one must appreciate the historical and structural realities of industrial capitalism and a market economy, otherwise social critique turns into abstract moralism.38 It is here that historical materialism and economic crisis theory are integrated with his social ethics. Reconfirming a continuity with the best of Western thought, the issues of politics, rights, and human emancipation (natural law), essential human nature (virtue, goodness, and reason), nature (physics and metaphysics), democracy (democratic polity), distribution (reciprocity of grace and human need), and production (moral economy and labor value) – the natural law of ethics, economics, and politics – are central to a critical theory of justice. The problem was that since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries these laws of nature were no longer part of the prevailing individualistic ethic of Protestantism or liberalism.39 These older questions were reconsidered and reconciled in the nineteenth century as Marx attempted to articulate his theory of natural law and social justice within a comprehensive philosophical theory of social ethics and a socio-economic theory of political economy.40 (6)  Economic Justice: critique of political economy and the logic and contradictions of capital and value production::Chrematistike and Critique: rejection of competition, self-interest, class property, and inequality in a market economy. These ancient and modern theories of justice – Aristotle and Marx – integrate production and distribution, virtue and politics, moral philosophy and social ethics (social institutions), and the individual and the community within an integrative theory of the structures of society in an ideal democratic polity and moral economy. 38 Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics, 46–47. Marx’s critique of moralism is not a critique of ethical theory or social justice but rather a critique of empty concepts and abstractionism that are not tied to the essential nature of humanity (species being) or the functional reality of capitalist history, structures, or internal logic (Begriff). 39 Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, 79–132. Of special interest is the materialist reinterpretation of Weber’s thesis of the Protestant Ethic and the loss of natural law and economic ethics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 40 This is not the place to analyze Marx’s theory of Critique and Science. However, if we move away from a mechanical, deterministic, and positivistic view of scientific inquiry and connect Marx back into the ethical tradition of German Idealism, we will be better able to see how he can integrate ethics, natural law, and historical science into his analysis of social justice; this is the true meaning of the “critique” of political economy. For further information on this point see, George E. McCarthy, Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece (Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 2003), 14–63.

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Social justice is the unifying theme that integrates his early and later writings on ethics, economics, and politics into a comprehensive critique of modern industrial capitalism and a market economy. Due to the spatial constrains on this essay, we will now focus only on Marx’s theory of political justice from The Civil War in France (1871) and his theory of distributive justice found in his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875).41 His analyses of workplace, ecological, and economic justice listed above will have to wait for a more extensive treatment of the topic in another work. In these later writings on the Paris Commune and the socialist Gotha Program, Marx continues to expand upon his theory of political and human emancipation, as well as his theory of human rights and the rights of a citizen, by developing further his theory of distributive justice, economic fairness, common property, and equal rights. All of these ideas require a total reorganization of the structures of production, distribution, and consumption of the social income and wealth of the community (Oikonomia). In 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, the surrender of the French army, collapse of the French Empire under Emperor Napoleon III, and the creation of a National Assembly under Adolphe Thiers, the citizens of Paris united together to resist both the provisional French government and the German army to form a new political and economic system that rejected the values and institutions of modern capitalism and its centralized state. A civil war between the Commune and the new provisional republic of Thiers began. For seventytwo days (March 18-May 28, 1871), they heroically withstood the armies of the French Republic and during that time attempted to construct a new social system based on economic democracy and workers’ control. The Central Committee of the Commune issued a declaration on March 18th and began to dismantle the centralized government and the national hierarchical orders of class and property within the old and new regimes of the French political system.42 The Commune’s first actions were to dismantle the army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and the judiciary. Continuing arguments from On the Jewish Question, Marx contends that the role of the French state was to maintain the 41

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Note the converging views of Marx and John Stuart Mill on the nature of economic or workplace democracy. Compare Marx’s statements from his analysis of the Paris Commune (1871) in the Civil War in France: The Paris Commune (New York, ny: International Publishers, 1972) to the beginnings of Mill’s theory of democratic socialism in his 1871 edition of the Principles of Political Economy (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985). Mill’s new chapters on socialism and property are especially interesting. For a collection of the various documents, announcements, and publications of the Paris Commune, see Stewart Edwards (ed.), The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1973).

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economic and political power of the propertied class: “The state power assumed more and more the character of the national power of capital over labor, of a public force organized for social enslavement, of an engine of class despotism.”43 To undertake a radical transformation of French society, the national standing army was replaced by a citizen National Guard consisting mainly of workers; the local police force in Paris was stripped of its political power and reduced to being responsible to the people; legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government and the whole institutional hierarchy and political division of labor were dismantled and democratized as these positions were filled through elections based on universal suffrage, social responsibility, and citizen recall; and the clergy and church which acted as “a spiritual force of repression” on behalf of the ruling class lost their property and political power within society as the clergy became private citizens, and church property was confiscated and redistributed. Other social institutions such as education and science were to be freed from the external authority of the state and the church and opened to all. Authority and control within society were decentralized and shifted to the workers’ communes in local municipal districts, rural communities, county hamlets, and to the elected representative to the National Delegation in Paris. Marx made the analogy that universal suffrage and local democracy now had the same power of self-determination just like the “individual suffrage” of property owners who were able to choose their own workers and managers and who could remove them at will to redress specific problems in the workplace. The Commune was a social republic or working class government grounded in the ethical principles of “the self-government of the producers” and “the economic emancipation of labor.”44 These political ideals, manifested in the constitution of the Paris Commune, represented an expansion of Marx’s earlier understanding of the nature of political rights and human emancipation. His original ethical theory of natural law and social justice is now being made real and concrete in the very values and institutions of the Commune itself. With the abolition of class rule, property is expropriated by the cooperative associations or production communes so that the means of production are now transformed into “the instruments of free labor.” Concerning the nature of 43 44

Marx, Civil War in France, 55 and mew, 17, 336. Ibid., 58 and 60 and mew, 17, 339 and 342. There were a number of other changes within the Commune, including the limitations of government salaries to worker’s wages to prevent “hunting and careerism,” separation of church and state, abolition of state payments for religious purposes, reopening of factories by workers, abolishment of night work at bakeries and employment offices, and the closing of pawnshops.

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this new social experiment, Marx maintains what appear to be two contradictory ideas. On the one hand, he states that the workers have no preset ideals to realize but wish “to set free the elements of the new society with which old bourgeois society itself is pregnant.”45 But a few pages later he poetically writes that this new system produces “a government of the people, by the people” (italics added).46 At first glance there seems to be a conflict between the two ideas until one realizes that, for Marx, the Paris Commune is not an abstract utopian ideal but rather presents us with the social and economic fruition of the history of Western liberalism: the ideal and the real have merged during the French Civil War as the ideals of liberalism are radicalized and institutionalized in the Commune. During the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln recognized that, as a result of the war and the famous battle at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, there were new political truths that had become self-evident. At the commemoration of the battlefield on November 19, 1863 in his Gettysburg Address, he eloquently stated “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”47 As Marx writes about the Commune and quotes from Lincoln’s famous address, he is also reconstituting the tradition behind Lincoln’s ideas and at the same time creating a phenomenology of social justice; he places the Commune in illustrious company that expands human rights to include all people. These include the American rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the American freedom from political bondage and slavery to a foreign power, the French rights of man and of the citizen, the American freedom from racial slavery and bondage to another person, and the French social rights to economic democracy. Marx only wishes to push Lincoln’s own ideas and words to their logical conclusion by extending human rights and freedom to all men, including workers within a truly democratic society. Equality and freedom have now become not only political and racial categories but also economic ones. Marx’s Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association (May 30, 1971) was, in fact, a funeral oration for the fallen members of the Paris Commune which afforded him the opportunity to develop his theory of human emancipation that self-consciously continues the tradition of Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1776), the French Declaration 45 46 47

Ibid., 62 and mew, 17, 343. Ibid., 65 and mew, 17, 347. Abraham Lincoln, “The Gettysburg Address,” in intro. by Blackburn (ed.) An Unfinished Revolution, 119.

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of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1793), and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1863). The history of human emancipation was a struggle to affirm equality and freedom, political and human rights, and the right to human dignity and emancipation from racial slavery; to this list Marx adds a new form of emancipation – the primacy of natural law and the community to be free from the alienation of work, exploitation of private property, and the slavery of wage labor and capitalist production. Toward this end, the worker associations and production cooperatives create a new form of human emancipation. In this phenomenology of the objective spirit of emancipation, Marx expands upon the nature of liberation and freedom from the political constraints of the British Empire in the American Revolution, from the racial bondage of slavery in the Civil War, and from the wage slavery of capitalism in France to the economic democracy of the Paris Commune: it is a call for political independence and equality, racial equality, and economic freedom. The American, French, and German traditions are forged into a new ethical spirit of human emancipation. Marx sees the Paris Commune as the historical fulfillment of the unrealized and unrealizable bourgeois values of human rights, justice, equality, freedom, democracy, and emancipation. Without an understanding of the logic of capital (industrial justice), the ethical and political ideals are simply metaphysical concepts which ideologically distort and hide the actual reality of civil society and capitalism, while making their realization within society impossible. Ethics and science, logic and structure, and ideals and ideology must be understood as inextricably interlinked. A few years later Marx supplements his analysis of the institutions of economic democracy in the Paris Commune with a more detailed study of the ethical values of distributive justice found in his analysis of the Gotha Program. Written as a critical response to the social democratic followers of Ferdinand Lassalle in 1875, the Critique of the Gotha Program expands his understanding of the issues of economic democracy and the emancipation of labor from slavery and broadens his theory of justice by focusing upon questions about the nature of distributive justice, reciprocity in labor exchange, and the ethics of human need. He asks about the criteria a free society applies in determining the just distribution of the social wealth of the community by distinguishing among traditional ethical principles of equal labor, work contribution, physical effort, intensity of labor, and talents and ability as the basis for determining distributive justice; in the end, as he has done so often in the past, Marx returns again to the Aristotelian view of equality of sharing, reciprocity of grace, and the fulfillment of human needs. Need, not demand, merit, effort, or accomplishments, becomes the basis for distributive justice, just as it formed the foundation in his earlier writings of the human need for universal creativity,

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brotherhood, social praxis, and democracy. At the end of his writings, Marx is coming full circle and returning to his own earlier writings and his own intellectual roots in the Ancients. Marx begins this essay with an analysis of the Gotha Program which was a political statement integrating the ideas of two different and competing Ger­ man socialist groups. Its focus was on the issues of distributive justice, fair wages, and just compensation for labor. He begins by quoting from the joint program that human labor is the “source of all wealth” in society and that all the “proceeds of labor belong undiminished with equal right to all members of society.”48 Years earlier in his essay “Alienated Labor,” Marx had raised a similar question with Pierre Proudhon, the French socialist, when the latter called for the equalizing and universalizing of income as the appropriate way to end the alienation of labor and the primacy of private property in capitalist production. Marx wrote in that essay that private property was not the cause of alienation, but the effect, and, therefore, equalizing income would not solve the initial problem.49 The issue now under consideration years later is about the just distribution of the material rewards of labor. The Gotha Program states that “useful labor” is the sole source of wealth and culture and thus belongs to those who produced it. Marx begins with a critique of the vagueness and hollowness of the concepts of the program; this is political sloganeering using empty phrases that are similar in tone to his later criticisms in this essay about the abstract moralizing of some utopian socialist theorists. Hurling moral aphorisms or metaphysical intonations at opponents does not help with uncovering the internal logic and structural contradictions of society which demand social change. Marx is simply drawing attention to his work on the critique of capitalist production and its internal laws of development – the dialectic of capital. Only by understanding the nature of capitalism is it possible to develop a theory of distributive justice. Lassalle calls for the redistribution of the means of production, creation of common property, cooperative regulation of labor, and fair distribution of the proceeds of labor. This reads like a social program for “crude communism” with its “envy and leveling.”50 These categories are too 48

49 50

Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” in Lewis Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Garden City, ny: Doubleday and Company, 1959), 112 and mew, 19, 15. Marx, “Alienated Labour,” in T.B. Bottomore (trans. and ed.), Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964), 131–132 and mew, Ergänzungsband, 1, 520–521. Marx, “Private Property and Communism,” in Karl Marx, T.B. Bottomore (trans. and ed.), 153 and mew, Ergänzungsband, 1, 534–535.

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abstract and removed from an empirical and historical understanding of the nature of capital and industrial production to be useful conceptual tools of analysis. Without knowledge of how the system is structured or actually functions, Marx questions whether moral criticisms or pragmatic policy will be insightful or useful. Marx now turns to an analysis of the nature of the emancipation of labor and “fair distribution of the proceeds of labor.” Throughout his writings a central theme has always been the issue of human emancipation in its various forms of natural rights, natural law, political emancipation, racial emancipation, etc. Now he returns to the central question of emancipation and social justice in the workplace and economic redistribution. This is the heart of his essay since it provides him with the opportunity to portray his ideas on the nature of property, distributive justice, and fair wages. One option for Marx is to simply accept the legal justification of bourgeois fair distribution in terms of the market and wage labor as some theorists have suggested. Marx implies that this is just a legal reflection and justification of the actual conditions of the capitalist mode of production. One can read this section of the essay as a restatement of his own theory of historical materialism from the “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).51 But the initial question allows Marx to reopen the whole discussion of income and wealth distribution, property, labor, rights, fairness, and justice in terms of the redistribution of the social wealth of society. Marx argues that before the social wealth or proceeds of labor can be fairly distributed to “all members of society” according to the principle of “equal right,” there must first be an accounting of the general economic costs of production (replacement and expansion of the means of production and social insurance against natural disasters), the social costs of production (administrative costs, common needs or social services such as schools, health care, etc.), and the costs for social welfare (unemployed, poor, sick, etc.). Only then can the issue of fair distribution of the means of consumption (income) be considered. Marx has rejected the basic categories of the Gotha Program because they fail to deal with the real foundations of distributive justice. Marx now engages the question of equality, fairness, and redistribution within a “cooperative society based on the common ownership of the means of production”52 and the nature of distribution as it emerges out of the old system of capitalism into the more developed forms of socialism and communism. 51 52

Karl Marx, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (New York, ny: International Publishers, 1970), 20–22 and mew, 13, 8–9. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” 117 and mew, 19, 19.

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What is to be the new ethical basis for fairness and justice of the “means of consumption” in a socialist society? Will it be merit, hard work, intensity of work, labor time, contribution and effort, etc.? Marx holds that the initial stages of socialist production, distribution, and consumption will still have some residual features of the old capitalist market exchange, that is, labor as a commodity will be exchanged for its equal value. This is the principle of equal market exchange within a system still characterized as capitalist commodity production. At the early stages in the movement toward communism, the principle of the bourgeois exchange of commodity equivalents will prevail as “a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form.”53 This principle of exchange based on commodity equivalency of human labor also contains the principle of “equal right” to both production and consumption: “The right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labor.”54 Distributive justice is immediately related to labor contribution whereby the ideal and reality of bourgeois exchange come to pass. The ideology of the exchange of equal labor becomes the accepted reality since forced labor and surplus value have been eliminated along with the institution of private property. By delving deeper into the idea of “equal rights” based on labor, Marx is forced to consider the nature of labor and contribution in terms of work duration (time) and work intensity (effort), and how they may affect the standard of measurement for an equal right to the products of labor. He concludes his analysis by saying that what at first appears to be an equal right to the means of consumption is, in fact, an unequal right based on an individual’s superior physical attributes. He recognizes that there is an inequality of physical endowments and an inequality of social obligations and responsibilities (marriage, children, etc.). Equal right (contribution) to labor equivalents (income) must be adjusted eventually to take these differences into account. Marx concludes this section on equal rights and inequality with the comment: “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development conditioned by it.”55 Justice is bound by the structural realities of society and history. The ethical principles of the ideal can never be beyond the possibilities of historical reality. Human rights and social justice are not abstract categories arbitrarily applied to the social conditions but are historically adapted to them and to the 53 54 55

Ibid., 118 and mew, 19, 20. Ibid. and mew, 19, 20. Ibid., 119 and mew, 19, 21.

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level of production in the economy. The ideal and real are not independent categories but are dialectically interrelated depending on whether they are applied in a scarcity or post-scarcity society. The socialist and communist principles of fair distribution would not be possible in a pre-modern and preindustrial society that did not have an abundance of social wealth and industrial production to fulfill the imperatives of the ethical principles nor would they be possible in a society in which self-consciousness and self-­ determination in a democratic society had not yet been achieved. The ethical principles of socialism and communism are simply not possible in a capitalist or pre-capitalist society, and any establishment of an abstract ideal always exhibits the problems of ideology and distortion that Marx initially examined in On the Jewish Question. As society evolves economically and self-consciously, as its economy and culture expand, it also adjusts its principles of social justice to reflect these institutional and phenomenological changes. At the earliest stage of development out of a capitalist society to socialism and communism, the ethical principles of just distribution change from labor equivalency and worker contributions to human need. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Need provides the reciprocal foundation for an egalitarian society adjusted to the specific requirements and social responsibilities of its citizens – adjusted to their particular roles in society. The communist economy is a secondary social institution that is not driven by economic remuneration and reward; its primary purpose is to ensure the material foundations for a virtuous (species being) and just social life (democratic socialism). This had been the guiding ethical principle of both the ancient Hellenes and Hellenists (early Christians) since justice refers not to the reward for effort, intensity of labor, or contribution to the social well-being and consumer goods of society, but rather to the extra-economic value of justice. Human need is an expression in the Greek and early Christian traditions for reciprocity, community, and love. Marx views human need as a drive for self-realization, freedom, and creativity of species being, democratic self-determination within a community of worker cooperatives, reciprocity and redistribution of production, and finally, as a need for social justice and human emancipation. At this point in his analysis Marx reiterates a theme that has run throughout his writings. As the ethical principles of the socialist parties must evolve to adjust to the historical circumstances, he is critical of continuing to maintain old ethical and economic concepts and dogmas that are no longer applicable under changed conditions. He rejects the “perfect utopias,” “obsolete verbal rubbish,” and “ideological nonsense” of philosophical concepts that are no longer tied to historical

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reality, such as the concepts of “proceeds and source of labor,” “useful labor,” “equal rights,” “members of society,” and “fair distribution.” They become dangerous when arbitrarily applied as transcendent moral values or utopian public policy because they no longer fit the nuances of the social reality. Marx’s categorizing of these ideas as ideological, irrelevant, and vacuous is not meant as a critique of a theory of justice or natural law principles, but rather as a critique of a form of ethics which is unconnected to history and structure. History does not devalue the ideals of reason and justice but it does frame the context in which they are understood, evaluated, and applied. History does not historicize or relativize natural law – it just makes it socially relevant and institutionally concrete. With increased industrial production and material surplus, scientific and technological advances, and more democratic and rational changes in the social relations of production, the very notion of distributive justice evolves in Marx from equal labor exchange, merit, and contribution to human need. This is the difference between Kantian morality (universality of categorical imperative) and Hegelian social ethics (morals embedded in the historical social institutions of the Objective Spirit). Marx rejects transcendental morality that is not tied to a critical theory and thus not reflective of real social problems; this transcendental morality is a form of justice not connected to social reality and thus no longer capable of being the basis for social policy and social change. It should be noted that the dialectical interrelationships between the ideal and the real, essence and reality, and justice and history also have relevancy for an understanding of Marx’s method of science and “critique,” that is, as empirical and historical research which integrates both science and ethics. His view of science is always a practical or ethical science. Ethics must be connected with structure and history for moral values to be made relevant. Simply shouting from the roof tops that something is morally wrong can actually be harmful if not connected to an understanding of the actual social relations of production. This is why he is so critical throughout his essay of utopian and vulgar socialism in the same way that Hegel was so critical of Kantian moral philosophy – abstractionism leads to alienation and terror. When ethics is turned into a metaphysics and dogmatically applied, it becomes oppressive because there are no institutional or constitutional limits to the exercise of morality or power.56 Almost all values can be turned into a categorical 56

Hegel’s Critique of Kant, Moral Empiricism, and Political Oppression: The oppressive nature of moral abstractionism and moral dogmatism was the basis for Hegel’s critique of Kant’s categorical imperative, practical reason, and moral individualism in his Early Theolog­ ical Writings, The Phenomenology of Spirit, and The Philosophy of Right. In Kant’s moral

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imperative, including suicide, theft, war, etc. Also when the focus is on moral philosophy and metaphysics and not social critique, a key element in Marx’s theory of social justice is missed: “Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself.”57 In this brief statement in the Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx shifts away from a concentration on issues of consumption, fair price, and distributive justice to return to those of economic justice with its analysis of the mode of production and the social organization of industry. The ethical basis for reciprocity and economic redistribution, as well as the other components of social justice listed above, ultimately lies in the economic foundation of society and its necessary restructuring and reorganization. Only in this way does social justice become part of a comprehensive analysis of political economy. Thus, at the end of the discussion of the Gotha Program, Marx integrates his theory of justice with historical materialism and political economy from the Grundrisse and Capital. These, in turn, must be reintegrated with the whole of his writings in order to appreciate how broad and comprehensive his theory of social justice truly is. At the end of the third volume of Capital and his discussion of the internal contradictions of the economy based on the organic composition and the overproduction of capital, Marx writes that freedom only begins when the

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philosophy, Hegel saw a radical individualism which resulted in the alienation of culture and self-consciousness, the French Terror, and the abstractionism and irrelevancy of moral philosophy. Hegel believed that the moral idealism of Kant could turn any precept into a categorical imperative so long as the principles of non-contradiction and universality were executed logically. Beginning with a first assumption of “no property,” there is no inherent logical contradiction to a moral imperative of “no property” and a corresponding practical action based on the rejection of private property; according to Hegel, the imperative of “no property” is quite consistent with the categorical imperative of “no property,” as is the opposite of any other universal principle mentioned by Kant in his Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, including suicide, false borrowing, theft, etc. See Louis Dupré, The Philosophical Foundations of Marxism (New York, ny: Harcourt, Brace & World,1966), 20–21; MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics, 197–198; and Smith, Hegel’s Critique of Liberalism, 91–94. Morality must be constrained by and embedded in social institutions and a moral community in order to be made real and relevant. Following upon Hegel’s critique of the abstract moralizing of Kant, some have rejected Kant’s practical reason and categorical imperative as a form of “moral empiricism” (Dupré, p. 21) or as “logically empty” and “parasitic upon some already existing morality” (MacIntyre, p. 198). That is, Kant’s critique of practical reason is incoherently grounded in the moral values of liberalism and natural rights. Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Program,” 120 and mew, 19, 22.

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exploitation of surplus value and the alienation of human labor end. The early writings have reached their conclusion in his later economic theory: ethics has become social, and morality has become institutional. Political economy, as in the case with the natural law tradition, has become a subdiscipline of social ethics. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialized man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy, which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis.58 In the end, according to Marx, the emphasis on the economy rests not on structural crises, class conflict, or social unrest, not on social breakdown or societal discord, not on madness or derangement, but rather on the immanent irrationality and logical contradictions of capital that neither realizes the potentialities of human productivity nor the possibilities of human freedom.59 The real wealth of society is left unrealized. Marx’s critical social and economic theory is, in effect, a modern rewrite of Aristotle’s critique of chrematistics and defense of the democratic polity, as well as a secularized rewrite of the medieval natural law theory of social justice. 58 Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 820 and mew, 25, 828. In the Grundrisse Marx writes that the bourgeois concepts of freedom and equality are based on the “insipidity of the view that free competition is the ultimate development of human freedom,” since “it is nothing more than free development on a limited basis – the basis of the rule of capital (der Herrschaft des Kapitals). This kind of individual freedom is therefore at the same time the most complete suspension of all individual freedom, and the most complete subjugation of individuality under social conditions which assume the form of oppressive powers…” [Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (New York, ny: Vintage Books, 1973), 652 and Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), 545]. 59 For an analysis of the ethics of political economy, see McCarthy, Marx and the Ancients, 209–246. See also Alan Gilbert who, in his essay “Historical Theory and the Structure of Moral Argument in Marx,” Political Theory 9 (May 1981), writes: “In some fundamental respects, therefore, Marx could have regarded his argument as a correction and refinement of Aristotle’s eudaimonism, not a replacement of it” (p. 193).

part 3 Toward a Theory of Marxist Ethics

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chapter 9

Philosophical Foundations for a Marxian Ethics Michael J. Thompson 1 Introduction My intention in what follows is to suggest a conception of ethical reasoning that is distinctively Marxian in character. In contrast to other approaches to Marxism’s relation to ethics, I do not seek to posit a set of ethical principles or concepts, but rather to outline a form of ethical reasoning derived from Marxian philosophy. I would like to propose a theory of ethics that relies on dialectical arguments and which can be used as a means to construct a critical theory of judgment. Basic to this approach is the construction of an objective ethics that possesses the capacity to articulate an ethics that is critical in nature, one that takes the concrete life processes of human beings as its end and its substance. This kind of ethical reasoning, I contend, is deeply anathema to contemporary trends in ethical theory and moral philosophy, particularly those dominated by approaches that consider themselves “postmetaphysical.” According to this view, ethical values and phenomena need to be detached from any ontological claims, in particular any claims that are rooted in anything external to the rational justification of moral claims alone. Concepts of the good are to be understood not as properties of human life, but as that which is discursively justifiable. Ethical claims are the product of intersubjective relations and mutual forms of understanding through experiment and communicative forms of rationality. Since this approach to ethical theory is conceived as a form of praxis where the content of ethical claims is inherent to the cooperative forms of communication that produce forms of consensus around specific values and forms of life, it is celebrated as post-foundational: lacking any need to depend on facts or “truths” external to rational justifications alone. This view is deeply critical a conception of the subject or reason that has some kind of direct reflective capacity to comprehend ontological claims about the “good” and the “right,” or “just.” Thinkers from Habermas to Rawls have therefore concluded that a Kantian framework is the proper philosophical context within which ethical philosophy should operate. In opposition to these projects, I believe the Marxian understanding of ethics and normative claims is distinctly metaphysical in that it is concerned with the progression of the phases of being of human life. This approach to metaphysics is not one grounded in a disembodied form of reason or transcendent forms of

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being. Rather, it refers to the concrete manifestations of being, the ways that objects cannot be reduced to their mere material properties, but rather possess active features that make them what they are. In this sense, I maintain that Marxian ethical theory is distinctively metaphysical in that it is concerned with progressing beyond the deviant and pathological forms of social life and individuality that predominate in capitalist society: forms of alienation, of reification, and so on. But perhaps even more, this approach to ethics opposed the constructivist and pragmatist approaches by unifying scientific and normative realms of knowledge. It proposes an objectivist ethics that has the ability to ground its normative claims in claims about the functional and processual nature of social facts and human life. An objective ethics is therefore distinctly foundational in that it is does not leave the construction and articulation of ethical propositions and values to the arbitrariness of discourse or to the constructivism of rational actors. Rather, it looks for the validity of any value, norm, institution, or form of life more generally in the ontological structure of social being and the processes that constitute it. Marx’s ethical framework, or the philosophical insight that grounds his critical social theory as a whole, is one that seeks the perfection of human subjects through the optimal organization of social relations. This perfectionism is derived from a metaphysical understanding of social and individual human life where human freedom and human life can be seen to have different ontological levels of being. Marx, like Plato and Aristotle before him, see that there exist certain objective goods that are required to bring about the flourishing of human life. According to this structure of thought, human beings require certain kinds of social relations, certain kinds of social and individual goods in order for their self-realization. A Marxian ethics is perfectionist in the sense that it seeks the flourishing and full development of human capacities and powers, the very negation of alienated forms of life. Fundamental to this broader thesis is that there exists a fundamental normative foundation upon which Marxist philosophy rests. Marx’s thought contains an ethical imperative that seeks to posit a specific conception of how human beings can develop, become free in his unique sense, and therefore understand how pathological forms of life can be critiqued from that standpoint. In this sense, Marx’s distinctive approach is dialectically to synthesize the normative, ethical conception of human life with his critical, scientific investigations into capitalist society. My first proposition will therefore be that Marx’s thought possesses what I will call here an ethical structure which constitutes a dialectical unity between epistemic, factual or scientific statements and normative-evaluative statements. As I see it, Marx’s theoretical

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arguments and claims cannot be seen in the light of neo-Kantian conceptions of scientific method but rather as a dialectical unity of empirical claims and value claims. What is required is a conception of critical judgment capable of uniting cognitive claims about the structure of the world on the one hand and evaluative claims about their legitimacy and moral rightness on the other. This will provide us with the proper epistemic framework for my second proposition which is that Marx’s critical social theory is concerned with the exploration of the ontological progression of human perfection and the ways that this ontology is rooted in concrete hypotheses about the nature of human social life itself. This will lead me to the final proposition which is that a Marxian ethical theory is distinctly objective in character and this is the essence of a critical theory of judgment that creates a more compelling space of reasons for any critical theory of society. Since knowledge claims cannot be separated from value judgments and remain genuinely critical, this ethical structure of Marxism should be seen as a basic framework not only for a critical theory of ethics, but for a critical social science and social theory more generally. 2

The Ethical Structure of Marxism

My first proposition is that Marx’s ideas possess an ethical structure by which I mean he was working within an intellectual frame whereby claims about empirical facts or cognitive claims are dialectically related to claims about value, ethics and normative ideas, or evaluative claims. The ethical structure of Marx’s ideas refers to the ways that these kinds of knowledge claims are mutually dependent; that critical reason conveys rational arguments about the ways that social pathologies can be understood objectively, or through the positing of the deformation of the capacities for full development and flourishing, or perfectionism, to which modern societies can provide. Marx therefore does not offer a set of ethical principles that a priori or in any way separable from the potentialities that lie inherent within the members of any community. Since the purpose of social life is seen to be the perfection of its members, Marx sees that modernity – or the social forces developed by capitalist society – are mismatched to the empirical ends that it produces. The ability to formulate such a critique rests on a philosophical reworking of the context of German philosophy that Marx inherited, but it also seems to me to be a largely underdeveloped area in Marxist philosophy. Bridging the divide between the scientific elements of Marx’s work and the humanist elements is therefore crucial.

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2.1 Theoretical and Practical Knowledge Judging and acting are generally seen as separate activities. Since Kant the idea of formulating judgments was conceived as the central mechanism of knowledge itself. Kant argued that the power of judgment is one that is the application of the rules of the understanding and it is therefore conceived as the activity of thought itself. This, Kant emphasizes, is distinct from the understanding (der Verstand) which is itself a collection or faculty of rules, whereas “the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming (Vermögen) under rules, i.e., of determining whether something stands under a given rule (casus datae legis) or not.”1 Kant’s thesis is that the understanding, or the faculty of reason itself, is dependent on the ability of the subject to subsume any object under the rules governing the understanding or “applying pure concepts of the understanding to appearances in general.”2 Kant saw judgments as the very essence of the activity of thinking and he separated three different kinds of judgment – theoretical, practical, and aesthetic – into three different spheres of knowledge. What is needed, as Hegel and Marx saw, was an overcoming of this deep division set up by Kant. What they were after, and what I believe Marx simply assumed and practiced in his writings, was the formulation of a single form of judgment that resolved the contradictions and antinomies of Kant’s system. The difference between factual and evaluative claims is rooted in the notion that there are distinct logics to theoretical and practical reasoning. My thesis is that Marx challenges this doctrine and posits that true knowledge about the world, a genuinely rational grasp of the social world, is only possible through the dialectical sublation of these two forms of reasoning. The separation between theoretical and practical reasoning was initiated and systematized by Kant who argued that there were two distinct kinds of concepts: those that are of nature and those that are of freedom. In so doing, he set out different principles according to which those objects can be known and, also, different principles that govern those concepts themselves. Kant calls technically-practical those concepts that refer to causality in nature and morally-practical those concepts that refer to freedom, or the will. This separation is crucial since Kant argues that these are two different spheres of reality with two correspondingly different sets of principles. What is crucial however is that Kant lays out two distinct forms of judgments for theoretical and practical questions respectfully. Since claims about the natural world or world of facts rest on causal claims, Kant argues that these require judgments of the kind if X then Y. These are causal claims in 1 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (A133/B172). 2 Ibid. (A138/B177).

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that they articulate a consequent derived from its ground. Hence, if water molecules bind together at zero degrees Centigrade, then whenever the temperature is at zero degrees Centigrade or below, then it will turn to ice. This is a causal claim relevant to the objective properties of water, pressure and temperature. However, practical claims are different in that they require not a ground but a maxim for them to become rational judgments but rather fall under the type of judgment what attributes a predicate to a subject. In this form of judgment, we convey knowledge claims about something by saying X is Y, or, all Xs are Ys, and so on. Categorical claims or statements such as these therefore are not casual in nature in the sense of a ground and its consequent. Rather, they take the form, as in Kant’s “categorical imperative”: Perform ϕ iff ϕ should be applied as a universal norm. There is nothing grounding the ethical claim to perform only those acts that are to be applied universally, but this is nevertheless a priori in the sense that it is formalistic and does not contribute to our understanding of the concept of ethical claims. Hence, in the Kantian framework, we need to construct reasons that are also a priori rather than ontological in nature. Ethics is divided from the material understanding of social facts. Hegel saw the distinction between these kinds of judgments as deeply problematic. For one thing, he saw the idea that the categories of reason could be generated a priori as a false move. Rather, the categories of reason (or the “understanding” as Kant would have called it) need to be generated from the object itself, not from the subject. In this sense, what was crucial was the thesis that reason was not simply a product of human intellection but also, and more fundamentally, a property of the world itself. When we think in terms of concepts, those concepts must – if they are rational – map onto the actual structure of the object in question. It makes no sense, Hegel argues, to conceive of the world in terms of categories we have generated but rather to ensure that the categories we possess in our subjective mind are also the categories that govern the objective world. Hence, the concept of ice is not simply, for Hegel, an idea that we impose or use to understand the phenomenon of ice, if it is to be genuinely rational, the concept of ice must match the actual conceptual properties of ice that are found objectively in the world – our ideas, our concepts, must, in the end, be constitutive of the world. Only then can the concept of ice we possess in our intellection become an Idea: the unity of the subjective concept and the objective reality (Wirklichkeit) that is found in the world. For Hegel, the development of reason is dialectically related to the development of human actuality or the full development of what it is conceptually. Hegel initiates what will become a crucial turn for Marx in that he

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views the development of the capacities of thought as tied to the selfdevelopment of the subject as well as the collective development of culture. Human beings do not simply acquire more knowledge about the world as they progress in their rational gasp of nature and of themselves; they also move through stages of ontological development and growth toward a state of freedom where they are able to fulfill the conceptual structure of what they are essentially. For Marx, this idea was problematic only insofar as it concerned the practical relations human beings had with the world and each other. Marx’s critique of Hegel is not that the world should be seen in materialist terms, but rather that the actualization of human society can only be achieved through the concrete actions of coordinated social praxis. Concepts do not simply realize themselves through the internal force of reason; rather, they must be worked out through the life process of history: the very dimension representing the modes of human self-creation and re-creation. In this sense, Marx’s relation to Hegelian metaphysics is crucial for understanding a Marxian ethical theory. The distinction – so crucial for Aristotle and Hegel – between Being and Becoming, between the empirical state of any object and its actualized state, constitutes the very grammar of Marx’s critical ideas about science and ethics. Since he opposed Hegel on the view that conceptual thought is the source of change, he would also oppose the idea that we can have ethical as opposed to scientific ideas about the world. Rather, normative statements are dialectically related to knowledge statements. There can be no separation between our knowledge of something and an understanding of what that thing should do. There can be no separation between the activity of science and the activity of judgment – both are sublated in the activity of critique: in the transcendence of the narrow understanding of science as empiricism, as understanding mechanism as a universal form of causation, and the abstraction of a moralism that is detached from the ontological shape of human life and its needs for actualization. Before I come to these concerns, it will first be necessary to deal with the epistemological question of how such judgments are possible in the first place. 2.2 Evaluative-Cognitive Claims Overcoming the dichotomy between facts and values is crucial for Marx because he sees any science of society without values as empty and any values not anchored in scientific understanding of nature and history as naïve and without any political or practical use. He saw that a critical theory of society would be possible only once objectively valid knowledge about the world was possible, and this would be possible only by overcoming the dichotomy

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between evaluative and cognitive claims.3 In particular, what I propose here is that any knowledge claims about the nature of social facts should be understood as evaluative-cognitive claims where the knowledge of X also provides an understanding of the norm involved in evaluating X and vice versa. This kind of reasoning is at the heart of Marx’s conception of social science and the ability to know social facts. Marx does not propose that knowledge of social facts can be divided analytically from our evaluation of those facts. Indeed, basic to this claim is that normative ideas underlie the empirical claims to knowledge within Marx’s framework. Assume that judgments come in two basic forms. On the one hand, we can make claims to truth about objects. These are knowledge claims about the empirical nature of an object, say: “this house is green,” or “stomachs secrete digestive enzymes.” These kinds of statements assert a specific factual claim and we can call them cognitive claims insofar as they communicate objective knowledge about concrete objects. Another kind of claim is one that seeks to assert a normative judgment. These claims seek to offer a norm such as “you should listen to your parents,” or “it is not fair to take another person’s property.” These claims are not cognitive in the sense that they seek to offer a factual claim of truth, but rather a value judgment or normative claim. But these normative claims are also rooted not in some concrete aspect of human life, but in an abstract principle of universalization. It is a formalism without content, and therefore expresses culturally relative ideas about the norms and values. We call these evaluative claims or statements. Marx rejected this kind of division of reasoning not unlike the way Hegel rejected the Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical rationality. What I am calling here the ethical structure of Marxism therefore rests on the following thesis: that Marx assumed that true science is a kind of critical theory that can explode ideological forms of consciousness and lead to radical critique rests on the givenness of evaluative-cognitive claims, i.e., those kinds of statements that dialectically bring together cognitive and evaluative judgments. Marx does not distance himself from ethical forms of reasoning, he sees normative claims about the 3 As George E. McCarthy has argued, “Marx reintroduced the question of objective validity back into the phenomenological method in his criticism of Hegel’s absolutism and identity theory… Rather it was the result of seeing that the method employed by Hegel could in fact be applied to the formation of real historical consciousness, the development of the speciesbeing, and the ideological critiques of truth-claims based on the ahistorical evaluative and cognitive perspectives of both political philosophy and political economy.” Marx’s Critique of Science and Positivism: The Methodological Foundations of Political Economy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 33.

