Marx and Rational Freedom
I read Marx critically and not theologically, which is how Marx intended he be read. I appreciate the fact that there are still people in the world who engage critically with the arguments of others, rather than simply divide and cheer and jeer according to political preference. Groupthink in all its forms is a baneful force in the world. I take a distinctive approch to Marx. I had avoided Marx like the plague during my university years, put off immeasurably by loud-mouthed, assertive activists and ideologues whose certainty on all things told me were wrong and dangerous. It was only with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the toppling of the statues that I took an interest in Marx. I wanted to know why someone who had been proven to be so wrong had succeeded in convincing so many that he was right. What I discovered was a Marx freed from his Communist prison, which is to say a critical and emancipatory figure who was the enemy of all extraneous force with respect to self-determining human subjects. Marx is as responsible for Stalinist Communism as Rousseau is for Fascism and Nietzsche for Nazism. Each of these figures is better understood as a critic of these false collectivisms as surrogates for the real thing – each showed that it is the alienating forces and abstracting tendencies of the modern world that generates such surrogacy.
In my PhD, I sought to recover Marx by going to the roots, only to find that those roots took me back to ancient Greece. I sought to develop Marx in terms of the idea of ‘rational freedom,’ a view which embodied and articulated ‘the philosophical ideal’ contained in transcendent standards of truth and justice. Such a view would have been anathema to Marx, who was scathing of notions of eternal truths and values. Marx, rightly, criticised those who would naturalise that which needed to be historicised as an ideological attempt to freeze existing social relations and institutions. This was an attempt to maintain an existing social order by way of false fixities. Marx engaged in critique to subvert all such fixities and, in the process, liberate the potential contained in immanent lines of development for a more free, more democratic, and more humane way of living.
I agreed with this, presenting Marx’s socialism as a vision of the immanent society. As a result I argued for a ‘socialism from within’ as a way out of the age-old struggle between socialism from above and socialism from below.
All the time, though, I noted the problem of self-creating man living in accordance with his own values and standards. What happens when projections of truth and goodness collide, as they invariably will? Without objective criteria, this vision of a self-creating humanity threatens to dissolve into a mutual self-cancellation. I therefore sought to recover the moral dimensions of Marx’s emancipatory project, but seeing morality has having an independent force above and beyond class and social functionality. In a contemporary world in which Leftists claiming an allegiance to Marx reduce everything to politics and politics to power, I stand by my reading. I continue to argue that Marx – and those who consider themselves to be socialists – require transcendent standards of truth and justice in order to make good their normative claims and emancipatory commitments.
I would discuss Marx and my approach to Marx with my Director of Studies Jules Townshend at length. I was aware that I was going out on a limb, and so felt vulnerable to criticism. But I read the latest works as well as a wealth of older works and saw no reason to modify my view of ‘Marx and Rational Freedom’ in any substantial way. ‘I can’t think of anyone who is doing work like this on Marx,’ Jules told me. I smiled disbelievingly. He paused and pondered further, before confirming ‘no, no-one.’ They still aren’t.
Of course, Jules also kept asking me: ‘are you sure this is what Marx said? Or is this you saying that this is what Marx should have said?’
He was dealing with the problems raised by my writing and thinking style, what may be called a dialectical inhabitation and articulation. I become others in order to argue my case.
I keep checking what the world is writing and reading these days, seeing revolutionaries wedded to vanguards and reactionaries repeating the mantra that Socialism and Communism are Stalinism and lead to the gulags. And I leave these people to keep getting it all wrong in their mutual loathing. Such is politics.
I read Marx as a liberating critic of the abstracting tendencies of the age, seeking the restitution of power – all kinds of communal resources and responsibility – from alien, extraneous forms back to the social forms from which it originates.
The political revolution dissolves civil society into its component parts without revolutionizing these parts and subjecting them to criticism. It regards civil society, the world of needs, of labour, of private interests and of civil law, as the foundation of its existence, as a presupposition which needs no further grounding, and therefore as its natural basis. Finally, man as he is a member of civil society is taken to be the real man, man as distinct from citizen, since he is man in his sensuous, individual and immediate existence, whereas political man is simply abstract, artificial man, man as an allegorical, moral person. Actual man is acknowledged only in the form of the egoistic individual and true man only in the form of the abstract citizen.
Rousseau's description of the abstraction of the political man is a good one:
Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a people's institutions must feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, human nature, of transforming each individual, who in himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which he somehow receives his life and his being, of substituting a partial and moral existence for physical and independent existence. He must take man's own powers away from him and substitute for them alien ones which he can only use with the assistance of others.
