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Marxian Freedom, Individual Liberty, and the End of Alienation*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

John Gray
John Gray
Affiliation:
Politics, Oxford University
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Extract

It is a commonplace of academic conventional wisdom that Marxian theory is not to be judged by the historical experience of actually existing socialist societies. The reasons given in support of this view are familiar enough, but let us rehearse them. Born in adversity, encircled by hostile powers, burdened with the necessity of defending themselves against foreign enemies and with the massive task of educating backward and reactionary populations, the revolutionary socialist governments of this century were each of them denied any real opportunity to implement Marxian socialism in its authentic form. Nowhere has socialism come to power as Marx expected it would – on the back of the organized proletariat of an advanced capitalist society. For this reason, the historical experience of the past sixty years can have no final authority in the assessment of Marxian theory. The failings of Marxist regimes – their domination by bureaucratic elites, their economic crises, their repression of popular movements and of intellectual freedoms, and their dependency on imports of Western technology and capital – are all to be explained as historical contingencies which in no way threaten the validity of Marx's central conceptions. It is not that Marxian socialism has been tried and found wanting but, rather, that it has never been tried.

Type
Research Article
Information
Social Philosophy and Policy , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , Spring 1986 , pp. 160 - 187
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1986

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References

1 Cohen, G. A., “Capitalism, Freedom and the Proletariat,” Ryan, A., ed., The Idea of Freedom (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 8–25.Google Scholar

2 ibid., p. 12.

3 ibid., p. 23.

4 ibid., p. 24.

5 See Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; I have myself discussed Berlin's value-pluralist defense of negative liberty in “Negative and Positive Liberty,” John, Gray and Pelcynski, Z. A., eds., Conceptions of Liberty in Political Philosophy (London and New York: Athlone Press and St. Martin's, 1984), pp. 321–348.Google Scholar

6 Hillel Steiner has argued from this correlativity (that social freedom is gained whenever it is lost) that social freedom can be neither increased nor diminished, but only redistributed. Steiner's conception of freedom as a zero-sum value rests on an unsound inference from the premise that freedom is gained where it is lost to the conclusion that it is the same freedom that is lost and gained. But see Steiner, Hillel, “Individual Liberty,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 75 (1974–5), pp. 35–50.Google Scholar

7 Cohen, op. cit., p. 15.

8 ibid., p. 12.

9 Macpherson, C. B., Democratic Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 154.Google Scholar

10 Cohen, op. cit., p. 15.

11 ibid., p. 15.

12 ibid., p. 17.

13 Hayek, F. A., The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), p. 121.Google Scholar

14 Trotsky, Leon, The Revolution Betrayed (New York: Pathfinder Books, 1937), p. 76.Google Scholar

15 Cohen, op. cit., p. 19.

16 Hayek, op. cit., p. 126.

17 Cohen, op. cit., p. 19.

18 Nozick, Robert, Anarchy, State and Utopia (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), p. 30Google Scholar, footnote.

19 Cohen has argued in conversation with me that his writings do not support the view that the liberty of the rapist has value, but only that it is the rapist's liberty that is lost when rape is prohibited. I am not sure I accept Cohen's account of his writings on this point. Even if it is correct, however, the central contrast between Cohen's view and Nozick's view of freedom as a moral notion whose content is given by a theory of justice remains valid.

20 ibid., p. 336.

21 Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 75.Google Scholar

22 ibid., p. 233.

23 I am indebted here, and throughout my account, to Roberts, Paul Craig and Stephenson, Matthew A., Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973).Google Scholar

24 Marx, Karl, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973), pp. 196–7.Google Scholar

25 Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1967), p. 80.Google Scholar

26 See, especially, Wilson, E. O., On Human Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1978).Google ScholarPubMed

27 The definitive history of the calculation debate is Lavoie's, DonRivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).Google Scholar The important later contributions are by Polanyi, Michael, The Logic of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1951)Google Scholar; Roberts, Paul Craig, Alienation and the Soviet Economy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971)Google Scholar; and Sowell, Thomas, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980).Google Scholar

28 I have set out this argument in greater detail in my Hayek on Liberty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), pp. 34–40.

29 See Schumpeter, Joseph, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (London: Unwin, 1943)Google Scholar, Ch. XV.

30 See Lavoie's superb book, cited in footnote 27 above.

31 I am indebted to David Miller for discussion on these questions, and for letting me see his Marx, communism and markets (unpublished draft). Elster's, Jon endorsement of market socialism can be found in Making Sense of Marx (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 527ff.Google Scholar

32 Elster, op. cit., p. 527.

33 See Dorn, James, “Markets, true and false: the case of Yugoslavia,” Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. 3 (Fall 1978), pp. 243–68.Google Scholar

34 Moore, Barrington Jr., Reflections on the causes of human misery (London: Penguin Books, 1972), p. 68.Google Scholar

35 See on this the first-hand account of Lyons, Eugene in Assignment in Utopia (New York: Twin Circle Publishing Co., Inc., 1967).Google Scholar Lyons's is by far the best account of life in the early years of the Soviet system.

36 See Olson, Mancur, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, for a seminal account of the paradoxes of collective choice.

37 That needs may be basic but nonsatiable is a fact often ignored by Marxian and other socialist theorists. I have explored the political implications of the nonsatiability of basic needs in my paper, “Classical liberalism, positional goods and the politicization of poverty,” Adrian, Ellis and Krishnan, Kurtan, eds., Dilemmas of Liberal Democracies (London: Tavistock, 1983), pp. 174–84.Google Scholar

38 See on this Brittan, Samuel, The Role and Limits of Government: essays in political economy (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1983)Google Scholar, Ch. 3.

39 For the best introduction to the public choice approach, see Buchanan, James, The Limits of Liberty: between Anarchy and Leviathan (Chicago and London: University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

40 For an excellent historical account of the last decades of Tsarism, see Stone, Norman, Europe Transformed (London: Fontana, 1983), pp. 201–2.Google Scholar

41 Western aid to the Soviet Union is exhaustively detailed in Sutton, Anthony, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development (Stanford Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1968–73).Google Scholar Western involvement in the Soviet economy began with a trade agreement with Germany in 1921, and includes the construction by Ford Motors in the late twenties of a vast integrated plant at Gorkii and the design and construction by the McKee Corporation of Cleveland of the famous Magnitogorsk steel mill in the thirites. As Sutton has put it (p.329): “From 1930 to 1945 Soviet technology was in effect Western technology converted to the metric system”.

42 A brilliant account of the uniqueness of the Soviet system is given by Besançon, Kalain in The Soviet Syndrome (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976).Google Scholar