“Karl (Heinrich) Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist and socialist revolutionary.”
The essay that follows acknowledges the ongoing and pressing relevance of Marx and Marxism for philosophy, morality (including moral psychology), and political economy, as well, of course, for social and political actions and activism. It also speaks to a world “after or beyond Marx and Marxism,” a world that remains more utopian than real, but no less possible for all that.
Jean-Paul Sartre captured at least one reason why Marx will remain relevant for the foreseeable future, namely, the fact that as long as this or that form of capitalism persists, Marx and Marxists have something to teach us: “As soon as there will exist for everyone a margin of real freedom beyond the production of life, Marxism will have lived out its span; a philosophy of freedom will take its place. But we have no means, no intellectual instrument, no concrete experience, which allow us to conceive of this freedom or of this philosophy.”
I am not convinced that it’s true that “a philosophy of freedom,” or least the conception of such freedom, requires as a necessary condition the prior and generalized concrete transcendence of capitalism (although no doubt such an experience will further contribute to its philosophical elaboration), for we can rely on our powers of imagination to conceive of this philosophy of freedom (as did Marx himself, as well as more than a few utopian thinkers and anarchists), even if only in a (non-pejorative) utopian sense, and even if its precise existential, psychological and material contours cannot now be decisively determined, let alone appreciated. But Sartre is right inasmuch as “Marxism” as a political philosophy with political ramifications and implications will one day become an historical relic or “object,” whereas the greater emancipatory project itself we might formulate in terms of Godwinian ”perfectibility,” in which case man is ever “perfectible” yet will never, given human nature, attain “perfection,” indeed, we have difficulty making sense what that could mean or be apart from an analogous or metaphorical extension of our concept of “God” as defined by the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, or omnipresence. Apart from theological philosophizing and concepts and closer to “existential” and spiritual musings or considerations, yet not less germane, are Gandhi’s speculative reflections said about mankind’s actual and possible relations to God:
“Man’s ultimate aim is the realization of God, and all his activities, social, political, religious, have to be guided by the ultimate vision of God [We might interpret this within the parameters of what Gandhi also said about ‘absolute’ truth: ‘God is Truth’ and ‘Truth is God’]. The immediate service of all human beings becomes a necessary part of this endeavor, simply because the only way to find God is to see Him in His creation and be one with it [and of course that sounds like either pantheism or panenthesim if not some species of religious mysticism]. This can only be done by service of all. I am part and parcel of the whole, and I cannot find Him apart from the rest of humanity.” The only way to find God, if you will, is to find Him is to find him “within” (the highest mode of ‘self-realization’) as well as to “see” God in creation itself (i.e., in everything that exists) and be one with it (which of course sounds like mystical experience). For Gandhi, aspiring to realization of the “oneness of humanity” is akin or analogous to or in harmony with the idea of the “oneness of God;” put differently, the absolute oneness of God implies or simply entails for him the oneness of humanity; man alone being made in the “image of God.”
Or, again, we might simply affirm that after the end of capitalism, and assuming we have replaced it with something far better designed to meet our needs and capabilities (‘doings and beings’ that people can attain should they choose to do so, assuming the requisites of human agency*), we become noticeably more adept at meeting the standards and criteria (which are subject to revision) that have come to associated with welfare, well-being, and human fulfillment or eudaimonia (or, albeit more vaguely and arguably, given its various meanings, ‘happiness’). Another way to spell out the quest for emancipation or freedom in a post-capitalist world is to appreciate the necessity of utopian imagination and thought, which has traditionally provided humanity (or at least parts thereof) the ideas, ideals, fantasies (distinguishable from ‘phantasies’), pictures, plans, dreams, thoughts, ethics, and so forth that enables us to imagine a plurality of democratic means and ends, ways and purposes, by way of progressively and concretely, generally or universally, embodying or instantiating well-being and human fulfillment so as to enhance the angelic parts of our nature, so as to, more deeper and more widely—express and utilize humanity’s unique moral, intellectual, and affective powers (to call them ‘unique’ is by way of distinguishing human from nonhuman animals, but that in no way denies the myriad ways in which we have natural and ethical or even spiritual kinship with them, or how they have properties and qualities similar to ours in some important respects; for as Darwin taught us and Hilary Putnam reminds us, evolution makes plain that ‘the line between species can’t be sharp—otherwise one species could not evolve from another!’).
Marx himself provided a taste or glimpse of such freedom in the future insofar as he envisioned what social and economic progress could be realized with the transcendence of capitalism, even if his speculations regarding the precise stages of socialism and nature of “communist” society were deliberately and fairly meager (perhaps disappointing in comparison, say, to the works of the utopian socialists and others, such as anarchists). Later avowed Marxists have attempted to fill out these stages or paint that picture with varying degrees of plausibility and “realism.” Jon Elster, for example, begins to outline the philosophy and praxis of components or facets of freedom in his essay, “Self-realisation in work and politics: the Marxist conception of the good life,” in Jon Elster and Karl Ove Moene, eds., Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989). The works of the late G.A. Cohen likewise go a considerable distance in demonstrating the significance of a demanding notion of a Marxian or at least Marxian inspired equality as integral to any socialist or communist conception of freedom. And a plurality of pictures of socialist or communist futures has been given substance, meaning, and aspirational direction and purpose in works by David Schweickart, Michael Luntley, Erik Olin Wright, and Peter Hudis, Rudolf Bahro, Christine Sypnowich, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, among others. And democratic philosophers and theorists, such as Robert E. Goodin, Nadia Urbinati, Amartya Sen, Alan Gilbert, Hélène Landemore and others have wittingly or not contributed greatly to this enterprise. It will not do to simply say that “we will know it when we see it,” or believe or think that some kind of revolutionary event will magically realize, once and for all, socialism or communism, for revolutions can only fertilize the existing grounds for socialism, not assure us of a bountiful harvest. And, to mix metaphors, there are no socialist or communist blueprints or plans that are infallible, that are not subject to or immune from alterations or amendments or protected from democratic deliberation and discussion.
