Marxism
and
Ethics
Freedom, Desire, and Revolution
Paul Blackledge
Marxism and Ethics
SUNY series in Radical Social and Political Theory
————— Roger S. Gottlieb, editor
Marxism and Ethics
Freedom, Desire, and Revolution
PAUL BLACKLEDGE
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2012 State University of New York
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Blackledge, Paul, 1967– Marxism and ethics : freedom, desire, and revolution / Paul Blackledge.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4384-3991-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1.
Socialism—Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title.
HX45.B53 2012
171'.7—dc22
2011010773
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Kristyn, with love
Contents
Acknowledgments
ix
Introduction: Marxism’s Ethical Deficit
1
1
Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
19
2
Marx and the Moral Point of View
45
3
Ethics and Politics in Second and Third International Marxism
101
4
Western Marxism’s Tragic Vision: Socialist Ethics in a Non-Revolutionary Age
141
5
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to an Ethical Marxism
171
Conclusion: From Ethics to Politics
195
References
209
Index
229
Acknowledgments
Some of the arguments presented below were first rehearsed in articles
published in the journals Analyse and Kritik, Critique, History of Political Thought, International Socialism, Political Studies, Science and Society, Socialism and Democracy, and Studies in Marxism. Thanks to the editors and referees of these journals for forcing me to sharpen up my ideas.
Thanks also to the numerous other people who have helped along the way. These include the various organizers of, and contributors to, conferences and seminars organized by Historical Materialism in both London and New York, the Political Studies Association, Manchester Metropolitan University’s annual Workshops in Political Theory, the University of Glasgow Centre for Socialist Theory, Nanjing University’s Institute for Marxist Studies, the Department of Philosophy at Flinders University Adelaide, the London Socialist Historians, and the SWP’s annual Marxism conference. Thanks also to my colleagues in the School of Social Sciences at Leeds Metropolitan University. For more detailed criticisms I am indebted to Colin Barker, Ian Birchall, Joseph Choonara, Neil Davidson, Sam Farber, Rob Jackson, Kelvin Knight, Rick Kuhn, Jonathan Maunder, Peter McMylor, and Victor Wallis. Chris Harman’s untimely death in 2009 robbed the international left of one its most important thinkers, and me of an inspirational mentor. The arguments presented in this book are much stronger for his searching comments on an earlier draft. At a more mundane level, my colleagues on the Branch Committee of UCU lecturers’ union at Leeds Metropolitan University are a practical example of the virtues of solidarity defended in the pages that follow. My thanks to them. My sons Johnny and Matthew are now old enough to ask hard questions about my work. They do, and they
ix
x
Acknowledgments
are inspiring. My daughter Kate isn’t old enough to do anything but inspire; she’s a beautiful reminder of the better world we’re fighting for. She was born and almost died while I was writing this book. The staff at Leeds General Infirmary, particularly those on the children’s intensive care unit, reminded me what a wonderful institution the NHS continues to be, despite all the attacks that market-driven politicians continue to make on it. My heartfelt thanks to them. Most of all, though, this book could not have been written without the unstinting support of Kristyn Gorton. Kristyn, you are my rock, and this book is dedicated to you.
Introduction
Marxism’s Ethical Deficit
We have found no way to replace capitalism as an effective mode of production, and yet that capitalist society as it actually functions violates all defensible conceptions of a rational moral order.
—MacIntyre 1979, 4
Marxism and Contemporary Political Philosophy
In a recent and very powerful critique of the social and political irrelevance of much of contemporary political theory, Raymond Geuss somewhat idiosyncratically suggests that if “political philosophy wishes to be at all connected with a serious understanding of politics, and thus to become an effective source of orientation or a guide to action, it needs to return from the present reactionary forms of neo-Kantianism to something like the ‘realist view, or, to put it slightly differently, to neo-Leninism’ ” (Geuss 2008, 99). Concretely, Geuss refers to Lenin’s famous question “who whom?,” or as he expands it “who does what to whom for whose benefit” (Geuss 2008, 23–30). If for Lenin, as for Geuss, the point of this question is to reconceptualize supposed value judgments as appeals to objectivity, the problems associated with this approach have been well rehearsed within the academy. For instance, Alasdair Macintyre argues that Leninism tends to degenerate into a caricature of the capitalist managerial pseudo-expertise it is meant to counter (MacIntyre 1973, 341–2). Both Leninists and managers repeat, or so he insists, a more general failing of modern politics: its inability to transcend the nihilistic limitations which Nietzsche (mistakenly) claimed
1
2
Marxism and Ethics
a more general failing of modern politics: its inability to transcend the nihilistic limitations which Nietzsche (mistakenly) claimed to be a universal feature of the human condition: “that what purported to be appeals to objectivity were in fact expressions of subjective will” (MacIntyre 1985, 113).
This pseudo-objectivist cover for a nihilistic practice is often assumed to be an uncontroversial corollary of Marx’s claim that the class struggle is characterised by “an antinomy of right against right” between which “equal rights, force decides” (Marx 1976, 344; cf MacIntyre 1985, 262). For instance, Simon Critchley criticizes Marxism precisely for its lack of a secure moral foundation. He claims that the present epoch has given rise not only to wars, poverty, and an impending environmental crisis, but also to a general “feeling of the irrelevance of traditional electoral politics,” and that comparable historical situations generated one or both of two unfortunate responses: passive and active nihilism. Following Nietzsche (Nietzsche1967; Spinks 2003, 104–109), he argues that whereas the passive nihilist simply focuses on the “particular pleasures and projects for perfecting” herself, the active nihilist accepts that the world is meaningless “but instead of sitting back and contemplating” she counters the moral crisis with an attempt “to destroy this world and bring another into being” (Critchley 2007, 3–6). Critchley claims that Lenin’s vanguardism reproduced a form of active nihilism which reflected “the silence or hostility to ethics that one finds in Marx and many Marxist and post-Marxist figures” (Critchley 2007, 5, 93, 146; cf Sayer 2000, 174). In an effort to overcome the limitations of these responses, Critchley argues that we now need “a conception of ethics that begins by accepting the motivational deficit in the institutions of liberal democracy, but without embracing either passive or active nihilism” (Critchley 2007, 8).
This assessment of the contemporary relevance and historical coherence of Marx’s and Lenin’s ethics and politics undoubtedly reflect the current academic consensus, even amongst the small minority of contemporary theorists who take the ideas of Marx and Lenin seriously (Wright 2010, 89–109). Perhaps the foremost contemporary representative of this tendency was, until his untimely death, Jerry Cohen. He argued that Marx developed what he called an “obstetric conception of political practice,” according to which the role of a revolutionary socialist is, like that of a midwife, not to consider the “ideals” she wants to realise but rather more prosaically to “deliver the form that develops within reality” (Cohen 2000b, 43, 50, 54). Cohen identified what he believed were two devastating criticisms of this approach. First, it takes no account of the
3
Introduction
it takes no account of the fact that the inevitability of an outcome does not guarantee its desirability. Second, he claimed that a number of Marx’s most important scientific predictions had been falsified by history. For these reasons Cohen, as we shall see in Chapter 4, believed that the only realistic contemporary political option for socialists from the Marxist tradition is to embrace what Marx would have dismissed as utopian socialism.
Interestingly, those contemporary theorists who, like Cohen, are influenced by Marx, but, unlike him, remain optimistic about the possibilities for radical change tend to share his unease with the scientific claims of classical Marxism. Thus Antonio Negri has suggested snatching “Marxism back from its scientific status and restore it to its utopian, or rather ethical, possibility,” while John Holloway has juxtaposed a more powerful tradition of workers’ self-emancipation within Marxism to the pseudo-scientific attempts of Engels and Lenin to reduce it to a form of mechanical materialism (Negri 2008, 130; Holloway 2002, Ch. 7).
In what follows I argue that this interpretation of the relation between science and ethics in Marx and Lenin is mistaken, and that, by contrast, Lenin shared with Marx a commitment to an ethics of freedom which points toward a compelling ethical critique of capitalism. Against the general drift of theory’s “return to ethics” since the 1970s (Bourg 2007), I argue that Marx’s attempt to escape the impotence of moral theory is best understood not as a nihilistic rejection of ethics, but more narrowly as a refusal of the modern liberal assumption, best articulated by Kant, that moral behaviour involves the suppression of our naturally egoistic desires on the basis of a disembodied conception of reason. In opposition to this model, Marx suggested that through its collective struggles against exploitation and alienation the newly emergent working class both illuminates the historical (capitalist) character of the (un)freedom experienced by Kant’s supposedly universal atomized individuals whilst simultaneously engendering virtues of solidarity which point beyond the narrow parameters of his account of morality. Against Kantianism, Marx’s ethics amounts to a modern version of Aristotle’s account of those practices underpinning the virtues through which individuals are able to flourish within communities. And just as Aristotle posited a natural movement from ethics to politics—“The science that studies the supreme Good for man is politics” (Aristotle 1976, 64)—Marx moved from formulating a model of human good to fighting for the political implications of this model. If this movement from ethics to politics was perhaps a little too quick both for many of
4
Marxism and Ethics
If this movement from ethics to politics was perhaps a little too quick both for many of Marx’s academic interlocutors and for some of his political followers, the fact that Capital is best understood as an extended study of the potential for and limitations of human freedom suggest it would be a mistake to deny either the first ethical step of this movement or the unity of the movement as a whole.
I argue that classical Marxism, once adequately reconstructed and disentangled from its Stalinist caricature, provides the resources to underpin an ethical political practice that is able to move beyond the negativity of anti-capitalism toward a positive socialist alternative to capitalism. Far from being a form of class reductionism, Marx articulated and justified a conception of social subjectivity in which the struggle for freedom (real democracy) is not only the imperative of free agency but is also rooted in the “new fangled” working class’s emergent desire to overcome alienation through the concrete forms of collective struggle and solidarity which characterize the highpoints of class struggle. In arguing this case, I position myself in opposition both to traditional right-wing critics of Marx and to the arguments made by his much more impressive critics on the left.
The Turn to Ethics (and Back)
The arguments of Cohen et al. reflect a general movement within political theory toward a reinvigorated ethical discourse over the last few decades. Insofar as contributors to this theoretical turn have engaged with Marx, they tend to dismiss his ideas as a variant of mechanical materialism. Marx’s claim that “[t]he history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx & Engels 1973, 67), is typically counterposed to, and found wanting by contrast with, moral theory’s focus on “the recognition of the subjective freedom of individuals” (Habermas 1987, 17).
Nevertheless, though Marxism has been criticized for its supposed failure to theorize individual agency, modern moral theory has problems of its own. Of particular significance is the tendency of normative theorists to embrace a cacophony of incommensurable perspectives, each with little or no relationship to real politics (Geuss 2008). Indeed, Alasdair MacIntyre has powerfully made the case that modern moral discourse is but a “simulacra of morality.” Whereas in the classical world ethics had an objective character, the associated imperatives of the various
5
Introduction
the associated imperatives of the various modern moral standpoints can be reduced to a series of more or less persuasive attempts to justify personal preferences (MacIntyre 1985, p. 2). Contemporary morality is consequently characterized by “interminable” disagreements which seem immune to rational closure: debates on war, rights, and justice, etc. each generate a multiplicity of rationally justified opposing positions which exclude reason as an independent arbiter (MacIntyre 1985, 6–7).
It was precisely to avoid this and other limitations with moral theory that Louis Althusser articulated an anti-humanist interpretation of Marxism in the 1960s (see Collier 1981, 6). And if it is undoubtedly the case that the coordinates of the left’s embrace of the “return to ethics” from the 1970s and 1980s onward included the defeats suffered by the workers’ movement in that period, it was also made in reaction to the breakdown of Althusser’s earlier “return to Marx” (Wood 1995, 30–35; Elliott 2006, xiii).
Althusserianism itself emerged as the dominant voice of French Marxism in the early 1960s at the conjuncture of two events of global significance and a more local intellectual failure: Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” the Sino-Soviet split, and the waning of Sartre’s star on the Left Bank in the wake of the Parisian reception of structuralism. These events combined to create an intellectual space on the Marxist left within which Althusser’s voice rapidly became hegemonic (Poster 1975, 306; Callinicos 1983, 89; cf Blackledge 2006a, 162–166). If Khrushchev’s speech opened the door to a variety of “socialist humanist” criticisms of Stalinism, Lévi-Strauss’s powerful critique of Sartre’s revolutionary humanism alongside a more general move by some of the milieu of 1956 socialist humanists toward liberalism in the 1960s informed Althusser’s search for standpoint from which to counter what he perceived to be the malign influence of humanism on Marxism. This project took him into the orbit of Maoism, even as he remained a member of the French Communist Party (Anderson 1980, 107).
Against the socialist humanists, Althusser rejected both the view that Marx’s conception of the social totality could be equated with Hegel’s analysis of the same (Althusser 1969, 107–116), and the idea that Marxism was in any sense a humanist ideology. He dismissed the suggestion that there might be a moral component to Marx’s (scientific) thought (Althusser 1969, 219–247), and argued that the role of Marxist philosophy was to defend materialism against idealism: it was the “class struggle in the field of theory” (Althusser 1976, p. 64). Furthermore,
6
Marxism and Ethics
he claimed that the “class struggle” was the motor of history, which was made by “the masses” and not by “man.” In fact, he insisted that the concept of “man” was a bourgeois myth, and society, far from being made up of individuals, was constituted through “social relations,” such that, crucially, “history is a . . . process without a subject.” From this perspective, Althusser argued that philosophy’s role was a political one: to defend materialism by exposing the myths of idealism, including that of the human subject; for these myths would tend to turn “workers away from the class struggle” (Althusser 1976, 77, 79, 85, 83, 98). Althusser’s project thus amounted to a nominally left-wing response to the liberalism supposedly inherent to socialist humanism (Althusser 1976, 77, 79, 85, 83, 98).
This interpretation of socialist humanism was doubly problematic.
For although it was true that socialist humanism marked a point on a road toward liberalism for many of the generation of 1956 (Anderson 1980, 108), as we shall see in Chapter 5 this was by no means universally so. And by suggesting otherwise, Althusser, as Kate Soper points out, caricatured the complex historical movement that was socialist humanism in an attempt to justify his own allegiance to the Maoist variant of Stalinism (Soper 1986, 112–113). More importantly, his variant of Marxism proved incapable of offering a coherent alternative to Sartre’s thought that was able to account for either the mass upsurge in struggle associated with the year 1968 or the subsequent defeats of the struggles that flared up in the wake of that year.
