Reason has a price.

Aggressive secularism has long seemed like the last gasp of an increasingly anaemic liberalism. All of the prominent so-called 'New Atheists' - Ditchkins, Harris, and co. - stand as exemplars of the virtues of liberal democratic capitalism. Faith is the enemy of progress because it has the terrible tendency to reach beyond the liberal framework of individual rights and liberties. As right as Nick Clegg may have been to call for the disestablishment of the Church of England the fact that it was Clegg calling for it proves it is not a radical demand. I find myself sympathising with the conservative tobacco salesman Roger Scruton as he took aim Dawkins with his musket and fired this noteworthy potshot:

Richard Dawkins and his followers have recycled the theory of evolution not as a biological theory but as a theory of everything – of what the human being is, what human communities are, what our problems are and how they’re not really our problems, but the problems of our genes: we’re simply answers that our genes have come up with, and it’s rather awful to be the answer to someone else’s question, especially when that thing is not a person at all. Nevertheless people swallow that.

Not long after that I was amused to find, in The Spectator of all places, a piece on the "cult" of Richard Dawkins. He's still busy since retiring years ago. For just £85 a month you can be apart of the 'Reason Circle' and get discounts on Dawkins merchandise. If you should want the chance to see Richard Dawkins speak at an event then you have to pay £210 a month. Only £100,000 to have a meal with him and gain entrance to the 'Evolution Circle'. That's not where it ends. You could make a donation of £500,000 to have dinner with the man - just the once - and become a member of 'The Magic of Reality Circle'.

The New School for the Humanities comes to mind. It was set up by another 'militant' atheist AC Grayling and it charges tuition fees of £18,000 a year. Is this more obscene than the Dawkins cult? It's a close call. And it was a long time ago that Marx wrote "Now atheism itself is a minor sin as compared with the criticism of existing property relations."

Tony Benn - He Encouraged Us.

You've all heard it said. It is one of the leading cliches in politics: the older one gets, the wider one's waistband expands, and the more conservative one becomes. There are notable exceptions to such sad cases that affirm this dictum of aging reactionaries. One such prominent case was Tony Benn, who started out as a mainstream Labour politician of the social democratic post-war establishment, only move further to the Left as he passed through Parliament and more than one Labour cabinet. The only thing startling about the old man was that he was ever a banal centrist.

The praise now being showered on Tony Benn relegates him to the dull realm of acceptability. It was not so in the days when Benn posed a serious challenge to the Labour leadership and the prevailing Cold War consensus. The Murdoch gutter press went after him with characteristic fairness, they went through his bins, produced a bogus report on his mental well-being, and probably tapped his land-line. The hysterical press barons saw a dictator of the proletariat on the horizon, but they also saw a similar figure under their beds at night. Those days are long gone. The Soviet Union collapsed and with it the threat of democratic socialism evaporated. The death of socialism and the end of history were proclaimed. Only liberal capitalism was left standing, seemingly everywhere triumphant. A socialist like Benn could be praised for his integrity only because the game was over. The conservatives and liberals can now applaud him precisely because they think the battle is over and his ideas don't really work.

No longer a prospective dictator, we find Anthony Wedgewood can be lauded as a man of principle from the old-fashioned days of Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan. The exactitude of the principles if a another matter entirely, we're led to believe that the 'Old' Labour Party was for stripping away the wealth of the propertied classes. It just didn't work. It turned Britain into the Sick Man of Europe. Have no doubt about it, the Labour government of 1945 to 1951 established a welfare state and mixed economy which produced greater development, economic stability, and growth, than have been enjoyed since the post-war settlement was dismantled from 1975 onwards. As much a creature of the War (not to be confused with any mere wars) and the social democratic consensus of the 1950s and 60s Benn had the qualifications to speak for the anti-war movement and the socialist movement.

As a Labour politician who lived through the first Wilson administration which had sought to deliver significant rates of growth rather than address the distributional basis of the economy. The hope was that the growth would raise living standards for the working-class without really changing the class structure of Britain. Yet Wilson had come to power just as an economic boom was hurtling out of control. The government had to look to hold down wages and prices to get a grip on inflation. In the midst of this Tony Benn was made the Minister of Technology and would go on to chair the Industrial Reorganisation Committee. He spent the last years of the Wilson government picking winners and backing takeovers in the midst of the Jim Slater era of asset stripping and ram-raids on corporate structures.

History is full of ironies. It was the beginning of the deindustrialisation of Britain that would eventuate in the 1980s and 90s. The conditions of the post-war settlement which amounted to the grave crises of the 70s are what led the way for Thatcherism and later Blairism. Only for the new establishment to lead to the current crisis we're living with today. The vast swathe of Labour parliamentarians were on board with the new consensus by the 80s and many of them had been even before it had fully emerged from the womb of social democracy. It was the Callaghan government which had signed up for the IMF austerity programme, which Denis Healey later admitted was unnecessary and probably cost Labour the election. We can and should praise Benn for learning from this experience and having the fortitude to take the stances he did against the onslaught which was well underway by 1979.

The stagnation of the 1970s matched a political crisis within the establishment itself. The Conservative Party wasn't going to forget the humiliation of 1974 and was determined to inflict a historic defeat on the trade unions. Under these conditions Margaret Thatcher came to the foreground. Originally the candidate was going to be Keith Joseph, who had helped to spread the ideas of Milton Friedman. He argued the crisis was down to the decline of wealth-producing sectors of the economy and the growth of the public sector and government. It was tremendously popular in contrast to the perceived bungling of Ted Heath. In the end Joseph eliminated himself by giving a eugenicist speech on poor mothers and their children. This may have been the exuberance of the emerging consensus which would be consolidated under Thatcher. Few people saw what was coming.

The major ideological triumphs of the Thatcher regime can be rounded down to just two: the Falklands War and the Miners' Strike. Tony Benn was on the right side in both instances. He saw that the war was an unnecessary loss of life and should have been handled through the United Nations. It really was a battle between two bald men fought over a comb. Without the war the Thatcher government may have well paid the price for its vandalism and suffered a defeat in 1983. Instead the Conservatives benefited from the patriotic fervour whipped up for the war. It's possible that the subsequent battle over the mines would have not arisen had the tide been turned back at that point. Once the miners had been defeated in 1985 the Thatcherite era had well and truly consolidated its gains and could go on to further victories. The labour movement that had vanquished Heath was smashed.

Even in the face of such defeats Benn stood strong and kept to his principles. He maintained his position as MP for Chesterfield and condemned the pit closures which would toss so many onto the trash heap. He stood as a voice of working-class interests against the tidal wave of Thatcherism and its bid to dismantle the entire edifice of social democracy. He remained steadfast in his optimism, at a time when many despaired, and had good reason to do so. The arguments he put forward were rooted in common-sense and populist appeals to the moral collectivism of the people. He was not a Marxist, but a left-moralist. The influence of the Fabian tradition, with its gradualist approach, and fetish for reform, can be picked up here; but there's also a break with Fabian progressivism in Benn's shift to the Left. His faith in the democratic mechanism is not as lukewarm as some on the hard Left may like to claim. The welfare state was socialist development, but it wasn't the end itself. He wanted to see democracy extended to the economy, it was a syndicalist call for industrial democracy.

Self-Service is Disservice.

The predominance of so-called 'self-service' machines in supermarkets should worry those concerned by the depredations of the market. The 'self-service' machines turn us into unpaid employees for a Tesco, or a Morrison's, or a Sainsbury's, and even a wholesome Waitrose. The fact of the matter is that it is a service to Tesco, not ourselves, for the most part, to man the till in the place of a paid worker. It is another way in which the rinsing of people, as workers and consumers, to amass huge profits - and it means worse and worse working conditions and job prospects for vast numbers of people. With all that said, it is unavoidable given the pace at which we have to live, that we are going to avoid queuing for longer (unless we have a tobacco habit), and we can't find an exit point in waiting longer. Notice that the fetish of 'free-choice' actually offers little in the way of quality, and even less in the way of consultation.

Before we go any further I ought to do some throat-clearing: the kind of jobs available to people in supermarkets should be romanticised, they are not examples of fulfilling work by and large. Nevertheless, it has to be said that once such an area of job opportunities is closed off it will leave behind a section of people who had little other immediate option to working in a supermarket. The innovation of 'self-service' machines really allow businesses to discard labour in the endless attempt to pull in enough labour to squeeze dry, but not too much as it encumber the maximalisation of profits. Important aside: profits are by definition what is leftover after the cost of labour is taken into account, before that point its just revenue. The contradiction faced by businesses is in the need to scrap labour to save money, while at the same time drag in even more of it to keep up productivity. The workers are a burden, but at the same time they are invaluable to the economy, they are a cost to be cut, and the source of mountainous revenue.

It is not the case that the prices of food have fallen since this innovation of the marketplace. Yet the liberal accounts of technological progress would have us believe that the betterment of life overall will come out of the liberating capacities of technology. Its a convenient viewpoint, for a liberal or even a Fabian, there is no need for radical change as the evolution of technology will gradually perfect us and perfect our society. If the 'self-service' machines are to be installed then the goods should be cheaper, and if not, then the employees of the supermarket should have a higher wage. Neither is the case. Not only do they take our money for over-priced products they make extra money by not hiring the staff to man the tills. It's yet another instance of the rationality of the market really amounting to irrationality. The business can depend on human beings to act against their own interests, to work for free, to buy over-priced garbage, and ultimately to contribute to the further enrichment of those layabouts convinced of their own brilliance - the crust of wealth hoarders.

Only under particular conditions would self-service actually be conducive to social betterment. The companies could probably be cooperatised, we could each be hired and have a slice of the profits if we are to be engaged in any meaningful kind of self-service. The right to work has to be enforced if there is to be full employment and equitable standards of living enabling each person to lead fulfilling lives instead of living to fulfill the lives of a tiny few. Under conditions of universality and mutuality these machines would be of better social use. It might actually free people from a mind dulling role standing by counters, leaving them to more authentic pursuits, and not just tossing them on the wayside to rot. Otherwise the machine is a bloody con, for consumers, and for workers. In the meantime one can hope that the managers will be replaced by machine innovation sooner rather than later. Now that would be progress of a kind.

Progress under Capitalism.

 

1.1 Materialisation of 'History as Progress'

 

The writings of Karl Marx can be understood in a historic-philosophical context that is specifically post-Enlightenment in a number of ways. One of the ways is that Marx seems to still adhere to a kind of historical progressivism. The idea of progress was around long before the Enlightenment, but it gained greater momentum during that time. As a concept progress became bound up with the emancipation of mankind from subservience and superstition. It was a matter of the expansion of scientific knowledge for many. Condorcet and Kant proclaimed progress as a trajectory of increasing reflexive self-awareness, on a cultural and not just individual level. Kant went further to reference to a 'hidden plan of nature' to bring about 'the sole state in which all of humanity's natural capacities can be developed'.[1] Progress has been taken as an uninterruptible evolution in its historic guise; the idea took hold strongly as human interventions began finally to displace the fatalistic acceptance of providence. This adherence to history as progress has manifested itself in terms of political change, technological advancement and even moral questions.

It may be said that the materialist conception of history was a transformation of Hegel’s historicism as a necessary step in Marx’s development of an analysis of capitalism. In Hegel's work we find its most emphatic version, since the real is rational and the rational is real all philosophy sets itself the task of revealing the gradual triumph of reason in all departments of cultured and social life.[2] In the subversion of Hegel's diagnosis of the seamless unfolding of universal reason Marx invoked a materialist conception of history. In this schema, we might say, progress is taken as an emergent emancipation through the realisation of hitherto-suppressed human potentiality and the control of our natural environment.

The integral role of revolution and schism is an objective liberality to the historical process. This could be understood as progress in teleological terms: as a more or less vital journey onwards (from feudalism to capitalism) and upwards (socialism on from capitalism) to a universally redemptive end (communism). Whether or not this historicism should be taken as teleological is a matter which we will explore later. Before we go any further we must first clarify the full quote referred to in the title and its context in Marx's project:

 

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.^[3]

 

This is an excerpt from a section of the Communist Manifesto focused on bourgeois and proletarians. The same section itself opens with the words “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” before elaborating that the modern bourgeois society had sprouted from the ruins of feudal society. That same burgeoning new order had failed to purge itself of the class struggle. In the place of the obliterated means to and forms of oppression the bourgeois epoch has only imposed its own. Yet the ambiguity in Marx’s analysis of capitalism is that he found revolutionary prospects in the universalization of the capitalist system, for he saw the obliteration of the old feudal order and the successive bourgeois liberal society as an advance upon what had existed before it.^[4]  He denoted the bourgeoisie as having played ‘a most revolutionary part’ in history in its capacities for rapid development, its rise hastened by the colonisation of America and exploitation of the East Indian and Chinese markets.^[5]  Marx attributes accomplishments to the bourgeoisie “far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former exoduses of nations and crusades.”^[6]  In this framework the bourgeoisie cannot exist without revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, in doing so the relations of society as a whole are transformed.

This revolution of the productive forces in its ability to bulldoze away all the old social conditions only to wipe away the new forms before they can become ossified. By these same processes the bourgeoisie circumvents barbarism and draws all countries into civilisation in its pursuit of greater expansion.^[7] This same process of expansion and growth requires as a necessary part of itself the extraction and accumulation of surplus value from the constant toiling of the proletariat. Karl Marx was well aware of the immense cost of this progression, he spent much of his life in critical engagement with the structures of exploitation as well as in political movements looking to overturn those same structures. In Eagleton's words Marx was neither a naïve progressivist nor a total pessimist about the world-historical situation in this sense.[8] It's more like Marx saw historical progress as inseparably from its often horrific costs. The circumvention of immediate obstacles to greater advances had brought not just improvements but limitations to those steps forward.

 

1.2 Species-Being and Directionality

 

For Marx and Engels, capitalism was not only the most dynamic economic model after all of its predecessors it was also just another transient form of exploitation – it was not itself the culmination of all history as progress. The four progressive epochs, in Cohen’s terms, may be designated as 1) pre-class society in which there is no surplus, 2) pre-capitalist class society where there is a growing surplus, which is still less than the reasonably high surplus generated by 3) capitalist society; and finally the enormous material surplus of 4) post-class society.[9] Each stage in this sequence gradually, if not suddenly and violently, supersedes its predecessor only to give way to another stage. In the world-historical situation this process is dialectical in that every advance achieved comes with its own limitations. In his magnum opus Marx takes an aside to comment on his own use of dialectics:

 

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea,’ he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.[10]

 

From this we might be justified in concluding that Marx had abandoned his earlier stances as a Young Hegelian. Yet it may be said that Marx was really engaged in the materialisation of Hegel’s framework, to move it from the realm of ideas to the material. Marx goes on to add after this paragraph that it is the “mystifying side” of Hegel’s dialectic which he has long criticised and, less directly, it is that mystification which he seeks to get away from. Marx describes himself as the “pupil of that mighty thinker” before affirming the dialectic as ‘working’ in a manner not mystifying in its Hegelian form.[11] Famously Marx remarks “With [Hegel] it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”[12] He notes that the dialectic became the height of fashion in Germany insofar as its mysticism was effectively conservative as Hegel glorified the ‘existing state of things’. Towards the end of the 1873 preface Marx stresses that the dialectic in its rational form stands as an ‘abomination to bourgeoisdom’.[13] This is so as the dialectic, as he employs it, includes not just the comprehension and recognition of the current epoch but acknowledges its transience and its ‘inevitable breaking-up’. In short, the dialectic reveals the fluidity of society’s development and in doing so may function to destabilise its claims to an unchanging solidity.

If we are to take Lenin’s word and see Marxism as a body of thought in its consummative unity of English economics, French politics and German philosophy, then we may view this materialisation as a transformation of these key areas.[14] We may trace the emergence of this in Marx's early work. In the Holy Family as part of comments on idealist conceptions of history Marx stresses “Just as according to old teleologists plants exist to be eaten by animals and animals by men, history exists in order to serve as the act of consumption of theoretical eating – proving. Man exists so that history may exist and history exists so that the proof of truths may exist.”[15] Noting that Hegel positions his own history, its speculative and esoteric elements, within an empiric and exoteric history, Marx goes on to write that the “history of mankind becomes the history of the abstract spirit of mankind, a spirit beyond all man!”[16] In this way we find Marx looking at the Hegelian framework as limited in its preoccupation with the ideational. It was this that would later lead Marx to embrace materialism over idealism. That isn't to say the Hegelian strain in Marx ends at the dialectic.

