Marxism, politics, and evil, part 2

This is the second part of an essay on the book Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, in which Bill Martin argues that Marxism requires morality in order to guide a revolutionary politics.  Part I, which was posted yesterday, was principally concerned with exposition. Today’s post takes up the principal line of argument of the book.

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

John Steele

II

In some sense Ethical Marxism is a long meditation on the crying need for liberation from the brutalities and morass of today’s world, but also the need to surpass Marxism-as-it-has-been. Indeed, Martin’s point is that these needs are crucially interrelated and that fulfillment of the former depends upon accomplishment of the latter. I think this is true and important – in fact I could not agree more. But when we come to the question of how we are to surpass the now-dead Marxism of our fathers, we have some differences. Most basically, I do not believe that the most essential thing, in order for Marxism to become an emancipatory theoretical structure, is that it be reoriented around “the ethical moment” as its basis. I believe that an ethics is founded upon the revolutionary project, rather than founding it, as Martin argues. Rather than morality being the core or foundation of a truly revolutionary politics, as Martin argues, I believe that the political is more basic, and that ethics finds its foundation within larger human projects, including that of an emancipatory politics. Obviously this is a basic point, and thrashing it out (or at least indicating a direction of argument) is one basic aim of the remainder of this paper.

There are also some matters of detail relating to Ethical Marxism which have their own importance, and which will also consume much of the space in what lies below. My concern is with several characteristic ways of arguing and framing things that Martin makes use of, which I believe are unfruitful or worse, and will not take us very far in terms of the discussion we need to be having. (These will be the subject of Part III of this essay.)

The movement from Is to Ought

Martin often tends to pose issues in terms of dichotomies (science/ethics, interest-based vs. ethical motivation, etc.); one of the most pervasive and basic in his thinking is the contradiction he proposes between a politics based on what at one point he calls “real ethics,” and a politics based “mere utilitarianism and calculation based on interests.” (211-12) Now one could question the adequacy of this and others of the dichotomous contrasts Martin sets up (and I’ll touch on this below), but for the moment I want to explore some of the tensions and problems that arise in Martin’s argument from it.

I’ll start from the following passage:

In Marx’s perspective, people do not question their circumstances (in general, broadly, deeply) except when motivated by material interests. Interests are experienced differently in different strata of society…; for there to be a larger change in society, however, there has to be a more general crisis, indeed a crisis felt by all sectors of society. In Lenin’s memorable description, the crisis has to be such that people cannot any longer live in the ways in which they have been living, and the ruling class cannot any longer rule in the ways in which it has been ruling. The Marxist perspective is that, short of an actual deep crisis in the social system, people do not (again – generally, broadly, deeply) go into motion against the existing order. People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order. (187)

On the one hand it seems that Martin accepts that this is the case. Although he does not say so directly, contextual indications are that Martin believes this to be so – that people generally do not go up against the established order in ordinary circumstances (in “times of ‘normal functioning’,” as he puts it), even though it is an unjust order. (And how would it be possible not to believe this? It seems quite clear that it’s the case.)

On the other hand, at several points throughout the book Martin advances the thesis that without ethical/moral motivation and intention, a better world cannot come to be: that moral motivation is necessary to a revolution which is not merely a ‘reaction formation’. And as noted above, Martin believes that “…the Kantian thesis is right: 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)

So it almost seems that Martin has, on the one hand, set up a problem which he believes must be solved, in order for any revolution to be truly a step in the actual liberation of humanity: The revolution must be made out of a moral motivation. But at the same time he also seems to believe that this is not (is never?) the case: “People do not set themselves against the existing order simply because it is an unjust order.” So he has set a problem for any revolution, it seems, which must be solved but which has not been solved and perhaps cannot be solved.

I do not mean to give an argument simply based on this contradiction of phrases. But I do want to ask what it indicates. It is very much as if Martin’s position is that although people broadly do not make revolution out of moral motivation, they ought to do so. Clearly this reproduces the is/ought gap at a higher level (the meta-level): why should we be moral? But when it is posed this way it is clear, I think, that Martin does not provide a way of bridging this gap.

Why should we be moral?

Martin proposes that, in addition to the Marxist description of the structure of the present world, only ethics can bridge the gap between the wretched present and what he sometimes calls the “redeemed world” of a possible future. Suppose we accept that ethics can perform this function. There would still remain the problem of: why take up this ethical stance? Ethics can’t itself provide the reason, or the motive, to be ethical, or to take the ethical bridge to the future. We might answer that it’s necessary to begin from “the ethical moment” because that’s the only way to reach “the redeemed world.” But that would presuppose that we already have the impetus toward that redeemed world – yet it was precisely this impetus which ethics was supposed to be necessary in order to provide in the first place.

I don’t want to seem unnecessarily paradoxical or logic-chopping here. The problem that Martin runs into, as I see it, can be described more simply from another angle. He has written a book which is addressed, in the main, to Marxists and to those who believe in the great desirability or necessity of gaining or moving toward the “redeemed future.” And he is arguing that Marxism does not provide the resources for reaching this possible future, but that a revamped theory, with ethics at its core, an Ethical Marxism, is necessary if such a future is to be reached. Martin believes, moreover, that moral feeling is the actual basis of people’s entering into revolutionary practice or oppositional political engagement in the first place, and his claim is that this “ethical moment” has not been theorized, and must be. (That, at least, is one of the lines of thinking in this book.) In this context the “why be moral?” question does not arise, given the assumption that those addressed already operate, in their basic political outlook, from a moral motivation.

But Martin also believes that, not only must this moral basis be realized and made explicit within the consciously revolutionary ranks, but it must also form the basis, very broadly among the people, in a mass revolutionary upsurge. “Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” (155)

I think it actually is true that a problem has been set which cannot be solved within the terms in which it is posed. But perhaps the quandary stems from these terms as they are understood in Ethical Marxism. I want to pursue this thought by exploring briefly some of the central concepts or markers which Martin deploys – ethics/morality – politics – Marxism and Marx’s thinking – all of which I believe should be understood or taken (along with their interrelations) differently than he does.

Ethics and politics

This is a large and important topic, in my view, and there’s far more to be said about it than I can possibly say here, or that I’m capable of saying generally. This should be a topic of discussion among all who work for human liberation, or want to. But I think I can say enough to make clear why I believe that Martin’s approach to the question will not lead very far.

Let’s begin from the following passage in Ethical Marxism:

Yes, the new society has to be against the ancien regime, but even more it has to be for the future and future possibilities…. It could be said that the dialectic of negativity is essential, but it is also in danger of becoming purely reactive without the notion of an underdetermined, redeemed future…. 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. (379-80)

Let us accept (as I do) that we need both of these dialectics, as Martin describes them, that we will be lost unless the necessary negation is interwoven with a striving toward the open redeemed future. The question is whether ethics is necessary to provide a link or bridge between the two, and whether ethics is adequate or sufficient to link them. (The question is not, it should be clear, whether “Marxism is ready, in a new synthesis, to accept that ethical questions are real questions” [256]; to deny that ethics is necessary for the “bridging” function is not to deny that ethical questions are real.)

Early in the book Martin talks about “the call of the future,” which he links with the concern expressed by Kant for “the most distant future generations,” and which he characterizes as an ethical demand. “In some sense,” he goes on to say, “my only argument in this book is the concern itself is the ground of the ‘science’, of systematic theorizing. That is the essence of Ethical Marxism.” (27)

Here the ethical demand embodied in a concern for the future is seen as both motive-force and ground for the sort of theorizing that Marx gave us. Sometimes this “call of the future” is characterized in terms of vision. 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 is that this vision has to have the question of the ethical at its core.” (160)

Unless this sort of ethically-motivated vision motivates and frames the intentions of those who are involved in making a new future, Martin believes, a “redeemed future” will not come about. (“Ultimately, people have to want to create a good society, or else they won’t.” – 155)

Ethics-based vs. interest-based?

It’s true, I think, that without a vision of the future, no popular uprising or revolutionary upsurge will change the social fundamentals of class society. Both a vision of communism (in a general way) and the conviction that it is possible are necessary to a coming about of a communist future. But why must this vision be founded, independently from the social and historical process, and even independently of a communist political project, in an ethics or morality? Martin’s predominant line of thinking, as I understand it, is that this sort of independent ethical basis is necessary if a would-be revolutionary politics is not to become an interest-based realpolitik. But his argument for it crucially depends on a series of dichotomous bifurcations: fact/value, history/morality, interest-based and ethically-based actions (as well as on a strictly Kantian-derived definition of the ethical), as in the following passages:

Either I take the core of moral theory to be the treatment of the other as an end-in-herself or -himself, or I simply take it as realpolitik that I find myself in the midst of a war of all against all…. (69)

It can…be argued that, without an “ethical grounding”…, “politics” can only mean a set of tactical considerations concerning the machinations and mechanisms of power, and not a “thinking of the polis,” particularly a thinking of the just polis…. (391)

The hold of these sorts of bifurcations on Martin’s thinking can be seen in his claim that Lenin’s internationalism should be seen as ethically-based. Why? Because “it goes against the grain of the existing society, and it does this on the basis of principle,” a principle “not based on a narrow conception of interest.” (164)

Do these alternative bases for a politics, interest-based and ethically-based, exhaust the field? To see how this may not be the case (and I don’t think it is), I want to look at a couple of observations by Mao Zedong, whom Martin characterizes as having “restitched” the ethical into Marxism. (391).

Mao said, speaking of his youth, “First we were revolutionaries, and as a result we became Marxists.” That captures very well what I am trying to capture with the idea of Ethical Marxism: first we see that there is something very wrong about the way that society is set up, and as a result we look for a systematic understanding of society that will allow us to move forward and try to make things right.”\ (340-41)

Martin takes it that becoming a revolutionary, that is, one who becomes dedicated to the systematic restructuring of social relations, must be based upon a primary insight which is ethical in character, and which provides guidance in the enterprise and a linkage to the “redeemed future” in this intial insight that “something is very wrong.”