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social world as inherent and discoverable immanently from within the actual structure of the world and its processes. But if we consider the thesis that any social fact can only be understood as existing within a systemic context of causes, then we must formulate critical knowledge of those social facts differently than if they were natural or brute facts. The reason for this is that within any functional system – i.e., one where the X is both the cause and effect of the system of which it is a part – knowledge of X will also imply and indeed require, if X is to be known completely and therefore rationally, that we know not only what X is, but what X ought to be able to do. Thus, if we ask what a liver is, i.e., an organ that metabolizes sugar within a living body, then we would also have to understand that a proper liver will need to perform function ϕ for it to be a liver. Livers would not be livers if they performed function ψ, say regulate body temperature, or whatever. And indeed, we can detect the presence of cancer when we find cells that perform no function at all instead of their own individual functioning as part of the organ. There is a distinction between the given, empirical state of any object and the fully realized, complete object that lies in potentia or δυνάμις within that empirically given object. This need not be seen as an Idealist distinction, but can be seen in material terms, as an objective, ontological distinction between the deformed, undeveloped object and its developed, realized state. Hence, any deviation from ϕ or the given empirical state of ϕ (we can delineate this as ϕˆ) can be seen as a pathology or the negation of the healthy or proper functioning of the object or attribute of that object. But we can only know that ϕˆ < ϕ if we also know the proper role of ϕ. And this knowledge can only be derived from the actual operations of that object itself, not assigned a priori. As Hegel notes in his Logik, the object must generate its own categories of knowledge.4 We can know what livers are because of their purpose or role within the functional system of the body as a whole. If we

4 Marx’s theory of scientific knowledge makes a similar claim in that the object itself dictates the kinds of reasoning needed for its comprehension, hence the materialist understanding of matter preceding consciousness. As Patrick Murray has explained: “This entails necessity in that the relation between the ‘facts’ and the logic that is to draw them together into the shape of a science sheds its arbitrariness. The object under study determines the science now in second intension; it determines the logic of the ‘facts’. Marx’s critique of empiricism is immanent in calling empiricism to submit the question of the relation of ‘facts’ and their logical reconstruction itself to empirical scrutiny. This critical approach to concepts and their logical interconnections is one of the features that sets Marx’s theory of scientific knowledge apart from positivist understandings of science.” Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, nj: Humanities Press, 1988), 41. Also see McCarthy, op. cit., 135ff.

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possessed only static knowledge of livers, we would not know what they ought to do; we would therefore be unable to judge them or to be able to diagnose their pathologies. Any true, concrete knowledge of livers entails a normative claim: to be a liver means it ought to perform function ϕ. There is no way to separate a cognitive and evaluative claim about such an object, because it is a processual, dynamic object with a function and, therefore, an end. I cannot reduce a liver to its constituent parts or its mechanisms since it is obvious that to know what a liver is, is to know what it ought to do, what function it ought to perform and what other functional relations depend upon it. Not only is there an intrinsic teleology involved in the knowledge of the actual object, but the object objectively possess that property or function. Similarly, the world of social facts is a series of objects that must reveal their functional properties for them to be known in a concrete, as opposed to abstract, sense. The knowledge of any object X that possesses at least one function, ϕ or, for that matter, any set of functions {ϕ1, ϕ2, ϕ3, …, ϕn}, therefore must be an evaluative-cognitive claim if it is to comprehend the object in its entirety and in its totality. We therefore cannot accept the positivist conception of knowledge that maintains an adherence to empirical phenomena alone – say inductive-statistical patterns of causality – and instead accept the notion that social facts possess functional properties.5 Since any function operates within a systemic, relational context of causality it must also be evaluated with respect not only to its static or empirical state, but its dynamic or relative state. This opens us up to the crucial distinction – laid out by Aristotle and Hegel in their respective metaphysics – that the empirical manifestation of anything cannot account for its essential reality.6 The distinction made by both of them was between the empirical existence of any object (δυνάμις for Aristotle, Dasein for Hegel) and the realized or actualized status of that object (ἐνέργεια for Aristotle,

5 This goes against the thesis articulated by Carl Hempel that “Functional analysis in psychology and in the social sciences no less than in biology may thus be conceived, at least ideally, as a program of inquiry aimed at determining the respects and the degrees in which various systems are self-regulating in the sense here indicated.” Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 330. For a contrasting view on functionalism in modern analytic terms, cf. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1961). The thesis that functionalist claims are not testable is linked to the problem that testable hypotheses are appropriate for mechanistic and chemical processes and not teleological ones. 6 I have discussed the relation of this structure of thought with Marxist theory in more depth in my paper “Marxism, Ethics, and the Task of Critical Theory,” in M. Thompson (ed.), Rational Radicalism and Political Theory (Lanham, md: Lexington Books, 2011), 161−188.

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Wirklichkeit for Hegel).7 According to this view, we cannot simply confine ourselves to empirical observations of the object, but rather to the extent to which it fulfills its essential function or telos.8 In this sense, we can make the distinction drawn above between an observed, given object Xˆ and its fully realized or actual form X. Hence, evaluative-cognitive claims do not simply state the status of X as an observed phenomenon, such as X is X or X is ~Y, and so on, but rather asks, is Xˆ  = X, or is Xˆ < X or is Xˆ ~X, and so on.9 This form of reasoning indicates a crucial distinction between the empirical, immediate existence or state of any object on the one hand and its realized form on the other. This is not an Idealist representation opposed to the real, but a means of judging when something has achieved the state that it has the inner potential to obtain. Therefore, we do not ask simply whether or not the liver is the thing that metabolizes sugar; we ask whether or not the liver metabolizes sugar properly. We ask this question because we know that livers have a role to play, an end that they are to achieve if they are working properly. And we can know the latter only by understanding that the liver operates within a systemic context of causes, that it can perform its function properly or not, and this can only be understood from within the context of those causes that it operates, within the

7 Aristotle emphasizes this distinction in his Metaphysics when he argues that “Even more, matter is potentiality because it may attain its form (τὸ εἶδος); but when it is actual it is then in the form (ὅταν δέ γε ἐνεργείᾳ ᾐ᷑, τότε ἐν τῳ� εἴδει ἐστίν).” 1050a, 15−16. 8 This is also Alasdair MacIntyre’s thesis when he argues that “Within that teleological scheme there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-couldbe-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature. Ethics is the science which is to enable men to understand how they make the transition from the former state to the latter. Ethics therefore in this view presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of the human telos.” After Virtue (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 51. Marx accepts this basic account of processual development, but sees that it is inherently social, that individuals can achieve their actualized state only from within a community organized around just those goods that will provide for that end, and that this is historically achieved: that it requires the development of social powers through to the present in order for this possibility to be actuated. 9 Hegel notes that the concept of essence (Wesen) is “Being (Dasein) that has gone into itself: that is to say, the simple self-relation is expressly put as its negation of the negative, as immanent self-mediation.” Enzyklopädia, §112. This means that essence is expressed as the identity A = A. At its basis, essence is therefore contrasted with immediate being, with Dasein itself. It seems clear that this is useful in understanding the logic employed by Marx in his understanding of deformed, alienated forms of social being as opposed to the full, species being that he sees as the expression of what a free community would be able to produce.

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role it plays in the totality to which it belongs. To know what X is in a concrete sense is also to know what X should do or what X’s end-state is. But this “should” is not moralistic in any sense, but rather derived from the knowledge of the essence of anything, of what it is ontologically. And these questions are united in a single form of inquiry: one that is able to distinguish between the appearance and essence of anything. This is why Marxism should not be seen as having an ethics, but rather an ethical structure. Marx’s emphasis upon the economic forces of society in terms of “base and superstructure” therefore takes on a more significant meaning. For one thing, it is not to be seen in mechanistic terms, but in teleological terms. The fact that human beings are processual, that they develop within a functional context of systemic causes means that social organization and the channeling of individual development causes pathologies such as alienation and unfreedom. We need to grasp social facts in these terms, not as static entities of mere mechanisms. This is one reason that attempts to characterize Marx’s scientific and moral method in terms of contemporary philosophies of science become misleading and incorrect. Marx advances certain hypotheses about the nature of the capitalist economy – such as the law of the falling rate of profit, the mechanisms of absolute and relative surplus value, and so on – but these are different claims than those that are made about the critique of capitalism as a social system. Value, for instance, cannot simply be understood as a concept or variable that is employed in the understanding of profit rates and so on. It is also a category that can be evaluated according to what role it plays in society – use or exchange value. Similarly, labor, productivity, science and technology, are not inherently problematic for Marx. The real evaluative question is: to what extent do these social forces play a role in realizing the essential properties of human beings; to what extent do they cultivate the potentialities inherent in them as opposed to perverting them for private, particular ends and purposes.10 Hence, the attempt to characterize Marx’s method as realist fails to capture the fact that the evaluative-cognitive claims contain within them both 10

Attempts to see Marx’s discussion in terms of a strict form of empirical scientificity therefore fail to capture the thrust of his critique of capitalism. Gavin Kitching therefore argues that “because the Marxist has no experiments or applications to which she or he can point to sustain a cynical epistemological agnosticism or instrumentalism. The Marxist cannot offer any propositions equivalent to ‘neutrons may not be real but I can produce a ray’ or ‘dna molecules may not be real but I can produce two-headed green mice’, and we can see this clearly if we consider what propositions the Marxist might adduce of this type.” Marxism and Science: Analysis of an Obsession (University Park, pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 37.

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an empirical component of observation as well as an dynamic ontological component of function and realization.11 For Marx, the impulse to critique capitalism is not simply based on the empirical status of human beings under capitalism; it is rooted in an understanding of what the nature, essence, and purpose of human societies actually are. There is always the notion of the potentiality of what human individuals and communities can realize, what can be perfected within them. Again these ideas are not a priori properties of the mind, but are to be understood negatively, as the determinate negation of the capacities that ought to be realized and seen as fulfilling a free, flourishing life.12 Unlike the Kantian and neoFichtean claims, I do not attribute ethical norms to an act or state of being; I look for the essential elements of what it means to be human and then seek to contrast this to the empirical state of being that predominates empirically. What the evaluative-cognitive claim is able to achieve, in this sense, is more than an empirical description of social facts, but also a sense of how those facts are to be judged. Critique, for Marx, therefore becomes a synthetic judgment between factual knowledge claims and evaluative, normative claims. There is no ethical system of values separate from how the world works, those values are inherent in an objective sense to social facts themselves. We can say that every social fact, every artifact of social life, contains the normative categories for its own judgment. And this means that we are thinking in terms that are not simply empirical, nor simply realist. Rather, we are thinking in terms that are critical in a distinctively Marxian sense. A Marxian form of ethical reasoning or judgment is therefore grounded in functionalist knowledge claims because the world is seen to operate, when grasped in its fullest and most concrete sense, as teleological in nature. It is rooted in the thesis

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For a thorough interpretation of Marx’s theory of knowledge as realist and correspondenceoriented, see David-Hillel Ruben “if we are forced to admit that Marx’s ontological position is materialist, then for the sake of epistemological consistency, Marxists must adopt a realist ‘reflection’ or correspondence theory of knowledge as well.” Marxism and Materialism: A Study in Marxist Theory of Knowledge (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977), 64 and passim as well as 95ff. But this is clearly not what Marx had in mind. It is true that the initial stage of acquiring knowledge about the objective world follows this path, but if we were to limit ourselves to this stage, we would be unable to perceive the processual dimension and hence the teleological end that constitutes the process in question. Hegel’s critique of mechanism is sufficient to counter this narrow understanding of cognition, and it is something that Marx, too, saw as problematic. It is important to note here that, in Hegel’s treatment of logic, it is the opposition between Being (Sein) and Nothing (das Nichts) leads to the “first concrete thought and with it the first

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that to know something is to at the same time be able to judge it in some evaluative sense. As John Searle argues about the nature of functional arguments: Even when we discover a function in nature, as what we discovered the function of the heart, the discovery, the discovery consists in the discovery of causal processes together with the assignment of a teleology to those causal processes. This is shown by the fact that a whole vocabulary of success and failure is now appropriate that is not appropriate to simple brute facts of nature. This we can speak of “malfunction,” “heart disease,” and better and worse hearts. We do not speak of better and worse stones, unless of course we have assigned a function to the stone.13 Functional relations therefore contain within them both normative and empirical claims since any object that has a functional property has some degree of teleological to its causation and proper action. However, whereas for Searle, this is the product of the human mind imposing or assigning function to an object, Marx – along with Hegel – argue that it is not simply our assignment of function to objects that is valid, but that the objects themselves objectively possess that property as well. For both Hegel and Marx, we do not come to assign teleology to hearts, they possess that feature as the final cause of what makes them what they are, what constitutes their essence.14 Grasping this is true

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Concept,” or Becoming (das Werden). Enzyklopädia, §88 Zusatz. This means that the statement: Xˆ is ~X leads to the dialectical force of becoming X within the object. For Marx, this process is mapped onto the objective social world and into the practical life of human beings within society where the chasm between empirical existence and the fulfilled, flourishing, free existence can be known by the determinate negation expressed therein. As Hegel remarks, “Becoming is the first concrete as well as the first true thought-determination.” Ibid. John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 15. The ideas Searle discusses about the intentional nature of functional arguments were well known to Kant and to Hegel. Hegel’s important critique of this kind of teleological reasoning was that it ignores another kind of teleology that is inherent within the structure and processes of objects themselves. This paves the way for a more objective and materialist understanding of teleological reasoning that Marx sees as axiomatic in his epistemology. What this means is that the end or telos that the heart has is intrinsic to it, not given to it by me as a regulative idea. Kant made this move in the Kritik der Urteilskraft where he argues that teleological ends and processes “cannot rest merely on empirical grounds, but must have some underlying a priori principle. This principle, however, may be one that is merely regulative, and it may be that the ends in question only reside in the idea of the person forming the estimate and not in any efficient cause whatever,” §5(66). By contrast, Hegel and Marx see teleological ends as constitutive of objects, not merely regulative ideas that the mind projects in order to organize the empirical phenomenon of the

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knowledge of hearts, it is not something assigned by intentional mental states, it is objective. Therefore, these properties precede our knowledge of them and they are therefore in some sense intrinsic to those objects. They possess an essential structure which cannot be reduced to their material parts or components alone, but rather have a higher ontological structure that can be either realized fully or deformed and stunted.15 For Marx, the implicit epistemological logic of critical knowledge is the idea, expressed also in Searle’s account, that social facts are functional in nature and that they possess functional properties. However, these functional features of social life are not simply attributed by us as intentional agents, they are, for Hegel and Marx, objective features of reality.16 This is the dilemma of science, one that must move beyond empirical, mechanistic forms of reason into a deeper, richer understanding of the object – and understanding that will reveal its teleological nature and therefore show us the ways that the necessary goods that human beings need are not arbitrarily attributed to them as predicates, but seen as part of the essential nature of what it means to be human in any full, real, developed sense.17 In this sense, evaluative-cognitive claims are critical knowledge claims about social

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object. They are therefore concerned with the metaphysical status of objects, not merely ideas about them and assigned to them. Scott Meikle calls this position “essentialist” and contrasts it with a reductive materialism which “believes in an ontology of simples, of basic building-blocks lacking complexity, and further believes everything else is reducible to them. Essentialism, on the other hand, admits into its ontology what I have referred to up to now as ‘organic wholes’ or ‘entities’, and does not consider them to be reducible but rather irreducible.” Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (La Salle, Ill: Open Court Publishers, 1985), 154. Stephen Houlgate has argued on this point that “the words ‘concept’, ‘judgment’, and ‘syllogism’ name structures in nature, and so in being itself, not just forms of human understanding and reason. They are, therefore, ontological as well as logical structures – structures of being, as well as categories of thought.” The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (West Lafayette, in: Purdue University Press, 2006), 116. Also see Eugène Fleischmann, La science universelle ou la logique de Hegel (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1968), 281ff. Marx’s divergence from Hegel is not as extreme as most of Marxist theory would suggest. For one thing, Hegel was certainly more materialist than Marx had believed, but also, Marx’s ideas are not as materialist either. The crucial issue is that Marx sees that there are objective properties to things that are independent of our consciousness. However, our consciousness of these objective processes of nature and of society are graspable and controllable, thereby leading to his basic precondition of freedom. The dialectical method therefore is seen as penetrating beneath the appearance into the essence of things, an essence that also reveals its structure of necessity. As Howard Williams notes, “There has to be a place, therefore, in Marx’s system for scientific (wissenschaftlich) analysis which goes behind the appearance of capitalist production to the

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facts in that the normative and the empirical valences of the object are grasped. Lacking this, we end up with the crude separation between facts and values and lapse into a neo-Kantian conception of social facts that is uncritical in the sense that ethical postulates about the social world are separated from their empirical reality. When we move to a functionalist understanding of social theory, we are therefore moving in a space of reasons that requires we know a totality as a dynamic system of processes that have some end. 2.3 Marxian Ethical Reasoning We can therefore see that Marx’s ideas do not mitigate against ethical or normative claims. It is also evident that there exists no facile opposition between “scientific” and “value” claims or statements. We can also see that Marx was not concerned in any sense with the formulation of a scientific form of ethics.18 Rather, Marx sees the objective, material conditions that human beings find themselves within as determinative of their ontological status as free agents. For Marx, freedom is not an abstract concern, but one that can only properly be understood concretely: it is an objective property of the members of a community that captures them in their totality, not a principle that applies to them juridically or ethically from the outside of those social relations and conditions, or one that simply takes one aspect of human life and then generalizes it to the whole.19 In such cases, freedom ceases to be a concrete reality and is

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complex laws which control the movement of the phenomenon… Empirical reality exists just as much as does scientific reality. The one can be observed by the senses and the other can be discovered by the intellect.” Hegel, Heraclitus, and Marx’s Dialectic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 144. Svetozar Stojanovic argues on this point that “Much time and energy have been spent in trying to create a ‘scientific Marxist normative ethics’. Since normative ethics, including a Marxist one, cannot be a science, all these efforts have been doomed to failure. But still it is possible, in my opinion, to work out a Marxist normative ethics using, among other things, all relevant scientific knowledge as cognitive premises or reasons for ethical statements.” “Marx’s Theory of Ethics,” in Nicholas Lobkowicz (ed.), Marx and the Western World (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), 167. But this still holds a separation between evaluative and cognitive claims. The dialectical synthesis of the two is lost here, the attempt to formulate a new kind of critical science that would be appropriate to social, human beings as an object of inquiry. As Mihailo Markovic has argued on the distinction between abstract and concrete in Marx’s sense, “Abstract refers to those general terms whose meaning is constituted solely by a few common features of the denoted objects. Concrete refers to general terms that have a rich meaning embracing not only common features by also many specific and even individual characteristics of the denoted objects… In the light of this dialectical demand

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imprisoned in the abstraction of principle, positivistic laws, and so on. The separation between the idea of freedom that operates socially or intellectually and one that is operative in the actual being of the individual is what divides Marx’s critique of liberalism on the one hand and his advocacy for socialism on the other. The critique of liberalism is based on the misunderstanding of man that it posits as axiomatic: as independent, as privileging private rights over public goods, as seeing freedom as the maximization of that independence, and so on. For Marx, such a doctrine does not possess the proper, rational conception of what it means to be human in any concrete, real, or actual sense. Marx has an idea about human social life and human individuality that is derived from classical and German Idealist sources: it claims that human beings are social in nature; that they depend on mutual forms of cooperation and interaction. But also, he sees that the nature of each individual is a function of the objective social formations within which it finds itself. But in order to understand how ethical ideas operate in Marxian terms, we need to also see that they are, as I suggested above, dialectically sublated into cognitive claims about social facts. We judge the alienated human being not from an ideal, a priori standard or status of unalienated life; rather, we diagnose the pathological status of human being at any given time relative to the social context within which one is found. The determinate negation of any pathological state leads us dialectically to the higher, richer state of anything. The productive capacities of the ancient Egyptians was such that they could build massive temple complexes and organize large armies for defense and conquest. But these societies were unable to organize the collective efforts of their social and human resources for social freedom. Since Marx, like Aristotle, conceives of society as essentially a cooperative, interdependent organization of its members for the purpose of the good life of them all, any community that does not realize this potential good inherent within it can be judged from the objective properties of what those social communities are capable of achieving and do not.20 In contrast to ancient Egypt which utilized collective social labor for the ends of the minority of the community, or to capitalist society

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for the maximum available concreteness, no humanist theory is satisfactory which operates with concepts such as human essence, human nature, generic being of man, alienation, etc., without bothering about sociological, psychological, and other relevant scientific data, and without taking into account specific conditions of human life in various contemporary societies.” “Humanism and Dialectic,” in Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1965), 85−86. See the excellent discussion by George E. McCarthy, Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece (Albany, ny: suny Press, 2003), 22ff.

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that organized social production and labor according to the interests of a specific class, Marx asks us to picture: a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labor power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labor power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labor are here repeated, but with this difference: that they are social instead of individual… The total product of our community is a social product.21 If we ask what leads Marx to such propositions, we find that one path to such an argument is that human beings are best suited to a social form of organization where social labor – or labor that has collective, common ends as their end – are given priority over capitalist forms of labor that privilege particularistic forms of labor and benefits. This passage indicates the expression of an evaluative-cognitive claim: the society characterized by social labor and means of production in common is a higher form of social organization than capitalism. But this assessment is not based on an arbitrary view of the good. Marx’s thesis rests on a claim that sees specific forms of labor, specific forms of social organization, as properties of a good life, and best fitted for the realization of human potentialities. But determining these qualities or features of a good life or good ends or purposes must have as their ground some sort of objective basis in order for them to qualify as evaluative-cognitive statements. Lacking this we are left either with a formalistic moralism or a scientific reductionism. Marx’s solution to this is that any kind of good end toward which individuals and social formations are oriented can be judged by the extent to which it is able to provide for the preconditions of self-realization. For Marx, what is “good” or “just” cannot be established a priori nor in any idealist sense. Rather, it is inherent in the function of what it means for any social context to produce the realization of human perfection: those characteristics and traits that make human subjects free from for self-development. Puppies are dogs in potentia just as a seed is a tree in the same way. They bear potential relations to an end. Indeed, this end is not chosen or willed or guided in any way, but is inherent in what the thing is. Teleological arguments therefore are not means by which we can discover the actual processes of the world, but rather to understand them as total, absolute forms of knowledge.22 Nevertheless, the claims remains that 21 22

Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 78. Myriam Bienenstock has wrongly argued on this point that “for Hegel, teleological arguments should not be considered as methods of acquiring knowledge but, rather, as a way

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the teleological end constitutes the actual process that itself constitutes the object; it is real, it is the highest form of complete, rational explanation. The conditions required for those objects to fulfill their ends – i.e., dogs and trees respectively – are objective and material: water, food, shelter, and so on. What is difficult to discern in any positive sense, however, is what that selfdevelopment will look like concretely. Since we cannot assemble a catalogue of traits that we would consider teleologically self-developed, we can only know the negation of those traits; and that becomes a determinate negation only when we are seeing those pathologies within the context of the ethical structure of thought Marx works within.23 Otherwise, such pathologies come

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of presenting an already acquired knowledge.” “Hegel’s Conception of Teleology,” in Kostas Gavroglu, John Stachel, and Marx Wartofsky (eds.), Science, Mind and Art: Essays on Science and the Humanistic Understanding in Art, Epistemology, Religion and Ethics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 56. But Hegel’s idea is more provocative: he believes that teleology is not simply a method of presentation, but also an actual feature of the totality of any object. In this sense, teleology overcomes the contradictions of mechanism and chemism in the dynamic theory of the object. Marx takes this as basic to his understanding of scientific investigation and his conception of the ontological foundation of the social and the natural world. As Rüdiger Bubner argues, “Determinate negation signifies that a given concept only acquires specifiable content if the concept in question can be delimited over against a concept that it is not. This delimitation is a negation, and arises in direct relation to an initially anonymous ‘other’ that is implicitly presupposed. Whatever this ‘other’ may be in any specific case, it constitutes an entirely formal opposition over against the articulated concept in the process of negation.” The Innovations of Idealism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 69. Marx takes this idea of determinate negation from Hegel without modification. However, whereas for Hegel it worked itself out in terms of conceptual thought, for Marx it should be detected in the nature of the whole life of the person and therefore the ontological state within which it finds itself and the forms of praxis that maintain that state. Determinate negation is therefore the logical mechanism that allows consciousness to grasp the capacity for self-realization, for the actualization of his powers no less than the fulfillment of deeper, richer needs. In this sense, I think Carol Gould’s thesis on this point is wrong. She argues that “one cannot read forward, from potentiality to actuality, but only backward, from the actualities to the potentialities that eventuate in them.” Marx’s Social Ontology (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1978), 30. This is not Marx’s position, for the main reason that Marx sees that historically new and higher forms of actualization will become possible. Human, hence, social ontology cannot be read off of the material constitution of man, it is historically contingent. Also, to be to read only backward from actuality to potentiality would short circuit the possibility of critique since we would not know when the true actuality of man has been realized. For a more precise account of the ontological dimensions of Marx’s thought and its connections with Aristotelian philosophy, see Jonathan E. Pike, From Aristotle to Marx: Aristotelianism in Marxist Social Ontology (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1999).

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to be states of being: alienation, reification, “what is animal becomes human, what is human becomes animal” – all begin to take root within culture, depriving human agents of a richer shape of human life. It is only when we are able to diagnose the material conditions that cause these pathologies that we are moving in a critical space of reasons, one that has as its ground the particular logical form of reasoning that posits an ontological form of process and realization within the objective structure of human social and individual life. This is important for Marx because he knows he must drop the ontologies of classical and Medieval philosophy and instead incorporate history as a central dimension of human reality. 3

Social Ontology and Human Self-realization

If what I have argued thus far is even conditionally accepted, then we can now begin to see how a Marxian ethics can be articulated in terms of the ways judgments are made about the perfection of human life (individually and socially). First, it is crucial to see that Marx begins not from the idea of human freedom or forms of ethical value, but rather from the dialectic between social structure and human self-realization. The extent to which any given social order is able to enhance the expansion and development of human capacities means that it is an objective development over previous phases of history in that the nature of human being has changed in an ontological sense. Second, this means that there exists some sense in which objective claims can be made about the status of human perfection or be able to formulate judgments about the relative pathological and self-perfecting properties of specific social practices and arrangements. Only then can we begin to construct a conception of ethics that is distinctively Marxian but which is also distinct from the prevailing view of Enlightenment liberalism which has sought to seal the domains of ethical value from the objective realm of facts. First to the foundations of Marx’s ideas about self-realization. Recall that for Aristotle, the essence of anything was to be found in the ends or purposes that it has. Also recall that his thesis about teleological reasoning posits that there is a full, or complete end (ἐντελέχεια) toward which all things are oriented by their nature. This was changed in Hegel’s reworking of his metaphysics to argue that mechanical arguments about causality were necessary but not sufficient for the comprehension of the whole of an object.24 More importantly, 24

Bienenstock points out that that mechanism “presupposes atomism. In it, no selfdetermination is at work. Rather, because the parts of a mechanism are taken to be external to each other, only efficient causes can be found in it. Indeed, he insists, one may well say

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Hegel’s thesis is that mechanistic claims are unable to reveal the actuality of the concept, that such claims are unable to grasp the essence of self-realization and therefore of freedom itself.25 To take this one crucial step further, this also requires that we adopt certain teleological claims about the nature of social and human life. For Marx, as for Hegel and Aristotle, the crucial insight about the nature of human beings is that they are processual: they are shaped by processes that cause their development over time. The Kantian view that attributes a mechanistic view of nature and objective phenomena is problematic in this sense, since Marx and Hegel both see that world is basically teleological in nature. But teleological arguments should not be dismissed as unscientific.26 The basic idea is that mechanistic explanations are incomplete, they do not allow us to move beyond the movements of the respective parts of an object.27 But teleological explanations require that we see any object within a broader context, within a totality. It means that self-realization is a teleological process and that this is something grasped only within the context to which an object belongs.

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that in a mechanism objects or their elements exert ‘violence’ (Gewalt) against each other: objects bear upon each other in a merely external way, and the resistance they evince in opposing each other appears as a resistance to merely arbitrary and ungrounded extraneous pressure.” “Hegel’s Conception of Teleology,” 58. Justus Hartnack comments that “The mechanical and the chemical models of the object imply a deterministic conception of the objective world – a world in which changes and processes are caused by external forces, not by the objects themselves. None of the objects, according to these models, are self-determined. Opposed to this is the teleological view, according to which the final determining cause is, no external, but an internal cause.” An Introduction to Hegel’s Logic (Cambridge, ma: Hackett Publishers, 1998), 108. Hence, for Hegel, the teleological model of causation gives not only a more comprehensive grasp of the object, but shows how its development is free, or self-determined. Applied to the world of man, this means that only those forms of self-development and self-realization that are teleological are those that are truly free and self-determined. Frederick Beiser has noted with respect to Hegel’s idea of teleological argument that he “insists that this concept does not involve intentionality, the attribution of will or selfconscious agency to a living thing. To state that a natural object serves a purpose is not to hold that there is some concealed intention within the object itself. Rather, all that it means is that the object serves a function, that it plays an essential role in the structure of the organism.” Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 100. Willem deVries argues on this point that “Hegel believes that mechanical and chemical explanations are condemned always to remain incomplete, for they cannot be applied to the totality of things to which they apply, because they always presuppose further links in the causal chains. That there are things ordered by the mechanical and chemical principles remains beyond their competence to explain.” “The Dialectic of Teleology.” Philosophical Topics, vol. 19, no. 2 (1991): 51−70, 66.

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Self-realization is therefore ontological in the sense that (i) it is something objective and inherent in potentia within anything; and (ii) that it is processual and that it can be judged according to the different phases of being that the object attains based on the actualization of its potentialities, its realization (Verwirklichung).28 Just as we are able to diagnose heart disease because we know the proper function of hearts, we can also judge human culture and societies based on how well it is able to form the context for the realization its members. Self-realization is therefore a central feature of teleological arguments, but also for Marx’s evaluative-cognitive reasoning.29 Since any given thing can be 28

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See Fleischmann, La science universelle, 199ff. For Marx, the materialization of this structure of thought means that we need to see the origin of what things ought to be as objective properties of the objects themselves rather than as concepts of reason alone. But this difference between Hegel and Marx is really a misunderstanding of Hegel’s thesis who is much closer to Marx than the latter would have admitted. Marx’s innovation is in seeing the primary cause of human pathologies in the economic structure and processes of society, hence the “materialist” terminology refers more often to the economic elements of social life rather than to a thesis that is somehow against an ontology he shares with Aristotle and Hegel. For a critique of Marx’s materialism along these lines, see George L. Kline, “The Myth of Marx’s Materialism,” in Helmut Dahm, Thomas, J. Blakeley and George L. Kline (eds.), Philosophical Sovietology: The Pursuit of a Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 158−203. It is not simply that self-realization is an end produced by being provided certain material and cultural goods, it also means that there are specific forms of social relatedness and organization that are needed for the free production of those goods. David Leopold has rightly remarked that these goods are to satisfy certain “non-volitional” needs implying that they are somehow ontologically necessary. He argues that: “In order to flourish, the essential capacities of the individual must have developed in a healthy and vigorous manner. This is possible only in a society which satisfies not only basic physical needs (for sustenance, warmth and shelter, certain climatic conditions, physical exercise, basic hygiene, procreation and sexual activity) but also less basic social needs, both those that are not often thought of as a distinctive part of Marx’s account (for recreation, culture, intellectual stimulation, artistic expression, emotional satisfaction, and aesthetic pleasure) and those that are often thought of in this way (for fulfilling work and meaningful community).” The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 241. This view does not take seriously the ontological arguments that Marx employs in his early writings and the form of logical argumentation he employs, i.e., evaluative-cognitive arguments. We cannot simply seek to produce a catalogue of non-volitional needs, we also must ask negatively how any given society deforms its members. Only in this way can we begin to grasp the process of historical change and progress. Otherwise, we are left with a sense that there is a final recipe for human self-realization and flourishing. This leads to confused views on the matter, such as John Plamenatz, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 346ff.

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understood in terms of its becoming what its inner capacities and essential properties dictate it to be, we can say that the process of self-realization requires certain necessary conditions – or at least the absence of certain countervailing conditions – to be present. This means that ontology is itself a crucial feature of the kind of evaluative-cognitive reasoning that plays a central role in Marx’s thought. Objects are not really what they are until they are complete, or achieve their fulfilled totality. “A railway on which no trains run,” Marx writes, “hence which is not used up, not consumed, is a railway only δυνάμις, and not in reality.”30 This shows the underlying kind of reasoning that Marx applies to the material as well as to the social world, one following the is Xˆ  = X logic that I have identified with Hegelian-Marxist ontological reasoning. We cannot reduce things to their material substrates; their reality consists in the ways they are employed, the way they participate in a larger framework or context of being. As with the railroad, so with human beings: we are not simply reducible to labor, to thought, to language, or whatever: we realize ourselves within the totality of the community, and the shape and nature of that community determines the nature and shape of our individuality. We can say that Marx’s ideas here, just as with Aristotle and Hegel, are essentially ontological in the sense that things in reality cannot be reduced to their materiality, to mere matter itself, to ὕλη as opposed to οὖσια. Indeed, for Marx, critical science approaches the world according to the is Xˆ  = X form of reasoning Ι sketched above. Anything requires the proper working of all of its constituent parts to be a totality, a real fulfilled thing. This forms the foundation for any understanding of a Marxian ethics. 3.1 Social Ontology as Ethical Ground As I have been arguing, Marx sees that things are to be understood in an ontological sense rather than a merely empirical sense. Things have ends not in the sense that they have an animated inner drive to become what they are but rather because the nature of reality to which he subscribes is one that is dynamic and in process. Since things have essences, and these essences are intrinsic to things and not attributed to them by us as agents, self-realization has specific prerequisites that are themselves objective. As such, the free development of human subjects must be understood objectively as the selfrealization of the objective features which they possess in potentia, features which are ontological in the dual sense I have been employing it: as objectively present and as non-reducible to mechanistic materia. If we go back to classical 30

Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin, 1973), 91.

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ideas about the nature of human communities, there exists a basic thesis that is maintained throughout the classical and medieval periods and one that Marx sees as worthy of progressing into the modern age. This thesis is that the purpose of the human community is the collective pursuit of the common good or interest. Aristotle’s metaphysics of human progress from the family, to village, to polis in Book I of the Politics is instructive in the sense that it conveys the process of realization of human beings as social beings, as being capable of the best form of life only with the dense network of social relations the polis provides.31 The argument for an ethical structure of Marxism is itself based on the idea of fundamental social ontology to human life. It must unite concerns of the individual with the specific structure of sociality, and it must also concern itself with the processual nature of human life. A social ontology therefore establishes a set of needs, of “strong social facts,” that can be used to underwrite objective ethical or normative statements or claims. The idea of a social ontology means, for Marx, that the essence of social facts and the essence of normative principles themselves must be seen within the context of the realization of man’s inherently social nature. Marx is insistent on this point, in particular in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts where he establishes the basic premises of a social nature of human life. The alienated consciousness of man is his failure to recognize his ontological essence; the fact that he, even as an individual, is social and therefore that society is the prerequisite for man himself. Even when I carry out scientific work, etc. an activity which I can seldom conduct in direct association with other men, I perform a social, because 31

The crucial passage in Aristotle is: “The association finally made up of several villages is the polis. It has finally attained the limit of almost complete self-sufficiency (αὐταρκείας) and therefore, even though it comes into existence for the sake of life, it exists for the good life (εὖ ζῆν). Hence every polis exists by nature just as the first associations exist. For the polis is the end of the previous forms of association, and nature is an end, since that which each thing is when its growth is complete we call the nature of each thing, for example of a man, a horse, or household. Again, the object for which a thing exists, its end, is its highest good (τὸ τέλος βέλτιστον), and self-sufficiency is an end, and a highest good.” Politics, 1252b, 30. The concepts of “self-sufficiency” as the proper end of the polis is akin to Marx’s idea that the aim of social life should be that it possesses within it all of the potentialities for its own self-development. Social and individual freedom are consequently only really possible for Marx within a context where social relations and forces are fully developed and oriented toward the needs of all. This is the “highest end” or “good” of the polis for Aristotle, and for Marx, is plays a similar role. We therefore can detect the negation of this state wherever social life is shaped not toward the needs of all, but the needs of the few.

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human, act. It is not only the material of my activity – such as the language itself which the thinker uses – which is given to me as a social product. My own existence is a social activity. For this reason, what I myself produce I produce for society, and with the consciousness of acting as a social being.32 The link between individual, society, and the concept of humanity itself is the essential triad that Marx seeks to establish as a ground for understanding the nature of alienation but also to comprehend the distinction between essence and appearance in social forms. We understand self-realization only through this ground, and this self-realization is where the action is for Marx: it is the very formula, so to speak, for the evaluative-cognitive system that becomes his critical social theory. Private property, and in turn capital, or the private control of socialized labor, becomes the ultimate expression of deformation since it introduces into society the pathology of partially developed humanity, onesidedness. It is the very negation of a “fully constituted society” which “produces man in all the plenitude of his being, the wealthy man endowed with all the senses, as an enduring reality. It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, cease to be antinomies and thus cease to exist as such antinomies.”33 Given this form of reasoning, we can see that the discussion of alienation in the writings of the young Marx, as well as the observations about the pathology of capitalist social relations in Capital and other mature writings, are not simply moralistic indictments of the system. They are forms of determinate negation which rest upon a specific understanding of human self-realization and social freedom which, in turn, are grounded in an ontological understanding of human potentialities the development of which is freedom.34 Without a social-ontological ground, we lack the capacity for the kind of critical 32

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Erich Fromm (ed.), Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), 130. Cf. the discussion by Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 127ff. 33 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 135. 34 Allen E. Buchanan has argued on this point that:  To say that man’s alienation from his species being is overcome only in communism is to say that certain distinctively human capacities are actualized, or actualized in their most appropriate or perfect form, only in communism. Thus capitalism is not defective because it fails to actualize all distinctively human capacities not because its productive activity in capitalism is not conscious or universal or social, but rather because productive activity in capitalism is not conscious, universal, and social in the appropriate senses – the senses which are fitting or fulfilling for beings such as we are.

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judgments made possible by evaluative-cognitive forms of reasoning. The social-ontological ground therefore constitutes the basis for the kind of negative reasoning that must lead us to the positing of critical rationality itself, a critical rationality where one grasps a richer understanding of X by comprehending what it opposes and what limits it, and what it requires to articulate a fuller, richer reality of itself. This is why it is necessary to employ the logic I outlined above expressed as: does Xˆ  = X. According to this account, we must ask the extent to which any given empirical state Xˆ deviates from X or is either the determinate negation or fulfillment of X (hence, whether any given state is Xˆ~X, Xˆ < X or Xˆ = X). This can be determined through the assessment of the telos of any given feature of Xˆ. But this telos should not be seen as a priori but rather as the developed capacities that individuals can achieve. It is also evident from the ways that any given empirical state of the object is unable to fulfill or to have its functions work properly, according to their respective ends. Hence, people may suffer from personality disorders, from depression, anxiety, or other deformations of character or ability – and we can diagnose these as negations of higher forms of life, of higher, more fulfilled forms of practice and functioning. The ground plays the crucial role in allowing us to grasp the teleological form of man’s social ontology rather than a pre-defined state: [T]he social character is the universal character of the whole movement; as society itself produces man as man, so it is produced by him. Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are social activity and social mind. The human significance of nature only exists for social man, because only in this case is nature a bond with other men, the basis of his existence for others and of their existence for him. Only then is nature the basis of his own human experience and a vital element of human reality. The natural existence of man has here become his human existence and nature itself has become human for him. Thus society is the accomplished union of man with nature, the veritable resurrection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized humanism of nature.35 Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Allenheld, 1982), 19. Buchanan, however, stops where the discussion must begin: with a fitting ontology of human sociality and individuality. This is the ground for a Marxian ethic and science. Without this, we are unable to root Marxian critical claims in any kind of radical alternative perspective to the conventional ideas and institutions of capitalist social relations and culture. 35 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 129.

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The emphasis Marx places on the words “human,” “society,” “bond” and “basis,” indicate his insistence that man’s essence is not only a social essence, but that it is a basis for the understanding of what it means to be human, fully realized as human. It is the ground for understanding, in a critical sense, the deviant forms of reality that pervade capitalist society. The negation of this condition or state therefore constitutes a deformation of human self-realization, of the processes that emancipate him as a social being. Ontology is therefore a ground for both ethical and scientific claims, claims that are braided dialectically for Marx. Marx sees the historical progression of human social organizations as moving toward a situation where human beings will produce socially as free beings; they will realize their essence not only as social beings – i.e., as beings who necessity is seen in their interdependence – but also they will grasp rationally and consciously that this interdependence should be the very source of their freedom.36 The kind of individuality that is possible through a society that organizes the production of goods for common ends is one that seeks to realize the fullest potentials not only of each particular member of the community, but the dialectical relation is such that we seek to perfect the social nexus of productive relations so that we as individuals, and not as atomistic particulars, come to our perfection within that social nexus. The kinds of eudemonic goods that are cultivated therefore are both social and individual goods at the same time; they are eudemonic in the sense that they are not arbitrarily chosen according to some atomistic, utilitarian calculus, but rooted in the objective, ontological structure of necessity that pervades human life. Society is therefore an entity with a purpose, or end: it is to serve as both the end of our labors and productive powers, but also as the means by which we achieve free individuality, the development of our individual and collective powers and abilities.37 Marx therefore sees the historical process as the working out of this social reality through different shapes and organizations of human praxis: Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded 36 37

See the comparative discussion of Hegel and Marx on this theme by Jacques d’Hondt, De Hegel à Marx (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 203ff. George E. Brenkert argues along similar lines that to be free in Marx’s sense “is for one to live such that one essentially determines, within communal relations to other people, the concrete totality of desires, capacities, and talents, which constitute one’s selfobjectification.” Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 88.

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on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individuality, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subordination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third. Patriarchal as well as ancient conditions (feudal, also) thus disintegrate with the development of commerce, of luxury, of money, of exchange value, while modern society arises and grows in the same measure.38 Here the third stage to which Marx refers, one of “free individuality,” is the result of the “social wealth” that the society creates. This social wealth is the product of “communal, social productivity” which means that the organization of social labor exists for the production of those social goods that aim toward common ends – ends that will enable the universal, free individuality of all members of the community. 4

Objectivity and the Validity of Ethical Propositions

The question I would like to pursue now is whether this form of argumentation that I have reviewed operating within Marx’s texts is something we can bring out and formalize as a form of ethical argumentation and reasoning. What I propose here is that we can formulate an objective ethics that is distinctively Marxian in the sense described above. As an entrée into this kind of ethical reasoning, first consider the thesis of Eugene Kamenka: The objectivity of ethical judgments can be most easily established if “good” is a quality, an intrinsic character common to those things or activities we correctly call goods. The assertion that a thing or activity has a certain quality raises in logic a clear, unambiguous issue; the truth of the assertion is logically independent of any relations into which the thing or the activity of the assertor may enter.39 Kamenka’s basic beginning for an objective ethics emphasizes both that the concept of value is tied to the object itself and that it is to be judged not 38 Marx, Grundrisse, 158. 39 Eugene Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 89.

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according to an arbitrary subjective stance, but from the stance of the intrinsic characteristics of the object itself. But the validity of an objective ethical judgment is another matter. As I have been arguing, Marx’s ethical reasoning is one that is in line with this objectivist view, but it must also be able to possess the character of validity if it can be taken as an ethical doctrine of any kind. My thesis here is that the validity of Marxian objective ethical statements is to be found in the very nature of the evaluative-cognitive claims I have been exploring. Since the ontological underpinnings of his thought are both a claim about the nature of objects (in particular about human beings and their dynamic social nature) as well as imply a particular logic for evaluative-cognitive claims, we can say that the criterion for validity of an objective ethics is to be found in the ways that the objective processes of social relations are constitutive of the potentialities of individuals. Marx’s concern with the objective, ontological aspects of social reality and human personality means that an ethical viewpoint must be rooted in those objective properties and their relative lack of fulfillment of human potentialities. Social theory and social philosophy are therefore sublated since we cannot posit abstract, a priori ideas about goods or the properties of an individual or society but, rather, need to show how concrete forms of life and praxis give rise to pathological (i.e., non-realized) states of being. We must ask how specific forms of life, institutions, norms, practices, and so on, either distort or fulfill human life and culture. These states cannot be simply individual in nature, but refer to the social-relational context within which individuals are socialized and what values and goals orient them. The objective features of human life to which Marx (as well Aristotle and Hegel, for that matter) point are not simply a blueprint for all forms of judgment.40 Rather, they constitute a basic framework for understanding the social deficits of modern forms of social life. The objectivity of ethics is therefore most strongly opposed to the paradigms of deontological and subjectivist reasoning that have been the hallmark of much of modern ethical philosophy. The search for values unhinged from the 40

Alan Gilbert has correctly written on this aspect of Marx’s ethical reasoning that “he also emphasized objective features of individual lives which would profoundly influence happiness (display of social connectedness in genuine forms of friendship and political community, freedom from exploitation, freedom from physical handicap, possession of the opportunity to realize one’s capacities, perhaps realization of some of one’s highest capacities), yet still allowed a distinctively modern, wide leeway for individual choice of specific activities to be undertaken.” “Historical Theory and the Structure of Moral Argument in Marx.” Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 2 (1981): 173−205, 193.

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objective needs, features, and potentialities of human (i.e., social) life is a crucial feature of a Marxian, objective ethics. Objectivity, in the sense I am employing it here, does not refer to the mere opposition to subjectivity. Rather, in Hegel’s sense, it means the extent to which a rational structure exists within an object. Therefore, an ethical statement is valid only when it can be shown to map onto the functional ends toward which any act or state is oriented. It is not enough to argue, as the realist does, that it can be tied only to empirical claims since empiricism, for Hegel as well as Marx, was an incomplete, immediate (unmittelbar) approach to the object.41 Rather, the objective stance is one that embraces not only the empirical state but also the processual dimension of the object as well. Going back to the distinction drawn initially by Kant between constitutive and regulative principles, we can see that a Marxian objective ethics is concerned with the constitutive processes of human social life; with the very foundations of what it means to be able to create forms of being that can emancipate the inherent potentialities of human life. It finds validity therefore not in a universal formula, such as the Categorical Imperative, nor in a set of practical, discursive agreement, as in Habermasian discourse ethics. Rather, ethical propositions need to be understood as emerging out of the determinate negation of any empirically observed state or condition. The knowledge of the conditions of such a state and its pathologies therefore convey the determinate negation of itself. This is precisely the power of functional and teleological arguments as I laid them out above. The role they perform in an ethical theory is to fuse the evaluative and the cognitive claim dialectically; to tie the values that one asserts to the actual functioning of the object. Our ethical life – the value system that should guide our judgments about the world and our courses of action and political praxis – should be worked out from within the social world, not from without. It should be guided by what we learn about the nature of alienated life under capitalism and modern forms of social life; about what we learn about the forms of socialization that permeates it; what kind of social goals that are set for the community, and so on, remembering that the basic essence of social life is the achievement of common goods that realize us individually. Such a state is a free state; such a condition is one that sets the preconditions for human self-realization. 41

Elsewhere, Gilbert argues that “Marx’s ethical viewpoint does not look like that of Rawls or of utilitarianism; it is much more embedded in and dependent on the validity of particular empirical claims.” “Marx’s Moral Realism: Eudaimonism and Moral Progress,” in George E. McCarthy (ed.), Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (Savage, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992), 320.

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5 Conclusion The argument I have presented should not be taken to imply a consequentialism that reduces all goods to social goods. A Marxian objective ethics is concerned not simply with end-states, but with processes; with the kinds of dynamic social relations that form the nexus for human individuation. The critique of economic processes, for Marx, therefore was central since it was the most basic, universal institutional force in modernity. It is also concerned with the relations that processes entail. There is no way to separate the process of individualization within a given culture with the dominant ways that social relations come to shape and legitimate particular norms and institutions. An ethical theory that bases itself on abstract and formal arguments is therefore prone to blind influence by the predominant social norms that it can come to posit as “universal.” Since social relations map themselves on to the individual through processes of socialization, we are forced to a deeper, more comprehensive form of critical reasoning that seeks to understand what is “good” and what is “right,” and so on, through an understanding of how, just as much as what, those institutional forms produce – what kinds of human subjects are expressed by them. And this means that we cannot simply find ethical validity through abstract means, i.e., those that do not take the ontological features of objective social life into account. The return to Kantian and Hegelian forms of ethical reasoning and the proliferation of the “postmetaphysical” view in social theory and philosophy, a Marxian ethics is therefore distinctly foundational in the sense that it sees the potential emancipation and perfection of human beings as dependent on specific needs and the understanding of concrete social processes. Detaching ethical discourse from the ontological ground leads us into an arbitrariness where ethical propositions can be led astray by false consciousness, alienated forms of theory and reasoning, and so on. Since this form of ethical argumentation is predicated on the separation between ethical values and objective social processes, it is unable to secure objective human ends from being maximized. It also rejects, due to its acceptance of pragmatist and Kantian theories of knowledge, the notion of an objective process of human self-realization, something that was the central concern for Marx. The attempt to focus on democratic forms of ethical validation and legitimation has obscured the foundational issues of what the purposes and functions of social life are and therefore ought to be. As a result, the capacity to judge has been eroded. We are told to look for forms of justification or mutual agreement even as the very object of our lives drops from view.

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Understanding this is not only relevant for moral philosophy but the social sciences as well. The evacuation of normative concepts from social science is reflected in the dominant trends of empiricism and positivism. But as I have shown above, cognitive claims suffer from the lack of their relation to evaluative claims just as the reverse is the fact. Our knowledge about the object social world is only comprehensive once we are able to formulate evaluativecognitive claims; once we are able to reclaim a theory of modern society that is able to posit the reality of deformed social processes that dehumanize its members. Hence, a Marxian form of ethical reasoning has as its central goal the unification of ethical value and social science, the wedding of social theory and social philosophy, the “what is” and the “what ought to be.” It is hoped that this will enable a more productive, more compelling, more critical form of social theory to compete with the politically domesticated forms that now prevail.

chapter 10

Political Economy with Perfectionist Premises Three Types of Criticism in Marx Christoph Henning This paper assumes two things: First, that Marx’s theories are not ethical theories, but theories as defined by Max Weber as value-free science. Consequently, efforts to (re-)moralize his theories misunderstand their epistemic grammar. His social theories were critical nevertheless – I will identify this type of criticism as an explanatory criticism. Second, the paper assumes that Marx’s writings do not only consist of theories. Marx took part in a worldhistorical emancipatory project. Practical movements have normative premises and goals defined by these premises. To a large extent Marx shared (as well as shaped) the values and premises of this movement. He did not have to make these premises explicit – except when they were wrongly imposed on the “scientific” branch of the movement by members of the movement themselves, or when the movement was attacked from the outside for its alleged immorality. It is the political localization of his project that gives away Marx’s own ethical worldview. Sections where Marx touched the ethical premises of his theories are rare, but all the more interesting to the moral philosopher. This paper claims that in addition to the explanatory criticism that carries the large share of the burden in the official theory, there are two supplementing, but extra-theoretical types of criticism – they are rather based in Marx’s own background. (Extra-theoretical does not mean that it is impossible to theorize about them, but it does mean that Marx did not elaborate on the theories himself.) Nevertheless these dimensions are present. There is, first, a naturalistic dimension with an Aristotelian trend which interprets the equal access to an all-round development of human capabilities as a criterion for a good society. This second, naturalistic criticism transcends the boundaries of a mere “immanent” critique which has become popular in recent critical theories. And there is, second, a radical-individualist criticism (which also is “humanistic”), appending that such a self-realization really needs to be a self-realization, not just a realization of some general “essences.” Only if these three types of criticism are read together the genuine Marxian perfectionism is apprehended fully. The paper will proceed in the following way: In a first step it will defend the idea that Marx’s theories were meant to be value-free (1) and that his own morality only joins in in practice-related sections (2). The reason for this

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_012

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defense is that only this perspective allows to identify his own (non-moral) theory of morality (3). A major problem of this theory of morality was that if true, it was self-referentially affecting the case for socialism. The next section discusses ways out of this dilemma and argues that only a non-immanentist approach can solve this problem (4). Finally, a look at the two perfectionist elements in Marx’s premises (the Aristotelian naturalism and the radical individualism) reveals that this approach did not only escape the problem of relativism, but still has some bearings for contemporary discussions in moral and political philosophy (5). 1

Philosophy and the Limits of Ethics

One of the main characters of the human condition is freedom: Every individual is free in the course of his or her action, even though in most cases we simply act as we are used to – or have to.1 We could always act differently, maybe more morally, even if the consequences may be hard to bear. And there always is a possibility to reflect upon our everyday life and become aware that we could act differently, even if this contingency is often concealed. This feature of the human condition is so evident that even a hard-headed naturalist cannot deny it – and even Marx did not, as George Brenkert has rightly stressed.2 It is not so clear, however, what this means for moral theorizing. At a first glance, one may deduce from this that Kantian ethics are right in stressing that morality is indispensable and needs to hold unconditionally, regardless of the details of the situation we are in at any certain moment. From this perspective ethics are indeed indispensable. Hence, it is hard not to judge ethically once we describe social ills. Philip Kain has inferred from the use of this language in Marx’s early texts that the young Marx argued along the lines of Kantian ethics.3 But every perspective has its limitations. The limitation of this Kantian perspective is not that it is a wrong perspective, but that it is only one perspective. At a closer look there are limits to the power individuals have over their own situation: Neither can individuals oversee all the consequences of their actions, nor do they necessarily have an impact on the general course of history. This 1 One could also say with Wittgenstein: We act as we are conditioned, or with Dewey: as we have made it a habit. 2 George Brenkert, Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (London: Routledge, 1983). 3 Philip Kain, Marx and Ethics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). Kant’s influence is also visible in the demand not to treat workers as mere means.

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limitation is not due to a defect in the individual’s cognitive abilities or strength of will, but rather due to the nature of social reality – we could also say: to the social ontology. Our society precedes us, and because we are embedded in it, to a certain extent it is also ‘stronger’ than we are: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.4 mew 8, 115

This passage may be read as an ethical preference of the living over the dead, as banal as it may seem (it is not, once we remember the definition of capital as “dead labor,” which leads to a comparison with vampirism).5 Here, however, I would rather read it as a hint toward the fact that a moral perspective misses the main point in social theory, and sciences in general. In other words, morality is not all there is in this world: Nature, for example, can do without human freedom to a large degree.6 Likewise, most social structures and forces cannot be reduced to individuals’ intentions – and historical events even less so.7 And to name the third ontological dimension that will be spelled out in a little while: our individual selves are interwoven into moral textures, as Charles Taylor rightly claims. But that does not mean that individuals are only moral beings or even constituted by this notion of moralized intersubjectivity. Their social and their individual natures have a reality of their own that goes way beyond the obeying of moral rules and social codes.8 As indispensable as a 4 I cite Marx’s text from the German edition of his and Engels’s collected works (Marx Engels Werke, mew, Berlin: Dietz, 1956ff.). In the endnotes I indicate the website from where I take the English translation. Here it is taken from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm. All emphasis from the originals is erased. 5 Mark Neocleous, “The political economy of the dead: Marx’s Vampires,” History of Political Thought XXIV.4 (2003): 668–684. Also see my radioprogram about this: http://www.srf .ch/sendungen/reflexe/themenmorgen-marx-und-die-vampire-4 (in German). 6 We may, however, find roots of moral behavior like empathy and cooperation in higher animals; see Frans de Waal, The Age of Empathy. Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (New York: Harmony Books, 2009). 7 Contrary to the assumption of rational choice theory or John Searle’s neo-idealist social ontology. 8 Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press). For this ‘trinity’ of natural, social and individual ontological layers cf. Margaret Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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moral perspective may appear in affairs of human freedom, sticking to it in every respect can cloud a clear view if we are dealing with natural or social facts. I can neither argue morally with a thunderstorm, nor can I blame a single individual for global warming. And thus it can be a good idea to suspend morals for a while in the realm of the sciences. With this dialectics the exact relation of science and morality becomes a problem: Because morality is indispensable, even science cannot do completely without morality – that is why we have bioethics, ethics committees or ethical counseling. Sciences are embedded into human practice, and with this embeddedness comes a moral involvement, willingly or unwillingly. However, because the perspective of morality is a perspective that argues from the choices an individual has, many issues in the sciences (both natural and social) cannot be modeled as moral ones, simply because neither natural nor social facts can be ontologically reduced to choices of individuals. This is why Marx wrote in the preface to Capital that he did not wish to blame individual capitalists for the shortcomings of capitalism as a system: My standpoint, from which the evolution of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history, can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he socially remains, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.9 mew 23, 15

Hence it becomes important to define the exact relation between ethics and science for different disciplines. In medicine, for example, ethics can play a crucial part even in the science itself, if we think of the importance of personal relations for the healing of a patient. But in the large share of the hard-sciencepart of medicine (anatomy, pathology, diagnostics etc.), ethics only comes in after the hard science part is done, namely in the practice of medicine. Concerning this ethical practice of medicine, the Hippocratic oath is quite explicit: Into whatever homes I go, I will enter them for the benefit of the sick, avoiding any voluntary act of impropriety or corruption, including the seduction of women or men.10

9 10

From www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm. From www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/greek/greek_oath.html.

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Even if you cannot heal a diarrhea by moral behavior toward the patient (and you therefore do not find ethics in medical textbooks on digestion), morality is involved in the practice of medicine nevertheless. From here we can draw an analogy to Marxism. It is evident that in Marx’s scientific texts morality itself hardly is a crucial argument – and there are good reasons for that: only think of the adhesion of the contemporary moral values with bourgeois attitudes, the shifting of the burden towards an individuals’ responsibility instead of social structures, or the long theoretical detour that a moral explanation would bring (maybe even without coming back to the initial problem, as it was the case in the history of critical theory).11 For Marx morality rather is an object of investigation (an explanandum instead of an explanans): it is described as an ideology, a bourgeois mindset that justifies exploitation and needs to be avoided in socialist theories.12 However, once we view socialism as more than just a theory, but rather as a political practice with very high ambitions, it is no longer evident that morality can or should be completely avoided.13 A critique of capitalism in the Marxian spirit could be rephrased in moral terms, as well as the quest for a new society that will offer individuals greater freedom and more possibilities. This, however, is only possible after the social theory has done its work – it adds nothing to understand capitalism better if we start moralizing too early.14 2

What is the Place of Morality?

Many authors engaged with Marxian ethics perceived it as a problem, yes even a paradox, that Marx condemns morality on the one hand, and sometimes uses moral undertones on the other hand. But I think there is a simple solution to 11 12 13

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Andreas Böhm, Kritik der Autonomie. Freiheits- und Moralbegriffe im Frühwerk von Karl Marx (Bodenheim: Syndikat, 1998), 74ff. In my mind still the best presentation of this view is Allen Wood: Karl Marx (London: Routledge, 2004). “So wenig das Humanitätsideal einer Gesellschaft der Freiheit und Gleichheit ohne solchen Rückhalt und Hintergrund [in a materialistic social theory, ch] eine geschichtlich wirkende Kraft entfalten könnte, so bedeutsam wird dasselbe, wenn es als ein Moment in die aus dem notwendigen Bedürfnis heraus geborene Klassenbewegung eingeht.” Conrad Schmidt, “Nochmals die Moral” (1900), in Hans Jörg Sandkühler (ed.) Marxismus und Ethik. Texte zum neukantianischen Sozialismus (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1974), 87–106, here 89. “Moral ideals should not influence the process of scientific discovery and analysis” (Kain, Marx and Ethics, 196).

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this philosophical riddle – but I am not speaking of the differentiation between two different moralities that is often used to counter Allen Wood’s anti-moralistic reading. I would rather differentiate between theory and practice; or, to put it more bluntly: between a value-free social theory and a morally laden praxis. As already indicated in the introduction, on the one hand we have Marx’s economic and political theories of capitalism. Their self-image is purely scientific: they articulate a political economy – an economic science that (unlike economists in our days) does not only play with numbers, but also deals with social and historical issues. And because political economy is a science – in fact Marx’s version is almost Newtonian in spirit, speaking of forces, tendencies and laws – ethics does not play a major role in it, at least not as an argument. Let me illuminate this with an example: A physicist cannot say: “I really think this particle should jump now, in order for me to be able to see and weigh it”. Likewise, stating how one likes what one sees is not a ‘move’ in the language game of science; it is only an unrelated “ceterum censeo.”15 Consequently, it is a mistake to interpret this epistemic purity, which is much in the spirit Max Weber’s absence of value judgments, as an anti-normativism. It is not a statement against norms, but only a decision not to use and interpret them as arguments in a field that is not primarily moral to start with. Now theories are theories. They are not per se practical.16 The practical effects of theories do not only depend on the theories themselves. It also depends on the circumstances and the morality of the practitioners. Consider the following example. Quite unsettling for even more radical anti-capitalists,17 Marx admitted in a fact-stating manner that capitalism is the most effective mode of production history has ever seen. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground – what 15

16 17

For Marx’s anticipation of Wittgensteinian insights see my “Wittgenstein, Marx und die politische Philosophie,” in Nele Schneidereit/Constanze Demuth (eds.) Interexistenzialität und Unverfügbarkeit. Festschrift for Thomas Rentsch (Freiburg: Alber, to appear 2014). Here I disagree with both Althusser and Adorno. “Grau, lieber Freund, ist alle Theorie, und grün des Lebens goldner Baum” (Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust I). Lenin believed that communism will grow even faster, whereas for radical ecologists growth itself is the problem.

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earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labor?18 mew 4, 467

And in the unpublished Theories of Surplus Value, Marx writes: Ricardo, rightly for his time, regards the capitalist mode of production as the most advantageous for production in general, as the most advantageous for the creation of wealth.19 mew 26.2, 110

I believe that even in these passages Marx was still engaged in the fact-stating line of work and tried to avoid value judgments. Here, however, we enter contested ground. If we continue the cited statement, we seem to find moral statements nevertheless – but I will argue that we will rather confront different starting points on the side of the readers/practitioners: To assert, as sentimental opponents of Ricardo’s did, that production as such is not the object, is to forget that production for its own sake means nothing but the development of human productive forces, in other words the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself. …[T]he higher development of individuality is thus only achieved by a historical process during which individuals are sacrificed for the interests of the species in the human kingdom, as in the animal and plant kingdoms, always assert themselves at the cost of the interests of individuals, because these interests of the species coincide only with the interests of certain individuals, and it is this coincidence which constitutes the strength of these privileged individuals. / Thus Ricardo’s ruthlessness was not only scientifically honest but also a scientific necessity from his point of view.20 mew 26.2, 111

If these notions are interpreted as moral ones, then the follow-up question would be: of what kind? It is possible to read this as a utilitarian statement, implying the following commitment: 18 19 20

Translation from www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01 .htm#007. From www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch09.htm#s2. From www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch09.htm#s2. In an astonishingly similar way Max Weber talks about “intellectual integrity.”

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Economic production for it’s own sake is increasing general utility and therefore is morally good, even if it comes at a (comparatively smaller) cost for individuals.21

Alternatively, it could be read as a perfectionist statement, implying a commitment like this: b) The development of human nature is morally good, even if some individuals have to be sacrificed for it. That would be a Nietzschean perspective, demanding that the higher cultivation of the noble view should be provided for by the slavery of the many. And finally it could be read as a cynical statement, by saying: c)

Why should I care about the others at all? As long as it benefits me, I agree to this process – because morally good is only that what serves my interest.

However, I think that none of these three statements can be extracted from Marx’s passages. He pictures the development as a natural – or rather, a naturalhistorical – fact. Hence the explicit praise of Ricardo’s scientific ethos: Ricardo is, like Marx, scientist enough to simply state the facts: it is a “scientific necessity” not to become “sentimental” (ibid.) here, that is: not to judge beforehand what first and foremost needs to be described. However, after the fact is stated, it is almost unavoidable to take a moral stand here. For this reason the three moral evaluations of this passage come to mind so quickly that they are often simply read into Marx’s text. However, I think it is important to keep in mind that they originate in the eye of the beholder. And because there are different observers, there are also different moral perspectives on the same fact. 3

What Kind of Morality, and Why?

Now, if evaluations come to mind so quickly, but there are different valueprojecting beholders, what kind of ‘beholder’ may Marx have had in mind while writing his texts? I think he addressed himself primarily to a public that already had socialist inclinations – hence also the polemics against competitive accounts (Max Stirner, Phroudhon, Lasalle, Bakunin etc.). The moral point 21

An utilitarian trend is also visible in the description of communism as a realm of material abundance.

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of view a socialist beholder brings adds yet another – a fourth – perspective. Clearly a socialist will object if burdens and benefits are distributed unequally in history. The socialist baseline for distributive matters is “natural equality” (mew 2, 137), which leads them to supporting ideas of equal rights, politically as well as economically. Even if this might not exactly be Marx’s own perspective22 he must have assumed that this is the moral perspective of most of his readers. To this public he did not have to argue in favor of a socialist morality, for such a broad attitude could already be presupposed.23 It is rational to avoid discussions about ethics at this point, it would only distract the reader from the fields Marx deemed more important. Nevertheless one may find certain ‘markers’ that signify which ethics Marx assumed to be the one of his readers. For example, when he formulates his much debated “categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable being” (mew 1, 385),24 I doubt that he wants to open the floor for an ethical discussion, putting his own Kantian approach against other ethics. He only articulates the point of departure for every reader familiar with the work of Ludwig Feuerbach. And in the Germany of the 1840s that was the case for a large share of the reading publics, at least for readers of political-philosophical texts. The following passage demonstrates that Marx really takes this moral starting point as a self-evident ‘given’: The evident proof of the radicalism of German theory, and hence of its practical energy, is that it proceeds from a resolute positive abolition of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man. mew 1, 385 (see fn. 24).

When the later Marx mentioned his earlier manuscripts, in which he experimented with fusions of moral philosophy and political economy, he characterized them as “self-clarification” (mew 13, 10).25 This does not imply that Marx changed his mind about his own moral standpoint. I think it remained astonishingly constant.26 It does mean, however, that Marx realized in the meantime 22 23

For Marx’s relation to natural law theories cf. McCarthy’s paper in this volume. The early communists called themselves the “league of the just”, and Engels published in Owens Gazette New Moral World until 1844. 24 From www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm (I translate “Wesen” as being instead of essence). 25 From www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm. 26 In fact Marx had already developed his ethical perspective in school, cf. www.marxists .org/archive/marx/works/1837-pre/marx/1835-ref.htm.

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that he does not need an ethical theory in order to develop his own critical approach in political economy. As straightforward as this avoidance of a moral language may sound in principle, things are getting more complicated due to the several ways one can talk about any morality. One can either articulate a moral judgment or a demand towards someone. I will call this the first-person-perspective.27 Or one can describe other people’s moral judgments or demands – that is a third-person-perspective, respectively. When we apply this distinction, we can non-morally talk about morals without a contradiction.28 In fact, where Marx talks about morality (in the Manifest or the German Ideology, e.g.), it is not as an argument but as an object. Marx does not claim that the economic function in capitalism proceeds value-free. For him economic functions are embedded into a cultural texture which legitimizes these functions. But this texture is not prior to the embedded, neither in a temporal nor in logical sense.29 Rather they are derivates: According to Marx’s Genealogy of Morals the interpretative patterns coevolve with the structural and functional ones. Even the metaphor of the “superstructure” does not imply that morality is pure decoration. It is ‘above’ the base only because its content is abstracted from the processes at the ground floor and it is mainly populated by ‘higher’ classes. But it is just as functional as the base: it regulates, monitors, idealizes and thereby legitimizes what is happening ‘below’.30 This, however, does not mean than a look at the norms could reveal much about the corresponding society. We have to proceed in the opposite direction. The science of morals has a lot to discover if it proceeds in this non-­ normativistic way. There are at least two noteworthy elements in Marx’s nonmoral thoughts about morality: the pluralism of morals within capitalistic societies and the hegemonic power of some of these morals over others. Both of these (proto-)theories contribute to Marx’s later abstinence in terms of a firstpersonal use of moral language. 27

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Based on Steven Wall, “On Justificatory Liberalism,” Politics, Philosophy and Economics 9 (2010): 123–149. Unlike Stephen Darwall I think the difference between first and secondperson perspectives is not that great: my demand is addressed at a concrete “you”, or yours at me. The real difference comes with the third person. Max Weber distinguishes value-judgments (first-person-perspective) from value-relations (third-person-perspective). Weber, “Der Sinn der ‘Wertfreiheit’ der soziologischen und ökonomischen Wissenschaften.” Logos 7 (1918), 40–88. As long as culture only interpretes the economic functions, these functions are at least logically prior. In other words: ‘having a function’ does not translate as ‘being a part of the base’. The super-structure is not super-fluous.

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3.1 Pluralism First, Marx’ theory of class implies a moral psychology. Accordingly every class will be inclined to conceive their economic interests not online as ‘imperative’ to themselves, but as moral laws more generally. But not every class has the power to effectively generalize its own interests in this way. This insight is especially enlightening for members of classes whose interests are not reflected in the dominating morality. Therefore Marx and Engels tried to get away from the influence of this class-based morality: But don’t wrangle with us so long as [or while, ch] you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class.31 mew 4, 477

The charge of relativism which is here addressed to bourgeois ethics is also self-reflexively addressed to the own camp. Socialists, too, should not overestimate the power of their ‘alternative’ ethics: Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all.32 mew 2, 126

The communists do not preach morality at all…[they] are distinguished precisely by the fact that they alone have discovered that throughout history the ‘general interest’ is created by individuals who are defined as ‘private persons’. They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, what is called the ‘general interest’, is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and in relation to the latter it is by no means an independent force with an independent history.33 mew 3, 229

31

From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02 .htm. 32 From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ch06_3_c.htm. 33 From https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch03f.htm #cb.2.