If the defeats suffered by the workers’ movement over the next couple of decades informed a widespread questioning of the idea that the class struggle was the motor of history, the fact that Althusserianism was particularly ill equipped to make sense of these defeats reinforced the view that Marxism was inadequate to modern conditions (Callinicos 1982, Ch. 1; 1989, 165; Eagleton 1996, 1). It is perhaps not surprising that as defeats opened the door to neoliberalism, the feeling of impotence and anger on the left lent itself toward a trend to increasingly abstract ethical discourse. Commenting on this tendency, Alain Badiou suggests that for many ex-revolutionaries the turn to ethics was experienced as a return from Marx (politics) to Kant (morality) (Badiou 2001, pp. 1–2, 4). More specifically, Dominique Lecourt explains this shift as
1. On the relationship of Maoism to Stalinism see Harris 1978, pp. 283–295.
7
Introduction
a consequence of a narrowing “of the political vision” that had been expanded in 1968 (Lecourt 2001, 98).
David Harvey has articulated a particularly sophisticated Marxist variant of this trajectory. He argues that although contemporary socioeconomic trends generally tend to confirm Marx’s damning indictment of capitalism, they simultaneously undermine the agency Marx believed would dig capitalism’s grave. Whereas the old forms of capital accumulation depended upon the expansion of wage labour which in turn gave “rise to oppositional cultures,” the new “accumulation by dispossession” leads to the fragmentation of oppositional forces (Harvey 2005, 178). This analysis informs his engagement with human rights discourse. Commenting on the problems associated with this concept, Harvey argues that though “the neoliberal insistence upon the individual as the foundational element in political-economic life opens the door to individual rights activism . . . by focusing on these rights rather than on the creation or recreation of substantive and open democratic governance structures, the opposition cultivates methods that cannot escape the neoliberal framework” (Harvey 2005, 176). Nevertheless, he argues that it is difficult to conceive of an alternative to the social fragmentation characteristic of neoliberalism without some reference to universal rights. Harvey accordingly suggests that, despite the power of Marx’s criticisms of abstract moral discourse, the ideas of justice and rights could be deployed as a mechanism through which the formation of alliances amongst neoliberalism’s opponents might be forged (Harvey 1996, 361; 2005, 179–180).
Jerry Cohen’s embrace of egalitarian liberalism is rooted in a similar, though less sophisticated discussion of Marx’s analysis of class. Cohen claims that, for Marx, the proletariat was that class of people who “constituted the majority of society,” “produced the wealth of society,” “were the exploited people in society,” and “were the most needy people in society.” It followed from these propositions that workers would have nothing to lose in a revolution and consequently “could and would transform society.” Unfortunately, or so he insists, while there are today groups of people who fit into one or the 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 (Cohen 2000b, 107). It is for this reason that Cohen embraced a form of utopian socialism that converges with egalitarian liberalism.
From a very different perspective Alain Badiou has, despite his criticisms of the return to ethics—he insists “the Leninist passion for the
8
Marxism and Ethics
the Leninist passion for the real, which is also a passion for thought, knows no morality” (Badiou 2007, 13–14)—articulated his own ethical perspective; specifically a defence of fidelity to the “truth” of an “event.” Hallward points out that Badiou follows Lacan in believing that the “real” can only be accessed through singular encounters or events, and that “a truth persists . . . solely through the militant proclamation of those people who maintain a fidelity to the uncertain event whose occurrence and consequence they affirm” (Hallward 2003, xxv). Concretely, for Badiou, a Maoist militant in his youth, this involves his continuing commitment to the idea of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the context of its defeat (Badiou 2001, 40–57). Interestingly, his affiliation to a variant of Maoism informs his belief that the failure of this project marked the end of the possibility of a revolutionary alternative to capitalism. Consequently, although he continues to call himself a Communist he refuses the signifier Marxist as “the disorganised masses of global capitalism are no longer divided into classes” (Badiou quoted in Žižek 2008, 406). From this standpoint, Badiou defends the ultimately futile “imperative to ‘Keep going!’ ”: Capitalism might be the only game in town, but Badiou will have no truck with it (Badiou 2001, 91).
This general perspective is shared by Simon Critchley, one of the foremost contemporary (anarchist) representatives of the ethical turn. Critchley argues that while “the truth of Marx’s work” is to be found in his analysis of the “emergence and nature of capitalism,” his discussion of the political implications of this critique was far less successful. Against Marx’s (supposed) claim that social divisions were becoming simplified into an antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, Critchley suggests that the proletariat has become increasingly fragmented, and that capitalism is now opposed by a “multiplication of social actors” (Critchley 2007, 90–91). He insists that this situation has had the effect of undermining not only the means by which Marx conceived the socialist struggle against capitalism but also his notion of the ends of communism itself. For, whereas workers’ solidarity was the “condition of possibility for the Leninist withering away of the state,” he points out that “if class positions are . . . becoming more complex . . . we are stuck with the state.” Critchley attempts to squares this pessimistic analysis with a call for action through the medium of what he calls “a politics of resistance,” which although condemned to perpetual opposition need not, at least, degenerate into tyranny so long as radicals keep “a distance from the state”—he points to the Zapatistas as a concrete example of this strategy (Critchley 2007, 89, 92, 112).
9
Introduction
If Slavoj Žižek agrees with Cohen and Critchley about the facts of the dissolution of the old working class, he disagrees with their respective utopian and perpetually oppositional political responses to this context. He goes so far as to call for a repeat of Leninism: although he is keen to point out that “to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin” (Žižek 2008, 326, 420; 2002, 310). On the significance of this distinction, Žižek argues that he is not invoking, like the Trotskyists, a project of building renewed Leninist parties which might realise the unfinished business of 1917. Rather, he has the more limited goal of embracing what he calls a “politics of truth.” He insists, against those postmodern relativists whose celebration of difference sits so easily with the contemporary liberal consensus, that to repeat Lenin today means to fight for the idea of truth and to challenge the liberal notion that any struggle for an alternative to contemporary capitalism will lead to a new Gulag (Žižek 2002, 168). Concretely, Žižek’s attempted repetition of his politics both starts from and is intended to end with a negative act of resistance. In a discussion of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, he suggests that just as Bartleby replied to his master’s demands with the statement “I would prefer not to,” today both the negative critique of the status quo and the positive construction of an alternative to it should be founded upon a similar refusal (Žižek 2006, 342, 382). This reference to negativity allows Žižek a medium through which to pass from Critchley’s ethics of resistance to a new political space. As to the concrete shape of this alternative, Žižek criticizes those left neoanarchists such as Critchley who refuse to engage with the state for what he labels their tacit “Fukuyamaianism.” Žižek suggests that though few would explicitly embrace Fukuyama’s end of history thesis, Critchley’s political pessimism effectively involves a tacit acceptance of the claim that varieties of capitalism mark the parameters of modern politics. Their moral critique of the state serves to limit their radicalism to a form of perpetual resistance: “the contemporary liberal democratic state and the ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchistic politics are thus engaged in a relationship of mutual parasitism” (Žižek 2008, 349). In opposition to the type of abstract and impossible demands advocated by Critchley, Žižek insists that the left should make concrete demands which cannot so easily be dismissed, and which can be used to mobilize the new proletariat. He argues that Hugo Chavez’s capture of the Venezuelan state through a project anchored in the politicization of the slum dwellers points to politics that is infinitely more appealing than the clean-hands characteristic of the postmodern left’s anti-statism (Žižek 2008, 427).
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Marxism and Ethics
Amongst the targets of Žižek’s polemical advocacy of this project are Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. If Cohen’s and Critchley’s variants of ethical politics reflect their pessimism about the possibility of radical sociopolitical change, Hardt and Negri’s ethical anti-capitalism is almost willfully naive in its optimism. Like Cohen, Critchley and Žižek, they agree that the old proletariat is no more. However, they do not suggest that this class has ceased to exist, but rather that it has “been displaced from its privileged position in the capitalist economy.” In place of the proletariat, which they characterize narrowly as the “industrial working class,” Hardt and Negri locate the hegemonic form of production in the postmodern world to be the “immaterial labour” of the “multitude” (Hardt & Negri 2000, 53). They suggest that this type of labour produces “relationships and ultimately social life itself” and consequently view the multitude, rather than capital, as the dynamic force creating the modern world (Hardt & Negri 2004, 109). Following this proposition, and against the left’s pessimistic interpretation of the dissolution of the proletariat, they insist that “the hegemony of immaterial labour creates common relationships and common social forms in a way more pronounced than ever before.” This in turn means that, finally, Lenin’s goal of the “abolition of the state” might now be realized in a way that was impossible in 1917. For whereas Leninism, in a reflection of the class structure of Lenin’s age, involved the reduction of this desire to the “objective of the insurrectional activity of an elite vanguard” whose hierarchical structure consequently reproduced a new form of sovereign state, Hardt and Negri suggest that today this desire is expressed through the “entire multitude” which “needs to abolish sovereignty at a global level” (Hardt & Negri, 2004, 353–354). So optimistic are they about the potential of the multitude’s role in creating “the common” that they tend toward a variant of the obstetric approach to politics which Cohen mistakenly ascribes to Marx (Hardt & Negri, 2004, 113, 189). Thus, Negri has gone so far as to claim that his model “abolish[es] any difference whatsoever between ethics and politics” (Casarino & Negri 2008, 151).
The goal of formulating an “ethical project” rooted in “an ethics of democratic political action within and against Empire” (Hardt, & Negri 2009, vii) is welcome. But, as David Camfield points out, the Hardt-Negri analysis of contemporary production tends to underestimate the barriers to building a unified anti-capitalist movement, leaving them with simplistic political perspectives that are little more than “wishful thinking” (Camfield 2007, 47; cf Callinicos 2006, 140–151). Developing
11
Introduction
Developing a similar point, Žižek claims that Hardt and Negri, in a postmodern repetition of the limitations of the obstetric approach to politics, are too Marxist but not Leninist enough (Žižek 2008, 352, 360). Because they do not adequately address either the problem of state power or the mechanisms through which networking can lead to resistance, they grossly underestimate the difficulties faced by anti-capitalist activists, thus condemning themselves, despite their superficial differences with Critchley, to a similar perspective of perpetual opposition.
Although Žižek is surely right about this, because he accepts Cohen’s analysis, the dissolution of the proletariat his politics is perhaps best understood as the flipside of post-Marxist utopianism rather than as a realistic alternative to it. Both sides agree that the state is here to stay, but whereas Critchley, for instance, seeks to wash his hands of this problem, Žižek distinguishes himself by his embrace of its political consequences: the left, he argues, should not fear “directly confronting state power”; it should forego “boring ‘ethical’ considerations” to “admit revolutionary violence as a liberating end in itself” (Žižek 2008, 339, 406; 2006, 380). He justifies this position through reference to Lacan’s claim that “there is no big Other”: that is, there is no ethical standard external to the act by which the act might be judged (Žižek 2007, xxiv). Thus, like “the Lacanian analyst, a political agent has to commit acts that can only be authorized by himself, for which there is no external guarantee” (Žižek 2004, 515). Thus Žižek defends a politics of “pure voluntarism,” which he equates with Bolshevik practice in 1921 (Žižek 2009a, 154).
Alex Callinicos calls this perspective a form of “left decisionism,”
and justifiably complains that through it Žižek attempts to defend a return to a variant of what Trotsky labelled, in Our Political Tasks (1904), political “substitutionism”; the tendency of elites to substitute their activity for that of the mass of the working class. Given Callinicos’s claim, made from a heterodox Trotskyist perspective, that this general approach has blighted much of the history of the left in the twentieth century (Žižek 2007; Callinicos 2006, 113, 119), it is perhaps surprising to note that Žižek has attempted to recruit Trotsky to this perspective. He does this, revealingly enough, through an engagement with what Ernest Mandel described as Trotsky’s “worst book,” Terrorism and Communism. Mandel suggests that whereas Trotsky was generally the most severe critic of all forms of elitism, this text marked an aberration in his career because in it he “justified and defended the practice of
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Marxism and Ethics
justified and defended the practice of substitutionalism” (Mandel 1995, 83. For a powerful critique of this reading of Terrorism and Communism see Lih 2007).
If Žižek’s reinterpretation of Trotsky as a substitutionist involves a fundamental distortion of the latter’s contribution to Marxism, it does tend to fit with his repetition of Lenin without soviets. Against those who have judged both Stalinism and Western capitalism by the standard of the workers’ councils, Žižek suggests that, to them, the “standard Hegelian answer is quite sufficient: the failure of reality to live up to its notion always bears witness to the inherent weakness of the notion itself” (Žižek 2004, 516). This argument allows him to bypass the importance of soviets to Lenin’s project (Cliff 1976, 315–327) whilst simultaneously dismissing the reality of workers’ councils as they have emerged at high points of workers’ struggles throughout the twentieth century. This is the backdrop to his idiosyncratic claim that Chavez’s government is “coming close to what could be the contemporary form of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ ” (Žižek 2008, 379). Whatever Chavez’s merits, Žižek’s use of the phrase “coming close” in this sentence hides a multitude of sins. Gregory Wilpert has pointed out that, although community and labour movement groups push for reforms from below while Chavez pushes for similar reforms from above, between these two forces the old state bureaucracy, which has remained relatively intact, acts as a barrier to continued radicalization (quoted in Gonzalez 2009, 57). A key weakness in Venezuela, from this perspective, is precisely that there is not a workers’ state (dictatorship of the proletariat), and by suggesting otherwise, Žižek not only confuses changes in government with changes in the state, but also underestimates the powerful barriers that stand between Chávez and the realization of his most radical goals: the state on which he relies is integrated “into networks of capitalist social relations” (Holloway 2002, 14).
A consequence of the way the state is enmeshed in a web of capitalist relations is, as John Holloway argues, a tendency amongst even the most sincere revolutionaries who aim at conquering state power to reproduce the kinds of hierarchical thinking and practices that are characteristic of capitalism generally, and capitalist states more specifically, in a way that undermines their radicalism because it invariably leads to an “instrumental impoverishment of struggle” (Holloway 2002, Ch. 2, 17). This certainly seemed to be the case in 2007 when Žižek dismissed the mass anti-war demonstrations of 2003 as an irrelevant sideshow which merely allowed the protestors to “save their beautiful souls” whilst
13
Introduction
save their beautiful souls” whilst those in power carried on regardless (Žižek 2007). If this claim is the corollary of Žižek’s suggestion that Bartleby’s “no” should not simply be addressed to “Empire” but also to any forms of resistance that “help the system reproduce itself by ensuring our participation in it” (Žižek 2006, 383), its problem is not that there aren’t faux acts of resistance to capitalism and imperialism, but that the anti-war movement certainly is not one of them. Nevertheless, if Holloway’s arguments suggest real problems with Žižek’s statism, his own embrace of the Zapatistas as an alternative model of revolutionary change is, as Žižek notes, no less problematic (Holloway 2002, 211; Žižek 2008, 372, 427): their refusal to challenge for state power leaves capitalist hierarchies in place just as much as underestimating the capitalist nature of the existing state does.
Back to Marx
Žižek’s concern with politics has the great merit of focusing our attention on the practicalities attendant to the anti-capitalist slogan “another world is possible.” However, by skirting over the weaknesses with Chavez’s project he leaves unexamined the capitalist social relations embedded within the modern state. The limitations of this approach are, as we have suggested, the flipside of Critchley’s stance of perpetual opposition: both agree that the state is here to stay, but disagree on how to respond to this situation. The pessimistic assumptions about not merely the resilience of capitalism but more importantly the fragmentation of the working class also informs the embrace, by David Harvey and Jerry Cohen respectively, of human rights discourse and abstract utopianism. While John Holloway and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt are much more optimistic about the possibilities for the radical left, this is perhaps because they do not adequately engage with the problems highlighted by Harvey. So whilst Hardt and Negri’s political optimism, as embodied in the concrete utopia of the multitude, is appealing, it also has the unfortunate character of being empirically suspect and politically weak (Callinicos 2006, 140–151). Similarly, despite his formal optimism, the reality of the problems faced by the left is reflected in Holloway’s paralysis before the question of “what to do?”: his answer, “we don’t know” (Holloway 2002, p. 215; 2010, p.255).
There is an important sense in which Holloway is right to claim that for anti-capitalists “there is no right answer, just millions of experiments”
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Marxism and Ethics
(Holloway 2010, 256). However, though past struggles do not provide a simple template of “correct” practice, they do provide an invaluable source of insight into the dynamics of anti-capitalism. For this reason, Holloway’s rejection of a caricatured version of classical Marxism acts as a barrier to reassessing the lessons embedded within that tradition. In this book I argue that, once untangled from its caricatures, a renewed Marxism can overcome the limitations of these varied anti-capitalist perspectives. One aspect of this renewal is to rescue Marxist politics from its caricature as a lineal descendent of Jacobinism (see Blackledge 2010a, 148–153). Interestingly, Critchely, Hardt and Negri, Holloway, and Žižek all share a more or less explicit conflation of revolutionary (Marxist) with insurrectionary (Jacobin) politics (Hardt & Negri 2004, 250; Holloway 2002, 15; Critchley 2007, 60; Žižek 2007, viii–ix). This is an important issue, because it involves eliding over the ethical dimension of Marx’s politics. From his earliest writings, Marx drew on Hegel’s analysis of Jacobinism to criticise the one-sidedly political character of Robespierre’s practice (Marx 1975e, 413). Despite Hegel’s belief that the Terror was the inevitable excess which accompanied the progressive realization of the freedoms of civil society, he believed that the Jacobin dictatorship did not point toward a more free society because it was the culmination of the abstract political will’s attempt to impose its vision on society from the top down, in a way that was not based upon a prior transformation of the nation’s “dispositions and religion” (Hegel 1956, 446, 449, 450). It was because Marx took this criticism seriously that he rooted his politics in an analysis of immanent tendencies within capitalism. If these tendencies, as we shall see in Chapter 2, provide a solid answer to the charge that Marx was a nihilist, they are too often misrepresented as evidence of his supposed fatalism (i.e., Wright 2010, 89ff). I have challenged this interpretation of Marx’s theory of history elsewhere (Blackledge 2006a), and in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 I argue that once classical Marxism is disassociated from both fatalism and Blanquism it is a relatively straightforward task to reconstruct an ethical Marxist politics that builds upon the contributions of Lenin, Lukács, Gramsci, and others. In this way, I point to a positive model of revolutionary socialist politics that escapes the related charges of nihilism and statism.
If Althusser was right to suggest that Marx aimed at overcoming the limitations of moral discourse, he was mistaken to believe that this entailed a total rejection of the ethical dimension of action. Far from
15
Introduction
Far from being a nihilist, I argue that Marx made a fundamental contribution to ethical theory.
In Chapter 1 I attempt to frame the problem of morality for Marxism. After a brief discussion of the emergence of modern moral theory through a comparison with classical Greek ethics, I survey the strengths and limitations of some of the most important modern moral perspectives. This chapter concludes with an overview of Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim that no modern moral theory is able to provide a rationally justifiable guide to action, but rather that each approach is best understood as a more or less coherent justification of personal preferences. As we shall see, MacIntyre also claims that Marx’s suggested alternative to this emotivist culture must ultimately be judged a failure. The rest of the book is best read as an extended discussion of and attempted answer to this criticism.
In Chapter 2 I argue that Marx was neither a nihilist nor that he held incoherent views on ethics, but that he is best understood as developing a critique of existing social relations from the point of view of the struggle for human freedom. If the theoretical foundation of this perspective involved a reworking of Aristotle’s ethics through Hegelian lenses, this synthesis was made from the standpoint of workers’ struggles against capital. Indeed, it was on the basis of the virtues of solidarity reproduced in these collective struggles that Marx both condemned capitalism and rejected modern moral discourse. If he took it to be uncontroversial that freedom was the human essence, the practical contestation of this concept through the class struggle informed his rejection of Kant’s trans-historical and one-sided understanding of it. In its place, Marx embraced a model, as George Brenkert argues, of freedom as communal self-determination (Brenkert 1983, 88). And whereas Kant naturalized the modern experience of the atomized egoist who is fated to confront the world as a pre-given entity which limits her freedom to (at best) make minor local modifications, workers’ struggles reveal a modern agency that is (potentially) able to remake social relations. It was from this perspective that Marx grasped, in Lukács’ phrase, the “present as a historical problem” (Lukács 1971, 157). He suggested that, by contesting the freedom of civil society, collective working-class struggles simultaneously provided the standpoint which revealed the essence of capitalism as a system of exploitation and alienation and the basis from which to fight against its egoistic individualism in the name of the virtues of solidarity. He therefore implied a solution to
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Marxism and Ethics
He therefore implied a solution to the separation, characteristic of the modern moral theory, between “is” (science) and “ought” (ethics). So while Marx agreed with Kant that freedom was the universal human essence, because he historicized this concept he deepened it to be simultaneously the means to and end of the struggle against capitalism.
In the Chapter 3, I survey the Marxist debates on the ethics of socialism as they evolved within the Second and Third Internationals. I begin with a discussion of the debate between Kautsky, Bernstein, Bauer, and Vorländer occasioned by the emergence of revisionism in Germany at the turn of the last century. This debate signalled the appearance of a Kantian theme that has been repeated within the Marxist movement over the last one hundred years. I then move on to discuss the contributions made to a Marxist ethics of liberation in the inter-war period by Bloch, Gramsci, Lukács, Pashukanis, and Trotsky. These theorists articulated the most sophisticated responses to the problems with Second International Marxism. Specifically, I deal at length with the critique of Kantianism and defence of Leninism as outlined in Lukács’ magnum opus History and Class Consciousness, before moving on to discuss both Bloch’s and Gramsci’s contribution to a Marxist ethics and the debate on revolutionary morality between Trotsky and Dewey in the 1930s. My aim is to point to the contribution made by these revolutionaries not only to a theoretical solution to the problem of the ethical status of socialism but also to the practical consequences of this model in an account of ethical leadership.
In Chapter 4, I discuss some of the main post-war (post) Marxist attempts to salvage elements of Marx’s critique of capitalism after the apparent falsification of classical Marxism’s wager on the proletariat. Theorists associated with both the Frankfurt School and Analytical Marxism, despite their implacably opposed methodological assumptions, agreed that Marx’s politics were inadequate to the modern world. After discussing Adorno’s specific question of how, if at all, it is possible to live a good life in a bad world, I analyze the normative shift in Analytical Marxism that occurred in the wake of the criticisms, made from within this School, of its founding text: Jerry Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History (1978). Between these two sections I outline Sartre’s brilliantly flawed attempt to outline a revolutionary humanist ethics of liberation. To a greater or lesser degree, I suggest that in each case the retreat from classical Marxism informed an embrace of increasingly abstract ideals, which are susceptible to MacIntyre’s criticism of the emotivist character of modern moral discourse.
17
Introduction
In the final chapter, Chapter 5, I move on to discuss the debates on socialist humanism as they evolved in the wake of Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech.” Focusing on this debate as it developed within the British New Left after 1956, I argue that it reached its zenith with the contribution of the young Alasdair MacIntyre. After surveying the debate, I argue that in the 1950s and 1960s MacIntyre pointed toward the ethical culmination of the all-too-brief renewal of Marxism associated with the works of Lenin, Trotsky, and Luxemburg in the period before the Stalinist counterrevolution, and that this contribution to Marxism points beyond the relativism characteristic of the contemporary turn to ethics.
This perspective provides me, finally, with the resources from which to trace the practical consequences of the argument thus far, and to apply this interpretation of Marx to contemporary trends. My aim in this concluding chapter is to suggest, via a brief survey of the literature on the continued salience of class politics to the modern world, a means through which we might learn from and build upon the lessons of classical Marxism for contemporary anti-capitalist politics.
1
Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
A moral philosophy . . . characteristically presupposes a sociology.
—MacIntyre 1985, 23
The refutation must not come from outside, that is, it must not proceed from assumptions lying outside the system in question and inconsistent with it. The system need only refuse to recognise those assumptions; the defect is a defect only for him who starts from the requirements and demands based on those assumptions.
—Hegel 1969, 581
Marx and Modern Moral Theory
Modern moral philosophy emerged, in part, as a reaction against those materialist models of human agency which, drawing on themes from the scientific revolution, attempted to explain human behavior reductively by reference to our materiality. If Thomas Hobbes’ interpretation of human nature was perhaps the most powerful early attempt to articulate such an approach, the continued popularity of something like his reductive model amongst evolutionary psychologists and proponents of selfish gene theory is evidence that its appeal shows little sign of abating (Swarmi 2007; cf Rose & Rose eds. 2000). Whatever the merits of this type of explanation of human behavior, it is at its weakest when confronted with the problem of human freedom; the fact that we always choose how to respond to our natural urges and desires. It was in response to the dilemmas faced when making such reasoned choices that a countermovement to the reductive paradigm emerged. Classically articulated by Immanuel Kant, the idealist alternative to reductive materialism attempted
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the idealist alternative to reductive materialism attempted to disarticulate the act of choosing from our human desires: the new science of morality taught that an unbridgeable gulf existed between what we ought to do and what we are inclined by our nature to do.
There is something appealing about both materialist and idealist models. It seems intuitively right to suppose that underlying the complex web of our actions is a desire to meet our natural needs; while it also true that on many occasions we choose to act so as to suppress or order our desires. Nevertheless, despite the undoubted attraction of these models of agency, neither seems adequate to the task of grasping what is distinctive about our humanity. For if materialists reduce us to little more than machines built for the satisfaction of our natural desires, idealists suggest that we should repress our natural desires when we make decisions about the ways we ought to act. These approaches therefore look less like alternatives than they do two sides of the same mistake: both analyze our activities in a way that makes them “unintelligible as a form of human action” (MacIntyre 2008a, 58).
Marx, as Lukács argued, aimed to overcome the opposition between materialism and idealism. His intention was to extend Hegel’s attempt to synthesize causal, materialist models of behavior with purposeful, idealist accounts of agency, and, by divesting the result of its religious coloration, provide a framework through which our actions could be understood as human actions (Lukács 1975, 345). Marx’s approach to the problem of human action therefore involved an attempted sublation (aufhebung) of materialism and idealism that is best understood, as we shall see in the next chapter, through the lens of his Hegelian reading of Aristotle’s essentialism (Meikle 1985; cf MacIntyre 2008a). It was from this perspective that he disassociated his theory of history from both crude materialism and idealism (moralism).
“The chief defect of all hitherto-existing materialism,” he wrote, “is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object, or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradiction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism—which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such” (Marx 1975f, 422).
While this argument underpins Marx’s famous formal solution to the problem of structure and agency—“Men make history, but not of their own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted” (Marx 1973c, 146)—perhaps more importantly it illuminates the fundamental limitations of modern moral theory.
