Marx's Dream

From Capitalism to Communism

Tom Rockmore

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226554662
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Two centuries after his birth, Karl Marx is read almost solely through the lens of Marxism, his works examined for how they fit into the doctrine that was developed from them after his death.With Marx's Dream, Tom Rockmore offers a much-needed alternative view, distinguishing rigorously between Marx and Marxism. Rockmore breaks with the Marxist view of Marx in three key ways. First, he shows that the concern with the relation of theory to practice—reflected in Marx's famous claim that philosophers only interpret the world, while the point is to change it—arose as early as Socrates, and has been central to philosophy in its best moments. Second, he seeks to free Marx from his unsolicited Marxist embrace in order to consider his theory on its own merits. And, crucially, Rockmore relies on the normal standards of philosophical debate, without the special pleading to which Marxist accounts too often resort. Marx's failures as a thinker, Rockmore shows, lie less in his diagnosis of industrial capitalism's problems than in the suggested remedies, which are often unsound.
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Only a philosopher of Rockmore's stature could tackle a project this substantial, and the results are remarkable: a fresh Marx, unencumbered by doctrine and full of insights that remain salient today.

PART ONE

On Marx’s Theory of Practice

Philosophical views, like theories of all kinds, are formulated to respond to problems, enigmas, and puzzles of the most varied kinds. Marx’s main concern is a modern variation on the traditional ethical theme of human flourishing. This theme, which overlaps with such related conceptions as nature and nurture, happiness, self-actualization, human development, and other near synonyms, is as old as the Western philosophical tradition. It is, though not under that heading, anticipated by Socrates, stated by Plato, restated by Aristotle, and reformulated in modern times by Rousseau as what I will be calling Rousseau’s problem.

Rousseau asks the crucial question, In what social conditions, or in what kind of society, do human beings flourish and, if there is a difference, in what conditions do they flourish best? This theme emerges in the ancient tradition and runs throughout the modern tradition. It clearly engages Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Yet at present, after John Rawls, it is possible we are in the midst of a turn away from a concern with human flourishing and toward the more limited and perhaps less interesting question of what is just, not, as Plato asked, in the state writ large, but rather for the modern individual.1

Marx and Hegel react to Rousseau’s problem, and more generally to the modern world, in sharply opposing ways. In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right and other texts, Hegel studies freedom within modern industrial society. This is a theme he does not discover but analyzes in depth and embraces. He thinks finite human beings “recognize” themselves within the modern world. Marx rejects Hegel’s view of capitalism as even potentially an acceptable solution. He focuses on liberating individuals from the consequences of modern industrial capitalism, hence from the modern world, as a condition of flourishing in communism or a future social phase lying beyond capitalism.

Hegel was consistently interested in property throughout his career, starting with his early theological writings, then again in the early Jena lectures, before culminating in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. He approaches the modern state through a quasi-Fichtean conception of the finite human subject as basically active from the related perspectives of property, morality, and ethics. Hegel’s ethical theory builds on a number of predecessors, including Rousseau. Hegel regards Rousseau as the first thinker to recognize that free will is central to political philosophy.

Hegel shares Rousseau’s view of the unity of morality or, perhaps better, ethics and desire when the subjective desire is objectively right. Yet he rejects the idea of the noble savage who acts on immediate desires. Hence he turns away from the idea of the isolated individual subject in favor of a plural conception of the subject2 as well as from the social contractarian position to which the concept of the noble savage leads.

Hegel believes that it is only in spirit that one is free. He thinks that human freedom is a product of human history, which is finally and best attained in the modern state. We know that Marx was already reading Hegel as a teenager. The beginning of his lifelong dialogue with Hegel is his “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s [Elements of the] Philosophy of Right” (1843), the essay that later led to his mature position; Marx initially encounters the problem of human freedom in modern industrial society in criticizing Hegel in the initial installment of a dialogue between these two conceptual giants that runs in different ways throughout all Marx’s later writings. Except for the introduction, this text was not published during Marx’s lifetime. The whole text, which only finally appeared in 1927, was not available as Marxism was taking shape.3

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel analyzes the problem of recognition in the context of an analysis of the relationship of master (Knecht) and slave (Diener). The Elements of the Philosophy of Right studies human freedom in the modern world, culminating in an account of recognition in the institutions of the modern state. Property is crucial to Hegel’s idea of modern self-recognition as well as to capitalism. According to Hegel, “A person, in distinguishing himself from himself, relates himself to another person, and indeed it is only as owners of property that the two have existence for each other.”4 Marx denies the Hegelian view that we recognize ourselves in modern society, particularly through property.

It would be incorrect to claim that Marx calls attention to private property, which Hegel somehow overlooks. Yet their views clearly differ on this topic. According to Hegel, property is a basic form of social possession that gives a person status protected by contract and against crime with respect to others. Marx believes that private ownership of the means of production does not enable but rather prevents human self-recognition, hence human flourishing in modern society.5 Hegel thinks individuals can and do flourish within the institutions of the modern world. According to Marx, an indispensable condition of human flourishing is to leave capitalism behind in making the transition to communism. Marx, for whom Hegel misunderstands the modern world, holds that we must change the world to bring about human flourishing.

The Marxian intention to change the world is a qualified restatement of the Aristotelian theory of the sublunar world in which we live. Marx’s position includes theories of the subject, modern industrial society, communism as opposed to capitalism, and human flourishing as real social freedom possible only under communism. These four views function as pillars of Marx’s solution to Rousseau’s problem of the real conditions of human freedom in the modern world. The Marxian conception of the subject arises in rejecting the Hegelian conception of the subject as the absolute, as well as the economic conception of what is often described as homo economicus, in favor of a modified form of the Fichtean view. Marx identifies capitalism and communism through the institution of private property. One of the great surprises is that Marx, who spent a life of enormous intellectual toil struggling to bring about the flourishing of human beings, and who wrote voluminously, said very little about how he understood this goal. He seems never to have identified a final view of human freedom. His solution to the theme of human flourishing in communism is perhaps best characterized through the shortening of the working day. I come back to this point below.

On Culture and Civilization

Human flourishing is studied in a bewildering series of domains including religion, medicine, sociology, philosophy, and so on. It includes such conceptions as happiness (eudaimonia), independence or self-sufficiency (autarkeia), virtue or excellence of function, health, welfare, full development, and so on. According to Christianity human flourishing depends on reversing the fall. Augustine describes this approach, which for Christians of all stripes has always centered on a relation of finite human being to an infinite God, as returning from Athens to Jerusalem.6 Another approach is to understand culture and civilization as human constructions, in short as a series of indirect relations to themselves.

Human beings emerge within nature in constructing culture as well as, if there is a difference, civilization. It has been widely believed since Greek antiquity that human beings are social animals who naturally live in groups of various kinds, including the Greek polis and later cities and modern states. The city in all its many forms has a special role for human beings as a site for living, living better, and living well. In different ways the relation of humanly constructed surroundings to human flourishing, roughly what Aristotle called happiness (eudaimonia) as the consequence of excellence of function, has been on the agenda over a very long period. Plato’s Republic is an early effort to respond to this problem through a rationally designed city-state at a point in time when city and state had not yet been separated. The vocabulary and in part the problem changes in the modern tradition, where the ancient concern with happiness7 gives way to emphasis on freedom. In modern times human flourishing is understood as variously referring to self-determination or human development8 by Adam Smith,9 Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Marx, and many others.

Plato’s Republic and Human Flourishing

The relation of nature and culture attracted interest in early Greek philosophy. In the Republic, Socrates is challenged to demonstrate that justice is better than injustice. He responds by describing a just city that, since no one is self-sufficient, relies on cooperation for meeting human needs.10 The Platonic conception of the city-state echoes through the later debate, where it is understood in different ways. What for Hegel is only an empty ideal11 is for Martin Heidegger the very model for the Nazi state12 from the totalitarian perspective K. R. Popper rejects.13

In different ways, the theory of the rational state links politics, aesthetics, and epistemology. According to Plato, those engaged in cultural pursuits, including artists, sculptors, and poets, should be banned from the polis. For they do not and cannot know what they depict. This view supposes a mimetic conception of art that was the norm in ancient Greece. Nonphilosophical art must be excluded from the just polis that is based on philosophical insights. Plato contrasts philosophers, who alone have access to reality, hence know, to artists, sculptors, painters, and others of all kinds who do not and cannot know. He depicts philosophers as the true artists, who construct a republic that, as a work of art in his sense, is simultaneously true, good, and useful.