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The later Rawls concluded from the “fact of pluralism” within the field of moral judgments that political philosophy should “avoid” theories of the good.34 This idea is not very far removed from Marx’s non-normativism, even though many people who praise it in Rawls seem to condemn it in Marx. The reason for this cleavage probably is that Marx also suspects ideological influences in theories of justice, whereas Rawls seems to belief that they are in some miraculous way immune to the influence of impure worldly “facts”. Once these two options are compared in that way, it seems unlikely that a position like Rawls’s could be taken seriously. The dominance of Rawls over Marx in the political philosophy of recent decades indicates a certain naïveté and non-worldly philosophical mindset which was rightly, though abstractly, criticized by Amartya Sen.35 3.2 Hegemony A second dimension of Marx’s non-moral theory of morality is hegemony: Even if there are different theories of the good, corresponding to the different social locations in society, a certain theory among them has a particular power over others. This power is not fueled by ‘better arguments’, but by two strong external factors: First, by the social power of the corresponding class in society. It is maintained by “ruling classes” – this is a political reading. And second, by structural effects of the market. It is “grounded” on the base: it coincides with the functional compulsions of the system and is therefore reproduced daily. [W]hen the economic form, exchange, posits the all-sided equality of its subjects, then the content, the individual as well as the objective material which drives towards the exchange, is freedom. Equality and freedom are thus not only respected in exchange based on exchange values but, also, the exchange of exchange values is the productive, real basis of all equality and freedom. As pure ideas they are merely the idealized expressions of this basis; as developed in juridical, political, social relations, they are merely this basis to a higher power.36 Grundrisse, mew 42, 170

The ethics of liberalism relies upon contractual law, especially sale contracts. Because such contracts are experienced every day, an ethics that simply transfers these experiences into a higher dimension has a certain persuasiveness for the “social imaginaries” (Charles Taylor) of capitalism. Hence, this ethics was 34 35 36

John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 395. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (London: Lane, 2009). From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm.

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used to legitimize capitalism in political philosophies from Locke to Rawls. For Marx this powerful ethics has two important characteristics: First, it cannot transcend capitalism because it is read of its functional compulsions. It is but an idealized expression of capitalism. While this “immanence” of ethics is a solution for modern critical theory searching for normative foundations of its normative criticism (inflating the normativism of critical theory), for Marx this is the problem of ‘normative’ approaches. This difference can be traced back to the different theories of morals. Whereas for Marx morality is one of many forces within a given society, contemporary critical theory takes the self-image of these norms (the “normative content”) at face value. Axel Honneth, e.g., seems to belief that these idealizations really are the nucleus for a better future. That already touches the self-reflexive aspect of the argument: This morality has a power even over the imagination of the opponents of capitalism. They start to draw their own interests in the light of these ethics,37 not daring to formulate their own ethics too divergently (maybe because the desire to gain their enemies’ “recognition” has become the central moral motive). But this questions the whole emancipatory project. This neutralizing effect was a good reason for Marx to abstain from moralizing in his political writings and to explain: what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French socialists.38 mew 19, 22

I agree with Allen Wood that this is a consistent non-moral position, or rather: opposition. Social Democrats, however, necessarily had an issue with it: On the one hand they saw that Marx did not need morals for his theory and did not want it in politics. On the other hand they had to rely upon a certain morality, presupposed even by Marx himself, in order to form a broad political movement and direct it toward the right path. At some places where Marx addressed workers directly some of these premises have sneaked through his filter: 37

38

“It is a general illumination which bathes all the other colors and modifies their particularity”. Cited from http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01 .htm. From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm.

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Capital is concentrated social force, while the workman has only to dispose of his working force. The contract between capital and labor can therefore never be struck on equitable terms, equitable even in the sense of a society which places the ownership of the material means of life and labor on one side and the vital productive energies on the opposite side.39 mew 16, 169

Owing to the fact that in the credit system the moral recognition of a man, as also trust in the state, etc., take the form of credit, the secret contained in the lie of moral recognition, the immoral vileness of this morality, as also the sanctimoniousness and egoism of that trust in the state, become evident and show themselves for what they really are.40 mew 40, 450

This use of moral terms (“equitable,” “immoral vileness”) only looks like a paradox as long as we assume only one morality.41 But this does not do justice to Marx: It overlooks first, that for Marx morality is always plural, so there is a class struggle even in moral philosophy. As soon as there are two or more different moralities facing one another, there is no paradox any longer. Rather, now it becomes the philosopher’s task to differentiate and assess both ethics critically. And secondly, this paradoxical reading jumps over the aspect of hegemony. If we consider the later, we have to distinguish the intention from the expression of an intention (or form and content). In order to get to an expression, a certain existing vocabulary is applied, as Luc Boltanski rightly observed The formulation of a critique presupposes a bad experience prompting protest… Without this prior emotional – almost sentimental – reaction, no critique can take of. On the other hand, it is a long way from the spectacle of suffering to articulated critique; critique requires a theoretical 39 40

41

From http://www.marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1866/instructions .htm#06. From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill. Some authors influen­ ced by Axel Honneth use sentences like these in order to demonstrate that Marx’s theory is really a theory of recognition. Aside from the word “recognition”, however, this claim is unfunded. In the citation above Marx clearly calls the ethics of recognition a vile morality based on a lie. Here I follow Steven Lukes, Marxism and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 29ff.

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fulcrum and an argumentative rhetoric to give voice to individual suffering and translate it into terms that refer to the common good.42 In this dimension of common theoretical patterns, ideology dashes in. Avoiding a moral vocabulary therefore does not mean that moral judgments are impossible, but rather that the available language is full of pitfalls. The available moral vocabulary is already occupied: In the “terms that refer to the common good” the liberal ethics is the hegemonial discourse. It is an act of political prudence of the socialist to ‘avoid’ this language as long as possible. 4

Three Answers to the Problem of Self-Application

For subsequent Marxist theorizing this notion of ethical pluralism carried along the problem of self-application we already mentioned: Once every ethics is considered relative to its social location, then none of them can be unconditionally valid. By implication, even socialist value judgments may be quite limited in scope (as Friedrich Nietzsche has argued indeed). They may be valid only for proletarians who do feel alienated and exploited – but then they are nothing but “expressions” of their world-view and cannot be generalized for the rest of society; even less so to another society or another time and age. So the Rawlsian filter could separate out these arguments from political theory. There are three possible answers to this quandary: insisting on a nonmorally-motivated vision of the future, falling back upon liberal ethics due to the lack of a genuinely socialist ethics, or providing a more consistent theory of the good that moves from a wrong-headed ideology towards more substantiated claims. First, one could insist that ethics are useless for political theory indeed. This, however, will not carry very far. Consider the following criticism of Louis Althusser’s anti-normativism by Rodney Peffer: Althusser claims that ‚ethics […] is in its essence ideology’. However, what Althusser is really claiming is not that Marxism is lacking in normative content, but that Marxist empirical, social-scientific theory is lacking in normative content. But this is a rather noncontroversial claim, especially 42

Luc Boltanski/Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005), 36.

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since Althusser does not deny that the workers movement relies upon a set of normative commitments.43 In other words: Even if we agree that the theory of political economy is free of value judgments, we need some ethical baggage in order to get from the theory to a socialist political practice. But it is exactly this baggage which is under suspicion, so we still need a better solution. In the 1920s, Karl Mannheim has argued for another option. He has articulated the problem of self-application most dramatically (and was attacked for this by Horkheimer and Adorno still decades later), but he also had a solution to offer. According to Mannheim, the difference between Ideology and Utopia is the following: whereas ideologies are only class-based and can therefore not be ethically generalized,44 utopias could in principle be realized. This “objective possibility” (a term by Max Weber, later utilized by Ernst Bloch), however, has to be theoretically demonstrated in the first place. And this is what we were asking for in the first place. Of the three paths just indicated (insisting on a non-morally-motivated vision of the future, falling back upon liberal ethics due to the lack of a genuinely socialist ethics, or providing a more consistent theory of the good), most often only the first two are taken: Marx was often criticized for being an amoralist and was hence ‘refuted’ by moral theories. If critical theories in Marx’s aftermaths follow this path, this leads them into a dialectics of ethical enlightenment: Of course it sounds much more comforting to apply a heartwarming vocabulary even within critical theory. Practically, however, this leads into the trap, already analyzed by Marx, of becoming overly affirmative: Uncritically using the “normative foundations” of capitalism in order to analyze the same capitalism reduplicates the reality to be criticized into its abstract idealization – and thereby unwillingly glamorizes it. The latest example for this affirmative turn is Axel Honneth’s opus magnum from 2011. His so called “normative functionalism”,45 which transforms social 43 44

45

Rodney Peffer: Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (Princeton:Princeton University Press 1990), 174. They are wrong to the extent that they generalize. As a description of particular interests in a given mode of production, to a certain extent they are also justified. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge, 1999, first German edition 1929). Axel Honneth, Freedoms Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (German edition 2011, to appear in English in 2014). Normative functionalism means for Honneth that norms do not just have some funtion, but the central funtion when it comes to constituting, stabilizing and developing societies.

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criticism into a primarily normativist enterprise, also has an effect on the empirical claims of social philosophy: it now believes that society itself is a product of “norms”. Norms become the base, and social structures their superstructure. The resulting charge against Marx is the traditional, though shortcircuited one that the perceived avoidance of first-personal moral vocabulary in his own social theory leads to a wrong theory of capitalism because capitalism itself is said to be primarily structured and guided by “norms”.46 But exactly this predominance of certain, rather narrow norms was Marx’s reason to remain skeptical about “norms”. Let me illustrate this claim a little further: Honneth believes that there could be no criticism of exploitation if social classes would not share a certain understanding of justice already. But according to this shared understanding, the process of exploitation is just. If only such “normative foundations” are left for a critical theory, it can no longer criticize exploitation, but rather becomes its apologist.47 The reason why Honneth’s perspective is happy to remain “immanent” to capitalism (and even claims that this is necessary) is his transformation of existing norms from an explanandum into an explanans. The only things left to criticize for his theory are cases where a society does not comply with its own norms (say by reintroducing slavery or a 60-hour workweek).48 Bad enough if that happens, but we do not need a sophisticated theory in order to prove it wrong – the existing laws will avenge it anyway. Therefore Marx was not very interested in this kind of criticism: being aware of the fact that by all means this is not always the case, his theory nevertheless assumes that capitalism abides to its own norms, in order to make his adversary stronger: what is more, in, e.g., the determination of the value of labor power I proceed from the assumption that it is really paid at its full value, which is in fact not the case.49 mew 19, 360

In order to get back on track, critical theory needs to reconsider the third path. 46

47

48 49

Honneth, “Die Moral im ‘Kapital’. Versuch einer Korrektur der Marxschen Ökonomiekritik,” in: Rahel Jaeggi/Daniel Loick (eds.), Nach Marx. Philosophie, Kritik, Praxis (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2013), 350–363. For example, there is no more criticism of exploitation in Honneth, “Labour and Recognition: A Redefinition,” in: The I in the We: Studies in the Theory of Recognition (Cambridge: Wiley, 2012), 56–74. Thus, business ethics reduces pathologies of capitalisms to mere problems of compliance. Instead of systemic problems it only perceives a few “black sheep”. From https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/01/wagner.htm.

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283

Marx’s Perfectionist Ethics

The third path just mentioned was to spell out and substantiate the presupposed socialist ethics. Even if it is no part of Marx’s theory, he presupposed it and recurrently touched it as a point of departure in order to get from his theory to a radical political project. So far I delivered no argument why a socialist ethics could be preferable to its liberal brethren. Can the Marxian premises be defended against the charge of relativism? And why should anyone prefer this ethics to another? One has to avoid a Heideggerian mysticism here50: If we cannot avoid morals because it is a necessity to guide emancipatory political action towards meaningful goals, but the available language is contaminated with ideology, we do not have to retreat to pre-lingual gestures in order to uncover the ‘true’ morality. Just as Heidegger turned to poetry, Marcuse to literature and Adorno to music, Luc Boltanski alludes to the arts in order to formulate a more “radical” criticism than Honneth’s immantentism allows for: Radical criticism has to bear upon existential tests. And here art and literature matter, because they are not bound to the requirements of legitimation and coherence. They can push things from the world into reality.51 Followings this existentialist turning, one could say – maybe a little less esoteric – that “ethics are self-evident”.52 The real difficulty is how not to obstruct this self-evidence by abstract theoretical constructions. Social scientists should always keep a keen eye on everyday-life. Whenever existential experiences conflict with the ideological language of morality, for Marx it is clear which instance is more important, since “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life” (mew 3, 27, cf. mew 13, 9).53 Existing norms have no primacy over other dimension of life, as the immanentist model assumes; especially not over ‘transcending’ experiences (one of which is political struggle itself). But this is neither a miracle nor a brute vitalism: once we subtract the liberal language of morals, there remains a lot more than just “bare life” 50 51

52 53

This has grown popular with Alain Badiou’s und Jacques Ranciére’s political philosophy. Boltanski/Honneth, “Soziologie der Kritik oder Kritische Theorie?” in Rahel Jaeggi/Tilo Wesche (eds.) Was ist Kritik? (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 2009), 81–115, here 103 (my translation, ch); cf. Boltanski, On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 107f, 113. “What is moral is always self-evident” (Sigmund Freud). From https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a1.

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(Giorgio Agamben). One may discover a remarkable systematic once Marx’s scattered utterances about this are drawn together. It is possible to reconstruct his approach as a layered ontology,54 based on which the hegemonic ethical discourse may be grilled from three sides: from the philosophy of nature, especially of human nature (1); from the materialist theory of society, as opposed to its moralistic idealization (2), and from the concept of genuine individuality, as opposed to subjectivations or “character masks” imposed by social force (3). Each successive layer has its own mode of criticism. The second version is the well-known explanatory criticism of false images of society based on the critique of political economy (which does not need morality yet). Here circulating ideologies are confronted with a more consistent theory of the structures and dynamics of society. But in the explanatory mode of criticism these structures only serve as a corrective of wrong theories. What if the structures are to be criticized themselves? What exactly can be wrong about them, if they influence everything else – including morals and our self-conceptions? In this domain, Marx applies an anthropological concept of the “first nature” of man. Marx knew as well as Rousseau or the postmodernists that any given society not only shapes some superficial patterns of behavior, but the whole ‘nature’ of its citizens. This transformed condition, however, is only the “second nature” of men – and there can be no second without a first: he that would criticize all human acts[...]must first deal with human nature in general, and then with human nature as modified in each historical epoch.55 mew 23, 637, Fn. 63

This anthropological level is vital in order to criticize society as a whole: Societal requirements can overstretch the limits of the first nature – which will then revolt. This would estrange “the species from man”.56 The first nature, however, is not defining ends, so this approach avoids the paternalism often associated with it. As a boundary concept it rather sets limit to society’s power over the second nature: As Freud and his scholars have congenially described, the first nature may rebel against the second once those limits are overstretched by societal pressures. Thus today we may read the contemporary

54 55 56

I have tried to show this in my habilitation-thesis: Freiheit, Gleichheit, Entfaltung: Die politische Philosophie des Perfektionismus (Frankfurt/M., New York: Campus, 2015). From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#n49. From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm.

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wave of burnouts and depressions as a sign that something is not quite right with the postmodern work-ethics. Marx has spelled out his thoughts about this first nature in the German Ideology, without mystifying it as something unapproachable, but also without mashing it together with the historical contingencies of any given age. A main moral element associated with this first nature is equality: As long as we remain ‘immanent’ to the ideology of a given situation, we will only find inequalities. Consequently, in case of doubt we would be pushed to drop the notion of equality altogether.57 According to Marx’s enlightenment naturalism, however, if we abstract from the differences between persons that are the result of their second nature, the first-natural constitution is pretty similar in everybody. Consequently, by belonging to the same species, every member possesses the same dignity and is entitled to claim the same rights.58 According to this second level, every society that robs people of their dignity or treats them unequally needs to be criticized, even if we need to ‘transcend’ the given moral vocabulary of this society. But there remains yet another level of criticism: In a deep struggle with Max Stirner Marx was pushed to acknowledge that ‘essence-talk’ may be as alienating as a religious language. Afterwards he used even more individualist notions than before. The naturalistic ethics of human essence, useful as it is in order to criticize a potentially conformistic ethics of second nature (like Hegel’s ethical life or Honneth’s updated redux), needs to be supplemented by a qualitative individualism. Against the claims of contemporary inter-subjectivist social philosophy, this dimension vindicates individuality as a reality in its own right that must not be fused together with the imperative to realize general “human potentials.” One’s individuality needs to be developed – hence Marx talks about “self-realization” (mew 42, 512), the “free development of each is the condition for the free development of all” (mew 4, 482) and communism as “a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle” (mew 23, 618).59 This is the liberal 57

58

59

For the analysis of a precedent see Michael Thompson, The Politics of Inequality. A political history of the idea of economic Inequality in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Hints to the idea of legal equality do not help: These are the very ‘fictions’ that need to be substantiated in the first place. For a similar idea see Martha C. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice. Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge, ma: Belknapm, 2006). Nussbaum often cites the young Marx as a main source of her ideas. See http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch12.htm, http://www .marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm and http:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch24.htm#S3, respectively.

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side of his ethics: it is a dialectics of enabling and potentially enchaining social conditions on the one hand, and a fragile individuality which needs the protection both of and from these social networks. Resuming, the three types of criticism resulting from this ascending ontology can be described in the following way: First, social theories, including ethical theories, should not idealize or glorify social reality, as it is so often the case in contractualist or discourse-ethical approaches. Rather they should represent it according to the best available empirical theory,60 which in Marx’s times was – and I think it still is – political economy. This is the level of explanatory criticism. Marx has not only practiced this criticism extensively in his economic writings, he has also recommended it. This is a normativity that is not primarily moral, but it is an ethos nevertheless – a scientific ethos. The corresponding values are clarity, intellectual soberness, and behind it the core value of rationality. If follows that theorists should not take unnecessary detours, including moralistic ones. The Communists[...]have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement. The theoretical conclusions of the Communists[...]merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes.61 mew 4, 474

Second, societies, including socialist ones, should neither repress nor skip human nature, for “Man is directly a natural being” (mew 40, 578).62 Rather, they should take it into account the way it is experienced by most people. For many people, confrontations with their own natures take place in their work, for work itself is “a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles”, “a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race” (mew 23, 58).63 This is the level of naturalistic criticism which Marx shares with Freud and Nietzsche, and which was revived by the Marxist humanism of the 1960s (e.g., of Erich Fromm and East-European philosophers) and laid to rest by the postmodern anti-essentialism of Althusser and Foucault. Marx not only took these naturalistic limits into accounts, he also required other writers to do so: 60 61 62 63

I think John Dewey’s various writings on ethics, e.g., have tried to do just this. From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch02.htm. From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/hegel.htm. From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm.

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The writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.64 mew 3, 20

Third, individuals, including those who already have the chance to realize their human potentials, have a right to their own individuality, even if it deviates from the moral majority. Rather, social institutions should foster and protect individuals’ self-realization, but “without the police sticking their noses in” (mew 19, 31).65 The twist in Marx’s interpretation of Aristotle’s zoon politikon as the “animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society” (mew 13, 615)66 is nicely catching this dialectical relation. Only within the community has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; hence personal freedom becomes possible only within the community. mecw 5, 78

This is the level of a radical-individualist criticism which was also brought forward by Otto Gross or the movement of humanist psychology. The catch of this reconstruction is that only together these three levels of criticism give us the full picture of the Marxian Proto-ethics. 64 65 66

From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#a1. From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm. From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm.

chapter 11

G.A. Cohen and the Limits of Analytical Marxism Paul Blackledge In his book If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Jerry Cohen commented on his own intellectual trajectory that he had “moved from an economic point of view to a moral one, without ever occupying a political one.”1 This pithy epigraph illuminates not only the arc of his academic career but also a broader truth about analytical Marxism’s convergence with egalitarian liberalism.2 In this essay I’ll focus on the co-ordinates of this movement with a view to challenging the idea, widespread within the academy, that Cohen’s evolution specifically and analytical Marxism’s tendency towards egalitarian liberalism more generally, represent the most powerful, and most reasonable, Marxist response to the changed circumstances facing the left since the 1970s. In part my argument is rooted in a simple exegetical difficulty with Cohen’s account of the changing focus of his work. His suggestion that he bypassed the political point of view is not simply an idiosyncratic position for a Marxist to take. Rather, it stands in sharp contradiction to the interpretation of Marxism implicit to Engels’s famous assertion that “Marx was above all else a revolutionist.” Engels’s claim is significant because it relates not merely to the personal idiosyncrasies of Marx’s biography, but more importantly to the profound contribution the two of them made in the 1840s towards transcending the antinomies of bourgeois thought.3 From the perspective of this revolution in philosophy, any attempt to unpick the economic and ethical points of view 1 G.A. Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 3. 2 Alongside Cohen himself, this tendency is associated most prominently with the works of John Elster, Andrew Levine, Philippe Van Parijs, Adam Przeworski, John Roemer, and Eric Olin Wright amongst others. See Erik Olin Wright, “What Is Analytical Marxism,” in Terrell Carver and Paul Thomas (eds.), Rational Choice Marxism (London: Macmillan, 1995), 11–30, 13; Christopher Bertram, “Analytical Marxism,” in Jacques Bidet and Eustache Kouvelakis (eds.), Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 123–141, 124; G.A. Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xviii−xix. For analytical Marxism’s convergence with egalitarian liberalism see Bertram, 137; Andrew Levine, A Future for Marxism? (London: Pluto, 2003), 123, and Marcus Roberts, Analytical Marxism (London: Verso, 1996), 203. 3 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1971) and Chris Arthur, The Dialectics of Labour (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_013

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from the political point of view would do intense damage to, and mark a fundamental retreat from, the concept of “sensuous human activity, practice” as developed in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach. In what follows, I outline a critique of Cohen’s interpretation of Marxism with a view to suggesting a positive, ethico-political, alternative to it. I argue that Cohen did not correct but rather inverted the weaknesses with his theory of history when he moved to embrace the moral standpoint, and that this inversion repeated an earlier, similar, movement within the history of Marxism. In effect, he played both parts in a dramatic renewal of Bernstein’s Kantian critique of Kautsky’s materialism. And just as Lukács argued that Bernstein’s subjectivism and Kautsky’s fatalism represented two sides of the missing category of the totality, I argue that Cohen’s movement from the economic to the moral point of view represented not a shift from classical Marxism to morality but a movement between pre-Marxist categories. Indeed, whereas in Marx’s conception of human agency the ethical and the economic are best understood not as two distinct spheres but rather as moments alongside the political within a total conception of practice, the tendency to conflate Marx’s critique of the moral standpoint with nihilism is an unfortunate consequence of viewing this model of practice from a standpoint that Marx had decisively criticised.

From the Economic to the Moral Point of View

In the late 1960s and early 1970s an upturn in the class struggle underpinned a period of political and ideological creativity on the left. Unfortunately, this renaissance was relatively short-lived, and subsequent defeats suffered by the workers’ movement opened the door not only to neoliberalism but also to a corresponding retreat from Marxism amongst intellectuals.4 One manifestation of this retreat was what Alain Badiou refers to as the return from Marx (politics) to Kant (morality).5 It is hardly surprising that many on the left should have moved in the direction of increasingly abstract moral criticisms of capitalism – what Marx, borrowing from Fourier, called “impotence in action” − in a situation characterised by a growing sense of social injustice on the one hand alongside mounting pessimism about the prospects for a socialist 4 Chris Harman, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After (London: Bookmarks, 1988) and Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism (Cambridge: Polity, 1989). 5 Alain Badiou, Ethics (London: Verso, 2001), 1–2, 4.

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transformation of society on the other.6 This process was given an added fillip by the failure of Althusser’s anti-humanist interpretation of Marxism to make adequate sense of the labour movement defeats that followed the upsurge of 1968.7 Althusser’s interpretation of Marx had gained a degree of hegemony on the left in the 1960s and 1970s, and its collapse helped frame the intellectual context in which the moral turn was justified by reference to the supposed failings of Marx’s claim that “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”8 This model of agency was typically counterposed to, and found wanting by contrast with, moral theory’s focus on “the recognition of the subjective freedom of individuals.”9 Analytical Marxism was in the van of this turn to ethics. Commenting on this tendency, Will Kymlicka argues that the widespread belief that Marxism died with the collapse of Soviet Communism is, at best, only partially true. For, alongside the demise of classical Marxism, the last two decades of the twentieth century saw something of a “rebirth of Marxist theorizing in the West” in the form of analytical Marxism. He follows Cohen’s suggestion that with the refutation of Marx’s claims about the inevitability of both the collapse of capitalism and the triumph of socialism through proletarian revolution, the classical Marxist attempt to provide a scientific account of the dynamic structure of capitalism was jettisoned in favour of a movement amongst a layer of socialist analytical philosophers to reshape Marxism as a normative political theory.10 There is a seemingly irreproachable logic to this trajectory: if Marx is understood through a positivist lens as perhaps the archetypical economic determinist and mechanical materialist whose scorn for moral theory’s engagement with the values that motivate individuals to action informed his embrace of a 6 7

8 9

10

Dominique Lecourt, The Mediocracy (London: Verso, 2001), 98; Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007). Alex Callinicos, Is There a Future for Marxism? (London: Macmillan, 1982), Ch. 1; Against Postmodernism, 165; and Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 1. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The manifesto of the Communist Party” in David Fernbach (ed.) The Revolutions of 1848 (London: Penguin, 1973), 62–98, 67. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 1987), 17; Ellen Meiksins Wood, “A Chronology of the new Left and Its Successors, Or: Who’s OldFashioned Now?” Socialist Register (1995): 30–35; and Gregory Elliott, Althusser: The Detour of Theory (Leiden: Brill, 2006), xiii. William Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 167–168; G.A. Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 144 and Tom Mayer, Analytical Marxism (London: Sage, 1994), 20–22, 314–316.

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fatalistic conception of historical change, it makes sense for those socialists who came to reject his explanatory model as an inadequate account of human action would tend toward a reengagement with normative theory. Nevertheless, it is more than a little ironic that analytical Marxism’s engagement with ethical theory was heralded by the publication of the most sophisticated argument for so-called “orthodox historical materialism”: Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (1978). Cohen’s book was published at the moment when Althusser’s star had begun to wane on the academic left, and in many ways can be seen as playing a pivotal role in helping shift the centre of gravity of academic Marxism within the Anglophone world towards analytical Marxism.11 Indeed, Alan Carling points out that Cohen produced his sophisticated analytical interpretation of Marx’s theory of history just as Britain’s foremost Althusserians, Paul Hirst and Barry Hindess, announced their “utter despair at systematic social thought in general and Marxist theory in particular.”12 Consequently, as Althusser’s project appeared to run out of steam, an alternative conveniently emerged to challenge its hegemony on the academic left.13 Nevertheless the shift from a dominant Althusserian to analytical tone within Anglophone academic Marxism did not entail a simple intellectual break. For though analytical Marxists sought to reverse Althusser’s attempt to expunge ethical and moral concerns from Marxist theory, they accepted his “expulsion of Hegelian modes of thinking from Marxist theory.”14 One important manifestation of this interpretation of Marx was registered only in passing in Karl Marx’s Theory of History. Cohen suggested that it would be a mistake to conflate Marx’s method with one or other recent “anti-positivist” contribution to the philosophy of science because Marx “did not deviate” from “nineteenth century conceptions of science” and he was not wrong to do so.15 This is a very controversial claim that goes against the grain of most contemporary commentary on Marx’s method which locates him as a powerful precursor of the anti-positivist tradition that culminates in the work of modern critical realist philosophers of science such as Roy Bhaskar.16 As we shall see, critical 11 12

Perry Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1983), 24. Alan Carling, “Rational Choice Marxism,” in Terrell Carver and Paul Thomas (eds.), Rational Choice Marxism (1995), 31–78, 31. 13 Levine, A Future for Marxism? 122–145. 14 Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 3 and Lawrence Wilde, Ethical Marxism and Its Radical Critics (London: Macmillan, 1998), 4–5. 15 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 46. 16 Andrew Sayer, Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach (London: Routledge, 1992); Andrew Collier, Critical Realism (London: Verso, 1994); Sean Creaven, Marxism and Realism (London: Routledge, 2000); and Alex Callinicos, Resources of Critique (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).

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realism points in the direction of a challenge to Cohen’s superficial positivist analysis of contemporary socio-historical trends. According to Bhaskar, reality should be understood as a stratified totality within which the laws governing higher strata emerge out of laws governing lower strata without being reducible to them. More importantly, because the empirical world is constituted through the interaction of a myriad of entities each with causal powers which may or may not be realised in specific circumstances, it cannot function as a transparent lens onto reality. This is because, though causal powers are immanent to things, they are realized within open systems. This means that they realise their potentials, contra Hume, not as constant conjunctures but as tendencies.17 Indeed, by contrast to positivism’s “shallow realism,” Bhaskar’s deep realism holds that social science should aim not to uncover constant conjunctures but should rather attempt to explain social processes through the retroductive inference of the explanatory powers of mechanisms within the world.18 This approach parallels Marx’s attempt to understand the world through a process of “rising from the abstract to the concrete,” and stands in sharp to contrast to Cohen’s positivist belief that, in the words of Jolyon Agar, “operating at the level of how things appear” is enough to understand the world.19 Indeed, Cohen explicitly reconstructed historical materialism as a positivist science in opposition to Marx’s claim that “all science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence.”20 To this end, in Karl Marx’s Theory of History, he famously sought to defend a version of historical materialism characterised by two key propositions. First, “the forces of production tend to develop throughout history (the development thesis),” and, second, “the nature of the production relations of a society is explained by the level of development of its productive forces (the primacy thesis).”21 Cohen explained this relationship in a functionalist manner thus: “if it is the case that if an event of type E were to occur at t1, then it would bring about an event of type F at t2, then an event of type E occurs at t3.” This is a form of what he termed a “consequence law,” but one which, paralleling the situation of pre-Darwinian biology, is innocent of the mechanism through which the law might be explained.22 17 Collier, Critical Realism, 20–27, 61–68. 18 Roy Bhaskar, Plato (London: Verso, 1994), 30; Sayer, Method in Social Science, 107; Collier, Critical Realism, 11. 19 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (London: Penguin, 1973), 101; Jolyon Ager, Rethinking Marxism (London: Routledge, 2006), 185. 20 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 956; Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 396; 411−414; Roberts, Analytical Marxism, 68. 21 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 134. 22 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 260; 272; Roberts, Analytical Marxism, 73.

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Cohen did, though, point to an explanation for the salience of the development thesis: he assumed that in a situation of scarcity human agents find it rational to develop the forces of production over time. This is because “men are…somewhat rational,” they live in a “historical situation of…scarcity,” and they “possess intelligence of a kind and degree which enables them to improve their situation.”23 Cohen’s interpretation of historical materialism thus involved an idiosyncratic defence of a type of political fatalism that was rooted in what Wright et al. call a “transhistorical” model of human rationality.24 Thus he claimed that “in so far as the course of history, and more particularly, the future socialist revolution are, for Marx, inevitable, they are inevitable not despite what men may do, but because of what men, being rational, as bound, predictably, to do.”25 Commenting on this argument, Alex Callinicos accurately observes that the inevitabilist structure of Cohen’s reinterpretation of historical materialism “is almost a reductio” of Marx’s theory of history.26 In defence of his account of historical materialism, Cohen argued that he had been drawn to these conclusions through a desire to reconstruct Marx’s theory of history free from much of the “bullshit” characteristic of the kind of lazy Marxist theorising that hid beneath a veneer of (often Hegelian) impenetrability. This process was sparked sometime around 1966–1967 when he delivered a paper to an academic audience including Isaac Levi. Levi first asked for clarification of a point made by Cohen, and then upon noticing Cohen’s discomfort ventured the following: “Look, I don’t mind a different way of doing things. I just want to know what the ground rules are.” Henceforth, Cohen claimed that, whenever he wrote, he tried to ask himself the laudable question “precisely what does this sentence contribute to the developing exposition or argument, and is it true.”27 Somewhat later Cohen sought to differentiate his understanding of bullshit from Harry Frankfurt’s discussion of the same. Whereas Frankfurt focused on the “bullshit of ordinary life,” Cohen was more concerned with the “bullshit that appears in academic works.” The distinction between these two forms of bullshit is important and centres on the problem of intentionality: whereas Frankfurt’s bullshitter was actively bullshitting, the bullshit beliefs of Cohen’s academic bullshitter were usually sincerely held.28 This distinction is of 23 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 152. 24 Wright et al., 1992, 24. 25 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 147; G.A. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 55. 26 Callinicos, 2004, 69. Terry Eagleton similarly comments on the thesis of Cohen’s, Karl Marx’s Theory of History that “[r]arely has a wrongheaded idea been so magnificently championed” (Eagleton, 2011, 242–243). 27 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, xxii. 28 G.A. Cohen, Finding Oneself in the Other (Princeton, 2013), 96−98.

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profound consequence because the sincere bullshitter, unlike the insincere bullshitter, should normally be open to rational criticism and correction. This conception of academia implied by this argument helps make sense of an aspect of Cohen’s work that might otherwise appear strange for a Marxist. Whereas Classical Marxist writers tended to address audiences of either or both workers or socialist activists,29 Cohen’s orientation was towards the academy. This is evident, for instance, in his comments on the structuralist and post-structuralist “bullshit” produced in France. He explained this phenomenon partly in terms of the difference between a unipolar Francophone culture centred on Paris, and a multipolar Anglophone culture based “in Oxford, in New York, in at least two Cambridges, in Los Angeles, in Berkely, in Sydney, and so on.”30 Whatever else may be said about this orientation, it certainly served to cut Cohen adrift from Marxist theory as it evolved beyond these elite institutions (even as it was practiced elsewhere in the academy). Indeed, his dismissive approach was most apparent in his insistence that though there existed tendencies within Marxism that were neither analytical nor bullshit, “once such pre-analytical Marxism encounters analytical Marxism, then it must either become analytical or become bullshit.”31 More specifically, he claimed that because “there is no such thing as a dialectical form of reasoning that can challenge analytical reasoning” those Marxists who resisted “non-bullshit” analytical reasoning did so from a perspective that could best be described as a form of “irrational obscurantism.”32 Callinicos rightly comments that Cohen’s “insufferably smug” use of the slogan “non-bullshit Marxism” to describe the analytical approach functions as a barrier to a creative dialogue between his work and non-analytical traditions within Marxism. Unfortunately, not only did Cohen rarely engage with nonanalytical Marxist critics,33 but a similarly dismissive tendency underpins Kymlicka’s claim that the trajectory of especially Cohen’s analytical Marxism amounted to the most creative Marxist response to the (supposed) falsification of the precepts of classical Marxism. This interpretation simply ignores 29

Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: Verso 1976); Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism (London: Penguin, 1958). 30 Cohen, Finding Oneself in the Other, 109. 31 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, xxvi. 32 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, xxiii−xxv. 33 Callinicos, Resources of Critique, 259. His angry response to Holstrom is the exception that proves the rule (G.A. Cohen, “More on Exploitation and the Labour Theory of Value,” Inquiry, 26, 1983: 309−331).

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the power of, for instance, Michael Lebowitz’s argument that the “essential thrust” of analytical Marxism is not merely mistaken it is actually “anti-Marxist.”34 Interestingly, far from exhibiting the kind of woolly thinking suggested by Cohen’s dismissive comments on “dialectical” and “holistic” thought, Lebowitz’s Hegelian Marxist critique of Cohen is actually commensurable with the latter’s preference for explanations of change in terms of “micro-constituents and micro-mechanisms.” Indeed, Lebowitz points out that Marx “never denied that real human beings are the only actors…what he always stressed, however, is that they act within constraints.”35 Superficially at least this comment overlaps with the sentiments expressed in the crucial line from the poem with which Cohen opened his study of historical materialism: “it all depends on where you live and what you have to build with.” But, as Lebowitz suggests, the difference between dialectical and analytical approaches isn’t that one accepts whilst the other rejects individual agency. Rather it relates, in the first instance, to how profoundly they each register the historical constitution of these agents. Whereas the analytical approach tends to view change as issuing, in Cohen’s words, from pristine individuals with properties “possessed independently of the social form,” dialectical Marxists embrace a deeply historical conception of agency which recognises that a “private interest” is, as Marx insisted, “already a socially determined interest.”36 Thus it is that Marx’s theory of history is intended to relate to his broader theory of revolution through the light it shines on the concrete content and historicity of these socially determined interests.37 That this is not how Cohen understood this relationship is apparent from an answer he gave in 1996 to a question about the trajectory of his research. When asked if the changing locus of his research reflected any doubts he might have about historical materialism, his answer was strangely equivocal. Rather than address the question directly, he merely suggested that a gulf separated his old and new research interests: “I just don’t think that [historical materialism] is terribly important, whereas I think that the normative questions are desperately important.”38 Clearly, the relationship between history and morality can only be understood in the terms implied in this sentence if we dismiss the socio-historical 34 Michael Lebowitz, Following Marx (Leiden; Brill, 2009), 41, 61; cf. Miller, 1984, 204. 35 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, xvii; xxiii; Michael Lebowitz, Following Marx, 252; cf. Callinicos, Resources of Critique, 258. 36 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, xxiv; 90; Lebowitz, Following Marx, 42. 37 Blackledge, Reflection on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), Chapter 5. 38 G.A. Cohen, 1996, “Interview” Imprints vol. 1, no. 1, 11.

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determination of human subjectivity. Marx thought otherwise, and in his more concrete musings on the subject Cohen showed that he was not unaware of the deeply historical constitution of individual rationality. Unfortunately, his theory didn’t rise to the level of these practical insights. So while he noted the relationship between his own upbringing and education and his deeply held beliefs, he no more than gestured to the “disturbing” consequences that this insight might have for his transhistorical conception of human rationality.39 This unfortunate theoretical lacuna has problematic consequences beyond Cohen’s conception of individual rationality: because humans change themselves through changing the world, transhistorical models of human nature tend to reify the context in which agents act as well as agency itself. This is why Moishe Postone is right to argue that Cohen’s materialism resembles the kind of approach “Marx had already criticized in the Theses on Feuerbach for not being able to grasp the subjective dimension of life and understand practice as socially constituting.”40 This is evident, for instance, in what has often taken to be one of analytical Marxism’s crowning achievements: John Roemer’s work on exploitation.41 Roemer’s aim in this work was to unpick what was defensible in the Marxist tradition, particularly its claims that capitalists exploit workers and that capitalism is unsustainable, from what he believed was the discredited notion of the labour theory of value.42 Accordingly, he insisted that “the classical concept of exploitation should… be abandoned, and replaced by a definition of exploitation phrased directly in terms of an unjust distribution of property in the means of production.”43 For his part, Cohen agreed with Roemer that the labour theory of value had been decisively refuted such that a sound model of exploitation must be freed from it.44 The claim that the labour theory of value has been refuted can be traced back to an argument, first systematically presented by Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, that Marx’s attempt to transform values into prices was internally inconsistent.45 Though Bortkiewicz tried to show that, once corrected, Marx’s schema could be reprieved; Ian Steedman articulated the most complete positive alternative through his argument that the concept of value was unnecessary to the 39 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 18. 40 Postone, Time, Labour, and Social Domination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 320. 41 Lebowitz, Following Marx, 49. 42 Roberts, Analytical Marxism, 157. 43 Roemer, “Introduction,” in John Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 6; and “Should Marxists Be Interested in Exploitation?” in John Roemer (ed.), Analytical Marxism (1986), 262–263. 44 G.A. Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom, 209−238. 45 Andrew Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s Capital (Lanham: Lexington, 2007), vix.

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­calculation of prices.46 These seemingly arcane points are of profound theoretical and political importance. For, as Lebowitz points out, in Steedman’s model capitalism tends to vanish as a specific object of enquiry. Indeed, by shifting the locus of exploitation from the process of production to the arena of circulation, Steedman’s neo-Ricardianism offered little by way of a mechanism to distinguish the exploitation of modern proletarians from the exploitation of producers in pre-capitalist societies.47 Similarly, Roemer’s attempt to reconstruct an account of exploitation on the micro-foundations of individual agency drew him away from Marx’s analysis of the specific capitalist form of exploitation towards a model in which “there is no distinction between a capitalist and a pre-capitalist relation.”48 Likewise, Cohen’s rejection of value theory led him to embrace an “ahistorical account of exploitation”49 and a similarly ahistorical account of the theft of labour as “the central justice objection to capitalism.”50 Interestingly, of those economists who defended Marx, Cohen’s critique focuses on the work of Ronald Meek. This is significant because Meek was amongst the most prominent of twentieth-century academic Marxists to conflate Marx’s value theory with Ricardo’s.51 This conflation is important because the supposed flaws with Marx’s method located by Bortkiewicz and Steedman can be resolved once these two conceptions of value are unpicked. Marx’s concept of abstract labour is fundamentally important to this task. Whereas Ricardo failed to explain how distinct and varied types of labour could be compared, Marx was able to solve this problem through his suggestion that labour had a dual character: it was both “concrete labour” − the specific act of working to produce useful things-and “abstract labour” − the process of value creation through the equalisation of concrete acts of labour under the discipline of competition.52 Unfortunately, by skirting over the discussion of value in the 46 47

Steedman, 1977. Bob Rowthorn, Capitalism, Conflict and Inflation (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), 14−47; Rosemary Crompton and Jon Gubbay Rosemary, Economy and Class Structure (London: Macmillan, 1977), 31. 48 Lebowitz, Following Marx, 56. 49 Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (Lieden: Brill, 2002), 49; Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom, 209. 50 Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, 145. 51 Jairus Banaji, “From the Commodity to Capital,” in Diane Elson (ed.), Value (London: cse Books, 1979), 24; John Weeks, Capital and Exploitation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 23. 52 Alfredo Saad-Filho, The Value of Marx (London: Routledge, 2002), 26−29; I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value (Montreal: Black Rose, 1973), 131−158; Lucio Colletti, From Rousseau to Lenin (New York: Monthly Review, 1972), 82−92.

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first chapter of Capital, Meek and other twentieth century Marxists effectively reduced Marx’s concept of abstract labour to (an agglomeration of simplified acts of) concrete labour. Steedman’s critique of Marx depends on this conflation, and consequently obscures that which the concept of abstract labour illuminates so well: the historically specific form of capitalist production.53 Of course, if Bortkiewicz was right and Marx’s attempt to convert values into prices was inconsistent then the latter’s attempt to delineate the historical specificity of capitalism would have to be dropped. We need not do this, however, because Bortkiewicz erred in supposing that Marx assumed that the values of commodities as they were inputted into a reproduction cycle were equal to their values at the end of the cycle. Andrew Kliman contrasts this assumption about “simultaneous valuation” of input and output values with the claim that values change “temporally” through the process of production. He argues that whereas Marx’s reproduction schema cannot be made consistent with the former, they can be made consistent with the latter.54 Though Kliman doesn’t attempt to prove the truth of value theory, he does show, contra Bortkiewicz, that it isn’t inconsistent. This is important both because Cohen’s dismissal of value theory assumed the validity of this criticism of Marx, and because the power of Marx’s anti-positivist method is nowhere better illuminated than through his concept of value. Cohen’s analysis of exploitation at the level of distribution was not only ahistorical, it also informed his conception of classes as mere agglomerations of individuals similarly related to the means of production.55 It is easy to imagine how, from this perspective, increasing occupational diversification could be interpreted as entailing the death of class politics. Because value theory, by contrast, focuses on the process of production it is able to frame these differences against a backdrop of emerging internal relations in the production process through which the working class is constituted as more than the sum of its (changing) parts.56 More importantly, value theory is intended to reveal the general dynamic contours of social life.57 Specifically, the concept of value functions for Marx much like the concept of gravity in Newton’s system: it is a non-observable entity at the heart of reality that accounts for its dynamism.58 So, contra Cohen’s 53 Cohen, History, Labour and Freedom, 225; “More on Exploitation and the Labour Theory of Value,” Inquiry, 26, 309−331, 1983, 326. 54 Kliman, Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, 34. 55 Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 76. 56 See, for instance, Kevin Doogan, New Capitalism? (Cambridge: Polity, 2009). 57 Sayer, Method in Social Science, 131; Collier, Critical Realism, 167, 172. 58 Nancy Holmstrom, “Marx and Cohen on Exploitation and Labor Theory of Value,” Inquiry, 26, 287−307, 300; Banaji, “From the Commodity to Capital,” 19.

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attempt to reduce the labour theory of value to a (flawed) way of understanding exploitation, for Marx’s value theory “is not an aspect of the analysis of capitalism, but the theoretical core from which all other analysis unfolds.” It consequently acts as “the key to unlocking the inner nature of capitalism.” Indeed, value theory illuminates the class relations at the core of capitalism and thus capitalism’s essence as a system of class struggle.59 Without something like this conception of capitalism, the orthodox comments on class agency made by Cohen in Karl Marx’s Theory of History are at best contingent: there is no good reason, as Debra Satz points out, why other non-class agents could not serve as the vehicles of social transformation.60 The theory of value explains tendencies within capitalism – to the ageing of the system and to crisis and class struggle. It neither predicts constant conjectures nor does it imply the kind of “inevitabilitarian claims” about capitalism and its revolutionary overthrow that Cohen in his positivist misreading of Marx argued has been refuted by history.61 According to Cohen, Marxists used to believe, on the basis of claims about the rise of the organised working class and the development of the productive forces, that material equality was both “historically inevitable and morally right.” These predictions had, or so Cohen claimed, been “shredded” by history: the proletariat was “ultimately reduced and divided by the increasing technical sophistication of the capitalist production process” while “the development of the productive forces now runs up against a resource barrier.”62 If Cohen’s suggestion that Marx was a promethean thinker cannot withstand critical scrutiny,63 his comments on class are equally problematic. He claimed that, for Marx, the proletariat “constituted the majority of society,” “produced the wealth of society,” “were the exploited people in society,” and “were the most needy people in society.” Consequently, they “could and would transform society” because they had nothing to lose in a revolution. Unfortunately, he suggested, though there are today groups of people who fit into one or other of these categories, because there is none that fits them all, there is none that can play the role previously ascribed by Marx to the proletariat. Socialists “must therefore settle for a less dramatic scenario” of social transformation 59 Weeks, Capital and Exploitation, 4, 6, 8, 191; cf. Marx, Capital, vol. 3, 957; Lebowitz, Paths to Marxism, 50. 60 Debra Satz, “Marxism, Materialism and Historical Process,” in Robert Ware and Kai Meilsen (eds.), Analyzing Marxism (University of Calgary Press, 1989), 409. 61 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 105; cf. Scott Meikle, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (La Salle: Open Court, 1985). 62 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 103−134, 114. 63 Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1999) and John Bellamy Foster, 2000, Marx’s Ecology, New York, Monthly Review Press.

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than that envisaged by Marx, and “they must engage in more moral advocacy than used to be fashionable.”64 As Callinicos points out, Cohen’s analysis of class “does not begin to rise to the level demanded by the subject matter.” And insofar as Cohen engaged with Marx’s account of social class he was simply wrong: Marx did not argue that the proletariat was the majority in society; neither did he believe it to be the only exploited wealth producer; and he did not believe that it was the neediest group in society.65 More generally, no serious Marxist has suggested that there have been no important changes to the class structure attendant to the rise of neoliberal capitalism.66 From a Marxist point of view, the most important question is not have there been changes, but rather have these changes transformed the essence of capitalist class relations such as to fatally undermine the Marxist wager on the proletariat. By denying the difference between appearance and essence, Cohen’s positivism informed his conflation of these two issues and thus his embrace, in the 1980s, of the “common sense” conclusion that class politics was in terminal decline.67 Indeed, his positivism not only informed a superficial and unduly pessimistic reading of contemporary sociopolitical trends, it also informed his dismissal of alternative attempts to come to terms with the defeats suffered by the workers” movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus it was that Cohen’s approach resonated with the zeitgeist because it spoke to the profound setbacks experienced by organised labour since the 1970s. Indeed, Cohen largely ignored the rich and powerful Marxist literature critical of this general perspective when he claimed that classical Marxism’s political project had been undermined by technological changes that meant “the class base of that movement is gone.”68 Amongst those classical Marxists to challenge this interpretation, Bill Dunn notes, in a systematic survey of the literature on the situation of workers in a number of key sectors of the world economy since the 1970s − automobiles, construction, semiconductors, and finance, that though certain social processes have increased tendencies toward the fragmentation and sectionalism of the working class over the last two or 64 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 107; Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, 6, 9. 65 Alex Callinicos, “Having Your Cake and Eating It,” Historical Materialism 9, 2001: 169−­ 195, 175. 66 Alex Callinicos, “What Does Revolution Mean in the Twenty-First Century?” in John Foran et al. (eds.), Revolution in the Making of the Modern World (London: Routledge, 2008), 151−164, 158ff. 67 Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, 157. 68 Cohen, On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 215.

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three decades, other processes have tended in the opposite direction. More to the point, Dunn argues that political conclusions cannot be read mechanically from either the old or the new patterns of class structure, and points out, against the simplistic view that changes in the labour process weakened the power of workers, that in the car industry for example, “decisive defeats for labour preceded substantial restructuring and may have provided the basis for it, rather than simply being its consequence.”69 More recently he has generalized this point to argue that transformations in the situation of labour over the last few decades “do not require new conceptualisations nor do political strategies have to be re-imagined from scratch.”70 Dunn may or may not be justified in making these claims, but his argument has substance. Similarly, Marxist critics of the pessimism that infected the British left under Thatcher cannot easily be dismissed as bullshitting optimists. Cohen’s discussion of class has much in common with Eric Hobsbawm’s analysis of the “forward march of labour halted,” and like Hobsbawm’s thesis it is susceptible to the criticism that it posits a mechanical account of the link between changing patterns of class structure and the demise of socialism. Bob Looker, for instance, criticised Hobsbawm for underestimating the ways in which politics mediates the relationship between economics and consciousness, and in particular for ignoring the way that the politics of Labourism helped undermine the labour movement. In fact, Looker argued that Thatcher’s victories over the working class had little to do with changing patterns of class structure but were only possible because the previous Labour government’s social contract “had sapped both shop floor organisation and economistic militancy.”71 Like Hobsbawwm, Cohen’s inevitabilist interpretation of Marxism informed a tendency to bypass political accounts of the crisis of labour for a much more simplistic model of the economic roots of labour movement decline. This approach had important political implications. By ignoring the Labour Party’s role in his economistic interpretation of the defeats suffered by the working class, Cohen joined the chorus of “realistic” (Labourist) critics of Arthur Scargill’s “obsolescent” politics: indeed he claimed that in the modern world revolutionary 69 70 71

Bill Dunn, Global Restructuring and the Power of Labour (London: Palgrave, 2004), 202. Bill Dunn, Global Political Economy (London: Pluto, 2009), 225. Eric Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted (London: Verso, 1981); Bob Looker, “Class Conflict and Socialist Advance in Contemporary Britain,” in David Coates et al. (eds.), A Socialist Anatomy of Britain (Cambridge, Polity, 1985), 245. For a survey of Marxist debates on Thatcherism see Paul Blackledge, “Marxist Interpretations of Thatcherism,” in Mark Cowling and James Martin (eds.), The Eighteenth Brumaire: (Post)Modern Interpretations (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 211−227.

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politics would play into the hands of the capitalist class.72 It was against this background that he moved to embrace moral theory. This movement saw him criticise what he called Marx’s “obstetric conception of political practice” for reducing revolutionary politics to, as it were, an act of midwifery. He claimed that the corollary of Marx’s inevitabilism was a view of politics in which socialists failed to consider the “ideals” they aimed to realise because they conceived their role more prosaically as “deliver[ing] the form that develops within reality.” This approach, or so Cohen insisted, is fundamentally flawed because it takes no account of the fact that the inevitability of an outcome does not guarantee its desirability.73 It is not that Cohen believed Marx did not have moral beliefs, it is rather that he thought that Marx’s inevitabilist model of historical change helped ensure that these opinions were at best undeveloped: “Marx mistakenly thought that Marx did not believe that capitalism was unjust, because he was confused about justice.”74 It was to remedy this theoretical failing that Cohen moved to embrace normative theory.

The Moral Point of View: Why Not Socialism?

Commenting on Roemer’s attempt to unpick the concept of exploitation from Marx’s analysis of the labour process so as to explain it instead in terms of the “differential distribution of productive assets,” Lebowitz suggests that this movement opened the door to the claim that inequality is not unjust “if the original inequality in property endowment itself was not unjust.” The substantive point had been addressed by John Elster, who argued that exploitation has been typically judged unjust because historically it “has almost always had a thoroughly unclean causal origin, in violence, coercion, or unequal opportunities.” But, Lebowitz asks, “what if there was a “clean path” of original 72 Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, 157. For a glimpse of Cohen’s fraught relationship with the Labour Party see Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 152. For a sense of how, despite repeatedly leaving the Labour Party, his politics remained resolutely, if critically, Labourist see Cohen, 2011, Chapter 10. Contra Jeffrey Noonan, this did not mean that Cohen had abandoned his earlier revolutionary politics, for the Communist movement which had framed his youthful politics had been firmly reformist since the 1930s (Jeffrey Noonan, “G.A. Cohen and the Ethical Core of Socialism,” Socialist Studies, 8, 1, 2012, 124; cf. Blackledge, 2004, 24). 73 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 43, 50, 54, 75, 105. 74 Cohen, “More on Exploitation and the Labour Theory of Value,” Inquiry, 26, 309−331, 444. Norman Geras famously expressed this contradiction thus: “Marx did think that capitalism was unjust but he did not think he thought so” (Geras, 1989, 245).

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accumulation”?75 Prefiguring an answer to this question, Cohen argued that capitalism generates unjust inequalities even assuming an initially just distribution of resources. Against Robert Nozick’s argument that equality leads to the suppression of freedom, Cohen argued in Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality that while it is conceivable that a conflict may exist between freedom and equality, “there is no conflict between equality and what the libertarian Right calls freedom,” and that in actual fact libertarian capitalism “erodes the liberty of a large class of people.”76 This powerful engagement with normative theory couldn’t be further from the anti-moral sentiments Cohen grew up with as a youth within the international Stalinist movement. Cohen illuminated this attitude through a discussion of a conversation he had with his “uncle Norman” in 1964. He enquired of his uncle, who was then domiciled in Czechoslovakia as an editor of the Stalinist World Marxist Review, his opinion on the relationship of Marxism to morality, and was quite shocked by the response he elicited. Morality, Norman suggested, “is ideological eyewash; it has nothing to do with the struggle between capitalism and socialism.”77 Unfortunately, Cohen saw in this reply not the arid response of a Stalinist apparatchik, but a “faithful” rendering of the viewpoint of “classical Marxism.”78 This dismissive attitude to morality is, of course, the flipside of the assumption that Marx and Engels were positivists. But Cohen’s claim that they criticised moral theory from the perspective of a “hard-headed historical and economic analysis” of a “stoutly factual character”79 flies in the face of their belief that the concept of practice illuminates the historical co-ordinates of the (capitalist) moment when facts and values were rent asunder while simultaneously transcending the opposition between the two. Thus, in the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx did not deny the ethical aspect of action but criticised modern moral theory for developing “the active side…abstractly.” This, he argued, was because modern moral theory (idealism) was articulated from the standpoint of civil society. Because this standpoint naturalises modern social relations and thus modern egoistic individualism it is unable to conceive modern humanity as a historical form. Consequently, it acts as a fundamental barrier to imagining life beyond this form of individualism except as an impotent and abstract imperative. So, like materialism, idealism is unable to grasp the full 75 Lebowitz, Following Marx, 53, 59. 76 Cohen, Self-ownership, Freedom and Equality, 36, 111. 77 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 101. 78 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 102; Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality, 133. 79 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 102.

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richness of “sensuous human activity, practice.” By contrast, Marx insists that the “new materialism” or “social humanity” he recognized from the perspective of the workers’ movement was able to transcend the limits of these outlooks and provide a justifiable basis for the struggle for freedom against alienation.80 Stalin’s bastardisation of Marxism into an incoherent combination of idealism (his own visionary leadership) and materialism (the automatic development of the forces of production) represented a fundamental retreat from this perspective back to the antinomies of bourgeois thought. Moreover, this movement reflected the way that his “Marxism,” which had become unhinged from the workers’ movement by the early 1920s, had by the 1930s become simply a cynical justification for actions of the new ruling state-capitalist bureaucracy.81 Cohen’s characterisation of his shift from defending Marx’s theory of history to articulating a socialist morality as a break with classical Marxism conflates this, Stalinist, social theory with Marxism.82 Indeed it was only through this conflation that he was able to present his (abstract) moral ideals not as an alternative to Marxism’s much more concrete ethical dimension but rather as a correction of its (failed) economic determinism. He suggested a political form to this abstract morality in “Back to socialist Basics” where he argued that though “socialist values” have lost what they once had – “mooring in capitalist social structures” − they should not be abandoned because the moral force of values such as community and equality “never depended on the social force supporting them that is now disappearing.”83 Cohen’s most accessible outline of his moral case for socialism was presented in his posthumously published booklet Why Not Socialism?. In this essay, and through the medium of a discussion of what he took to be a reasonable account of a camping trip, Cohen argued for a socialist alternative to market capitalism that would appeal to “all people of good will.”84 At its core, this 80

Istvan Mészáros, “Marxism and Human Rights,” in István Mészáros (ed.), Philosophy, Ideology and Social Science (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1986), 196−211, 105. 81 Though Cohen recognised that his reconstruction of historical materialism lent itself to Trotsky’s critique of the socialist pretentions of Stalinism (Cohen, Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 394), he didn’t follow the logic of this argument to explore how the disjuncture between theory and reality profoundly distorted the Stalinist Marxism with which Cohen was raised. Indeed, because Cohen confused Marxism with Stalinism, his critique of Marx’s anti-moralism had him effectively tilting at windmills (On Stalin’s distortion of Marxism see Marcuse, Soviet Marxism, 124, 121 and Nigel Harris, Beliefs in Society (London: Penguin, 1968), 156). 82 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 103. 83 Cohen, On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 215. 84 Cohen, Why Not Socialism? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 51, 10.

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vision combined an egalitarian principle of justice with a principle of community.85 With regard to the former, Cohen differentiated his “socialist” egalitarian principle from both “bourgeois” and “left liberal” alternatives through his attempt to correct not only for status based and socially constructed restrictions to equality but also for inborn disadvantages.86 Clearly, although this approach is more radical than Rawls’s egalitarian liberalism, it can readily be described, as Cohen himself acknowledged, as a variant of left-Rawlsianism.87 Despite these overlaps with Rawls, it is less clear that Cohen’s principle of community is as easily subsumed within the universe of egalitarian liberalism. For, by contrast with liberalism, his principle of community requires that “people care about and, where necessary and possible, care for, one another, and, too, care that they care about one another.”88 Elsewhere he defines this situation as being a “justificatory community” in which “there prevails a norm…of comprehensive justification.”89 This argument functions as a corrective to weaknesses with Rawls’s “difference principle”, which, or so Cohen argued, undermines the radical egalitarian intentions of his work by justifying what are in effect acts of blackmail by the rich against the poor – “pay me more or I won’t work!.” By focusing on the immoral consequences of market forces – “the motives of greed and fear are what the market brings to prominence” − Cohen intended his principles of equality and community to contribute towards a powerful leftist critique of Rawls’s egalitarianism.90 However, as he himself recognized, it is not self evident that these two principles actually cohere.91 Indeed, both Jeff Noonan and Norman Geras suggest, albeit from opposite perspectives, that they do not. Geras argues that socialism is best conceived through “just moral principles of equality of opportunity…backed up by a suitable political framework of law and sanctions” rather than through “assumptions about wideranging fellow feeling or community” because the latter assumption is “not secure.”92 Elaborating on this point, he argues that though “generous propensities are indeed common and widespread…they are also of restricted strength” because there are no good reasons for supposing that “communitarian-type 85 Cohen, Why Not Socialism? 12. 86 Cohen, Why Not Socialism? 17. 87 Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality (Harvard University Press, 2008), 12. 88 Cohen, Why Not Socialism? 34−35. 89 Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 43. 90 Cohen, Why Not Socialism? 40. 91 Cohen, Why Not Socialism? 37. 92 Norman Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” in Alex Callinicos (ed.), Marxist Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 211−267, 234.

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sentiments of friendship…could obtain across a very large society, much less the world.”93 Alternatively, Noonan argues that Cohen’s principle of community is much more promising as a founding principle of socialism than is his principle of equality.94 This is because, as he argues, Cohen’s principle of equality focuses on what Marx rightly rejected as bourgeois “interpersonal comparisons relative to an abstract metric of equality.”95 The concept of community, by contrast, opens the door to a conception of humanity as an interconnected web of individuals who are able to flourish only “through cooperation and sharing of resources.”96 Insofar as it goes I think Noonan’s argument is more appealing than Geras’s. However, without something like what Geras calls a “communitarian-type sentiments of friendship” Noonan’s argument runs the risk of merely shifting the locus of the abstract moral criterion against which capitalism is to be found wanting. Unfortunately, the whole thrust of Cohen’s discussion of modern class relations leads him to deny the possibility that class struggle can underpin the emergence of such a community.97

Towards Revolutionary Ethics

Similarly, because Noonan’s model of community doesn’t appear to be rooted in immanent tendencies within capitalism his argument reproduces what Raymond Geuss reminds us are the more general failings of the Kantian type approaches that dominate political philosophy. By starting from ideals about how people ought to act rather than the art or craft of how real historically and socially constructed individuals actually do act in the context of specific “social, economic, political, etc., institutions” the moral approach operates as a retreat from an engagement with the power relations characteristic of real politics in a way that, in stark contrast to its averred intentions, is deeply ideological.98 It was precisely against the “true socialist” variant on this model of politics that Marx and Engels first outlined their new worldview in the 1840s. Prefiguring Cohen’s socialism for “all people of good will,” the true socialists claimed their 93 Geras, “The Controversy about Marx and Justice,” 237, 244. 94 Noonan, “G.A. Cohen and the Ethical Core of Socialism,” 132. 95 Noonan, “G.A. Cohen and the Ethical Core of Socialism,” 133. 96 Noonan, “G.A. Cohen and the Ethical Core of Socialism,” 133. 97 Cohen, If You’re an Egalitarian, 43; On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, 215. 98 Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 6−15, 90.

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ideas were in the general human interest irrespective of class and other antagonisms. Max Stirner countered that, beneath the fine phrases, this socialism was but another form of repressive moralism. Marx and Engels replied to Stirner by distancing themselves from true socialism, claiming that neither the true socialists nor Stirner were able to grasp the richness of modern subjectivity. Solidarity wasn’t a transhistorical fact of human nature and nor was it an abstract ideal, but it was emerging as a need and desire amongst the “new fangled” working class.99 It was because of this link between ideals and desires, rather than some mythical nihilism, that Marx and Engels argued “communists do not preach morality” to workers.100 Marx was not confused about the place of moral ideals in his account of historical change; he simply assumed a distinction between abstract conceptions of morality which he rejected, and more concrete ethical claims which he, of course, made.101 These ethical commitments were certainly not the incoherent flipside to an inevitabilist conception of social change. Rather, they were an essential ethical aspect of the rich model of subjectivity that was the corollary of the sublation of materialism and idealism that he and Engels had formulated in the 1840s. The fact that Marx didn’t make these arguments explicit does not mean that they aren’t implied in his work. Alasdair MacIntyre articulated one of the most powerful attempts to extend this approach in the context of New Left debates in the 1950s. He did this through his argument that the left should look for an ethical “theory which treats what emerges in history as providing us with a basis for our standards, without making the historical process morally sovereign or its progress automatic.”102 The possibility rather than inevitability of socialism, according to this model, is rooted in the specific capitalist form taken by the exploitation of what Marx calls the “collective labourer.”103 It is because solidarity in the struggle against capital is in the objective interests of these workers that community, of a very concrete sort, can be understood both as a need and potentially as a desire for proletarians.104 99 100 101 102

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For an overview of Marx’s view see Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics (Albany, ny: suny Press, 2012), 78−82. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology,” in Karl Marx and Frederck Engels, Collected Works, vol. 5 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 20−539, 247. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 468. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” in Paul Blackledge and Neil Davidson (eds.), Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Essays and Articles 1953−1974 (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 45−68, 57. On MacIntyre’s relationship to Marxism see Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics, 179−189. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Chapter 14. MacIntyre, “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” 63−64.

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This is not a mechanical claim, and it certainly doesn’t depend on the proletariat being an undivided whole. The working class is undoubtedly divided as Cohen points out. The problem with Cohen’s analysis is not that he is alive to divisions within the working class, but rather that he seems unaware that it has always been thus. There is nothing new about “increasing technical sophistication” and divisions within the working class are as old as the working class itself.105 The importance of value theory stems from its ability to express not only differences amongst the exploited but also the internal relations through which commonalities of interest exist across the collective labourer. The tension within working-class life between centrifugal and centripetal forces has always been mediated by activists against the background of the ebb and flow of the class struggle. In a context shaped by these struggles, revolutionary politics is best understood as a call to action based on an assessment of tendential potentialities. This open-ended political wager on the revolutionary potential of the proletariat106 is simultaneously historical and ethical in character: because the possibility of socialism is historically grounded but not historically guaranteed it has to be fought for against organised forces fighting for other goals.107 More to the point, the ideal of freedom in this account is profoundly concrete – it is embedded in the collective struggles of the working class. This argument is an example of the anti-positivist way that Marx and “most of his insightful followers” have understood historical materialism.108 Conceived thus, Marx’s critique of moralism is not the flipside of his supposed positivism, but rather emerges out of his recognition that abstract moral concepts cannot “substitute” for concrete political analyses of concrete situations.109 Similarly, Marx is best understood as an ethical thinker who is a stern critic of moralism, where ethical theory is understood to be socio-historical in character and concretely grounded while moral theory involves abstract imperatives to action. Marx’s criticisms of moralism, therefore, do not reflect a tendency in his work to dismiss purposeful human agency. On the contrary, they emerge out of his realisation that moral theory is unable to address people in their concrete particularity. In Marx’s view, the limitations of morality must be overcome alongside those of materialism in a concrete and complex sublation of these one-sided conceptions of agency. 105 Raphael Samuel, “Class and Classlessness,” Universities and Left Review 6 (Spring, 1959), 44. 106 Goldmann, 1964, 300−301. 107 Colin Barker, “Robert Michels and the “Cruel Game,” in Colin Barker et al. (eds.), Leadership and Social Movements (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 108 Richard Miller, Analyzing Marx (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 7, 271ff. 109 Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 4 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 29, 31.

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Unfortunately, Second International Marxism retreated from this vision of agency towards a re-emergent mechanical materialism. For instance, Karl Kautsky, in a tone that prefigured Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History argued that “socialist production must, and will, come. Its victory will have become inevitable as soon as that of the proletariat has become inevitable.” It was against the palpable failings of arguments such as this that Eduard Bernstein similarly prefigured Cohen’s moral turn when he famously argued that socialists should re-engage with Kant.110 This exchange set the backdrop against which Lenin and others powerfully renewed Marxism after 1914. The most philosophically sophisticated contribution to this debate was made by Georg Lukács who claimed that rather than overcoming Second International fatalism, Bernstein’s embrace of Kantianism was merely its flipside: it “is the subjective side of the missing category of totality.”111 Similarly, Lenin attempted to transcend Second International dualism by going back to Hegel. This process informed his renewal of the idea of real sensuous activity through his argument that “the activity of man, who has made an objective picture of the world for himself, changes external actuality, abolishes its determinates (=alters some sides or other, qualities of it), thus removes from it the features of semblance, externality and nullity, and makes it as being in and for itself (=objectively true).”112 Commenting on Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel, Stathis Kouvelakis points out that it is “particularly significant that Lenin ended the section on ‘philosophical materialism’ with a reference to the notion of ‘revolutionary practical activity’.” For Lenin understood that subjective practical activity lay at the centre of the “objective” world. He consequently insisted that social scientific laws should not be “fetishised” as things distinct from conscious human activity but instead be recognised as necessarily “narrow, incomplete, [and] approximate” attempts to frame political intervention.113 So, whereas Second International theorists had interpreted Hegel’s claim that to act freely meant to act in accordance with necessity in a reductive manner, for Lenin, as Richard Day argues, “man’s consciousness not only 110 Karl Kautsky, The Class Struggle, http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1892/erfurt/ index.htm, 1892; Eduard Bernstein, “How Is Scientific Socialism Possible?” in Manfred Steger (ed.), Selected Writings of Eduard Bernstein (1996), 89−104, 91, 94−95; cf. Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics, 107−114. 111 Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, 38. 112 V.I. Lenin, “Philosophical Notebooks,” Collected Works, 38, 1961, 217−218. 113 Stathis Kouvelakis, “Lenin as Reader of Hegel,” in Sebastian Budgen et al. (eds.), Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (London: Duke University Press, 2007), 164−204, 174, 186.

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reflects the objective world but creates it.”114 Similarly, Callinicos points out that it was because Lenin was unsure about the future that he acted with the intention of influencing the course of history: his activism was rooted in his belief that “the very unpredictability of history requires that we intervene to help shape it.”115 This form of practice assumed a guiding ideal, but not of the abstract kind imagined by Cohen. As Ernst Bloch argued, Marx’s claim that the working-class has no ideals to realise should not be understood mechanically as suggesting that Marxists have no vision of a better future, but that its ideals are “tendentially concrete goals” rather than “abstractly introduced goals.”116 So, whereas Kant’s categorical imperative “lacks all real practice,” Marx “cultivates not a general and abstract but an addressed humanity.”117 Specifically, Marx’s dialectical method points beyond Kant’s formalism by justifying his orientation towards the working class by reference to the socialist potential inherent in their revolt against even the most oppressive forms of capitalism.118 This is not a teleological view of history’s movement towards an inevitable conclusion. History doesn’t replace subjectivity. Rather it, in the words of Henri Lefebvre, “gives a direction to our view of the future, to our activities and our consciousness, it does not abolish them.”119 Conclusion The claim that Jerry Cohen’s work marked a rebirth of Marxism as a normative project in the context of its demise as a scientific project is fundamentally mistaken. Because Marx was not a positivist, to show that a positivist interpretation of his work has been refuted by history doesn’t prove anything very interesting. Cohen’s attempt in Karl Marx’s Theory of History to develop a positivist “reconstruction” of historical materialism as an inevitabilist model of progressive social evolution, though theoretically sophisticated, left him ill placed to understand the defeats suffered by the workers’ movement from the 114 Day quoted in Kevin Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 113. 115 Alex Callinicos, “Leninism in the Twenty-First Century?” in Sebastian Budgen et al. (eds.), Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth (London: Duke University Press, 2007), 18−41, 26. 116 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vols. I−III (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 173, 199; cf. Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics, 81. 117 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. II, 872; vol. III, 1357. 118 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. II, 874; vol. III, 1357. 119 Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 152.

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1970s except superficially as a refutation of Marx’s model of social change. His subsequent pessimism was reinforced by his analysis of the changing working class: divorced from Marx’s labour theory of value, he interpreted this process simplistically as the reduction and division rather than recomposition of the working class.120 If he understood this as the falsification of classical Marxism, he responded to it by flipping from pre-Marxist materialism to pre-Marxist idealism: he reorientated his research from a focus on economics and history towards a commitment to normative theory. Unfortunately, his contribution to normative theory merely inverted the limitations of his reconstruction of historical materialism. In both instances he deployed transhistorical categories − of human rationality on the one hand and of justice on the other − in ways that informed his reversion to pre-Marxist modes of thought – specifically to the crude materialism of his theory of history on the one side or to the abstract moralism of his later normative works on the other. Thus it was that he rehearsed variants of both Kautsky’s materialist and Bernstein’s idealist contributions to the famous revisionist debate. And like his famous precursors, in both Cohen’s economic and moral theories social processes were, as Sean Sayers points out, “lifeless, without any independent development or internal activity of their own.” Consequently, “[t]he dynamic of history comes from outside of history; and without external push, the social mechanism would grind to a halt.”121 So, just as his theory of history placed inevitabilist claims in the theoretical space where Marx had attempted to underpin a guide to action, his moral theory was equally abstract and empty. Indeed, this is the rational core of his claim to have “moved from an economic point of view to a moral one, without ever occupying a political one.” Clearly Cohen contributed to strands of socialism associated with Kautsky on the one hand and Bernstein on the other. Equally clearly these were traditions that had been powerfully challenged by Lenin’s renewal of Marxism after 1914. Interestingly, Lenin famously wrote of Kautsky and his ilk that having not read Hegel, none of them had understood Marx.122 The same might be said of Cohen, whose unpolitical Marxism can be understood as the flipside of his rejection of Marx’s dialectical sublation of materialism and idealism.

