Philosophical Foundations for a Marxian Ethics

For use by the Author only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV

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Constructing Marxist Ethics

Critique, Normativity, Praxis

Edited by

Michael J. Thompson

LEIDEN | BOSTON


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Contents

Acknowledgments vii List of Contributors viii

Introduction 1

Part 1Marxist Humanism and Ethical Models

1 The Marxian Roots of Radical Humanism 9Lawrence Wilde

2 The Idea of the “Struggle for Recognition” in the Ethical Thought of the Young Marx and its Relevance Today 33

Tony Burns

3 Political Economy and the NormativeMarx on Human Nature and the Quest for Dignity 59

Lauren Langman and Dan Albanese

4 Art as EthicsThe Aesthetic Self 86

Ian Fraser

Part 2Critical Perspectives on Rights and Justice

5 Reclaiming Marx 109Principles of Justice as a Critical Foundation in Moral Realism 109

Wadood Y. Hamad

6 Marx as a Critic of Liberalism 144Sean Sayers

7 Marx, Modernity and Human Rights 165Bob Cannon


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Contents

8. Last of the SchoolmenNatural Law and Social Justice in Karl Marx 192

George E. McCarthy

Part 3Toward a Theory of Marxist Ethics

9 Philosophical Foundations for a Marxian Ethics 235Michael J. Thompson

10 Political Economy with Perfectionist PremisesThree Types of Criticism in Marx 266

Christoph Henning

11 G.A. Cohen and the Limits of Analytical Marxism 288Paul Blackledge

12 On the Ethical Contours of Thin Aristotelian Marxism 313Ruth Groff

13 The Ethical Implications of Marx’s Concept of a Post-Capitalist Society 336

Peter Hudis

Index 357


part 3

Toward a Theory of Marxist Ethics

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For use by the Author only | © 2015 Koninklijke Brill NV© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2015 | doi 10.1163/9789004254152_011

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chapter 9

Philosophical Foundations for a Marxian Ethics

Michael J. Thompson

1 Introduction

My intention in what follows is to suggest a conception of ethical reasoning that is distinctively Marxian in character. In contrast to other approaches to Marxism’s relation to ethics, I do not seek to posit a set of ethical principles or concepts, but rather to outline a form of ethical reasoning derived from Marxian philosophy. I would like to propose a theory of ethics that relies on dialectical arguments and which can be used as a means to construct a critical theory of judgment. Basic to this approach is the construction of an objective ethics that possesses the capacity to articulate an ethics that is critical in nature, one that takes the concrete life processes of human beings as its end and its substance. This kind of ethical reasoning, I contend, is deeply anathema to con-temporary trends in ethical theory and moral philosophy, particularly those dominated by approaches that consider themselves “postmetaphysical.” According to this view, ethical values and phenomena need to be detached from any ontological claims, in particular any claims that are rooted in anything external to the rational justification of moral claims alone. Concepts of the good are to be understood not as properties of human life, but as that which is discur-sively justifiable. Ethical claims are the product of intersubjective relations and mutual forms of understanding through experiment and communicative forms of rationality. Since this approach to ethical theory is conceived as a form of praxis where the content of ethical claims is inherent to the cooperative forms of communication that produce forms of consensus around specific values and forms of life, it is celebrated as post-foundational: lacking any need to depend on facts or “truths” external to rational justifications alone. This view is deeply criti-cal a conception of the subject or reason that has some kind of direct reflective capacity to comprehend ontological claims about the “good” and the “right,” or “just.” Thinkers from Habermas to Rawls have therefore concluded that a Kantian framework is the proper philosophical context within which ethical philosophy should operate.

In opposition to these projects, I believe the Marxian understanding of ethics and normative claims is distinctly metaphysical in that it is concerned with the progression of the phases of being of human life. This approach to metaphysics is not one grounded in a disembodied form of reason or transcendent forms of


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being. Rather, it refers to the concrete manifestations of being, the ways that objects cannot be reduced to their mere material properties, but rather possess active features that make them what they are. In this sense, I main-tain that Marxian ethical theory is distinctively metaphysical in that it is concerned with progressing beyond the deviant and pathological forms of social life and individuality that predominate in capitalist society: forms of alienation, of reification, and so on. But perhaps even more, this approach to ethics opposed the constructivist and pragmatist approaches by unifying scientific and normative realms of knowledge. It proposes an objectivist ethics that has the ability to ground its normative claims in claims about the functional and processual nature of social facts and human life. An objec-tive ethics is therefore distinctly foundational in that it is does not leave the construction and articulation of ethical propositions and values to the arbi-trariness of discourse or to the constructivism of rational actors. Rather, it looks for the validity of any value, norm, institution, or form of life more generally in the ontological structure of social being and the processes that constitute it.

Marx’s ethical framework, or the philosophical insight that grounds his crit-ical social theory as a whole, is one that seeks the perfection of human subjects through the optimal organization of social relations. This perfectionism is derived from a metaphysical understanding of social and individual human life where human freedom and human life can be seen to have different onto-logical levels of being. Marx, like Plato and Aristotle before him, see that there exist certain objective goods that are required to bring about the flourishing of human life. According to this structure of thought, human beings require cer-tain kinds of social relations, certain kinds of social and individual goods in order for their self-realization. A Marxian ethics is perfectionist in the sense that it seeks the flourishing and full development of human capacities and powers, the very negation of alienated forms of life.

Fundamental to this broader thesis is that there exists a fundamental nor-mative foundation upon which Marxist philosophy rests. Marx’s thought con-tains an ethical imperative that seeks to posit a specific conception of how human beings can develop, become free in his unique sense, and therefore understand how pathological forms of life can be critiqued from that stand-point. In this sense, Marx’s distinctive approach is dialectically to synthesize the normative, ethical conception of human life with his critical, scientific investigations into capitalist society. My first proposition will therefore be that Marx’s thought possesses what I will call here an ethical structure which constitutes a dialectical unity between epistemic, factual or scientific state-ments and normative-evaluative statements. As I see it, Marx’s theoretical


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arguments and claims cannot be seen in the light of neo-Kantian conceptions of scientific method but rather as a dialectical unity of empirical claims and value claims.

What is required is a conception of critical judgment capable of uniting cog-nitive claims about the structure of the world on the one hand and evaluative claims about their legitimacy and moral rightness on the other. This will pro-vide us with the proper epistemic framework for my second proposition which is that Marx’s critical social theory is concerned with the exploration of the ontological progression of human perfection and the ways that this ontology is rooted in concrete hypotheses about the nature of human social life itself. This will lead me to the final proposition which is that a Marxian ethical theory is distinctly objective in character and this is the essence of a critical theory of judgment that creates a more compelling space of reasons for any critical the-ory of society. Since knowledge claims cannot be separated from value judg-ments and remain genuinely critical, this ethical structure of Marxism should be seen as a basic framework not only for a critical theory of ethics, but for a critical social science and social theory more generally.

2 The Ethical Structure of Marxism

My first proposition is that Marx’s ideas possess an ethical structure by which I mean he was working within an intellectual frame whereby claims about empirical facts or cognitive claims are dialectically related to claims about value, ethics and normative ideas, or evaluative claims. The ethical structure of Marx’s ideas refers to the ways that these kinds of knowledge claims are mutually dependent; that critical reason conveys rational arguments about the ways that social pathologies can be understood objectively, or through the positing of the deformation of the capacities for full development and flourishing, or perfectionism, to which modern societies can provide. Marx therefore does not offer a set of ethical principles that a priori or in any way separable from the potentialities that lie inherent within the members of any community. Since the purpose of social life is seen to be the perfection of its members, Marx sees that modernity – or the social forces developed by capitalist society – are mismatched to the empirical ends that it produces. The ability to formulate such a critique rests on a philosophical reworking of the context of German philosophy that Marx inherited, but it also seems to me to be a largely underdeveloped area in Marxist philosophy. Bridging the divide between the scientific elements of Marx’s work and the humanist ele-ments is therefore crucial.


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2.1 Theoretical and Practical KnowledgeJudging and acting are generally seen as separate activities. Since Kant the idea of formulating judgments was conceived as the central mechanism of knowl-edge itself. Kant argued that the power of judgment is one that is the applica-tion of the rules of the understanding and it is therefore conceived as the activity of thought itself. This, Kant emphasizes, is distinct from the under-standing (der Verstand) which is itself a collection or faculty of rules, whereas “the power of judgment is the faculty of subsuming (Vermögen) under rules, i.e., of determining whether something stands under a given rule (casus datae legis) or not.”1 Kant’s thesis is that the understanding, or the faculty of reason itself, is dependent on the ability of the subject to subsume any object under the rules governing the understanding or “applying pure concepts of the under-standing to appearances in general.”2 Kant saw judgments as the very essence of the activity of thinking and he separated three different kinds of judgment – theoretical, practical, and aesthetic – into three different spheres of knowl-edge. What is needed, as Hegel and Marx saw, was an overcoming of this deep division set up by Kant. What they were after, and what I believe Marx simply assumed and practiced in his writings, was the formulation of a single form of judgment that resolved the contradictions and antinomies of Kant’s system.