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Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
Contemporary Moral Discourse
The novelty of modern, post-Kantian, moral theory is perhaps best illuminated through a comparison with classical Greek conceptions of ethics. Greek ethics, especially as developed by Aristotle, was unlike modern moral philosophy in that it did not suppose that to be good entailed acting in opposition to our desires. Aristotle held to a naturalistic ethics, which related the idea of good to the fulfilment of human needs and desires (MacIntyre 1985, 122, 135). According to Aristotle the good is that “at which all things aim” and the good for man is eudaimonia (Aristotle 1976, 63). Literally translated this concept means something like being possessed of a “well-demon” or being “watched over by a good genius” (Knight 2007, 14; Ross 1949, 190). However, it is more usually, and usefully, rendered as happiness, well-being, self-realization, or flourishing. The latter of these translations perhaps gives the best sense of Aristotle’s meaning of eudaimonia as a way of life rather than a passing sensation, not a transitory psychological state but an “objective condition of a person” (Norman 1983, 39). In this model, the virtues are those qualities which enable social individuals to flourish as part of a community (MacIntyre 1985, 148). And because Aristotle recognized that humans are only able to flourish within communities—he defines us as “political animals”—he made a direct link between ethics and politics. The question of how we are to flourish lead directly to questions of what form of social and political community would best allow us to flourish. Consequently, as against those who would suggest an unbridgeable gulf between ethics and politics, as we noted in the introduction Aristotle declared the subject matter of his book on ethics to be politics (Aristotle 1976, 64; MacIntyre 1966, 57). More concretely, Aristotle was prescriptive in his model of happiness. He believed that each thing in the world has an end, or telos, that is some role which it is meant to play. So, just as, according to his preDarwinian biology, eyes have the end of seeing, humans have a specific end which differentiates us from the rest of nature and at which we must excel if we are to be truly happy. Uniquely amongst animals, or so Aristotle believed, humans have the power to contemplate eternal truths. Consequently, he surmised, at its best human happiness involves a life spent developing and using this faculty in line with the virtues (Ross 1949, 191). He therefore distinguished between contemplative activity and more mundane acts of production; associating eudaimonia with the former and not the latter. The intrinsic elitism of this argument
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Marxism and Ethics
The intrinsic elitism of this argument is all the more apparent when combined with his claim that the good life lived to its full was only open to those who had the leisure time to commit to a life of contemplation, and thus restricted to those who had the fortune to be born well, that is to be born a male member of an aristocratic family with enough wealth to underpin such an existence (Knight 2007, 26). Indeed, Aristotle’s discussion of the virtues as the moderate mean between competing vices of extreme, at the peak of which is a virtue of magnanimity which by its very nature was only open to the rich, has led one commentator at least to label him a “supercilious prig” (MacIntyre 1966, 66). Nevertheless, if the substance of Aristotle’s ethics is consequently colored by his own social location as a member of the elite of an elitist society—a type of “class-bound conservatism” in MacIntyre’s opinion (MacIntyre 1966, 68)—its form implies much more radical conclusions, and indeed opens the door to a far-reaching critique of social relations. For instance, Kelvin Knight argues that the distinctions Aristotle draws between theoria, the contemplation of that which is eternal, praxis, the contemplation of those processes that are subject to human action, and poiesis or productive activity, are unstable, such that Aristotle’s elitist conclusions are open to immanent critique from the standpoint of his own system (Knight 2007, 14ff; cf Nederman 2008). Nevertheless, beyond his elitism, Aristotle’s account of what it is to flourish presupposes a pre-Darwinian model of human nature that is at odds with both modern liberal conceptions of individual egoism and Marx’s historical humanism.
As opposed to Aristotle’s social conception of individuality, liberal political theory has at its center a model of egoistic individualism. While this model is often assumed to be obviously true, the biological fact of our individuality should not be confused with the ideology of individualism, which was first systematically conceptualised in Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651).
According to Hobbes the central fact of human nature is a desire for self-preservation. From this physiological starting point he concludes that in a situation of material scarcity individuals tend to come into conflict with each other over resources resulting in a “war of all against all” (Hobbes 1998, esp. Ch. 13). He argues that, in this context, concepts such as good and bad relate to the need for self-preservation. Accordingly, the might of the individual becomes the basis for what is right. Since the seventeenth century, moral theory has attempted to escape the relativistic consequence of Hobbes’ thought while continuing to accept something like his model of competitive individualism.
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Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
Marx points to a fundamental problem with this approach. He insists that to perceive oneself as an individual in opposition to society is a product of specifically modern social relations. The further one looks back into history, “the more does the individual . . . appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole.” Conversely, it is only in the eighteenth century, in the context of the newly emergent “civil society,” that social relations between people “confront the individual as mere means toward his private purposes, as external necessity.” One consequence of this fact is that “private interests,” assumed as fundamental in the ethics of both Kant and Hobbes, are in fact “already a socially determined interest, which can be achieved only within the conditions laid down by society and with the means provided by society” (Marx, Karl 1973a, 156). Against the ahistorical assumption of the universality of modern egoistic individualism, Marx extended Aristotle’s claim that we are “political animals” to suggest that it is because of our “gregarious” nature that we are able to “individuate [ourselves] only in the midst of society,” and that this process occurs at a historically specific juncture (Marx 1973a, 84). This explains why, for instance, whereas in pre-capitalist societies individuals conceived themselves through mutual relations involving obligations, in modern capitalist society individuals appear “unconstrained by any social bonds” (MacIntyre 1966, 121–128).
Engels claims that in the medieval period, despite the fact that the bulk of peasant production and appropriation was carried out individually, local bonds of solidarity amongst feudal Europe’s peasantry were underpinned by those forms of communal land which the peasantry needed in order to survive and which helped them resist lordly power (Engels 1972, 123, 216; Anderson 1974, 148). By contrast, the emergence and eventual domination of capitalist market relations has resulted in production becoming socialized while appropriation remains individualized (Engels 1947, 327–8). This generates a contradictory relationship. Socialized production means that humans depend for their very existence upon a massive web of connections through each other, whereas individual appropriation implies that these individuals confront each other merely as competitors. Modern moral theory arose against the background of this contradiction. Thus, whereas pre-modern thinkers had assumed that because people are social animals, individuals cannot be understood except as part of society, modern moral theory is confronted by the reality of society but can only conceive it negatively as a series of Hobbesian competitors.
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Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
struction of the concepts of the autonomous individual subject and of universal reason alongside a return to Kantian ethical concerns. One consequence of this contradictory movement is that whereas Kant’s moral theory presupposed as its point of departure the reasoning individual who was able to come to some universally valid moral conclusions, the poststructuralists’ deconstruction of these concepts led them toward locating the moral law in “sheer arbitrary rhetorical force” (Eagleton 1993, 129; 2003, 152–3). More specifically, deconstruction’s focus on the concept of the other has led to an extreme form of relativism which can if taken seriously, according to David Harvey, lead to the conclusion that “it would be just as unjust to try to override the cultural achievements of slavery, apartheid, fascism, or caste society as it would be to deny the rights to self-determination of native-Americans or Vietnamese peasants” (Harvey 1996, 351).
One attempt to escape this predicament involves a return to classical (Greek) virtue ethics (Slote 1997). Instead of focusing on the intentions of actors or the consequences of actions, virtue ethicists insist that the key ethical question should be “what kind of person ought I be?” While Aristotle was able to answer this question through reference to his pre-Darwinian model of human nature, an adequate modern virtue ethics must be rooted in a model of human nature that is compatible with Darwin without succumbing to the reductive temptations of social Darwinism. It was Hegel who first pointed toward a solution to this dilemma by suggesting a historical model of human essence.
Ethics beyond Aristotle and Kant
Despite their profound differences both modern and classical conceptions of ethics tend to naturalize the very different social contexts in which they were formulated (MacIntyre 1985, 159). Hegel’s great contribution to moral theory was grounded in his historical comparison of these two contexts: he asked how and why moderns are different from ancient Greeks. By doing this he began a process, later completed by Marx, of synthesizing and overcoming the limitations of both Kantian morality and Aristotelian ethics.
As we will see in the next chapter, while Marx shared with Kant the idea that freedom was the essence of humanity, he also insisted upon the concrete natural and historical form taken by that freedom. This
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This alternative to the reified conceptions of humanity common to much of modern moral philosophy drew upon the works of both Aristotle and Hegel. And if we follow Knight’s suggestion that Aristotle’s substantive elitism is open to an immanent critique from the standpoint of his own system, it is rather beside the point to claim, as does Rodney Peffer, that Marx’s views on morality cannot be “completely assimilated to Aristotle’s”: the issue is rather that their methods converge in important ways (Peffer 1990, 102; Gilbert 1984, 155). For if humans have an essence, and if the aim of human life is to realize the potential of this essence, it follows that social structures which impede this should be challenged (Eagleton 1997, 17–33). Indeed, Richard Miller points out that Marx’s theory of alienation recalls Aristotle’s “description of deprivations which . . . would deny people a good life” (Miller 1989, 178; 1984, 76ff; cf Wood 1981, 126).
According to Allen Wood, Hegel’s contribution to ethical theory is perhaps best understood as an attempt to synthesize the most powerful elements of Kant’s and Aristotle’s thought (Wood 1990, 7). Just as Aristotle sought to base his ethics on a model of human essence, Hegel insisted that ethics must start from a model of “what human beings are,” for it is only when they are so grounded that they are able to say “that some modes of life are suited to our nature, whereas others are not” (Wood 1990, 17, 32). Nevertheless, while Hegel follows Aristotle in assuming that the goal of life is self-realization, he broke with him in a typically modern way by recognizing that it is only by way of freedom that this is possible. Consequently, whereas Aristotle insisted that happiness is the end of life, Hegel believed that the end of life was freedom (Wood 1990, 20, 33). Moreover, by linking the pursuits of happiness and freedom—for instance when he wrote that “the moral consciousness cannot forgo happiness”—Hegel suggested a solution to the paradox characteristic of Kant’s morality noted above, whereby Kant believed that to act from a sense of duty meant repressing our desires but also that by thus acting we would be rewarded with happiness (Solomon 1983, 568).
For Hegel, to act freely involved acting in accordance with necessity, that is, in line with our human needs and desires (Lukács 1975, 354; Engels 1947, 140; Hegel 1956, 26; Adorno 1973, 249). He therefore criticized “Kant for seeing dichotomies in the self between freedom and nature . . . where he ought to have seen freedom as actualizing nature” (Wood 1990, 70). He believed that moral laws, far from being
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Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
far from being universal in a transhistorical sense, are in fact only intelligible “in the context of a particular community,” and are universalizable only in the historical sense that “communities grow and consolidate into an international community” (Solomon 1983, 480–481). Indeed, Robert Solomon points out that when someone claims to act out of conscience, according to Hegel they are in fact engaged in behavior that is in line with beliefs which “echo” those of the moral community of which they are a part (Solomon 1983, 577). Hegel called this unity of the subjective and objective aspects of ethics in social life Sitttlichkeit, or ethical life, which he understood to encompass both social institutions and “subjective dispositions” (Wood 1990, 196). Through this concept Hegel pointed to the social content to the idea of freedom by relating it to the movement of “a living social whole” (Lukács 1975, 153). Specifically, whereas liberals embrace an ahistorical conception of human nature, Hegel historicized the concept of essence by conceptualizing humans through their social relations. He nevertheless immunized his thought against possible relativistic consequences of this theoretical movement by reserving the idea of ethical life for those social orders that rationally articulated the relationship between the community and the freedom of the individual (Wood 1990, 205, 208). In this way he worked a dramatic change on Aristotle’s conceptualization of happiness. For if there is an important sense in which human nature evolves with the cultural evolution of communities, then so too does the concept of self-realization. Wood consequently labels Hegel’s theory as a form of “dialectical or historicised naturalism” (Wood 1990, 33). From this perspective, Hegel partially accepts Kant’s argument that ethical norms be used as standards which act as a constraint on our desires. However, as opposed to Kant, he also argues that duties need not merely be things I ought to do but can in certain circumstances be things, in Wood’s words, “I spontaneously want to do.” Indeed, he insists that the good only truly becomes good when it is reconciled with our desires (Wood 1990, 210, 214). This approach involved a conception of desire that was both historical and critical, and therefore a conception of essence which escaped the abstractions of liberal political theory.
Unfortunately, if the great strength of Hegel’s ethics was his attempt to overcome the opposition between Aristotle and Kant through a historicized conception of essence, his own positive account of the institutions through which the freedom of moderns could be realized was far from persuasive (MacIntyre 1966, 209). This reflected, as Marx suggested,
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a deeper limitation with his thought: despite his nominally historicized conception of essence, because he conceived the self-transformative labour at the core of his theory of history as intellectual labour while accepting the political economists’ ahistorical conception of productive labour, in practice he was unable, as Chris Arthur comments, to “see beyond the horizon of capitalism” (Arthur 1986, 68). Consequently, according to Lukács, although Hegel criticised “the narrow and confined character of Kant’s moral doctrine, he does not manage to surpass this limitation himself” (Lukács 1980a, 71). This contrasts with Marx’s standpoint, which as we shall argue in the next chapter allowed him to recognize the specifically capitalist nature of alienation and therefore the anti-capitalist implications of the struggle for freedom. It is because Hegel conceived history as the history of consciousness rather than as the practical transformation of the world and humanity through productive labour he was ultimately unable either to “make a radical critique of the real world of estrangement” or to point to its “practical objective transformation” (Arthur 1986, 61).
The Crisis of Modern Moral Theory
The problem of how one might live a virtuous life in a world in which community and the virtues are constantly undermined by the rule of capital has taxed some of the most important moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Commenting on the culture in which deontological and consequentialist approaches to morality dominate, Elizabeth Anscombe famously argued that whereas consequentialism is obviously inadequate as a theory claiming to guide our actions, contemporary moral discourse more generally—that is morality understood in broadly Kantian terms—continues in the shadow of a past moral framework, but without the belief in a law-giving deity through which such an approach might be justified.
To have a law conception of ethics is to hold that what is needed for conformity with the virtues failure in which is the mark of being bad qua man (and not merely, say, qua craftsman or logician)—that what is needed for this, is required by divine law. Naturally it is not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a law-giver;
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Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
like Jews, Stoics, and Christians. But if such a conception is dominant for many centuries, and then is given up, it is a natural result that the concepts of “obligation,” of being bound or required as by a law, should remain though they had lost their root; and if the word “ought” has become invested in certain contexts with the sense of “obligation,” it too will remain to be spoken with a special emphasis and special feeling in these contexts. (Anscombe 1981, 30)
Naturally it is not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a law-giver; This argument greatly influenced Alasdair MacIntyre’s claim, noted above, that in the modern world ethics has become but a “simulacra of morality,” characterised by interminable debates where the arguments presented by either side are “incommensurable” while purporting to present “impersonal rational arguments,” which in fact are premised upon a variety of distinct historical antecedents (MacIntyre 1985, 8–10).
In an early review of Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, MacIntyre claimed that despite the undoubted power of Rawls’ arguments, his thesis was undermined by his unwitting confusion of general and historically specific characteristics of human rationality: the “initial situation” which Rawls deployed as a convenient analytical tool from which to imagine “rational agents” agreeing upon the basic structure of society reflected not some pristine human rationality but a bias toward modern bourgeois individuality (MacIntyre 1972; 1988, 133). Beyond smuggling a bias toward bourgeois individualism into his moral theory, Rawls smuggled more specific aspects of his own egalitarianism into his first principles. While there was much that was subsequently persuasive about Rawls’ arguments, these tacit assumptions would act as the Achilles’ heel of his arguments, undermining their appeal to all who did not share his starting point.
More generally, MacIntyre argues that in the contemporary world, though we continue to use many of the concepts associated with classical ethical theory, these concepts have been unhinged from the social context in which they once made sense. It is as if, he argues, some dramatic catastrophe was to overcome our world, the consequences of which included the destruction of our existing scientific culture, right down to the teaching of elementary science in schools. Assuming that a movement arose in the wake of this event which sought to reinstitute science, but in a world without scientists or even a basic knowledge of science and with only a few fragments of surviving scientific texts, the
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the resultant pot pourri of decontextualized snippets of scientific knowledge would be but a pathetic parody of the original, now lost, culture. Similarly, he argues that whereas conceptions of good and bad, etc. once had definite meanings within classical literature, today they have become disembodied. For instance, MacIntyre argues that Homer believed that to be good was to play a particular social role well—thus it would have been meaningless to ask “was he a good man?” in some generic sense rather than was he a good athlete/king/soldier, etc. in a sense that is partly comparable to modern questions such as “is she a good electrician?.” It follows that to be virtuous involves work toward excelling in your social role. For Aristotle, the moral question has changed but is still recognizably related to Homer’s. To be good, from his perspective, is to be a good citizen of the polis, and this involves carrying out some specific socially accepted role as part of the polis. In both of these cases the separation of facts and values does not exist in the way that it does within, and in large part defines, modern moral theory. MacIntyre suggests that where there had once been socially accepted norms, there exists today a cacophony of incommensurable moral perspectives which can be reduced to more or less coherent expressions of personal preferences (MacIntyre 1985, 122, 135).
Developing this argument, MacIntyre claims that Marx was “right when he argued against the English trade unionists of the 1860s that appeals to justice were pointless, since there are rival conceptions of justice formed by and informing the life of rival groups.” Furthermore, although he was mistaken in his belief that contestations over the nature of justice were secondary social phenomena, he was “fundamentally right in seeing conflict and not consensus at the heart of modern social structure”: “modern politics is civil war carried out by other means.” Interestingly, MacIntyre argues that the pervasiveness of these conflicts in the modern world was classically expressed in the work of Nietzsche (MacIntyre 1985, 19, 113, 250, 252–3). However, he claims that Nietzsche’s perspective on the world is best understood not, as Nietzsche himself would have it, as a radical alternative to eighteenth and nineteenth century liberal individualist ethical thinkers, but rather as a “representative moment in [the] internal unfolding” of this system of thought. As an alternative to the worldview which culminated in Nietzsche, MacIntyre suggests that some form of Aristotelianism is able both to account for the impasse of liberal individualism and to offer the basis for an alternative tradition through which we might restate our “moral and social attitudes and
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Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
moral and social attitudes and commitments” in such a way as to restore their “intelligibility and rationality” (MacIntyre 1985, 259). Commenting on a number of expected criticisms of this argument, MacIntyre predicted that although Marxists might accept his critique of liberal individualist—bourgeois—morality, they would reject his “realistic” political alternative to the status quo.
Against Marxism, MacIntyre posited a number of arguments.
First, in the century since Marx’s death, insofar as Marxists had taken “explicit moral stances” they tended to fall back on either one form or another of “Kantianism or utilitarianism.” Second, Marx failed to conceptualize the means through which his vision of “a community of free individuals” was to be constructed. Third, Marxists in power had tended to become Weberians. Fourth, Marx’s political optimism was undermined by capitalism’s tendency to morally impoverish the human resources necessary to renew society. Additionally, MacIntyre insisted that anyone who took Trotsky’s mature analysis of the Soviet Union seriously would be drawn to embrace a form of political pessimism that was incompatible with Marxism. Finally, he argued that in conditions of moral impoverishment, far from offering an adequate alternative to Nietzschianism, Marxists were wont to construct their own “versions of the bermensch”: “Lukács’s ideal proletarian,” or “Leninism’s ideal revolutionary” for instance (MacIntyre 1985, 261–2).
MacIntyre claims that the failure of Marx’s politics was rooted in a systemic problem with his theory of history. His economic predictions had been found wanting by the test of history, and the working class had failed to become the self-conscious revolutionary agency that Marx had envisaged. In fact, Marx’s analysis of capitalism was correct “only so long as the capitalist does not become conscious of those workings in a way that enables him to modify them.” However, capitalists had in the second half of the twentieth century attained such a consciousness and consequently had suitably modified the system. Furthermore, the working class “was either reformist or unpolitical except in the most exceptional of situations.” Indeed, Marx’s failings as a political economist informed his failings as a politician: economic expansion underpinned a growth in the standard of living of workers, which in turn fostered an unpolitical and reformist way of life (MacIntyre 1995, 83–4, 119–120).
Marx had failed to see how politics and ideology could fundamentally affect economics in the way noted above because he had become hamstrung by his use of the base-superstructure metaphor, according to which, or so MacIntyre claimed in 1968, these two elements of the
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these two elements of the social totality “stand in external, contingent, causal relationship to each other.” Repeating this claim in 1995, he suggested that this reified way of conceptualizing the relationship between politics, economics, ideology, and so forth reflected the extent to which Marx’s thought was “distorted in a characteristically bürgerlich manner” (MacIntyre 1995, xviii, 136–137; 1970, 60–61). Marxism was a product of its time, and this was its undoing. For while Marx attempted to theorize praxis, his deployment of the base-superstructure metaphor saw him revert back toward crude mechanical materialism. Nevertheless, the base-superstructure metaphor was not the fundamental problem with Marxism; rather this prize was reserved for Marx’s undeveloped model of praxis itself.
In his most developed mature criticism of Marx, “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road not Taken,” MacIntyre argues that Marx was too impatient when he left philosophy in 1845, and that had he developed the implicit Aristotelianism of his concept of working-class practice he might have recognised the limitations of this practice, and, consequently, the utopian nature of his own political optimism. It was to Marx’s credit, MacIntyre argues, that he recognized that the standpoint of civil society could not be overcome by theory alone, but it was unfortunate that he had not given greater philosophical consideration to the nature of the practice through which it might be sublated (MacIntyre 1998, 230). While it was not fatal to the Marxist project that Marx had not made explicit the Aristotelian assumptions which underpinned his Theses on Feuerbach—MacIntyre notes that others, as we have noted above, have made explicit what was implicit—it was disastrous for his project that he left unexamined the nature of proletarian activity itself. He argues that the modern proletariat is unable to embody the type of social practice imagined by Marx, and illustrated by Edward Thompson in his The Making of the English Working Class. Indeed, he claims that the process of proletarianization, by contrast with Marx’s expectations to the contrary, has simultaneously made resistance a necessary part of the lives of the working class, while robbing this resistance of its emancipatory content. Proletarianization, he claims, “tends to deprive workers of those forms of practice through which they can discover conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance” (MacIntyre 1998, 232). Developing this point, Kelvin Knight argues that because workers are not only exploited and alienated, but also find themselves, insofar as they act as workers, manipulated by managers, then their typical form of activity cannot generate those goods internal to practice which
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then their typical form of activity cannot generate those goods internal to practice which MacIntyre believes are essential if a virtuous alternative to capitalism is to emerge in practice (Knight 2000, 86; 2007, 149). Consequently, MacIntyre has concluded that Marx’s wager on the working class cannot today be justified, and, because Marxism cannot legitimately claim to be the theoretical expression of working-class practice, to the extent that Marxists articulate ethical critiques of capitalism they tend to revert to one or other form of modern bourgeois morality: typically either consequentialism or deontology.
According to MacIntyre, Marx’s theories of exploitation and alienation imply that because capitalist production involves the separation of means and ends, working-class producers “cannot be understood as engaged in practices with internal goods” (Knight 2007, 149; 1998, 232). Even when workers combine in struggle to resist the dehumanizing effects of capitalism on their lives, they tend to do so within parameters set by capitalism. So, in struggling for a “fair day’s wage,” for instance, workers accept the separation of means and ends characteristic of capitalism. Consequently, MacIntyre concluded that both proletarian productive activity and the struggles of workers against that activity are conceived as being forever trapped within the confines of civil society.
It was for this reason that Marxism failed to become the theoretical expression of real workers in struggle, but rather became the pseudo-science of the self-appointed “leaders” of the workers’ movement whose claims to understand the iron laws of history were but masks for another incommensurable moral framework in a world where ethical positions generally have become more or less coherent expressions of personal preferences (MacIntyre 1985, 19). It was the elitism of Marxism thus presented which tied it too closely to modern society, and which therefore opened it to subsumption amongst the traditions criticized in After Virtue. Thus, it was the consequentialist framework allegedly shared by Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin, which revealed how far their critiques of capitalism were not simply marked by their origin within bourgeois society but had in fact failed to go beyond the typically bourgeois separation of means and ends. Although Marxists such as Guevara or Liebknecht broke with this framework, they did so only to replace Bentham with Kant: the bourgeois frame of reference was apparent at every turn (Knight 2007, 119–122). So while, in 1977, MacIntyre argued that “one Liebknecht [is worth] a hundred Webers” and “one Jaurès is worth a hundred Durkheims,” he bemoaned the fact
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” he bemoaned the fact that the Marxism of these virtuous men had undermined their attempts to break free of bourgeois modes of thought (Knight 2007, 127, 172).
Conclusion
Given the content of this argument, it is perhaps surprising to discover that in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as we shall see in Chapter 5, in a brilliant contribution to the British New Left’s debates on the nature of socialist humanism, MacIntyre prefigured many of the criticisms of contemporary moral philosophy that were later extended on the pages of After Virtue but with one very important difference. In this period he not only declined the suggestion that Marx’s mature writings had degenerated toward a form of mechanical materialism, but also argued that a viable virtue ethics could be reconstructed from Marx’s comments on the subject which could provide a powerful basis from which to articulate an alternative both to Stalinism and liberalism. He argued that Marx had provided a framework through which the limitations of Kantianism and utilitarianism could be historically explained, whilst simultaneously providing a framework to understand how human desires might evolve to provide a materialist basis for the realization of something like Kant’s categorical imperative. He formulated this argument through an attempt to disarticulate Marx’s theory of history, including his use of the base-superstructure metaphor, from what he then considered to be its positivist caricature at the hands of both liberals in the West and Stalinists in the East.
He therefore pointed toward a solution to the paradox by which Marx famously rejected the suggestion that socialism be grounded in some abstract moral principles while simultaneously making ethical criticisms of capitalism. The question that I ask in this book is “Need we accept MacIntyre’s mature critique of Marxism, and if not, does Marxism indeed provide the resources which might help both to extricate us from the crisis of modern moral philosophy, and also inform those anti-capitalist struggles which could contribute to overcoming the social basis for our contemporary moral fragmentation?.”
I attempt to show that Marx did succeed in overcoming the limitations of both modern moral theory and modern materialism while preserving insights from each: he articulated a non-reductive, but scientific, basis for human action that escapes the weaknesses of “commonsense”
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morality. In so doing, Marx showed, contra the moralists, that although there are no disinterested reasons for action, in certain circumstances specific interest groups can act in the universal interest. Moreover, he showed that under modern capitalist relations of production working-class revolutionary practice could be in the universal interest whilst simultaneously realising such needs for solidarity which make socialism a real historical possibility. Indeed, I argue that Marxists have, in their most sophisticated writings on the subject, outlined a basis from which they are able to justify revolutionary socialist practice through reference to Marx’s implicit Aristotelianism, by which the goods internal to workingclass struggles are both the means and ends of virtuous activity. Specifically, I argue that Marx showed that collective working-class struggles against capitalism not only provide a viable, virtuous alternative to the consequentialist and deontological ethics that are hegemonic within contemporary political philosophy but also point to the concrete social content of the struggle for freedom in the modern world.
2
Marx and the Moral Point of View
The criticism of religion ends with the doctrine that for man the supreme being is man, and thus with the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a debased, enslaved, neglected and contemptible being.
—Marx 1975c, 251
Introduction
This chapter opens with a discussion of Marx and Engels’ famously ambiguous comments on the issue of ethics and morality. Against the dominant reading of these texts, according to which “no interpretation of Marx’s various remarks on justice and rights can make them all consistent with one another” (Elster 1985, 230), I follow those, such as Alan Gilbert and Roy Edgley, who have suggested that a coherent ethics can be reconstructed from their writings once they are adequately contextualized and understood (Gilbert 1984, 155; Edgley 1990, 24). Specifically, Marx and Engels’ approach (Blackledge 2006a, 20) to the issue of morality is best understood as an aspect of a broader methodology which encompasses both normative and explanatory social theory: Marx’s critique of political economy, his theory of history, his ethics, and his politics are all aspects of a greater whole which derives from viewing society from the standpoint of the working class. This aspect of Marx’s work sets it apart from modern moral theory in a way that has confused so many who have interpreted his work from the moral standpoint. Marx not only claims that workers’ collective struggles illuminate the historical specificity of capitalism’s exploitative and alienated essence, he also suggests that through their collective struggles
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he also suggests that through their collective struggles workers are able to realize an emergent need for solidarity through which they are able to reproduce virtues which begin to overcome the dualism between the good of each and the good of all in a way that points to a possible future beyond the capitalist mode of production. Ironically, it is precisely because Marx recognizes that everyone (himself included) “believes” in morality, truth, justice, and so on that these concepts cannot, as Hal Draper points out, act as “substitutes” for concrete political analyses of concrete situations (Draper 1990, 29, 31). However, it does not follow from Marx’s argument that morality is an inadequate basis for action in socially divided societies that he was a nihilist. It is better to understand him as an ethical thinker who is a stern critic of moralism, where the term moral is understood to emphasize an abstract imperative to action on the individual by contrast with (virtue) ethics which stresses the development of “individual character” in a sociohistorical context (Williams 2006, 6). More generally, Marx’s criticisms of abstract moralizing do not reflect a tendency in his work to dismiss purposeful human agency. Rather, they illuminate the importance of such agency to his model of social transformation. It is because, in Marx’s view, the struggle for socialism involves concrete and complex social movements whose outcome cannot be determined in advance that abstract concepts, such as moral abstractions, must be replaced by more concrete categories.
While this approach is a powerful counter to moralism, it has had the unfortunate consequence of obscuring the ethical dimension of Marx’s thought. In fact, not only is this aspect of his work often only implied, frequently it is actually denied. If these denials inform the manner in which his contribution to the study of ethics is often dismissed within the academy, the tendency to overlook his ethics also reflects the way that his approach to such issues defies the categories of contemporary moral discourse. For, whatever the undoubted differences between and within modern social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantianism, and even contemporary virtue ethics, Marx characterised many of the seminal texts of these traditions as examples of the type of reified thinking typical of attempts to understand the world from “the standpoint of political economy” or, what is a synonym for this, “the standpoint of civil society.” By this, Marx meant that these theorists tended to naturalize that which was a product of history; the modern notion that society is made up of atomized and egoistic individuals. Whether modern moral philosophers extend this assumption to derive egalitarian or libertarian,
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deontological or consequentialist conclusions from their work is of secondary importance to this fact, for Marx shows that modern egoistic individualism, far from being a self-evident starting point for theories which aim to inform human behaviour, is itself a product of history.
Moreover, although modernity can be characterized, in part, by the rise of egoistic individualism, it has also witnessed a series of titanic collective struggles for freedom which do not fit easily with the models of selfish egoism assumed to be true by the classical political economists. Indeed Marx’s ethics of freedom, while built upon insights taken from Hegel’s attempt to deepen Kant’s ethics through a synthesis of elements of his thought with aspects of Aristotelianism, was only possible from the perspective of these struggles. It was from this vantage point that Marx recognized the historical nature of modern individualism and the real unfreedom and alienation that lies beneath capitalism’s formal freedoms. Marx wagered that the need for solidarity and collective organization amongst workers creates the potential not only to expose but also to overcome the narrow confines of bourgeois society: his was most definitely an ethical politics.
Marx and Morality
A fundamental problem common to any attempt to reconstruct a Marxist ethics from Marx’s writings is that he nowhere wrote anything comparable to the classical works of ethical theory penned, for instance, by Aristotle, Mill, or Kant. Kamenka has claimed that if an anthology entitled “Marx on Ethics” were to be published, “it would contain no passages that continue to be strictly relevant for more than three or four sentences” (Kamenka 1969, 6). Nevertheless, while Marx did not write a work of ethics, he did engage with ethical themes throughout his oeuvre such that Brenkert is justified in claiming that “much of Marx’s writings, for example the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, The Communist Manifesto, even Capital and the Grundrisse, sound very much like moral tracts—or at least significant parts of them do—even though little ‘moral language’ appears in them” (Brenkert, 1983, 15).
It is perhaps as a consequence of the scattered and unsystematic nature of Marx’s remarks on ethical themes that academic discussions of his approach to issues of socialist morality tend to focus upon individual sentences which when taken out of context are easily misconstrued.
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Thus, typically, Marx’s “scientific” criticisms of moral theory and moralizing are juxtaposed to his own moral condemnations of capitalism and the like to suggest the irredeemably inconsistent quality of his thought (Kamenka 1969, 5). While this is an easy rhetorical ploy, it is an uncharitable one that serves to obscure more than it illuminates. By contrast, Brenkert points out that it is of the first importance when discussing Marx’s views on morality to understand that his seemingly contradictory remarks on the subject are conceptualized as part of his broader social theory (Brenkert 1983, 132–3). For beneath the superficial contradictions manifest in Marx’s comments on ethical matters, there is a deeper consistency to his approach to politics. To grasp this involves extricating oneself from the positivistic assumptions that underpin the caricatures of both Marx’s political economy and his theory of history.
It is important to remember that although Marx wrote in a language inherited from Hegel and Aristotle, he has often been criticized as though he was a positivist and technological determinist. For example, in the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, he wrote that “[a]t a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution” (Marx 1970, 20). Richard Miller points out that when statements such as this are interpreted through a positivist lens, Marx is construed as making hard technologically deterministic predictions which are not only falsifiable but have in fact been falsified. As Miller argues, neither Marx nor “most of his insightful followers” understood historical materialism in this way (Miller 1984, 7, 271ff). Developing a similar point, Scott Meikle suggests that historical materialism is best understood as locating tendencies within history (Meikle 1985, 57; cf Blackledge 2006a, 14–16). From this perspective, while the mode of production shapes the contours of social struggles, it is up to real men and women to fight for their desired ends, and such struggles necessarily have a normative dimension (Blackledge 2006a).
As to the nature of the normative dimension of his work, Marx is at least clear that it should not be conflated with bourgeois morality, which naturalizes capitalist social relations and the historically relative morality concomitant to these. In what was perhaps his most famous discussion of morality, Marx wrote to a number of his closest collaborators in Germany in 1875 to dismiss the claim as put forward in the new Social Democratic Party’s Gotha Programme, for the “fair distribution of
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fair distribution of the proceeds of labour.” Against this demand, he wrote: “Does not the bourgeoisie claim that the present-day distribution is ‘just?’ And given the present mode of production is it not, in fact, the only ‘just’ system of distribution?” (Marx 1974d, 344). This suggestion of the rights of the capitalist system itself was but a recapitulation of his claim, as laid forth in Capital, that within bourgeois society the class struggle manifests itself as a conflict of “right against right,” and that between this antinomy of “equal rights” only “force decides” (Marx 1976, 344). Two decades earlier he and Engels, writing in The German Ideology (1845), had similarly argued that the emergence of a contradiction between capitalists and workers “shattered the basis for all morality, whether the morality of asceticism or of enjoyment” (Marx and Engels 1976, 419). Within a year they reaffirmed this position in a letter to Köttgen (15 June 1846), in which they argued that Communists must “have no truck with tedious moral scruples” (Marx and Engels 1984, 56). Similarly, in 1846 Marx criticised Proudhon for, amongst other things, his “mutton-headed, sentimental, utopian socialism” (Draper 1990, 23). More generally, he insisted in the Civil War in France (1871), that
[t]he working classes have no fixed and perfect Utopias to introduce by means of a vote of the nation. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation—and with it that higher form of life which the present form of society irresistibly makes for by its own economic development—they, the working classes, have to pass through long struggles, a whole series of historical processes, by means of which men and circumstances will be completely transformed. They have no ideals to realise, they have only to set at liberty the elements of the new society which have already been developed in the womb of the collapsing bourgeois society. (Marx 1974d, 213)
This argument resonated with another put forward a quarter century
earlier in The German Ideology:
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. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. (Marx and Engels 1976, 49)
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he asked what bourgeois democrat would demur from Trotsky’s praise of an individual for his lifelong devotion to the cause of the “oppressed.” According to Sartre, whereas Trotsky argued that Marxism held to the dialectical unity of means and ends in practice he did not provide an ethical justification for the class struggle as the means to the end of socialism, and by suggesting “an absolute end” as a goal for his activity he implicitly reverted back to a form of Kantianism (Sartre 1992, 159–161). This Kantianism was also apparent in the reality of Trotskyism in France in 1947. In a situation in which the PCF was hegemonic within the working class, and where, at a global level, the fundamental question posed of any political activist was in what relation did they stand vis-à-vis the conflict between Washington and Moscow, Sartre suggested that the “Trotskyist deprives himself of the possibility of preventing war or of attaching himself to one or other of the two camps. He refuses realistic politics in the name of an imperative that appears to have no connection with the facts.” Somewhat ironically given the ontology of Being and Nothingness, he criticized this perspective for its “idealis[m].” And while this idealistic attitude may have been “commendable,” because it was divorced from the real workers’ movement it was a “moral and abstract” perspective (Sartre 1992, 163). Thus Sartre concluded that Trotsky, despite his valiant attempt to formulate a socialist ethics, had failed to move beyond a typically bourgeois moral standpoint.
Against Trotsky’s abstract morality Sartre comments that Lenin had a greater intuitive sense of the dialectic of means and ends when, for instance in Left-Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder, he recognized (in a way which Sartre suggests is reminiscent of Spinoza’s tool forging itself in forging) that in building the organizations necessary for the negative task of smashing capitalism the proletariat simultaneously re-forges itself as a positive alternative to capitalism: “the proletariat transforms itself into its own ends.” Because, therefore, “the negativity becomes an internal positivity,” Marxist ethics transcends the limitations of bourgeois moral theory in which the “abstract will towards positivity turns into absolute negativity.” By contrast with bourgeois morality, as it organizes “against the oppressive class, the proletariat becomes conscious of being its own end for itself. It assimilates its cause to that of man” (Sartre 1992, 166–7).
If Sartre criticized Trotsky’s idealism, elsewhere he argued that the Stalinists had reduced Marxism to a crude form of materialism. As opposed to his dismissive treatment of Marx in Being and Nothingness,
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just three years later he was to argue that Marx should be disassociated from those crude Marxists who failed to ground their strategic pronouncements in detailed studies of concrete historical processes but tended instead to impose abstract Platonic ideals onto reality. This is the thrust of his “Materialism and Revolution” (1946), in which he drew a distinction between Marx and his epigones: “Marx had a much deeper and richer conception of objectivity” than did the Stalinists. He claimed that his criticisms of Marxism in the essay were “not directed against” Marx, but against “Neo-Stalinist Marxism” (Sartre 1955, 188, 185).
For Sartre, the materialist pretensions of Stalinist Marxism acted to negate its revolutionary intent as materialism tended toward “the elimination of human subjectivity” from history. This was important because if the revolutionary is defined by transcendence, her “going beyond the situation” in which she finds herself, then revolutionary politics demands that the revolutionary evolve a total comprehension of her “situation” within society. Consequently, “revolutionary thinking is thinking within a situation; it is the thinking of the oppressed in so far as they rebel together against oppression; it cannot be reconstructed from the outside.” Revolutionary thought is therefore, first and foremost, thinking from the standpoint of revolutionary activists, and cannot be equated with Stalin’s contemplative materialism (Sartre 1955, 188, 210–12, 237).
Sartre believed that his activist-centered approach to politics had much in common with Marx’s attempt to overcome the opposition between materialism and idealism, but that, in reverting to simple materialism, intellectuals within the Communist Party had retreated back from Marx’s revolutionary theoretical breakthrough to a variant of the position from which he had broken in his Theses on Feuerbach (Sartre 1955, 203). Against Stalinist materialism, Sartre insisted that “the superiority of revolutionary thinking consists in its first proclaiming its active nature” (Sartre 1955, 213). He argued that it was the role of the revolutionary to show that any “collective order” is not the necessary product of either God or History, that those values which suggest otherwise are not universal truths but in fact reflect and tend to preserve the status quo, and contra these values any society can be transcended: “The revolutionary philosopher has, above all, to explain the possibility
1. This section draws upon the discussion of Sartre’s contribution to the Marxist theory of history in Blackledge 2006a, 154–161.
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of this movement of transcendence” (Sartre 1955, 219–220). The idea of freedom was central to this project, because it was only through an act of free will that the revolutionary is able to “rise above” her situation (Sartre 1955, 220, 228–9).
Despite the tension between these arguments and the ontology of Being and Nothingness, Sartre’s engagement with Marxism did not lead him to make a fundamental break with his earlier phenomenology. In part this was because, despite the distinction he drew between Marx and Stalinism, he continued to believe that Stalinism, through the medium of the PCF, was the real practical manifestation of both the workers’ movement and of Marxism in modern France. If this position was made most explicit in The Communists and Peace (1952–54), it was implicit to his writings of the 1940s where, for instance, he considered it an adequate riposte to Henri Lefebvre’s reassertion of Marx’s claim to have transcended the opposition between materialism and idealism to refer negatively to the crude critique of idealism articulated by the PCF’s Roger Garaudy (Sartre 1955, 203).
This theoretical ambiguity was highlighted by Marcuse in a discussion of “Materialism and Revolution.” Marcuse claimed that Sartre’s existentialism offered two “apparently contradictory aspects”: on the one hand it suggested “the transcendental stabilization of human freedom in the face of actual enslavement,” while, on the other hand, it posits a “revolutionary theory which implies the negation of this entire ideology” (Marcuse 1972, 162). Marcuse argued, contra Sartre’s claim that “freedom is the very structure of human being and cannot be annihilated even by the most adverse conditions,” that although this aspect of consciousness is “one of the preconditions for the possibility of freedom—it is not freedom itself” (Marcuse 1972, 162, 183). By conflating these two aspects of freedom, Marcuse noted that Sartre immunized his thought against the “tribulations to which man is subjected in the empirical reality” (Marcuse 1972, 176–7).
If Sartre’s early conception of freedom is therefore “at most a freedom of consciousness, not the concrete freedom of a situated human being” (Anderson 1993, 24), in the wake of the publication of “Materialism and Revolution” he increasingly confronted the realities of the objective context of action. Marcuse commented that in the two decades following the publication of Being and Nothingness Sartre’s “concept of pure ontology and phenomenology recede before the invasion of real history” (Marcuse 1972, 189). This process was informed by Sartre’s political engagement. Unfortunately, while the idea of revolution was very
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much alive in the immediate postwar period when millions of French workers were involved in a strike wave, once this movement subsided there was a gap of two decades before the events of 1968 once again revived hopes for revolution (Birchall 1974, 62–66). The difficulties faced by the French left became apparent when, in the late 1940s, Sartre attempted to build a socialist organization that was independent of but also able to bring together both Communists and social democrats, the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR). Ian Birchall points out that this project failed, in part, because, in the absence of a revolutionary workers’ movement, Sartre was unable to articulate a positive political goal that offered an alternative to both the East and the West in the Cold War: “The RDR was against Washington and Moscow, against the PCF and the SFIO; what was it for?” (Birchall 2004, 104). Sartre’s radicalization through the 1940s subsequently broke against the problem of how to articulate a revolutionary political programme in the absence of a revolutionary movement.
