- 12 Mar 2020 03:01
#15074575
Do Marxists simply resort to modern moral theories and fill it with concepts and content associated with the working class ie solidarity.
[url]https://epistemh.pbworks.com/f/4.+Macintyre.pdf
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[url]https://epistemh.pbworks.com/f/4.+Macintyre.pdf
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Thirdly there will certainly be a quite different set of critics who will begin by agreeing substantially with what I have to say about liberal in dividualism, but who will deny not only that the Aristotelian tradition is a viable alternative, but also that it is in terms of an opposition between liberal individualism and that tradition that the problems of modernity ought to be approached. The key intellectual opposition of our age, such critics will declare, is that between liberal individualism and some version of Marxism or neo-Marxism. The most intellectually compelling expo- nents of this point of view are likely to be those who trace a genealogy of ideas from Kant and Hegel through Marx and claim that by means of Marxism the notion of human autonomy can be rescued from its original individualist formulations and restored within the context of an appeal to a possible form ofcommunity in which alienation has been overcome, false consciousness abolished and the values of equality and fraternity realized.
My answers to the first two kinds of critic are to some large degree con- tained, implicity or explicitly, in what I have already written. My answers to the third type of criticism need to be spelled out a little further. They fall into two parts.
The first is that the claim of Marxism to a morally distinctive standpoint is undermined by Marxism's own moral history. In all those crises in which Marxists have had to take explicit moral stances-that over Bernstein's revisionism in German social democracy at the turn of the century or that over Khruschev's repudiation of Stalin and the Hungarian revolt in 1956 , for example-Marxists have always fallen back into relatively straight- forward versions of Kantianism or utilitarianism. Nor is this surprising. Secreted within Marxism from the outset is a certain radical individualism. In the first chapter of Capital when Marx characterizes what it will be like 'when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but per- fectly intelligible and reasonable relations' what he pictures is 'a community of free individuals' who have all freely agreed to their common ownership of the means of production and to various norms of production and dis-
tribution. This free individual is described by Marx as a socialized Robin- son Crusoe; but on what basis he enters into his free association with others Marx does not tell us. At this key point in Marxism there is a lacuna which no later Marxist has adequately supplied. It is unsurprising that ab- stract moral principle and utility have in fact been the principles of associa- tion which Marxists have appealed to, and that in their practice Marxists have exemplified precisely the kind of moral attitu~e which they condemn in others as ideological.
Secondly, I remarked earlier that as Marxists move towards power they always tend to become Weberians. Here I was of course speaking of Marx- ists at their best in, say, Yugoslavia or Italy; the barbarous despotism of the collective Tsardom which reigns in Moscow can be taken to be as irrele- vant to the question of the moral substance of Marxism as the life of the Borgia pope was to that of the moral substance of Christianity. Nonetheless Marxism has recommended itself precisely as a guide to practice, as a politics of a peculiarly illuminating kind. Yet it is just here that it has been of singularly little help for some time now. Trotsky, in the very last years of his life, facing the question of whether the Soviet Union was in any sense a socialist country, also faced implicitly the question of whether the categories of Marxism could illuminate the future. He himself made everything turn on the outcome of a set of hypothetical predictions about possible future events in the Soviet Union, predictions which were tested only after Trotsky's death . The answer that they returned was clear: Trot- sky's own premises entailed that the Soviet Union was not socialist and that the theory which was to have illuminated the path to human libera- tion had in fact led into darkness.
Marxist socialism is at its core deeply optimistic. For however thorough- going its criticism of capitalist and bourgeois institutions may be, it is com- mitted to asserting that within the society constituted by those institutions, all the human and material preconditions of a better future are being ac- cumulated. Yet if the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived? It is not surprising that at this point Marxism tends to produce its own versions of the Ubermenscb: Lukacs's ideal proletarian, Leninism's ideal revolutionary. When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fan-
tasy. One of the most admirable aspects of Trotsky's cold resolution was his refusal of all such fantasies.
A Marxist who took Trotsky's last writings with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism. This conclusion agrees of course with my own. For I too not only take it that Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition, a claim borne out by the almost indefinitely numerous and con- flicting range of political allegiances which now carry Marxist banners- this does not at all imply that Marxism is not still one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society- but I believe that this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics