1.

In the body of this paper I’ll develop two points: (i.) the division of political philosophy into those for and those against liberal democracy and (ii.) the division of philosophy into those concerned with founding the correct form of society, in its broadest sense as an ideal set of institutions, and those concerned with – borrowing from Raymond Guess – ‘real politics’.[1] My concerns are (a.) that political philosophy misconceives political practice, (b.) that this is symptomatic of a general misconception of practice in philosophy and that (c.) the conception of political practice needs to be reconsidered.  I’ll develop points i. and ii. as well as concerns a., b. and c. by working through Will Kymlicka’s suggestion that ‘the idea that each person matters equally is at the heart of all plausible political theories’.[2]

I’ll argue that the conception of equality that Kymlicka works with is a placeholder for liberal democracy. Kymlicka divides political theory, point i., and gives this placeholder as its unifying concept. This misconceives political practice, concern a., as a concern about the correct form of society (i.e. liberal democracy). This is symptomatic of a general misconception of practice in philosophy, concern b. Instead, political practice is concerned with forcing the state to adapt to social change. The irreducibility of equality does not follow from ‘the idea that each person matters equally’ but is an effect of political practice. This forces plausible theories to adopt a sense of egalitarianism. This cannot be demonstrated philosophically but only empirically, point ii. I conclude that practice needs to be reconsidered by philosophy, concern c.

2.

In the preface to the second edition of his Contemporary Political Philosophy, Kymlicka divides political theory into those for and those against liberal democracy.[3] In the textbook he argues that this division is unified around an ‘abstract’ and ‘fundamental’ conception of equality. This conception of equality is abstractly and fundamentally moral. There is a whole literature dealing with the equality of what? question, but this literature deals with the equality of things like resources (Ronald Dworkin), capabilities (Amartya Sen), access to advantage (G.A. Cohen), &c.[4] Kymlicka insists on not grounding equality in the distribution of things, but in an intuitive moral philosophy that he derives from a ‘natural’ and ‘intuitive sense of right and wrong’.[5] Competing theories of justice work from the same conception of equality, but interpret it differently. In this first section I’ll argue that the moral conception of equality that Kymlicka works with is a placeholder for liberal democracy and that this follows his misconception of political practice as a concern about founding the correct form of society.

Kymlicka borrows his conception of equality from Ronald Dworkin. Dworkin’s concern is with the classical liberal problem of legitimating the state, and particularly the law. Particular theories of justice in political philosophy deal with the distribution of things (resources, capacities, advantage, &c.) among populations and the sorts of remedial state action that can ensure this distribution (remedial action is often thought in reverse from conceptions of the correct form of the state).[6] If a distribution of resources fails a given standard of right, then the state is put to task to fix the problem. A substantial part of political philosophy involves stipulating the conditions of this remedial action. In his most recent book, Justice for Hedgehogs, Dworkin argues that the state is primarily under the condition of equality in its remedial action. ‘No government is legitimate unless it subscribes to two reigning principles,’ he argues. ‘First it must show equal concern for the fate of every person over whom it claims dominion. Second it must respect fully the responsibility and right of each person to decide for himself how to make something valuable of his life’.[7] The legitimacy of the state is dependent upon its equal concern for those it rules.

Kymlicka develops two formulations of this idea: (p.) ‘A theory is egalitarian if it accepts that the interests of each member of the community matter, and matter equally’ and (q.) ‘egalitarian theories require that the government treat its citizens with equal consideration; each citizen is entitled to equal concern and respect’.[8] The difference between p. and q. is that p. refers to a more (custom) that might organise a community, while q. places that community within a political state. But this double formulation follows Kymlicka’s separation of the moral conception of equality from the horizon of liberal democracy; it makes sense in Kymlicka’s mind for equality to have both a moral and a political formulation. This intuitive unity actually follows the unity of the conception of equality and the horizon of liberal democracy. This becomes clear as Kymlicka compares theories of justice. He argues that all theories tend towards liberal democracy, have their best formulation when they are closest to liberal democracy, and that they satisfy the conception of equality to the degree that they agree with liberal democracy.

This begins in his discussion of utilitarianism. He is concerned about the will to maximise utility. Utilitarianism develops the idea that happiness (utility) is the currency of human well-being and then aims to accumulate the greatest mass of it. Kymlicka correctly notes that responsibilities to other people fall outside this logic; if I happen to keep a promise it is not because I am personally obliged to you, but instead because it just happens that this coincides with the maximisation of utility.[9] In other words, personal obligation becomes contingent. It should be noted that this only presents a problem for politics if morality is its base. This theme is then read through utilitarianism’s more sophisticated presentations; but Kymlicka’s concern remains the same: it allows ‘some people to be sacrificed endlessly for the greater benefit of others’.[10] Though everyone is counted for one and no one for more than one, ex post of the maximisation of utility some may count for less than others. However, Kymlicka feels that the idea of well-being and the idea that everyone should count for one and no more are attractive and wants to retain them. To salvage these ideas he introduces a modality of political philosophy as a concern about founding the correct form of society.

The conception of political philosophy that slips in is the idea of a perfect beginning. One of Kymlicka’s central ideas is that the market is just if it begins operating in a situation of equal resources, which he refers to as a theory of ‘fair shares’.[11] ‘People should have ex ante equal endowments when they enter the market,’ he argues.[12] This idea follows the major moral argument that grounds equality. ‘The prevailing view is that people’s fate should be determined by their choices … not by the circumstances which they happen to find themselves in,’ he argues.[13] ‘In a society where no one is disadvantaged by social circumstances, then people’s fate is in their own hands.’[14] His development of a liberal political philosophy is fundamentally concerned with endowing persons with particular sets of property prior to their social interaction, if the beginning can be called just then anything resulting from the choices people make in this situation is just. This argument is something like a social contract. The social contract conceives a community prior to its political organisation and develops an idea of justice on the basis of this – in Rawls’ words – original position. If things are right there, then the resulting political community is just. Kymlicka is clearly arguing this in his use of the conditional ex ante. He also means what he is saying quite literally: ‘Of course, any attempt to achieve this sort of ex ante equality would require a major attack on entrenched economic divisions in our society,’ he notes.[15]

So, the elements that come together in Kymlicka’s reformulation of utilitarianism draw the conception of equal consideration into the horizon of liberal democracy. In his treatment of Libertarianism and Marxism the same thing happens. He interprets Robert Nozick’s idea of self-ownership ‘to make it a more adequate conception of equality’ so that ‘we will be lead towards, rather than away from, the liberal view of justice’.[16] When he comes to Marxism, he comments that in ‘its new forms, Marxist exploitation theory seems to apply liberal egalitarian principles, rather than compete with them’.[17] Equality is fundamentally to do with respecting others’ property and goals and holding others responsible for their choices. Kymlicka sustains this conception of equality as intuitive through the fiction of a moral community that is prior to its own political life, a sort of social contract; this follows his belief that ‘ex ante‘ equality justifies ‘ex post‘ (market) inequalities. But how this conception of equality is more abstract and fundamental is unclear. It seems quite concrete and subordinate: it is a description of persons as property-owners, which is arguably not central to our equal consideration of other persons.[18] It only recalls C.B. Macpherson’s criticism of Rawls’ liberalism: ‘It leaves out of account the relative advantages to men in all other aspects, as exerters and developers of all their human capacities’.[19]

The difference between p. and q. above is, finally, modal rather than substantive. Kymlicka’s conception of equality is a placeholder for the horizon of liberal democracy.[20]

 3.

This is symptomatic of a general misconception of practice in philosophy. I noted Kymlicka’s insistence on the literality of his ex ante condition of justice. He develops this condition reflectively between a conception of equality and the horizon of liberal democracy that he posits. He calls this reflection ‘intuitive’ and ‘natural’. I propose that we can read this method through the division of philosophy into two sorts of concern about reality. Kymlicka reflects on comparative theories of justice in order to discern something about all of them that unifies the field of political theory, viz. liberal egalitarianism. The model of liberal justice he develops is explicitly a substantive program that legitimate states ought to adopt or approximate in order to fall within the ambit of justice. His belief that Dworkin’s practical arguments are too conservative in is indicative of this.[21] These arguments certainly show that Kymlicka isn’t an apologist for really existing liberal democracy, but someone who wants to radicalise it.[22] However, the trap he does fall into is conceiving political practice as a concern with the correct form of the state. This ex ante form would then found a just political society. This falls broadly within a conception of practical life as having philosophical foundations, be they moral or metaphysical.

W. A. Suchting argues that there are elements within practices that explain why philosophy believes it needs to found them. Regarding science, he argues that being scientific ‘is a matter of choice, is the exhibition of a set of preferences for such things as a non-dogmatic, anti-fedeistic, critical attitude in which strength of belief is attuned to evidence, and for “open horizons” over closures’. He argues (after Wittgenstein) that this is a ‘game’ with a series of demands that form the ‘rules of the game‘. Because a series of rule-like demands constitute the practice of (a) science, it appears that scientific thought is founded, and philosophy is given an in. Suchting however quotes Pascal’s claim that the only ‘principles of physics’ are the ‘experiments which give us our knowledge’ and ‘multiply continually’.[23] Science, like any practice, is self-founding or bootstrapping.

The same case can be made about political practice. The only principles of politics are the discrete political sequences that activists (militants) engage in to test the limits of their practice. An example of this is Norman Finkelstein’s argument regarding the resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict (the details of which I’ll, or course, pass over). In response to calls for a one-state solution, Finkelstein argues that this is outside the limit of ‘public opinion’, which will only allow a two-state solution, and that political action can only take place within what public opinion will allow.[24] Public opinion can either be interpreted as a field of moral consensus or it can be taken as  demand of the game that must be submitted to in order to play along. It can either (r.) give plausibility to the idea that political practice is founded by moral philosophy, or it can (s.) suggest that politics is founded by its own conditions of existence: public opinion about Israel-Palestine doesn’t precede the conflict, but is an element of the conflict. To return to Kymlicka’s suggestion that ‘the idea that each person matters equally is at the heart of all plausible political theories’, I think this follows r. It suggests that the idea that each person matters equally exists outside politics. Kymlicka uses the words ‘natural’ and ‘intuitive’ to mark this exclusion. However we could also follow s. and say that the irreducibility of equality cannot be demonstrated philosophically but only empirically. The irreducibility of equality does not follow from ‘the idea that each person matters equally’ but from political practice. This forces plausible theories adopt egalitarianism as a demand of the ‘game’.

This force is fundamentally a product of modernity. ‘The events of 1789-94, and the popular mobilisation that enabled them, continue to frame our most basic political choice,’ Peter Hallward argues, ‘between empowerment or disempowerment of the will of the people.’[25] Thomas Rainsborough’s claim ‘the poorest he that is in England hath a life to lead as the greatest he’ at the Putney Debates in 1647, or the claim that ‘all men are created equal’ in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, could be added to this. But the narrative that Hallward develops suggests that the empowerment or disempowerment of the will of the people is fundamentally the opening or closure of extension of equality. Alex Callinicos argues that ‘the ideal of equality came … packed with tacit and explicit clauses excluding women, the poor, slaves and may other groups from its ambit’.[26] The uncertain promise of equality that opens modernity is what forces plausible theories to adopt egalitarianism. To talk about the place of equality in politics, recourse must be taken to empirical historical sequences, rather than an idea. Philosophy is under the condition of real empirical sequences, rather than their guarantee. So, practice needs to be reconsidered and philosophy must be located much closer to real experimental sequences, in this the experimental sequences of Raymond Guess’s ‘real politics’. Of course, Removing philosophy’s foundational role does leave open the substantive question of what philosophy does do.

4.

So, I both agree and disagree with Kymlicka’s suggestion about equality. I agree that it is an irreducible demand on plausible political theories, but I don’t agree that this results from philosophical reflection. Instead, equality is an external condition on philosophy that appeared historically and that philosophy may have something to say about. I argued that Kymlicka gets this wrong because he misconceives philosophy a concern about founding the correct form society. This lead him to both divide political theory around the horizon of liberal democracy and to claim that this division was founded by a placeholder for this same horizon, viz. ‘the idea that each person matters equally’. Philosophy must instead pay closer attention to real political sequences and the demands that these place on states. Political practice is concerned with forcing the state to adapt to social change and philosophy needs to find some other role to play than founding this force. Perhaps this is simply in making the demands placed against states coherent. A final point. The division I’ve suggested (after Suchting) doesn’t develop a typology of political theories such that Liberalism always wants found politics while Marxism is more attuned to real practices. It is instead a line of demarcation that can be draw within either of these, as well as other, political theories.

References.

Callinicos, Alex. Equality. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.

Dworkin, Ronald. Justice for Hedgehogs. Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2011.

Dworkin, Ronald. Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.

Finkelstein. Norman G. ‘Finkelstein on 2 State Solution (Berkeley 5-13-10)’. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuQzGihJZz8, accessed 26 July 2011.

Guess, Raymond. Philosophy and Real Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Hallward, Peter. ‘The Will of the People: Notes Towards a Dialectical Voluntarism’. Radical Philosophy. 155 (2009), pp. 17-29.

Kymlicka, Will. Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Macpherson, C. B. Democratic Theory: Essays in Retrieval. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 1971.

Suchting, W. A. ‘The Nature of Scientific Thought’, Science and Education. 4 (1995), pp. 1-22.

The difference between Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli’s treatments of the right of the sovereign to rule over its subjects involves two distinct theoretical practices. The simplest way of expressing this is by noting that Hobbes is compelled to take a long philosophical detour, to the state of nature, to show that an act of consent legitimates power and bans dissent. Machiavelli’s argument is simpler because it does not require this philosophical detour; he instead assumes that there is power and concerns himself with how politics is practiced. ‘As my intention is to write something useful for discerning minds,’ Machiavelli writes in The Prince, ‘I find it more fitting to seek the truth of the matter rather than imaginary conceptions.’[1] Hobbes’ state of nature is precisely the sort of imaginary conception that Machiavelli thinks can only distract from his argument.

2.

The irony is that Hobbes agrees that imaginary conceptions distract from the truth of matters. ‘They that make little, or no enquiry into the naturall cause of things, yet from the feare that proceeds from the ignorance it selfe, of what it is that hath the power to do them much good or harm,’ he writes, ‘are enclined to suppose, and feign unto themselves severall kinds of Powers Invisible; and to stand in awe at their own imaginations.’[2] The only invisible power that Hobbes allows is God. He argues that we are naturally inclined to seek out the causes of the effects that we perceive in the world, but that we come up against an unthinkable primary cause and name it God.[3] However, he argues that those who don’t investigate the causes of perceived effects invent superabundant invisible powers, ‘making the creatures of their own fancy, their Gods’.[4]

The state of nature is a superabundant invisible power. Hobbes argues that just beneath the rule of law is a visceral fear of the harm others would do us in the absence of a sovereign.[5] Hobbes names this fear the state of nature. He argues that a sovereign is legitimate just so long as it secures us against it. The state of nature isn’t a real place, or even a possible place: it is the content of a fear. Hobbes defines fear as ‘Aversion, with opinion of Hurt from the object’ and distinguishes aversion from hate by the absence or presence of an object.[6] Fear involves precisely the absence of its object. We do not need to know the state of nature in order to fear it.[7] Hobbes calls it an ‘Inference, made from the Passions’.[8]

C. B. Macpherson argues that Hobbes’ entire philosophical detour, his inference from the passions, is an abstraction from the social anxieties of a rising capitalist society.[9] Hobbes suggests this himself when he asks readers that are sceptical of the state of nature to consider their society instead.[10] Louis Althusser summarises: ‘all society is based on fear, Hobbes says, the factual proof being that you have keys.‘[11] Hobbes himself provides the counter claim to this abstraction: ‘If we could suppose a great Multitude of men to consent in the observation of … Lawes of Nature, without a common power to keep them all in awe, there neither would be, nor need to be any Civill Government, or Common-wealth at all.’[12] There is a need for sovereignty because if there is not a common power to overawe a society it will quickly descend into the state of nature. But the fear that it will thus descend is precisely an imaginary conception, a superstition, an invisible power that is confected to stand in for the actual practice of politics.