The difference between factual and evaluative claims is rooted in the notion that there are distinct logics to theoretical and practical reasoning. My thesis is that Marx challenges this doctrine and posits that true knowledge about the world, a genuinely rational grasp of the social world, is only possible through the dialectical sublation of these two forms of reasoning. The separation between theoretical and practical reasoning was initiated and systematized by Kant who argued that there were two distinct kinds of concepts: those that are of nature and those that are of freedom. In so doing, he set out different principles according to which those objects can be known and, also, different principles that govern those concepts themselves. Kant calls technically-practi-cal those concepts that refer to causality in nature and morally-practical those concepts that refer to freedom, or the will. This separation is crucial since Kant argues that these are two different spheres of reality with two correspondingly different sets of principles.

What is crucial however is that Kant lays out two distinct forms of judg-ments for theoretical and practical questions respectfully. Since claims about the natural world or world of facts rest on causal claims, Kant argues that these require judgments of the kind if X then Y. These are causal claims in

1 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (A133/B172).2 Ibid. (A138/B177).



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that they articulate a consequent derived from its ground. Hence, if water molecules bind together at zero degrees Centigrade, then whenever the tem-perature is at zero degrees Centigrade or below, then it will turn to ice. This is a causal claim relevant to the objective properties of water, pressure and temperature. However, practical claims are different in that they require not a ground but a maxim for them to become rational judgments but rather fall under the type of judgment what attributes a predicate to a subject. In this form of judgment, we convey knowledge claims about something by saying X is Y, or, all Xs are Ys, and so on. Categorical claims or statements such as these therefore are not casual in nature in the sense of a ground and its conse-quent. Rather, they take the form, as in Kant’s “categorical imperative”: Perform ϕ iff ϕ should be applied as a universal norm. There is nothing ground-ing the ethical claim to perform only those acts that are to be applied univer-sally, but this is nevertheless a priori in the sense that it is formalistic and does not contribute to our understanding of the concept of ethical claims. Hence, in the Kantian framework, we need to construct reasons that are also a priori rather than ontological in nature. Ethics is divided from the material understanding of social facts.

Hegel saw the distinction between these kinds of judgments as deeply problematic. For one thing, he saw the idea that the categories of reason could be generated a priori as a false move. Rather, the categories of reason (or the “understanding” as Kant would have called it) need to be generated from the object itself, not from the subject. In this sense, what was crucial was the thesis that reason was not simply a product of human intellection but also, and more fundamentally, a property of the world itself. When we think in terms of concepts, those concepts must – if they are rational – map onto the actual structure of the object in question. It makes no sense, Hegel argues, to conceive of the world in terms of categories we have generated but rather to ensure that the categories we possess in our subjective mind are also the cat-egories that govern the objective world. Hence, the concept of ice is not sim-ply, for Hegel, an idea that we impose or use to understand the phenomenon of ice, if it is to be genuinely rational, the concept of ice must match the actual conceptual properties of ice that are found objectively in the world – our ideas, our concepts, must, in the end, be constitutive of the world. Only then can the concept of ice we possess in our intellection become an Idea: the unity of the subjective concept and the objective reality (Wirklichkeit) that is found in the world.

For Hegel, the development of reason is dialectically related to the devel-opment of human actuality or the full development of what it is conceptu-ally. Hegel initiates what will become a crucial turn for Marx in that he


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views the development of the capacities of thought as tied to the self- development of the subject as well as the collective development of culture. Human beings do not simply acquire more knowledge about the world as they progress in their rational gasp of nature and of themselves; they also move through stages of ontological development and growth toward a state of freedom where they are able to fulfill the conceptual structure of what they are essentially. For Marx, this idea was problematic only insofar as it concerned the practical relations human beings had with the world and each other. Marx’s critique of Hegel is not that the world should be seen in materialist terms, but rather that the actualization of human society can only be achieved through the concrete actions of coordinated social praxis. Concepts do not simply realize themselves through the internal force of reason; rather, they must be worked out through the life process of history: the very dimension representing the modes of human self-creation and re-creation.

In this sense, Marx’s relation to Hegelian metaphysics is crucial for under-standing a Marxian ethical theory. The distinction – so crucial for Aristotle and Hegel – between Being and Becoming, between the empirical state of any object and its actualized state, constitutes the very grammar of Marx’s critical ideas about science and ethics. Since he opposed Hegel on the view that con-ceptual thought is the source of change, he would also oppose the idea that we can have ethical as opposed to scientific ideas about the world. Rather, norma-tive statements are dialectically related to knowledge statements. There can be no separation between our knowledge of something and an understanding of what that thing should do. There can be no separation between the activity of science and the activity of judgment – both are sublated in the activity of cri-tique: in the transcendence of the narrow understanding of science as empiri-cism, as understanding mechanism as a universal form of causation, and the abstraction of a moralism that is detached from the ontological shape of human life and its needs for actualization. Before I come to these concerns, it will first be necessary to deal with the epistemological question of how such judgments are possible in the first place.

2.2 Evaluative-Cognitive ClaimsOvercoming the dichotomy between facts and values is crucial for Marx because he sees any science of society without values as empty and any values not anchored in scientific understanding of nature and history as naïve and without any political or practical use. He saw that a critical theory of society would be possible only once objectively valid knowledge about the world was possible, and this would be possible only by overcoming the dichotomy



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between evaluative and cognitive claims.3 In particular, what I propose here is that any knowledge claims about the nature of social facts should be under-stood as evaluative-cognitive claims where the knowledge of X also provides an understanding of the norm involved in evaluating X and vice versa. This kind of reasoning is at the heart of Marx’s conception of social science and the ability to know social facts. Marx does not propose that knowledge of social facts can be divided analytically from our evaluation of those facts. Indeed, basic to this claim is that normative ideas underlie the empirical claims to knowledge within Marx’s framework.

Assume that judgments come in two basic forms. On the one hand, we can make claims to truth about objects. These are knowledge claims about the empirical nature of an object, say: “this house is green,” or “stomachs secrete digestive enzymes.” These kinds of statements assert a specific factual claim and we can call them cognitive claims insofar as they communicate objective knowledge about concrete objects. Another kind of claim is one that seeks to assert a normative judgment. These claims seek to offer a norm such as “you should listen to your parents,” or “it is not fair to take another person’s prop-erty.” These claims are not cognitive in the sense that they seek to offer a fac-tual claim of truth, but rather a value judgment or normative claim. But these normative claims are also rooted not in some concrete aspect of human life, but in an abstract principle of universalization. It is a formalism without con-tent, and therefore expresses culturally relative ideas about the norms and val-ues. We call these evaluative claims or statements. Marx rejected this kind of division of reasoning not unlike the way Hegel rejected the Kantian distinction between theoretical and practical rationality. What I am calling here the ethi-cal structure of Marxism therefore rests on the following thesis: that Marx assumed that true science is a kind of critical theory that can explode ideologi-cal forms of consciousness and lead to radical critique rests on the givenness of evaluative-cognitive claims, i.e., those kinds of statements that dialectically bring together cognitive and evaluative judgments. Marx does not distance himself from ethical forms of reasoning, he sees normative claims about the

3 As George E. McCarthy has argued, “Marx reintroduced the question of objective validity back into the phenomenological method in his criticism of Hegel’s absolutism and identity theory… Rather it was the result of seeing that the method employed by Hegel could in fact be applied to the formation of real historical consciousness, the development of the species-being, and the ideological critiques of truth-claims based on the ahistorical evaluative and cognitive perspectives of both political philosophy and political economy.” Marx’s Critique of Science and Positivism: The Methodological Foundations of Political Economy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 33.


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social world as inherent and discoverable immanently from within the actual structure of the world and its processes.

