Kamenka - The Ethical Foundations of Marxism (RLE Marxism)

ROUTLEDGE LIBRARY EDITIONS: MARXISM

Volume 3

THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MARXISM

THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MARXISM

EUGENE KAMENKA

First published in 1962

This edition first published in 2015

by Routledge

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1962, 1972 Eugene Kamenka

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-85502-1 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-315-71284-0 (Set) (ebk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-88550-9 (Volume 3) (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-71539-1 (Volume 3) (ebk)

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THE ETHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MARXISM

by

EUGENE KAMENKA

First published 1962

Second edition 1972

by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd

Broadway House, 68-74 Carter Lane,

London EC4V 5EL and

9 Park Street,

Boston, Mass, 02108, U.S.A.

Printed in Great Britain by

Redwood Press Limited

Trowbridge, Wiltshire

Eugene Kamenka, 1962, 1972

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism

ISBN 0 7100 7360 7

Contents

IT is now almost ten years since this book was first published. I still hold, without significant reservations, what I take to be the books main theses in the area of Marx scholarship. These are:

(1) The underlying ethical and logical assumptions of Marxs work are to be understood in terms of a technical metaphysical concept of freedom, involving the associated philosophical notions of universality, rationality and self-determination.

(2) The internal logic of Marxs intellectual development is to be understood as the attempt to realise his concept of freedom by overcoming the dualisms of universal and particular, society and individual, civil society and state, autonomy and heteronomy.

(3) Marxs work thus reveals no radical break between his early philosophical concern with freedom and alienation and his subsequent exposition of an allegedly scientific theory of social change and social development. After his discovery of the materialist interpretation of history in the spring of 1845 we find a certain change in style and a growing socio-historical concreteness. Marxs concern shifts from proclaiming the philosophical nature of freedom to ever-deepening studies of the social and historical conditions that produce alienation, but we do not find a change of theoretical structure or a major revision of his philosophical premises.

These three theses, which go to make up and explain the assertion that alienation is a central concept in Marxs work, are now very much more familiar to an educated English-speaking public than they were ten years ago. As set out in this book, they may not command universal assent; nevertheless it seems to me that they have survived unscathed the widespread scholarly discussion of these issues, a discussion that takes up material in this book and in other books. Certainly, these theses have gained much wider acceptance than they had ten or fifteen years ago and among the scholarly the place of ethics in Marxs intellectual development and in his mature scientific system is now very much better understood. For a period, under the influence of such men as Robert Tucker, Fromm and Marcuse, this led, intra et extra muros, to an excessive moralisation of Marx, to a tendency to expose him as a moralistic religious ideologist or to deify him as a philosopher of the human condition whose relevance is eternal and largely independent of the concrete social and historical details of his work. In my more recent writings on Marx and Marxism, no doubt in reaction against this tendency and the growing misuse of Marxs name by peasant anarchists, romantic nihilists and revolutionary Jacobins, I have put greater stress on the nineteenth-century European context and on the specific socio-historical content of Marxs work, on his numerous social insights, on his concern with modernisation, with revolutionary realism, with the educative role of the industrial process, and with the social base of a revolution. Nevertheless, the eliciting of Marxs philosophical and ethical assumptions does remain of central importance to an understanding of the total thrust and direction of his work, to a grasp of the interrelation of its parts, to a deeper appreciation of the force and point of his key categories, from exploitation and dehumanisation to free labour and the proletariat as a universal class.

With all this in mind, I have thought it best to allow this book to go into a second edition unchanged, except for the correction of misprints and some minor improvements in the Index. To write in the historical dimension of Marxs work at this stage would be to open up new concerns more appropriate to another book and to destroy the unity and coherence that I have striven to give this one. Similar considerations have made me resist the temptation provided by a new edition to expound in somewhat greater detail my views on the extent of Marxs debt to Kant, to Fichte, to Hegel, to Feuerbach, to Moses Hess, to French Socialism and French historiography, to Ferguson and to classical English economics. The determination of Marxs precise position in the movement of ideas is both exciting and difficult; Marxs work is part of many intellectual histories. The careful reader of this book will note a certain emphasis on the Young Hegelian character of Marxs interpretation of Hegel and on his consequent debt to Kant and Fichte and to the aesthetics of German Romanticism. This is part of what is now often discussed under the heading Marxs Prometheanism and Marxs handling of alienation in many respects owes more to Fichte than it does to Hegel. I have said and am saying something more on these matters in other works. Here, I was concerned to refer to Marxs intellectual antecedents and to his cultural debts only in so far as such reference was necessary to an understanding of Marxs work; it seems best to leave it thus.

EUGENE KAMENKA

Canberra,

1971

MARXISM, as a theoretical system, is a product of nineteenth-century north-western Europe, which nevertheless looks beyond Europe and its nineteenth century. In the name of science and of man it seeks to transcend the specific divisions of climate, race and creed, of nation-state and language-group, in order to chart a common future for mankind.