3.

Machiavelli responds directly to the question of ‘invisible powers’ in The Prince. In the chapter on ecclesiastical principalities he says, ‘since they are under the guidance of a superior power that the mind of man cannot fathom, I will not discuss them,’ and continues: ‘For as they are exalted and maintained by God, it would be the act of a presumptuous and audacious man to do so.’[13] He then proceeds to discuss them, saying that ‘it does not seem to me redundant to commit the essentials of this situation to memory.’[14] He flags Hobbes’s detour through superstition, but deflects it. The implication is that God hasn’t secured the papal state, but that the pope has been a skillful enough prince to make it a genuine temporal power in Italy. Rather than detouring through theology, he concerns himself with how politics is practiced.

Machiavelli’s overriding concern, in both The Prince and The Discourses, is with a political practice that can lead to stability. In The Discourses he introduces a conception of the cycle of governments that describes history as the generation of principalities, monarchies or democracies and their corruption into tyrannies, oligarchies or anarchies.[15] Machiavelli calls the motor of this cycle ‘the changeability of fortune’; ‘variations of government among men are due to chance,’ he says.[16] The lessons of The Prince aim to teach the new prince of a new principality that conditions do not remain the same and that the skill of a prince is precisely their capacity to master change. ‘I conclude that when Fortune changes and men rigidly continue in their ways,’ he writes, ‘they will flourish so long as Fortune and their ways are in accord, but they will come to ruin the moment these are in discord.’[17]

If the play of skill and fortune is Machiavelli’s first lesson, then his second lesson is the need to secure the faith of the people. ‘A wise prince must find a way in which his citizens will consider him and the state to be indispensable in all circumstance and at all times,’ he writes. ‘Then his citizens will always be faithful.’[18] Machiavelli prescribes the institution of and obedience to good laws as this ‘way’. This could be interpreted as an argument about legitimacy. However, the faith of the people doesn’t legitimate the right of the sovereign to rule over its subjects. The right of the sovereign derives either from hereditary rule or from the seizure of power. Instead Machiavelli’s reference to the faith of the people refer to his overriding concern for the stability of states. He argues that locating power with the people is preferable to locating it with either the nobility or a prince. The nobility creates instability because it wants to oppress and command the people for its own gain, ‘for men are inclined to think that they cannot hold securely what they possess unless they get more at others’ expense’.[19] He argues that people and princes can equally be variable, fickle and ungrateful or stable, prudent and grateful but that the people in the end are a surer bet. ‘For if to cure the malady of the populace a word suffices and a sword is needed to cure that of a prince,’ he writes, ‘no one will fail to see that the greater the cure, the greater the fault.’[20]

4.

In the end, Machiavelli argues, what the people want is stability. As in Hobbes, the people desire security of industry and life.[21] It could be argued correctly that both Machiavelli and Hobbes are responding to the historical fact of war as the constant disruption of industry and life. In Machiavelli’s lifetime Italy’s city-states were regularly at war and both France and Spain invaded. Hobbes fled England during the English Civil War that culminated in the execution of the sovereign, Charles I. But this doesn’t explain their different treatments of the right of the sovereign to rule over its subjects. They respond differently to war. Hobbes cannot find a basis for his Royalism in the bloody clash of Roundheads and Cavaliers and develops an imaginary conception of the origins of power to justify absolute sovereignty and to deny dissent. Machiavelli, in contrast, has no interest in the origins of power. It is instead a fact of his historical conjuncture. His manual, The Prince, doesn’t address the question of legitimacy precisely because the answer to the question has no bearing on a prince’s capacity to dominate change, or fortune.[22]

In the following comments, I’ll develop the consequences of Marx’s thought for contemporary political philosophy by describing alienation and justice as modalities of the relation between labour and the worlds that it creates. I’ll argue that alienation is the domination of labour by the worlds that it creates and that justice is the opposite of this, the domination of labour over the worlds that it creates. I’ll do this in three steps: (i.) I’ll summarise Marx’s description of labour, then develop the concepts of (ii.) alienation and (iii.) justice. I’ll conclude by suggesting that the reason we don’t have a ready-made conception of justice in Marx is that everything is already there in his conception of communism as the ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ – taking ‘the present state of things’ as the domination of labour by the worlds that it creates.[1]

2.

Marx’s presentation in Capital involves the concretisation of abstractions through the progressive introduction of conceptual determinations. He gives a separate discussion of the concept of labour before attributing any concrete social form to it; he separates its general character from the same ‘under the control of a capitalist’.[2] Marx describes labour as ‘an appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirements of man … the universal condition for the metabolic interaction between man and nature, the everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence … independent of every form that existence takes, or … common to all forms of society in which human beings live.’[3] This means that communism cannot involve the abolition of labour, nor that labour as it exists under capitalism is the character of labour as such. But this is still too much. Marx reduces labour to five elements: (i.) a purpose, (ii.) an object, (iii.) instruments for working up ii. in accordance with i, (iv.) a product and (v.) living labour itself.[4] Each of these elements is always already given within a mode of production; whatever the mode of production is, labour involves these elements.

Marx argues that the labour-process is ‘extinguished’ in the use-values it creates: ‘what on the side of the work appeared in the form of unrest now appears, on the side of the of the product, in the form of being, as a fixed, immobile character.’[5] One of the metaphors Marx uses to describe the domination of labour by the worlds that it creates is the domination of the dead over the living. (In fact, his concepts of value and dead labour are isomorphic, but this won’t be taken up here.) Marx introduces something of this theme with the idea that labour must seize objects, ‘awaken them from the dead, change them from merely possible into real and effective use-values’.[6] This idea becomes important when we come to the question of justice; for now, we can simply note that there are both dead objects and labour that may revivify them; the sort of relation this revivification is results from the historical determination of an actual social formation. The general description of labour can’t determine this.

So, labour is the process of carving meaning into reality by appropriating nature for human ends. Whether of not this relationship has negative consequences for human society is a question external to the concept of labour. In the following two sections I’ll specify alienation and justice as different modalities of the relation between labour and the worlds that it creates.

3.