All emancipation is reduction of the human world and of relationships to man himself.
Political emancipation is the reduction of man on the one hand to the member of civil society, the egoistic, independent individual, and on the other to the citizen, the moral person.
Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed.
Marx EW OJQ 1975
Put simply, the state and capital are alienated social powers which rule human beings extraneously; freedom and democracy are premised upon the practical reappropiation of this power by the self-conscious, self-organised human subjects and its reorganisation as a self-determining social power, the democratisation of power, politics, production, and philosophy as against their bureaucratisation. The world has gone in precisely the opposite direction, with ‘ordinary’ citizens confronted by the bureaucrats of knowledge and power in myriad forms at all levels. The animus against ‘elites’ and ‘experts’ expresses in superficial and incohate form the feeling that we are being managed and manipulated by extraneous power. What needs to be remembered – and what is always forgotten – is that Marx didn’t waste time targetting the personifications of extraneous power and economic categories. In an alienated system of production, it is the processes and forms of alienation that need to be identified and uprooted, not their personifications. Hence Marx didn’t waste time identifying the globalist masterminds behind the systemic and institutional processes and imperatives but the relations, forms, and logic behind it all. The problem is not one of personnel but of process. It is easy enough to replace the personnel and expropriate the institutions of the capital system, only to find this changes nothing with respect to the logic and dynamic of capital itself – hence much that is proclaimed to be socialism turns out in practice to be a state capitalism and bureaucratic collectivism still under the sway of accumulative imperatives. Top-down politically enforced collectivisation and industrialisation is a programme of economic modernisation, not socialism. Simple. The fact that workers remain proletarians is something of a giveaway.
Conservative reactionaries are more than happy to take Stalinism and ‘State Socialism’ as the perfect realisation of Marx’s vision. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? This is politics after all, an arena in which the protagonists have a vested interest in portraying their opponents in the worst possible light. There is a view, straight out of Elite Theory, which holds that to reach the broad mass of people you have to keep it simple. So here is politics at its simplest : our side stands for freedom and all other sides stand for tyranny, either explicitly or objectively (if you don’t support us in our stand for freedom then you are, objectively, on the side of our tyrannical opponents). And you wonder why the world keeps getting itself into a mess.
I’m little interested in reactionaries. Clinging on to outmoded forms, they are utopians of a past that never was. They can often be the sharpest critics of the present age. The very fact that they tend not to have any interest in existing schemes for improvement and reform means that they can scrutinize present claims realistically and honestly, exposing ideological fantasies for what they are.
I’m more interested in the radicals, though, because they are the ones seeking to take the future into their own hands. The reactionaries may often be right about the ideological fantasies of the ‘progressives.’ But the fact that they have nowhere to go leaves people forever succumbing to the temptations of change and transformation. My concern is that the radicals get it right rather than keep offering up further confirmation of the futility of political ambition to reactionaries. And it is here that the continued failure to understand the nature of Marx’s emancipatory-practical critique of alien power and his commitment to the restitution of social power is debilitating. In fact, it is worse than debilitating. Not only is the result the failure to bring about the socialism Marx envisaged, it also generates repressive effects. And so we go back into the ‘socialism is Stalinism’ / ‘free markets under the sway of accumulative imperatives is freedom’ loop.
Not the least of the capital system’s alienating properties and effects is the ideological inversion that leaves those subject to capital’s imperatives forever engaged in debilitating dispute between false antitheses, illusory dichotomies, and unreal alternatives. These can only be properly understood by being traced back to their roots in an alienated system of production and politics which must for ever create false contradictions to better conceal its true ones. Grasping Marx’s critical conception of ideology here is crucial. Most people understand ideology in its sociological sense as a system or body of ideas. As against this neutral conception, Marx develops a critical conception of ideology as a set of ideas which is embedded in an alien reality, arising to conceal and preserve the asymmetries in existing power relations. Since this point is rarely understood, it is worth elaborating further. Marx’s key works were significantly titled and subtitled ‘the critique of political economy.’ Marx did not produce new theories to replace old theories, true theories to replace false theories. The problem was not ‘bad’ theory to be replaced by ‘good’ theory but the fact that the bad theory was a correct representation of an alienated system of production. In other words, the ideological inversion that was the target of critique was the product of an inverted reality – the inversion in theory/political economy which critique exposed was embedded in the social forms, structures, and relations of capitalist reality, not in its theoretical expression. Put simply, political economy was not simply wrong, but right about the wrong – alienated – system.
Once this is understood it can be appreciated why Lenin so profoundly – and dangerously – misinterpreted Marx when arguing for socialism as a ‘correct ideology.’ This makes a nonsense of Marx and socialism and has much more in common with the Jacobinism and bourgeois revolutions Marx sought to supplant. The same critical comments apply with respect to the Kautsky-Lenin thesis that the working class are capable only of an economistic trade union consciousness and that socialism is introduced into the proletarian movement ‘from the outside’ by socialist intelligentsia and politicians (people like Lenin, then). This is a complete inversion of Marx’s emancipatory critique and, predictably, issues in an authoritarian form of socialism that bears no resemblance to Marx.
It is for these reasons that the almost complete silence on class and socio-economic issues among the contemporary identitarian Left is significant. Because the divisive, obfuscating, and mystifying workings of a system premised on alienation and inversion are glimpsed only, and even then only partially, by those closest to exploitative reality. Marx understood alienation to be a self-alienation, a production and a praxis. The problem can only be resolved at this structural level, not through the ideological and political superstructure. But even at this structural level, the system would still have those subject to it so mis-identify the nature of their afflictions as to understand them as individual problems and disorders to be overcome by personal effort. Already, as the backlash against identity politics, ‘woke,’ and the Cultural Left grows, it is possible to hear conservative voices arguing for fiscal retrenchment, the cut-back of the big-spending socialist state, and for individuals to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps. Yes, all of that libertarian nonsense that got us into this mess in the first place.
Beware alien politics and abstracting tendencies are the unreal dichotomies and illusory alternatives that comes with them.
Marx thus argues for a self-governing society which embodies and articules authority and autonomy in and through its forms of social self-mediation as against the alien mediation of ‘the abstraction of the political state’ and capital, which rise and rule in symbiotic relation. The current hook-up of state and corporate power under what superficial critics call ‘globalism’ would not have surprised Marx. How else was the globalisation of capitalist relations going to end? The neoliberal ideologues claim a stateless world of free trade and free markets, whilst all the time centralising state powers to impose such freedom – authoritarianism and libertarianism proceed hand-in-hand, always have and always will.
If you don’t understand Marx as a critic of alien power, of abstraction from the realities of labour and nature, and of ideological inversion and perversion, then you don’t understand Marx.
My biggest criticism of Marx concerns God and religion, which he saw as a primary abstraction and inversion, an ideological projection of all the best human qualities which human beings should take into their own form. Marx came close here, when he argued that alienation is a self-alienation. His error was to identify that self as a human self, missing completely that the biggest alienation of all is that of the human self from God. This identifies Marx as an advocate of an affirmative materialism, looking ahead to Nietzsche and the ‘death of God.’
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is therefore in embryo the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.
It is therefore the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics.
Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction
I used to believe this to be true. I now consider it to be a fatal mistake and dangerous delusion. Without God inviting the expansion of being outwards into communion with things greater than the ego and self-interest, humanity fractures into myriad humans, each their own god pursuing their own good, cancelling one another out and closing in on themselves.
When the words and actions contradict one another, believe the actions.
Recovering Associational Space as the Site of Human Flourishing (2021) 26 8,725
The Return of Materialist Dialectics: Review of The Return of Nature by John Bellamy Foster (2020) 142 55,895
An Introduction to the Thought of István Mészáros (2018) 197 65,006
Social Restitution and Metabolic Restoration in the Thought of Karl Marx (2018) 618 211, 678
Ethics, Essence and Immanence: Marx's Normative Essentialism (2018) 460 160,478
My main criticism of Marx is contained in this work:
A Home and a Resting Place Homo Religiosus: The Reality of Religious Truth and Experience (2018) 484 171,487
The Ecological Communism of William Morris (2006) 117 38,688
Critical Studies in Rational Freedom (2001) 405 150,416
Marx, Reason and Freedom: Communism, Rational Freedom and Socialised Humanity (2001) 1205 383,707
Commune Democracy and the Associative Public: Marxism, Socialism, and Democracy (1999) 434 148,706
Materialist Dialectics : Praxis and the Society-Nature Interchange (1997) 1324 421,913
Marx and the Recovery of the Political (1997) 441 166,382
The Thought of Karl Marx (1997) 14,675
The Proletarian Public: The Practice of Proletarian Self-Emancipation (1996) 557 180,180
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