It does appear that we are, as yet, a rather long way from overthrowing the irrational, cruel, and obdurate “aristocracy of capital” and thus the rule of capitalists and its corresponding forms of alienation, including the “economization of social relations” that together make for the marrow of capitalism will remain with us for some time. In other words, there has yet to be sufficient or widespread (i.e., past the tipping point) appreciation of the fact that the best or good life, or at least the necessary conditions for universal or generalized welfare, well-being and happiness (i.e., self-fulfillment or eudaimonia) are not sufficiently or well-served by wooly and contradictory criteria and standards derived from either theoretical models or existing forms of capitalist industrial production and consumption, by the corresponding or consequential inordinate desire for wealth or fame, by purely hedonic pleasures within this or that kind of narcissistic hedonism, or by narcissistic psyches of adults that were fully formed in childhood. The autonomous moral psychological development embodied in or ideally represented by processes of individuation and self-realization must be available to everyone, whether or not an individual chooses to take advantage of them.
We remain far from a world in which the best (i.e., the true) interests of workers, or the masses generally, are not canalized into the Malthusian Social Darwinist (with apologies to both Malthus and Darwin) pursuit of economic advantage, or determined by the crass ideological parameters of “bread and circuses” or the “pathology of normalcy,” in other words, a state of affairs in which the masses can live without a chronic sense of material uncertainty, insecurity, and anxiety, let alone the afflictions that define several kinds of alienation. It appears to be a rather distant future in which a socialist political economy is guided by profound political, social, and philosophical ideals cultivated in the gardens of personal and democratic experience, a political economy that accords pride of place to the necessary social and economic conditions of psychological, moral and “spiritual” development of human beings, one in which economic progress is achieved in the first instance by the universal provision of basic needs for life and human flourishing that exist in environmental harmony with the natural world, by a social-economic self-sufficiency which recognizes the necessity and integrity of ecological processes, by a political economy forged in the fires of the struggle for justice and within the constraints of compassion and nonviolence, of care and love, motivated by the endless pursuit (after Condorcet and Godwin) of human perfectibility as first enshrined in the tripartite motto or secular trinity that emerged from the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité (or ‘community’).
Put differently, we look forward to the day in which the economy is no longer dependent on the production and cultivation of distorted and artificial needs or individually and socially debilitating desires, a time and place in which the masses are not bound and bewitched by an overwhelming and oppressive need or desire to be psychologically indemnified by possession, accumulation, and consumption of goods and services. This would be a world in which egregious, mindless and heartless displays of conspicuous consumption no longer exist unabashedly alongside absolute and relative poverty. This would be a world in which the aristocracy of Capital no longer contributes to the systematic dehumanization of workers in the form of commodified labor and irrational labor markets, in which the false promises of a good life defined by consumption and irresponsible affluence no longer make mincemeat of the pursuit of true human fulfillment or happiness nor systematically and thus ruthlessly thwart the capacities and capabilities of individuals alone and in concert to realize self-chosen values or exemplify the endeavor to live a virtuous life in concert with those near and dear as well as distant and unknown.
Marx and Marxists will continue to speak to us so long as we remain unable or unwilling to fully articulate and significantly realize the ends made possible by universal achievement of the satisfaction of basic material human needs, those ends associated with the recognition and fulfillment of moral and spiritual values and virtues by way of the subordination of economic life to the goals of establishing the conditions necessary for the generalized pursuit of self-actualization or self-realization. Marx and Marxists will continue to speak to us so long as most of us lack the innate incentive or motivation toward worthy living, for realizing in some significant measure, and within the constraints of human dignity and self-respect, the capacity and possibility for autonomous, self-directed living as part of an associative or communal life characterized by a fundamental and vital existential interdependence of ethical and spiritual labor with respect to the realization of values.
* From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry: “The capability approach [after Amartya Sen and Martha C. Nussbaum] is a theoretical framework that entails two normative claims: first, the claim that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance and, second, that well-being should be understood in terms of people’s capabilities and functionings. Capabilities are the doings and beings that people can achieve if they so choose — their opportunity to do or be such things as being well-nourished, getting married, being educated, and travelling; functionings are capabilities that have been realized. Whether someone can convert a set of means—resources and public goods—into a functioning (i.e., whether she has a particular capability) crucially depends on certain personal, sociopolitical, and environmental conditions, which, in the capability literature, are called ‘conversion factors.’ Capabilities have also been referred to as real or substantive freedoms as they denote the freedoms that have been cleared of any potential obstacles, in contrast to mere formal rights and freedoms. Within philosophy, the capability approach has been employed to the development of several conceptual and normative theories within, most prominently, development ethics, political philosophy, public health ethics, environmental ethics and climate justice, and philosophy of education.”
Please see also my bibliography for Marxism and the list for Democratic Theory and Praxis. The above essay is also available on my Academia page.
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