Marxism and Ethics

Freedom, Desire, and Revolution

Paul Blackledge

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781438439921
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Marxism and Ethics is a comprehensive and highly readable introduction to the rich and complex history of Marxist ethical theory as it has evolved over the last century and a half. Paul Blackledge argues that Marx's ethics of freedom underpin his revolutionary critique of capitalism. Marx's conception of agency, he argues, is best understood through the lens of Hegel's synthesis of Kantian and Aristotelian ethical concepts. Marx's rejection of moralism is not, as suggested in crude materialist readings of his work, a dismissal of the free, purposive, subjective dimension of action. Freedom, for Marx, is both the essence and the goal of the socialist movement against alienation, and freedom's concrete modern form is the movement for real democracy against the capitalist separation of economics and politics. At the same time, Marxism and Ethics is also a distinctive contribution to, and critique of, contemporary political philosophy, one that fashions a powerful synthesis of the strongest elements of the Marxist tradition. Drawing on Alasdair MacIntyre's early contributions to British New Left debates on socialist humanism, Blackledge develops an alternative ethical theory for the Marxist tradition, one that avoids the inadequacies of approaches framed by Kant on the one hand and utilitarianism on the other.

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 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.

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 pre-Darwinian 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 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.

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.

Social contract theory, utilitarianism, Kantianism, deconstruction, and even modern virtue ethics can all be understood as attempts to provide an answer to the problem of how to formulate a common good in a world of egoistic individuals. Though Marx's criticisms of morality involve a rejection of these approaches, he follows Kant in putting human freedom at the center of his social theory, whilst arguing that Kant fails to understand real human freedom.

In Hobbes' version of the social contract, self-interested individuals would, in a hypothetical situation, agree to the rule of an absolute sovereign as the best way to guarantee their self-preservation. Although later contract theorists such as John Locke and more recently John Rawls have rejected Hobbes' (conservative) political conclusions, they continue to accept his (liberal) way of framing the question. How, they ask, can self-interested individuals agree to some moral and political order?

A similar problematic stands at the center of the dominant mode of English moral philosophy over the last couple of centuries: utilitarianism. Originating with Jeremy Bentham's defense of the principle of utility or greatest happiness, this approach aimed at providing a scientific basis for reforming society so as to ensure that the greatest number of individuals achieve the greatest pleasure for the least pain. Bentham argued that as “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pleasure and pain,” it is these two sensations that provide not only “the standard of right and wrong,” but also “govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think” (Bentham 1990, 9). He insisted that the principle of utility, or what is but another way of saying the same thing—the principle of greatest happiness, is that scientific approach by which we are able to restructure the social order so as to ensure that the greatest pleasure is provided for the greatest number of individuals for the least pain (Bentham 1990, 9–10). Bentham's community is a collection of individuals, and the importance of the concept of individuality to his moral theory cannot be overstated. He argued that it “is in vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual” (Bentham 1990, 10). How, according to this model, can a plurality of pleasure seeking individuals avoid Hobbes' “war of all against all”?

An answer to this problem had been articulated by Adam Smith half a century earlier. Smith famously claimed that in a free market economy the general interest could emerge, not from the good intentions of individual actors, but rather as a consequence of the interaction of a plurality of individuals pursuing their own selfish individual interests. Although it might be true, he argued, that concrete individual businessmen act selfishly; the consequences of these actions are improvements to the common good.

He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was not part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. (Smith 1994, 484–485)

Smith's “invisible hand” provided a powerful consequentialist foundation upon which later thinkers were able to construct a utilitarian justification of capitalism. However, just as Smith naturalized the capitalist economy and capitalist individualism (Rubin 1979, pp. 167–175), at the core of their moral theory the classical utilitarians posited the existence of reified individuals whose desires were not only assumed to be unproblematically registered in the marketplace, but were also accepted as the proper basis for a moral community. Thus in a development of Bentham's ideas, John Stuart Mill argued that according to utilitarianism the only thing that is desirable as an end is happiness, and the only evidence that something is desirable is that “people do actually desire it” (Mill 1991, p. 168). By thus equating what is good with what people desire, Mill, or so G. E. Moore argued, committed “as naïve and artless a use of the naturalistic fallacy as anybody could desire” (Moore 1990, 21). While this is true, as will become apparent below, the key problem with Mill's argument is not his derivation of ought from is, but his assumption that our needs can be adequately registered through the alienated medium of the marketplace. Mill's approach is innocent both of the ways in which our desires are malleable, and of the fact that just because people are happy with their lot does not entail “that their lot is what it ought to be” (MacIntyre 1966, 237). Moreover, because markets have no mechanism for registering social desires, it is only by looking to those social forces that challenge these alienated relationships that we can begin to conceptualize a link between what is right and what is desired. In contrast to this, Bentham and Mill suggested that by our actions we show that we desire these benefits, that they make us happy, and that therefore they are good. Consequently, as Rawls pointed out, by defining the good “independently from the right” such that the right is defined as that which “maximises the good” it is not difficult to see why utilitarianism acts as a “tacit background” belief within contemporary society (Rawls 1971, 25; Kymlicka 2002, 10). It is no less obvious that it is an inadequate basis from which to articulate a satisfactory theory of soc...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Marxism's Ethical Deficit
• 1. Ethics as a Problem for Marxism
• 2. Marx and the Moral Point of View
• 3. Ethics and Politics in Second and Third International Marxism
• 4. Western Marxism's Tragic Vision: Socialist Ethics in a Non-Revolutionary Age
• 5. Alasdair MacIntyre's Contribution to an Ethical Marxism
• Conclusion: From Ethics to Politics
• References