Chapter 6

Alasdair MacIntyre as a Marxist1

Introduction

Fifty years on from the events of 1956, one might have expected all the important Marxist thinkers who emerged in and around that year to have long since been identified, their works discussed, their contributions assessed, their biographies written. Alasdair MacIntyre has certainly also been afforded the same scrutiny granted to, for example, Ralph Miliband or Edward Thompson, two writers from different generations who came to prominence after 1956; but critical attention has not been focused on the writings by MacIntyre that were contemporary with Parliamentary Socialism (1961) or The Making of the English Working Class (1963). Instead, it has been directed toward a series of books that only began publication in the 1980s, long after he had abandoned his earlier Marxist positions. The books in question—After Virtue (1981, 1984, and 2007), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry (1990), and Dependent Rational Animals (1999)—have elevated his reputation from being that of another philosopher, albeit one highly regarded within his profession, to perhaps the most discussed intellectual in the West. In these works and the numerous articles and interviews in which he has elaborated or commented on their themes, MacIntyre has attempted to articulate what Kelvin Knight has labeled a theory of “revolutionary Aristotelianism.”2 One, relatively trivial, indication of his newfound celebrity was his preeminence in a poll of professional philosophers for the Observer, taken immediately after the publication of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?3 The concomitant neglect of his Marxist work can easily be demonstrated by a brief survey of the book-length collections and studies of his work.

The selection of MacIntyre’s work by Kelvin Knight in The MacIntyre Reader (1998) includes only the 1959 essay “Notes From the Moral Wilderness” from his Marxist work, although the bibliography also lists one article from Universities and Left Review (“On Not Misrepresenting Philosophy”) and one from Labour Review (“The ‘New Left’”).4 The two collections that have been published on his ideas, After MacIntyre (1994) and Alasdair MacIntyre (2003), list only “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” in their bibliographies.5 Peter McMylor’s book, Alasdair MacIntyre: Critic of Modernity (1994), is a far more serious engagement with MacIntyre as a Marxist, but one restricted to a very limited number of works, principally Marxism: An Interpretation and the inevitable “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” (although there is reference to “Breaking the Chains of Reason” in a footnote and it is included in the bibliography).6 The overall effect is to present MacIntyre as a commentator on, rather than a practitioner of, Marxism. None of these three books consider the articles or pamphlets published in or by Universities and Left Review, The Newsletter, Labour Review, New Left Review, Socialist Review, International Socialism, or even the Listener; the places, in other words, where MacIntyre attempted to use his Marxism as a tool for analyzing the world in order to change it. Indeed, McMylor and other commentators seem either to be unaware of the bulk of his early writings, or to consider them unworthy of comment. Why should this be? There seem to be four main reasons why MacIntyre’s early work has been ignored, and for the relative obscurity into which it has fallen.

The first is that MacIntyre not only wrote from a Marxist perspective, he belonged to a number of Marxist organizations that, to differing degrees, made political demands on their members, demands from which intellectuals were not excluded. Even the most insightful of MacIntyre’s admirers tend to treat the subject of these political affiliations as an occasion for mild amusement. Knight, for example, writes that after leaving the Communist Party, “MacIntyre first joined a dogmatically Trotskyist group. Then . . . he joined another, less dogmatic one.” Fortunately, as Knight sees it, MacIntyre’s resignation as an editor of the “less dogmatic” International Socialism in 1968 came “just in time to avoid association with the posturing of the second and final wave of the New Left.”7 In fact, during the period from 1953 to 1968, he seems to have treated membership of some party or group as a necessary expression of his political beliefs, no matter how inadequate the organizations in question may ultimately have been. In other words, his was not the type of academic Marxism that became depressingly familiar after 1968, in which theoretical postures were adopted according to the dictates of intellectual fashion, by scholastics without the means or often even the desire to intervene in the world. On the contrary, at some level MacIntyre embraced what a classic Marxist cliché calls “the unity of theory and practice,” particularly in the Socialist Labour League (SLL) and International Socialists (IS). Membership of revolutionary parties has always been a minority position in British and—especially—North American academic life, even in the sixties, and MacIntyre’s ascent to global fame from the early eighties coincided not with the rise of an insurgent left but that of a resurgent right. Nothing could have been less fashionable at this time than a Marxist past, particularly one associated with organized activity rather than passive contemplation. Consequently, MacIntyre’s newfound admirers were able to treat his early commitments as either an aberration or a detour that had led to a dead end.

The second reason, consequent on the first, was the sheer unavailability of the work in question. Even if there had been any level of interest in MacIntyre’s early work, the relevant pieces were published in the publications mentioned in the preceding paragraph, many of which are the now-forgotten organs of parties, movements, and organizations to which MacIntyre belonged between 1956 and 1968. It is rare to find the New Reasoner or Labour Review in a university library, and only slightly more common to find International Socialism, at least in the case of the first series to which MacIntyre contributed. In short, much of his work was unobtainable for practical purposes and the organizations that originally published it are either long defunct or, if still in existence, unwilling or unable to republish it. This would be less of a problem if MacIntyre himself had shown any interest in reproducing these early writings, but until recently he has not, selecting for reprint in Against the Self-Images of the Age only those that appeared in what he describes as “professional philosophical journals” or “journals of general intellectual culture.”8 In skirting over his more explicitly political writings, the essays brought together by MacIntyre in Against the Self-Images of the Age acted to distort the image of their author. One side of his persona in the 1950s and 1960s, the high-flying academic, was allowed to eclipse another, the revolutionary socialist. In the most recent “official” selection of his essays to be published, the earliest to be included dates from 1972.9

The third reason is their perceived irrelevance. For many commentators on MacIntyre, the main characteristic of his work is the consistency with which it returns to certain key themes. McMylor sees the shifts from Anglican Christianity through Marxism to his current Thomist affiliations as part of the same attempt to find a secure basis for the critique of liberal individualism: “Anyone looking at MacIntyre’s work must not only be struck by the remarkable consistency of his intellectual preoccupations but that in many respects he has turned full circle and in his later work returned to the theological issues and concerns that he began with.”10 Knight describes “Notes from the Moral Wilderness” as the paper that “establish[ed] the project,” its importance lying in the fact that it “prefigures aspects of After Virtue.”11 And these two writers are actually more sympathetic to Marxism than most of MacIntyre’s critics. For the others, Marxism is simply an obsolescent doctrine that MacIntyre unaccountably took seriously during the earlier part of his career—a period that should now be decently passed over in silence.

The fourth and final reason is the critical hostility with which MacIntyre’s Marxist work was received by other Marxists, notably by those associated with the New Left Review. While a dismissive attitude toward MacIntyre’s early Marxism is to be expected from those conservative thinkers who have praised his more recent critique of liberalism, it is more perplexing that many on the political left share this condescending outlook. One reason for the disdain shown to his work in these quarters can be traced to an understandable reaction on the part of many of his contemporaries in the New Left to MacIntyre’s decision to publish some of his most important political essays of the 1960s in journals such as Encounter and Survey, whose relationship to the CIA through the Congress for Cultural Freedom was then something of an open secret.12 For instance, when the Socialist Society at the London School of Economics attempted to organize a series of Marxist lectures in 1965–66, problems arose when Isaac Deutscher did not want to appear on the same list as MacIntyre because the latter had criticized him on the pages of Encounter.13 While this was embarrassing to MacIntyre’s closest contemporary comrades in the IS, the issue was neither raised within the organization nor with MacIntyre individually. To the editors of the New Left Review (NLR), by contrast, MacIntyre’s decision to publish in Encounter was perceived as an act of renegacy that mirrored more general problems with his politics. When Robin Blackburn reviewed MacIntyre’s book Marcuse in the journal Black Dwarf during 1970, his polemic expressed a resentment that extended far beyond that particular work: “MacIntyre has for a long time specialised in doing hatchet jobs on such figures as Isaac Deutscher, C. Wright Mills, Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse, as well as purveying slanders on the Cuban, Chinese and Vietnamese revolutions.” It was not only the “miserable charlatan” MacIntyre who was at fault, however, but the organizations that had harbored him: “Perhaps older groups on the Left have indulged MacIntyre’s political delinquency and intellectual bankruptcy in the past, but that was part of the traditional philistinism of the Left in this country.”14 In 1972 a comrade of Blackburn’s in the International Marxist Group, Tariq Ali, advised his readers: “A look at the back copies of the New Reasoner provides an interesting insight into the workings of the New Left Mind.” He went on: “In particular, readers are recommended to read (for pure amusement) . . . an article by Alasdair MacIntyre entitled, ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness.’”15 During an overview of the work of Edward Thompson from 1980, Perry Anderson summarized the conventional view of MacIntyre’s trajectory, and the reason behind some of the bitterness expressed toward him, in some passing comments, severely dismissive in tone, on one of “the two philosophers Thompson cites most frequently and warmly in The Poverty of Theory.” MacIntyre, we were told, had entered the socialist movement “fresh from providing books on Marxism for the Student Christian Movement” and subsequently “ended up in the pages of Encounter and Survey.” Clearly Anderson thought there was little more to be said for someone who had been an unwelcome presence in the socialist camp and latterly become a renegade from it, other than that his work displayed “a remarkable demonstration of ideological continuity” at both points in his career.16 Before the decade had closed, however, Anderson had occasion to refer to MacIntyre again, while surveying the transformation of English intellectual life during the Thatcher years. Now the tone, though still critical, held considerably more respect, as MacIntyre was compared to the other theoreticians of morality: Taylor, Griffin, and Honderich.17 Here again it is After Virtue and its successors that confer intellectual respectability and make MacIntyre a fitting subject for Andersonian pronouncement.

It is true, of course, MacIntyre did not engage in the uncritical adoration of the fashionable idols of the New Left, but he was at least as open to the world of European Marxism as contributors to the NLR, arguing that one of the main incentives for socialists to support European integration was that it would make more accessible theoretical traditions of which they were shamefully ignorant: “I can see nothing but good in an enforced dialogue with the exciting movements on the Italian Left,” he wrote in 1963. “We should have to take seriously brands of European Marxists and brands of European anti-Marxists of whom we had scarcely heard.”18 His discussions of Sartre, Goldmann, Lukács, Deutscher, and C. Wright Mills displayed varying degree of sympathy with their subjects, but in no case were they simply the “hatchet jobs” of which Blackburn was later to complain. More generally, the political culture in which he operated, unlike that of the NLR and the writers it promoted, was not one that imitated the writing style of the bourgeois academy. MacIntyre’s writing is clear and comprehensible even to readers without philosophical training, never displaying the kind of obscurantism typical of academics whose audience consists solely of their fellow-initiates. MacIntyre’s former comrade Peter Sedgwick once wrote of him operating “as an intellectual rather than solely as an academic.” This was partly because his range of reference encompassed areas beyond his professional specialism, and partly because of “his enviable capacity to take selected themes from the technical, professionalised debates among philosophers and social scientists and re-fashion them as material for the urgent attention of a non-specialised public, often using dramatic, poetic and prophetic devices in the casting of his arguments.”19

There were of course socialists who found MacIntyre’s Marxist work worth discussing. As noted above, Anderson’s first comments on MacIntyre were written in the context of a discussion of Thompson’s work, specifically in relation to the latter’s reliance on MacIntyre’s early ethical thought for his 1973 open letter to Leszek Kolakowski.20 Unfortunately, Thompson’s deployment of MacIntyre’s arguments is submerged in the self-dramatization and nationalist bombast for which this essay is notorious. Most of his other admirers, like Sedgwick, were members of the IS, the last organization to which MacIntyre belonged before abandoning organized political activity. Martin Shaw’s bibliographical guide to Marxist thought for students, also from 1973, refers to several works by MacIntyre.21 David Widgery introduced his 1976 collection of British left-wing writings between 1956 and 1968 with the hope that it might convey “what the modern socialist movement feels like from within—its humour and music and oratory and colours and the intellectual sensations of its mentors and inventors,” among which he specifically included “the whiskey and ice of Alasdair MacIntyre.”22 During the 1980s Chris Harman identified MacIntyre as a writer who had “produced some useful work” based on the ideas of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, “but then slid back . . . towards liberal reformism.”23 And in the same decade Alex Callinicos thought that MacIntyre might have played a more specific role, writing of how exceptional it was for English-speaking Marxists to directly challenge the analytic tradition in philosophy: “Alasdair MacIntyre might have been another exception, had he not long since bid Marxism farewell.”24

The second and most easily remedied condition responsible for the ignorance and lack of discussion of MacIntyre’s Marxism has been removed, with the republication of the many of the relevant texts in Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism. The renewed availability of these writings will in turn remove the third, making it clear that MacIntyre’s Marxist affiliation was no mere flirtation, but a passionate encounter that gave birth some of his greatest insights. The arguments presented in this chapter and in various contributions by Paul Blackledge are an attempt to remove the fourth by demonstrating that what MacIntyre had to say was important at the time and remains so for a new generation of activists against capitalist globalization and imperialist war.25 What cannot be created by publication, reading, and argument is the first condition: the reemergence of a revolutionary movement in which MacIntyre’s Marxism once again makes sense. Whether that culture can be re-created is still undecided, but it would be in keeping with the subject of this chapter to conclude that we must actively contribute to its re-creation rather than passively wait upon the outcome.

Marx and Saint Paul: 1953–1958

Alasdair MacIntyre was born in Glasgow in 1929 of Irish descent. He took a degree in classics at the University of London during the late 1940s and subsequently a postgraduate degree in philosophy at Manchester University, where he stayed on as a lecturer between 1951 and 1957.26 This was a period when the political bipolarity of Cold War international relations was refracted in British working-class politics through the Communist and Labour parties. While the Labour Party, then as now, was hegemonic on the British left, this position was not unchallenged; the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) positioned itself as the left opposition to Labour, most successfully in the trade unions. Unsurprisingly, the Communist Party had long since proved its willingness to perform any number of elaborate political contortions at the behest of its mentors in Moscow; while the Labour Party, though more pluralistic, had developed a parallel relationship to Washington. This situation was not conducive to the development of an independent left capable of articulating a political program that went beyond the dualism of the Cold War.

During his period in London MacIntyre was both a member of the CPGB and a communicant with the Church of England.27 MacIntyre himself has stated that one of his reasons for joining the CPGB was the influence on him of Executive Committee member George Thompson: “He played a part, I believe, in my joining the Communist Party for a short time. In 1941 he published Aeschylus and Athens, which came after a history of Greek philosophy up to Plato written in Irish, entitled Tosnu na Feallsunachta, as well as the translation of some Platonic dialogues into Irish.”28 Being a member of the CPGB at that time did not necessarily involve abandoning the Christian faith. From the onset of the Popular Front period in 1935 the CPGB had been involved in what it termed a “dialogue” with various Christians, a process that climaxed when Hewlett Johnson, the Dean of Canterbury, joined the editorial board of the Weekly Worker in 1943. Most contributions to this dialogue consisted of vague invocations of the supposedly shared humanist values of Communism and Christianity. MacIntyre entered the debate with his book Marxism: An Interpretation, which instead made a serious attempt to discern intellectual links between Christian theology and Marxist theory. It was the most significant Marxist theoretical work to appear in Britain since Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development of Capitalism in 1946 and, despite its religious perspective, it gives a far clearer introduction to Marx’s views than anything being produced by the official Communist movement at that time.

Drawing heavily on the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” (at that time available only in a German edition), MacIntyre hails Marx for the prophetic quality of his work; in other words, he regards Marx, contrary to the latter’s own claims, as an essentially religious writer. Nevertheless, MacIntyre highlights several themes in Marx’s early writings that were to be decisive for his own Marxism:

First, such truth as we possess is the record not of passive observation of the world, but of active discovery. Secondly, Marx is attacking the problem as to whether in changing the world we should start with transforming ourselves and mankind . . . or rather should begin with transforming circumstances. Marx’s answer is that you cannot do one without doing the other. To acquire a true philosophy is, of course, part of the transformation of oneself: this truth is only to be acquired in practice.

MacIntyre draws here on the “Theses on Feuerbach” that—in an interesting anticipation of Louis Althusser’s notion of an “epistemological break” around 1845—he sees as being prescientific, while ascribing an entirely opposite value to the works on either side of it. For Althusser, the “epistemological break” marks the passage from mere ideology to science.29 For MacIntyre, The German Ideology is the turning point where Marx has “abandon[ed] prophesy for theory,” but in doing so he also “abandons himself to all the hazards of empirical confirmation”: “Consequently, the claims of Marxist materialism are vindicated, if, and only if, the predictions of Marxist theory are verified.” What differences are there between prophesy and prediction? For MacIntyre there are four:

[First], both prophecy and theory point to a pattern in events: but the pattern to which prophecy points is always one in terms of purpose, in personal terms. [Second], for prediction to be of any value, for it to be a real prediction at all, it must specify accurately what is to happen and when. Prophecy, by contrast, presents us with a general pattern of events in personal terms which may occur once or several times . . . Thirdly, a prediction should tell us what to expect: a prophecy may come true in quite unexpected ways. Fourthly, a prophecy is guaranteed not by verification but by trust in the prophet: it presupposes a commitment to someone who exemplifies in his or her life the purposeful pattern which enables history to be interpreted in personal terms.

For MacIntyre then, Marx is a prophet posing as a theorist: “Thus, in Marx’s later thinking, and in Marxism, economic theory is treated prophetically; and that theory cannot be treated prophetically without becoming bad theory is something that Marxism can teach us at the point where it passes from prophecy to science.” In economic terms Marxism is “bad theory” because its empirical claims cannot be sustained. MacIntyre gives two reasons for this. First, “the labour theory of value does not work outside a state of perfect competition.” Since perfect competition does not exist in modern conditions of monopoly and oligopoly, MacIntyre claims the theory of marginal utility is superior because of its general applicability. Second, and more important, MacIntyre claims that the increasing immiseration of the working class that Marx predicted has not taken place. Nevertheless, MacIntyre claims that capitalist civilization has failed, even if capitalist economy has not. How so? “The essential failure of capitalism is not that the pursuit of profit is incompatible with the pursuit of social welfare: the essential failure is that the kind of society which capitalism creates is one that can never fully employ the skills of hand and brain and eye, the exercise of which is part of man’s true being.”30 These were to be persistent themes in his work over the next fifteen years.

For five years after the publication of Marxism: An Interpretation MacIntyre was prepared to praise Marx as an individual thinker: “Marxism is an attempt to provide the conceptual key to both nature and history. The attempt to present Marx as a scientific sociologist in the modern sense is like presenting Hamlet as a play about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”31 But as late as 1956 he was still dismissing all contemporary Marxist theory as largely “fossilised.”32 What did MacIntyre consider to be “Marxism” at this point? Although he was clearly aware of several key debates within the Marxist tradition—the debates between Bernstein and Kautsky on socialist morality and between Plekhanov and Lenin on the nature of the revolutionary party are both mentioned in Marxism: An Interpretation—he did not distinguish between any tendencies or traditions, still less argue that one of these might be more authentically Marxist than another. In drawing examples from outside Marx’s own writings to illustrate specific arguments, MacIntyre is entertainingly but also indiscriminately eclectic: a novel by Silone on Fascist Italy, a memoir by Koestler on the Spanish Civil War, a handbook by Liu for Chinese Communists.33 Crucially, there was no specific discussion of Stalinism. Indeed, one characteristic of Marxism: An Interpretation is the way in which it accepts the dominant view of the Marxist tradition in which there is an unbroken succession from Marx and Engels to Lenin and from Lenin to Stalin. This was almost universally accepted, not only by both sides of the Cold War (although they ascribed different and opposing values to the lineage), but also by any surviving anarchists who took neither side. Only Trotskyists continued to insist on the existence of what Trotsky himself had called “a whole river of blood” separating Lenin and the Bolsheviks from Stalinism.34

