I wish to discuss aspects of this article, reviewing a new book by Erik Olin Wright:
I’d quibble a little with this title. Marx wasn’t so much anti- as post-capitalist, the many organic metaphors he employed – betraying his core essentialism – indicating the extent to which he saw socialism emerging from within the unsocial objective socialization of the capital system. Leaving that to one side, it is this passage that caught my eye:
“The influence of analytical Marxism can be felt throughout Wright’s book. And, like his colleagues, he arrives at some very unorthodox conclusions, most crucially on the question of class. Class is a subject he knew extremely well: he devoted much of his career to examining its complexities. Here, he concludes that those complexities make class an unsuitable edifice on which to build a socialist movement. In his view, the working class has become too fragmented to play the historic role that Marxism traditionally assigns it. Rather, socialism must be an ethical project. Class is less important than a shared commitment to moral values.”
It’s a contentious point. I insist on the centrality of class analysis as well as the critique of political economy. But that emphasis on a shared commitment to moral values is one I argued for in my own work on Marx two decades ago, which I have developed since. And it expresses a concern with ethics as the way by which human beings as social beings with different views, interests, and platforms come to orient and organize their existence and order their common affairs. The commitment to ethics, in other words, possesses a significance that is far more than overcoming the fragmentation of class.
I’ve been getting good feedback on my work recently, with good authorities actually ‘getting it,’ so I am emboldened to explain my position further (if necessarily simplistically). I argued for the centrality of the ethical dimension in my work on Marx in the 1990s, arguing for a consensual devotion to common ends, a morality that is capable of inciting common action, inspiring, orienting, and obligating individuals towards common ends. And I proceeded to develop and enrich that moral dimension into the realization of the need to go beyond the conventionalism, relativism, and sophism of modern morality and embed praxis in a commitment to transcendent standards. That remains my view, and it opens the door to the contemplation of the divine. That may be so contentious in Marxist terms as to be patently non- or ex-marxist, but I note Terry Eagleton has gone some way in the same direction. The way Eagleton argues for the intertwining of politics and ethics and defended essentialism in After Theory (2004) and after is very similar to the views I set out in greater depth. Here’s a review of Eagleton’s Culture and the Death of God (2014).I’ve been onto the themes addressed by Eagleton here for a while now.
Erik Olin Wright belongs to the tradition of ‘analytical Marxism.’ I never cared for it. I thought Jon Elster’s Making Sense of Marx made non-sense of the man’s work. I was always, unashamedly, part of the ethical, essentialist, Hegelian tradition. Analytical Marxism entails translating Marx’s essentialist categories – form, necessity, immanent lines of development etc – into atomistic terms which are antithetical to Marx’s emancipatory commitments at every point. I just find it interesting that Wright seems to have gone in the direction of another of the analytical Marxists, G.A. Cohen, with respect to recovering the ethical dimension.
“By 2000, when he wrote If You're an Egalitarian, How Come You're So Rich? (based on the Gifford lectures he gave at Edinburgh University in 1996), Cohen no longer believed socialism to be inevitable and considered politics a matter of personal moral engagement. He described himself as having moved from historical materialism to a belief that what is needed to bring about equality are changes in individual attitudes and choices – a position, he said, so near to Christianity that it would have shocked his younger self.”
“He loved art, and became fascinated by religion, especially Christianity. He felt intensely, loyally Jewish …”
I note that another of the thinkers I studied in depth, Jurgen Habermas, has come in later life to take religion seriously. I love Habermas’ communicative community, his commitment to the force of the better argument, his view of the rational society, and have written at length on these things. But I noted their brittle and abstract quality. And I note developments in the thought of the later Habermas. Calling for constructive models of the future society, Habermas has underlined the importance of something that I consider key in allying social transformation with personal transformation: ‘I know that all learning depends on the formation of inner motives’ (Habermas 1981: 28). Hence my emphasis on modes of conduct, character-construction, the character-forming culture of work, community, place, enabling tradition, narrativity, communities of virtuous practice, right relations and so on, proceeding hand in hand with social formation.
I don’t shy away from these conclusions and now openly argue that an emancipatory politics can only succeed when buttressed by the three transcendentals, which are all qualities of God. I seek to order the relations here properly in order to avoid a brittle scientism or analytical philosophy provoking an empty, idealistic moralism in reaction. I’ve argued on this in the past, locating this in a fact-value, science-ethics, is-ought dualism characteristic of the modern world, which my own tradition overcomes.
None of which entails the repudiation of class and class analysis. If this seems to imply ‘us and them’ thinking, then my response is that we live in an ‘us and them’ society and require an ethic buttressed by communities of practice and character within social relations that unite each and all.