There are a couple of things to be said initially about this schema. First, note how this passage brings out again the dual function which Martin depends upon the ethical to perform: both beginning and bridge, providing both the initial impetus which brings the actor into revolutionary practice, and the linkage to the redeemed future (the vision of which is to be provided by the basically untheorized religious dimension).

At the same time, it is clear here why Martin needs the “bridging” function. For there is no reason why an initial perception that “something is very wrong” will not go in a sort of revenge direction, or toward what Martin calls a reaction-formation. But if this is true, what justifies calling the initial perception ethical? We seem to be in the same position, whether we say that the initial impetus to revolutionary politics is ethical insight or an interest-based motivation. In either case we need (on Martin’s set-up) a more fully-fledged ethics to act as “bridge.”

The role of practice

We seem to be consistently drawn into conceptual and logical tangles as we trace the implications of what’s said in Ethical Marxism. I think this should be taken as a marker of some basic inconsistencies or jumbles in the theory advanced in this book. I hope to point to some possibilities in the way of emerging from this thicket. I want to proceed by way of one more quotation, both from Martin and from Mao.

…many of [Mao’s] popular formulations have a distinctively “categorical imperative” ring to them – probably most of all the famous statement, “Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all come down to one thing: It is right to rebel against reactionaries.”  (194)

Let’s start from a fuller quotation of Mao’s famous statement in its original context:

The immense complexity of Marxism can be summed up in one sentence: ‘It is justifiable to rebel’ For centuries people have been saying: ‘It is justifiable to oppress or to exploit people, but it is wrong to rebel’. Marxism turned this thesis upside down. That is a great contribution, a thesis established by Marx from the struggle of the proletariat. Basing their action on this thesis, people have shown defiance, struggled, and worked for socialism.³

In making an interpretation here, a lot turns on a question of priority. Should the Marxism put forward by Mao in this passage be understood as beginning from a primordial ethical judgment (rebellion is right, justified)? Or should rebellion be seen as the primary action, generating a for-or-against field, with Marxism beginning from affirmation of the rebellion, putting oneself on the side of those who rebel? In the latter case, which I’d argue for, the justifiability is not an abstract (or an a priori) judgment, but a practical one which is simultaneous with ranging oneself with those who rebel.

Putting this together with the “first revolutionaries, then Marxists” statement, we can see how (as I see it) the basic movement is from rebel or revolutionary practice to Marxism as the affirmation and comprehension of that practice within a larger, deeper context, and then movement forward from there. This primacy of practice is essential for Mao, as for Marx and a revolutionary Marxism. Ethics in this conception is formed upon and around a basic practical orientation. (The movement here is similar to Badiou’s sequence of event, subject and truth-process, where it is the recognition of the event which founds both subject and truth-process, with an ethics following out of this nexus.⁴)

What is primary is the movement in the world, practice, and it’s this which generates the need which is not only what has led, historically, to taking up Marx, but which is also necessary in order to come at Marx in such a way as to see his theory as an understanding of the present which shows a different future as possible. At that point, in coming to grips with the revolutionary political vista thus opened up, there are many problems to be solved, including ethically. None of this movement from practice to theory guarantees anything, of course, and certainly not a good or fruitful understanding of Marx. The point is not a sure-fire method of getting everything right, but a conceptual relationship and construal of what’s going on.

The point in all this is not, of course, justification through quotations from Mao or l’explication du texte. But it is significant that these statements can (and I think should) be understood differently than they are taken by Martin.

But as well, I do believe that something along the lines of the above is how we need to understand the relation, not only between ethics and Marxism, but ethics and an emancipatory politics, and between each of these and a primary social stirring in the world.

Let us sketch the differences by way of a few questions. Are we, principally, Marxists because we are revolutionaries, or revolutionaries because we are Marxists? I think it is clear that the primacy must go to the first: Marxists because revolutionaries.  But how about the question with a closer relevance to Martin’s argument: Are we revolutionaries due to our ethical principles (ethical stance, an ethical insight or vision), or is there an ethics which crucially follows upon the taking up of the revolutionary project, which stems from an emancipatory political project? I believe the latter is true.  And finally, is politics an autonomous field of human social practice (or of truth-processes, as Badiou argues), or does it require to be founded upon a religio-ethical vision, as Martin believes? Here my own answer is less certain (I am not sure whether, or to what extent, the political field should be seen as autonomous), but I would not see it as needing to be founded in ethics or religious vision.

Thus I am arguing that both our taking up Marxism (and the sort of Marxism we take up), and our ethics (and the character of this ethics) follow upon and stem from our primary step in practice, which must be understood politically. There is no automaticity here, that is, it is not the case that anyone who takes up a revolutionary project thereby takes it up in the best way or draws the right conclusions. There is plenty of scope, and necessity, for thinking, argument, and investigation. And the whole matter is far more complex than the schemata I’ve offered might seem to indicate. On the one hand there are many ways and even degrees of “being a revolutionary”; and on the other, there are many types and aspects of ethics, for ethics are associated with overarching projects (understood in the Sartrean manner), and there is more than one project in any human life.

Without going into these complications, though, I hope to have said enough to indicate a different way of coming at the questions of ethics, politics, and Marxism.

Notes

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Related posts:

1. Marxism, Politics, and Evil, part 1
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