Alienation varies in content throughout Marx’s writing, but it always involves both the inversion of labour and the worlds that it creates and the domination of labour by the worlds that it creates. Marx describes this effect as a camera obscura and as well as the fetishism of commodities.[7] He provides three distinct conceptions of alienation. In the 1844 Manuscripts Marx describes alienation as the loss of the product of labour, the activity of labour, nature and humanity.[8] The person that remains is worthless, misshapen, barbarous, powerless, dull and enslaved.[9] This is the classic description of alienation. Marx does however present two other modes of alienation that bear on the question of justice. Marx continues, throughout his writing, to view the state as the alienation of power from its correct location in society. In his early paper On the Jewish Question Marx thematises this as the division of life into political and civil societies. The individual ‘lives in the political community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil society, where he is active as a private individual, regards other men as means, debases himself to a means and becomes a plaything of alien powers’.[10] In his 1871 address on the Paris Commune, published as The Civil War in France, this theme reappears in the destruction of the state and the return of power to its proper location: ‘the merely repressive organs of the old government were to be amputated, its legitimate functions were to be wrested from an authority usurping pre-eminence over society itself, and restored to the responsible agents of society’.[11] The final way that Marx describes alienation is closest to its Hegelian origin. In the Capital I Marx repeatedly comes back to the phrase ‘behind their backs’. The abstraction of concrete labours into their expression as values is ‘established by a process that goes on behind the backs of the producers’; the change in market prices for linen happens ‘without the permission of, and behind the back of, our weaver’; and the historical appearance of the present division of labour ‘acquires the most appropriate form at first by experience, as it were behind the backs of the actors’.[12]

This final instance is enigmatic. Marx couples the expression ‘behind their backs’ with ‘experience’, begging the question of how one comes to experience something that has happened behind their back. However it cuts right to the core of the question of alienation and justice. If the movement of history is a process that happens behind our backs, how can alienation ever be dispensed with? The question has been rendered entirely insoluble in the literature. Both Richard Arneson and Jon Elster, for example, argue correctly that ‘productive labour’ is alienated but they then counter-pose this to other forms of activity, i.e. consumption or leisure.[13] This not only begs the entire question of unproductive labour, but also misses Marx’s claim that the worthlessness, misshapenness, barbarousness, powerlessness, dullness and enslavement are the content of one’s entire lifetime once the activity of labour is alienated; alienated labour isn’t one career opportunity among others, but is the source of a major debasement of human life.[14]  When Marx introduces the idea of fetishism in Capital he explains it solely with reference to the ‘social form’ of labour, and not any particular instance of labour. The camera obscura effect that puts labour under the domination of the worlds that it creates is located within the productive labour that they refer to, but Arneson and Elster fail to connect this with Marx’s political agenda. When it comes to relating alienation to Marx’s political commitment the only route left open is the blunt juxtaposition of alienated labour and non-alienated labour, with the prefix non- bearing an enormous explanatory load. By broadening the effects of alienated labour to human debasement, the state and the historical process Marx’s political commitment can be conceived more fully.

4.

If alienation is the domination of labour by the worlds that it creates – in the immediate activity of labour, in the state and in history – then justice is the opposite of this, the domination of labour over the worlds that it creates. I’ll develop this idea with reference to the dominant conception of justice in political philosophy. John Rawls opens A Theory of Justice by comparing truth and justice. ‘A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how efficient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust,’ he says.[15] Justice and truth have the same effects in their different domains: rejection or abolition, revision or reform. W.A. Suchting notes that ‘the way in which a criterion of truth has generally been posed involves the idea of a standpoint outside all specific items of knowledge, since what is being sought is a quite general criteria’.[16] Without attributing any particular criterion of truth to Rawls, we can say that his theory of justice involves a like move: the original position that allows us to judge situations bearing on our sense of justice involves ‘the symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other’ and ‘the choice of the first principles of a conception of justice which is to regulate all subsequent criticism and reform of institutions’; it is outside all specific items of knowledge about where anyone will end up in society and the conception of justice acts as a general criteria for the criticism and reform of that society’s public institutions.[17]

At the core of Marx’s intervention in philosophy is the disruption of the sort of theory of truth that Suchting describes and conception of right that Rawls prescribes. Continuing with Rawls’ comparison of truth and justice, Marx equates truth with power. ‘The question of whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question,’ he says. ‘Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.’[18] The question of communism – and therefore justice – falls under the same form; it is a social power and not a conception of right. It is well known that Marx had a hard time working through the limitations he felt existing working class politics was under in the early 1840s and throughout his political life. In the Communist Manifesto he develops a typology of eight socialisms, including ‘reactionary’, ‘feudal’, ‘petty-bourgeois’, ‘German’, ‘true’, ‘conservative’, ‘bourgeois’ and ‘critical-utopian’ socialisms.[19] This follows from his claim that ‘the thing, reality sensuousness’ – that is a phenomena under investigation – must be conceived as ‘sensuous human activity, practice‘ – as the product of our investigation of it.[20] To develop a conception of justice under the consequences of Marx’s thought, we thus have to work under the assumption that it is a human practice and not a conception of right that might judge or direct that action.

If we return again to Marx’s concept of labour we can map justice as a human practice.[21] We saw that Marx gave labour five elements: (i.) a purpose, (ii.) an object, (iii.) instruments (iv.) a product and (v.) living labour itself. Alienation and justice are modalities of the relation between labour and the worlds that it creates: justice is the domination of labour over the worlds that it creates. This is what we can map onto Marx’s description of labour. (i.) The purpose is labour’s domination of the worlds that it creates (another world for this is freedom). (ii.) The object is the given world where ‘the present state of things’ is the domination of labour by the worlds that it creates. (iii.) The instruments to hand are social movements and conceptions of social movements. (iv.) We know that the product is a world where human practice is free. (v.) Living labour is the people who make up social movement and have conceptions of social movements. These are the elements of any theory of justice under the consequences of Marx’s thought. Justice is a like any other human practice: labour.

5.

When Marx and Engels first thematised communism against those they would later typopologise in the Communist Manifesto they described it as the ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’.[22] They emphasise real because they weren’t interested in developing a concept of communism as a theory of justice. One consequence of this is a significant debate within contemporary political philosophy over whether or not Marx regarded capitalism as unjust at all.[23] However, the consequence that we should draw is to do with what Marx’s thought means for the theories of justice as such. The reason we don’t have a ready-made conception of justice in Marx is that everything is there in his conception of communism as the ‘real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ – taking ‘the present state of things’ as the domination of labour by the worlds that it creates. The domination of labour over the worlds that it creates must be, for Marx, a practical question. I have followed Marx’s conception of labour to suggest what this might look like.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. For Marx. London and New York: Verso, 2005.

Arneson, Richard J. ‘Meaningful Work and Market Socialism’, Ethics, 97, 3(1987), pp. 517-545.

Elster, Jon. An Introduction to Karl Marx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Geras, Norman. ‘The Controversy About Marx and Justice’, New Left Review, I, 150(1985), pp. 47-85.

Marx, Marx. Capital I, trans. Ben Fowkes. London, Penguin, 1990.

Marx, Karl. Early Writings. Edited by Lucio Colletti. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton. London: Penguin, 1975, p.220.

Marx, Karl. The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings Volume 1. Edited by David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1973.

Marx, Karl, The First International and After: Political Writings Volume 3. Edited by David Fernbach. London: Penguin, 1974.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press: 1971.

Suchting, W.A. Marx and Philosophy. New York: New York Unversity Press, 1986.

Suchting, W.A. ‘On Some Unsettled Questions Touching the Character of Marxism, Especially as Philosophy’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal, Vol. 14, No. 1(1991), pp. 139-207.

Over five books Eric Aarons has argued that we need to put overarching social theories aside and focus on the values that animate us to seek out those theories.[1] “Intellect and reason alone are not enough,” he says. “We must want something different, must feel it in our gut, bones and heart to prompt our reason and goad us into action”.[2] Wanting and feeling ground action; reason is secondary.

The impulse behind this division is biographical.