But if we consider the thesis that any social fact can only be understood as existing within a systemic context of causes, then we must formulate critical knowledge of those social facts differently than if they were natural or brute facts. The reason for this is that within any functional system – i.e., one where the X is both the cause and effect of the system of which it is a part – knowledge of X will also imply and indeed require, if X is to be known com-pletely and therefore rationally, that we know not only what X is, but what X ought to be able to do. Thus, if we ask what a liver is, i.e., an organ that metab-olizes sugar within a living body, then we would also have to understand that a proper liver will need to perform function ϕ for it to be a liver. Livers would not be livers if they performed function ψ, say regulate body temperature, or whatever. And indeed, we can detect the presence of cancer when we find cells that perform no function at all instead of their own individual function-ing as part of the organ. There is a distinction between the given, empirical state of any object and the fully realized, complete object that lies in potentia or δυνάμις within that empirically given object. This need not be seen as an Idealist distinction, but can be seen in material terms, as an objective, onto-logical distinction between the deformed, undeveloped object and its devel-oped, realized state. Hence, any deviation from ϕ or the given empirical state of ϕ (we can delineate this as ϕ̂) can be seen as a pathology or the negation of the healthy or proper functioning of the object or attribute of that object. But we can only know that ϕ̂ < ϕ if we also know the proper role of ϕ. And this knowledge can only be derived from the actual operations of that object itself, not assigned a priori. As Hegel notes in his Logik, the object must generate its own categories of knowledge.4 We can know what livers are because of their purpose or role within the functional system of the body as a whole. If we

4 Marx’s theory of scientific knowledge makes a similar claim in that the object itself dictates the kinds of reasoning needed for its comprehension, hence the materialist understanding of matter preceding consciousness. As Patrick Murray has explained: “This entails necessity in that the relation between the ‘facts’ and the logic that is to draw them together into the shape of a science sheds its arbitrariness. The object under study determines the science now in second intension; it determines the logic of the ‘facts’. Marx’s critique of empiricism is imma-nent in calling empiricism to submit the question of the relation of ‘facts’ and their logical reconstruction itself to empirical scrutiny. This critical approach to concepts and their logi-cal interconnections is one of the features that sets Marx’s theory of scientific knowledge apart from positivist understandings of science.” Marx’s Theory of Scientific Knowledge (Atlantic Highlands, nj: Humanities Press, 1988), 41. Also see McCarthy, op. cit., 135ff.



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possessed only static knowledge of livers, we would not know what they ought to do; we would therefore be unable to judge them or to be able to diag-nose their pathologies. Any true, concrete knowledge of livers entails a nor-mative claim: to be a liver means it ought to perform function ϕ. There is no way to separate a cognitive and evaluative claim about such an object, because it is a processual, dynamic object with a function and, therefore, an end. I can-not reduce a liver to its constituent parts or its mechanisms since it is obvious that to know what a liver is, is to know what it ought to do, what function it ought to perform and what other functional relations depend upon it. Not only is there an intrinsic teleology involved in the knowledge of the actual object, but the object objectively possess that property or function. Similarly, the world of social facts is a series of objects that must reveal their functional prop-erties for them to be known in a concrete, as opposed to abstract, sense.

The knowledge of any object X that possesses at least one function, ϕ or, for that matter, any set of functions {ϕ1, ϕ2, ϕ3, …, ϕn}, therefore must be an evaluative-cognitive claim if it is to comprehend the object in its entirety and in its totality. We therefore cannot accept the positivist conception of knowl-edge that maintains an adherence to empirical phenomena alone – say induc-tive-statistical patterns of causality – and instead accept the notion that social facts possess functional properties.5 Since any function operates within a sys-temic, relational context of causality it must also be evaluated with respect not only to its static or empirical state, but its dynamic or relative state. This opens us up to the crucial distinction – laid out by Aristotle and Hegel in their respec-tive metaphysics – that the empirical manifestation of anything cannot account for its essential reality.6 The distinction made by both of them was between the empirical existence of any object (δυνάμις for Aristotle, Dasein for Hegel) and the realized or actualized status of that object (ἐνέργεια for Aristotle,

5 This goes against the thesis articulated by Carl Hempel that “Functional analysis in psychol-ogy and in the social sciences no less than in biology may thus be conceived, at least ideally, as a program of inquiry aimed at determining the respects and the degrees in which various systems are self-regulating in the sense here indicated.” Aspects of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1965), 330. For a contrasting view on functionalism in modern analytic terms, cf. Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation (New York: The Free Press, 1961). The thesis that functionalist claims are not test-able is linked to the problem that testable hypotheses are appropriate for mechanistic and chemical processes and not teleological ones.

6 I have discussed the relation of this structure of thought with Marxist theory in more depth in my paper “Marxism, Ethics, and the Task of Critical Theory,” in M. Thompson (ed.), Rational Radicalism and Political Theory (Lanham, md: Lexington Books, 2011), 161−188.


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Wirklichkeit for Hegel).7 According to this view, we cannot simply confine our-selves to empirical observations of the object, but rather to the extent to which it fulfills its essential function or telos.8 In this sense, we can make the distinc-tion drawn above between an observed, given object X̂ and its fully realized or actual form X. Hence, evaluative-cognitive claims do not simply state the sta-tus of X as an observed phenomenon, such as X is X or X is ~Y, and so on, but rather asks, is X̂ = X, or is X̂< X or is X̂~X, and so on.9 This form of reasoning indicates a crucial distinction between the empirical, immediate existence or state of any object on the one hand and its realized form on the other.

This is not an Idealist representation opposed to the real, but a means of judging when something has achieved the state that it has the inner potential to obtain. Therefore, we do not ask simply whether or not the liver is the thing that metabolizes sugar; we ask whether or not the liver metabolizes sugar prop-erly. We ask this question because we know that livers have a role to play, an end that they are to achieve if they are working properly. And we can know the latter only by understanding that the liver operates within a systemic context of causes, that it can perform its function properly or not, and this can only be understood from within the context of those causes that it operates, within the

7 Aristotle emphasizes this distinction in his Metaphysics when he argues that “Even more, matter is potentiality because it may attain its form (τὸ εἶδος); but when it is actual it is then in the form (ὅταν δέ γε ἐνεργείᾳ ᾐ᷑, τότε ἐν τῳ� εἴδει ἐστίν).” 1050a, 15−16.

8 This is also Alasdair MacIntyre’s thesis when he argues that “Within that teleological scheme there is a fundamental contrast between man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realized-his-essential-nature. Ethics is the science which is to enable men to under-stand how they make the transition from the former state to the latter. Ethics therefore in this view presupposes some account of potentiality and act, some account of the essence of man as a rational animal and above all some account of the human telos.” After Virtue (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 51. Marx accepts this basic account of pro-cessual development, but sees that it is inherently social, that individuals can achieve their actualized state only from within a community organized around just those goods that will provide for that end, and that this is historically achieved: that it requires the development of social powers through to the present in order for this possibility to be actuated.

9 Hegel notes that the concept of essence (Wesen) is “Being (Dasein) that has gone into itself: that is to say, the simple self-relation is expressly put as its negation of the negative, as immanent self-mediation.” Enzyklopädia, §112. This means that essence is expressed as the identity A = A. At its basis, essence is therefore contrasted with immediate being, with Dasein itself. It seems clear that this is useful in understanding the logic employed by Marx in his understanding of deformed, alienated forms of social being as opposed to the full, spe-cies being that he sees as the expression of what a free community would be able to produce.



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role it plays in the totality to which it belongs. To know what X is in a concrete sense is also to know what X should do or what X’s end-state is. But this “should” is not moralistic in any sense, but rather derived from the knowledge of the essence of anything, of what it is ontologically. And these questions are united in a single form of inquiry: one that is able to distinguish between the appearance and essence of anything. This is why Marxism should not be seen as having an ethics, but rather an ethical structure.

Marx’s emphasis upon the economic forces of society in terms of “base and superstructure” therefore takes on a more significant meaning. For one thing, it is not to be seen in mechanistic terms, but in teleological terms. The fact that human beings are processual, that they develop within a functional context of systemic causes means that social organization and the channeling of indi-vidual development causes pathologies such as alienation and unfreedom. We need to grasp social facts in these terms, not as static entities of mere mecha-nisms. This is one reason that attempts to characterize Marx’s scientific and moral method in terms of contemporary philosophies of science become mis-leading and incorrect. Marx advances certain hypotheses about the nature of the capitalist economy – such as the law of the falling rate of profit, the mecha-nisms of absolute and relative surplus value, and so on – but these are different claims than those that are made about the critique of capitalism as a social system. Value, for instance, cannot simply be understood as a concept or vari-able that is employed in the understanding of profit rates and so on. It is also a category that can be evaluated according to what role it plays in society – use or exchange value. Similarly, labor, productivity, science and technology, are not inherently problematic for Marx. The real evaluative question is: to what extent do these social forces play a role in realizing the essential properties of human beings; to what extent do they cultivate the potentialities inherent in them as opposed to perverting them for private, particular ends and pur-poses.10 Hence, the attempt to characterize Marx’s method as realist fails to capture the fact that the evaluative-cognitive claims contain within them both

10 Attempts to see Marx’s discussion in terms of a strict form of empirical scientificity there-fore fail to capture the thrust of his critique of capitalism. Gavin Kitching therefore argues that “because the Marxist has no experiments or applications to which she or he can point to sustain a cynical epistemological agnosticism or instrumentalism. The Marxist cannot offer any propositions equivalent to ‘neutrons may not be real but I can produce a ray’ or ‘dna molecules may not be real but I can produce two-headed green mice’, and we can see this clearly if we consider what propositions the Marxist might adduce of this type.” Marxism and Science: Analysis of an Obsession (University Park, pa: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 37.


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an empirical component of observation as well as an dynamic ontological component of function and realization.11

For Marx, the impulse to critique capitalism is not simply based on the empirical status of human beings under capitalism; it is rooted in an under-standing of what the nature, essence, and purpose of human societies actually are. There is always the notion of the potentiality of what human individuals and communities can realize, what can be perfected within them. Again these ideas are not a priori properties of the mind, but are to be understood nega-tively, as the determinate negation of the capacities that ought to be realized and seen as fulfilling a free, flourishing life.12 Unlike the Kantian and neo- Fichtean claims, I do not attribute ethical norms to an act or state of being; I look for the essential elements of what it means to be human and then seek to contrast this to the empirical state of being that predominates empirically. What the evaluative-cognitive claim is able to achieve, in this sense, is more than an empirical description of social facts, but also a sense of how those facts are to be judged. Critique, for Marx, therefore becomes a synthetic judgment between factual knowledge claims and evaluative, normative claims. There is no ethical system of values separate from how the world works, those values are inherent in an objective sense to social facts themselves. We can say that every social fact, every artifact of social life, contains the normative categories for its own judgment. And this means that we are thinking in terms that are not simply empirical, nor simply realist. Rather, we are thinking in terms that are critical in a distinctively Marxian sense.

A Marxian form of ethical reasoning or judgment is therefore grounded in func-tionalist knowledge claims because the world is seen to operate, when grasped in its fullest and most concrete sense, as teleological in nature. It is rooted in the thesis

11 For a thorough interpretation of Marx’s theory of knowledge as realist and correspondence-oriented, see David-Hillel Ruben “if we are forced to admit that Marx’s ontological position is materialist, then for the sake of epistemological consistency, Marxists must adopt a realist ‘reflection’ or correspondence theory of knowledge as well.” Marxism and Materialism: A Study in Marxist Theory of Knowledge (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1977), 64 and passim as well as 95ff. But this is clearly not what Marx had in mind. It is true that the initial stage of acquiring knowledge about the objective world follows this path, but if we were to limit ourselves to this stage, we would be unable to perceive the processual dimension and hence the teleological end that constitutes the process in question. Hegel’s critique of mechanism is sufficient to counter this narrow understanding of cognition, and it is something that Marx, too, saw as problematic.

12 It is important to note here that, in Hegel’s treatment of logic, it is the opposition between Being (Sein) and Nothing (das Nichts) leads to the “first concrete thought and with it the first



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that to know something is to at the same time be able to judge it in some evaluative sense. As John Searle argues about the nature of functional arguments:

Even when we discover a function in nature, as what we discovered the function of the heart, the discovery, the discovery consists in the discov-ery of causal processes together with the assignment of a teleology to those causal processes. This is shown by the fact that a whole vocabulary of success and failure is now appropriate that is not appropriate to simple brute facts of nature. This we can speak of “malfunction,” “heart disease,” and better and worse hearts. We do not speak of better and worse stones, unless of course we have assigned a function to the stone.13

Functional relations therefore contain within them both normative and empiri-cal claims since any object that has a functional property has some degree of teleological to its causation and proper action. However, whereas for Searle, this is the product of the human mind imposing or assigning function to an object, Marx – along with Hegel – argue that it is not simply our assignment of function to objects that is valid, but that the objects themselves objectively pos-sess that property as well. For both Hegel and Marx, we do not come to assign teleology to hearts, they possess that feature as the final cause of what makes them what they are, what constitutes their essence.14 Grasping this is true

Concept,” or Becoming (das Werden). Enzyklopädia, §88 Zusatz. This means that the state-ment: X̂ is ~X leads to the dialectical force of becoming X within the object. For Marx, this process is mapped onto the objective social world and into the practical life of human beings within society where the chasm between empirical existence and the fulfilled, flourishing, free existence can be known by the determinate negation expressed therein. As Hegel remarks, “Becoming is the first concrete as well as the first true thought-determination.” Ibid.

13 John Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 15. The ideas Searle discusses about the intentional nature of functional arguments were well known to Kant and to Hegel. Hegel’s important critique of this kind of teleological reason-ing was that it ignores another kind of teleology that is inherent within the structure and processes of objects themselves. This paves the way for a more objective and materialist understanding of teleological reasoning that Marx sees as axiomatic in his epistemology.

14 What this means is that the end or telos that the heart has is intrinsic to it, not given to it by me as a regulative idea. Kant made this move in the Kritik der Urteilskraft where he argues that teleological ends and processes “cannot rest merely on empirical grounds, but must have some underlying a priori principle. This principle, however, may be one that is merely regulative, and it may be that the ends in question only reside in the idea of the person forming the estimate and not in any efficient cause whatever,” §5(66). By contrast, Hegel and Marx see teleological ends as constitutive of objects, not merely regu-lative ideas that the mind projects in order to organize the empirical phenomenon of the


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knowledge of hearts, it is not something assigned by intentional mental states, it is objective. Therefore, these properties precede our knowledge of them and they are therefore in some sense intrinsic to those objects. They possess an essential structure which cannot be reduced to their material parts or compo-nents alone, but rather have a higher ontological structure that can be either realized fully or deformed and stunted.15 For Marx, the implicit epistemologi-cal logic of critical knowledge is the idea, expressed also in Searle’s account, that social facts are functional in nature and that they possess functional prop-erties. However, these functional features of social life are not simply attrib-uted by us as intentional agents, they are, for Hegel and Marx, objective features of reality.16 This is the dilemma of science, one that must move beyond empiri-cal, mechanistic forms of reason into a deeper, richer understanding of the object – and understanding that will reveal its teleological nature and there-fore show us the ways that the necessary goods that human beings need are not arbitrarily attributed to them as predicates, but seen as part of the essential nature of what it means to be human in any full, real, developed sense.17 In this sense, evaluative-cognitive claims are critical knowledge claims about social

object. They are therefore concerned with the metaphysical status of objects, not merely ideas about them and assigned to them.

15 Scott Meikle calls this position “essentialist” and contrasts it with a reductive materialism which “believes in an ontology of simples, of basic building-blocks lacking complexity, and further believes everything else is reducible to them. Essentialism, on the other hand, admits into its ontology what I have referred to up to now as ‘organic wholes’ or ‘entities’, and does not consider them to be reducible but rather irreducible.” Essentialism in the Thought of Karl Marx (La Salle, Ill: Open Court Publishers, 1985), 154.

16 Stephen Houlgate has argued on this point that “the words ‘concept’, ‘judgment’, and ‘syl-logism’ name structures in nature, and so in being itself, not just forms of human under-standing and reason. They are, therefore, ontological as well as logical structures – structures of being, as well as categories of thought.” The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (West Lafayette, in: Purdue University Press, 2006), 116. Also see Eugène Fleischmann, La science univer-selle ou la logique de Hegel (Paris: Librairie Plon, 1968), 281ff. Marx’s divergence from Hegel is not as extreme as most of Marxist theory would suggest. For one thing, Hegel was cer-tainly more materialist than Marx had believed, but also, Marx’s ideas are not as material-ist either. The crucial issue is that Marx sees that there are objective properties to things that are independent of our consciousness. However, our consciousness of these objec-tive processes of nature and of society are graspable and controllable, thereby leading to his basic precondition of freedom.

17 The dialectical method therefore is seen as penetrating beneath the appearance into the essence of things, an essence that also reveals its structure of necessity. As Howard Williams notes, “There has to be a place, therefore, in Marx’s system for scientific (wis-senschaftlich) analysis which goes behind the appearance of capitalist production to the



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facts in that the normative and the empirical valences of the object are grasped. Lacking this, we end up with the crude separation between facts and values and lapse into a neo-Kantian conception of social facts that is uncritical in the sense that ethical postulates about the social world are separated from their empirical reality. When we move to a functionalist understanding of social theory, we are therefore moving in a space of reasons that requires we know a totality as a dynamic system of processes that have some end.

2.3 Marxian Ethical ReasoningWe can therefore see that Marx’s ideas do not mitigate against ethical or nor-mative claims. It is also evident that there exists no facile opposition between “scientific” and “value” claims or statements. We can also see that Marx was not concerned in any sense with the formulation of a scientific form of ethics.18 Rather, Marx sees the objective, material conditions that human beings find themselves within as determinative of their ontological status as free agents. For Marx, freedom is not an abstract concern, but one that can only properly be understood concretely: it is an objective property of the members of a com-munity that captures them in their totality, not a principle that applies to them juridically or ethically from the outside of those social relations and condi-tions, or one that simply takes one aspect of human life and then generalizes it to the whole.19 In such cases, freedom ceases to be a concrete reality and is

complex laws which control the movement of the phenomenon… Empirical reality exists just as much as does scientific reality. The one can be observed by the senses and the other can be discovered by the intellect.” Hegel, Heraclitus, and Marx’s Dialectic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 144.

18 Svetozar Stojanovic argues on this point that “Much time and energy have been spent in trying to create a ‘scientific Marxist normative ethics’. Since normative ethics, including a Marxist one, cannot be a science, all these efforts have been doomed to failure. But still it is possible, in my opinion, to work out a Marxist normative ethics using, among other things, all relevant scientific knowledge as cognitive premises or reasons for ethical state-ments.” “Marx’s Theory of Ethics,” in Nicholas Lobkowicz (ed.), Marx and the Western World (Notre Dame, in: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967), 167. But this still holds a separation between evaluative and cognitive claims. The dialectical synthesis of the two is lost here, the attempt to formulate a new kind of critical science that would be appro-priate to social, human beings as an object of inquiry.

19 As Mihailo Markovic has argued on the distinction between abstract and concrete in Marx’s sense, “Abstract refers to those general terms whose meaning is constituted solely by a few common features of the denoted objects. Concrete refers to general terms that have a rich meaning embracing not only common features by also many specific and even individual characteristics of the denoted objects… In the light of this dialectical demand


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imprisoned in the abstraction of principle, positivistic laws, and so on. The separation between the idea of freedom that operates socially or intellectually and one that is operative in the actual being of the individual is what divides Marx’s critique of liberalism on the one hand and his advocacy for socialism on the other. The critique of liberalism is based on the misunderstanding of man that it posits as axiomatic: as independent, as privileging private rights over public goods, as seeing freedom as the maximization of that independence, and so on. For Marx, such a doctrine does not possess the proper, rational con-ception of what it means to be human in any concrete, real, or actual sense. Marx has an idea about human social life and human individuality that is derived from classical and German Idealist sources: it claims that human beings are social in nature; that they depend on mutual forms of cooperation and interaction. But also, he sees that the nature of each individual is a func-tion of the objective social formations within which it finds itself.

But in order to understand how ethical ideas operate in Marxian terms, we need to also see that they are, as I suggested above, dialectically sublated into cognitive claims about social facts. We judge the alienated human being not from an ideal, a priori standard or status of unalienated life; rather, we diag-nose the pathological status of human being at any given time relative to the social context within which one is found. The determinate negation of any pathological state leads us dialectically to the higher, richer state of anything. The productive capacities of the ancient Egyptians was such that they could build massive temple complexes and organize large armies for defense and conquest. But these societies were unable to organize the collective efforts of their social and human resources for social freedom. Since Marx, like Aristotle, conceives of society as essentially a cooperative, interdependent organization of its members for the purpose of the good life of them all, any community that does not realize this potential good inherent within it can be judged from the objective properties of what those social communities are capable of achiev-ing and do not.20 In contrast to ancient Egypt which utilized collective social labor for the ends of the minority of the community, or to capitalist society

for the maximum available concreteness, no humanist theory is satisfactory which oper-ates with concepts such as human essence, human nature, generic being of man, alien-ation, etc., without bothering about sociological, psychological, and other relevant scientific data, and without taking into account specific conditions of human life in vari-ous contemporary societies.” “Humanism and Dialectic,” in Erich Fromm (ed.), Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium (Garden City, ny: Doubleday, 1965), 85−86.

20 See the excellent discussion by George E. McCarthy, Classical Horizons: The Origins of Sociology in Ancient Greece (Albany, ny: suny Press, 2003), 22ff.



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that organized social production and labor according to the interests of a spe-cific class, Marx asks us to picture:

a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labor power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labor power of the community. All the characteristics of Robinson’s labor are here repeated, but with this difference: that they are social instead of individual… The total product of our community is a social product.21

If we ask what leads Marx to such propositions, we find that one path to such an argument is that human beings are best suited to a social form of organiza-tion where social labor – or labor that has collective, common ends as their end – are given priority over capitalist forms of labor that privilege particular-istic forms of labor and benefits. This passage indicates the expression of an evaluative-cognitive claim: the society characterized by social labor and means of production in common is a higher form of social organization than capital-ism. But this assessment is not based on an arbitrary view of the good. Marx’s thesis rests on a claim that sees specific forms of labor, specific forms of social organization, as properties of a good life, and best fitted for the realization of human potentialities. But determining these qualities or features of a good life or good ends or purposes must have as their ground some sort of objective basis in order for them to qualify as evaluative-cognitive statements. Lacking this we are left either with a formalistic moralism or a scientific reductionism.

Marx’s solution to this is that any kind of good end toward which individu-als and social formations are oriented can be judged by the extent to which it is able to provide for the preconditions of self-realization. For Marx, what is “good” or “just” cannot be established a priori nor in any idealist sense. Rather, it is inherent in the function of what it means for any social context to produce the realization of human perfection: those characteristics and traits that make human subjects free from for self-development. Puppies are dogs in potentia just as a seed is a tree in the same way. They bear potential relations to an end. Indeed, this end is not chosen or willed or guided in any way, but is inherent in what the thing is. Teleological arguments therefore are not means by which we can discover the actual processes of the world, but rather to understand them as total, absolute forms of knowledge.22 Nevertheless, the claims remains that

21 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1977), 78.22 Myriam Bienenstock has wrongly argued on this point that “for Hegel, teleological argu-

ments should not be considered as methods of acquiring knowledge but, rather, as a way


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the teleological end constitutes the actual process that itself constitutes the object; it is real, it is the highest form of complete, rational explanation. The conditions required for those objects to fulfill their ends – i.e., dogs and trees respectively – are objective and material: water, food, shelter, and so on. What is difficult to discern in any positive sense, however, is what that self-development will look like concretely. Since we cannot assemble a catalogue of traits that we would consider teleologically self-developed, we can only know the negation of those traits; and that becomes a determinate negation only when we are seeing those pathologies within the context of the ethical structure of thought Marx works within.23 Otherwise, such pathologies come

of presenting an already acquired knowledge.” “Hegel’s Conception of Teleology,” in Kostas Gavroglu, John Stachel, and Marx Wartofsky (eds.), Science, Mind and Art: Essays on Science and the Humanistic Understanding in Art, Epistemology, Religion and Ethics (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995), 56. But Hegel’s idea is more provocative: he believes that teleology is not simply a method of presentation, but also an actual fea-ture of the totality of any object. In this sense, teleology overcomes the contradictions of mechanism and chemism in the dynamic theory of the object. Marx takes this as basic to his understanding of scientific investigation and his conception of the ontological foun-dation of the social and the natural world.

23 As Rüdiger Bubner argues, “Determinate negation signifies that a given concept only acquires specifiable content if the concept in question can be delimited over against a concept that it is not. This delimitation is a negation, and arises in direct relation to an initially anonymous ‘other’ that is implicitly presupposed. Whatever this ‘other’ may be in any specific case, it constitutes an entirely formal opposition over against the articulated concept in the process of negation.” The Innovations of Idealism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 69. Marx takes this idea of determinate negation from Hegel with-out modification. However, whereas for Hegel it worked itself out in terms of conceptual thought, for Marx it should be detected in the nature of the whole life of the person and therefore the ontological state within which it finds itself and the forms of praxis that maintain that state. Determinate negation is therefore the logical mechanism that allows consciousness to grasp the capacity for self-realization, for the actualization of his powers no less than the fulfillment of deeper, richer needs. In this sense, I think Carol Gould’s thesis on this point is wrong. She argues that “one cannot read forward, from potentiality to actuality, but only backward, from the actualities to the potentialities that eventuate in them.” Marx’s Social Ontology (Cambridge, ma: mit Press, 1978), 30. This is not Marx’s position, for the main reason that Marx sees that historically new and higher forms of actualization will become possible. Human, hence, social ontology cannot be read off of the material constitution of man, it is historically contingent. Also, to be to read only backward from actuality to potentiality would short circuit the possibility of critique since we would not know when the true actuality of man has been realized. For a more precise account of the ontological dimensions of Marx’s thought and its connections with Aristotelian philosophy, see Jonathan E. Pike, From Aristotle to Marx: Aristotelianism in Marxist Social Ontology (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1999).



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to be states of being: alienation, reification, “what is animal becomes human, what is human becomes animal” – all begin to take root within culture, depriv-ing human agents of a richer shape of human life. It is only when we are able to diagnose the material conditions that cause these pathologies that we are moving in a critical space of reasons, one that has as its ground the particular logical form of reasoning that posits an ontological form of process and real-ization within the objective structure of human social and individual life. This is important for Marx because he knows he must drop the ontologies of classi-cal and Medieval philosophy and instead incorporate history as a central dimension of human reality.

3 Social Ontology and Human Self-realization

If what I have argued thus far is even conditionally accepted, then we can now begin to see how a Marxian ethics can be articulated in terms of the ways judg-ments are made about the perfection of human life (individually and socially). First, it is crucial to see that Marx begins not from the idea of human freedom or forms of ethical value, but rather from the dialectic between social structure and human self-realization. The extent to which any given social order is able to enhance the expansion and development of human capacities means that it is an objective development over previous phases of history in that the nature of human being has changed in an ontological sense. Second, this means that there exists some sense in which objective claims can be made about the sta-tus of human perfection or be able to formulate judgments about the relative pathological and self-perfecting properties of specific social practices and arrangements. Only then can we begin to construct a conception of ethics that is distinctively Marxian but which is also distinct from the prevailing view of Enlightenment liberalism which has sought to seal the domains of ethical value from the objective realm of facts.

First to the foundations of Marx’s ideas about self-realization. Recall that for Aristotle, the essence of anything was to be found in the ends or purposes that it has. Also recall that his thesis about teleological reasoning posits that there is a full, or complete end (ἐντελέχεια) toward which all things are oriented by their nature. This was changed in Hegel’s reworking of his metaphysics to argue that mechanical arguments about causality were necessary but not suf-ficient for the comprehension of the whole of an object.24 More importantly,

24 Bienenstock points out that that mechanism “presupposes atomism. In it, no self- determination is at work. Rather, because the parts of a mechanism are taken to be external to each other, only efficient causes can be found in it. Indeed, he insists, one may well say


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Hegel’s thesis is that mechanistic claims are unable to reveal the actuality of the concept, that such claims are unable to grasp the essence of self-realization and therefore of freedom itself.25 To take this one crucial step further, this also requires that we adopt certain teleological claims about the nature of social and human life. For Marx, as for Hegel and Aristotle, the crucial insight about the nature of human beings is that they are processual: they are shaped by processes that cause their development over time. The Kantian view that attri-butes a mechanistic view of nature and objective phenomena is problematic in this sense, since Marx and Hegel both see that world is basically teleological in nature. But teleological arguments should not be dismissed as unscientific.26 The basic idea is that mechanistic explanations are incomplete, they do not allow us to move beyond the movements of the respective parts of an object.27 But teleo-logical explanations require that we see any object within a broader context, within a totality. It means that self-realization is a teleological process and that this is something grasped only within the context to which an object belongs.

that in a mechanism objects or their elements exert ‘violence’ (Gewalt) against each other: objects bear upon each other in a merely external way, and the resistance they evince in opposing each other appears as a resistance to merely arbitrary and ungrounded extraneous pressure.” “Hegel’s Conception of Teleology,” 58.

25 Justus Hartnack comments that “The mechanical and the chemical models of the object imply a deterministic conception of the objective world – a world in which changes and processes are caused by external forces, not by the objects themselves. None of the objects, according to these models, are self-determined. Opposed to this is the teleologi-cal view, according to which the final determining cause is, no external, but an internal cause.” An Introduction to Hegel’s Logic (Cambridge, ma: Hackett Publishers, 1998), 108. Hence, for Hegel, the teleological model of causation gives not only a more comprehen-sive grasp of the object, but shows how its development is free, or self-determined. Applied to the world of man, this means that only those forms of self-development and self-realization that are teleological are those that are truly free and self-determined.

26 Frederick Beiser has noted with respect to Hegel’s idea of teleological argument that he “insists that this concept does not involve intentionality, the attribution of will or self-conscious agency to a living thing. To state that a natural object serves a purpose is not to hold that there is some concealed intention within the object itself. Rather, all that it means is that the object serves a function, that it plays an essential role in the structure of the organism.” Hegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 100.

27 Willem deVries argues on this point that “Hegel believes that mechanical and chemical explanations are condemned always to remain incomplete, for they cannot be applied to the totality of things to which they apply, because they always presuppose further links in the causal chains. That there are things ordered by the mechanical and chemical princi-ples remains beyond their competence to explain.” “The Dialectic of Teleology.” Philosophical Topics, vol. 19, no. 2 (1991): 51−70, 66.



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Self-realization is therefore ontological in the sense that (i) it is something objec-tive and inherent in potentia within anything; and (ii) that it is processual and that it can be judged according to the different phases of being that the object attains based on the actualization of its potentialities, its realization (Verwirklichung).28 Just as we are able to diagnose heart disease because we know the proper function of hearts, we can also judge human culture and societies based on how well it is able to form the context for the realization its members.

Self-realization is therefore a central feature of teleological arguments, but also for Marx’s evaluative-cognitive reasoning.29 Since any given thing can be

28 See Fleischmann, La science universelle, 199ff. For Marx, the materialization of this struc-ture of thought means that we need to see the origin of what things ought to be as objec-tive properties of the objects themselves rather than as concepts of reason alone. But this difference between Hegel and Marx is really a misunderstanding of Hegel’s thesis who is much closer to Marx than the latter would have admitted. Marx’s innovation is in seeing the primary cause of human pathologies in the economic structure and processes of soci-ety, hence the “materialist” terminology refers more often to the economic elements of social life rather than to a thesis that is somehow against an ontology he shares with Aristotle and Hegel. For a critique of Marx’s materialism along these lines, see George L. Kline, “The Myth of Marx’s Materialism,” in Helmut Dahm, Thomas, J. Blakeley and George L. Kline (eds.), Philosophical Sovietology: The Pursuit of a Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988), 158−203.

29 It is not simply that self-realization is an end produced by being provided certain material and cultural goods, it also means that there are specific forms of social relatedness and orga-nization that are needed for the free production of those goods. David Leopold has rightly remarked that these goods are to satisfy certain “non-volitional” needs implying that they are somehow ontologically necessary. He argues that: “In order to flourish, the essential capaci-ties of the individual must have developed in a healthy and vigorous manner. This is possible only in a society which satisfies not only basic physical needs (for sustenance, warmth and shelter, certain climatic conditions, physical exercise, basic hygiene, procreation and sexual activity) but also less basic social needs, both those that are not often thought of as a distinc-tive part of Marx’s account (for recreation, culture, intellectual stimulation, artistic expres-sion, emotional satisfaction, and aesthetic pleasure) and those that are often thought of in this way (for fulfilling work and meaningful community).” The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 241. This view does not take seriously the ontological arguments that Marx employs in his early writings and the form of logical argumentation he employs, i.e., evaluative-cognitive arguments. We cannot simply seek to produce a catalogue of non-volitional needs, we also must ask negatively how any given society deforms its members. Only in this way can we begin to grasp the process of historical change and progress. Otherwise, we are left with a sense that there is a final recipe for human self-realization and flourishing. This leads to con-fused views on the matter, such as John Plamenatz, Karl Marx’s Philosophy of Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 346ff.


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understood in terms of its becoming what its inner capacities and essential properties dictate it to be, we can say that the process of self-realization requires certain necessary conditions – or at least the absence of certain coun-tervailing conditions – to be present. This means that ontology is itself a cru-cial feature of the kind of evaluative-cognitive reasoning that plays a central role in Marx’s thought. Objects are not really what they are until they are com-plete, or achieve their fulfilled totality. “A railway on which no trains run,” Marx writes, “hence which is not used up, not consumed, is a railway only δυνάμις, and not in reality.”30 This shows the underlying kind of reasoning that Marx applies to the material as well as to the social world, one following the is X̂ = X logic that I have identified with Hegelian-Marxist ontological reasoning. We cannot reduce things to their material substrates; their reality consists in the ways they are employed, the way they participate in a larger framework or con-text of being. As with the railroad, so with human beings: we are not simply reducible to labor, to thought, to language, or whatever: we realize ourselves within the totality of the community, and the shape and nature of that com-munity determines the nature and shape of our individuality. We can say that Marx’s ideas here, just as with Aristotle and Hegel, are essentially ontological in the sense that things in reality cannot be reduced to their materiality, to mere matter itself, to ὕλη as opposed to οὖσια. Indeed, for Marx, critical science approaches the world according to the is X̂ = X form of reasoning Ι sketched above. Anything requires the proper working of all of its constituent parts to be a totality, a real fulfilled thing. This forms the foundation for any understand-ing of a Marxian ethics.

3.1 Social Ontology as Ethical GroundAs I have been arguing, Marx sees that things are to be understood in an onto-logical sense rather than a merely empirical sense. Things have ends not in the sense that they have an animated inner drive to become what they are but rather because the nature of reality to which he subscribes is one that is dynamic and in process. Since things have essences, and these essences are intrinsic to things and not attributed to them by us as agents, self-realization has specific prerequisites that are themselves objective. As such, the free development of human subjects must be understood objectively as the self-realization of the objective features which they possess in potentia, features which are ontological in the dual sense I have been employing it: as objectively present and as non-reducible to mechanistic materia. If we go back to classical

30 Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Penguin, 1973), 91.



