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Marxian Metaphysics and Individual Freedom
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
Extract
The principles of historical materialism involve Marx in making two crucial claims about freedom. The first is that the revolutionary proletariat is, in an important sense, more free than its class antagonist the bourgeoisie. The second is that the beneficiaries of a successful proletarian revolution—the members of a solidly established communist society—enjoy a greater freedom than even proletarians engaged in revolutionary praxis. It is perhaps natural to take Marx to be operating here with what might be called a logically continuous notion of freedom, established communists enjoying to perfection (or as near as maybe) what revolutionary proletarians merely imperfectly experience and what the bourgeoisie entirely misses. But whatever one's views might be about what Marx in fact says about freedom this cannot be what he ought to say for his theory of freedom to work. The kind of line Marx (and Marxists) need to take finds a significant precedent in his economics where we find a theory implying two quite distinct logical dimensions in that the principles and concepts designed to apply to the transactions of capitalism (commodity, capital, wage-labour, surplus-value, and so on) necessarily lack descriptive purchase on communist economic reality. The existence of these two dimensions, and particularly Marx's comparative silence as to the nature of the second, reflect his conviction that the transition between the two systems must be marked by a profound conceptual as well as material break. Consequently it is not unreasonable, perhaps, to look for an analogous discontinuity in his metaphysics and to expect to find two distinct varieties of freedom, the one reflecting the nature of class society, the other of human community.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 14: Marx and Marxisms , September 1982 , pp. 229 - 242
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 1982
References
1 It might be objected that certain crucial concepts straddle the economic divide, ‘exploitation’ being perhaps the most important. After all, Marx undoubtedly condemns capitalism for being exploitative and commends communsim on the grounds that it is non-exploitative. But the contrast here must be between contradictories rather than contraries, if only because the category of exploitation is defined in terms of a measure a priori inapplicable in communism, namely exchange-value. (The capitalist coercively extracts in the form of profit the difference between the exchange-value of the labour-power he purchases and the exchange-value of the commodities produced by the worker.)
2 Marx, K. and Engels, F., The German Ideology, (Arthur, C. J.) (ed.) (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 121.Google Scholar
3 Mill, J. S., A System of Logic (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1974), Book 6, Chapter 2.Google Scholar
4 Ibid., 840.
5 For a less hasty treatment see my ‘The Logic of J. S. Mill on Freedom’, Political Studies 28 (1980), 238–252.Google Scholar
6 The best treatment of the philosophical issues concerning individuation raised by Kant's approach is to be found in Strawson, P. F.'s The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966).Google Scholar The key idea here is that the notion of an enduring self is logically parasitic upon a prior recognition of an independently existing world furnishing physical object reference points which can be encountered and re-encountered in the course of a ‘subjective experiential route through an objective world’ (125). Kant psychologizes as the ‘activity’ of the transcendental ego in ‘imposing’ categories upon experience what Strawson more austerely regards as logical conditions for the intelligibility of the idea of the self.
7 Some of the problems involved in introducing individuating terms into the notion of ‘experience-in-general’ are discussed by Strawson in The Bounds of Sense, 162, 170Google Scholar, and at greater length in my ‘Concepts of the Sceptic: Transcendental Arguments and Other Minds’, Philosophy 49 (1974), 149–168.Google Scholar
8 ‘Hegel's Concept of “Geist”’ in MacIntyre, A. (ed.), Hegel (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 125–150.Google Scholar
9 Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 265.Google Scholar It is worth noting the difference between this and the position expressed in the sixth thesis on Feuerbach where the ‘single individual’ seems to be reduced to the ‘ensemble of social relations’. (‘Seems to be’ because it is the ‘human essence’ that is directly assimilated to the latter and it is unclear whether Marx thinks that the ‘single individual’ has an essence or not.)
10 A more developed account along these lines would parallel, at a more abstract level, the kind of interpretation of the ‘dialectic of labour’ so brilliantly presented by Cohen, G. A.. See ‘Marx's Dialectic of Labour’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 3 (1974), 236–261.Google Scholar
11 German Ideology, 83 and 82.Google Scholar
12 Ibid., 82–86.
13 Marx faces, at the metaphysical level, difficulties similar to the sociological problems Cohen identifies in his ambition to transcend both the ‘submergence’ and the ‘detachment’ of the individual in ‘community’ whereby he is to step out of inhibiting social roles without stepping out of society.