Karl Marx shares the materialist assumptions of the more optimistic forms of pre-Kantian modern liberalism. He lists these in The Holy Family. They are: “the original goodness and equal intellectual endowment of man, the omnipotence of experience, habit and education [i.e., the malleability of human nature], the decisive importance of industry [i.e., the labor theory of value], the justification of enjoyment [i.e., hedonism],” along with empiricism. Hobbes and Locke would demur on the allegation of natural goodness and intellectual equality, although not on egalitarianism generally, but they endorse all the other items. And, as the example of some of the philosophes shows, liberalism comes in a sunny, human-perfectibility form as well as its drizzly, British Isles one. The British liberals, with Marx, also make “enlightened interest” the “principle of all morality”; they demur, however, on the claim of natural human sociality (although another good ‘liberal,’ Thomas Jefferson, would not).
Marxism shares with modern liberalism the overall pattern of the modern philosophic project, particularly as seen in Bacon. Marx himself acknowledges this. Bacon is “the real ancestor” of “English materialism and all modern experimental science.” His disciple Hobbes makes “power and freedom” identical (The Holy Family; see also Capital III. 7). Enlightenment is part of this pattern, or project. Marx sees himself as carrying forward the Enlightenment task, to “unmask human self-alienation.” As do most of the principal modern philosophers, Marx regards human beings as self-created, creating through their own labor, aimed at the conquest of nature. The struggle with nature, seen in “the labor process,” is “the necessary condition for affecting exchange of matter between men and nature; it is the everlasting, nature-imposed condition of human existence, and therefore is independent of every social phase of that existence, or rather, is common to every such phase” (Capital III. 7).
Marx shares the egalitarianism of earlier moderns. With respect to the character of human wants, the lures which impel men to strive against outer nature, it “makes no difference” whether wants “spring from the stomach or from fantasy” (Capital I. 7). This equalization of human wants, in such sharp contrast with, for example, Aristotelian hierarchy, is identifical to the arguments seen in Smith and Mandeville (that “honest, clear-headed man” [Capital VII. 25]). The same goes for Marx’s labor theory of value, which is already in Locke: All kinds of labor are equal, a point, Marx claims, that Aristotle ‘fails’ to see.
Progress, in this view, consists of the progressive appropriation of the matter of outer nature for the purposes of inner nature–to be sure, no less material than outer nature, but organized humanly. The progress from the state of nature to civil society and eventually, after centuries of despotism, to political democracy has the same general direction as Marxist dialectic.
This said, there is modernity and then there is modernity; modernity comes in a several (often mutually rivaling) varieties. The results of Marxism in practice—by Marxism’s own standards, the crucial test—cannot allow anyone to leave things at comparisons. The contrasts between Marxian and ‘liberal’ regimes have been noticeable, even after Marxian regimes ‘liberalize.’
While Marx applauds the philosophic work of modern materialism so far, he also criticizes it, along with the political regimes it has spawned. Marx allows that the Enlightenment has unmasked human self-alienation in its “holy forms,” crushing the ‘infamy’ that is religion, but it has actually fostered alienation in its “unholy forms,” possessive individualism and capitalism. (See “Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law.”) Locke is the best of all previous materialists, but his materialism centers on the individual, objectivist, remaining at best civil-social. Marxian materialism, centers on “sensuous human activity,” praxis; comprehensively social, it includes politics (Theses on Feurbach). Liberals start with the state of nature, but in real history the individual comes last, and is a social product (Critique of Political Economy, Introduction). The modern, liberal state is merely “an accommodation between the political and the unpolitical state.” Machiavelli had said this, thinking of Christianity; Rousseau had said this, too, thinking of the middle class. Liberals did not say it. Marx complains that freedom, “the feeling of man’s dignity,” “with Christianity vanished into the blue of heaven,” leaving earthly life open to bourgeois egoism. (See “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of the State.”)
