Sunday, February 12, 2006

Alasdair MacIntyre is the author of the bestseller A Short History of Ethics, and of the extremely influential After Virtue. He reviewed my book Deals and Ideals, which owes much to his work, in 2001.
Posted by at No comments:

Saturday, February 11, 2006

  • review of
Deals and Ideals

James Daly has written a book of quite unusual interest and distinction, at once an original interpretation of some central strands in the history of Western thought and an incisive contribution to debates in contemporary moral and political philosophy. It is a deliberately contentious book, challenging some widely and deeply held preconceptions, and there are therefore those who will take him to be not just in error, but obviously in error. They will find materials to support their view in a number of bold and unqualified generalisations that Daly advances and in the brevity of his explanations of some of his key concepts. But, while it is true that some of his generalisations need qualification and some of his explanations need to be expanded, a critique that focused on these would badly miss the point.
The background to Daly's work is worth noting. I have to resist the temptation to think that Belfast is the centre of the world -- after all, nowhere is -- but it is, with Sarajevo, one of the best places for observing the world, not only because of its own conflicts, conflicts of a complexity that generally goes unnoticed, but also because of how, in their attitudes to those conflicts, the dominant powers of modernity reveal so much of themselves. Daly has been more than a mere observer of those attitudes and those conflicts. And the context of his academic life has been the Department of Scholastic philosophy in the Queen's University, a Department in which students and teachers have learned to a quite unusual extent what it is to engage in philosophy from a range of rival standpoints, from that of Aquinas and other mediaeval thinkers, certainly, but also from a variety of modern European perspectives. It is a milieu that makes it less surprising that it would otherwise be that one and the same philosopher should be committed to engage with Plato, with Aquinas, with Hegel, with Marx, and with Levinas. It is a milieu that partly explains why Daly's standpoint is so very different from that of the prevailing orthodoxies, both in the arenas of morals and politics and within academic philosophy.
Daly identifies what he calls "a transhistorical divide" (12) between two intellectual and moral traditions, each of which has its own ideal type of enlightenment. The protagonists of these rival traditions differ systematically in their understanding of value, of reason, of nature, and of freedom. They have in different periods employed different idioms, but the same fundamental opposition between the two can be identified in different periods.
The first of these two traditions is that exemplified by the eighteenth century Anglo-French Enlightenment. It counts Protagoras and other Sophists among its ancestors, and all those modern theorists who have reduced ideals to expressions of preference are its descendants. Counterposed to it is a line that runs from Socrates and Plato through Aristotle to Aquinas and beyond. Their most important modern heir is Marx. Following Daly, let us name these the materialist and the dialectical traditions. How are the key differences between them to be characterised?
The materialist tradition understands all value to be a matter of what happens to please or satisfy some individual or set of individuals and so all judgements of value are taken to be relative to the standpoint of some set of individuals. When individuals utter their judgement of value, they are in one form or another giving expression, often in disguised form, to their own particular attitudes of approval and disapproval, which can find no justification, so they believe, in how things are, in any set of facts about the workings of nature or of human nature. So this is a tradition generally committed to some version of Hume's thesis that "ought" conclusions cannot be derived from "is" premises.
The dialectical tradition, by contrast, understands human beings as directed by our nature towards the achievement of "our objective essential good," "our telos" (18), a good which is universal in that it is the good of all human beings. The achievement of that good requires the exercise of the cardinal virtues and conformity to the requirements of the natural law. To understand what human nature is, and the inclinations that belong to it essentially, is also to understand that it is directed towards such a good. What human beings ought to be follows from what they are and the is/ought dichotomy is a conceptual illusion, one that disguises the relationship of human nature to its good.
Closely related to these disagreements about value are disagreements about nature. For the materialist tradition nature is to be understood, following Galileo and Descartes, in mechanical determinist and sometimes reductionist terms. Human beings have through science and technology acquired the means "to dominate and direct a mechanical and quantifiable nature" (25). Nature so understood could not of course be a source of value and this way of understanding nature, just because it excludes Aristotelian essentialism in, makes those who embrace it unable to recognise the nature of the human intellect. That intellect is directed to its distinct good, truth: "knowing the truth is its function and its fulfilment" (34). By contrast on the dialectical view, nature is to be understood in terms of natural kinds and of the powers and inclinations natural to members of each species. In the "creative shaping of nature" (99) human needs are indeed met, but those needs include the need for truth and the need for beauty.
A further set of related disagreements concerns reason. For the materialist tradition practical reason is instrumental, calculative reason, a power that enables us to identify the most effective ways to satisfy our desires, while theoretical reason has as its goal a grasp of nature that can serve the same purpose. For the dialectical tradition reason has the task of discovering the place of human beings in a universe in which they can be satisfied only by the attainment of truth in understanding and of a good that is not only their own, but the good of every human being. Truth is not an instrumental good. "Dialectic" names the kind of reasoning that aims at achieving truth through overcoming the limitations and contradictions that it confronts at each stage in its development. Plato, Aquinas, and Marx are all in this sense dialectical thinkers.
What is at stake in the conflict between these two traditions becomes clear by comparing the attitudes that each warrants to the institutions of a technologically developing market society. For the materialist tradition technology is valued insofar as it emancipates us from the constraints imposed by nature, and the institutions of a market society are valued because they are thought to rid us of constraints upon achieving the satisfaction of our desires. The relationships through which individuals can achieve these ends are contractual and so the question of what norms should govern the making and fulfilling of contracts becomes a central preoccupation. The concern is with political and commercial deals rather than with ideals.
Yet this culture of deals and the economic structures that underlie it from the standpoint of the dialectical tradition are held to obstruct and to frustrate the potential of human beings for achieving their good, by alienating their labour, by disguising from them the realities of their social relationships, and by involving them in a system of unjust exchanges. The thinker who both enables us to understand this and who identifies what is needed to overcome these obstacles and frustrations is of course Marx. Readers of Daly's excellent Marx: Justice and Dialectic (London: Greenwich Exchange, 1996) will not be surprised by this portrait of Marx. Others may well be.
Three features of Daly's treatment of Marx are worth remarking. The first is his ascription to Marx of a conception of justice that informs all his major writings. Marx was not, on Daly's view, any kind of relativist. His accounts of class society presuppose a universal standpoint from which the inadequacies of conceptions of justice that express the standpoint of this or that dominant class can be evaluated. Secondly, Daly denies that Marx was a materialist. Here he could have drawn, although he does not, upon the compelling evidence provided by George L. Kline in " The Myth of Marx's Materialism" (Annals of Scholarship, vol. 3, no. 2, 1984) who demonstrates that "Marx himself neither developed nor defended a materialist ontology," something that was projected on to Marx's thought by Engels and Plekhanov.
Thirdly, Daly emphasises the Aristotelian elements in Marx's thought, following the pathbreaking work of Scott Meikle, especially in his Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (London: Duckworth, 1985) and Aristotle's Economic Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), although Daly recognises, as does Meikle, that there are important respects in which Marx is certainly not an Aristotelian.
The portrait of Marx that emerges is a complex one. Daly sees him as both a severe critic of the Anglo-French Enlightenment -- his critique of Benthamism is highlighted -- but also as in various respects its heir. Nonetheless, Marx is most instructively read as a thinker who brought to nineteenth century debates concepts and standards that are at home within the moral and political philosophies of Aristotle and Aquinas. And, on Daly's view, Marx's contribution to the dialectical tradition is of the first importance in confronting the contemporary defenders of the materialist tradition.
What divides these two traditions most notably in the present are their differing and incompatible conceptions of freedom. The core notion of freedom for the materialist tradition is that of negative freedom, of freedom as freedom from external constraint. Against this the dialectical tradition advances a notion of positive freedom and Daly provides his own account of what is needed in a much too short and compressed ten page outline. (Inside this thin book there is a fat book on freedom screaming to be let out.)
Some of Daly's key propositions are: that "[f]ree actions and their habitual patterns are... a structured response to a structured situation more or less truly and clearly perceived. Freedom arises from the ability to universalise, the ability to structure and restructure..." (101); that there are laws that hold of free human activity, but they are emergent from and not reducible to the laws of the natural sciences; that to be free is "to be the cause of one's actions under a definite description (i.e. intention)" (101); that one's actions to be free must be influenced by reasoning and be capable of being influenced by further reasoning; that free actions are exhibited in an agent's being empowered with others to control aspects of the environment; that to be free is to be free from the force of others' unreasonable wills.
Among the authors on whom Daly draws in constructing his account are Merleau-Ponty, Cassirer, Roy Bhaskar, and Kierkegaard. The reader of this review may well feel intolerably frustrated by the abbreviated account of my summary and the ten pages that Daly provides will still leave the reader frustrated, yet also, I hope, stimulated and excited. Far too much is left unargued, but what we have been given is a brilliantly suggestive programme for further philosophical work.
Finally, I have two questions to raise. The first concerns those passages in which Daly seems to allow that perhaps his narrative of the dialectical tradition has, or needs, some theological component. So he is unwilling to allow Levinas to define himself as wholly outside the tradition that Daly represents and he seems to denies that there is a polar opposition between Hebraic, that is, biblical thought, and the Greek thought which he acknowledges as originating the dialectical tradition. Moreover, he follows R.H.Tawney in taking a negative view of secularisation and of the subordination of the churches to the state in the sixteenth century. Yet everything that he says about religion is too brief and allusive and the word "spiritual", as Daly uses it, obscures rather than reveals Daly's point of view. We are left with ambiguity where we need clarity.
A second question arises from a paragraph on p.16 in which Daly asserts on the one hand that "[t]he two transhistorical rival claimants to the title of enlightenment are two wholly opposed views... of mind or reason," that "what will seem good reasons to Socrates will not seem good reasons to a Callicles," and that "[r]ationality requires a spiritual orientation," while on the other hand denying that what is presented is "a radical ungrounded decision between two incommensurable 'forms of life.' " Daly's all arguments however, and especially his most daring and controversial arguments, seem to appeal to standards and to make use of premises that are in very large part rejected by the adherents of the opposing view. So I ask: What more can Daly say that will persuade us that these two traditions do not represent incommensurable alternatives? Without an answer the argument of this excellent book is importantly incomplete.
ALASDAIR MACINTYRE, University of Notre Dame.
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 75, Issue No. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 629-33.


Posted by at No comments:
Deals and Ideals:
Chapter 1
Two Concepts of Nature, and Two Concepts of Reason
The Sophists, Plato and Natural Law
The key to an understanding of ethics and politics (and of the relation between them) is in the conflict between Socrates and the Sophists. The division between them polarised two claims to enlightenment, with mutually exclusive concepts of nature, human nature, reason, the good, justice, right, law, virtue, happiness and freedom.
The Sophists' epistemological- and value-relativist position was that all reasoning and all valuation is subjective because it is relative to and subservient to the immediate, particular desire or will of each individual. They also held that by nature the primary, basic and inevitable desire of every individual is to survive. Once that is guaranteed the next desire of everyone (including Socrates, who was declared by Polus in the Gorgias to be hypocritical for not admitting it) is to possess everything, and to rule and enslave all others. That would provide the greatest possible amount of value. There is no hierarchy of values; they are quantitative, not qualitative.
The Socratic, Platonic and Aristotelian reply was that the Sophistic perspective ignored the specifically human natural capacity of the intellect to transcend the immediate, particular and finite towards the universal, in the forms of the understanding of universal essences, the orientation to universality as unity and totality, and the love of infinite and absolute truth, beauty and goodness. The fulfilment of the individual is found not in the false infinity of the endless satisfaction of finite desires for quantifiable things, but in the infinitude of these values, which are qualitatively better and higher than that of survival, and may require the sacrifice of one's life, liberty or finite goods. The most fulfilling relationship between human beings is mutual justice; that includes in principle the common ownership of resources, at least as a ground for the community's requiring that, if they are to be distributed (by the community) among the citizens, they must be used for the common need and the common good.
This teleological, hierarchical but unified ethical, socio-economic and political naturalism was developed by the Stoics, the Neoplatonists, philosophers and theologians in the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions, and the scholastics, notably Thomas Aquinas. Thomas adopts the substance of Aristotle's ethical theory, seeing it as a department of politics, and also of ontology. He also adopts an Aristotelian method. He begins his ethics with the good and happiness; he takes up Aristotle's theme of contemplation as the most complete human happiness in his location of ultimate happiness in the beatific vision; he devotes the bulk of his ethics to the virtues; and he does not begin but ends with the natural law theory. Unlike Kant, Thomas is not legalistic. What he means by natural law is not a detailed moral code but a rational guide to the good we seek. Above all he means that law is a function of reason or intellect, not of desire or will. The basis of the entire tradition is essentialism. Its approach to the universal, unlike Kant's, involves recognition of the capacity of the mind to grasp essences, as well as the demands of formal logic.
Posted by at No comments:
Mervyn Hartwig
Paradigms of Enlightenment
DEALS AND IDEALS:
two concepts of enlightenment
By James Daly.
Greenwich Exchange, London 2000. 160 pp.
1-871551-31-5 paperback

Doubtless largely by moral luck, Deals and Ideals is a very well timed book within the critical realist context. It appeared shortly after the dialectically developing metaphysical idealism of the Bhaskarian system had been rendered explicit in From East to West, and claims, not just Bhaskar, but the 'comet of critical realism' and modernity's perhaps most notorious atheist and materialist - Marx himself - for the idealist tradition of dialectical spiritual enlightenment and natural law, whose leading expositors are Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. Together with related themes, its central stance on the human condition is very close to that of From East to West: the enslavement of humankind's free, creative and communal essential nature by capital and the ideology of having, and the necessary possibility of liberation and oneness of being - of bringing our 'existence' into line with our 'essence' - vouchsafed by the dialectical unity of the human and divine mind, and of mind and being, such that the nature [of a thing] (e.g. rational or universalising animal; creative and social producer; or indeed both) is not only what an entity essentially is, potentially or actually, but also what or how it therefore ought to be - as near as possible to an ideal example of its kind; and it determines what is good for such an entity (18).
Shorn of divinity, but not of its religious inspiration, this shared stance arguably finds a common source in the humanism of Marx, which was given clearest and most sustained expression in the early writings, but is, Daly cogently argues, the unifying motivation of Marx's overall thought. Further, it is the recent development by Bhaskar and others of an anti-mechanist, anti-positivist, realist and essentialist theory of science that now makes full appreciation of this humanism possible. Most of us have been brought up to believe that there is only one Enlightenment - the modern bourgeois, encompassing Bacon, Hobbes, Hume, Bentham, the philosophes, and Kant -, that Marx belongs to its materialist wing, and that it is the intellectual counterpart of the sun in our planetary system. Not only are there two, Daly insists, but the bourgeois enlightenment is not even unique in its own terms, or very enlightened. While some aspects of its commitment to science and technology, liberty and equality, are indeed novel and valuable, it is fundamentally a return to the tradition of Thucydides, Protagoras, and the Sophists. Virtually coeval with the rise of large-scale maritime trade in the West, and extensive commercialisation of labour in urban slave markets, it is ultimately a mercantile, materialistic tradition whose conception of rationality is in terms of deals or profitseeking, rather than ideals (the hallmark of dialectical enlightenment). Prior to the development of capitalism, it was very much subordinate to its older spiritual antithesis, which viewed it as obscurantist, and which alone held the title to enlightenment. Reinvigorated by the modern bourgeois revolution, however, it inverted the relationship and usurped the title. This was effected above all by divorcing being (nature) from mind and value, thereby 'infinitising and absolutising the finite in the same way as the Sophists had done' and breaking up 'the dialectical view of the ideal unity of all things in the infinite' (23). The notion that there is only one Enlightenment is thus an index of the thoroughness of the bourgeois revolution, and it motivates one of Daly's leading themes, a Benjaminian emphasis on the vital importance for the socialist project of recuperating aspects of the past.
Summary account
Daly's account of the two traditions is of course in terms of the ideal type, which abstracts from complexity and diversity in order to divine quintessential nature and basic principles. Even so, as far as I can judge - and I should perhaps warn that I am by no means as well versed in the western philosophical tradition as Daly evidently is - the account is rich and deft (notwithstanding that it is also hard hitting and passionate, I would say partly in virtue of this). Daly moves among the cast of major philosophers in the ongoing struggle between Socrates and the Sophists with great assurance. Here is his own summary of the account:
The two claimants to enlightenment are polar opposite orientations.
The materialistic one sees itself as this-worldly, and condemns the other as irrational because other-worldly. The spiritual enlightenment however sees itself as questing for the fullest rational [including scientific - MH] understanding of the human world in its totality, and condemns its opponent as not in fact earthy, but in essence hellish. The Platonic Socrates classifies Sophists not among intellectuals, as a rival group to philosophers, but among pimps. Aquinas classifies unjust laws not among laws at all but among acts of violence. For Aquinas, nature is law; and the nature of law is not the same as that of an act of violence. For Thucydides and Hobbes on the contrary nature is violence, and law is the product of successful counter-violence. For the dialectical Fichte the age of Hobbes and Locke is 'the age of complete sinfulness' - of Sünde, of the sundering (Sonderung) of the mind from its essential self [cf Bhaskar's concept of 'structural sin'. - MH].
The rival versions of enlightenment present systematically antithetical ontologies and epistemologies.
· Nature is seen by one as crude and chaotic, as 'mere' nature, to be dominated by […] technology, including political and social engineering; by the other, it is seen as telos, a potential to be realised, an ideal to be lived by.
· Mind is seen by one as relative, ultimately reducible to sense experience, and confined to serving the passions; for the other it includes the capacity for absolute, timeless truth, and guides human beings to their objective natural good, their ideal fulfillment.
· For the one the good is hedone, individualist pleasure, subjective and relative [Benthamite] 'happiness' […]; for the other eudaimonia, the objective communal happiness of spiritual and general well-being. · For one, individual human excellence, arete, is worldly success; for the other, it is the development of temperance, courage, justice and practical wisdom (phronesis) in the pursuit of truth, beauty and goodness.
· Freedom is for one negative, the unhindered pursuit of one's pleasures, immediate or long-term utility […]; for the other positive, self-government by universal requirements of reason, binding like those of mathematics.
· For one, justice is the equality of free citizens making political deals, that is, negotiating their other systematic equality as property owners making economic deals in a free market; for the other it is the common good, the good both of the community as community and of all members of the community equally.
Capitalism is clearly compatible with the first, but equally clearly it is opposed to the second […] (14-15)
At the time of its bid for the mantle of enlightenment, the Sophistic tradition encountered the challenge of German idealism, which took up the dialectical tradition of spiritual enlightenment, adapting it to the egalitarian and democratic pulse of modernity. Experiencing the divorce between reason and nature, fact and value, as 'a diremption of human essential being', it sought to recover 'a spiritual unity, deriving from our sharing universal mind and being united in the love of truth, beauty and goodness' (35). It was fundamentally weakened and compromised, however, by its endorsement of private property rights, acceptance of a version of 'the Whig theory of history' whereby injustice is justified by 'progress', and above all by ceding, explicitly or implicitly, the concept and understanding of nature to mechanistic materialism; even Hegel, the very principle of whose philosophy was the unity of the divine and human mind, accepted the Hobbesian account of the human 'state of nature', whereby there could be '"no idle talk about a state of natural goodness"' (36). It accommodated, in short, to the bourgeois revolution, which indeed, as Marx pointed out, was idealised by Hegel, or 'transfigured and glorified', such that 'what seems in appearance alien to me is in its depths the requirement of absolute universal self-consciousness - and therefore of mine [i.e. my own self-consciousness - MH]' (54).
Marxian redemption