In response to the failures both of Trotskyism and of his own revolutionary alternative to Communism and Social Democracy, in The Communists and Peace he attempted to justify a policy of fellowtravelling with the PCF. He did so by extending his criticism of contemporary Trotskysim for juxtaposing an “ideal” class struggle to the “real” struggles of the French masses (Sartre 1968, 105–6). Against this method, Sartre maintained that “I don’t concern myself with what would be desirable nor with the ideal relationship which the party-initself sustains with the Eternal Proletariat; I seek to understand what is happening in France today before our very eyes” (Sartre 1968, 120). Concretely, he argued that the proletariat needed a party through which it could be constituted as a class: “it is the party which demands of the masses that they come together into a class under its direction” (Sartre 1968, 128–9). He went so far as to suggest that “without the CP the French proletariat would not have an empirical history” (Sartre 1968, 134). To criticize the bureaucratization of the CP, as did the Trotskyists, was therefore anachronistic: “Will you speak after that of ‘communist betrayal?’ Come off it! This ‘bureaucratisation’ is a necessity in the period of scientific management” (Sartre 1968, 213). The politics of the PCF merely reflected the real needs and aspirations of the French workers, rather than the needs and aspirations ascribed to them by Trotskyism.
While this argument aimed to inform realistic revolutionary politics by escaping from the unreal abstractions of orthodox Trotskyism, it ran the risk of providing an apology for the politics of the PCF. If both
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the Trotskyists and the Stalinists could be faulted for the methodological sin of dissolving real history in a generalizing bath of “sulphuric acid” (Sartre 1963, 44), at least the Stalinists could claim a degree of real political support for their project whereas the Trotskyists were confined to the sectarian wilderness. If this reality informed Sartre’s rapprochement with the PCF in the early 1950s, his argument that revolutionary thought could advance only if it aimed at the scientific analysis of the “projects” of free individuals to move from one concrete situation to another meant that he could never wholly commit to the Stalinist project (Sartre 1963, 91; 1955, 220; 1976, 36). In fact, the anti-Stalinist political implications of his understanding of revolutionary practice became apparent in the wake of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. So whereas Sartre had responded to the Cold War in the early 1950s by moving to occupy a position of intellectual fellow-travelling with the PCF, the news of Khrushchev’s invasion of Hungary and of the PCF’s support for that policy forced him to rethink this stance. The most important consequence of this rethink was his break with the PCF, which he described as “monstrous” for its defence of Russia’s intervention. He described the Soviet attack on Hungary as a moment when “the concrete struggle of the masses [was] drowned in blood in the name of a pure abstraction” (Sartre 1969, 87, 104).
Partly as a response to these events, over the next decade Sartre continued to deepen his conception of practice through an extension of his understanding of the historical conditioning of freedom. While this trajectory took him closer to Marx, there remained an important tension between his thought and Marx’s. For while he aimed to affirm the “specificity of the historical event,” he introduced two transhistorical concepts into the heart of his theory of history—scarcity and the practicoinert—which seemed to imply not simply that Trotskyism was an unreal utopia but also that socialism itself was an unattainable goal. In his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) Sartre suggested that scarcity is the “fundamental relation of our history.” This starting point had dramatic consequences for his Marxism. He argued that because scarcity “produces everyone in a multiplicity as a mortal danger for the Other,” its existence implies that reciprocal relations of solidarity between individuals must, of necessity, be transient (Sartre 1976, 735). Consequently, while social atomization might be challenged through revolutionary struggles, the “fused groups” thus created could hope only to reproduce themselves for short periods of time before becoming “institutionalised” (Poster 1979, 81–111). Once institutionalized those groups would break down,
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to be replaced by reemerging antagonistic relations between individuals. Sartre labelled this type of relationship “seriality,” and suggested that this condition was the basis for the formation of states. Accordingly, he dismissed as “absurd” the Marxist concept of dictatorship by the proletariat, because the proletariat could not possibly rule collectively (Sartre 1976, 662). The pessimistic implications of this ahistorical conception of scarcity were reinforced by his concept of the practico-inert. By this notion, Sartre meant to explain the “equivalence between alienated praxis and worked inertia” (Sartre 1976, 67). The practico-inert, in Poster’s words, is “matter which has absorbed the past actions and meanings of human beings” (Poster 1979, 60). It is therefore much more than the human created world around us: it is an alienated context, the product of our praxis, the “unintended consequences” of which constantly “thwart” and “confound” our intentions. Following the logic of these claims, in the unfinished and posthumously published second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, he argued that Stalinism, or at least something very much like it, was “inevitable” in the conditions existent in postrevolutionary Russia (Aronson 1980, 280; McBride 1991, 8).
These conclusions suggest a degree of continuity across Sartre’s oeuvre from Being and Nothingness to Critique of Dialectical Reason. In both cases, freedom appears as something to which humans are condemned, rather than something that we can fight for and deepen through struggle. Whilst Sartre rejected Stalinism after 1956, his claim that something like it was an inevitable consequence not simply of the Russian Revolution but of any revolution seemed to fly in the face of his own commitment to an anti-Stalinist socialism.
Nonetheless, elsewhere in the Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre suggested a very different and much more historical conceptualization of scarcity. For instance, he wrote that “Man is violent . . . until the elimination of scarcity” (Sartre 1976, 736). Commenting on this ambiguity, Thomas Anderson points out that by thus historicizing the concept of scarcity, Sartre suggests a “much more hopeful reading of human history than most of the Critique offers” (Anderson 1993, 109). Interestingly, it appears that it is this optimistic element to his thought that underpinned his attempt to formulate a second ethics in the 1960s that went beyond what Sartre himself characterized as the abstract idealism of his earlier Notebooks for an Ethics (Anderson 1993, 111).
He signalled his belief that revolutionary practice demanded an ethical component in a brief comment on the question of ethics in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Here Sartre argued that moral values are
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“bound up with the existence of the practico-inert field, in other words with hell as the negation of its negation.” While such values are born as a reaction to exploitation and oppression, insofar as they are realized in some system or another they subsequently contribute to exploitation and oppression, even where such systems are “constructed by oppressed classes.” It was Marxism’s strength, he suggested, that it grasped this aspect of morality—the way in which it functioned as part of the ideological superstructure by helping reproduce systems of exploitation and oppression. However, Sartre suggested that while the base-superstructure metaphor thus contributed to the critique of existing moral categories, it unfortunately lent itself to a myopic rejection of morality tout court (Sartre 1976, 247–250; cf 132ff).
It was to help overcome this lacuna in Marxism that Sartre embarked upon his second ethics in the 1960s. In a lecture presented at the Instituto Gramsci in Rome in 1964, part of which was published as “Determinism and Freedom,” and another series of lectures that were to be presented at Cornell University in 1965, but which were cancelled by Sartre in protest at America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Sartre suggested an ethics which went beyond the limitations both of Marxism and of his own earlier thought (Anderson 1993, Ch. 7; Stonet and Bowman 1991; 1986).
The Rome notes opened with the claim that “[t]he historical moment has come for socialism to rediscover its ethical structure, or rather, to unveil it” (Anderson 1993, 112; Stone and Bowman “Dialectical Ethics,” 196). To this end, Sartre first rejected “all ethics by edict,” examples of which included, or so he argued, the work both of Kant and Nietzche (Stone and Bowman 1986, 197; Sartre 1974, 241). Such ethics, he suggested, represent the domination of the practico-inert, the alienated consequences of earlier human praxis, over new praxis. According to Stone and Bowman, by contrast with Marx, Sartre characterized history “not as class struggle . . . but as the struggle between praxis, which is always creative, and the practico-inert which always appears as repetition” (Stone and Bowman 1986, 200). Concretely, he argued that needs sit at the core of human praxis, for we must satisfy them if we are to survive. Consequently, praxis comes from “the future that has been projected by need” (Stone and Bowman 1986, 207). Nevertheless, so long as people are isolated and serialized they remain trapped within the alienated system of the practico-inert. Conversely, it is only when they come together in revolutionary groups that their praxes are capable
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of becoming autonomous, for it is only in such groups that they are able to “submit the world to the fulfilment of needs” (Sartre quoted in Stone and Bowman 1986, 210). Therefore, while Sartre followed Kant’s insistence that for a person to become moral she must become an autonomous agent, against Kant he argued that we are able to do so only when united in groups acting in revolutionary praxis. As William McBride argues, Sartre’s ethical goal in this essay involves a synthesis of “of autonomy and need satisfaction—the first reminiscent . . . of the Kantian ethic as well as of Sartre’s career-long emphasis on freedom, the second crucial in the Marxist understanding of human beings as material entities” (McBride 1991, p. 179). This was not the only parallel with Marx, for Sartre also argued that because the bourgeoisie benefited from the capitalist system they fought to reproduce this alienated world: they are “products of the capitalist system, but they unceasingly uphold it and perpetuate it—not from inertia but by choice.” By contrast, the proletariat, as a class, has at least two futures: passive object with the system or transcended subject. “One appears imperiously and restrictively within the system: find work, feed your family, save your pay, etc. The other is manifested as pure and total future through the rejection of the system and the production of a different system” (Sartre 1974, 251). In the words of Anderson, while the “oppressed proletariat also support that system in order to survive in it, . . . at the same time, and more deeply, they contest it” (Anderson 1993, 116). Specifically, insofar as proletarian praxis challenges capitalism it aims at autonomy in a way that is not true of the bourgeoisie. Following Marx, Sartre suggested that in struggling more or less consciously against capitalism the workers aim for a “pure future beyond the system” (Sartre 1974, 251). Through this example Sartre aimed to illuminate his attempted synthesis of moralism and materialism. While the materialists robbed humans of their conscious will, he had previously underestimated the material moment of human action: “the agent determines his behaviour as a synthetic unity” of external causes and internal “imperative or value” (Sartre 1974, 244). Thus Sartre aimed at developing Engels’ claim that people make “history on the basis of prior circumstances” (Sartre 1974, 250).
The overall intent of these arguments was to outline a dialectical synthesis of materialism and idealism which deepened Sartre’s attempted justification for the claim, made in “Materialism and Revolution” that “the declaration that ‘we too are men’ is at the bottom of any revolution” (Sartre 1955, 217, 219). So, whereas Sartre, in the 1940s, had
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insisted that to act authentically “involves at once recognizing the ultimate gratuitousness of all human projects and yet devoting oneself to one’s freely-chosen project with full reflectiveness” (McBride 1991, 63), by the early 1960s he pointed toward a humanistic justification for taking the side of the proletariat in its struggle against capital. Unfortunately, as Stone and Bowman point out, Sartre’s discussion of these issues is “disappointingly abstract” (Stone and Bowman 1986, 211). This is true most especially of his tentative statements on agency. Anderson notes that Sartre, by positing the future-oriented and needs-satisfying character of praxis, asked how one might judge the moral code of the existing society by the morality of a different future society (Anderson 1993, 113). And while, as we have seen, Sartre had, in 1947, pointed to an answer to this problem in his claim that proletarian praxis was simultaneously the means and ends of socialist morality, he did not explore how the proletariat might move from even a revolutionary state of dissatisfaction with the existing capitalist society toward the more positive goal of creating a future socialist society. For instance, whereas Sartre claimed that ethical systems represent “the totality of imperatives, values, and axiological judgements constituting the commonplaces of a class, a social milieu, or an entire society,” he did not develop these themes and their implications therefore remain vague. Moreover, when Sartre moved to discuss the practical consequences of his theory, he reinforced the sense that he had come to an impasse. Thus in an interview given in 1969, he argued that whereas the working class needed a revolutionary party to fully realise the anti-capitalist potential of its practice which he suggested would proceed “more on the basis of ‘alienation’ than on ‘needs,’ ” he confessed that he could not envisage “how the problems which confront any stabilised structure could be resolved” (Sartre 1970, 242, 245).
Conclusion
In the wake of their rejection of Lukács’ immanent critique of capitalism from the standpoint of the proletariat, the leading members of the Frankfurt School were left, on the one hand, with a model of immanent critique which could not escape the parameters of bourgeois thought, such that, on the other hand, they were compelled to grasp at a starkly abstract conceptualization of the categorical imperative as the negative rudder by which they would aim at avoiding another Auschwitz, even if socialism itself was no longer feasible. This pessimism was reflected, despite
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other profound differences, in the conclusions drawn by the Analytical Marxists. Cohen, like Adorno before him, could not but oppose capitalism from a perspective informed by the stark abstractions of egalitarian liberalism, even if his criticisms of Marx’s predictions for the working class meant that he believed there was little hope of an alternative to capitalism. Although Callinicos does not share this pessimistic analysis of the modern working class, because he agrees about the limits of immanent critique, he does see the sense in following Cohen through an engagement with egalitarian liberalism. The strengths of his endeavors are plain to see: first, it involves a powerful counter to Cohen’s almost caricatured “obstetric” reworking of Marx’s theory of history; second, it points to the anti-capitalist implications of much egalitarian liberalism; and, third, it is alive to the need for Marxists to be explicit and coherent about the moral aspect of their critique of capitalism. Unfortunately, if his deployment of Griffin’s concept of “informed desire” is intended as a mechanism to escape the problem of moral relativism, it is not clear how it does not simply push this problem backward to the equally contested discourse on human nature. Interestingly, Callinicos suggests a solution to this problem by reference to Lukács’ defense of the standpoint of the proletariat as the basis for grasping the truth of society as a totality (Callinicos 2006, 247–252). However, because he does not link the standpoint of workers’ struggles to his preferred concept of human nature through a historically emergent conception of desire, his argument is open to precisely the charge it is intended to escape: that of relativism. In stark contrast to these various approaches, Sartre, at least in places, pointed toward an engagement with Lukács’ Hegelian ethics through his analysis of the way workers’ struggles simultaneously act as the means to and ends of the ethical alternative to capitalism. Nonetheless, despite these powerful insights, whereas Marx powerfully historicized the concept of scarcity (Harvey 1996, 139–149), Sartre never adequately disarticulated his understanding of this idea from its reification in liberal theory so as to provide coherent historical and structural account of a long-term socialist alternative to seriality.
So, whereas Callinicos’ perspective provides a basis for historical optimism it is less clear that he escapes the emotivist parameters of modern moral discourse, while Sartre points beyond this emotivist culture even if he was unable to provide a coherent model of a socialist alternative to it. If the problem for Marxism is to synthesize insights from both of these perspective, in the following chapter I argue that such a synthesis was suggested by Alasdair MacIntyre in the 1950s and 1960s.