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ideas about the nature of human communities, there exists a basic thesis that is maintained throughout the classical and medieval periods and one that Marx sees as worthy of progressing into the modern age. This thesis is that the purpose of the human community is the collective pursuit of the common good or interest. Aristotle’s metaphysics of human progress from the family, to village, to polis in Book I of the Politics is instructive in the sense that it conveys the process of realization of human beings as social beings, as being capable of the best form of life only with the dense network of social relations the polis provides.31 The argument for an ethical structure of Marxism is itself based on the idea of fundamental social ontology to human life. It must unite concerns of the individual with the specific structure of sociality, and it must also con-cern itself with the processual nature of human life.

A social ontology therefore establishes a set of needs, of “strong social facts,” that can be used to underwrite objective ethical or normative statements or claims. The idea of a social ontology means, for Marx, that the essence of social facts and the essence of normative principles themselves must be seen within the context of the realization of man’s inherently social nature. Marx is insis-tent on this point, in particular in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts where he establishes the basic premises of a social nature of human life. The alienated consciousness of man is his failure to recognize his ontological essence; the fact that he, even as an individual, is social and therefore that society is the prerequisite for man himself.

Even when I carry out scientific work, etc. an activity which I can seldom conduct in direct association with other men, I perform a social, because

31 The crucial passage in Aristotle is: “The association finally made up of several villages is the polis. It has finally attained the limit of almost complete self-sufficiency (αὐταρκείας) and therefore, even though it comes into existence for the sake of life, it exists for the good life (εὖ ζῆν). Hence every polis exists by nature just as the first associations exist. For the polis is the end of the previous forms of association, and nature is an end, since that which each thing is when its growth is complete we call the nature of each thing, for example of a man, a horse, or household. Again, the object for which a thing exists, its end, is its high-est good (τὸ τέλος βέλτιστον), and self-sufficiency is an end, and a highest good.” Politics, 1252b, 30. The concepts of “self-sufficiency” as the proper end of the polis is akin to Marx’s idea that the aim of social life should be that it possesses within it all of the potentialities for its own self-development. Social and individual freedom are consequently only really possible for Marx within a context where social relations and forces are fully developed and oriented toward the needs of all. This is the “highest end” or “good” of the polis for Aristotle, and for Marx, is plays a similar role. We therefore can detect the negation of this state wherever social life is shaped not toward the needs of all, but the needs of the few.


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human, act. It is not only the material of my activity – such as the lan-guage itself which the thinker uses – which is given to me as a social product. My own existence is a social activity. For this reason, what I myself produce I produce for society, and with the consciousness of acting as a social being.32

The link between individual, society, and the concept of humanity itself is the essential triad that Marx seeks to establish as a ground for understanding the nature of alienation but also to comprehend the distinction between essence and appearance in social forms. We understand self-realization only through this ground, and this self-realization is where the action is for Marx: it is the very formula, so to speak, for the evaluative-cognitive system that becomes his critical social theory. Private property, and in turn capital, or the private con-trol of socialized labor, becomes the ultimate expression of deformation since it introduces into society the pathology of partially developed humanity, one-sidedness. It is the very negation of a “fully constituted society” which “pro-duces man in all the plenitude of his being, the wealthy man endowed with all the senses, as an enduring reality. It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism, spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, cease to be antinomies and thus cease to exist as such antinomies.”33

Given this form of reasoning, we can see that the discussion of alienation in the writings of the young Marx, as well as the observations about the pathology of capitalist social relations in Capital and other mature writings, are not sim-ply moralistic indictments of the system. They are forms of determinate nega-tion which rest upon a specific understanding of human self-realization and social freedom which, in turn, are grounded in an ontological understanding of human potentialities the development of which is freedom.34 Without a social-ontological ground, we lack the capacity for the kind of critical

32 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Erich Fromm (ed.), Marx’s Concept of Man (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1961), 130. Cf. the discussion by Jean Hyppolite, Studies on Marx and Hegel (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), 127ff.

33 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 135.34 Allen E. Buchanan has argued on this point that:

To say that man’s alienation from his species being is overcome only in communism is to say that certain distinctively human capacities are actualized, or actualized in their most appropriate or perfect form, only in communism. Thus capitalism is not defective because it fails to actualize all distinctively human capacities not because its produc-tive activity in capitalism is not conscious or universal or social, but rather because productive activity in capitalism is not conscious, universal, and social in the appropri-ate senses – the senses which are fitting or fulfilling for beings such as we are.



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judgments made possible by evaluative-cognitive forms of reasoning. The social-ontological ground therefore constitutes the basis for the kind of nega-tive reasoning that must lead us to the positing of critical rationality itself, a critical rationality where one grasps a richer understanding of X by compre-hending what it opposes and what limits it, and what it requires to articulate a fuller, richer reality of itself. This is why it is necessary to employ the logic I outlined above expressed as: does X̂ = X. According to this account, we must ask the extent to which any given empirical state X̂ deviates from X or is either the determinate negation or fulfillment of X (hence, whether any given state is X̂~X, X̂ < X or X̂ = X). This can be determined through the assessment of the telos of any given feature of X̂. But this telos should not be seen as a priori but rather as the developed capacities that individuals can achieve. It is also evident from the ways that any given empirical state of the object is unable to fulfill or to have its functions work properly, according to their respective ends. Hence, people may suffer from personality disorders, from depression, anxiety, or other deformations of character or ability – and we can diagnose these as negations of higher forms of life, of higher, more fulfilled forms of practice and functioning. The ground plays the crucial role in allowing us to grasp the teleo-logical form of man’s social ontology rather than a pre-defined state:

[T]he social character is the universal character of the whole movement; as society itself produces man as man, so it is produced by him. Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are social activity and social mind. The human significance of nature only exists for social man, because only in this case is nature a bond with other men, the basis of his existence for others and of their existence for him. Only then is nature the basis of his own human experience and a vital element of human reality. The natural existence of man has here become his human existence and nature itself has become human for him. Thus society is the accomplished union of man with nature, the veritable resur-rection of nature, the realized naturalism of man and the realized human-ism of nature.35

Marx and Justice: The Radical Critique of Liberalism (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Allenheld, 1982), 19. Buchanan, however, stops where the discussion must begin: with a fitting ontology of human sociality and individuality. This is the ground for a Marxian ethic and science. Without this, we are unable to root Marxian critical claims in any kind of radical alternative perspective to the conventional ideas and institutions of capitalist social rela-tions and culture.

35 Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, 129.


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The emphasis Marx places on the words “human,” “society,” “bond” and “basis,” indicate his insistence that man’s essence is not only a social essence, but that it is a basis for the understanding of what it means to be human, fully realized as human. It is the ground for understanding, in a critical sense, the deviant forms of reality that pervade capitalist society. The negation of this condition or state therefore constitutes a deformation of human self-realization, of the processes that emancipate him as a social being.

Ontology is therefore a ground for both ethical and scientific claims, claims that are braided dialectically for Marx. Marx sees the historical progression of human social organizations as moving toward a situation where human beings will produce socially as free beings; they will realize their essence not only as social beings – i.e., as beings who necessity is seen in their interdependence – but also they will grasp rationally and consciously that this interdependence should be the very source of their freedom.36 The kind of individuality that is possible through a society that organizes the production of goods for common ends is one that seeks to realize the fullest potentials not only of each particu-lar member of the community, but the dialectical relation is such that we seek to perfect the social nexus of productive relations so that we as individuals, and not as atomistic particulars, come to our perfection within that social nexus. The kinds of eudemonic goods that are cultivated therefore are both social and individual goods at the same time; they are eudemonic in the sense that they are not arbitrarily chosen according to some atomistic, utilitarian calculus, but rooted in the objective, ontological structure of necessity that pervades human life. Society is therefore an entity with a purpose, or end: it is to serve as both the end of our labors and productive powers, but also as the means by which we achieve free individuality, the development of our individual and collective powers and abilities.37 Marx therefore sees the historical process as the work-ing out of this social reality through different shapes and organizations of human praxis:

Relations of personal dependence (entirely spontaneous at the outset) are the first social forms, in which human productive capacity develops only to a slight extent and at isolated points. Personal independence founded

36 See the comparative discussion of Hegel and Marx on this theme by Jacques d’Hondt, De Hegel à Marx (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 203ff.

37 George E. Brenkert argues along similar lines that to be free in Marx’s sense “is for one to live such that one essentially determines, within communal relations to other people, the concrete totality of desires, capacities, and talents, which constitute one’s self- objectification.” Marx’s Ethics of Freedom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), 88.