The Platonic account of human flourishing is based on a conception of human being. The main insight is the conception of function (ergon) that, if properly exercised, constitutes human well-being. The basic argument emerges in the course of thinking about living better in a just state late in Republic, book 1. Socrates asks, in calling attention to a conception of human being underlying the theme of living better in the just state: “Do you think there is such a thing as the function of a horse?”14 This leads to an important argument linking function and virtue. A function is what someone or something alone can do or does better than anything else, and a virtue is excellence of function. Socrates illustrates this doctrine in pointing out that a horse has a function, or what one can do with it. In the same way, the function of the eye is to see and of the ear it is to hear. Socrates goes on to suggest that, if the soul is just, a person will live well.

The key insight is that a human being has a function best expressed in a particular kind of social context. Plato links his conception of human function to the organization of the city-state, or the individual writ large. The Platonic republic is conceived as a living work of art, in which, through division of labor corresponding to intrinsic capacity, each person is subordinated to the whole in exerting a function that that person is most capable or even only capable of performing.

Plato draws attention to a link between human capacity and human function that echoes through the later debate. He believes that living well—what Aristotle later thinks of as human happiness (eudaimonia),15 which is also sometimes translated as human function16—depends on excellence of human function in a social context, in short, in doing the job well for which one is assigned by nature as it were. This view echoes through the later tradition. In modern times, it returns as the idea of the division of labor in two ways. On the one hand, there is one’s specific capacity to be happy in a social context. Thus Aristotle describes human flourishing as an activity, or the exercise of virtue, also called excellence (arête), according to reason, a characteristic he understands as unique to human beings. On the other hand, there is the maximization of profit within the process of production condemned by Smith, Marx, and many others. Smith points out that, as Marx later emphasizes, especially in his account of alienation in the Paris Manuscripts, “the man whose life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding . . . and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be. . . . But in every improved and civilized society this is the state in which the laboring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”17

Rousseau’s Problem

The problem of human flourishing takes different forms at different times. Plato bases his solution to the problem of human flourishing in the ideal city-state on his view that human beings have a fixed nature, hence a fixed social function. In modern times, Rousseau and others call this Platonic assumption into question. This assumption is understood from many different perspectives. In his influential version of human flourishing,18 Rousseau examines the Platonic assumption of a fixed link between human being and the social surroundings. In this way he transforms the theme of human flourishing, which the Greeks approach through happiness, into the problem of freedom in the modern social context.

In the seventeenth century, in Leviathan Thomas Hobbes is concerned with the problem of defending the mere possibility of life that, as he famously observes, is “nasty, brutish and short”19 through a social contract. When around a century later in the eighteenth century, Rousseau equally famously observes that “man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains,”20 his objective in entering into a social contract is not merely life itself. It is rather a meaningful form of freedom in the social context as the central modern place of human flourishing.

The challenge Rousseau posed in the middle of the eighteenth century was interpreted in vastly different ways. Kant was deeply interested in Rousseau. He depicts the latter’s problem from a recognizably Aristotelian perspective in terms of the relation of morality and happiness. According to Kant, Rousseau, “in his Emile, in his Social Contract, and other works . . . seeks to answer this more difficult question: how must culture progress so as to develop the capacities that belong to mankind’s vocation as a moral species and a natural species? From this conflict . . . arise all true evil that oppresses human life and all vice that dishonors it.”21 In his “Handschriftlicher Nachlass,” he repeats his acceptance of Rousseau’s thesis in adding a kind of early ecological point about the proper relation to nature. According to Kant, humanity must strive for “the unity of happiness and morality” that reaches its high point not in dominating nature but rather in enabling it to flourish.22 Other observers, including Hegel and Marx, treat Rousseau’s challenge as a problem of civilization.

There are in general three main modern solutions to the problem of human flourishing. These include, first, returning beyond the socially constructed context to an earlier, more primitive but clearly imaginary state of development, sometimes called the state of nature. Some observers think the state of nature is comparatively more advanced than alternative approaches to human well-being. Second, there is the concern to seek the human good not outside of but within the modern social context in all its many forms. Third, there is the view that it is only in transcending the modern social contex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• PART ONE  On Marx’s Theory of Practice
• PART TWO  Marx and Marxism on Materialism, Feuerbach, and Hegel
• PART THREE  On the Practice of Marx’s Theory, or the Transition from Capitalism to Communism
• Conclusion: Marx’s Dream
• Notes
• Index