As Alasdair MacIntyre observes, the importance of the concept of freedom runs from Hegel into Marx in that it is conceived in each as the overcoming of the limitations and constraints of one social order by hastening the arrival of a less limited order.[17] Hegel had written of freedom that “this very idea itself is the actuality of men – not something which they have, as men, but which they are.”[18] Marx saw human freedom as so essential that even the opponents of freedom realise it and furthermore “No man fights freedom; he fights at most the freedom of others.”[19] Where Hegel interprets those limitations and constraints as primarily the limitations and constraints of a conceptual scheme Marx does not. It is this that distinguishes the materialists from the idealists. The social order is constituted not in ideational but in material form, its prevailing mode of production specifically. Its possibilities and limitations are constituted in the prevailing form of production in that social order.

As MacIntyre notes the forms of labour will vary in accordance with the available technologies, how labour is divided (if at all) and the consequent split of society into masters and labourers in turn producing classes.[20] The conflict between classes is inherent to the mode and relations of production, its contradictions and sudden twists a necessary consequence of the development of the productive forces. MacIntyre notes that the conceptual schemes with which people grasp their own society have a duality of roles: revealing the nature of that activity while at the same time concealing its true character.[21] The critique of concepts and the struggle to transform society are necessarily connected, albeit with variation on that relation over time. In the materialist conception of history Marx replaces the self-development of the Absolute Idea with the socio-economic history of class. In this way Marx transforms the Hegelian conception of individuality, finding its hindrances and advances (which Hegel attributes to conceptual schemes) only comprehensible as part of an analysis of class society.

Consciousness would not be understood in terms of a formative impetus on life, famously for Marx it is life that determines consciousness.[22] In this way the emphasis ought to be on the material conditions and economic formations which constitute the historical epoch. Naturally then Marx worked to demystify political economy. All the while Marx stressed that the mode of production known as capitalism has its own historicity, it is just as transient as the previous forms of society. Marx went as far as to deem the whole of, what we could call, history as 'pre-history', for it is only a record of one exploitative system after another: slavery, feudalism, capitalism.[23] Accordingly the only truly 'historic' act in Marx's mind would be to break with this succession of variations on exploitation. To break with this long record of miserable toil would mean bringing into fruition an epoch wherein the possibilities of self-realisation are as unencumbered as possible. Notably sparse on this matter Marx did have this to say about the end of pre-history and what communism would look like:

 

Within communist society, the only society in which the original and free development of individuals ceases to be a mere phrase, this development is determined precisely by the connection of individuals, a connection which consists partly in the economic prerequisites and partly in the necessary solidarity of the free development of all, and, finally, in the universal character of the activity of individuals on the basis of the existing productive forces.[24]

 

Wilde argues that Marx shares with Aristotle the view that the elements of human essence are sociality and rationality – the exercise of these capacities are what make us human.[25] Primarily Aristotle was concerned with the self-development of citizens, the refinement of virtue through practice, requiring the opportunity to contemplate truth to achieve eudaimonia. Marx saw more in human essence than just the capacity for reason, the distinction of humanity from other animals is in the capacity for productive creativity and mastery over nature. Species-being referring to the human capacity to transform the environment around them. The world can be shaped through the practical engagements of humankind, partly leading to greater and greater self-knowledge. In class society, human beings are left alienated from what we produce and thus cannot understand its species-being.[26] Furthermore, Wilde argues that, the directionality of historical development for Marx lies with the self-realisation of human essence – it is its telos – and only after the overthrow of capitalism can human beings find their social creativity realised in communism.[27]

 

2.3 The Limits of Emancipation

 

The historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that “the world transformed by capitalism which [Marx] described in 1848, in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognisably the world of the early twenty-first century.”[28] It was this prescience demonstrated the Manifesto – for the rising tide of neoliberal globalisation especially – which may lead us to conclude that the analysis of capitalism drafted by Marx and Engels can’t be dismissed easily even more 150 years since it was first written. At the time of writing, Marx and Engels attributed much greater industrial accomplishments to the capitalist system than were actually achieved. By 1850 the world produced no more than 71,000 tons of steel, with almost 70% being produced in Britain, and it had built less than 24,000 miles of railroads with two-thirds of these in Britain and the United States.[29] It was inaccurate of the possibilities of the world, if not most of Europe, in the nineteenth century and the globalisation of capitalism has only been achieved after a long and contorted journey. It is vital not to overlook the fact that Marx has definitely not been proven right in all of his predictions and expectations. Most infamously in the prediction that the capitalist system will, inevitably, produce its own ‘gravedigger’, in its creation of the proletariat and transformation of productive relations through a period of primitive accumulation, and driving the class struggle to a revolutionary conclusion.

The implications of the way Marx theorised of capitalism as a historically transient stage are huge. After all the breakdown of pre-capitalist formations of class society to give way to capitalist class society does not bring the process to a close. As each stage advances it brings with it limitations. This means that the transformative capacities of capitalism can be evaluated and not just described in historicist terms. This is where the distinction Marx made between political and human emancipation may have great relevance. Marx came to this distinction in his exchange with Bruno Bauer on the issue of Jewish emancipation. Bauer had taken the position that it was religion that was the barrier to emancipation. The Jews couldn't be emancipated politically, e.g. granted rights, until they ceased to be Jews, given that the state should retain its secularity it cannot concede space to forms of identity to any religion. Instead Marx argues that the political emancipation of European Jewry is possible, compatible and preferable within a liberal framework to the religious-states of Europe at the time. As Jonathan Wolff notes, Marx makes a central contribution to the criticism of liberal societies in his distinction between political and human emancipation.[30] It’s on this distinction that Marx rests his argument writing that “The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and religious man in general implies the emancipation of the state from Judaism, Christianity, and religion in general. The state as state emancipates itself from religion in the manner peculiar to its own nature by emancipating itself from the state religion, i.e. by not recognising, as a state, any religion, by affirming itself simply as a state. Political emancipation is not the completed and consistent form of religious emancipation because political emancipation is not the completed and consistent form of human emancipation.”[31]

Marx argues that the abolition of religion does not undo the ills of religion, nor is it an end-all solution to society's problems. Secularism is not in itself emancipatory, while liberal societies offer political emancipation it is only to separate social groups into atomised individuals with sets of rights and liberties to protect them from others. In turn this serves to undermine the prospects of human emancipation; it puts up the barriers to solidarity. As Wolff notes, the right to private property leads men to limit their own freedom.[32] The continuing existence of religion is more than compatible in this liberal framework. He gestures to the United States as an example of a republic with a separation between church and state that has always had a large population of religiously observant citizens. As Wolff concludes, the major point is that we have to get beyond liberal society and abolish the gap between the state and civil society.[33] Political emancipation in the form of rights is not the end of all forms of oppression and certainly not of exploitation under capitalism. The bestowing of rights is not the means to solving the problem of alienation. For Marx it is only emancipation from the conditions of the market system which will answer that qualm.

Against human emancipation Marx contrasts its liberal precursor political emancipation as the “reduction of man, on the one hand to a member of civil society, an egoistic and independent individual, on the other hand to a citizen, a moral person.” As we have seen previously, these words may well presuppose an evaluative criterion in Marx's thinking which holds human fulfilment and realisation in the highest of priorities. Liberalism falls short in its devotion to bourgeois freedom and the free-market, bringing with it new forms of unfreedom and servitude. Marx writes “The limitations of political emancipation are immediately evident in the fact that a state can liberate itself from a limitation without man himself being truly free of it and the state can be a free state without man himself being a free man.”[34] He advocates the emancipation of the Jews in political terms of rights, as that would be a significant step forward, while at the same time he has no illusions about the limitations which will come from this advance. This is all in line with the dialectic process by which freedom unfolds over time laid out in Hegel’s work.