Marx 'redeem[ed] the faults' (43) of German idealism's attempt to counter the Anglo-French enlightenment, and a large part of the book is devoted to arguing that he belongs squarely within the first tradition. Crucially, Marx rejected the bourgeois enlightenment's mechanistic concept of nature, enshrined both in empiricist reductionism and in idealist mind/ nature dualism, espousing the dialectical unity of being and mind upheld by dialectical enlightenment, according to which 'an understanding of nature, what is and what by right ought to be (i.e., by right reason […]), gives an understanding of the good, the right, the due, the proper, the virtues (including justice), law, rights, freedom and happiness; they form a unity of mutual implication' (18). His thought is thus at its core a recuperation of Aristotelian essentialism and eudaimonism; however, it is 'not Aristotelian in the sense of advocating conformity to a totally preordained essence' (60), rather it is dynamised and diffracted, multi-tiered and diachronically emergentist. His 'naturalism seems to involve the theory that without [the] deformations, distortions and restrictions' of class society 'human beings will naturally develop their potentiality for creative social production' (67), rejecting the 'bad infinity' of pleonexia or unlimited acquisitiveness, which Marx abhors as much as Aristotle, and which 'twins with injustice' in his condemnation of 'the "rastlos, masslos [restless, measureless] werewolf hunger of surplus-value' (19); for 'it is in the nature or essence of a mode of production that it ought to embody production from each according to ability, and distribution to each according to need' (35). Such a position is presupposed by Marx's theory of alienation; and indeed, the 'original inspiration' of his thought is 'the German idealist schema, derived from the Plotinian dialectic, of the alienation and return of Mind' (57). Albeit an atheist, Marx, as 'the inheritor of idealism', had a fundamentally religious sensibility, but without a theological commitment.1 His materialism was no 'metaphysics of matter', rather it amounted to denial of the Hegelian notion that the actual is rational or ideal; recognition of the structural conditioning by 'material' circumstances of human free will, and of the importance of production and therefore of class in history; and rejection of nature/ spirit dichotomy in favour of a naturalist humanism which, in his own words, '"differs both from idealism and materialism and […] is at the same time their unifying truth"' (112). Marx's humanism was of the Feuerbachian 'I-thou' kind, unified around the theme of loving relations of production. Far from being a moral relativist, as argued by Allen Wood and others, Marx was a moral 'absolutist and perfectionist', who condemned capitalism 'totally and critically from outside in terms of its divergence from a potential alternative, a classless productive system' based on love, trust, and 'total generosity' (128).2 Marx thus does indeed have a notion of historical progress, but it is not the bourgeois justification of evil by progress, rather the resolution of (the problem of) evil via 'the redemption of humanity' in and through practice.
Marx's thought has however been 'bourgeoisified' by Kautsky, Plekhanov, the analytical 'Marxists', and many others; that is, interpreted through the framework of the mechanistic enlightenment (which Marx explicitly condemned), such that he is seen to espouse the separation of state and economy, the determination of 'superstructure' by 'base', the divorce of fact from value, a stagist view of history as mechanistically law-governed and predictable, and so on. From this perspective much post-Marx Marxism appears as the complicit twin of liberalism, a dialectical sub-plot of the main bourgeois story, with no prospect of sublating it (cf MacIntyre 1981: Ch. 18).
Bhaskarian elaboration
Today Marx's true legacy can best be appreciated from the vantage point of the Bhaskarian vindication of emergentist ontology and natural kinds, and explanatory critique. Daly does not discuss Bhaskar's philosophy at any length, but a clear implication of his account is that Bhaskar's thought (including the spiritual turn) is no departure from, rather an elaboration and development of, the work of Marx within the tradition of dialectical enlightenment. It is unclear, however, how Daly would relate his own account of that tradition, and in particular his own evident commitment to a version of the Platonic Forms, to the swingeing Bhaskarian critique of Platonism and Aristotelianism in Plato Etc. (1994) as dialectical counterparts in the forging of the 'common mistaken problematic' of the 'unholy trinity' of ontological monovalence, the epistemic fallacy, and the 'primal squeeze' on natural necessity and empirically controlled scientific theory between rationalism and empiricism, which has dominated western philosophy to this day. Elsewhere Daly adverts to a 'possible bridge building between a realist philosophy of science and an Aristotelian essentialism', to which he invites Bhaskar's participation (Daly 2000: 12). Indications are that he would regard Aquinas as a key mediating link between the classical and modern phases of dialectical enlightenment.
Daly's wide-ranging account inevitably raises many controversial issues, only a few more of which can concern us here. It might be thought that his view of the modern enlightenment is arbitrarily restricted. There is a sense, after all, in which the bourgeois revolution gave rise both to mechanistic materialism and the romantic (antibourgeois) and idealist reaction to it, as dialectical counterparts, just as the rise of Athenian civilisation produced both Socrates and the Sophists. Indeed, in the case of the towering figure of Kant, with his dichotomies of nature and reason, fact and value, both tendencies are united in the one thinker, and most of us will be accustomed to thinking of him as the epitome of Enlightenment. On Daly's account, however, Kant's position (like that of German idealism generally, only more so) is ambiguous, with one foot in each of the two camps. Which view is correct? I would say that both are: Daly's account is a valid perspectival switch (Bhaskar 1993: 401) from the traditional view (and vice versa). The one emphasises synchrony and novelty, at the expense of continuity, as Daly shows; the other diachrony and continuity, in particular in regard to class interest, arguably at the expense of novelty (which however is acknowledged, albeit perhaps a little grudgingly).
Two enlightenments, or three?
Daly is very much aware that the dialectical tradition, like its rival, suffers from the 'distortions' of class. Its experience of community was achieved on the pedestal of slavery and other forms of formally unfree labour. It is arguably, however, less compromised by class than mechanistic materialism, which today is straightforwardly bourgeois, in that it can also be seen as a recuperation of the pre-class outlook in which communal utilisation of resources was viewed as 'a natural and rational basis for all human relations'. In endorsing the earlier tradition (minus its class distortions) and espousing certain (recuperated) feudal values (nobility, honour)4, Daly runs the risk of appearing backward looking. However, Marx himself frequently and centrally deployed concepts of nobility and honour, as Daly points out (58). Further, Daly also sometimes seems to imply that the work of Marx heralds a third enlightenment on the basis of a sublating synthesis of the two traditions, both of which he rescued from their class distortions. Doubtless such a sublation is more preservative in relation to the earlier than to the later tradition, but Daly acknowledges that Marx 'belongs to modernity' and that he is indebted to the bourgeois revolution for both his technological Prometheanism and significant aspects of his social and political thought, such as the 'standpoint of labour' (that humans make the human world) and the values of genuine equality and democracy, albeit such values only 'accidentally and deceitfully' accompanied that revolution and are radically transformed by Marx. Daly therefore seems to want to claim both that Marx belongs to the first tradition and that he sublated both traditions in a third. The paradox is resolvable in part by considering that, while the third enlightenment has already occurred at the level of theory, it has yet to become the common sense of the age; Marx can be seen as heralding a third, which has yet to be achieved in any full way. It can be resolved fully, however, only by seeing Marx either as heavily influenced by spiritual enlightenment, rather than its adherent, or as heralding a new stage of human enlightenment from within - via a dialectical development of - the earlier tradition. Daly clear favours the latter. What we have in effect is his own version, at the level of the historical movement of philosophical thought, of the 'Neoplatonic […] Eden/ Fall/ Redemption motif [… which] sees the essence of things in terms of their ideal, the Alpha of their Edenic natural perfection' (Daly 2001). Daly contends that this motif was stressed by Marx in his last writings on the fate of the Russian agrarian commune, and seems to hint that Marx's own earlier Hegel-inspired three-part dialectic of being and having - from 'primitive' communal being, to private property and class having, and the return to full selfconscious communal being - is more aligned to the Whig view of history.
Irruption of the new
That this is Daly's overall position seems above all clear from his discussion of how we can choose between the two paradigms. In an argument recalling Bhaskar's distinction between 'epistemic relativism' and 'judgemental rationalism', he insists that the choice is a rational one, notwithstanding that 'the nature and status of reason itself is at issue' - i.e. that foundationalism or Archimedianism is false:
What are necessary and possible are holistic arguments and complex judgements, evaluating the two opposing constellations of concepts, values and methods for their adequacy to our best understanding of nature and reason. However, what will seem good reasons to a Socrates will not seem good reasons to a Callicles. Rationality requires of us a spiritual value orientation; if necessary a conversion, a metanoia. This is Plato's intention, and it took all twelve books of The Republic to carry it out. (14)
What Daly has in mind, of course, is no Kierkegaardian leap of faith against reason, but a leap that is founded in reason. His starting point is that of Marx (and Bhaskar), that the human being is a 'universal and therefore free being'. Plato's and especially Aristotle's claims to the universality of their reasoning had been vitiated by the distortions of property and class. Only the propertyless proletariat of our own epoch has the potential to become a genuinely 'universal class', because it 'has no other social need than the "radical human need" […] of meeting each other, not in some version of a master and slave relation, but […] as human beings' (58). However, the facing of its 'human situation' and the realisation of its potential requires 'a new orientation, away from the pursuit of pleasure, money and power, and towards the good', forged in the crucible of revolutionary practice (third thesis on Feuerbach). This involves a Benjaminian or Levinasian 'rupture with time' and 'irruption of the new': 'a breakthrough from nothingness to totality and infinity', a transition from a state of having to a state of being prefigured in 'the divine ecstasy of the lover, the madman, the poet', a transcendence of the bourgeois enlightenment in a 'wholly other', socialist enlightenment - 'from possessive individualist propertied Hell to communal Heaven' (41, 78). Such a concept of 'conversion' or metanoia clearly has a great deal in common with the Bhaskarian concept of 'shedding' or 'letting go' our alienated existence - the 'warp' on our true natures - in the transition to eudaimonia.
Everything would seem to depend here - as, indeed, in regard to the essentialism, ideal teleology and natural ethics of the tradition of spiritual enlightenment quite generally - on the argument for the dialectical unity of the human and divine mind, for the essential unity and goodness of reality. Daly at one point seems to imply to the contrary:
Crucially, Thomas argues that reason, not will, is the basis of natural law: God wills x because it is good; x is not good because God wills it. For Aquinas's natural law philosophy, even if God did not exist, x would be desirable to a rational mind if it is good; x is not good because it is desired, willed or commanded, whether by God, the Church, 'society', the Party, or the state. (16; my emphasis)
But - without in any way querying the rejection of a command theory of law here - it would seem that, if x is good, it is so in virtue of its essential nature or idea(l), which is ultimately grounded in the nature of God. Of course, it is possible to construct arguments which ground the ontological primacy of the good in, say, the process of biological and human evolution, without invoking God (Brereton 2000; Hartwig 2000), but this only shelves larger questions concerning why things should be so. Hence here too everything would in fact seem to depend on that 'holistic argument' for the overall position, issuing in a dialectical ascent to the divine; if God did not exist, everything would ultimately fail. It is an argument that Daly develops with a passion and insight that very much commands the respect of this agnostic reviewer.
Perfectionism
Daly's embracement of Marxian (and Bhaskarian) perfectionism puts him at odds with the 'anti-perfectionist' wing of critical realism (itself dividing into 'Popperian', or reformist, and 'Timpanaroian Marxist', or revolutionary, strands), which holds that the fallibility or fallenness (or both) of humanity entails that 'it is beyond the capacity of finite beings' to order society and live their lives according to 'a universal care ethic' (Collier 2001: 113-4). Daly is surely right here, in the sense that to rule out such a shift as impossible in advance is itself to attempt the impossible: to foreclose on possibility in an open world. It is not as though a leap into the utterly unknown is envisaged; people do have the capacity, among others, to love and trust one another, to dialectically universalise, and to understand, like Vermeer's Milk Maid, that virtue is its own reward. It is early days in the development of our species' powers. We may legitimately aspire to something more than that personification of instrumental rationality, Beckett's Hamm, who opines that 'here if you were careful you might die a nice natural death in peace and comfort'. Nor are such 'ruptures with time' without any sort of historical precedent; the irruption of human selfconsciousness, religion and art seventy thousand years ago, and the transition to master-slave type society some sixty thousand years later, are perhaps at least as momentous. Nor again is it easy to see how else the planet can be saved and its seething poor achieve a life 'worthy of our human nature'. Nor does perfectionism entail that we eschew or postpone amelioration of the human condition via reform. The standard liberal charge against rationalist perfectionism (echoed by Collier 2001: 13), with its positive view of freedom as self-government by reason, is of course that it leads to totalitarianism. Daly's response is that 'totalitarian power is not reason; and reason is not totalitarian power' (104). Eudaimonistic freedom demands the fullest possible development of individual freedom and the 'holistic politics of participatory democracy', including economic democracy. While this can only be achieved on the basis that those who oppose it 'can be forced to be free' (Rousseau), the same holds true of the 'negative' freedom as freedom from constraint that is enshrined in the market: bourgeois democracy and freedom by no means came into the world by the democratic road (Trotsky), and today people continue to be 'shelled into the enforced unity' of its 'negative freedom' (58). Isaiah Berlin's problem of 'positive freedom's negating true (i.e. negative) freedom' is therefore false.
Nightingalian self-evidence
Deals and Ideals is not an easy book to read. Ranging over the whole of western philosophy, it is very closely argued and necessarily presupposes considerable knowledge on the part of the reader. Sometimes repetitive and occasionally obscure, it is more often wonderfully illuminating and incisive, as when the essence of a mode of production is said to be production according to ability and distribution according to need - something which would have 'a Nightingalian self-evidence if we were shipwrecked on a desert island instead of being the inheritors of class modes of production'. (Florence Nightingale, it is explained, 'pointed out that whatever else hospitals do, they should not spread disease' (35)). It makes out a strong and plausible case for its central themes, and, importantly for critical realists, both illuminates the Bhaskarian project and elaborates aspects of it. It can be seen as a vindication of Alisdair MacIntyre's argument that 'the crucial moral opposition [in modernity] is between liberal individualism in some version or other and the Aristotelian tradition in some version or other' (MacIntyre 1981: 241), with the important difference that, unlike MacIntyre, Daly locates the thought of Marx within the Aristotelian tradition. Even those who are not persuaded by its main theses will find in it a rich source of insight and pointed argument on rationality, relativism, nature, freedom, justice, progress and much more.
Notes
1. This way of putting it was suggested to me by Tobin Nellhaus.
2. Marx's views on morality and justice are discussed at length in Daly (1996).
3. Whereby the perfection or ideal of things is 'their matter's being limited by nothing but their form, their idea, which also gives them their proper relation to the idea of other things' (20).
Cf Collier 2001: 106-7, 123, who opts for the 'alternative' feudal values of Robin Hood. Daly agrees (1996: x) that Robin Hood was invoking the natural law tradition against the Sheriff of Nottingham.
Cf Bhaskar 1986, who looks forward to 'the dawning of a new enlightenment, a socialist enlightenment which will stand to some future order of things, as the eighteenth-century bourgeois enlightenment stood to the American Declaration of Independence, the French revolution and the overthrow of colonial slavery for which it helped to prepare the cultural ground.'
Collier is careful to say 'terror and dictatorship', rather than 'totalitarianism', since he reserves the latter term for his own apt characterisation of the ideology of late capitalism as 'totalitarian commercialism'.
References
Bhaskar, Roy. 1986. Reclaiming Reality: a critical introduction to contemporary philosophy. London & New York: Verso.
Bhaskar, Roy. 1993. Dialectic: the Pulse of Freedom. London & New York: Verso.
Brereton, Derek. 2000. 'Ontic morality and human being'. Alethia 3 (2): 21-28.
Collier, Andrew 2001. Christianity and Marxism: A philosophical contribution to their reconciliation. London: Routledge.
Daly, James 1996. Marx, Justice and Dialectic. London: Greenwich Exchange.
Daly, James 2000. Dialectical enlightenment [review of Roy Bhaskar's From East to West]. Alethia 3 (2): 11-13.
Daly, James 2001. Religious sensibility. bhaskar@lists.village.virginia.edu, 7th July (cited with permission).
Hartwig, Mervyn. 2001. 'New Left, New Age, New Paradigm? Roy Bhaskar's From East to West'. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 31 (2): 139-166.
MacIntyre, Alisdair 1981. After Virtue: a study in moral theory. London: Duckworth.
Posted by at No comments:
MARX and JUSTICE

James Daly

Abstract

Marx's thought about justice is essentialist and dialectical. It has been interpreted in terms of immoralism. It is in fact a synthesis of the traditional natural law, based on the Aristotelian concept of nature as the potential for perfection or ideal fulfilment, radically different from the Hobbesian reductionist concept of nature as atomistic and mechanical; of the tradition of dialectics in its German idealist form; and of Feuerbach's (I-thou) humanism.
Marx's explicitly realist idea of science reveals "veiled wage-slavery". Concentration on the market exchange, to the exclusion of the subsequent exploitative use, of labour power deceives observers who are exclusively analytic into the belief that there is some justice in capitalism.
Marx characterised the proletariat as the "universal class", capable of bringing about the fulfilment of the human essence in a family-style mode of production, because it is the victim of total injustice. However, he criticised workers for not rising above such bourgeois selfishness as demanding "a fair wage", which he shows is not even a coherent concept. Capitalism is not only a moral injustice, but an ontological injustice, a violation of the worker's humanity. It is coercion into alienation, fetishism and idolatry.
Keywords: Marx; justice; Enlightenment; reason; nature; ontology
Posted by at No comments:


MARX and JUSTICE
James Daly

Marx's implicit theory of justice should not be interpreted in terms of the two dominant Cartesian distortions of morality, utilitarianism and Kantianism, in terms of modern (eg Rawlsian) natural law (or rather natural rights), or in terms of immoralism or a-moralism. It is rather a synthesis of three elements; of the traditional natural law, based on the Aristotelian concept of nature as the potential for perfection or ideal fulfilment, happiness as eudaemonia (radically different from the Hobbesian reductionist concept of nature as atomistic mechanical repetition); of the tradition of dialectics in its German idealist form; and of Feuerbach's humanism. Marx is not only explicitly returning to Aristotle's condemnation in terms of the natural good for human beings of chrematistike, the use of money with the sole aim of making more money, and of pleonexia, unlimited acquisitiveness. He is also recovering the Platonic, Senecan and Isidorean basic human value -- and right -- of communism, shared by Thomas Aquinas. For Marx capitalism is an inhumanly unjust system and its unjust "rights" are not (genuine) rights at all but despotic powers; just as unjust "laws" are not only not moral (as those in the tradition of nominalism, empiricism and legal positivism could agree), but are not essentially legal -- are not law at all but are acts of violence.

The distortion of this last by Kautsky and Plekhanov into a metaphysical determinism, culminating in "Dialectical" and "Historical" Materialism, eliminated the essence of Marx's thought -- humanism as the Feuerbachian "I - thou" relationship, with a corresponding critique of alienation and fetishism -- and created the problem of "Marx and justice". Marx's concept of justice can be seen at work in his critique of Lassallean and Ricardian socialism and anarchism, both of their mistaken pursuit of justice in badly misunderstood economic questions, and of their failure to rise above narrow egoistic bourgeois categories of justice, to the broad ontological vistas of justice which Marx called humanism, and which he claimed their economic situation made visible and attainable.

The distortion of this last by Kautsky and Plekhanov into a metaphysical determinism, culminating in "Dialectical" and "Historical" Materialism, eliminated the essence of Marx's thought -- humanism as the Feuerbachian "I - Thou" relationship, with a corresponding critique of alienation and fetishism -- and created the problem of "Marx and justice". Marx's concept of justice can be seen at work in his critique of Lassallean and Ricardian socialism and anarchism, both of their mistaken pursuit of justice in badly misunderstood economic questions, and of their failure to rise above narrow egoistic bourgeois categories of justice, to the broad ontological vistas of justice which Marx called humanism, and which he claimed their economic situation made visible and attainable.

But most of all Marx was objecting to a combination of all these and other factors in the bourgeois notion of justice or "rights" which he attacked in "On The Jewish Question" as "the rights of separation", the universalised rights of alienated, egoistic, possessive individualist bourgeois "Man", of which the flagship, as in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, was the modern right of private property, differences in the amount of which, varying from a coal mine to nothing but one's labour power, did not count as grounds for different treatment in the impersonal market to which every human relationship was being reduced. His main concern was that these selfish values, which so obviously favoured the rich and powerful, not only were confusing the would-be revolutionary bourgeois Young Hegelians and leading them to condemn the workers' social struggles, but had already corrupted and thus debilitated the working-class itself. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts Marx condemned the mean petty envious levelling of the "crude communists" for its confinement to possessive Having, instead of opening up to to self-realising Being. The rejection in the Critique of the Gotha Programme of "vulgar [i.e. Benthamising] socialism's" demand for rights, was part of the same call for the transcendence of "the muck of ages" needed for the working-class to "fit itself to found society anew". Proletarian revolution would require a transcendence of the merely book-keeping justice of the possessive individualism of "bourgeois right", and a dialectical ascent to the ontological justice of the fulfilment of the human essence in communal humanism. It is significant that bourgeois right echoes the unthinking mercantile definition of justice by Cephalus in The Republic; he, like most merchants in Athens was a metic, a non-citizen immigrant from another city-state, thus not belonging to the Athenian community.