Insofar as there was a commonly held alternative to the continuity thesis on the left, it was concerned to place a break after Marx, so that Lenin and the Bolsheviks bore sole responsibility for initiating the descent into totalitarianism. Ironically, Trotsky’s earlier writings, together with those of Rosa Luxemburg, were frequently quoted, in a decontextualized manner, as prophetic warnings about the likely outcome of Lenin’s organizational innovations.35 In this tradition, the former is seen as having succumbed to the Leninist virus and the latter to have heroically, if tragically, maintained her faith in the democratic role of the working class until the end.36 And sure enough, the only reference to Trotsky in Marxism: An Interpretation invokes the passage from Our Political Tasks in which he allegedly foresees the emergent dictatorship of the party over the class.37 There was nothing unusual in his lack of engagement with Trotsky. The fact that Trotskyism later became the dominant tendency on the British far-left has tended to obscure the fact that, before 1956, most people in the labor movement had never read anything by Trotsky or personally encountered any of his followers.38 Indeed, even today it is not unknown for well-known left intellectuals to admit to ignorance of his work.39 Only a few years later MacIntyre himself was to acidly suggest in an open letter to a Gaitskellite that “you are perhaps slightly disappointed to find that those who denounced Trotskyism among your friends had never actually read Trotsky.”40

The Asia-Africa Conference at Bandung in 1955 provided the first sign of an alternative to the bipolar world of the Cold War. At this event, what was coming to be called the “Third World” declared itself for the first time as a major player in international affairs. If this episode opened a crack in the world order, the events of 1956—Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, the Russian invasion of Hungary, the thwarting of reforms in Poland, and the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt—together created a much wider space for widespread criticism of the world order as a totality. In striking deep at the heart of the international system these actions opened a space from which independent political forces could grow in Britain, where a “New Left” emerged seeking a third way between both Eastern Stalinism and Western capitalism, and their local left-wing political allies, Stalinism and social democracy. The first New Left, as Peter Sedgwick pointed out in the wake of its collapse in the early 1960s, was less a coherent movement than a milieu within which many diverse political perspectives were aired.41 It was formed of fragments from both the Labour and Communist parties, alongside members of the revolutionary left, students, and other non-aligned elements radicalized by the events of 1956. However, while the events of 1956 marked the point at which an independent left first emerged in post-war Britain, it was a further eighteen months or so before a movement erupted that offered this milieu the opportunity to test its politics against those of the Labour and Communist parties. The force that brought a new generation of activists onto the streets, and then into the New Left meeting rooms, was the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), whose marches from early 1958 saw thousands of the dissatisfied youth come into conflict not only with the government but also with the leaderships of the Labour and Communist parties—both of whom initially opposed the demand for unilateral nuclear disarmament. Indeed, it was through activity within CND that the New Left was able to break out of the political ghetto. However, the promise of radical change, which had nourished both the New Left and CND, was quickly stifled when the right wing of the Labour Party succeeded in overturning the previous year’s call for unilateral nuclear disarmament at the 1961 Labour Party conference. Subsequently, both the New Left and CND became casualties of shared overly optimistic hopes for the radicalization of the Labour Party.42

MacIntyre did not respond immediately to the emergence of the New Left. He seems to have left the CPGB by 1956—at any rate he was not involved in the debates within it sparked by the events of that year. Indications that he had begun to rethink his position only came two years later, by which time the New Left had become firmly established. What was MacIntyre’s attitude to Christianity by this point? In June 1958 he wrote in the BBC journal the Listener, bemoaning the social irrelevance of his own community of faith: “As a member of the Church of England, I am concerned that in this situation [i.e. ‘of deep moral sickness’] the Church should be effective in its mission, and to that end should not cherish the illusion of a moral integrity which is just not there.”43 As late as 1959 he wrote in a discussion of Hume for Philosophical Review that he “would agree with Marxists” about the change for the worse in ethical theory involved in the shift from substantive to formal moral judgments.44 The reference to “Marxists” as a separate group with which he was in agreement over this issue might be taken to indicate a certain distance; but by the time this article appeared in print he had already identified himself with them. Why he came to do so is suggested by another passage in the same article. Human nature endows us with certain common desires, he points out, which in turn suggests that we should therefore share a common morality; but in class-divided societies this is impossible:

We have moral rules because we have common interests. Should someone succeed in showing us that the facts are different from what we conceive them to be so that we have no common interests, then our moral rules would lose their justification. Indeed, the initial move of Marx’s moral theory can perhaps be best understood as a denial of the facts which Hume holds to constitute the justification for social morality. Marx’s denial that that there are common interests shared by the whole of society in respect of, for instance, the distribution of property, meets Hume on his own ground.45

The point is of wider application, suggesting that in the entire aspect of social life, the central question is whether Marx was right about the existence of social classes and, perhaps even more importantly, right about the relationships of exploitation and conflict that existed between the main classes in capitalist society.

Trotsky, not Keynes: 1958–1964

By the time “Hume on Is and Ought” appeared in October 1959 MacIntyre has apparently decided that Marx was in fact correct. His first two Marxist articles appeared in Universities and Left Review in 1958.46 A third, published over two issues of the other main New Left journal, the New Reasoner, returned to the question of morality, but now in the context of a discussion of Stalinism rather than class society in general. Edward Thompson had opened a debate on the nature of socialist humanism in the first issue of the New Reasoner. His contribution combined powerful criticisms of the inhumanity of Stalinism with a tacit acceptance of the consequentialist frame of reference through which the Stalinists had attempted to justify their actions. Thus, he commented that although the means employed by Stalin could not be defended, he had gone some way toward realizing at least aspects of socialism in Russia.47 Harry Hanson’s reply denounced the Stalinist experiment tout court as a strategy of forced industrialization carried out through an assault on the basic human rights of the mass of Russians.48 MacIntyre’s contribution to this debate, “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” argued that both positions were inadequate.

