Marxism and Ethics

Paul Blackledge

Description

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.
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
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 14 février 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438439921
• Langue: English

Extrait

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
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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
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 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 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 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