However, there is a peculiar complication and confusion of the question of justice for Marx, and hence for his interpreters ever since. This is due to the class situation in which it was presented (and was myopically accepted by workers) as a question of economic detail, of distribution, leaving unquestioned the entire system of production, including exchange and consumption, of which it was a part. The material part of that class situation was the spread of laissez-faire capitalism, under which the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. The intellectual part was the bourgeois attempt to explain, justify -- or even better deny -- this fact, in the terms of political economy, an alleged natural science which was supposed to show that there are eternal laws of economics, such as those of supply and demand, which, like the laws of physics, are outside human control. This was done at first in terms of the labour theory of value, which, when combined with the belief that labour is a commodity, made the problem of the origin of profit insoluble even for Ricardo. The political part of the situation, finally, was that workers, under the influence of a Ricardian labour theory of value, demanded justice (their "rights") within the system, but in the form of the full value of their labour (thereby implying that they had been cheated in the market), or of the return to workers of the full proceeds of their labour (which is of course impossible under capitalism). At that point, as a result of this subversive if confused use of the labour theory of value, bourgeois proponents of political economy changed over from a Lockean labour-oriented theory of value, which Marx regarded as basically scientific, to a Benthamite merchant-oriented psychological theory of value, producing a pseudo-science which Marx called "vulgar political economy".

In 1859 Marx's Critique explained capital accumulation in terms of the commodity labour power, thereby exposing the total misunderstanding of capitalist economics underlying these demands for justice, thus showing them to be absurdities. In 1865 Marx explained his theory very simply in Wages, Price and Profit, an educational pamphlet written for the International Working Men's Association. Even Capital I was written in as popular a style as was possible, to make the real relationship between wages and capital accessible to workers. However, in 1875 the exasperated Marx found that the Lassallean authors of the Gotha programme had not understood what he had been saying, and were still making the same absurd demands for justice within the wages system as had been made in the 1840's, at the same time couching them in Benthamite categories, thus producing what Marx called "vulgar socialism". This he thought both scientifically (intellectually) and humanly (ontologically, including morally) degrading. He also thought these reformist demands were a recipe for disaster in the class struggle, since they did not challenge the bourgeois system as a whole in a revolutionary way, but accepted bourgeois domination and exploitation in principle and in practice. As he said in Wages, Price and Profit about current trade union struggles, their function could only be to help the system by keeping the price of labour power up to its value (to secure a living, as opposed to a starvation, wage). The communist workers whom Marx met in Paris understood, as Marx did, that fully human relations between human beings (in which a wide and hierarchical range of considerations of justice must play a vital part) requires the abolition of the wages system, which from the humanism of their class standpoint they could see was totally alienating of the human being, as well as being the most inhuman example of the general injustice of class domination and exploitation.

But what is the value of labour? What is a fair wage? Put this way the problems are insoluble, both theoretically and practically.

After many years of research, especially into "theories of surplus value", Marx eventually solved the theoretical problem by abandoning the misleading terms in which it had been set, and by demonstrating that they amounted to the double-take of a confidence trick. In the first place, in his analysis the commodity being bought and sold in the capitalist "labour" market -- but unbeknown to the labourer is -- is not labour, but labour-power (this is Marx's technical term, meaning simply the ability to work). At the level of the market there is therefore, in Marx's analysis, an exchange of two commodities of equivalent value, but they are not labour and wages. They are labour power (a human being's ability to work) and wages. For a wage is the equivalent of the value of labour power, which, just like the value of any other commodity, is the value it takes to produce it; in this case that is the cost of subsistence, the value it takes to produce, or to reproduce and replace, a human being with the ability to work; the value found in a subsistence wage.

But even if the workers could penetrate the illusory appearance that wages are exchanged for labour, not labour-power, they would face another sleight of hand; that is, the pretence that the exchange of labour power and wages is a normal market exchange of commodities like any other. Quite apart from its unique ontological nature, in that its use is the expenditure of the worker's "life-activity" or being, the commodity labour-power is also unique in capitalist economic terms. It has a unique use value, which is only revealed at a deeper level of the bourgeois mode of production than that of the market; that is, at the level of production, where what Marx calls "the immediate process of production" takes place. This is the level at which the commodity labour-power, just bought, is used by the capitalist as abstract labour, to create profit. In commercially successful cases the "socially necessary" labour (i.e. labour that is averagely productive, in competition with other labours) creates more value in the commodities sold than labour-power's own value (what it cost the capitalist, its market price, on average its value, a subsistence wage). The difference -- that surplus of value over the wage value, which is realised when the commodity is sold -- is the source of the capitalist's profit. Since surplus value is the product of the use of labour-power, it is now the property of the buyer of labour power, the capitalist. The latter appropriates it as profit, interest and rent, by the same right as that by which the buyer of a car appropriates the proceeds of its use as a taxi. The erstwhile owner of labour-power has no more right to a say over how hard or for how long it is used than the previous owner of a car has over whether or how it may be used as a taxi by the present owner. That is what it means for the human essence, the potential ability to produce spontaneously, intelligently, aesthetically, creatively and socially, to be alienated (sold) instead, as the commodity labour power.

There is no human relationship involved in such capitalist processes. Any individuals involved in capitalist economic relationships are, as such, merely "bearers of economic categories" (but it must be noted that Marx's whole message could be said to be precisely that that does not mean that they are so as human beings). Economic relationships as such are not moral ones. Wage relationships are impersonally structured by the economic system, involving no personal malice or injustice. Nevertheless the Ricardian socialists' suspicions of theft are well founded; not, however, in the way they think. Marx judges the processes of the system as a commutative injustice. He is able to do that, in the terms of his own analysis of the capitalist mode of production, because his is not a non-moral science of economics. In The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts he condemned the bourgeoisie's separation of the alienated sciences of political economy and "Cousin Morality", as itself a product of alienation. He did not believe that social science was value-free; in his opinion political economy's value was the accumulation of capital through thrift, which just happened at that time to be also Cousin Morality's chief value, making the contemporary "asceticism" of political economy (what Weber called "the Puritan ethic") "the most moral of sciences" -- therefore the most alienated .

In the terms of his humanist science, Marx explains how bourgeois morality justifies exploitation. The labourer receives in wages the value produced by half of the day's labour. That is an exchange of real equivalents; in other words that much use of labour-power -- a deformed expression of the human essence -- is thereby requited, though in the alienated form of the return to the worker of the value s/he has created. (Of course there is no way for this exchange to be acknowledged in the ledger books, because there the exchange is said, in what Marx has shown amounts to a confidence trick, to be between the day's labour and the day's wages). The second half of the day's labour is therefore unrequited -- so that that part of the mode of production is obviously not a free and equal exchange, but what Marx calls "the direct opposite of exchange", extortion, exploitation, which in his unalienated human science he is entitled to call, and does call, "robbery, embezzlement, theft". In real life, in the real mode of production, there is surplus labour -- labour, that is, surplus to that required to produce the value which forms the subsistence wage, which is the value necessary for the production of the commodity labour-power, that is, a human being's ability to work. This surplus labour produces surplus value, appropriated by the capitalists as profit, interest and rent. Of course the surplus labour in the real mode of production as analysed by Marx (but not recognised by the "labour" market or its ideological apologia, political economy) is not something which by bourgeois right has to be requited. That is indeed the essence of the system's exploitation.

It means that the unrequited surplus labour, while an injustice to the worker as a human being, is, in Marx's famous ironic phrase, the "no injustice to the [worker as] seller" [my emphasis-JD]. The irony is unfortunately, totally missed and this little phrase misinterpreted by those who think that it indicates that Marx is an immoralist. The reason that it is no injustice to the seller is clear once one considers what it is that the worker is selling: it is labour-power, the ability to work. The worker is not selling any part of the day's actual labour, neither the necessary nor the surplus portion of it. The day's labour is not a commodity at all and therefore has no value (although that statement is contrary to appearances, to the ledger books, and to the political economy textbooks); because the day's labour is the use of the commodity labour power, which has already been bought and fully paid for in the genuinely equal exchange of labour-power with wages. The previous owner of a car does not have to be requited by the new owner for its use as a taxi; that is bourgeois right.

Thus, in human terms, the wage relationship, as an integral and vital part of an entire system of production, is, in spite of superficial market appearances, "total injustice", just as Marx said it was in his "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction". Firstly, in terms of commutative justice, there is, as we have seen, a theft of unrequited surplus labour. In fact in the final analysis, since today's wages come from yesterday's profit (yesterday's surplus value, the product of yesterday's surplus labour), the worker in the final analysis works, not for an exchange at all, equal or unequal, "fair" or "unfair", but for nothing . This is nihil pro quo, the maximum of commutative injustice, of inequality of alleged "exchange", making the capitalist economy therefore the theft of all labour (the fully unrequited use of labour-power).

Secondly, there is distributive injustice. There is no equality in the primary distribution, that of access to resources (means of production). Some own capital with which to exploit, others only labour-power with which to be exploited. (Labour-power, says Marx, is not an asset; it is a liability). Thirdly, there is also, unrecognised by the workers, a vicious circular relationship between the distributive injustice and the commutative injustice; between the primary distribution, that of means of production, and the secondary distribution, that of income. The first determines the second; the industrial and financial capitalists and landlords necessarily get as income profit, interest and rent, the labourer wages. The secondary distribution (of income) however also determines the first (of means of production). Profit is for the capitalist the accumulation of capital, that is, an increase in ownership of the exploitative means of production; whereas the receipt of wages does not enhance the relationship of the worker to the means of production, which continues to remain the same, the ownership of nothing but labour-power. The capitalist secondary distribution (of income) is thus the continuous reproduction of the primary distribution (of means of production, that is, of capital and of labour-power), and thus of the exploitative capitalist relations of production. To put it another way, the labourer produces surplus value, which is appropriated by the capitalist as profit, and returns as capital to further exploit the labourer. The worker makes ever bigger sticks, and gives them to the capitalist, to beat him or her with.

Thirdly, this process is not only a moral injustice. It is something infinitely worse, an ontological injustice. It is the ultimate in coerced alienation, fetishism and idolatry. Capital is the work of the labourer's hands; it is in fact the worker's self -- now totally alienated; yet s/he bows down and worships it, and is prepared at its command to live or die, to kill or be killed. Labour is the alienation of the worker's own essence, which becomes transformed into the ravenous monster, capital, a "restless, measureless thirst for surplus value" which Marx describes as a were-wolf, or a vampire which drains the worker' s blood.

Unlike the Lassalleans, Marx thus sees the system not partially and uncritically from within bourgeois economic terms, but holistically and critically from outside, as a divergence from a potential alternative, a classless productive system, one which would be a fully human approach to meeting the fullness of human needs, the physical, the moral, and above all the ontological -- that is, the radical human need to become fully human, to fulfill the human potential in a human way, in community. Therefore his condemnation of capitalism does not focus on the theft of surplus labour, even though he spent years discovering and demonstrating the existence and central importance of that, as the underlying mechanism which was the answer to the question he posed in The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: how is it that the rich become richer and the poor become poorer? Even that material inequality itself is not his primary concern. He condemned capitalism as a whole, as a totality. His understanding of capitalism was not confined to the inhumanly narrow parameters of the bourgeois categories of negative freedom, wants, arbitrary pleasures or preferences, and exchange -- even of the unequal "exchange" in real life of surplus labour (and in the final analysis of all labour) for nothing. It is not even confined to the injustice of unequal distribution of means of production, overlooked by the workers in the purely (bourgeois) economic demands which were the only ones politically allowed. Marx is concerned with the totality of capitalist relations, economic and political, in other words human; with the ontological injustice of the system: its denial to workers of relationships which would be "worthy of" [ontologically due to - J.D.] "their human nature" (Capital III); its coerced alienation of the human essence, of human life-activity, into being a commodity competing with machines and other commodities; its prevention of, and repression of attempts at, a caring and intelligent system -- one of production from each according to ability, and of distribution to each according to need. His condemnation extends to the Enlightenment's ideology of possessive individualism, to its rejection of the model of social production, as the natural and rational one for humanity's dealings with each other, in favour of that of commerce in private property leading to the commodification of the human being. It is a condemnation of the inhuman aim of the capitalist economic system, which is the accumulation of capital, and of the fact that, with the completion of the world market, that is becoming the sole aim of the human race, the goal towards which all human activity is becoming organised by capital.

In this Marx is not only explicitly returning to Aristotle's condemnation in terms of the natural good for human beings of chrematistike, the use of money with the sole aim of making more money, and of pleonexia, unlimited acquisitiveness, but also recovering the Platonic and Senecan basic human value -- and communal right -- of communism. This is a value rediscovered by anti-feudal peasant movements, by Franciscans and Anabaptists. Hegel did not consider it, even when he was turning to the idea of the polis to try to compensate for what Fichte called "the complete sinfulness" of the modern age -- the consciously theorised and deliberately institutionalised private use of the community by the individual. Like Hegel, Marx keeps some elements of the Anglo-French Enlightenment's liberty and equality, and his idea of freedom is, like Hegel's political version of it, not the negative freedom of "civil society", the unhindered ability of a-social individuals to pursue pleasure, but positive freedom, the power to govern oneself by reason. However, human freedom in Marx's terms requires the abolition of the bourgeois separation between the "natural" economic and the "spiritual" political (and moral), and of the corresponding division, according to Hegel's justificatory theory, between civil society ("the natural") and the state ("the ethical"). For Marx a self governing community of self governing individuals requires, not the bourgeoisie's alleged classlessness of individuals in the market, but the genuine classlessness of community, of the "democratic association of producers". His idea of equality too (and hence of justice) is classlessness; as Engels puts it "The proletarian demand for equality is the demand for the abolition of classes" (Anti-Duehring, p. 132) . That would be the fullest democracy -- but as justice, an ontological and moral good. There is indeed a need to "make despotic inroads on capital ", but not, as Allen Wood interprets that phrase of Marx's, as the assertion of will and brute force against unqualified "right". It is the justified force of attacks on an inhumanly unjust system and its rights, one not only morally but ontologically unjust, destructive of human happiness because it is destructive of human being.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)