We might just as well look at the steps made toward political emancipation of African-Americans may have made them citizens rather than slaves, but they are still enduring the alienating conditions of capitalism. The example of the abolition of slavery was one that Marx was familiar with. He and Engels were vocal supporters of Abraham Lincoln. The American Civil War as a struggle between pre-capitalist class society where there is a growing surplus and the forces of a burgeoning capitalist society. The war between the Union and the Confederacy is understood in terms of a struggle by the impulse of emergent capitalism towards industrialisation and away from agrarian formations. The preservation of the Union required the transformation of the forces and relations of production in conjunction with a victory over the secessionists. Marx believed the war would open the way toward the revolutionary path of free, self-owning labour, and eventually hasten the advent of a post-capitalist society. When Lincoln was re-elected Marx and Engels wrote to him “If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.”[35] Before going on to add that “the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class.”[36]

Elsewhere, Engels elaborated “Once slavery, the greatest shackle on the political development of the United States, has been broken, the country is bound to receive an impetus from which it will acquire a different position in world history.”[37] Just as the American War of Independence initiated a period of middle-class ascendancy, Marx hoped, the Civil War would open a period of working-class ascendancy.[38] The abolition of slavery was framed in this way as a necessary step for the American working-class to attain ‘true freedom’ as well as to support the side of the European working-classes. Slavery was an obstacle to the furtherance of capitalism that had to be shaken off if capitalism were to be overcome. In Marx’s own words “this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.”[39] With all of this in light we might be justified in seeing Marx as an adherent to a form of historical progressivism. It should also be clear that this isn’t the end of the story.



Next: Moral Objectivity in History

---

[1] Edgar, A; Sedgwick, P; Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1999) pg.311-312

[2] Marx, K; Capital v.1 (1873 Preface | Dover Publications Inc., New York, 1906) pg.25-26

[3] Marx, K; The Manifesto of the Communist Party (The Revolutions of 1848 | Verso, 2010) pg.71

[4] Teschke, B; Marxism (The Oxford Handbook of International Relations, edited by Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal, Oxford University Press) pg.163-170

[5] Marx, K; The Manifesto of the Communist Party (The Revolutions of 1848 | Verso, 2010) pg.68-71

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Eagleton, T; Is Marxism a Theodicy? (2010)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJePGD7D_RQ

[9] Cohen, GA; Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (Oxford University Press, 2004 reprint) pg.197-201

[10] Marx, K; Capital v.1 (Preface, 1873 | Dover Publications, Inc., New York, 1906) pg.25-26

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Callinicos, A; The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx (Bookmarks Publications, 2010 reprint) pg.52

[15] Marx, K; The Holy Family (McLellan, D; Karl Marx: Selected Writings | Oxford University Press, 1977) pg.138-139

[16] Ibid. pg.144

[17] MacIntyre, A; A Short History of Ethics (Routledge, 1967) pg.210-214

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid.

[21] MacIntyre, A; A Short History of Ethics (Routledge, 1967) pg.210-214

[22] Hobsbawm, E; On History (Abacus, 1997) pg.211

[23] Eagleton, T; Why Marx was Right (Yale University Press, 2011) pg.73

[24] Marx, K; The German Ideology (McLellan, D; Karl Marx: Selected Writings | Oxford University Press, 1977) pg.191

[25] Wilde, L; Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Nottingham Trent University, 1998) pg.32-35

[26] Edgar, A; Sedgwick, P; Key Concepts in Cultural Theory (Routledge, 1999) pg.309

[27] Wilde, L; Ethical Marxism and its Radical Critics (Nottingham Trent University, 1998) pg.32-35

[28] Hobsbawm, E; On the Communist Manifesto (How to Change the World | Little Brown, 2011) pg.110-111

[29] Ibid.

[30] Wolff, J; Karl Marx entry, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.1

[31] Marx, K; On the Jewish Question, Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

[32] Wolff, J; Karl Marx entry, Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/#2.1

[33] Ibid.

[34] Marx, K; On the Jewish Question, Marxists Internet Archive: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

[35] Marx, K; Engels, F; Letters to America: 1848-1895 (International Publishers, New York; 1963) pg.65-66

[36] Ibid.

[37] Zaretsky, E; Why America Needs A Left (Polity, 2012) pg.56

[38] Marx, K; Engels, F; Letters to America: 1848-1895 (International Publishers, New York; 1963) pg.65-66

[39] Ibid.