Aarons was an activist in the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) between 1938 and its dissolution 1991. The reality and eventual collapse of state-capitalist society in Eastern Europe and Stalinism globally gave those within the movement an acute feeling of chagrin. The 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia was Aarons’ traumatic moment. “Why had theory that had seemed to explain social developments so fully … resulted in this appalling outcome,” he asks.[3] He still felt committed to struggles for equality and against injustice but could no longer attach this commitment to Marxist theory. “I came to the conclusion that my values … had been a deeper and more constant motivation for my activities than the theory which I had thought to be their source,” he says.[4] The importance of the division of values from theory is that it allows Aarons to separate the values that motivated him to join the CPA from Stalinism.

He argues that the contemporary impasse of the Left repeats the strong ideological character of Stalinism. “Our basic framework of thought was defective in important respects,” he says. “We placed the ‘objective processes’ and structure of society far above the subjective ones in degree of importance.”[5] The destruction of the Prague Spring was only one instance in many that exposed the degeneration of communism into the left-wing Social Democracy that Pier Paolo Pasolini called, “a pessimism into which hopes drown to become more virile”.[6] The essential pessimism of Social Democracy is that we must accept what the “objective processes” say is possible. To have virility we take part in the socially valid practices (we could say, “best practices”) of our situation but by doing this we drown our hope for a world that isn’t this one.

This logic of playing along lead the CPA to back the turn to economic rationalism in Australia. It’s advocacy for the 1983 Prices and Incomes Accord between trade unions, employers and the Labor government was significant in the success of that decade’s turn to social liberalism.[7] The substitution of a former President of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), Bob Hawke, for Reagan or Thatcher is the specific difference of the rise of neo-liberalism in Australia: all along it was the Left that was driving the class-struggle. Laurie Charmichael, one the CPA’s most charismatic leaders, Junior Vice-President of the ACTU and some-time leader of the metal workers’ union, argued that unions needed, “to recognise that the process of intervention in the economy will prevail and we can be part of it.” He concluded: “Our position needs to be that we want to be involved.”[8]

In Hayek versus Marx and Today’s Challenges this is expressed in Aarons’ willingness to concede Friedrich von Hayek’s (indirect)[9] argument against Karl Marx; viz. that we cannot hope to do away with the market.[10] His concession is made on purely pragmatic grounds that contradict his insistence on the primacy of values. If values are the rationalisation of wanting and feeling, does surrender to the inevitability of the market not surrender the wanting and feeling of the Left, viz. for a world that isn’t this one, to an external rationality? Does this not repeat the privileging of “objective processes” over “subjective ones” that Aarons names the failure of the communist movement?

2.

Hayek argued that there is no alternative to the market because knowledge and values are dispersed across many individuals. “All man’s mind can effectively comprehend are the facts of the narrow circle of which he is the center,” he said.[11] The addition of one imperfect individual knowledge to another establishes at an infinite point what he calls, “the extended order”, viz. capitalism. Hayek’s method is thus referred to as, “methodological individualism”.[12]

The market overcomes the limitation of these many individual knowledges by transmitting fragments of information through price signals to exactly the people who need to know: the buyer and seller.  “The spontaneous actions of individuals will … bring about a distribution of resources which can be understood as if it were made according to a single plan, although nobody has planned it,” he said.[13] Socialists like the Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb genuinely believed that bureaucratic central planning was the model of the good society. Hayek’s argument against this was that reason simply cannot cope with the infinite quantity of information that human society is. Individuals can have their idiosyncratic plans, but any deliberate and collective plan is disposed to systemic error.

The “extended order” is the spontaneous interaction of many individuals and is undesigned by any one person. It is, thus, neither just nor unjust but simply is. “Justice has a meaning only as a rule of human conduct,” Hayek said, “and no conceivable rules for the conduct of individual persons supplying each other with goods and services in a market order would produce a distribution which could be meaningfully described as just or unjust.”[14] He said that the only common values of a market order are, “not concrete objects to be achieved, but only such common abstract rules of conduct as secure the constant maintenance of an equally abstract order”.[15]

While the actual movement of the market is exactly amoral, the way we ground it can be called good or bad. Hayek argued that a set of abstract “rules of just individual conduct” have evolved over thousands of years to ground the spontaneous market order of capitalism.[16] These rules are, “private property, honesty, contract, exchange, trade, competition, gain and privacy.”[17] Hayek’s concession that this definite set of values underwrites the market is in fact an argument against any counter-set of values from the Left.

Hayek argued that left-wing intellectuals recklessly abandoned the basic liberal values that had underwritten massive growth in material wealth when thy rejected the market. “According to the views now dominant the question is no longer how can we make the best use of the spontaneous forces found in a free society,” Hayek said. “We have in effect undertaken to dispense with the forces which produced unforseen results and to replace the impersonal and anonymous mechanism of the market by collective and ‘conscious’ direction of all social forces to deliberately chosen goals.”[18] Hayek insists that the result is totalitarianism. “The rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction to the socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of those tendencies,” he said.[19]

Further, opposition to the market is simply ressentiment toward the efficacy of capitalism. “Most people are reluctant,” he said, “to accept the fact that it should be the disdained ‘cash-nexus’ which holds the Great Society together.”[20]

3.

Aarons takes Hayek’s theory of the market as a revelation next to the disaster of state-capitalist society. “On the subject of markets, Marx was almost wholly wrong, and Hayek largely right,” Aarons says. “With a widespread division of labour in separate societies which now extends across the world, exchanges of billions of different commodities are a daily necessity, and markets are the site in which they take place.”[21]

But there is something different in Aarons’ argument.

His idée fixe is the division of labour rather than the individual.[22]

Aarons begins with the failure of central planning in Russia and then derives the benefit of market exchange from its deficiencies; for instance that consumer preferences had no affective expression.[23] “Neither Marx nor any other socialist had considered or explained how, if markets were abolished, the society or its officials would be able to work out quantities of consumer goods to be produced and distributed,” he says.[24] He insists that Ludwig von Mises’ argument that any non-market economy disqualifies rational calculation is sound.[25] The failure of Gosplan to work through an infinite quantity of information proves that a system of prices is indispensable to social reproduction. “The capacity of the market to generate prices is its key virtue,” he says. “Such prices, necessary for economic calculation in any society with a wide division of labour, cannot be obtained in any other way.”[26] Hayek’s theory of the market is then an almost convenient patch-up for Aarons. But Hayek would criticise him for beginning with an abstract whole, the division of labour, and then backtracking to individual preferences. “Wholes as such are never given to our observation but are without exception constructions of our mind,” Hayek said.[27]

A further problem is that by deciding at the outset that the question of the market is about the allocation of resources within an assumed division of labour the question is divested of wanting and feeling. “Even today,” he says “some still say that the large number of equations involved in the projections about prices and their changes can be solved because of the capacity of even small modern computers to process an almost infinite quantity of data.” But, he concludes: “This quite misses the point. It is not the processing of the data that is the problem—it is the one of collecting it.”[28]

The problem, of course, is neither.[29]

What Aarons misses is the normative ground of the market.

Aarons does allow that the market might leave out important elements of society, like the environment, and he does argue that governments must intervene in the market under the condition of definite social values,[30] but he refuses to allow the market itself to be the problem. “Forms of regulation are needed … to restrict the damage their [markets] free operations are likely to cause,” he says. “Not, it must be said, that the market mechanism as such is the direct cause of any damage, but because the competitive struggle for profits promotes efforts to reduce even necessary expenditure.”[31] Aarons is equally explicit that nothing political is implied in accepting Hayek’s thesis that the market is a mechanism for communicating infinitely dispersed information. “Recognising that prices convey information throughout society as a whole,” Aarons says, “has no inherent political implications beyond a heightened appreciation of the necessity and value of market mechanisms.”[32]

4.

Marx argues exactly the opposite. Whereas Hayek argued that the market is grounded by liberal values and Aarons doesn’t allow values a place in the market, Marx argued that the market generates the liberal values that Hayek defends.

In other words, the market is partisan and Hayek is its commisar.

Marx’s concept of value is exactly the notion that labour is transfigured into a material process that makes a set of atomised individuals its object. Marx called value a “subject” in exactly this sense.[33] “Value” names the real reduction of material wealth and labour to objects of indifference. “With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears,” Marx said. “They can no longer be distinguished, but are altogether reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.”[34] Hayek said that this creates an, “order in which all human brings count alike”.[35] But Marx insists that it is the capacity to create value, not being human, that is counted alike. The market then becomes a process of sorting out which labours are socially valid and which are not. “A thing cannot be a use-value without being a value,” he says. “If the thing is useless, so is the labour contained in it; the labour does not count as labour, and therefore creates no value.”[36] The market says what does and doesn’t “count” as valid human activity.

Where Hayek said that the market is amoral, Marx said that the law of value is a normative ground internal to it: the good society accumulates surplus-value.

Human judgement is displaced by this alienation of wanting and feeling. Our capacity to say if this is the good society or not is carried over into a material process, that, as Marx never tired of saying, goes on “behind our backs”. The director  of Barack Obama’s National Economic Council expressed this concisely in his infamous World Bank memo. “The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that,” Lawrence Summers says. His recommendation is entirely acceptable within capitalism: “a piece of good luck for the buyer but by no means an injustice towards the seller.”[37] The revulsion that emerged against Summers was revulsion at the logic of capital. But it equally expressed ressentiment toward our everyday submersion in the market. “Fair Trade” is an example of an initiative from the Left that thrives on this ressentiment. It sublates the logic of capital without destroying it. It begins by saying there is something terribly wrong with the market and ends by saying how great it is. It is the scene of someone drowning.

5.

Splitting reason from wanting and feeling allows Aarons to clarify the rudimentary impulse that motivated his political commitment. It is a significant point and does isolate a perennial problem in politics. But it also expresses bad faith in his 50 years plus of activism within the communist movement.

Jean Paul Sartre names the denial of one’s own will “bad faith”. He gives the example of a waiter who is aware that he or she can choose to turn up to work at 5am and open; but, rather than accepting this, he or she becomes, “this person who I have to be … and who I am not”.[38] Sartre refers to this more generally as playing a role. For instance, the bartender he describes in his 1945 novel The Age of Reason: “A little while ago he had been smoking a cigarette, as vague and poetic as a flowering creeper; now he was awakened, he was rather too much the bartender, manipulating the shaker, opening it, and tipping yellow froth into glasses with a slightly superfluous precision: he was impersonating a bartender.”[39]

Aarons likewise describes the personalities fostered by the CPA as “one sided” and “rather frantic”.[40] He says that when the party faced its end, for some members, “the desire to hang on was a gut feeling based largely on the fact that they had been communists all their lives and could not imagine any other identity.”[41] Tying one’s identity to some specific organisational practice is very much an instance of Sartre’s notion of “impersonating what one is”.[42] Marx, of course, called this alienation: “The worker feels himself only when he is not working; when he is working he does not feel himself.” [43]

Aarons’ protest against Marxist theory can then be understood as a repetition of exactly the subjectivity he imbues it with, viz. the elevation of objective processes over values. While he had believed that some “law of history” would draw workers into the ranks of the CPA, he had down-played the wanting and feeling that had drawn him to communism in the first place. Likewise Marxist theory didn’t do anything. It certainly didn’t invade Czechoslovakia! Rather, real individuals made a series of choices in definite political situations from “gut feeling”. Aarons’ point is that their gut feelings were disfigured by ideology. But this only reiterates Lukacs’ comment that any genuinely political organisation, “will necessarily consist of men who have been brought up in and ruined by capitalism”.[44]

If this ruined subjectivity remains, even after Aarons has made his noisy brake with Marx, can we not say that it was not Marx’s thought, but exactly the alienation he diagnosed, that caused individuals to elevate objective processes over values? One of Marx’s most rudimentary ways of describing alienation is after all: “the conversion of things into persons and persons into things.”[45]

6.

Aarons’ adoption of the market doesn’t move him beyond this ruined subjectivity. It seems almost naive to note that his idée fixe, the division of labour, is socially determined and not, “an eternal natural necessity”.[46] If politics is about anything it is about making what appears to be constant buckle. Adorno notes that, “to think is, in itself and above all particular content, negation, resistance to what is imposed on it”.[47] By assuming the contemporary division of labour, viz. a direct expression of the law of value, politics is divested of any substantive role. It can’t think against the situation it wants to throw off. Aarons can only end up surrendering the possibility of there not being the law of value; or, the other way around, of there being a world that isn’t this one. What can he tell those people whose wanting and feeling is for an end to the indifference of the market if his narrative is ultimately that there is no alternative?

This only continues the failure of twentieth century communism.

At its end the CPA was convinced that the road to socialism required trade unions to join the state. It increasingly called local disputes around pay and conditions retrograde and unproductive. It argued that unions needed a global “interventionist strategy”, or to take up their place within the state. The CPA’s 1982 congress decided that, “if the union movement takes a leading role in formulating policies to benefit the whole working class … and full participation, democracy and mobilisation is developed, then a challenge to the ruling class in Australia can develop in a socialist direction.”[48] After the Hawke-Labor government came to power in March 1983 the CPA argued that, ‘expanding trade union rights through involvement in economic decision making is a first step towards democratic planning in industry and democratic control of investment.”[49] Its newspaper, Tribune, soon ran the headline: “Extend and Defend Labor’s Reforms”.[50] This was a bizarre, but probably common, tranfiguration of changing the world by occupying the state.

The CPA wasn’t alone in thinking that the Accord was a first step towards socialism, when it was rather a first firm step into neo-liberalism. But it had made a long argument within the labour movement that having a place inside the state was the only way toward a just and equal society. It believed that trade unions were somehow the base of socialism and that socialism was portended if trade unions became a formal part of government “decision-making”. In other words, its idea of socialism hadn’t moved beyond Stalinism. It certainly had nothing to do with emancipation.  The CPA had become, what Theodor Adorno called, “a piece of the politics it was supposed to lead beyond” – it had drowned to become more virile.[51] It was doomed to the, ‘constant and monotonous repetition of the same process”.[52]

And Aarons is still submerged.

The claim that the market causes no “damage”, but rather “the competitive struggle for profits” does, is formally identical to the claim that state-capitalism caused no damage, but rather “excesses” (murders, show trials, labour camps, the cult of personality, etc.) did. In both cases an ideal is violently abstracted from its reality in flat-out denial of the world. But the world of concepts provides no proof against drowning, as Marx note at the opening of The German Ideology.[53] Aarons simply substitutes Hayek’s theory of the market for Marxist theory. Reason grounds action; wanting and feeling are now secondary. He hasn’t let values determine social theory, but has let social theory remain a condition on action.

Aarons’ development after the CPA is simply the denial that genuine alternatives to Stalinism existed becoming the denial that there are genuine alternatives to Social Democracy today.

References

Aarons, Eric, 1972, Philosophy for an Exploding World (Brolga Books)

Aarons, Eric, 1993, What’s Left? (Penguin)

Aarons, Eric, 2003, What’s Right? (Rosenberg)

Aarons, Eric, 2008, Market versus Nature: The Social Philosophy of Friedrich Hayek (Australian Scholarly Publishing)

Aarons, Eric, 2009, Hayek versus Marx and Today’s Challenges (Routledge)

Adorno, TW, 2001, Negative Dialectics, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1966/negative-dialectics/index.htm

Caldwell, Bruce, 2005, Hayek’s Challenge: An Intellectual Biography of F. A. Hayek (The University of Chicago Press)

Colletti, Lucio, 1972, From Rousseau to Lenin (New Left Books)

Hayek, Freidrich von, 1944, The Road to Serfdom (Routledge & Keagan Paul)

Hayek, Freidrich von, 1952, The Counter-Revolution of Science (The Free Press)

Hayek, Freidrich von, 1958a, “Individualism: True and False” Individualism and Economic Order (The University of Chicago Press), pp1-32

Hayek, Freidrich von, 1958b, “Economics and Knowledge” in Individualism and Economic Order (The University of Chicago Press), pp33-56

Hayek, Freidrich von, 1978, The Three Sources of Human Values (London School of Economics)

Hayek, Freidrich von, 1979, Social Justice, Socialism and Democracy (Centre for Independent Studies)

Hayek, Freidrich von, 1988, The Fatal Conceit (The University of Chicago Press)

Lukacs, Georg, 2002, History and Class Consciousness (The MIT Press)

Marx, Karl, 1975, Early Writings (Penguin)

Marx, Karl, 1990, Capital Volume I (Penguin)

Marx, Karl, 1992, Capital Volume II (Penguin)

Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, 1976, The German Ideology (Progress Publishers)

McNally, David, 1993, Against the Market: Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique (Verso)

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 1964, “Vittoria”, in Poesia in Forma di Rosa (Garzanti). Available in English at: http://direland.typepad.com/direland/2005/10/a_hitherto_unpu.html

Sartre, Jean Paul, 1984, Being and Nothingness (Washington Square Press)

Sartre, Jean Paul, 2009, The Age of Reason (Penguin)

I. Commonsense philosophy and Philosophy

Everyone spontaneously believes that they know what philosophy is, and yet philosophy is said to be a mysterious activity, difficult and inaccessible to ordinary mortals. How can we explain this contradiction?

Let’s examine its terms a little more closely.

If everyone believes that they spontaneously know what philosophy is, it is on the basis of the following conviction: all men are more or less philosophers, even if they don’t know it (like Monsieur Jourdain: writing prose without knowing it).[1]

It is a thesis the great Italian Marxist theorist Gramsci supports: ‘every man is a philosopher’.[2] And Gramsci gives interesting details. He observes that, in popular language, the expression ‘taking things philosophically’ designates an attitude that contains in itself a definite idea of philosophy related to the idea of rational necessity. Whoever, in the face of a painful event, ‘takes things philosophically’ is a man who stands back, restrains his immediate reaction, and conducts himself in a rational manner: he understands and accepts the necessity of the event that affects him.

Of course, says Gramsci, that attitude may involve an element of passivity (‘be philosophical’, meaning ‘tend to your own garden’, ‘mind your own business’, ‘each to his own’:[3] in short, it often resigns itself to necessity and with that resignation withdraws to its private life, domesticity, trivial matters, and wait for things to ‘blow over’). Gramsci doesn’t deny this: but he insists on the fact that this passivity paradoxically contains the recognition of a certain order of things, as necessary, as intelligible.

Yet, at the same time, we find in its popular portrayal (as Plato already says) another idea of philosophy, embodied in the figure of the philosopher, who lives with his head in the clouds or in abstractions, and who ‘falls down a well’ (in Greece, wells did not have walls like ours do) because they didn’t have their eyes on the ground, but on the heaven of ideas. That caricature, thanks to which the ‘people’ can laugh at philosophers, is itself ambiguous. On the one hand, it portrays an ironic critique of philosophy: an affectionate or bitter settling of accounts with philosophy. But on the other hand, it involves a de facto recognition: philosophers practice a discipline that is beyond the reach of ordinary people, the simple people,[4] and is at the same time a discipline that entails grave risk.

Gramsci only takes account of the first element of the contradiction, but does not take account of the second.

In the correct method, we cannot break things in two and keep what is convenient to us. We must account for all the elements of the popular portrayal of philosophy.

It appears then that in the popular expression ‘taking things philosophically’, what jumps out, is that before anything else the resignation to necessity must be taken as inevitable (‘we wait for things to blow over’ or until we die: ‘a philosopher learns how to die’ – Plato).[5] The recognition of ‘rational necessity’ moves into the background. It then becomes necessity as such (the reason for it is unknown to us; it therefore isn’t rational), i.e. fate (‘we haven’t the means to do otherwise’). This is generally the case; a crucial observation.

First, because it puts the accent on the idea that philosophy = resignation. It may not be possible to tell [dire] that this identity contains, in fact, and in spite of itself, an idea of philosophy which possesses a critical value. What we we will show is that, effectively, the immense majority of philosophies are forms of resignation, or to be more precise they are a submission to the ‘ideas of the ruling class’ (Marx), thus to class rule.

Next because it contains a distinction between two completely different types of philosophy. On the one hand there is a passive and resigned ‘philosophy’ which ‘takes things philosophically’ by ‘tending to its own garden’ and by ‘waiting for things to blow over’ (we will call that ‘philosophy’ commonsense philosophy). But on the other hand there is an active philosophy which submits itself to the order of the world because it knows it through Reason; it submits itself either to know the world, or to change it (we call that Philosophy as such, and we write its name with a capital letter). For example, a Stoic philosopher: he is a ‘philosopher’ in so far as he actively conforms to the order of the world, and this rational order is so because he knows it through the exercise of Reason. Or, a communist philosopher: he is a ‘philosopher’ in so far as his arguments hasten the coming of socialism, which he knows (from scientific reason) is historically necessary. We claim that all the disciples of Stoicism, and all the communist militants are, in this respect, philosophers in the second sense of the word, the strong sense. They ‘take’ if you like ‘things philosophically’: but in their case, this expression relates to knowledge of the rational necessity of the course of the World, or of the development of History. Of course, there is a big difference between the disciple of Stoicism and the communist militant, but this difference does not interest us for the moment. We will talk about it later.

What is essential, for the time being, is to be clear that commonsense philosophy, which the popular expression is talking about, must not be confused with Philosophy in the strong sense of the term, the philosophy ‘elaborated’ by the philosophers (Plato … the Stoics, &c., Marx, Lenin) which may or may not be spread, or rather disseminated among the popular masses. Today, when we encounter philosophical elements in the popular portrayal of the broad masses, this dissemination must be taken into account, otherwise we can mistake elements which are Philosophical in the strong sense for the spontaneous popular consciousness, when these elements have in fact been ‘inculcated‘ (Lenin, Mao) in the masses by the union of Marxist theory and the Labour Movement.

A- That Philosophy can be something entirely different than the ‘philosophy’ of commonsense is explicitly recognised elsewhere in the popular portrayal of Philosophy,  when it ironically shows us the philosopher with his head ‘in the clouds’. This irony, which is a sympathetic, ironic or severe settling of accounts with a speculative Philosophy, which is incapable of occupying itself with earthly problems, contains at the same time a ‘grain of truth’ (Lenin), namely that true philosophy ‘moves’  in an ‘other world’ than the world of spontaneous popular consciousness (tentatively the world of ‘ideas’). Philosophy ‘knows’ and says things that ordinary men don’t know, it must travel the difficult path of abstraction to attain this higher ‘knowledge’, which is not immediately given to all men. In that sense, we can no longer say that every man is a spontaneous philosopher, unless we play, as Gramsci does, on the meaning of the word ‘philosophy’, unless commonsense philosophy is confused with Philosophy (as such).

So we fall back to our question: what is philosophy.  But at the same time we realise that our first question was pregnant with with a second one: what is commonsense philosophy?

To respond to this double-question, we will develop a number of Theses which will introduce a certain number of realities. It is only when we have put these realities in place, that we can return to our questions, and respond to them.

II. Philosophy has not always existed

We begin with this simple observation: if commonsense philosophy, as it seems, has always existed, Philosophy has not always existed.

We know how Lenin begins his famous work on the State and Revolution. Lenin observes: the State has not always existed. He adds: we observe the existence of the state only in societies which include the existence of social classes.

We will make an observation of the same sort, but it is going to be slightly more complicated.

We will say: Philosophy has not always existed. We observe the existence of Philosophy in societies that include:

1. The existence of social classes (and thus the State);
2. The existence of the sciences (or of one science).

To be clear: by science we understand not simply a list of empirical knowledge (which could also be very long: as the Chaldeans and Egyptians knew a considerable number of technical formulae and mathematical results) but an abstract and ideal (or rather ideational) discipline that proceeds by abstraction and demonstrations: like Greek Mathematics, founded by Thales – or whoever that names designates, who is no doubt mythical.

If we return to our observation, it indeed seems that we are justified by the facts. We can observe this in both the past and present.

It is a fact that Philosophy, as far we know, began with Plato in Greece in the fifth century before our era. Now, we note that Greek society included social classes (first condition), and that on the eve of the fifth century the first science known to the world, namely Mathematics, began to exist as science (second condition). These two realities, social classes and (demonstrative) mathematical science, were registered in the Philosophy of Plato – and united in it. Plato wrote on the door of the school where he taught Philosophy: ‘let no-one enter here who is ignorant of geometry’. And made use of the ‘geometric proportion’ (which founded the idea of proportional equality, that is to say inequality) to establish class relations between men suitable to his aristocratic and reactionary convictions (there are men who are made to work and others to command, and finally others to establish, over slaves and artisans, the order of class rule).

But let’s not go too fast.

We will indeed record this further fact. There existed other class societies well before fifth century Greece, but they did not possess the idea of a demonstrative science, and, effectively, they did not have the idea of Philosophy. Examples: Greece itself before the fifth century, the great kingdoms of the Middle East, Egypt, &c. It seems clear that, for Philosophy to exist, the two conditions that we have cited are required: the necessary condition (the existence of classes) and the sufficient condition (the existence of science).

It may be objected: but men who are call ‘philosophers’ existed before Plato, for example the Seven Sages, the ‘Ionian Philosophers’, &c. We will respond to that objection a little later.

Let us return to the conditions we have defined and continue our observations.

This discipline without precedent, Philosophy, was founded by Plato, but it did not stop with Plato’s death. It survived him as a discipline, and has always found men to practice it, as if there was a need for the existence of Philosophy: not only to exist, but to perpetuate itself in a unique way, almost as if it repeated something important in its own transformations.

But, why has it kept going and transformed?

We observe that that this continuation and development has taken place in what we call the ‘Western World’ (relatively isolated from other parts of the world until the rise of capitalism): a world where classes and the State have continued to exist, and where the sciences have known great developments, but where the class struggle has also known great transformations.

And Philosophy, what happened to it?

Well, we will establish that.

III. Politico-scientific conjunctions and Philosophy

We will observe that Philosophy has known, as well, important transformations. Aristotle is not same as Plato, Stoicism is not same as Aristotle, Descartes is not same as Saint Thomas, Kant is not same as Descartes, &c. Did these transformations take place for no reason, with no other reason than the inspiration of great authors? Or if we want to formulate the question differently: why have these authors become great authors, while a mass of other philosophers, who have written a lot of books, have remained – so to speak – in the shadow, without playing a historical role?

Once again, we will make some observations.

We will observe, maybe to our surprise, that all the great transformations in philosophy intervene in history, either when notable changes occur in class relations or in the state, or when great events in the history of science occur: but with this qualification, that notable changes in the class struggle and great events in the history of science seem for the most part to be intensified by their encounter and produce striking effects in Philosophy.

We will give some examples, that we are obliged, given the rudimentary details that we have advanced so far, to present in an extremely schematic form. We will ultimately modify these examples, when we are in possession of further analytic principles.

Regarding the majority of the grand ‘authors’ of Philosophy, we can indeed observe in the conjuncture they thought and wrote under the conjunction of political and scientific events, which represent important changes to the prior conjuncture.

We will leave the task of making “sense” of the elements of this schematique table to the reader. We will be content to give some simple remarks, that are again extremely schematic, toward one example, Descartes.

We must read carefully: Descartes’s Philosophy, which marks a crucial moment in the history of Philosophy, as it inaugurates what we call ‘modern Philosophy’, emerges within the conjunction of important changes in class relations and the state, on the one hand, and in the history of the sciences on the other.

In class relations: we can draw attention to the development of bourgeois right, itself sanctioned by the development of commodity relations in the period of manufacture under Absolute Monarchy, a new form of the state, representing the form of the state in the transition between the feudal state and the capitalist state.

In the history of science: The foundation of scientific physics by Galileo, representing the great scientific event of Modern Times, comparable only in its importance with two other great discoveries that we know: the foundation of mathematics in the fifth century, and when Marx laid the basis for the Science of History in the middle of the nineteenth century.

We are be no means suggesting that we can deduce the Philosophy of Descartes from the conjunction of these two decisive economico-political and scientific events. We are only saying that the conjuncture, within which Descartes thought, is dominated by their conjunction, which radically distinguishes it from the prior conjunction, for example the conjuncture the Italian Renaissance Philosophers thought within.

We are content for the moment to put the Philosophy of Descartes in relation with that conjuncture (and that conjunction). What interests us in that conjuncture, is this conjunction, which verifies, it seems, the double condition that we earlier put forward to take account of what may count as Philosophy. For the moment, we will say no more about this.[7]

If we want to carefully read the other examples in our table, we will clearly observe that Philosophical transformations are, it seems, related to a complex game, which it cannot contest, between the transformations in class relations and their effects on the one hand, and the great events of the history of science on the other. We will ask no more of this, what it gives us is the plausibility of the condition of existence of Philosophy that we have defined. So much for the past.

But the present?

We will appeal to it to again make our definition more plausible. But we cannot draw attention only to societies where Philosophy exists in the present, but also societies without Philosophy.

There exist in our world societies or human groupings within which Philosophy, such as we known it, has never reached its birth. For example, the societies called ‘primitive’, traces of which still survive. Or, the great societies in which we can still isolate what has been brought in from the outside, considering them – so to speak – in the state they were in before this importation (the importation of the sciences and of philosophy). We can think of examples like India, and China in the nineteenth century, and ask ourselves if these societies which contain social classes (even if they have been hidden within the caste form, as in India), but  (to our knowledge, subject to error on our part) not science, have experienced what we call philosophies in the strict sense.

Hindu Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy are often brought up at this point. It may be that this objection involves theoretical disciplines which have the appearance of Philosophy, but that would no doubt be better called something else. After all, even in the West, we possess a theoretical discipline, Theology, which while being theoretical is not in principle a Philosophy. We can provisionally suggest that this question of so-called Hindu or Chinese Philosophy is of the same order as the question of Greek philosophies before Plato. We will ultimately try to give a response.

To sum up, here is what we have ‘found’ in this investigation, that philosophy has not always existed: we have found (empirically) that the existence of philosophy and its transformations seem closely related to the conjunction of important events in class relations and the state on the one hand, and in the history of science on the other.

This does not mean that we have said something we haven’t. At the point we have reached, we have only established the existence of a relation between these conditions and philosophy. But as yet we know nothing of the nature of this relation. To see this relation clearly, we will be forced to advance some new theses, and make a very long detour. This detour passes, as I have previously announced,[8]through the exposition of the scientific results of historical materialism which we need to produce a scientific definition of philosophy. And to begin with through the question: what is a ‘society’?