Like other moderns who are not liberals, Marx wants to ‘de-feminize’ or re-thumotize the world. The Communist Manifesto ends with a conspicuously ‘manly’ or spirited peroration. Unlike the Declaration of Independence’s manly and spirited peroration, the Manifesto predicts victory, relies on no Providence, refuses to moderate its spiritedness. The liberal regimes don’t go far enough, offering only formal, political, epiphenomenal liberation, “the negation of alienation within alienation,” the final order of liberation within the prevailing order of things. In America, the State is free but men are not; the tyrannical relations of employer and employee remain. Modern natural right is egoistic/individualist, yielding a society based upon the inhuman cash nexus. Money is the “alienated essence of man’s labor and life,” a social relation disguised as a thing, a ‘thingification’ of social relations. Money externalizes a social practice, labor, such that the laborer looks at his own work as a thing to be sold, a mere means to get money, rather than an authentic life activity. We get money in order to buy ‘goods’ to consume and time in which to lay about; human means are aimed at animalistic ends. Hobbes’s state of nature reappears within society itself, a war of all against all pitting men alienated from their humanness and from their fellows. Godlike, the bourgeoisie has created a world after its own image, moving like a decidedly unholy world-spirit, ever changing, destroying old life-ways in order to create anew. This is the penultimate, deformed but necessary, ‘dialectical’ move in human history, which is the story of the self-creation of human beings through labor. Self-creation makes man the free and universal being, the only species that remakes/synthesizes all of nature, bending it to his collective, not merely individualistic will. Freedom is power. “The principle of politics is will.”
Marx’s celebration of sociality over individuality causes him to sound rather like Aristotle, or any modern pope, on the topic of usury (Capital II. 4). Capital is even worse; describing it, Marx invokes Bram Stoker-like images of gothic horror: “Capital is dead labor, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” (Capital II. 4). And so Marx sharply departs from liberalism not only by proposing a variant form of the labor theory of value but in his application of that theory. With international capital comes an international proletariat as disenchanted and dis-enchanting as the bourgeoisie, but more numerous (90% of the population, according to Marx), more productive, and therefore potentially far more powerful. The universal suffrage wrought by liberalism is not panacea, but it “possessed the incomparably higher” (if quite unintended) “merit of unchaining the class struggle,” of bringing “the real people” (as distinguished from the middle class alone) onstage for the first time (Class Struggles in France). The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat, announced first in 1848 (the first shot in a world war of classes) will soon be at hand (Critique of the Gotha Program). Increasingly conscious of its own power and of the ways of power, the international proletariat will expropriate the expropriators of the products of its labor, establish its own brief dictatorship, abolish private property and thereby abolish politics as we have known it—an instrument of class domination.
Looking at the most liberal of the liberal regimes, that of the United States, Marx insists that merely political emancipation seen there will not do, even for settling the problem of religious conflict. To abolish religion entirely—part of the radical Enlightenment project—and thus to find a final solution to the problem of religious differences, one must also abolish private property, that is, “the right of self-interest” and the division of labor. Only when labor unifies in a far more profound unity than any seen in the federalism of the ‘United’ States, will the State transcend particular religions to become “a universality” (“On the Jewish Question”). The maintenance of the civil society of private individuals seen in liberal religious toleration, which means continued toleration of religion, means men still treat each other as means. Marx instead wants the advent of “species being,” the extension of conscious life that distinguishes the human species from other animal species (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts) to replace liberal “security” (as per Hobbes and Locke), that “guarantee of egoism” to continued preservation of itself. “The political revolution dissolves civil life into its constituent elements without revolutionizing those elements themselves and subjecting them to criticism” (“On the Jewish Question”). ‘Judaism’ is Marx’s synecdoche for the money society of liberalism, whose devotees worship money as value-giver. But this god is false, “the alienated essence of man’s labor and life.”
This critique of liberalism, as Marx makes clear in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, is a ‘materialized’ form of Hegelian dialectic, “the dialectic of negativity as the moving and productive principle,” seen in the historical alternation of “alienation and transcendence.” It is Marx’s neo-Hegelianism that accounts for both his similarity to, and his divergence from, modern liberal philosophers. Hegel of course subsumes all previous philosophic doctrines into his own system on the basis of his omnivorous, all-synthesizing dialectical ‘Absolute Spirit,’ the self-mastery of which consummates a vast process of which Bacon’s ‘conquest of nature’ afforded an early glimmering. The Baconian, Hobbesian, Lockean, French-philosophe, and even Kantian elements of Marx (the latter seen in his indignation of the use of human beings as means, not ends), make sense in terms of this Hegelian character of his thought.
Why then has Marxism in practice resulted in so much tyranny, with the further result that Marxism itself has been largely discredited? Hegel and Marx are among those who have attempted to lift liberalism from its deliberate occupation of the low but solid ground. What makes liberalism so difficult to lift?
Another anti-liberal philosopher, Nietzsche, famously predicts that national war, not class war, will characterize the future of the world, because the will to power will endure. But Marx says much the same thing about power, if his comments on labor as Baconian conquest are remembered; yet Nietzsche got the form that the will to power would take correct, as Marx did not. Marx rejects Nietzsche’s prediction in advance with the rhetorical question, “Is Achilles possible when powder and shot has been invented?” Marx fails to see that the answer is ‘yes.’
The thumotic man, the warrior spirit, remains alive in the modern world, both as a physical warrior and as a mind-warrior. Marx himself is one of the latter, explicitly linking philosophy to the project of changing the world, not just understanding it. He fails to see that political men think the same way, and they have armies at their disposal. Marx, Hegel-as-materialist, weakly grasps politics, which he dismisses as epiphenomenal. Modern liberalism gives less scope for politics than the ancients did, splitting it off from civil society and therefore from economic life, but the milder politics that resulted did not dismiss political men as anachronisms, limiting their revulsion to tyrants (whom Aristotle doesn’t classify as genuinely political men at all). Tyrannical souls will rage against the liberal regimes, adopting such thumotic ideologies as Communism and its structural twin, Fascism, but they have been outnumbered and, so far, outgunned by the productive power of the bourgeois order. Marx does not anticipate that his philosophy and the rhetoric he deploys to advance it will attract the kind of men very likely to oppose liberalism too thumotically, too unintelligently.
The excessively spirited man is unlikely to be sufficiently ‘erotic’ or receptive to study concrete circumstances patiently, without giving way to moral indignation or bending what he knows to polemical purposes. In Marx himself one sees an intense conflict between eros and thumos, a conflict which, in his disciples, saw the unqualified victory of thumos. Marx too-hastily eschews all natural-right philosophy in his angry critiques of a particular kind of natural right, modern liberal natural right. This lack of a moderating standard of conduct led to a series not of supermen but of super-Robespierres, who told the workers they had nothing to lose but their chains. On the contrary, millions lost their lives or were fastened in chains. Instead of recognizing each social class as a potential faction, as the natural-right commercial republicans did, Marxists treated a particular class the way religionists often think of themselves, and as Hegel thought of himself: as the God-bearing (or ‘History’-bearing) class destined to carry humanity to glory. But whereas religionists teach the God-bearing nation that God is the heaviest burden, the strictest lawgiver, the gravest imposer of responsibilities, Marxists ‘realistically’ speak of power, of ‘laws’ inhering in social relations, rather than laws untouched by what human beings think or do. What realism? What law?
Marx writes, “All mythology subdues, controls, and fashions the forces of nature in the imagination and through imagination; it disappears when real control is established.” To which Publius replies: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” To oblige anyone to do anything, you need a standard beyond his own will and you need institutions so arranged as to check him from doing as he will if, in a fit of libido dominandi or even honest moral indignation, he inclines to violate that standard. More thumotic, and less genuinely scientific than it knows, Marxism fails on both counts, in theory and in practice. Liberalism does not, always.
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