120 Terry Eagleton comments that “Class Changes Its Composition all the Time. But This Does Not Mean That It Vanishes without Trace,” in Why Marx Was Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 162. 121 Sean Sayers, “Marxism and the Dialectical Method,” in Sean Sayers and Peter Osborne (eds.), Socialism, Feminism and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1990), 163. 122 Lenin, “Philosophical Notebooks,” 180.

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This misunderstanding is perhaps best illustrated through Cohen’s critique of Marx’s obstetric metaphor. He framed his critique of this idea in terms of a crude opposition between materialism and idealism: Marx, or so he argued, rejected morality for a form of economic determinism and political fatalism. Cohen viewed his own trajectory towards moral theory as the most rational response to the failure of this project. But this is certainly not how Marx perceived his standpoint. The obstetric metaphor was not meant to be understood literally – societies are not pregnant women, and social change is not like childbirth. However, Marx was right to point out that the only realistic alternatives to the status quo are those that grow within it. The obstetric metaphor is therefore best understood not as the medium through which Marx ditched moral theory for teleology but rather as his way of exploring the rich sociohistorical content to the ethical form under capitalism. Marx’s theory of history was intended to explain the emergence of these novel forms of subjectivity with a view to illuminating the concrete content of freedom as it emerges as a historical possibility.123 Classical Marxism was thus simultaneously ethical, historical, economic, and political in character – it is much richer than Cohen’s positivist account suggests, and continues to be a dynamic and fertile theoretical and political project.124 123 Alasdair MacIntyre, A Short History of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1967), 204. 124 See, for instance, the literature surveyed in Blackledge, “Marx in the Anglophone World,” Socialism and Democracy, 24, 3, 2010: 160−168.

chapter 12

On the Ethical Contours of Thin Aristotelian Marxism Ruth Groff An awful lot has been written already about whether or not Marx had a moral theory.1 Or thought that capitalism is bad. Or bad, but not morally or ethically bad. Or that workers are good – or are, but only if and when they act as a universal subject. Or that Marxists need not concern themselves with such ideological constructs in the first place. Upon being invited to weigh in, one is tempted to say only: “Does too,” or maybe: “What so-and-so said,” and leave it at that. Still, on the presumption that there is at least one last thought to be had, I will go further. In response to the question of whether or not Marx’s work yields a distinctive ethics, my answer is this: (a) Marx’s analysis of the phenomenon of capital, including but not limited to what he takes value to be, has a normative infrastructure – by which I mean that it involves ethical assessments essentially, and is therefore irreducibly evaluative. However, (b) although no one before him had said exactly what Marx says, the normative stance that is built into the explanatory account is best described as a species of Aristotelianism. Thus, while there is indeed an ethics implicit in Marx’s political economy, it is a variation upon a theme.2 Moreover, (c) the Aristotelian apparatus embedded in Capital is not yet a full-blown moral theory – not even Aristotle’s. I will add, therefore, that (d) at a minimum, Aristotle’s concept of phronesis is a natural one for Marxists to endorse when it comes to theorizing the nature of ethical judgment. However, (e) doing so is not required. In sum, a Marxist ethics is necessarily Aristotelian at its core, but it is not necessarily so beyond its core. I’ll begin by setting out a few background points, terms of debate upon which I think all parties do or can agree, then go on to develop the position that I have just outlined.

Thanks very much to Elizabeth Foreman, David McNally and Vanessa Wills, for reading and commenting on earlier drafts of this paper, and for conversation about various points. 1 For an excellent bibliography, as well a significant new contribution to the literature in question, see Paul Blackledge, Marxism and Ethics: Freedom, Desire and Revolution (Albany, ny: State University of New York Press, 2013). 2 See George E. McCarthy, ed., Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1992), for a fine collection of relevant papers on this topic. See also Scott Meikle’s classic work, Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court Publishing Company, 1985). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_014

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I Preliminaries (a) Ethics or Morality Contemporary analytic philosophers sometimes distinguish between the concepts of “ethics” and “morality.” For those who do, morality is thought to be a matter of explicit rules or principles that dictate right action. Ethics, by contrast, is understood to be a more general attitude or stance, indicative of a value-slope (to steal a term put to excellent use by Charles Taylor)3 relative to competing ends or goods. Morality is a code for how to behave; an ethos is a view about what is most important, what is desirable for its own sake. This same distinction, or one very close to it, sustains similar dichotomies in liberal political theory between, e.g., the right and the good; deontological versus teleological theories of justice; and norms of justice that are “political” rather than “metaphysical.” All of these divisions are contestable, and have in fact been contested. I draw attention to the terminology only to avoid potential confusion: I will use the terms “moral” and “ethical” interchangeably. My claim is that Marx has a view about what is good without qualification, and I am just as happy to call such a commitment a moral theory as I am to call it an ethics. I want to be clear, however, that I am not saying that Marx advances a set of normative precepts – even if “From each according to his ability; to each according to his needs” is one that he may well have thought would hold in a society in which human beings were fully flourishing. (b) Marx’s Disavowal of Morality Everyone agrees that Marx treated with disdain what he took to be utopian political discourse. It is precisely the point of the Critique of the Gotha Program that, far from being a rallying cry for the creation of a non-class society, the principle that I just quoted presupposes such a society as a condition of its applicability. Appeals to the moral superiority of socialism have no traction with respect to historical development, Marx says. There is consensus too (a) that Marx relegates to the ideological superstructure of society something that he calls morality, which phenomenon he claims has the role of legitimizing given relations of production; and (b) that in Capital he is at pains to stipulate that the wage-relation as he has modeled it presumes that labor power is both sold by its rightful owner and purchased for its correct value – and that in this precise sense (if no other) the exchange really is just and fair, relative to the

3 Charles Taylor, “Neutrality in Political Science,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

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contractual norms of the mode of production in which it occurs.4 Finally, most people also agree that Marx is nonetheless critical of capitalism, and that he thinks that a classless society (were the potential for such a formation ever to be realized) would not just be different from everything that preceded it, but better. The interpretive question is what to make of the apparent contradiction. I take Marx’s objection to utopian socialism to be that its proponents are operating on the basis of a bad theory of social change, and I agree with Kai Nielsen that the equation of moral philosophy with ideology is a sociological claim, not one of moral ontology.5 However, while I do want to acknowledge these nodal points in the debate surrounding Marx and morality, I don’t plan to make my case by addressing them directly. Instead, my strategy will be to concentrate on the explanatory categories of Capital, and to identify what is involved normatively in virtue of accepting those. II

On the Ethical Infrastructure of Capital

It is not hard to see that there is some sense, at least, in which Marx thinks that workers (but also, in the end, owners) are not thriving as human beings in the context of capitalism. We need only attend to the closing declaration of the Manifesto to appreciate that this is so. The metaphor of chains tells us that the situation involves a significant denial of agency, of self-determination.6 Unlike Rousseau, Marx does not propose, even if only to toy with us, that the shackles either are or could be made to be legitimate.7 On the contrary, the “working men of all countries” are enjoined to cast them off.8 There in the Manifesto, the tethered element is conceived as “the forces of production,” and the claim is that the fetters are about to be burst asunder. If we add in the depiction of estranged labor in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, we get a fuller characteriza4 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans., Ben Fowkes (Penguin Classics: New York, 1990), Chs. 7–10 especially. 5 Kai Nielson, Marxism and the Moral Point of View: Morality, Ideology and Historical Materialism (Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1989). 6 “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1978), 500. 7 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Social Contract,” in The Social Contract and Other Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London, Melbourne and Toronto: Dent & Sons, Ltd.; Everyman’s Library, 1973; printed 1982). 8 Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 500.

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tion of both that which is fettered and the nature of the constraint. Above all, we learn that we have a species-specific ability to create not just purposefully, as do other animals, but “in accordance with the laws of beauty,” as Marx puts it there.9 This capacity – an ability to concretize our creativity, to self-consciously shape the world, our own nature and our relations with one another – is foreclosed, Marx says, where labor is estranged; it is what is thwarted. In Aristotelian terms, our species-being (as Marx calls it) is not actualized as energeia in the context of private property. The idea that capitalism is antithetical to the realization of species-being is the more sharply articulated version of the thought that workers are not thriving. And it is not simply the passing concern of a youthful, pre-scientific Marx. It is at the heart of Marx’s mature, explicitly social scientific work, where it is built into the most basic explanatory concepts of Capital, amongst which we may surely count value, variable capital and the fetishism of commodities.10 Marx assumes that alienated species-being is a bad thing. It follows from this that the concepts that he deploys in Capital for which alienated speciesbeing is the referent are, in his hands, simultaneously descriptive and evaluative. To begin, let me illustrate the point in relation to value, variable capital and the fetishism of commodities. I’ll first rehearse the definitions of these terms, then bring their normative valence to the fore. Value, Marx tells us at the start of Volume 1, can be thought of as a generic power to make or do.11 “If we leave aside the determinate quality of productive activity,” he says, “and therefore the useful character of the labour, what remains is its quality of being an expenditure of human labour-power.”12 In this initial, purely analytic sense, value – some quantity of human efficacy-assuch – is just that: an abstraction. But when different types of laboring have come to be functionally interchangeable, their similarity ceases to be a mere cognitive distillation. In such a context (i.e., in circumstances in which the purpose of production is such that the qualitative character of laboring becomes accidental), even concrete labor power is reduced to being a quantity of energy 9

Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, ed. Dirk Struik; trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 114. Marx, no doubt intentionally, uses the word “form”: “Man therefore also forms things in accordance with the laws of beauty.” 10 See, especially, Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, 2nd Edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); but also I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, trans. Milos Samardzija and Fredy Perlman (Montreal: Black Rose Books, Third Printing, 1982). 11 Marx, Capital, 134. 12 Ibid.

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vis-à-vis a quantitative end. If we take the average productive capacity of a society, assuming the conditions just described, and divide the total into units of duration, each unit is a quantity of value as Marx uses the term.13 The concept of real-but-generic labor power then impels the analysis forward. “What are the material conditions presupposed by the reality of value?” Marx asks. The immediate, minimal version of the answer is: uncoordinated production for the purpose of market-based exchange. The more fully developed version is: a mode of production in which labor power that is itself commodified is expended for the purpose of producing profit (viz., surplus value turned back into the form of money) rather than for the purpose of producing useful artifacts. As categories of analysis, variable capital and the fetishism of commodities are further specifications of the phenomenon of value, and of the social configuration in which it figures essentially. Variable capital is the name that Marx gives to commodified labor power when it has been purchased with money that is itself being deployed as capital, i.e., in order to secure surplus value. Variable capital is the source of the surplus. Workers, Marx says, not raw materials or machines, supply to the capitalist an amount of labor power that is greater than the amount that is represented by the wage that they are paid, i.e., greater than the cost, to the capitalist, of the purchase. (In the case of what Marx calls constant or fixed capital, by contrast, the input equals the output.) It is not hard to see why this should be so. Nothing but laboring can introduce unpaid-for value into the daily circuit of accumulation because value just is human productive power – labor is its substance, Marx says.14 Labor power is the unique valuegenerating commodity because human beings are the source of human energy. If, given the parameters of the work-day, there is a surplus expenditure of such energy, over and above the amount equal to that represented by the wage that purchased it, the added value will have to have come from the variable capital just as the quantity of value that is equivalent to the wage-quantity does; all other commodities are simply material objectifications of some past exertion. 13 Marx begins Capital with the distinction between exchange-value and use-value. However, value stands in a different relationship to use-value than to exchange-value. Exchange-value is a quantitative ratio (of equivalence, paradigmatically) of the value of two commodities; value is that which is being measured. Use-value, by contrast, is what a thing can do, given its properties. Of course, even in capitalism commodities revert to use-values when they drop out of circulation. And as natural objects they are indeed physically produced by workers functioning as variable capital. Nevertheless, as a concept use-value does not immediately invoke value in the way that exchange-value does. 14 Marx, Capital, 131.

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And once we have put it this way we have come to the idea of the fetishism of commodities – which, for present purposes, may be parsed as follows: (1) in capitalism, the human labor power that is objectified in commodities is conflated with the natural properties of material objects, such that commodities appear to exchange in the ratios that they do in virtue of the latter rather than in virtue of the former; (2) even if we appreciate that it is the social phenomenon of value (rather than the natural properties of objects) that underwrites exchange-value, the system is one in which macro-level “decisions” about the allocation of total productive capacity are made by the market, rather than being made directly and intentionally by the members of society as a whole, i.e., by a collective human subject. The concepts of value, variable capital and the fetishism of commodities are inherently normative, for Marx, in that they all refer to thwarted human powers. One might object that value just is efficacy; its substance is labor, after all. But value is not labor in any simple way. Value is not, for example, the natural activity of engaging with nature that is described at the start of Chapter 7, a form of human activity that yields products that are use-values.15 Rather, value is efficacy the qualitative character of which is inessential. It is abstract labor, to use the technical term, not labor.16 Activity of this type is decidedly not the expression of the distinctively human capacity for creative, intentional doing. On the contrary, it is antithetical to it. Hence the substance of value is indeed labor, but it is estranged, reified, literally de-humanized labor, not the kind-specific energeia of human beings. Variable capital, in turn, is labor power the use-value of which is to create, in a given time period, a quantity of commodities whose value (i.e., the amount of generic labor power objectified in them) is greater than that which is indirectly contained in the wage. Qua variable capital, all laboring is the same. It is simply the source of surplus value, in the context of what Marx calls “valorization,” the process by which an initial quantity of value is increased. In this respect, the concept of variable capital presumes alienated speciesbeing in the same sense in which the concept of value does, albeit with greater specificity. Valorization is not the human energeia at all. It is a perverted, unnatural form of activity, as Aristotle would say (does say, by implication, in his 15

16

For a lovely discussion of the various senses of abstract labour power, see Patrick Murray, “Marx’s ‘Truly Social’ Labour Theory of Value: Part 1, Abstract Labour in Marxian Value Theory,” Historical Materialism, Volume 6, Number 1: 27–66 (2000) and “Marx’s ‘Truly Social’ Labour Theory of Value: Part 2, How Is Labour That Is under the Sway of Capital Actually Abstract?” Historical Materialism, Volume 7, Number 1: 99–136 (2000). Thus to say that value is estranged labor is not to say that objectification as such (i.e., all production of use-values) is alienation.

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discussion of “retail acquisition” in Book 1 of the Politics).17 The concept of variable capital involves the idea of stunted potential in an additional sense, too, in that it presupposes that workers and capitalists alike are unable to make meaningful choices regarding their behavior as productive beings. Workers are compelled to sell their labor power in order to subsist; capitalists are compelled to accumulate in order to remain in business. Neither party to the capital-labor relation is able to engage in properly human self-determination. The concept of the fetishism of commodities, finally, amounts to a further claim regarding this same limit to freedom. It is not just that individuals are forced to obey the Law of Value. Our capacity for collective self-determination, for shared deliberation about the making of history – this power, too, remains un-actualized, having been supplanted by market forces. Whatever else it may be, Capital is an account of a social formation in which we are alienated from our distinctively human powers – or, as Marx puts it, our species-being.18 The core diagnostic insight is not that immiserated workers lack the time and money to pursue their interests (though this is an important point), or even that, via the wage-relation, the working class provides more value to the owning class than it receives, and that the non-equivalence of the exchange is a necessary feature of the logic of valorization (though this is also important). Rather, the core insight is that capitalism is made of estranged labor. Such a claim is both descriptive-explanatory and normative. It tells us what capitalism is, but it also tells us that, whatever its merits may be (and Marx recognizes that it has them), capitalism is necessarily at odds with collective human flourishing. There is simply no such thing as value, variable capital or the fetishism of commodities that is not the exact inverse of the good for human beings (viz., the actualization of species-being). To denote such phenomena is thus, for Marx, simultaneously and necessarily to identify that which has been denoted as objectionable. Of course, in saying this I immediately come up against at least one, and perhaps two, well-known interpreters of Marx who emphasize the issue of alienated human powers, but who conclude that Marx does not have an ethics at all – Allen Wood and Bertell Ollman. Let me therefore take a moment to respond to the positions of each. Doing so will (I hope) not only secure my own first premise but allow me to ground it more firmly. 17 Aristotle, Politics, trans. Barker; Revised with an Introduction and Notes by R.F. Stalley (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 18 For an interesting discussion of the relationship between Capital and the 1844 Manuscripts, see Andrew Chitty, “Species-Being and Capital,” in Karl Marx and Contemporary Philosophy, eds. Andrew Chitty and Martin McIvor (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).

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Wood attributes to Marx a “recognizably Aristotelian conception of human self-actualization, the development and exercise of our ‘human essential powers’,” but he disagrees with those who think that such a view “[constitutes] the ‘moral foundation’ of Marxism, or at least an important part of these foundations.”19 First (he says), the conception in question does not amount to a moral or ethical principle; second, it is not foundational to Marx’s analysis. Others have responded to Wood at length;20 my main concern is only the question of whether or not the notion of a human essence, conceived as a potential of the species that may or may not be achieved historically, counts as a properly normative term – such that one who relies upon it may be said to hold at least the rudiments of an ethics, if not a complete theory. Wood distinguishes between what he (not Marx) calls moral goods and nonmoral goods. “We all know the difference,” he writes, “between valuing or doing something because conscience or ‘the moral law’ tells us that we ‘ought’ to, and valuing or doing something because it satisfies our needs, our wants or our conceptions of what is good for us (or for someone else whose welfare we want to promote – desires for non moral goods are not necessarily selfish desires.)”21 Moral goods, as Wood has it, include “virtue, right, justice, the fulfillment of duty, and the possession of morally meritorious qualities of character.”22 “Selfactualization,” meanwhile, is on the list of nonmoral goods, along with freedom, happiness and community, amongst other things.23 Wood allows that Marx does criticize capitalism for denying people various goods that (according to Wood) are nonmoral, including that of “self-actualization,” but Marx, says Wood, never claims (a) that people have a right to such goods (Wood’s emphasis), or (b) that they should be provided because “justice (or some other moral norm) [my emphasis] demands it.”24 Therefore, Wood concludes, Marx doesn’t think that the alienation of species-being is a moral wrong. It is hard to see how this way of dividing things up is going to be correct even for Aristotle, who certainly is a champion of “morally meritorious qualities of character,” as Wood puts it. For Aristotle, the practice of good character (i.e., of full moral virtue) just is the second best way to realize the human form. It will therefore not be possible to put “the development of character” on a list of 19

Allen W. Wood, Karl Marx, 2nd Edition (New York and London: Routledge, 1981; reprinted 2004), 128. 20 See, for example, Kai Nielson, esp. Ch. 8. 21 Wood, 128. 22 Ibid., 128–129. 23 Ibid., 129. 24 Ibid.

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moral goods, but exclude “self-actualization,” or “the cultivation of our kindspecific powers.” But Wood’s categories are problematic in Marx’s case, too. Recall Marx’s insistence in the 1844 Manuscripts that Hegel does not properly distinguish between objectification and alienation.25 Hegel, Marx says there, having swapped subject for predicate (Hegel has, not Marx), treats consciousness as though it, rather than actual human beings, were the active ground of history. As a result, Hegel counts material being as the “negation” of consciousness. In the subsequent negation of this first negation, consciousness (construed as a subject) recognizes that materiality is not other, and comes back to itself. Marx counters that there is nothing alienated about materiality per se; on the contrary, it is Hegel’s own inversion, relative to which all objectification appears to be the negation of a pure Subject, that itself bespeaks the real alienation that is estranged labor. What sense can we make of Marx’s effort to correct Hegel on this point if we assume, with Wood, that what Marx means to say is only that Hegel overlooked the reality of some practical or prudential-instrumental ill – nothing that would rise to the level of an offense of conscience, a matter of right and wrong? Setting aside the rhetorical features of the piece (tone, motivation, etc.), the ill that Marx thinks Hegel has overlooked is that we are cut off from our very nature as a species, that we are not living lives that are human lives. Wood’s claim, again, is that this sort of thing is not the stuff of morality. But Wood may well be wrong. Let’s go back to Aristotle – to the Ethics, augmented by De Anima. Not only is flourishing itself a moral good, from an Aristotelian perspective, it is the moral good, the ultimate moral good. Why? Because it is unconditionally good for things to fully actualize their form by, or in, doing that which it is their nature to do. Indeed, Aristotle maintains that there is no normative criterion over and above thriving in just this sense. There is no form of Goodness that pertains to practical activity;26 there is only the unqualified good that is the actualization of a thing’s kind-specific powers – which, in the human case, involves the practice of full moral virtue. Aristotle and Kant may disagree about what it is that is good without qualification, relative to human beings, but it would be a Kantian prejudice to assume that, for Aristotle himself, it is good character, and not the fulfillment of the human telos (of which good character is just one iteration), that occupies the position of summum bonum.

25 Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 173–193. 26 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1962; 19th printing, 1980), Book 1.

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And what about Marx? Does Marx, too, in keeping with Aristotle, think that the realization of species-being is the ultimate, non-derivable good for human beings? Certainly he thinks that it is a good; Wood concedes this much. The question, then, is whether or not there is anything in Marx’s own thinking that would lead us to believe that it is not good simpliciter, as it is for Aristotle. The answer, it seems to me, is no: there is nothing to suggest otherwise. A Kantian might object that a duty to flourish is nonsensical, so even if Marx regards the actualization of species-being as good without qualification, it’s still not a properly moral good. One response to such an objection would be to say that to be morally obligated to treat others as ends just is to be required to promote the realization of species-being. Horkheimer argues this way in “Materialism and Morality,” for example.27 But the simpler reply is surely that no one has claimed that Marx’s implicit normative stance is duty-based (nor has Wood established, other than by decree, that Kantianism is the only moral theory that warrants the name). The claim is only that Marx thinks that the human energeia is an unqualified good, and that this assumption is built into Capital, albeit negatively, in that the basic explanatory categories of the work denote the perversion of the powers that constitute our form. To Wood’s second objection, meanwhile – viz., that alienation is not a fundamental concern – I can only reiterate what I have already said: without the concept of alienation, there is no concept of value. Ollman approaches the issue differently. He fully appreciates that value is alienated species-being, and that alienation is absolutely fundamental to Marx’s analysis. Moreover, he says that he is happy to attribute an ethics to Marx if by having an ethics we mean that Marx is “motivated…by some idea of the ‘good’” – or even just that he “expresses feelings of approval and disapproval in his works”; “takes sides”; “uses his writings to incite people to act,” let alone that he thinks that communism is a higher form of social life than capitalism.28 On balance, though, Ollman says, he prefers not to say that Marx has an ethics. The normative standard in play is too broad, he thinks. “My own difficulty,” he writes, “…is not that I find it hard to answer ‘yes’, but that I find it hard to answer ‘no’ to any of them. In other words, if Marx’s theories…rest on some prior moral commitment, I believe that this commitment can be stated equally well in terms of working class interests, humanity, communism and human fulfillment.”29 Ollman adds that there is also a risk that if one describes 27

28 29

See, e.g., Max Horkheimer, “Materialism and Morality,” Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings, trans. G. Frederick Hunter, Matthew S. Kramer and John Torpey (Cambridge: mit Press, 1993). Ollman, 42–43. Ibid., 43.

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Marx as an ethical thinker, one will be read as suggesting that Marx holds an “absolute standard” relative to which “each new question as it comes up” may be judged.30 To translate Marx’s normative thinking into something that delineates it correctly, meanwhile, would be (says Ollman) to engage in a different kind of analysis altogether than that of bourgeois moral philosophy. I agree with Ollman in that, as I see it, the ethics that is built into Capital is not a fully developed theory. But the point is not that if we ascribe an ethics to Marx then either (a) Marx shows up as endorsing ideals that have no content; or (b) we are required to break entirely with philosophical convention in order to understand what he is saying. Rather, the situation is as follows. Embedded in Marx’s analysis is the idea that the good for human beings is to engage in the energeia that defines us as a species. This much, as I’ve said, Marx shares with Aristotle. For Aristotle, the activities that constitute flourishing are: (1) “contemplation,” viz., math, science and some forms of philosophy (i.e., activity in conformity with sophia, itself a mix of nous and episteme); and (2) “politics,” viz., the shared, dialogical practice of full moral virtue (i.e., activity in conformity with phronesis).31 There is a sense in which Marx too thinks that human flourishing consists in the excellent doing of “activity of the soul in conformity with a rational principle,” as Aristotle puts it32 – although, unlike Aristotle, Marx arguably would count techne as “action.” For Marx, however, the rationality that is enacted as the human energeia is parsed not as phronesis (and/or sophia), but rather as first and second-order expressive creativity – which, unlike phronesis, is not a faculty of specifically moral judgment. The issue, therefore, is not (contra Ollman) that anything and everything will count as “flourishing,” or that we can’t say why that which does count, does. For as with Aristotle, who ties eudaimonia to the realization of what he takes to be our kind-specific essential powers, what does or would count as flourishing, for Marx, is fixed by our species-being. The issue is that even though the theory involves a perfectly restrictive conception of the good for human beings, it is nonetheless in the nature of the case that, given Marx’s account of the human form, the nature of moral judgment cannot be read off of it. It is a mistake to conclude that Marx doesn’t have a moral theory at all. Better, I think, is to register that the theory that is there is not fully developed. Let me say just a word or two more about what I mean by this, before moving 30 Ibid. 31 Aristotle, of course, stipulates that in principle only Greek men are naturally capable of the excellence of the relevant powers, and further that only those with wealth are capable in practice. 32 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a.

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on. The most basic point, to reiterate, is that while the structure of the position is Aristotelian, Marx’s conception of species-being does not involve phronesis, as Aristotle’s does. Aristotle gives us a model of moral reasoning as part and parcel of identifying the essential powers of human beings. Marx, by contrast, having picked out different kind-constitutive properties than did Aristotle, does not. To be sure, even in the Aristotelian case there is an ontological gap between the fact that phronesis (along with sophia) is constitutive of the human form, on the one hand, and the actual schedule of virtues that Aristotle posits (courage, justice, magnanimity, etcetera). That the virtues are the particular ones that Aristotle enumerates does not follow necessarily from what phronesis is. Nor is it obvious that the exercise of phronesis necessarily yields the Aristotelian inventory. Nevertheless, in Aristotle’s case, if we know what a human being is, we already know what moral judgment is. With Marx, we don’t. It seems to me perfectly legitimate for a Marxist to take an interest in such a phenomenon, which is why I shall pursue the question of what he or she might be able to say about it. There are, however, ways in which a moral theory might be filled out that in principle do not apply to Marx. For example, the very capacity for creative, self-conscious self-determination that, in Marx’s work, gives content to the idea that the ultimate good is to actualize our species-being – this very capacity for freedom entails that we cannot know ahead of time what the governing norms of the Marxist analogue of a proper Aristotelian polis will be. We can know only that, necessarily, such a society cannot be the sociological expression of estranged labor, as capitalism is. Notice that although the anchoring category for Aristotle is wisdom rather than freedom, this same indeterminacy holds with respect to rule by the wise. Because rule by the wise consists (according to Aristotle) in the expression of context-specific judgments, we cannot know in advance what the laws, policies or courses of action taken by an Aristotelian aristocracy will be. We can know only that, whatever they are, they will be the deliverances of full moral virtue. Notice too that if Marx is correct about the nature of species-being, then the gap between our essential powers and a list of the traits that make for ethically good character will not be able to be bridged by appeal to the phronimos, as it is by Aristotle in the Ethics – this because it is precisely in the nature of the case that we can change ourselves, too, and in so doing may well revise our cultural mores. At best, I suspect, one who adopts Marx’s notion of speciesbeing would be able to say on that basis, as John Stuart Mill does in the context of his own work, that a thriving human being will have a creative, “energetic” character.

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Moral Judgment

Thus far I have argued (a) that Marx does indeed have a moral theory, inasmuch as the core explanatory categories of Capital involve the supposition that the good for human beings is to realize our species-being as Marx defined it in 1844; and (b) that the theory is recognizably Aristotelian. I added, however, that the account (c) does not amount to a full-blown normative theory. Specifically, Marx refers us to a human essence, but because he defines species-being in terms of a capacity for creativity or freedom rather than for practical wisdom, we don’t know anything about the nature of moral judgment (broadly construed) on the basis of knowing what our essential properties are. The question, then, is how one might add this bit of conceptual weight to what I’m calling “thin Aristotelian Marxism,” if one thought that it needed it. I am less interested here in surmising what Marx himself may have said, had he said more, than with clarifying what may be said by anyone at all who affirms, at a minimum, the analysis of Capital. My view, as stated at the outset, is: (d) that Aristotle’s concept of phronesis is ready-made for the Marxist who wants to give an account of moral judgment, but that (e) one could retain the analysis of Capital yet reject those aspects of Marx’s thinking that would preclude the embrace of a non-Aristotelian alternative. Let’s begin with (d). Here I am imagining a Marxist who endorses not just Capital, but – heuristically speaking – The German Ideology. Such a stance would (if the foregoing analysis is correct) commit one to the minimal neoAristotelian ethics outlined above, according to which the good for human beings is to actualize our species-being, but it would also involve the view that, like all thought (assuming that morality is in some important way cognitive), moral beliefs are not trans-historically true, even if they may be widely believed to be so in any given historical context. I have described the concept of phronesis as a natural one for such a thinker to adopt, because it will allow her to say more about what is involved in ethical behavior than she otherwise could, without undercutting her repudiation of trans-historical claims. Phronesis, Aristotle tells us in the Ethics, is the ability to deliberate excellently, i.e. to come to the right conclusion about what the non-instrumentally good course of action is (good in an unqualified sense, Aristotle says), on the assumption (a) that one desires to do the best thing (though this desire is not itself phronesis); and (b) that what we ought to do, in any given situation, is not fixed a la the measurements of a triangle. The different virtues, we can say, e.g., courage or justice, require correct judgments about what to do in situations calling for different affective reactions, and involving different kinds of objective circumstances. As noted earlier, the schedule of virtues is not itself given by

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the nature of phronesis. Aristotle assumes the familiar Greek virtues, with the phronimos as the litmus or standard thereof, but they are not the only traits that would be consistent with such a faculty. Certainly, a purported virtue that was at odds with human flourishing (i.e., with the actualization of our essential powers) would not count as an excellence on an Aristotelian model. But short of this the concept of phronesis allows for cultural and historical variation both in the inventory of virtues and in where the correct mark may lie, to employ the metaphor of archery as Aristotle does, with respect to an agreed-upon virtue. Aristotle takes phronesis itself to be a virtue, albeit an intellectual as opposed to a moral virtue – as it clearly has to be, given that it is one of the powers the display of which constitutes the human energeia. With Marx, the structurally analogous essential power is our capacity for creativity. That such a power (and not phronesis) is itself the substance of moral judgment is (arguably) the existentialist position. I have rejected such a view, albeit only implicitly thus far, in assuming that the capacity to act freely, creatively and self-consciously is not yet the narrower ability to engage in moral deliberation, and/or to have moral insight. I shall return to this point below. Here I want to say only that for the purposes of further developing a Marxist ethics, nothing hangs on the idea that being wise is a virtue. What the concept of phronesis does for the thin Aristotelian Marxist who takes it on philosophically, regardless of whether or not she thinks that it is an excellence, is give her a way to specify what moral judgment involves. One way to see that this is a difference that makes a difference is to appreciate that the historicist Marxist who plumps for phronesis will, in so doing, come to disagree substantively with, e.g., utilitarians and Kantians alike, about the nature of ethical evaluation. At the same time, as I have been emphasizing all along, doing so commits her to nothing at all with respect to the content of the conclusions reached by the phronimos. One might think that the concept of phronesis is too weak.33 We may as well be anti-moralists if “Emulate the phronimos” is the best we can do for an objective moral standard. I shall turn in a moment to the question of whether or not a Marxist may appeal to something stronger than phronesis, but for the Marxist who embraces historicism, I do think that the Aristotelian approach is 33

One might also think it in principle unnecessary for a Marxist to theorize moral judgment. Marx, one might say, shows us that in a properly human society normative assessments would come naturally – and, in a sense, automatically – and there would be consensus across a population, such that there would be no need to theorize the activity in question (a phenomenon that might also turn out to be purely affective); it is only in the context of alienation, one might take Marx to have established, that there is a need, or even the appearance of a need, for an account of moral judgment. I will say in response first that I do not mean to insist that it is a weakness of Marx’s own work that he does not

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­ referable both to outright subjectivism and to other potential historicistp friendly alternatives. That opting for phronesis is not to plump for subjectivism should be clear enough. Aristotle is not Hobbes. Conclusions reached by the phronimos are not presumed to be statements about what will satisfy his (sic) desire for pleasure and/or for power. If this were not so, then Aristotle would not have thought it necessary to distinguish flourishing from the pursuit of pleasure, as he so carefully does in the Ethics, or oligarchy from aristocracy, as he does in the Politics. Nor is the veracity of wise counsel thought to be relative to the judgment of a single person; only a god, Aristotle tells us, could be wise on its own. Whatever it is exactly that Aristotle thinks is the truth-maker for correct moral judgments, that they are correct is appreciated not only by the individual phronimos, but also by his (or, contra Aristotle, her) qualified equals; it is possible for any one individual to judge incorrectly. For the Marxist who denies the purchase of trans-historical categories, an appeal to phronesis should be preferable to anti-moralism because, unlike anti-moralism, it does not have the effect of rendering incoherent Marx’s plainly ethical appraisals of capitalism – or, which is even more decisive, rendering senseless the fundamental explanatory terms of Capital by evacuating them of normative content. What about other alternatives? To come back to existentialism, for example, one might think that existentialist “authenticity” perfectly describes the activity that Marx takes to be the human energeia. Just as wise deliberation is the expression of our form for Aristotle, one would contend, authentic acts are the expression of our species-being from a Marxist perspective. Actions are normatively sanctioned (one would go on to say) if and only insofar as they are issued in by decision-making of a certain caliber: viz., by choices through which one declares one’s standing as the author of the act in question, and thereby assumes ownership of, and responsibility for, what one has elected to do. Authenticity so construed is surely as adaptable to changing historical conditions as phronesis is, and it can be read right off of the anti-essentialist human form as Marx conceives it. Why look any further? Why would it not be enough, by way of a moral theory, to know that we can act freely and self-consciously, pursuing ends that we set for ourselves and claim as our own?

offer an account of moral insight. It seems to me to be a fact that he does not, and my intended audience is Marxists who see a need for one, if only for the time being; I am prepared to agree to disagree with those who don’t. This said, I suspect – though I cannot make the case here – that the implicit theory (be it a brand of emotivism or just a presumption of harmonious accord) required in order to sustain the kind of historicized naturalism that sometimes looks to be Marx’s view, does not square well with Marx’s other implicit philosophical commitments.

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Earlier, I noted that the assumption that it is not enough is built into the very line of analysis that I am now pursuing. But the assumption is not a dogmatic one. The issue, as I see it, is this: nothing about an ability to act authentically enables us to tell which of our authentic acts is ethically sound. Of course, the contention is that having been freely and responsibly chosen just is what renders an action right or good (similarly, being a person who consistently acts authentically is what it would be to be ethical). If one were making the case for such a view, one might observe that Kant, too, fuses morality and freedom; the existentialist position is not unique in this respect. There is, though, a difference between the Kantian and the existentialist. Kant has it that acts done for the sake of duty are free because they are moral, not moral because they are free. And they are moral because they conform to the requirements of moral law. Substantively, moral law does not authorize all potential courses of action. Some will fail the test of universalizability, regardless of the attitude of the agent. By contrast, any bit of behavior, it would seem, may be whole-heartedly and self-consciously enacted, depending upon its meaning for the subject. Thus we can imagine – I think – an action that counts as authentic nevertheless being wrong. The limits of Kantian formalism notwithstanding, “I know that I have a moral duty to do x, but is x what I ought to do?” seems a rhetorical question. “I know that I can authentically choose to do x, but is x what I ought to do?” is not so obviously rhetorical. My suggestion is that, at the level of moral theory, it is just this un-bridged gap between the actualization of species-being (as Marx conceives it) and the wise actualization of species-being that the concept of phronesis, assuming that it picks out a real power of human judgment, can fill. Kai Nielsen, meanwhile, proposes that Marxism invites a stance that Nielsen calls “contextualist objectivism.”34 Contextualist objectivism involves two firstorder terms, plus an additional meta-theoretical component. The first idea is that of a “moral truism,” which Nielsen distinguishes from “eternal principles or eternal moral truths.” As examples of moral truisms, Nielsen offers: that suffering and degradation are bad; that servitude is bad; that an inability to use one’s non-destructive powers is bad; that health is good; that pleasure is good; that kindliness is good; that mutual concern and respect are good; that human autonomy is good; that it is a good thing for people to live lives in which their non-destructive needs are met and in which their wants are satisfied when they are neither self-destructive nor harmful to others.35 Moral truisms differ from eternal principles or eternal moral truths, Nielsen says, in that the latter 34 35

Nielsen, 130. Ibid., 10.

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are true a priori, and/or in all possible worlds and/or can be denied without contradiction.36 Everyone does (and should) agree with moral truisms, Nielsen says, even if they “cannot in some incorrigible manner just be seen, noted or adverted to as being unquestionably true,”37 but how they are acted upon will depend upon a society’s material circumstances. To be clear, with respect to moral truisms it is not that people’s beliefs vary, rendering different moral claims true at different times and in different places, but rather that the objective conditions in which moral truisms are carried out vary, such that their application necessarily assumes different form in different historical settings. The second idea is that of “principles of justice,” such as laws to protect private property, or laws permitting slavery. These beliefs will change over time, Nielsen says: to mistake the given principles of one’s society for universal norms is to engage in thinking that is ideological. Finally, as a matter of metatheory, contextualist objectivism permits one to conclude that different ­societies meet the norms represented by moral truisms more or less satisfactorily. Principles of justice that are functional for less desirable circumstances (i.e., societies in which moral truisms are less well satisfied) can be said to be inferior to those that are functional for better circumstances. Here too, as before in relation to existentialism, it seems to me that an appeal to phronesis is more serviceable for the ethically minded historicist Marxist than is the alternative. For one thing, Nielsen has the tricky job of maintaining that moral truisms are “transhistorical moral beliefs,” to use his terminology, but are nevertheless not “eternal moral truths.” The historicist might very well think that Nielsen has set the bar too high for what would count as problematically a-historical. When she objects to a-historical accounts, she would say, her criteria for a-historicity are not that the claims be (a) true in all possible worlds (and not just at all times in this one); (b) analytic truths; or (c) synthetic a priori truths. Rather, she is objecting to purportedly universal norms. Unlike the notion of a moral truism, the concept of phronesis enriches the story that Marxists can tell about enacted morality without requiring the historicist Marxist to countenance patently trans-historical moral claims. Nielsen can be expected to reply that the trans-historical claims in question are benign, “trivial in the sense of being non-controversial,” as he puts it.38 But if they really are trivial, then it will be hard to see how they can do the work that they are supposed to do, which includes grounding the arguably non-trivial claim that capitalism (and its attendant principles of justice) is inferior to socialism (and its 36 Ibid., 11. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.

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associated principles). The truisms, it seems, either do too much or too little. It is not surprising, in this regard, that Nielsen draws as heavily upon Rawls as he does. Rawls gave us so-called political liberalism, designed to meet the reflective impulses of already-liberal citizens of the liberal capitalist state. Nielsen, it seems to me, provides Marxists with a similar model for a possible socialist state, the tacit assumption of which is that we all agree about the important things anyway; the only mistake is to think that class-bound principles of justice are actually moral truisms. Phronesis is an obvious and beneficial concept for the historicist Marxist to avail herself of, and there is no reason for her not to do so. At worst, a wisdombased account of moral judgment amounts to constructivism, and so adds nothing to the historicist position; at best, it allows the historicist to say more about what is involved in discerning what to do in order to act well than she otherwise could. Now, however, I want to relax the commitment to historicism, and assume instead only the analysis of Capital, with its Aristotelian infrastructure. Can the thin Aristotelian Marxist who is not necessarily opposed to trans-historical categories consistently endorse a more robust and/or more universalist approach to normativity than that of asserting that human beings have, essentially or not, the power of phronesis? I think that the answer is yes, though it is a qualified yes. For the purposes of discussion, I’ll consider utilitarianism, Kantianism and Platonism, respectively. None of these positions coheres with the ethical core of Capital to the degree that an Aristotelian-derived view would (and they are differentially compelling for reasons independent of this), but neither is it clear that any one of them must be rejected outright. In the case of utilitarianism, at least as articulated by John Stuart Mill, whether or not the position is available at all to the thin Aristotelian Marxist will depend largely upon whether we consider Utilitarianism on its own, or in conjunction with the claims made in Chapter three of On Liberty (and elsewhere). In Utilitarianism, Mill has it that acts or rules are sanctioned to the extent that they increase aggregate pleasure in a society. The axiom holds because happiness, according to Mill, is the highest good, and happiness, he says, amounts to the experience of pleasure. The so-called “higher pleasures” are the most pleasurable of all, which is why the energetic, other-minded personality-type is morally desirable (as are the social and political relations required to cultivate and sustain it). Conceived in these terms, the principle of utility, as Mill calls it, is certainly an object of derision for Marx, who points out that the reduction of qualitatively different kinds of positive experience into a single, fungible equivalent is precisely what one would expect to find in a society marked by the ubiquity of exchange value. (Here’s Marx on utilitatianism: “The apparent

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stupidity of merging all the manifold relationships of people in the one relation of usefulness, this apparently metaphysical abstraction arises from the fact that, in modern bourgeois society, all relations are subordinated in practice to the one abstract monetary-commercial relation.”39) More to the present point, however (since strictly speaking we need to know only if utilitarianism is consistent with the thin Aristotelianism of Capital, not if it is open to incisive critique from a Marxist perspective), Mill’s claim in Utilitarianism is that it is the experience of pleasure that is the unqualified good for human beings. This claim does conflict with the Aristotelian view that I have argued is embedded in Capital, which is that it is not pleasure itself (again, Mill expressly equates happiness with pleasure), but rather flourishing as a member of our kind that is the unqualified human good. And if we were to stipulate that this part of Mill’s theory would therefore have to go, the pleasure maximization calculus, even one calibrated for higher and lower pleasures, and directed to the aggregate pleasure rather than to the pleasure of the agent, would become significantly less compelling as a means for guiding specifically ethical or moral behavior. The upshot, it seems to me, is that this formulation of utilitarianism does not, in fact, sit well with the implicit normative theory of Capital. If we look beyond Utilitarianism, though, the prospects for accommodation improve. In particular, if we look to Chapter three of On Liberty (as well as to Mill’s reflections on character formation in On Representative Government and in the Logic), we find a Mill who has more in common with Aristotle than it may have initially seemed – for it turns out here that what matters above all else is the cultivation, over time, of the distinctively human endowments, as Mill puts it, displayed in the energetic but well-disciplined personality. To be sure, Mill has it that flourishing is good because it is pleasurable, not because it is flourishing. And in this regard we might conclude that he is with Plato, in the end, rather than with Aristotle – even if, unlike either, he cannot explain why the higher pleasures are more pleasurable, if they are, or would be, if they were. Still, insofar as flourishing rather than the maximization of pleasure units does come to the fore in this formulation, utilitarianism construed in this manner might be at least partially accommodated by a thin Aristotelian Marxism. What it would amount to, significantly or not, is that the “distinctive endowments” that Mill identifies as essential to human beings would be added to the set of capacities thought to constitute species-being (presuming that they are missing in the first place), the realization of which would be taken, as before, to be good without 39

Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Part One with Selections from Parts Two and Three and Supplementary Texts, trans. Lawrence and Wishart (New York: International Publishers, 1947; revised translation 1970; 8th printing 1981), 109.

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qualification. Notice that such an enhancement would not yet give the Marxist anything to say about moral judgment. In the Kantian case, too, there will be disagreement about what is good without qualification. Is it the good will, as Kant says, or is it the full development of our species-being? Here, though, there may be more room to maneuver. The thin Aristotelian Marxist will hold that it is the latter, but she may still be able to claim that human beings have pure practical reason, and that it is in virtue of this faculty (rather than, or perhaps even in addition to, phronesis) that we are able to make ethical judgments. She may even want to say that it is essential to substances of our kind that we have such a power – that pure practical reason is a component of our species-being. Ironically, doing so would render her position closer to Aristotle’s own, structurally. Here, that is, as with Aristotle, a capacity for specifically moral judgment (now pure practical reason) would be thought to be an aspect of our to-be-actualized essence. Her underlying metaphysics would still have to be one that can sustain the ontological claims of Capital, as Marx’s can (though I have not discussed the issue here), which (I would argue) would preclude her taking on Kant’s account of causation and of the constitution of material objects. But it seems to me that the thin Aristotelian Marxist may help herself to Kantian resources with respect to specifying the nature of what I have been loosely calling moral judgment. One might object that it is necessary to have already sided with Kant in order to be justified in thinking that pure practical reason is an appropriate instrument for normative evaluation in the first place. Why would an ability to universalize be relevant for this kind of reasoning if the categorical imperative were not itself the essence of normativity? If it is true that that the norm of universality is entirely irrelevant to moral judgment unless reason itself (construed as pure practical reason) is taken to be the ultimate good, then it may not, in fact, be possible for the thin Aristotelian Marxist to consistently hold that there is a role for pure practical reason in normative evaluation. But it is not obvious that it is true. It seems possible, at least, to think that while reasonqua-the-form-of-universality is not the summum bonum, it is nonetheless relevant to ethical evaluation, if only because it can correct for certain kinds of partiality, errors that are not simply a failure to comply with moral law as conceived by the Kantian. If it is true, meanwhile (i.e., if pure practical reason can only be thought to have normative purchase if it is itself the good), then it looks as though there will be an analogous problem, even for Aristotle himself, in relation to the concept of phronesis – which at least appears to be relevant to ethical evaluation for reasons that hold at a different level of abstraction than, and are separate from, its being (in Aristotle’s view) internal to flourishing. As Aristotle would have it, phronesis is relevant to ethical evaluation not

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because wise deliberation is one of the activities the doing of which is the good for human beings, though it is this; rather, phronesis is relevant to ethical evaluation because it just is the ability to judge well what ought to be done in any given situation. Sophia, by contrast, which is also one of the activities the doing of which is internal to flourishing, is not relevant to ethical evaluation. Why? Because it is the ability to grasp unchanging form. While the ability to grasp unchanging form is, like phronesis, part and parcel with flourishing, according to Aristotle, and is therefore an unqualified good, it is irrelevant to the activity of wise deliberation because (according to Aristotle) the object-domain of wise deliberation does not include the unchanging forms of things.40 Of course, the fact that an objection to appropriating pure practical reason without declaring universality to be the good may have implications for Aristotle – this fact does not prove the objection wrong. It is just a reminder that Aristotle’s treatment of analogous issues lends potential credence to the idea that a form of reasoning can be relevant to normative deliberation (or fail to be relevant) regardless of whether or not it is itself that which is unconditionally good. Finally, what about Plato? Can the thin Aristotelian Marxist look to Plato for an account of the goodness of the actualization of species-being and, more locally, for insight into the nature of wise or normatively correct judgments? I think that the answer is yes, although it is already clear in my formulation of the question that in doing so she will have had to revise her position in a way that I have heretofore not allowed. Specifically, it is in the nature of this case that it will not be possible to import the normative term of interest – viz., “goodness” – without having it supplant “flourishing” as the grounding ethical category. In considering the issue in relation to utilitarianism, I expressly rejected the substitution of “the realization of species-being” with “the maximization of the higher pleasures amongst the greatest number of persons.” The thin Aristotelian Marxist could augment her ethics with utilitarianism, I said, only insofar as she looked to those formulations of the latter in which Mill talks of the cultivation of “the distinctive endowments” of human beings as though it, perhaps, rather than the experience of pleasure, were the highest good. Certainly the Marxist could argue – as Mill himself did, after all – that the full expression of our kind-specific faculties is good because, and only insofar as, it is maximally conducive to the feeling of pleasure. But this move is difficult for anyone to defend, let alone someone who would likely agree with Marx (or at least ought to) that the very concept of a generic pleasure unit, be it higher or lower, is an artifact of a commodified environment if ever there was one. On balance, therefore, I did not want to suggest that Mill’s Principle of Utility can 40

Thanks to Elizabeth Foreman, who may very well disagree, for conversation about this point.

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be made to cohere with a well-conceived thin Aristotelian Marxism. I rejected the substitution of ends in the Kantian case, too. The Categorical Imperative might be thought to be a helpful tool for the purpose of ethical assessment, but thinking so will not give the Marxist any reason to (a) replace the good of realizing our species-being with the good of employing pure practical reason; or (b) reduce the former to the latter. Things look to be different in the Platonic case. For one thing, the thesis in question (i.e., that it is “goodness-as-such” that grounds normativity) can answer what is plausibly an intelligible follow-up question even for Aristotle, viz., why (and/or how so, exactly) is it good to flourish? What is the sense of “good,” there? In rejecting the Good as a form, Aristotle effectively treats the question as unworthy of a response: if one has to ask why it is better to be an excellent version of a substance of one’s kind than to be a poor version of a substance of one’s kind, then one has simply failed to understand the relevant terms. Or, in a more naturalist register: it is “good” to flourish in that flourishing represents completion, i.e., the fully expressed energeia of a thing, and completion is the end of purposive processes (of which nature is one, says Aristotle). Nevertheless, even Aristotle seems to think not only that nature is nature, and that flourishing is flourishing, but also that it is good to flourish – not just functionally, but normatively, where the latter category has not, in fact, been collapsed into the former. And even if he didn’t, the proponent of what I’ve been calling thin Aristotelian Marxist very well might. The actualization of species-being is the good for human beings (she might want to say) precisely in that its achievement is in keeping with goodness – which really is manifestly good. With respect to particular acts of what I have been calling moral judgment, the claim would be that normative evaluation amounts to grasping what goodness enjoins, which is to say undertaking to identify which course of action would instantiate goodness in any given situation. Clearly the Marxist will not want to import Plato’s idealism as a general ontology, and more specifically she will need to understand goodness-as-such in a way that permits her Marx’s Aristotelianism with respect to the metaphysics of non-commodified substances (and artifacts). But assuming that it is possible to extricate a Platonic concept of goodness from its (Platonic) metaphysical backdrop, it seems to me that the thin Aristotelian Marxist is entitled to incorporate a category of “goodness-as-such” into her account of moral judgment. Indeed, it is quite often assumed to be far easier than this to make use of desirable elements of a theory while leaving the rest behind. (I can easily imagine being faulted for thinking that the thin Aristotelian Marxist will have to be able to accommodate the concept of goodness at the level of metaphysics in order

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to be able appropriate it at the level of ethics.) My own meta-theoretical convictions being as they are, I will add that if it turns out that realism about goodness-as-such is incompatible with a roughly Aristotelian account of the nature of non-commodified objects (to which I believe Marx is committed in Capital, though I have not made the case here), then it will still be an option for the thin Aristotelian Marxist to adopt the concept of goodness as a regulative ideal. As I said at the outset, my view is that even defined in the most minimal of terms as consisting only of the analysis of Capital (albeit Capital properly related to the 1844 Manuscripts), the infrastructure of Marx’s thinking is irreducibly normative: the good for human beings is the intentional, free, creative, self-reflexive activity that just is the realization our species-being. Whatever else it may be, capitalism is morally wrong because value not only is not this; it is the opposite of this, the negation of this. Thus I do mean to disagree with all versions of the idea that Marx’s thinking is non-moral or even anti-moral (although it is abundantly clear that, for Marx, the wrong-ness of capitalism is irrelevant to whether or not conditions are ripe for transforming it). But, as I have argued, to say that Marx’s thinking has a moral infrastructure is not to say that he advances a full-blown moral theory. I also want to emphasize that in suggesting that elements of various existing normative frameworks are available, in different ways and to different degrees, to the thin Aristotelian Marxist, I am not claiming that any combination at all will be viable. One cannot simply mix and match categories as one pleases. That I am not advancing a kind of free-floating pluralism should be clear from the preceding analysis. Nor, however, at the other extreme, do I mean to conclude either (a) that one cannot defensibly ascribe to Marx himself a fuller ethical theory than the minimal commitments that I have identified; or (b) that the options for going beyond them that I have considered are exhaustive. What is required for rigorous thinking is only strict attention to the object, in this case the phenomenon of deformed human activity that is at the heart of Marx’s work.

chapter 13

The Ethical Implications of Marx’s Concept of a Post-capitalist Society Peter Hudis The emergence of new social movements in the past decade, from the Arab Spring and Occupy Movement to ongoing protests against economic austerity and ecological destruction, have provided a much-needed opportunity to re-examine Marx’s philosophical contribution. This is especially important because they are occurring at the same time as the first complete edition of Marx’s works is finally appearing, the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (mega2).1 In recent years a number of new studies have appeared that make use of heretofore unavailable writings in the mega2, such as Marx’s work on natural science,2 non-western societies,3 and gender,4 while others have re-examined his contribution to dialectical thought.5 What may prove no less important is the growth of interest in what, if anything, Marx wrote about the alternative to capitalism. Is it really the case—as generations of Marx commentators have assumed—that he had little or nothing to say about a post-capitalist society? Did his objections to utopian speculation about the future really mean he has nothing to teach us about what kind of social formations are needed to overcome the all-dominating power of capital? If that is the case, then how can his legacy truly speak to the realities of our time, when the failure of the societies 1 The first Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe was issued in 12 volumes from 1927–35. The new Gesamtausgabe, or mega2, began appearing in East Germany in 1972 and has been issued since 1990 by an international group of scholars. It will eventually include everything Marx ever wrote, including his voluminous excerpt notebooks, most of which were unknown until recently. 2 See Karl Marx—Zwischen Philosophie und Naturwissenschaften, Anneliese Griese and Hans Jörg Sandkühle (eds.), Philosophie und Geschichte der Wissenscaften, Studien und Quellen, Band 35 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997). 3 See Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 4 See Heather Brown, Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013). 5 See especially Alan Megill, The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market) (Lanham, md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002) and Norman Levine, Marx’s Discourse with Hegel (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_015

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that called themselves “Marxist” and the widespread claim that “there is no alternative to capitalism” has led to a crisis of the imagination of unparalleled proportions?6 Might there not be important theoretical sources within Marx’s body of work that can aid the effort to address the most difficult question facing today’s social movements—what is a genuine alternative that transcends the limits of both “free market” capitalism and the “socialist” experiments that claimed to rule in Marx’s name? In this paper I will seek to argue, taking off from the fuller discussion in my Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism,7 that Marx had much more to say about a post-capitalist society than has generally been assumed. I further wish to argue that his conception of a post-capitalist society was grounded in normative principles that are no less important for our time than his. By exploring the ethical implications of Marx’s vision of a new society, we may be in a better position to contribute to the effort to work out a comprehensive liberatory alternative to both statist and “free market” variants of capitalism today. I

Marx’s Approach to the Problem of a Post-capitalist Society

There is no question that Marx’s comments about a post-capitalist society are few and far between. He never devoted a full-length work to the subject, nor did he see it as his job to do so. His work instead consists of a detailed, comprehensive, and complex analysis the central social relation of capitalism— capital. If capital were a simple or self-evident formation, he would not have needed to devote almost 40 years of his life to its analysis. Capital is indeed a most contradictory phenomenon, since it is at one and the same time product and producer, result and cause, concrete and abstract. It is an internally differentiated, mystifying phenomenon. What makes capital so mystifying is that it is not just a thing but a social relation mediated by the instrumentality of things. Capital is not simply congealed labor; if that were so there would be nothing mysterious about it at all. Capital is instead congealed abstract labor. It is the congelation of a most peculiar kind of labor—abstract, homogeneous, undifferentiated labor. Abstract labor, according to Marx, is the substance of value, and capital is self-expanding value. 6 I especially have in mind the widely discussed refrain that it has become easier to envision the end of human existence than to imagine the abolition of capitalism. For more on this, see Slavoj Zizek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (London: Verso, 2012). 7 See Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013).

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Given the complexity of capital as a social relation and the time and effort required of Marx to systematically analyze its law of motion, it would not be surprising if he had nothing to say about a post-capitalist society at all. Yet this is clearly not the case. Scattered throughout his writings are indications and intimations—and in some cases, explicit delineations—of the nature of a post-­ capitalist society that transcends value production. Why is this, when the nature of capitalist society is clearly the foremost object of his analysis? The reason is two-fold. First, for Marx, as for Spinoza and Hegel, “all determination is negation.” We know what is by knowing what is not. Negativity reveals not just the limits of the thing but also what stands on the other side of the limit. As Hegel wrote in the Science of Logic, “negation as such is formless abstraction. Speculative philosophy must not be accused of making negation, or Nothing, its end: Nothing is the end of philosophy as little as Reality is the truth.”8 More specifically, “In order that the limit applying to Something in general should also be the Barrier, Something must pass over into itself beyond the limit; it must, referring to itself, relate itself to it as to something which it is not.”9 The critique of the limits of capital—which is the actual subject matter of Marx’s Capital10—therefore cannot help but illuminate in some way, that which stands beyond its limits—socialism. For this reason, much as Marx may have wanted to limit his analysis to a critique of the existent, at numerous instances, including in Capital itself, he ventures forth into discussions of a future post-capitalist society. That the positive is disclosed through the negative is likewise seen in Marx’s intensive polemics with other socialist and communist thinkers and activists of his day. Many of these consisted of extended criticisms of what Marx considered to be their erroneous understanding of the alternative to capitalism. This appears as early as the 1844 Manuscripts, in Marx’s claim that PierreJoseph Proudhon’s effort to apply the quantitative determination of value based on socially necessary labor time (which to Marx was the basis of capitalist value production) to “socialism” would lead to nothing less than replacing 8 9 10

G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, vol. I, W.H. Johnston and L.G. Struthers (trans.) (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1929), 125. Ibid., 144. Although the aim of Marx’s Capital is often seen as a theory of capitalist development, this does not appear to be accurate. His object of analysis is the dissolution and destruction of capitalism. Marx’s “historical materialism” is no mere descriptive analysis, since it aims is to disclose the elements of dissolution that reside within any given phenomena. For a substantiation of this view, see Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, 147–182.

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individual capitalists with “society as an abstract capitalist.”11 This critique is further developed in his Poverty of Philosophy, Grundrisse, and all three volumes of Capital. So persistent was Marx’s attack on such efforts to apply categories specific to capitalism to the new society that it could be argued that all of his work represents an ongoing polemic against Proudhon and his followers. Nor was it a matter of them alone. Marx’s work is full of extended criticisms of the English neo-Ricardian socialists and German statist socialists (foremost of which was Johann Karl Rodbertus and Ferdinand Lassalle).12 This was not about factional hair-splitting, but rather taking issue with those within the socialist movement who fell far short of what Marx considered the depth of uprooting needed to get rid of capitalism. If one wishes to discover Marx’s view of a post-capitalist society, there is no better place to look than at his critiques of the radical tendencies of his own time—a critique that in many respects anticipates the horrors wrongly associated with his name in the twentieth century. Second, the central concept in all of Marx’s discussions of a new society is that it must emerge from the conditions provided by the social being of capitalism itself—otherwise, it will not emerge at all. As he writes in the Grundrisse, “If we did not find latent in society as it is, the material conditions of production and the corresponding relationships of exchange for a classless society, all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.”13 This is repeated again and again throughout his work. Marx focused on a critique of capital, not because he thought it was superfluous to discuss socialism, but because he held that the latter could be achieved only on the basis of the former. In taking this standpoint, Marx was adopting a specific normative or ethical position: namely, the alternative to capitalism needs to be articulated not via a recourse to a sollen, 11 See Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 3 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 280. Proudhon held that since workers do not receive a “fair” portion of the value of the commodity produced by their labor, relations of circulation should be transformed so that they are paid its full value. Marx’s castigates this approach on the grounds that it entails eliminating the personifications of capital, the capitalist, while leaving capitalist value production intact. 12 The basis of this critique likewise first appeared in the 1844 Manuscripts, in Marx’s attack on “vulgar communism.” Established “Communist” regimes in the ussr and elsewhere went to great lengths to insist that this critique applied only to the earliest communists— like as Cabet, Dézamy, et al.—but the logic of Marx’s analysis, which centered on the limitations of those who equate the abolition of private property with “socialism,” told a rather different tale. 13 Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft of 1857–58), in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 28 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 96–97.

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a Kantian ought, but rather on the basis of what is immanent to the object of cognition itself. Marx clearly adopted his notion of immanent critique from Hegel. In the very letter in which the 19-year old announced his break from Kant and conversion to Hegelianism, he states his dissatisfaction “with the opposition between what is and what ought to be” and proclaims that he will seek “the idea in reality itself.” Clearly, Marx was adverse to Kantian Moralität from the inception of his intellectual career. But that hardly means he was adverse to ethics per se, since he adopted an Aristotlean-Hegelian standpoint of immanent critique in seeking to go beyond the Kantian standpoint.14 II

Dialectical Rationalism versus Traditional Rationalism

The most important factor that has to be kept in mind in approaching Marx’s conception of a post-capitalist society is the difference between the dialectical reason employed by Marx and traditional rationalism. Traditional Enlightenment rationalism, as has long been noted,15 proceeds from the isolated, atomized individual. The thinker starts from the part, the atomized unit, and from there seeks to comprehend the whole. But the whole is never actually comprehended. Concrete totality escapes it. This is because traditional rationalism proceeds from a particular (and peculiar) view of reality. “Reality” is defined as what can be known quantitatively, in a mathematical pattern. What cannot be quantified in mathematical terms is considered “unreal” and outside the scope of analysis. Whole arenas of the lifeworld— immaterial entities, “metaphysical” ideas, emotions—are either ignored or reduced to mere “reflections” of material entities. In this way, traditional rationalism detaches “the absolute” from history. As a result of its failure to account for the totality of lived life, the door gets opened for non-rationalist approaches to take account of what is left out. 14

15

It is worth noting that the words in the above sentence was written by Marx in 1837—long before he even thought about engaging in a critique of capitalism. Yet his notion of “finding the idea in reality itself” is a general expression for his later view that the principles of the new society (the idea) can only effectively come into being on the basis of sufficiently developed material (or real) conditions. This is a striking illustration of how Marx’s adaptation of a specific normative approach grounds his later “materialist conception of history.” The most outstanding critique of the pitfalls of modern rationalism is found in Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

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Irrationalism and intuitionism are merely the “other side” of the deficiencies of traditional rationalism. Intuitionists race to “the absolute” like a shot out of the pistol—but, since they detach it from actual history, from the journey through myriad stages of contradiction, they posit no more than an empty absolute.16 Rationalism brings forth and necessitates its anti-rationalist opponent, just as the increasing rationalization of social relations creates the basis for irrational mysticism in “highly developed” capitalist societies. Marx, as is well known, is not a traditional rationalist since he does not proceed from the standpoint of the atomized individual. Nor does he reduce reality to what is solely capable of mathematical expression. He proceeds from a very different view of reality—that of a structurally evolving whole that combines inner and outer, material and ideal, subject and object, absolute and relative. Marx is able to comprehend the concrete totality of capitalist society precisely because he is a practitioner of dialectical instead of traditional rationalism. Of course, a society can be systematically grasped as a concrete totality only if that society itself appears in the form of a system.17 Pre-capitalist societies produced no systematic theory of economics, precisely because they did not exist, properly speaking, as systematic economies.18 There was no singular principle or totalizing social relation that was systematically responsible for the reproduction of the whole. Capitalism, in contrast, is governed by a singular principle—capital. But what does grasping a phenomenon as a concrete totality have to do with delineating an alternative to it? Does the future have anything to do with 16

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The most profound discussion of this phenomenon remains Hegel’s discussion of “The Three Attitudes of Thought Towards Objectivity” in his Smaller Logic. The First Attitude is pre-Kantian Scholasticism, which assumes an identity of thought and being; the Second Attitude is Kant’s Critical Revolution, which limits cognition to the realm of phenomena. Hegel does not proceed to delineate the next attitude as dialectical reason. On the contrary, the Third Attitude is a reversion to the immediacy of faith, as typified by the approach of Jacobi. Like Schelling’s absolute, which “appears in a night in which all cows are black,” the intuitionist absolute is empty, because it rushes to the essence in lieu of the phenomena. See G.W.F. Hegel, Logic. Part I of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, William Wallace (trans.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 47–112. See Karel Kosik, Dialectics of the Concrete: A Study on Problems of Man and World (Dordrecht-Holland: D. Reidel, 1976), 51. The first systematic theory of economics is found in the works of the French Physiocrats of the mid-eighteenth century, especially that of Francois Quesnay. See especially his Tableux Economique—a work that Marx repeatedly praised for providing the first comprehensive theory of social reproduction. Marx made important use of it in Volume Two of Capital as well as elsewhere.

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dialectical analysis? Is the vision of a new society immanent in reality, and if so, can it be known, at least provisionally, in advance? The answer seems to be no, if we take literally Hegel’s injunction that “the Owl of Minerva19 spreads her wings only at dusk.” But does that one phrase really capture the essence of Hegel’s—let alone Marx’s—dialectical rationalism? Karel Kosik argued in his magisterial Dialectics of the Concrete: “The unreason of reason, and thus the historical limitation of reason, is in its denial of negativity. The reasonableness of [dialectical] reason is in that it assumes and anticipates negativity as its own product, in that it grasps itself as a continuing historical negativity.”20 By reducing cognition to that which merely reflects the quantifiably given, traditional rationalism denies the negative moment that Hegel and Marx held to be at the heart of thinking. Positivism is the fullest expression of this inability to think the negative. Since it is unable to think the negative, it cannot think the other side of the given. It is trapped in finitude, in the horizon of existing social relations. Sociologism and Positivism are ideological prisoners of the systematic structuring of modern society by capital. Yet what about Marx? If Marx’s work solely consists of a systematic analysis of capital sans any vision of the future, how could it be fundamentally different from Positivism? According to Kosik, The absolute and the universal are formed in the course of history. Ahistorical thinking knows the absolute only as non-historical, and thus as eternal, in the metaphysical sense.21 Historicism culls the absolute and the universal out of history altogether.22 In distinction from both, dialectics considers history to be a unity of the absolute in the relative and of the relative in the absolute, a process in which the human, the universal, 19 20 21 22

G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, T.M. Knox (trans.) (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 13. Karel Kosik, Dialectics of the Concrete, 60. Kosik is referring to the Platonic and Neo-Platonic view of the absolute as an eternal Form residing outside of and beyond historical contingency. It has often been presumed that Marx also “culled” the absolute from out of history. Surely, Marx did not believe in fixed and eternal “absolutes”; every universal is, for Marx, an element of a historical reality and exists only in relation to it. But that hardly means that he dispensed with absolutes or universals tout court, as seen for example in the discussion in section of Capital, Vol. I on “The Absolute General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” For more on this, See Raya Dunayevskaya, The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx, Peter Hudis and Kevin Anderson (eds.) (Lanham md: Lexington Books, 2000).

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and the absolute appear both in the form of a general prerequisite and as a specific result.23 Since dialectical cognition is imbued with negativity it alone can discern the limited, historical, and transitory nature of its object of cognition and capture the movement towards the future imbedded within it. Dialectical cognition has to venture into the future, precisely because its fiercely negative standpoint towards the given is integral to its very mode of being. Marx, therefore, could no more prevent himself from venturing, in some way, into a discussion of the future post-capitalist society, than could Hegel cause the dialectic to stop in its tracks just because his pen reached the last page of his Phenomenology of Spirit. As Raya Dunayevskaya put it, Whatever Hegel said, and meant, about the Owl of Minerva simply does not follow from the objectivity of the drive, the summation in which the advance is immanent in the present…. When subjected to the dialectical method from which, according to Hegel, no truth can escape, the conclusion turns out to be a new beginning. There is no trap in thought. Though it is finite, it breaks through the barriers of the given, reaches out, if not to infinity, surely beyond the historic moment.24 III

The Ethics of Post-capitalist Society

With these considerations in mind, we can turn more directly what Marx actually had to say about a post-capitalist society and its ethical implications. There is no doubt that Marx’s critique of capitalism centers on the inversion of subject and object. Capital, according to Marx, is a product of subjective human activity that takes on a life of its own and confronts the producers as an all-dominating objective power of its own. The division of labor, according to Marx, is a product of historical developments that presents itself to individuals as a “person apart” that dictates their fate. The state, according to Marx, is a result of subjective interaction, an “excrescence”25 of civil society that takes on 23 Kosik, Dialectics of the Concrete, 82–83. 24 Raya Dunayevskaya, “Hegel’s Absolute as New Beginning,” in The Power of Negativity, 184. 25 See The Civil War in France, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 22 (New York: International Publishers, 1986), 332: “The unity of the nation was not to be broken; but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal constitution, and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence.”

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the form of a quasi-autonomous force in disregard of the will of those who engender it. History itself appears to operate behind the backs of individuals, irrespective of their consciousness or desires—even though it too is a product of humanity’s capacity for conscious, purposeful activity. Marx’s entire critique of class society in rooted in his objection to any situation in which the products or predicates of human activity take on a life of their own and constrain the subject who engenders them. What led Marx to place such emphasis on the inversion of subject and object, and why did he consider it to be of such critical importance? His critique of subject-object inversion actually long precedes his break from capitalism and analysis of the capitalist mode of production. It also precedes his encounter in 1842–43 with Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity, which held that God, a product of the human subject, becomes viewed as an objective power that engenders it.26 Marx first refers to inversion in 1839, in his Notebooks for his dissertation On the Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature. He does so in the course of critiquing Plutarch’s Colotes for claiming “so that of every quality we can truly say, ‘It no more is than is not’; for to those affected in a certain way the thing is, but to those not so affected it is not.” Marx notes that Plutarch “speaks of a fixed being or non-being as a predicate.” However, “the being of the sensuous” is not a predicate; it is a subject. He concludes, “Ordinary thinking always has ready abstract predicates which it separates from the subject. All philosophers have made the predicates into subjects.”27 It may be an exaggeration to claim that all philosophers have confused the predicate with the subject. Yet there is surely a lengthy history of this inversion, going back as far as Plato’s concept of the Forms and the efforts of the medieval Schoolmen to interpret Aristotle’s concept of the “active intellect” as an objective force that thinks in us, rather than being thought by us.28

26 Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, in which his critique of inversion first appeared, was published in 1841—two years after Marx had already discussed the issue of subjectpredicate inversion in the Notebooks to his dissertation. Though Feuerbach’s work created a huge stir at the time, it was hardly original, since the eighteenth century French materialists and David Hume had earlier reached essentially the same position. 27 “Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), 58. 28 The classical formulation of this position is found in Alexander of Aphrodisias (200 ad) who wrote “For just as light, being productive of actual vision, is itself seen along with its concomitants…so also the intellect from without becomes the cause of thinking for us….” See De Intellectu, in Richard N. Boely and Martin M. Tweedale (eds.), Basic Issues of Medieval Philosophy (Toronto: Broadview Press, 2006), 630.

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In any case, Marx subsequently applies his normative principle of opposing subject-predicate inversion to a critique of modern philosophers—Hegel most of all. His 1843 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right attacks Hegel for inverting the relation between civil society and the state. He claims that Hegel posits the state as an “external necessity” above civil society—even though the abstract character of the private sphere of civil society is responsible for the repressive character of the modern state. Marx proceeds to ask why Hegel commits this error. The reason, he contends, is that Hegel posits the idea as the subject instead of as the predicate of the “real subject”—live men and women: “The idea is made the subject, and the actual relation of family and civil society to the state is conceived as its imaginary activity.”29 What results from this inversion of subject and predicate, according to Marx, is that Hegel adopts an uncritical attitude towards the state. The state necessarily becomes viewed uncritically if it is assumed ahead of time that it is an instantiation of the self-determining idea. Marx has here found the answer to the question that has troubled him from at least as early as the writing of his dissertation: namely, how could Hegel, the philosopher of negativity par excellence, end up accommodating himself politically to existing society? With the 1844 Manuscripts—by which time (unlike the case in 1843) Marx had now begun to delve deeply into political economy—Marx has developed a somewhat different take on Hegel’s “inversion.” He no longer views Hegel’s confusion of subject and predicate as a mere idealistic delusion. On the contrary, he sees that it contains a vital materialist insight, insofar as Hegel’s “error” reflects an actual inversion of subject and object that takes place in the capitalist labor process.30 In capitalism, Marx shows, the worker is not simply alienated from the product of labor but from the activity of producing it. Human subjective activity becomes reified, thing-like, and this objectified form becomes the norm that governs all social interaction. Subjective activity is now constrained and dominated by an objective formation of its own creation. Insofar as Hegel, in Marx’s 29 30

Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, 8. This should make it clear that Marx’s critique of inversion has nothing to do with replacing Hegel’s “idealism” with “materialism.” There are materialist elements in Hegel (as Marx explicitly acknowledged) as well as idealist elements in Marx. Marx objects to inverting subject and predicate on any grounds—be it for purposes of idealism or materialism. As for himself, he defined his new continent of thought as a unity of idealism and materialism: “Here we see how consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the truth uniting both.” See 1844 Manuscripts, 336.

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view, has dehumanized the idea by conflating it with the subject instead of the predicate, Hegel gives intellectual expression to the actuality of alienation in the capitalist production process. For this reason, Marx does not accuse Hegel of failing to deal with reality. The problem is that he deals with it all too well! By dehumanizing the subject of the dialectic, Hegel adopts an uncritical attitude toward the alienated structure of modernity and thereby fails to point to its transcendence. Hegel’s inversion of subject-predicate leads him to betray his own dialectic of negativity. It is not possible here to go into whether or not Marx’s critique is fair to Hegel, nor can I go into how he develops this critique of inversion in Capital. More pertinent for our purposes is how Marx’s normative objection to the phenomenon of inversion informs his view of a post-capitalist society. Since Marx locates the central problem of capitalism in the dominance of the subject by products and activity of its own making, a new society represents the inversion of this inversion insofar as it abolishes any condition in which such a situation prevails. The Grundrisse states that in capitalism, “individuals are subsumed under social production, which exists outside them as their fate; but social production is not subsumed under the individuals who manage it as their common wealth.”31 But what if we “assume” the existence of a noncapitalist society? Now if this assumption is made, the general character of labor would not be given to it only by exchange; its assumed communal character would determine participation in the products. The communal character of production would from the outset make the product into a communal, general one. The exchange initially occurring in production, which would not be an exchange of exchange values but of activities determined by communal needs and communal purposes, would include from the beginning the individual’s participation in the communal world of products…labor would be posited as general labor prior to exchange, i.e., the exchange of products would not in any way be the medium mediating the participation of the individual in general production. Mediation of course has to take place.32 This suggests that in a post-capitalist society labor would still be an important factor in social reproduction. However, its “general” character would not be based on the dominance of abstract or undifferentiated labor. Abstract labor 31 Marx, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, 96. 32 Ibid., 108.

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serves as the substance of value in capitalism; it is the common denominator that enables discrete products of labor to be exchanged for one another. The existence of value production signifies that human relations are only indirectly social, since individuals are connected to each other through abstract forms of domination—such as money. Labor is indirectly social in capitalism. In contrast, in a post-capitalist society labor takes on a “general” character prior to the exchange of products, on the basis of the “the communal character of production” itself. Freely associated individuals distribute the elements of production according to their needs instead of being governed by social forms that operate independently of them—such as by the state or the market. Marx is not referring here to the existence of small, isolated communities that operate in a world dominated by value production, but rather to a communal network of associations in which value production has been superseded on a systemic level. In such a post-capitalist society labor becomes directly social, since the actions and decisions of the human subject, not an autonomous force such as exchange value, mediates the relations between them. Marx avers, “Mediation of course has to take place.” However, a force that is independent of the actual human subject does not mediate social relations; the subjective acts of the community of individuals serves as the mediation. The inversion of subject and predicate is thereby superseded. Of course, exchange of some sort would exist in such a new society. However, it would be radically different from what prevails in capitalism, which is governed by the exchange of commodities. Instead of exchange being based on exchange values, prices, or markets, distribution would be governed by an exchange of activities that are “determined by communal needs and communal purposes.” Relations of exchange, which are products of human activity, no longer confront the individual as a “person apart.” Exchange value—which for Marx is the phenomenal expression of value production based on abstract labor—is eliminated as soon as new, freely associated and non-alienated conditions of labor come into existence. This vision is, needless to say, a far cry from what called itself “socialism” or “communism” in the twentieth century—as well as what for the most part calls itself that today. Neither here nor in any of Marx’s many other discussions of a post-capitalist society does he so much as mention the state. Socialism is not state control of society, any more than it is market control of society. It is control of society by the freely associated producers, who democratically organize production and distribution. This vision is further developed in Volume One of Capital, in the section entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and its Secret.” Georg Lukács famously remarked that this section “contains within itself the whole of historical

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materialism and the whole self-knowledge of the proletariat seen as the knowledge of capitalist society.”33 What is often overlooked, however, is that it is precisely in this section that Marx introduces one of his most extensive discussions of a post-capitalist society. He writes, “Let us finally imagine, for a change, an association of free men, working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labor power in full self-awareness as one single social labor.”34 He then proceeds to spell this out more specifically. First, in this postcapitalist society all products are “directly objects of utility” and do not assume a value form. Marx takes it as a given in all of his discussions of a post-capitalist society that value and exchange value are abolished. Second, what characterizes it is “an association of free men”—not a mere association as such. Many pre-capitalist societies were collectively organized, but that didn’t make them less despotic. The new society, in contrast, is one in which social relations are freely constituted. Third, the individuals in this new society directly take part in producing, distributing, and consuming the total social product. There is no objectified expression of social labor that exists as a person apart from the individuals themselves. He continues: “The total product of our imagined association is a social product.”35 One part of the aggregate product serves to renew the means of production. The other part “is consumed by members of the association as means of subsistence.” How is this division of the aggregate product to occur? No mechanism independent of the free association of the producers decides this for them. Marx does not go into any details of how this would be arranged, since it “will vary with the particular kind of social organization of production and the corresponding level of social development attained by the producers.”36 He is reticent about going into too many details, since to do otherwise would amount to imposing a fixed formula or plan upon the subject—which is exactly what he opposes in his critique of inversion. He then adds, “Labor time serves as the measure of the part taken by each individual in the common labor, and of his share in the part of the total product destined for social consumption.”37 The specific share of each individual in social consumption is determined by the actual amount of labor time that they 33

Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Rodney Livingston (trans.) (London: Merlin Press, 1968), 170. 34 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, Ben Fowkes (trans.) (New York: Penguin, 1976), 171. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 172. 37 Ibid.

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perform in the community. Someone who performs a given number of hours of labor obtains from the common storehouse an amount of goods produced in the same amount of time. It is crucial to recognize that Marx is not suggesting that this arrangement is governed by socially necessary labor time. There is a world of difference between actual labor time and socially necessary labor time. Under capitalism, actual labor time does not create value; instead, the social average of necessary labor time creates value. If workers in China assemble a car (on average) in 18 hours while those in Detroit do so in 12 hours, no value is created in those extra six hours of labor by the Detroit workers. From a capitalist point of view it is a waste of time. This is why capitalism constantly revolutionizes relations of production and forces workers to produce more in fewer hours. The worker, as well as the capitalist, is not the master of their fate; each is governed by the social average of necessary labor time established by the world market. So why does Marx say that in a new society “the means of subsistence is determined by labor time”? The answer lies in the distinction between actual labor time and socially necessary labor time. The latter governs the old society; the former governs the new one. With the creation of a free association of individuals who consciously plan out the production and distribution of the social product, labor ceases to be subject to time as an external, abstract, and impermeable force governing them irrespective of their will and needs. Once time becomes the space for our deliberation and development, we are no longer governed by an abstract average that operates behind our backs. Time, a product of contingent history, ceases to confront us an abstract, immutable force to which we must submit. The abolition of the dictatorship of time as an abstract form of domination makes it possible to distribute the social product on the basis of the actual amount of time that individuals contribute to society, since production relations have been transformed in such a way as to make that possible. So what does this have to do with ethics? Isn’t it just about economics?38 Surely, Marx is envisioning a radically different economic order for life after capitalism. But what governs his specific delineation of the form that should take, if not the normative principle he had adopted as early as 1839—the aversion to any inversion of subject and predicate? Marx’s entire critique of value production, and his insistence that a socialist or communist society will not be 38

The assumption that economics is somehow incompatible with ethics is a distinctively recent prejudice. It was not present in the work of the classical political economists, let alone those who came earlier. Adam Smith’s first book was The Theory of Moral Sentiments—a work that is often ignored in literature on the history of economics.

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governed by it, flows from the ethical principle that he had enunciated from his earliest writings. So committed was he to this principle that it informs even his most “economic” works, such as Volume Three of Capital, in which he stated that “human power is its own end.”39 Human powers, whether material or intellectual, social or spiritual, must never, he insists, be used as a mere means to an end or constrained by the products of its own creation. These powers are self-sufficient ends. This view was integral to his work from the start. As he wrote in 1843, “All emancipation is a reduction of the human world and relationships to humanity itself.”40 The ethical implications of Marx’s vision of emancipation become most explicit in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. The Critique is striking not only for its detailed discussion of post-capitalism, but also because it introduces, for the first time in his work, a distinction between a lower and higher phase of the new society. He does not, however, refer to the lower phase as socialism and a higher one as communism. Socialism and communism are completely interchangeable terms in Marx, and nowhere in any of his writings does he conceive of them as distinct phases or stages. Instead, “What we are dealing with here [in the lower phase] is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society, which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectual stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.”41 What defines this initial phase of a new society? He spells it out thusly: “Within the collective society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the product appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of the total labor.”42 Why does Marx suggest that with the common ownership of the means of production “the producers do not exchange their products?” The answer is that generalized commodity exchange is possible only if there is a commensurate social substance that enables the diverse array of products of labor to be universally exchanged. That commensurate substance is abstract or undifferentiated labor—alienated labor. But once we reach the “common ownership” of 39 40 41

See Marx, Capital, vol. 3, David Fernbach (trans.) (New York: Penguin, 1981), 959. “On the Jewish Question,” in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 3, 168. Critique of the Gotha Program, in Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 24 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), 85. Emphasis is in Marx’s original. 42 Ibid.

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the means of production, abstract or alienated labor is overcome. The producers cease to be controlled by an alien force or class that is distinct from their own self-activity. A new kind of freely associated labor has been born, that puts an end to the split between concrete and abstract labor. But if the substance of value, abstract labor, ceases to exist, value production itself cannot exist. And since exchange value is the phenomenal or monetary expression of value, it too cannot exist once value production comes to an end. Therefore—even at the most initial phase of a post-capitalist society—“the producers do not exchange their products.” Marx is pointing to a radical breach between capitalism and even the most “defective” or initial phase of the new society. “Socialism” or “Communism” does not represent, for Marx, a more equitable distribution of value. It represents the abolition of value production itself, from its initial moment of emergence. So in what way is this lower phase defective, compared with what comes after—a higher phase of communism? The lower or initial phase of communism eliminates a defining characteristic of capitalism—wage labor. Wage labor, Marx insists throughout his writings, is inseparable from the domination of capital. Hence, in the lower phase, a new form of remuneration must replace wage labor. It works as follows: “The individual producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor.” Individuals receive from society a voucher or token that they have “furnished such and such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds)” and from it obtains from “the social stock of means of consumption as much as the amount of labor costs.”43 This essentially recapitulates what Marx had earlier spelled out about the new society in chapter one of Capital. Marx is once again not suggesting that the worker’s labor is computed on the basis of a social average of labor time. Here, labor time simply refers to the amount of actual hours of work performed by the individual. This is completely different than in capitalism, where remuneration is based on socially necessary labor time. Nor is the lower phase compatible with “from each according to his ability, to each according to his work.” This slogan, never used by Marx, became a staple of Stalinist dogma after Marx’s death. But it has no place in the lower phase, since the worker is remunerated, not on the basis of the amount of product or value produced in a given unit of time, but solely on the basis of the actual quantum of hours worked. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his work” is simply another form of wage labor based on socially necessary labor time. It does not matter whether the instrumentality by which it is affected is a 43

Ibid., 86.

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state plan or a free market. Either approach is still beholden to capitalist social relations. But by the time we reach the lower phase of socialism or communism, capitalism is far behind us. So what distinguishes the lower phase from a higher one? The form of remuneration in the lower phase is still defective, since it is based on a quid pro quo. The individual only receives from society what he puts into it, in the form of actual hours of labor time. Exchange value is abolished, but exchange based on an “equal standard”—actual amounts of labor time—still exists. Although the lower phase abolishes value rather than simply redistributing it, the principle of distributive justice—I get so much from society by giving so much to it— continues to prevail. This equal standard or right, Marx acknowledges, “is still in principle bourgeois right.” That is because “the right of the producers is proportional to the labor they supply.” Since some might work longer hours than others, depending on their social situation, there will be inequities in the amount of remuneration received by each producer. The application of an equal standard—remuneration according to actual labor time—therefore produces unequal results. Classes cease to exist, but not social differentiation based on amounts of remuneration. This is an unfortunate defect, but a necessary one, since “Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development which this determines.”44 In contrast, when we reach a higher phase of communism, a completely different ethical principle applies—one that is the negation of bourgeois right. By this time, more fully social conditions have emerged, since communism now “stands on its own foundation.” The division between mental and manual labor comes to an end. Labor ceases to be a mere means of life but becomes “life’s prime want”—an action that is done for its own sake. The productive forces have grown to the point of allowing for “the all-round development of the individual.” Obviously, it will take some time to reach this lofty point after the revolution! Yet once it is reached, the governing principle now becomes: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” No longer is remuneration based on the amount of labor time that the individual contributes to the community. Actual labor time ceases to be a measure of social relations. In fact, no “equal standard” of any sort applies to a higher phase. The realm of bourgeois right is therefore left behind. The producers simply withdraw from the common storehouse what they need, and they give to society what they can, based on their natural and acquired abilities. But this involves no quid pro quo. Since an “equal standard or right” ceases to exist once 44

Ibid., 87.

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actual labor time is no longer a measure of social relations, the principle of “equal exchange”—I give so much to society in exchange for getting so much back from it—cannot apply. Instead, the individual simply gives to others based on their abilities, and from others they obtain the satisfaction of their needs. Put differently, in a higher phase of communism each gives to the other for its own sake—not for the sake of expecting some particular reward. No longer are others treated as a mere means to satisfy your ends. If a quid pro quo were involved, bourgeois right would still prevail. But in a higher phase you give to the other for the sake of the other, and the other gives to you for the sake of yourself. The principle of equal exchange that we have come to take for granted as “natural” because of millennia of class society is superseded in a higher phase of communism. This is what it means to practice “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” It is not hard to discern the Aristotlean structure of Marx’s view of a higher phase of communism. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle delineates three types of friendship: friendship for pleasure, friendship for use, and perfected friendship. The first two are lower or defective forms, since friendship is a mere means to some other end. With perfected friendship, however, a different structure prevails. A true friend gives to the other for the sake of his love of the other, without expectation of reward.45 And he loves the other because the other embodies the good. Perfected friendship is therefore unqualified love of the good. It is not a means to some other end. It is an end in itself. For Aristotle, it is the highest of ethical principles. Needless to say, perfected friendship is a rare gift; not everyone can be worthy of such friendship, for not everyone is good. According to Aristotle, a system of justice is needed to cement social relations in the absence of perfected friendship. Unlike friendship, which is warm and intimate, justice is a “cold” and distant. But it is necessary, so long as social relations cannot be bound together by relations of perfected friendship. As he noted so poignantly, “when people are friends there is no need of justice.”46 Marx of course does not presume that we will achieve perfected friendship with everyone in the new society. He was far too realistic to believe that! Nor does he conceive of the new society as anything remotely similar to Aristotle’s

45

46

See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Joe Sachs (trans.) (Annapolis: Polity Press, 2002), 164: “Those who give freely to one another for their own sake are free of complaints (for friendship in accord with virtue is of this sort).” (1164a36-8). Ibid., 144 (1155a26-7).

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aristocratic and elitist conception of the polis.47 But the structure of Aristotle’s cardinal ethical principle is echoed in Marx’s conception of a higher phase of communism. In a higher phase, we will not use people as means to some ulterior end, since labor, instead of being a mere means of life, will become “life’s prime want”—a self-sufficient end. The realm of bourgeois right and distributive justice is left far behind. A much warmer principle of inter-subjectivity now prevails—“From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.” Humanity will have matured to the point of being able to forge social relations that are not circumscribed by the narrow horizon of the quid pro quo. We will engage in social activities, with all their inevitable frictions and conflicts, not by treating our human powers as a mere means to some other end, but to fructify those powers as ends in themselves. Marx, like Aristotle, understood that the greatest good is a self-sufficient end. What else does it mean to say, “human power is its own end”? IV Conclusion In light of the tragedy that has beset “Marxism” for the past century or more, it appears that the depth and breadth of Marx’s concept of a post-capitalist society did not get much of a hearing. What was heard were his injunctions against “utopianism” and making “blueprints for the future.” What got much less attention was the ramifications of his vision of a non-alienated society. This is not to suggest that Marx provided anything in the way of a comprehension model of post-capitalist society, nor does it suggest that all of the problems associated with Marxism after his death would never have arisen even if he had. What we can see with eyes of today, however, is that Marx’s work contains important markers and indications of what kind of society humanity must aspire to if it is to overcome capitalism’s inherent drive for self-destruction—a drive that not only threatens the future of society but the very existence of our planet. Surely, the time has come to re-examine anew what his concept of a post-capitalist society can teach us. That being said, not only did Marx not create a systematic account of what follows capitalism; I do not believe it is possible for one to be provided. As noted earlier, a systematic theory of society is only possible if society itself 47

As is well known, Aristotle does not think it is possible for a man of virtue to achieve perfected friendship with commoners or slaves, since they are presumably so mentally deficient as not to be good! This only shows how deeply committed Aristotle was to the hallmark of all class society—the division between mental and manual labor.

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takes the form of a system. Capitalism clearly is such a society. But the society that replaces it—if we manage to bring it into being—will not, in my view, take the form of a system. Once capital as the all-determining and all-dominating power of society is thoroughly uprooted, we can return, on a higher level, to those forms of earlier societies that were governed by a multiplicity of principles. We need not, nor should we want to, answer every question about a new society in advance—if for no other reason than that would violate the injunction to oppose any tendency that defines the course of the subject’s development independent of the freely constituted expression and deliberation of that subject itself. It is one thing, of course, to indicate that Marx’s concept of a post-capitalist society is based on specific ethical principles; it is quite another to argue that such principles are integral his body of work as a whole. So to what extent do his comments about a post-capitalist society speak to the presence of an ethical framework when it comes to the project he dedicated most of life to— delineating the logic of capital? As we can see from his discussion of the lower and higher phases of communism, Marx ties the ability to practice and realize ethical principles to the level reached by the historical and economic development of society. If it is not possible to rid our social and personal relations of bourgeois notions of right in the lower phase of communism, how can we be expected to do so while living in capitalism? Marx is not interested in elaborating an ethical or moral code of conduct for those of us living in capitalism, precisely because the realization of the ethical values that he aspires for are only possible in socialism. But this hardly suggests that ethical values are therefore alien to Marxism— as far too many commentators on Marx’s works have claimed. That could only be the case if Marxism had nothing to say about the alternative to capitalism. But if Marxism cannot speak to that issue, what is the point to being a Marxist in the first place? The whole point to the Marxian critique of capital is to free our minds from the horizons of the present and to elicit from us the expectation and hope that another world is possible. By singling out the social formations of the future that become revealed through the critique of capital, Marx’s work actually brings to awareness the ethical principles that humanity has long sought to explore and master. Our lives would be much more impoverished without them.

Index Adler, Max  2–3 Adorno, Theador  20, 67, 84, 281, 283 Alienation  4–5, 14–5, 33, 35–6, 38–9, 41, 44–5, 47–9, 55–6, 59–60, 63, 65–6, 68–70, 72, 80, 87, 93, 95, 97, 101, 106, 115, 155, 158, 160, 172, 200–3, 207–8, 213–4, 216–7, 219, 221, 225–6, 230–2, 236, 245, 253, 258, 304, 316, 318, 320–2, 326, 346 Althusser, Louis  3, 113, 121, 280–1, 286, 290–1 Altruism  44, 47, 159 Anarchists  10 Aquinas, Thomas  194, 197 Arendt, Hannah  39 Aristotle  11–14, 18–19, 59, 73, 161, 194, 216, 232, 236, 240, 243, 250, 253–4, 256–7, 262, 287, 313, 318, 320–7, 331–4, 340, 344, 353–4 De Anima  13, 321 Art Greek  91, 93 Arthur, Chris  54–5 Authority  18, 39, 46, 57, 62, 67–8, 79, 152, 162, 223 Autonomy  67, 81–2, 126, 129–30, 147, 170, 185, 210, 328 Bauer, Bruno  119, 153, 155–6, 204–6 Bauer, Otto  1 Beauty  14, 17, 26, 67–8, 87, 91–2, 95, 100, 210, 215, 217, 316 Benhabib, Seyla  147 Bentham, Jeremy  17, 175 Berlin, Isaiah  168, 186–8 Bernstein, Eduard  5, 289, 309, 311 Bloch, Ernst  6, 11, 88, 281, 310 Bourgeois  38, 84–5, 103, 137, 160, 167, 177, 186, 190, 211–2, 218, 276, 305–6, 323, 355 Economics/economists  121–2, 124 Mode of production  16 Phenomenon  191 Right  139–40, 158, 174, 176,183, 352, 354 Society  20, 37, 124, 144–6, 152–8, 161, 163, 165, 170, 174, 331 Thought  288, 304 Values  225, 270 Bourgeoisie  10, 20, 162, 180, 183, 271

Callinicos, Alex  165, 176, 293–4, 300, 310 Capitalism  2–5, 9–11, 13, 19–20, 25–30, 32, 39, 44, 49–50, 53–5, 57, 59–61, 66, 68–9, 72, 76, 80–1, 83, 86–7, 90, 93–5, 98, 100, 102–6, 116, 125–6, 134–5, 138, 146, 157, 159, 163–9, 172–81, 183–6, 188–92, 200–2, 204, 207, 213–16, 219, 221–2, 225–7, 245–6, 258, 263, 269–71, 275, 277–8, 280–2, 289–90, 296–300, 302–4, 306, 310, 312–3, 315–20, 324, 335–41, 343, 345–7, 349, 350–52, 354–5 Chomsky, Noam  62 Class Conflict  74, 112, 232 Consciousness, see Consciousness, Class Domination  61, 81 Economic  15 Middle  31 Ruling/bourgeois/elite/owning  20, 38, 67–8, 129, 223, 277, 319 Struggle  3, 17, 21, 25, 34, 41, 49, 66, 111, 168, 177, 279, 286, 289–90, 299, 306, 308 Working  1–2, 5, 10, 20–4, 27, 64, 66, 99, 113–4, 123, 162–3, 166, 168, 172–3, 176–9, 183, 185, 188–90, 286, 298–301, 307–9, 310–1, 319, 322, 348 Cohen, G.A.  136, 288, 310 Communism  4, 9–10, 26–7, 65, 113, 132, 138, 141, 156–60, 162, 175, 186, 216, 226–9, 258, 271, 273, 285, 290, 339, 347, 350–5 Soviet  9, 290 Compassion  12, 22–5 Conscience  3, 212, 320–1 Consciousness  5, 14–5, 17, 27–8, 62, 65–7, 70, 72, 74, 80, 95, 99, 106, 111, 128, 132, 172, 145, 150, 173, 216, 258, 283, 309, 321, 344 Alienated  257 Class  114 Critical  22 Ethical  3 False  216, 264 Forms of  81, 127, 241 Historical  123 Self-  34, 46, 74, 117, 128, 171, 218, 229 Semi-  100 Social  111, 132 Cooperation  13, 25, 28–30, 61, 250, 306

358

Index

Darwin, Charles  70, 79 Durkheim, Emile  37

Geras, Norman  62–3, 140, 146, 155, 157, 167, 191, 305–6

Egoism  44, 46–7, 203, 206, 208–9, 212, 279 Engels, Friederich  10, 37–9, 85, 111, 142, 150, 162, 166, 168, 172–3, 276, 288, 303, 306–7, 336 Epictetus  53 Epicurus  11, 217 Ethics Humanist  4, 12–3, 27, 31, 101 Utilitarian, see utility Virtue  12–3, 19, 31, 76, 78, 142, 147, 151, 161, 169, 192–3, 195, 197, 201, 209 214–6, 221, 244, 315, 318, 320–1, 323–6, 332, 353–4 Exploitation  2, 5, 9, 12, 22, 24, 60, 62, 76, 80–1, 114, 125, 136, 167, 176, 185–6, 194, 202, 214, 218–21, 225, 232, 262, 270, 282, 294, 296–9, 302, 307

Habermas, Jürgen  6, 235, 263 Hegel, Georg W.F.  33–5, 45–6, 48–51, 54–7, 67, 72, 74, 111, 117, 119, 147–153, 159–160, 170–2, 174, 182, 202–4, 213–4, 230, 238–44, 247–8, 253–4, 256, 262–4, 285, 291, 293, 295, 309, 311, 321, 338, 340, 342–3, 345–6 Heidegger, Martin  283 History  34, 61, 65, 69, 73, 91, 93, 106, 112–3, 118, 124–5, 128–32, 142, 145, 148, 150, 164, 178, 189, 202, 207, 211, 220, 225, 228, 230, 240, 253, 267–71, 274, 276, 287, 289, 292, 299, 307, 310–1, 319, 321, 340–2 Bourgeoisie  20 French  100 Of Art  91–2 Of Capitalism  100, 103, 176 Of Class Struggles  111, 290 Theory/Philosophy of  60, 113–4, 118–21, 127, 149, 163, 291, 293, 295, 304 Hobbes, Thomas  64, 66, 147, 184, 196, 212, 327 Homer  90 Honneth, Axel  35, 37, 42–3, 49–51, 278, 281–3, 285 Hooker, Richard  196–8 Horkheimer, Max  20, 67, 281, 322 Human Flourishing  5, 10–1, 13, 15, 17, 31

Feuerbach, Ludwig  55, 62, 114, 116–9, 171–2, 217, 274, 344 Flourishing , Human (Eudaemonia)  5, 10–1, 13, 15, 17, 31, 43, 69, 236–7, 246, 314, 319, 321, 323, 326–7, 331–4 Fraser, Nancy  35, 50–1 Freedom  1, 15, 19, 23–4, 59–65, 67–8, 70, 77, 80–3, 109, 132, 148–9, 153, 167, 172–3, 175, 177, 182–4, 200, 203, 208, 212–3, 215, 218, 220, 224–5, 229, 231, 238, 240, 249–50, 254, 260, 267–8, 270, 276–7, 303–4, 308, 312, 319–20, 324–5, 328 Ethic of  66, 69 Human  16, 31, 169, 207, 232, 236, 253, 268–9 Individual  31, 152, 207, 214, 290 Negative  168, 186–8 Objective  174 Political  155–6, 206–7 Positive  186 Realm of  10, 16, 18, 27, 88, 106, 232 Social  6, 209, 258 Subjective  152, 170–1, 174, 290 Universal  150 Will, of the  39 Freud, Sigmund  64–7, 69, 77, 284, 286 Fromm, Eric  12, 18, 25, 27, 66–7, 69, 73, 78, 82, 286

Jefferson, Thomas  218, 224 Justice  1, 4, 5, 9–12, 17, 21, 32, 35, 47, 49–52, 54, 56, 59, 107, 109, 113–4, 116, 125–6, 132–3, 135–40, 143–6, 149, 151–3, 157–61, 165–8, 176–7, 181, 188, 191–8, 200–4, 206, 208–11, 213–6, 218–232, 259, 277, 279, 281–2, 285, 297, 300, 302, 304–6, 311, 314, 320, 324–5, 329–30, 352–4 Kant, Immanuel  2, 6, 12, 64, 77, 83, 115, 117, 144, 147–8, 161–3, 169–170, 182, 188, 213, 230, 235, 237–9, 241, 246, 254, 263–4, 267, 274, 289, 306, 309, 310, 321–2, 326, 328, 330, 332, 334, 340 Kautsky, Karl  9, 309

359

Index Labour  10, 23, 25, 27–9, 35–6, 38, 40–2, 45, 46–50, 53, 55, 122, 138–41, 146, 157, 160, 166–9, 172–85, 188–90, 199, 290, 296–7, 299, 301–2, 307–8, 311 Abstract  297–8 Alienated  38, 42, 46 Attractive  27 Child  23–4 Concrete  297–8 Cooperative  28 Division of  53, 88–91, 94, 96–8, 100, 106, 140 Estranged  39, 42, 46 Instruments of  15 Human  15, 36, 40, 93, 100, 104–6, 112, 171–2, 316 Organised  29, 31, 300 Productive, (Un)  92, 97 Slave  47 Social  28, 36, 160, 181 Wage  28, 177 Lincoln, Abraham  218, 224–5 Locke, John  195, 197–8, 218 Lukács, Georg  3, 5, 163, 289, 309, 347 Lukes, Steven  165 Machiavelli, Niccolo  77 MacIntyre, Alasdair  12, 307 Marcuse, Herbert  55, 67–8, 85, 283 Marx, Karl  1–7, 9–29, 31, 33–70, 72, 74–5, 77, 81–94, 96–8, 100, 106, 109–147, 149–169, 171–197, 200–233, 235–355 Marx, Karl, main works “Alienated Labor”  208, 226 Capital  15, 17, 19, 22, 27–8, 109–11, 114, 121, 133, 203, 219, 231, 269, 298, 313–6, 319, 322–3, 325, 327, 330–2, 335, 339, 347, 350–1 Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right  214, 345, 354 Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A  203, 217, 219, 227 Communist Manifesto  10, 16, 20, 37–8, 85, 111, 162, 177, 315 Critique of the Gotha Programme   137–8, 156, 350 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of  1844 13, 33, 62, 203, 213, 289, 315, 321

German Ideology, The  14, 20, 63–4, 119, 141, 168, 275, 285, 289, 325 Grundrisse  16, 27, 31, 63, 123, 203, 219, 231, 339, 346 On the Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature  344 “On the Jewish Question”  153, 155, 196, 202–4, 213–4, 229 The Civil War in France  218, 222 Theories of Surplus Value  125, 133, 272 Theses on Feuerbach  114, 116, 118, 289, 296, 303 Marxism  1–6, 9–14, 33, 41–2, 49–51, 54, 59, 65, 109–10, 113, 133, 136, 143, 145–6, 149, 151–2, 155, 158, 161–4, 166, 178, 182, 188, 190–1, 193, 195, 201–3, 209, 211–2, 217, 219, 221, 231, 235, 237, 241, 243, 245–6, 257, 261, 270, 279–81, 288–97, 299–301, 303–5, 307, 309, 310–13, 315, 317, 319–21, 323, 325, 327–9, 331, 333–5, 354–5 Materialism  1, 111, 127, 126, 133, 134–5, 142–3, 145, 149, 151, 209, 212, 217, 221, 227, 231, 258, 289, 296, 303–4, 307–312, 348 Historical  111, 126, 134–5, 142–3, 145, 209, 221, 227, 231, 291–3, 295–6, 308, 310–1 Mechanical  309 Mill, John Stuart  324, 330 Moral Concepts  10 Discourse  9, 11, 16, 264 Morality  1, 10–11, 71, 79, 83, 128, 130, 148, 151, 165–7, 169, 188, 193, 105, 197, 201–2, 204, 210, 215–7, 220, 230–2, 266–7, 269–71, 273–79, 281, 283–4, 289, 295, 303–4, 307–8, 312, 314–5, 321–2, 325, 328–9 Mozart  69 Nature Human  11–4, 16–8, 41, 46, 48, 59–67, 69, 71, 73, 77, 81–2, 114, 126, 143, 197, 221, 254, 257, 272–3, 284, 286, 296, 307 Neoliberalism  24–5, 30–1, 289 Nietzsche, Friedrich  71, 77, 273, 280, 286 Paine, Thomas  177–8 Peffer, Rodney  11, 280 Pippin, Robert  169

360 Plato  59, 119, 161, 236, 330–1, 333–4, 344 Popper, Karl  151 Productiveness  12, 25–8 Proletariat, see class, working Property  10, 28–9, 65, 80, 132, 170, 174–5, 198–9, 208, 212–4, 219, 223, 227, 302 Bourgeois  276 Distribution of  296 Functional  247 Items of  45, 47 Objective  249 Private  14, 17, 26, 59, 66, 81, 131, 144, 155, 157–8, 160, 196, 199–200, 202, 215, 218, 225–6, 228, 258, 316, 329 Public/Social/common  2, 200, 218, 222, 226 Right of/to  154, 156, 180, 198 Rationality  12, 18, 28, 75, 83–4, 112, 286 Communicative  235 Critical  259 Formal  19 Human  293, 296 Idea of  19 Individual  296, 311 Instrumental  19 Modes of  120 Practical  241 Social  19–21 Substantive  19, 21–22 Superficial  20 Rawls, John  6, 11, 152, 159, 161, 277, 330 Reason  18–20, 25–6, 65, 171, 209, 221, 230, 239–40, 242, 245, 248, 294 Cognitive  255–6 Dialectical  342 Ethical  235, 246, 249, 261–2, 264–5 Innate  211 Moral  324 Natural  194, 197–200 Political  67 Practical  202, 238, 332–4 Purposive  67 Reich, Wilhelm  66–7, 80 Religion  12, 15, 74, 80, 124, 128, 156, 175, 179, 206–8, 213–4, 274 Riccardo, David  123, 272–3, 297

Index Rights Abstract (Abstractus Recht)  34, 147–9, 152 Equal  138–9, 176, 178, 218, 222, 226–8, 230, 274 Human  5, 69, 144, 153–4, 161, 165–9, 174–80, 183, 185–6, 190–1, 201, 204, 207, 210, 222, 224–5 Natural  147, 149, 152–4, 196–202, 204–11, 213–4, 221, 227 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques  64, 66, 80, 144, 204, 210, 284, 315 Sartre, Jean-Paul  55 Sennet, Richard  30, 50, 76 Smith, Adam  27, 48, 123, 189 Socialism  1–5, 60–2, 66, 83, 141, 183, 186, 189, 227, 229, 230, 250, 267, 270, 290, 301, 303–8, 311, 314, 329, 338–9, 347, 350–2, 355 Democratic  221, 229 True  167–8, 173–4, 182, 188, 307 Utopian  315 Socialists  10, 31, 177, 276, 291, 299, 339 French  183, 278 True  168, 172, 182, 306–7 Utopian  117–8 Spinoza, Benedict  19, 203, 338 Stirner, Max  46–7, 55, 89, 90, 98, 119, 273, 285, 307 Sweezy, Paul  109–10 Tawney, Richard  192 Taylor, Charles  268, 277, 314 Truth  68, 117, 129, 166, 235, 241 A priori  329 Analytic  329 Eternal  10 Moral  328–9 Objective  117 Political  224 Utilitarianism, see utility Utility  17, 59, 92, 113, 199, 273, 330, 333, 348 Values  16, 28, 79, 90, 120, 127, 129, 132, 142, 145, 162, 167, 178, 187, 191, 196, 200, 212, 222–3, 236, 240, 246, 249, 262–4, 266, 286, 290, 296, 298, 303–4, 318

361

Index Communist  163 Critical  146 Dominant  130, 138 Equal  139, 15708 Exchange  277, 346–7 Fundamental  144 Human  4–5, 17, 91 Liberal  153, 155, 160–1 Market  179, 199 Moral/ethical  146, 150–1, 197, 211, 225, 230, 235, 264, 270, 355 Objective  143 Oppositional  130 Political  147 Primary  133–4

Rational  137 Social  179 Virtue, see Ethics, Virtue Vorländer, Karl  2 Wealth  16, 29, 43, 44, 61, 64, 78, 83–4, 125, 140, 222, 226–7, 232, 272, 229, 300 Common  346 Elite  70 Objective  142 Social  225, 227, 229, 261 Weber, Max  19, 67, 75, 77, 266, 271, 281 Zigedy, Zoltan  165