Marx Karl - On Marx : revolutionary and utopian

ALSO BY ALAN RYAN

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On Machiavelli: The Search for Glory

On Aristotle: Saving Politics from Philosophy

On Politics: A History of Political Thought:
From Herodotus to the Present

Liberal Anxieties and Liberal Education

John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism

Bertrand Russell: A Political Life

Property

Property and Political Theory

J. S. Mill

The Philosophy of the Social Sciences

The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill

ON MARX

Revolutionary and Utopian

ALAN RYAN

LIVERIGHT PUBLISHING CORPORATION

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Copyright 2014, 2012 by Alan Ryan

Portions previously published in On Politics: A History of
Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present

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I N THE INTRODUCTION TO On Politics, I suggested that one measure of the books success would be the readers who went and read the works of the authors I discussed. Some readers suggested that I might encourage them to do so by taking chapters of On Politics and adding to them substantial extracts from the works I hoped they would read. What follows is exactly that, with a short introduction to provide some of the context that the chapters original placement in On Politics would have provided. As before, I am grateful to Bob Weil and William Menaker at Liveright, as well as to the Norton production team, for their help in making an authors life as easy as it can plausibly be made.

T HE DISCUSSION OF MARX that follows these introductory pages has been taken from a long book, On Politics. There, it was given a context, not only by the discussions of particular authors and ideas that preceded and followed it but also by the question that provided the thread on which the discussion of individual thinkers and their ideas was strung. The history of political thought is in large part a series of answers to the question whether human beings are capable of self government and, if so, under what conditions. That was the question around which On Politics was constructed. Some writers take it for granted that small, tough city-states are paradigms of self-governing political communities; but then the question arises of how far self-government as a political community is compatible with the liberty of the individual, let alone how far the politics of tiny, long-vanished societies can provide a model for our own politics. Spartans would die to the last man to defend the autonomy of Sparta, but Sparta was at the opposite end of the spectrum from a society built around modern liberal ideals of individual liberty. Modern liberal democracy is sometimes offered as a compromise: individuals sacrifice some but not too much of their individual freedom in order to ensure that government can operate at all. Liberal democratic states can call on the patriotism of their citizens, if not for the suicidal commitment that kept Leonidas and his 300 Spartans facing a Persian army of perhaps 150,000 at the pass of Thermopylae. Both critics and skeptical defenders of modern representative democracy observe that it cannot achieve literal self-government in the sense in which the Athenian Assembly achieved it for every Athenian citizen, let alone solve the insoluble riddle of squaring individual and collective autonomy. It can, as Mill said, allow the citizenry to take securities for good government by allowing them to dismiss their rulers at the ballot box. For Marx this was not enough. He moved the argument to a different plane. Self-government was possible, both for individuals and communities. It had hitherto not been achieved, because humanity had been at the mercy of ill-understood forces that dictated forms of government whose underlying purpose was to allow an exploiting ruling class to force the productive classes to provide the resources for whatever purposes their exploiters might have in mind. But the exploiters themselves were not autonomous, either; they, too, were at the mercy of ill-understood historical forces that they could not control. If there was to be true human freedom, it would lie beyond politics in the communist utopia; only then would there be no conflict between individual liberty and the ability of the state to determine events, since there would be no states as we have known them. Marx imagined a transition from the government of menan essentially coercive processto the administration of thingsa rational process where an unforced agreement on how to collectively organize our lives could be expected.