5
Alasdair MacIntyre’s Contribution to an Ethical Marxism
Two images have been with me throughout the writing of this essay. Between them they seem to show the alternative paths for the intellectual. The one is of J. M. Keynes, the other of Leon Trotsky. Both were obviously men of attractive personality and great natural gifts. The one the intellectual guardian of the established order, providing new policies and theories of manipulation to keep society in what he took to be economic trim, and making a personal fortune in the process. The other, outcast as a revolutionary from Russia both under the Tsar and under Stalin, providing throughout his life a defence of human activity, of the powers of conscious and rational human effort. I think of them at the end, Keynes with his peerage, Trotsky with an icepick in his skull. These are the twin lives between which intellectual choice in our society lies.
—MacIntyre 2008f, 166
In his magnum opus, After Virtue (1981), Alasdair MacIntyre wrote that a “provisional conclusion about the good life for man . . . is a life spent seeking for the good life for man,” and that we must aim to construct “local forms of community within which civility and intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us” (MacIntre 1985, 219, 263). If the “pessimism” of this conclusion is, as MacIntyre rightly argues, “alien to the Marxist tradition,” why discuss his ideas in this book? The simple answer is that prior to writing After Virtue MacIntyre made an important contribution to Marxist ethical theory which pointed beyond the limitations of those writers discussed in Chapter 4 of this study and toward a realization
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alien to the Marxist tradition of the renewal of Marxism begun by the writers discussed in Chapter 3. This chapter aims to rescue this contribution to Marxism from the “enormous condescension of posterity.”
As noted in the introduction, Althusser rejected the idea that Marxism was a form of humanism, and criticized the socialist humanists for contaminating Marxist materialism with bourgeois, idealist moral theory. The logic of the socialist humanist “turn to ethics” included, or so he insisted, a retreat from Marxism toward liberalism. If, as Perry Anderson has pointed out, there was evidence aplenty in the 1960s of ex-Marxists who had passed through the socialist humanist milieu before breaking with Marxism (Anderson 1980, 108), and while the more recent convergence between Analytical Marxism and egalitarian liberalism seems to confirm this prognosis, it is nonetheless far too simplistic to claim that this trajectory necessarily followed from the humanistic critique of Stalinism. Edward Thompson was also undoubtedly right when he wrote that, whatever else it was, “1956 was a year of hope” (Thompson 1978b, 304). We might add that this was a hope for, amongst other things, a renewal of Marxism. Against both too uncritical and too dismissive approaches to socialist humanism, I argue that the socialist humanism of the generation of 1956 is best understood, in Chris Harman’s words, as an “intellectual staging post” (Harman 1983, 61): it marked a fork in the road through which a generation of radicals passed on their way to more coherent, if sometimes less savoury, political conclusions. If many took the road to Cold War liberalism, for a small minority of the left, socialist humanism pointed beyond the morass of Stalinism toward Marx’s humanist critique of capitalism. In the decade after 1956, Alasdair MacIntyre took this turn and made an important contribution to the revitalization of Marxism. Extending the New Left’s critique of Stalinism, he argued that Marx’s concept of practice suggested a standpoint from which to overcome the division between science and morality characteristic of mechanical materialism. This contribution not only
1. It is a weakness of much of the academic literature on the British New Left that they tend to stress in a one-sided fashion the ways in which it acted as a conduit through which a number of important intellectuals bade their farewell to Marxism. (See, for instance, Chun 1993, 191; Kenny 1995, 200–206; Foote 1997, 296.) Interestingly, in their eagerness to portray the New Left as a way out of Marxism, all of these studies downplay Alasdair MacIntyre’s important contribution to its debate on socialist humanism.
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complements the renewal of Marxism associated with the revolutionary break with Second International Marxism discussed in Chapter 3, it also provides the most powerful materials from which to construct a counter to the claim that Marx was a nihilist whose rejection of moral discourse reflected his inadequate model of social transformation.
The New Left’s Socialist Humanism
In 1956 four events came together to create a political space to the left of the two faces of the Cold War. First, in February, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev made the so-called “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in which he detailed some of the crimes committed by Stalin before his death in 1953. Second, over the summer and autumn of that year there occurred a rapid polarization and radicalization in Poland and Hungary which culminated, in October and November, in the emergence of a revolutionary workers’ movement in the latter country: for the first time since the 1920s workers’ councils emerged as a potential alternative form of rule to bureaucratic dictatorship (Eley 2002, 334; Anderson 1964, 66–72, Lomax 1976, and James 1992, 265; Fryer 1997; Harman 1988, 88–186). Third, in November Soviet troops intervened to crush the Hungarian Revolution. While, fourth, on the very same weekend, British and French troops in cooperation with Israel invaded Egypt with a view of seizing the Suez Canal.
As a response to these events, a New Left emerged out of dissident groups within the Communist Party, alongside student radicals, left labourites and members of the tiny revolutionary left (Sedgwick 1976, 143; Blackledge 2004b; 2006b; 2007a). While the New Left had neither fixed political positions, nor an agreed agenda, it did aim at making socialism a living force in Britain. New Leftists articulated this message in a number of journals, including Universities and Left Review edited by students in Oxford and The Reasoner/New Reasoner edited by the historians and (ex-)Communist activists Edward Thompson and John Saville in Yorkshire. Published initially as a dissident magazine within the Communist Party, and subsequently as an independent journal of socialist theory and practice after its editors refused the Party leadership’s demand to stop publishing, The Reasoner/New Reasoner made its name as the foremost British voice of socialist humanism. It was in this journal that Edward Thompson opened an important debate on the
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The Reasoner/New Reasoner made its name as the foremost British voice of socialist humanism socialist humanist alternative to Stalinism, through which he aimed to rescue Marxism from its mechanical bastardization at the hands of Stalin.
Thompson was perhaps the most prominent English representative of an international milieu which emerged in response to developments in Russia in the wake of Stalin’s death. At its core, socialist humanism involved a call to “revise” Marxism-Leninism through a return to the humanist values of the young Marx (Satterwhite 1992, 3–11). Amongst the most influential of those to articulate a variant of this position was the Polish academic Leszek Kolakowski. In his “Responsibility and History” (1956–58), he suggested that moral crimes were moral crimes whether or not Stalin proclaimed that they were inevitable: “no one can be absolved of moral responsibility for supporting crime on the grounds that he was intellectually convinced of its inevitable victory” (Kolakowski 1971, 132). Developing this point, he argued that socialists must retain the concept of “moral responsibility,” and further that they must liberate it from that interpretation of Marxism by which it had become “a tool of history,” and which in turn was a “pretext for villainy” (Kolakowski 1971, 149, 157). By contrast with this Stalinist perversion of Marxism, Kolakowski insisted that “social involvement is moral involvement” and moral involvement is premised upon our “power to choose freely” (Kolakowski 1971, 159–160).
The first major theoretical contribution to the British New Left’s engagement with Marx’s humanism was Thompson’s “Socialist Humanism: An Epistle to the Philistines” (1957). Published in the launch issue of The New Reasoner this essay was a brilliant and original contribution both to the analysis of Stalinism and to Marxist moral theory more generally. At the heart of Thompson’s essay, as Kate Soper has argued, there was a reaffirmation of “moral autonomy and the powers of historical agency” within historical materialism (Soper 1990, 89). Stalinism, Thompson wrote, was an ideology whose characteristic procedure involved the imposition of abstract ideas upon reality. Moreover, this ideology represented the world-view of a “revolutionary elite which, within a particular historical context, degenerated into a bureaucracy.” The Stalinist bureaucracy had acted to block the struggle for socialism, and thus the human revolt which underpinned the struggle for socialism had evolved to include a revolt against Stalinism. Negatively, this revolt was a revolt against ideology and inhumanity. Positively, it involved a “return to man,” in the social sense understood by Marx. It was thus a socialist humanism: humanist, because it “places once again real men
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because it and women at the centre of socialist theory and aspiration”; socialist, because it “reaffirms the revolutionary perspectives of Communism” (Thompson 1957, 107–9).
Thompson’s argument opened with the claim that one-quarter of the earth’s surface was controlled by a new society, which, despite its many abhorrent features, represented a qualitative break with capitalism: “The instruments of production in the Soviet Union are socialised. The bureaucracy is not a class, but is parasitic upon that society. Despite its parasitism, the wave of human energy unleashed by the first socialist revolution has multiplied the wealth of society, and vastly enlarged the cultural horizons of the people” (Thompson 1957, 105, 138). In contrast to this characterization of the soviet system as at once socialist while yet morally unpalatable, elsewhere, he insisted that “the ‘end’ of Communism is not a ‘political’ end, but a human end” (Thompson 1957, 125). This formulation suggested a tremendous gap between the human ends of the Soviet experiment and the inhuman means through which these ends were, at least partially, being realized. Consequently, though Thompson implied that a plurality of means could be utilized to achieve the end of communism, he was aware that these means were not morally equivalent. In the Soviet case, he argued, the flaws of the Stalinist system could best be understood as a consequence of the Bolsheviks’ inadequate model of Marxism. They had embraced a mechanical interpretation of Marx’s base-superstructure metaphor according to which agency in the form of conscious activity is reduced to structure, only to reappear through the monolithic party which became the guardian of true socialist consciousness. The Bolsheviks subsequently, and “immorally,” replaced the actions of real individual with those of cardboard abstractions; abstractions which became “embodied in institutional form in the rigid forms of ‘democratic centralism’ ” (Thompson 1957, 121). Thompson’s moral critique of Stalinism therefore concluded not only with a call for a more flexible interpretation of Marx’s theory of history, but also with a rejection of the Leninist form of political organization.
For all the undoubted power of Thompson’s reaffirmation of moral agency at the core of the socialist project, his thesis was susceptible to a number of distinct, but related, criticisms. First, could a mechanical version of Marxism as embodied in a democratic centralist organization adequately explain the rise of Stalinism? Second, what, if any, were the relations between socialism and Communism in his model, and if the latter was a human “end,” then what could be said of the abhorrent means
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end through which the Stalinists had at least gone some way to achieving this end? Third, if the base-superstructure metaphor had contributed to the emergence of Stalinism, then was not Marxism damned by this failure? Finally, was not Thompson’s rejection of the base-superstructure metaphor open to the criticism that it informed a political voluntarism, which rather than correcting the errors of mechanical fatalism merely inverted them.
Thompson’s implicit answers to these questions suggested that he had not broken with as much of the common sense of his age as he imagined. Thus, traditional consequentialist ethics, which included for the little they were worth the ethical justifications of their actions deployed by the Stalinists, suggest that good ends could come from bad means; while the dominant liberal and Stalinist histories of the Soviet system were agreed on one point at least, that Leninism led to Stalinism. In tacitly accepting both of these positions, Thompson opened his moral critique of Stalinism to an immanent critique from those who saw a contradiction between his humanist claim that socialism represented the realization of historically (self) created human potentialities, and the suggestion that the Stalinist system might represent, in an albeit distorted form, a progressive break with capitalism. This is more or less the form of the critique formulated by Harry Hanson in the next issue of The New Reasoner.
Hanson argued that “Communism, in the modern world, is not the creed of the proletariat. First and foremost, it is a technique, operated by a revolutionary elite, for pushing forward the economic development of an underdeveloped country at the fastest possible rate . . . [which] is a very painful process” (Hanson 1957, 88). He insisted that, for all of Thompson’s rhetoric and his indisputable honesty, his was an untenable critique of Stalinism, as it shared with the Stalinists, and Marxism more generally, a consequentialist moral framework which, despite fine talk of the interdependence of means and ends, tended to subordinate the former to the latter, thus offering an unsatisfactory basis from which to criticize Stalinist immorality. Though this negative criticism of Thompson was convincing, Hanson’s own positive critique of Stalinism was less than satisfactory. He argued that there was no alternative to something like Stalinism in Russian conditions—forced industrialization could not succeed in a democracy—but that he could not embrace Stalin’s methods. His morality was thus cut adrift from any practical political anchorage
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He argued that there was no alternative to something like Stalinism in Russian conditions—forced industrialization could not succeed in a democracy—but that he could not embrace Stalin’s methods in contemporary conditions: it was abstract and utopian in the negative sense of those words (Hanson 1957; cf Kolakowski 1971, 161).
If Hanson criticized Thompson’s moral consequentialism without providing a viable alternative to it, Charles Taylor argued that Thompson’s attempt to retrieve a vibrant Marx from the Stalinist distortion of his theory elided over deep problems within Marxism itself. For Marx’s understandable impatience with abstract moral criticisms of capitalism, and his juxtaposition of proletarian virtue to bourgeois morality, could easily slip into a justification for the type of revolutionary elitism that had morphed into Stalinism. The party, according to Taylor, could imagine itself as the embodiment of proletarian virtue against the real inadequacies of the proletariat (Taylor 1957a; 1957b).
Beyond these theoretical issues, Thompson’s model of socialist agency also informed the New Left’s political orientation. In his introduction to the New Left collection Out of Apathy (1960), he addressed what he believed was the key political issue of the day: mass apathy. Defining apathy as the search for “private solutions to public evils,” he explained its contemporary prevalence, principally, as a function of a lack of real political alternatives for the electorate (Thompson 1960, 5, 8). Developing this theme, he suggested that a solution to the problem of apathy should begin by presenting the electorate with a real, viable political alternative to what in 1954 the Economist labelled “Butskellism”: the consensus between the policies of the Labour and Tory chancellors Hugh Gaitskell and RAB Butler. Concretely, Thompson aimed to win over the Labour Party to the New Left’s vision of socialism. Thus in 1960 he suggested that the transformation of Labour into a socialist party was not only possible, but also that this potential was being realized as he wrote: “Labour is ceasing to offer an alternative way of governing existing society, and is beginning to look for an alternative society” (Thompson 1960, 19). He argued that the New Left’s role should be to encourage this process, while remaining aware that if his more optimistic perspective for the transformation of the Labour Party were frustrated “then new organisations will have to be created” (Thompson 1960, 29).
With hindsight the problems with this argument are manifest.
Thompson, alongside the majority of the New Left, underestimated the power of the right wing within the Labour Party machine whilst simultaneously overestimating the contemporary British working class’s