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on objective [sachlicher] dependence is the second great form, in which a system of general social metabolism, of universal relations, of all-round needs and universal capacities is formed for the first time. Free individual-ity, based on the universal development of individuals and on their subor-dination of their communal, social productivity as their social wealth, is the third stage. The second stage creates the conditions for the third. Patriarchal as well as ancient conditions (feudal, also) thus disintegrate with the development of commerce, of luxury, of money, of exchange value, while modern society arises and grows in the same measure.38

Here the third stage to which Marx refers, one of “free individuality,” is the result of the “social wealth” that the society creates. This social wealth is the product of “communal, social productivity” which means that the organiza-tion of social labor exists for the production of those social goods that aim toward common ends – ends that will enable the universal, free individuality of all members of the community.

4 Objectivity and the Validity of Ethical Propositions

The question I would like to pursue now is whether this form of argumentation that I have reviewed operating within Marx’s texts is something we can bring out and formalize as a form of ethical argumentation and reasoning. What I propose here is that we can formulate an objective ethics that is distinctively Marxian in the sense described above. As an entrée into this kind of ethical reasoning, first consider the thesis of Eugene Kamenka:

The objectivity of ethical judgments can be most easily established if “good” is a quality, an intrinsic character common to those things or activities we correctly call goods. The assertion that a thing or activity has a certain quality raises in logic a clear, unambiguous issue; the truth of the assertion is logically independent of any relations into which the thing or the activity of the assertor may enter.39

Kamenka’s basic beginning for an objective ethics emphasizes both that the concept of value is tied to the object itself and that it is to be judged not

38 Marx, Grundrisse, 158.39 Eugene Kamenka, The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (London: Routledge and Kegan

Paul, 1962), 89.


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according to an arbitrary subjective stance, but from the stance of the intrinsic characteristics of the object itself. But the validity of an objective ethical judg-ment is another matter. As I have been arguing, Marx’s ethical reasoning is one that is in line with this objectivist view, but it must also be able to possess the character of validity if it can be taken as an ethical doctrine of any kind. My thesis here is that the validity of Marxian objective ethical statements is to be found in the very nature of the evaluative-cognitive claims I have been explor-ing. Since the ontological underpinnings of his thought are both a claim about the nature of objects (in particular about human beings and their dynamic social nature) as well as imply a particular logic for evaluative-cognitive claims, we can say that the criterion for validity of an objective ethics is to be found in the ways that the objective processes of social relations are constitutive of the potentialities of individuals. Marx’s concern with the objective, ontological aspects of social reality and human personality means that an ethical view-point must be rooted in those objective properties and their relative lack of fulfillment of human potentialities.

Social theory and social philosophy are therefore sublated since we cannot posit abstract, a priori ideas about goods or the properties of an individual or society but, rather, need to show how concrete forms of life and praxis give rise to pathological (i.e., non-realized) states of being. We must ask how specific forms of life, institutions, norms, practices, and so on, either distort or fulfill human life and culture. These states cannot be simply individual in nature, but refer to the social-relational context within which individuals are socialized and what values and goals orient them. The objective features of human life to which Marx (as well Aristotle and Hegel, for that matter) point are not simply a blueprint for all forms of judgment.40 Rather, they constitute a basic frame-work for understanding the social deficits of modern forms of social life. The objectivity of ethics is therefore most strongly opposed to the paradigms of deontological and subjectivist reasoning that have been the hallmark of much of modern ethical philosophy. The search for values unhinged from the

40 Alan Gilbert has correctly written on this aspect of Marx’s ethical reasoning that “he also emphasized objective features of individual lives which would profoundly influ-ence happiness (display of social connectedness in genuine forms of friendship and political community, freedom from exploitation, freedom from physical handicap, possession of the opportunity to realize one’s capacities, perhaps realization of some of one’s highest capacities), yet still allowed a distinctively modern, wide leeway for individual choice of specific activities to be undertaken.” “Historical Theory and the Structure of Moral Argument in Marx.” Political Theory, vol. 9, no. 2 (1981): 173−205, 193.



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objective needs, features, and potentialities of human (i.e., social) life is a cru-cial feature of a Marxian, objective ethics.

Objectivity, in the sense I am employing it here, does not refer to the mere opposition to subjectivity. Rather, in Hegel’s sense, it means the extent to which a rational structure exists within an object. Therefore, an ethical state-ment is valid only when it can be shown to map onto the functional ends toward which any act or state is oriented. It is not enough to argue, as the realist does, that it can be tied only to empirical claims since empiricism, for Hegel as well as Marx, was an incomplete, immediate (unmittelbar) approach to the object.41 Rather, the objective stance is one that embraces not only the empirical state but also the processual dimension of the object as well. Going back to the distinction drawn initially by Kant between constitutive and regulative princi-ples, we can see that a Marxian objective ethics is concerned with the constitu-tive processes of human social life; with the very foundations of what it means to be able to create forms of being that can emancipate the inherent potentialities of human life. It finds validity therefore not in a universal for-mula, such as the Categorical Imperative, nor in a set of practical, discursive agreement, as in Habermasian discourse ethics. Rather, ethical propositions need to be understood as emerging out of the determinate negation of any empirically observed state or condition. The knowledge of the conditions of such a state and its pathologies therefore convey the determinate negation of itself. This is precisely the power of functional and teleological arguments as I laid them out above. The role they perform in an ethical theory is to fuse the evaluative and the cognitive claim dialectically; to tie the values that one asserts to the actual functioning of the object. Our ethical life – the value sys-tem that should guide our judgments about the world and our courses of action and political praxis – should be worked out from within the social world, not from without. It should be guided by what we learn about the nature of alienated life under capitalism and modern forms of social life; about what we learn about the forms of socialization that permeates it; what kind of social goals that are set for the community, and so on, remembering that the basic essence of social life is the achievement of common goods that realize us indi-vidually. Such a state is a free state; such a condition is one that sets the precon-ditions for human self-realization.

41 Elsewhere, Gilbert argues that “Marx’s ethical viewpoint does not look like that of Rawls or of utilitarianism; it is much more embedded in and dependent on the validity of par-ticular empirical claims.” “Marx’s Moral Realism: Eudaimonism and Moral Progress,” in George E. McCarthy (ed.), Marx and Aristotle: Nineteenth Century German Social Theory and Classical Antiquity (Savage, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992), 320.


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5 Conclusion

The argument I have presented should not be taken to imply a consequential-ism that reduces all goods to social goods. A Marxian objective ethics is con-cerned not simply with end-states, but with processes; with the kinds of dynamic social relations that form the nexus for human individuation. The critique of economic processes, for Marx, therefore was central since it was the most basic, universal institutional force in modernity. It is also concerned with the relations that processes entail. There is no way to separate the process of individualization within a given culture with the dominant ways that social relations come to shape and legitimate particular norms and institutions. An ethical theory that bases itself on abstract and formal arguments is therefore prone to blind influence by the predominant social norms that it can come to posit as “universal.” Since social relations map themselves on to the individual through processes of socialization, we are forced to a deeper, more compre-hensive form of critical reasoning that seeks to understand what is “good” and what is “right,” and so on, through an understanding of how, just as much as what, those institutional forms produce – what kinds of human subjects are expressed by them. And this means that we cannot simply find ethical validity through abstract means, i.e., those that do not take the ontological features of objective social life into account.

The return to Kantian and Hegelian forms of ethical reasoning and the pro-liferation of the “postmetaphysical” view in social theory and philosophy, a Marxian ethics is therefore distinctly foundational in the sense that it sees the potential emancipation and perfection of human beings as dependent on spe-cific needs and the understanding of concrete social processes. Detaching ethical discourse from the ontological ground leads us into an arbitrariness where ethical propositions can be led astray by false consciousness, alienated forms of theory and reasoning, and so on. Since this form of ethical argumen-tation is predicated on the separation between ethical values and objective social processes, it is unable to secure objective human ends from being maxi-mized. It also rejects, due to its acceptance of pragmatist and Kantian theories of knowledge, the notion of an objective process of human self-realization, something that was the central concern for Marx. The attempt to focus on democratic forms of ethical validation and legitimation has obscured the foundational issues of what the purposes and functions of social life are and therefore ought to be. As a result, the capacity to judge has been eroded. We are told to look for forms of justification or mutual agreement even as the very object of our lives drops from view.



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Understanding this is not only relevant for moral philosophy but the social sciences as well. The evacuation of normative concepts from social science is reflected in the dominant trends of empiricism and positivism. But as I have shown above, cognitive claims suffer from the lack of their relation to evalua-tive claims just as the reverse is the fact. Our knowledge about the object social world is only comprehensive once we are able to formulate evaluative-cognitive claims; once we are able to reclaim a theory of modern society that is able to posit the reality of deformed social processes that dehumanize its members. Hence, a Marxian form of ethical reasoning has as its central goal the unification of ethical value and social science, the wedding of social theory and social philosophy, the “what is” and the “what ought to be.” It is hoped that this will enable a more productive, more compelling, more critical form of social theory to compete with the politically domesticated forms that now prevail.

Philosophical Foundations for a Marxian Ethics

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