The article points to a new class politics emerging in recent years. This is important. Classless appeals to reason and morality will fail on account of presupposing a social identity that does not exist, an identity in which individual and social interest, short- and long-term good, coincide. Socialism, as I argue it, is precisely about the creation of such an identity within whatever institutions and infrastructure that make it effective.
The article concludes:
“This isn’t enough to make socialism, but it suggests that class struggle is far from a spent force. The critical question in the coming years will be how to intensify that struggle before capitalism takes us off a cliff. Climate crisis is discussed only briefly in Wright’s book, but it presents the single largest obstacle to pursuing his slow road to socialism: we may not have the time. While Wright correctly calls our attention to the dangers of rupture, something like rupture may be the least dangerous option for the planet and most of the people living on it.”
I baulk at arguments couched in necessity and narrow timescales, they have always been the tyrants’ plea, and I am concerned to avoid potentials for radical social transformation being diverted and perverted, once again, by being canalized in directions confined within the institutional and structural parameters of the status quo.
“The challenge will be to avoid replaying the nightmares of the 20th century while facing down the nightmares of the 21st. Wright’s final book embodies the qualities we will need to make it through with our habitat and humanity intact: a clear mind, a generous spirit and a faith in the capacity of people to govern themselves.”
To the end, Marx insisted that the emancipation of the working classes – let’s say ‘the people’ – is an act of the working classes themselves. He was scathing about 'alchemists of revolution,' 'would-be universal reformers,' 'workers' dictators,' and well-meaning bourgeois who thought the people too uneducated to be able to emancipate themselves. I affirm the capacities for people to supply the forms of social self-mediation to overcome alien power and govern themselves. Truth cannot just be given, it has to be actively willed, internalized, social power restituted and reorganized in the process. I am against the violence and tyranny of abstraction, and that’s how I have read Marx from the start.
I argued something very similar to this twenty years ago, making the case for foregrounding ethics. My concern wasn’t just with the fragmentation of class but with the insufficiency of material and sectional interest as an ethic capable of unifying, binding, obligating, and inspiring over the long run. I agree very much with the importance Marx assigned to resolidyfing human relations and communities, creating new solidarities and loyalties, my view was that economic self-interest are the weakest and most ephemeral and transitory of bases to rest such things upon, part of the very monetisation of human relations that Marx criticized with respect to capitalism. I put it better in my thesis and elsewhere. The upshot is that, in time, moving beyond the sophism of competing interests and perspectives within power relations, I came to reinstate transcendent standards, truths, and values. It may baffle people. The view is clear, consistent, and cogent. And it won’t work without God and religion. Because nothing does and nothing will. The civilization founded on a disenchanting science is falling apart.
In reading Marx, I always read widely. I absorbed lessons from conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet. This is from Nisbet’s The Quest for Community:
“When Marx, largely under the suggestive influence of the early interpreters of the French Revolution, made class conflict the central fact in historical interpretation, he was not wrong in seizing upon the reality of conflict, and it is not wholly his fault if followers as well as enemies have chosen to interpret this conflict in the picturesque terms of the barricades. Where Marx was grievously in error was in singling out the ill-defined category of class—the institution in capitalist society with the least possible claim to being regarded as a significant structure of personal allegiance and functions—and in investing conflict with an ideological essence that must make it culminate in a new Golden Age of tranquillity. He was wrong in overlooking the far more momentous conflicts in social history between such institutions as kinship, religion, gild, and State. But Marx was profoundly right in stressing the centrality of conflict in institutional change.
In the orthodox rationalist tradition little attention was paid to periods and spheres of crisis in society and to persistent conflicts of values among coterminous institutions. The gospel of homogeneity and adjustment held the field. Attention was fixed on what was believed to be the natural provision of nature for the smooth and orderly change of society as a whole. That a plurality of institutions could exert upon individuals powerful and possibly irreconcilable conflicts of allegiance was seldom considered by the progressive rationalist.” (Nisbet 1990 ch 4).
Ponder.
Some of my own work on this. (Oh, sorry, I forgot, we don’t have time to read, write, think; let’s just act within the very intellectual and institutional parameters that got us into this mess then, because that’s all we’ve got to work with. That’ll turn out well, I’m sure. It's a phoney dichotomy. A twin-track approach establishing short- and long-run on a continuum is perfectly possible. I am leery of a language of ‘system change’ that cuts substantive transformation off by the imposition of a timetable).
My thesis, emphasising the foregrounding of the ethical dimension: