Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1

Is Marxism, or revolutionary politics generally, sufficient for human emancipation? In Ethical Marxism, Bill Martin argues that Marxism requires ethics as the necessary foundation of any politics which may actually be capable of leading to this goal. Following is the first part of an essay critically examining this book and this thesis. The entire piece will appear in three parts,  over the next few days.

Khukuri features several essays by Bill Martin, and he is a participant in the Kasama Project, with which both this site and Kasama are associated. He is the author of a number of books, including Matrix and Line: Derrida and the Possibilities of Postmodern Social Theory, The Radical Project: Sartrean Investigations, Listening to the Future: The Time of Progressive Rack, 1968-1978, and (with Bob Avakian) Marxism and the Call of the Future: Conversations on Ethics, History, and Politics, as well as others.

This is the second engagement with Ethical Marxism to appear on this site. The first, by Vern Gray can be found here.

Marxism, Politics, and Evil:  A Critical Engagement with “Ethical Marxism”

John Steele

In this essay I’ll be attempting to come to grips with Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, a major effort by Bill Martin to map out the sort of theory he believes to be necessary in the 21^st century for revolution and human liberation. I’ll first try to lay out Martin’s principal claims and lines of thought, followed by some questions and critique.

This is a large book which brings a number of themes, subjects and questions into play. I will only be dealing with the essential line of argument and thought, concerning Marxism, politics and ethics. Specifically, I will not be able to enter into some concrete questions which Martin casts as ethical and to which he devotes a large proportion of space in the book: imperialism, animals and the human consumption of meat, and the question of place. These are major parts of the book, not only in bulk but conceptually too, as attempts to both configure political questions ethically (imperialism) and to situate ethical questions (meat-eating) within a Marxist context. But although this study does examine some of the forms of argument which emerge in these areas, I have not been able to consider the substance of these questions, as they are framed in Ethical Marxism.

As will become clear, I think the theory sketched in Ethical Marxism is seriously flawed, and I will often be sharply critical. But I want to salute at the outset Martin’s attempt at the great and necessary task undertaken here, the refiguration of Marxism in the light of past impasses and present needs. I hope I’ll succeed in making clear the ways and extent to which I believe that the questions and problems which Martin is attempting to solve by means of this approach are very real and unresolved problems for all revolutionaries in this era.

I

The principal and overall thesis of Ethical Marxism (EM) is that ethics and politics need each other, that neither by itself is sufficient – sufficient for a just society, for revolution, for the emancipation of humanity, for the redemption of the world. On the one hand “ethics does not have, by itself, what it takes to be ethical” (25; numbers in parentheses refer to page numbers in EM). That is, ethics in itself does not have the power to make effective its own insights and conclusions, cannot of itself bring the good and the right into being in the world: “to make these things a real force in the world, we also need something like Marxism” (26). On the other hand, neither does politics (or history or economics) have what it takes to be other than realpolitik, another way of regulating or taking part in the scramble among human beings and groups in pursuit of self-interest.

Martin argues that there is a “kind of vision that is absolutely necessary for the transformation of society and yet is underdetermined by systematic study of the ‘social evidence.’ In terms of modalities, the vision is necessary for the transformation, but the vision does not represent the necessity of the transformation itself.” (x) This vision springs, Martin believes, from what he calls “the religious perspective.

Since the vision of the future does not spring directly or necessarily from a study of the present, but yet this vision does not represent or imply its own necessity, there is still a gap, which Martin proposes to bridge through ethics: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos [end or goal] might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps.” (49)

Martin relates these three aspects or moments – scientific description/explanation, ethical prescription, and future-oriented vision – to the three questions, which Kant thought encompassed the concerns of reason: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? He also seems to relate them, as Kant did, to what he sees as three discontinuous discourses: science, ethics, and religion. (Although at one point Martin makes ethics central, as well, to vision: “…the argument of this book is that this vision has to have the question of ethical relation at its core” [160]. In general the emphasis throughout is on the discontinuity of science from both ethics and “the religious dimension,” with little or no theorization of differences between the latter two.

Thus “this book is about how the ethical point, or what I sometimes call the ‘ethical moment’, is indeed needed, and along with it intentionality and responsibility (and agency) and even a discourse that partakes of transcendence and theology.” (4) Such a perspective, he argues, is vitally needed in order to strengthen Marxism to enable it to “become a more powerful instrument for guiding humanity in going from an unjust and unsustainable world to a global community of mutual flourishing.” (4)

On the one hand this is posed as an external critique, in that it is grounded outside of Marxism as such, in both religious and ethical perspectives. (In the latter case Martin takes Kant to be the definatory figure.) But on the other hand Martin believes he is pointing to something that is present but unacknowledged and untheorized, both in Marx (“Marx’s work is permeated with moral concepts” – 2) and in the life of revolutionary movements. In pointing to the need for “the ethical moment” he is reaching for “a conception that is at work in actual revolutionary processes, and that would play an even greater role in human emancipation and critical emancipatory theory if it were clarified and embraced for what it is.” (14)

Although at one point describing the project of the book as one of making explicit and fleshing out what is already implicit or taken for granted in Marx (230), generally and on the whole Martin seems to be working from the conception of a Marx and Marxism which has no place for ethics (or intentionality either), but only for the description and projection of material forces.

Martin’s most basic thesis, then, is that Marxism and revolutionary theory generally, on the one hand, and ethics and the religious dimension, on the other, need each other in order to fulfill their own most basic aims and functions. The aspect that receives by far the most attention in this book is the need that Marxism has for ethics. This is a work addressed chiefly to those who see themselves as within or deriving from the Marxist tradition, arguing for the necessity of “the ethical moment.”

(Although the religious perspective would appear to be equally important to Martin’s overall conception, this aspect receives little sustained focus here, although it does make a reappearance in the book’s Conclusion, where religious narratives are described as “stories that people themselves tell in the living of their lives under specific conditions, but under the twin imperatives of mortality and the possibility of redemption,” a sort of story and language which is “both near and far from Marx.” [397])

Argument

The argument for Ethical Marxism in a nutshell is that the creation of a ‘social society’ has to issue both from a political-economic analysis and a moral recognition of what is morally wrong about the antisocial form of society. (179)

This is one of Martin’s most succinct statements of what he aims to show (it’s not actually an argument). In the process of attempting to show this, the principal argument of the book is that Marxism has not and cannot in itself generate the ought which is necessary for a process which is truly revolutionary and emancipatory, and that Marxism’s attempted theorization of a revolutionary imperative in terms of interests is radically insufficient and must be supplemented by a separately-based ethical imperative.

Obviously this depends on the supposition that Marxism posits a purely interest-based motivation and imperative for revolution. We’ll return to this important question, which is related to Martin’s conception of a Marxism which positions itself as a positivistic science. But first let’s look at how the argument of Ethical Marxism develops.

At one point Martin lays it out along the following lines:

The most pressing ethical concern is the hardest thing not only to accomplish, but even to thematize, even to begin to get people to grapple with….Certainly there are ways in which power and ‘things’ work, and…even while these workings have to be studied and understood and grappled with from a strategic perspective, it is precisely the reduction to causal ‘thingness’ that is the essence of economism, or, to put the point the other way around, it is the complete setting aside of any consideration of the thing that ought to be done in some matrix of pure causality and interest that is the essence of economism. Lenin saw this, in his critique of economism, and yet, out of the orthodox Marxist refusal of the ethical, did not thematize the point this way….This refusal has had consequences, indeed dire consequences [and] overcoming this limitation is absolutely essential for any future Marxist project. (189)

(The “dire consequences” here would seem to refer to events in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s ascendancy, and indeed Martin later points to the Stalin period as “probably the main reason why there has to be a way of articulating the ethical with Marxism – or else it would probably be better not to have Marxism any more.” [302])1

Martin’s analysis is that Marxism, conceived simply as a science which describes and explains the dynamics of capitalism and projects an historical sequence, offers at best the sort of interest-based politics which follows from its explanation of history in terms of class struggle, and that such a politics will be equivalent to a realpolitik power-politics and can easily (or perhaps is bound to) issue in the perversions of the revolutionary process seen in the Soviet Union under Stalin. For Marx, he holds, “it is only a happy by-product that socialism and ultimately communism would be good for humanity…; instead, these social forms are inevitable… these forms are simply what will occur in the objective unfolding of the material dialectic of history.” (392)

