Many authors to try explain Marx to puzzled readers. Vanessa Christina Wills’s Marx’s Ethical Vision is one of the best books on the topic.
Wills takes a cluster of ideas – the ethical content of Marx’s philosophy – and draws out these themes over the course of his career. Other Marx books I highly recommend – such as David’s Harvey’s commentaries on Capital – tend to focus on a deep reading of a specific text.
I think Wills’s project is more difficult to pull off. But she does it remarkably well.
Let’s take a look at Marx’s Ethical Vision.
Central Marxist Ideas
We’ll get to the main argument of Marx’s Ethical Vision in a bit. First, Wills does an excellent job explaining central Marxist ideas. And she connect those ideas, in a variety of ways, with ethical theory.
We get substantive chapters on: ideology critique, human nature, alienation, the free will debate, individuality, and the critique of bourgeois rights. Each chapter explains Marx’s view in a way that respects his philosophical debt to Hegel. And they do so in a way that’s not as difficult to read as…Hegel.
Here’s what Wills brings to the table. She resists any attempt to pull Marx from his historical origins, as the Analytical Marxists do. And she situates Marx not only within the traditions of German philosophy and French socialism, but also in the ancient eudaimonistic tradition.
This produces interesting results, especially in the chapters on human nature and individuality. Wills argues convincingly that Marx held a historically and materially situated view of human nature. But this come with a eudaimonistic core. The prevailing mode of production produces different sorts of people with different sorts of needs. But in any era, there’s an underlying striving to express ourselves through our labor as full, complete human beings.
This full and complete human being – a rich individual – expresses itself only when the proletariat becomes the representative of all of humanity. And this happens only at a particular historical stage – the late stages of capitalism.
The Abolition of Morality
Wills thereby presents Marx as a philosopher who both appeals to moral notions and sees the end of morality. And it’s in this tension that Wills situates the debate in the literature between Marx as a moral theorist and Marx as one who doesn’t ‘preach morality.’
Wills sets up the debate as a dichotomy between an ‘amoral Marx’ and an ‘ethical Marx.’ The former lacks the tools to condemn any action taken in the defense of Communism, while the latter maintains the tools from Marx’s early philosophy to bring to bear on the scientific socialist project of Capital.
More on that in a bit.
Wills’s ultimate view of Marx on the abolition of morality is that, under Communism, we will dispense with moral theory. We won’t need it. But until the Communism stage, we need moral theory in order to make sense of our world and change it.
The Unity of Marx’s Work
Many Marx scholars draw a strong division between his early and later work. They almost present them as two different philosophers. Indeed, we can find this division even in compilations of his writing. For one example, look to the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, which put out editions called Early Political Writings and Later Political Writings.
The intellectual basis for this division bears directly on the project in Marx’s Ethical Vision. Marx appeals to normative ethical notions such as alienation and emancipation in works like ‘Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844’ and ‘On the Jewish Question.’ But Marx drops explicit appeals to these notions in his later work. This goes especially for his more ‘scientific’ work in the late 1850s and 1860s.
Marx scholars often taken this as evidence that Marx did ethical theory only in an early, immature phase of his philosophical career. In his later career, he came to reject ethics in the service of a ‘scientific socialism.’
Wills argues against this interpretation of Marx.
Moral Theory, Amorality, and Persuasion
I saw in Wills’s division between an ‘amoral Marx’ and an ‘ethical Marx’ both a highlight of the book and one of its key challenges. Wills argues effectively that Marx retained many of his early ethical notions in his later, scientific work. The extended discussion of how alienation plays a role in Capital is a particular highlight.
Alienation haunts the text, even though Marx makes no direct appeal to it.
With that said, I think there’s still an open question of what kind of ethical work Marx is doing in later texts. Wills is right that ethical notions play a role. But I’m less sure I’d call it ‘ethical theory.’ These roles seem to help Marx persuade people to join him.
Marx aimed the Manifesto at a broad audience. And he understood readers would approach the text with ethical notions in mind. Even in Capital, I situate Marx’s use of ethical notions with his many cultural appeals – from Shakespeare to Faust – as persuasive in nature. In addition, he spends dozens and dozens of pages describing the conditions in English factories. All these things read to me as ways of motivating the reader to take on the scientific aspects of the work.
In that regard, I saw some space between the ‘amoral Marx’ and the ‘ethical Marx.’
With that said, Wills does convincingly show that ethics, for later Marx, is not only rhetorical. But I do think that as Marx’s career progressed, its role became less theoretical and more rhetorical.
I’ve found something similar in my own tenants union work. Ethical notions (e.g., ‘housing is a human right’) attracted people to the project. But we got to the business of forming tenants as a class built around common interests.
In that regard, we neither ignored ethics nor focused on it.
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