Just the realization that more is needed, or the merely implicit exemplification of this realization (as seen, Martin believes, in the example of Lenin’s polemic against economism in What Is To Be Done) – this is quite insufficient. The only remedy is the explicit “thematization of the ethical” and the bringing of the ethical into politics, for “…a significant part of humanity (a critical mass) has to intend to defeat the existing, evil form of society and it has to intend to create a better form of society, in order for a better form of society to come about.” (392)

Materialism

One concern in pursuing this thesis (which takes Martin in many directions) is to maintain a philosophically materialist outlook:

The aspect of the struggle to overcome capitalism that has to do with justice and the aim of creating a good society remains subordinate and epiphenomenal [in Marx]. My argument in this book is that, if there are not at least key moments when these terms are not explicitly thematized and pursued in their own right, then this struggle cannot be carried through. The question remains how this thematization and motivation can be understood within an historical materialist framework, but my hope is that it can…. (155)

Obviously the concern here – what Martin at times calls “the ethico-ontological problem” (220), is to ground ethics immanently, that is, in this world, as opposed to an other, transcendent, world. Martin, it seems clear, wants to remain on the materialist ground of Marxism; but he wants to expand the meaning of that materialism. But although this is clearly his desire, it can’t be said that he is able to resolve the ethico-ontological problem, how to explain the genesis and status of the ethical within a general materialist ontological framework. At best he expresses a hope (as above), or points to a need, as in the following passage:

…there ought to be an argument for the material role that the ethical, and the discourse of the good, needs to play in creating a good society. In other words, if economics, politics and history cannot do what they were supposed to do, then we had better consider the materiality of the ethical – which means grappling with the materiality of evil. (48)

He does, though, point to indications that there must be some sort of materiality of the ethical, or indications that he thinks imply this. He points to what he believes to be gaps, gaps which can only be bridged by the ethical: “There are gaps in the world, and there are gaps in whatever telos might be constructed on the basis of history and economics alone and only the intervention of the ethical can begin to bridge these gaps” (49), and “…there are gaps in Marx’s analysis that can only be addressed in irreducibly normative terms” (103).

Gaps

Over the course of the book, Martin describes several gaps of different character, in each case only bridgeable, he believes, by the ethical. These gaps could be grouped under the following headings:

Most obviously, there is the gap between description and prescription, the gap between description/explanation and normative prescription which is demonstrated, he says, by “the irreducibility of vocabularies (the causal and the value-driven)” (403).

This is clearly the underlying thread of the book: that no amount or depth of description and explanation of the workings and dynamics of capitalism and imperialism, such as Marx and Marxism gives us, will generate the sort of moral imperative, the “ought,” which is necessary both to overthrow this system and to go beyond a “reaction formation” to build a genuinely different society. Further, that this gap is made larger and more pressing by the phenomena of colonialism, and in the 20^th century (and the 21^st) by imperialism. (See 102 – 155 or so, within the section of the book on “Imperialism as the Ethical Problem of Our Time”; “reaction formation” is introduced on 121.)

There is also the gap between necessity and possibility, between what must happen and what may potentially be brought into existence. This is the argument that historical necessity would obviate human freedom and particularity. But, given that the necessity of Marx’s historical template is questionable today in any case, we face the question (present in any case but brought home by the failure of Marxist inevitabilism) of how to understand the generation and actualization of possibilities. (At one point Martin describes his aim as “a ‘postinevitablist’ Marxism that is reconfigured in terms of ethical themes” – 191.) Such an understanding, he believes, must centrally involve the ethical.

His argument runs along the following lines:

Such a scheme presented as inevitability is either theology or strategic audacity; it is only in such a scheme presented as possibility, however, that the history and possible future of humanity actually matters….We are back into the problem of theodicy…in which case ‘redemption’ is not really redemption, this life is not a ‘real fight’ (James), there are no actual people who actually matter involved in history, but only the god of historical inevitability…. (158)

Rather than laws necessarily generating certain results, the laws of history “ought to be understood instead as ‘laws of possibility’, ways of theorizing where the openings might occur in the existing society that would allow for something different and better to arise,” thus introducing “an irreducible element of normativity.” (160, 268)

In order for this better world to come into existence, there is “the question of what vision can galvanize the popular understanding that the existing society needs to be overthrown and a new form of society needs to be created. This ‘vision thing’ is not an optional add-on, and the argument of this book that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

The question of vision is also conceived by Martin as invoking “the religious dimension.” and it’s worth pausing a moment to ask how he conceives the relation of ethical and religious. At one point he speaks of a confidence that is needed which “holds central faith in the principles that exploitation, domination, and oppression are wrong, that we are ethically compelled to struggle against every form that these things take, and that another world is possible.” (409) He believes such a confidence is not only ethical but also religious in the sense that it is a faith both in these ethical principles and in the possibility of a different world.

The “vision thing” also brings us to the gap between destruction and construction. Revolutions involve both, but there is a danger of a construction which is merely a “reaction-formation,” a new which will not be qualitatively different or better because it is simply built through a negation of or reaction to the old. Only ethics, once again, can bridge the gap between revolutionary negation and destruction, and the vision of a redeemed future (a vision whose source he finds in “the religious dimension” of human existence).

The dialectic of negation and the (shall we say) necessarily open dialectic of redemption have to work together; the bridging principle is, in my view, the ethical impulse. (380)

Now these gaps are supposed to show, not only the necessity of the ethical, but to imply its materiality (see above). The argument for this would be along the following lines (this is strongly implied, I think, in Martin’s account, although not quite stated as suchⁱⁱ): If there are lacunae and gaps in Marx’s schema of explanation and projection, such that the gaps can only be bridged normatively, then (a) there is a need for the normative in order to make Marx’s account complete or coherent, and (b) if Marx’s account is overall materialist, then whatever it takes to fill these gaps must have some material status.

Presuming that I’ve correctly captured Martin’s argument, it’s a troublesome one logically, and I don’t think it really goes through very well. For one thing, although it’s asserted that this is so, it is never really demonstrated that only the ethical or normative can bridge these gaps. Why cannot there be some other way of filling these gaps? (In fact I believe there are other ways, as I’ll try to indicate below.)

Even more bothersome from a logical point of view is the status of (b): from the fact that there are gaps in a materialist account, it’s hard to see why it would necessarily follow that whatever is needed to fill the gaps must also be material. Take, as a rather highly charged parallel, the anti-evolutionist argument that there are irreducible gaps in the Darwinist (materialist) theory of evolution, which can only be bridged by a divine creative force. Suppose we granted that argument, would it follow that this “divine force” is therefore material? Of course the creationists and others who put this forward believe, on the contrary, that the “argument from gaps” shows the incompleteness of a materialist explanation, which must therefore be supplemented by an independent spiritual reality. But if materialism is ones axiomatic basis then presumably the argument would simply mean that the “divine force” is actually material: if there is an explanatory gap in a theory, then the presumption would be that whatever is necessary to bridge that gap will have a material status. But if materialism is already presupposed, it’s hard to see how the “argument from gaps” can be an argument for the materiality of ethics.

Sometimes Martin takes a different tack, which, at least as I see it, is more promising as a way of finding a basis for an ethics in human social materiality. Proposing “flourishment” as a translation of the Greek eudaimonia (an important term in Aristotle’s ethical discussions), Martin says that “even if flourishment might be understood in different ways in different times or places, or even if it is barely understood at all, we humans are good at recognizing what is not flourishment, and in knowing we need something else,” and that even if this sense may be little more than a bare feeling or reaction, “it is from this feeling that normative social theory develops.” (59) The overall human project, in which human good is based, would then be “to create possibilities for human flourishment.” (64: he calls it “the Aristotelian answer,” but it seems clear, at least during these pages, that it is also Martin’s answer.) Although these ideals of flourishment would differ historically, the notion would provide a common (formal) criterion of the good, with evil occurring “when possibilities for flourishment are cut off through the efforts of some human agency….” (63)

This seems, as I say, more promising, both with regard to the material rooting of morality and as a conception which can be integrated with Marxism, or which it might be argued is something presupposed by Marx. But although this line of thought is taken up by Martin over the course of ten pages or so at one point, it is not pursued systematically in the book.

Notes

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Related posts:

1. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2
2. Marxism, politics, and evil, part 3
3. John Steele: Marxism, Politics, and Evil
4. Marxism or anarchism or —?
5. Some contributions to thinking in the present moment