MacIntyre opened this essay with a critique of the implied Kantianism of Hanson’s morality: “The ex-Communist turned moral critic of Communism is often a figure of genuine pathos . . . They repudiate Stalinist crimes in the name of moral principle; but the fragility of their appeal to moral principles lies in the apparently arbitrary nature of that appeal.” Despite the direction of this criticism, MacIntyre was equally as critical of those apologists for Stalinism for whom socialism’s moral core was lost amidst a mechanical theory of historical progress. MacIntyre suggested that the Stalinists, through the medium of a teleological vision of historical progress, came to identify “what is morally right with what is actually going to be the outcome of historical development, such that the ‘ought’ of principle is swallowed up in the ‘is’ of history.” It was thus not enough to add something like Kant’s ethics to this existing Stalinist theory of historical development if one wished to reinsert moral principle into Marxism, for this theory of history negated moral choice. Conversely, neither was it adequate to reject, as immoral, any historical event from some supposed higher standpoint, for “there is no set of common, public standards to which [one] can appeal.” Indeed, any such maneuver would tend to gravitate to an existing tradition of morality that, because these had generally evolved to serve some particular dominant class interests, would “play into the hands of the defenders of the status quo.” Therefore, MacIntyre insisted, apologists for both the East and the West in the Cold War based their arguments upon inadequate theoretical frameworks. In contrast to these perspectives, MacIntyre argued that we should look for a “theory which treats what emerges in history as providing us with a basis for our standards, without making the historical process morally sovereign or its progress automatic.” In his search for a basis from which to reconstruct a Marxist ethics, MacIntyre argued, contrary to “the liberal belief in the autonomy of morality,” that it was the purposive character of human action that could both distinguish human history from natural history and provide a historical and materialist basis for moral judgments. MacIntyre suggested that Marxists should follow the Greeks in general and Aristotle in particular and insist on a link between ethics and human desires: “We make both individual deeds and social practices intelligible as human actions by showing how they connect with characteristically human desires, needs and the like.” He thus proposed to relate morality to desire in a way that was radically at odds with Kant; for where Kant’s “‘ought’ of morality is utterly divorced from the ‘is’ of desire,” MacIntyre pointed out that to divorce ethics from activities that aim to satisfy needs and desires in this way “is to make it unintelligible as a form of human action.” In contrast to the Kantian categorical imperative, MacIntyre therefore argued that we need a morality that relates to our desires. However, while human desires are related to human needs, MacIntyre refused to reify the concept of human nature. Instead, he followed Marx in radically historicizing human nature, without losing sight of its biological basis. Indeed, Marx’s greatness, or so MacIntyre argued, was rooted in his historicization of Man: for Marx refused to follow either Hobbes into a melancholic model of human needs and desires, or Diderot into a utopian counterposition of the state of nature against contemporary social structures. Instead, Marx comprehended the limited historical truth of Hobbes’s insight, but counterposed to it, not a utopia, but the real movement of workers in struggle through which they are capable of realizing that solidarity is a fundamental human desire. Specifically, under advanced capitalism in MacIntyre’s reading of Marx, “the growth of production makes it possible [for man] to reappropriate his own nature.” This is true in two ways: first, the increasing productivity of labor produces the potential for us all to lead much richer lives, both morally and materially; and, second, capitalism creates an agency—the proletariat—that embodies, through its struggles for freedom, a new collectivist spirit, through which individuals come to understand both that their needs and desires can best be satisfied through collective channels, and that they do in fact need and desire solidarity. Indeed, he claimed that the proletariat, in its struggles against capital, was beginning to create the conditions for the solution of the contemporary problems of morality: it embodies the practice that could overcome the “rift between our conception of morality and our conception of desire.” MacIntyre concluded that once the political left had rid itself both of the myth of the inevitable triumph of socialism, and of the reification of socialism as some indefinite end that could be used to justify any action taken in its name, then socialists would truly comprehend the interpenetration of means and ends through the history of class struggle. Consequently, they would understand Marxist morality to be, “as against the Stalinists,” “an assertion of moral absolutes,” and, “as against the liberal critic of Stalinism,” “an assertion of desire and history.”49

MacIntyre would quickly have become aware that Trotskyism offered an explanation for the realities of Stalinism that did not simply rely on moral categories—the key problem with which he had wrestled in the pages of the New Reasoner. MacIntyre made his first reference to Trotsky or Trotskyism in 1958, in one of his first articles for the socialist press. It was not complimentary. In a review of Raya Dunyevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom for Universities and Left Review, he wrote of the author: “She has been repelled by the arid, seminary text-book Marxism of the Stalinists and the Trotskyists (who share all the dogmatism of the Stalinists without any of their achievements).” Three aspects of MacIntyre’s thought emerge from this review. First, he regarded the USSR and the other Stalinist states as socialist, or at least in the process of transition to socialism. He criticized Dunayevskaya for her belief that society had entered “the age of state capitalism, a form of economy common to both U.S.A. and U.S.S.R,” because it involved “a fantastic under-valuation of socialist achievement in the Soviet Union”: “she writes of the Soviet state as though the Moscow trials, Vorkuta, and Hungary were its supreme and authentic expressions.” Second, he rejected what he regarded as Dunyevskaya’s idealized conceptions of the working class: “And of course those who have to idealise the workers are precisely those who have lost their faith in the real flesh-and-blood working class.” Third, he did not see any immediate prospect of the actual working class moving into revolutionary action. For this reason it was necessary, like Marx and Lenin in their time, “to be prepared to live without signs of hope”: “It is from Lenin’s stance of hope in a situation which to the ordinary eye would be one of hopelessness that we have to learn.” The source of hope was in fact the opposite of those usually cited by orthodox Marxists, not the supposed law-given predictability of the development of the productive forces, but the potential for working-class creativity suppressed by class divisions and awaiting release:

We are so used to having Marxism interpreted for us as the science which lays bare the laws of society that we tend to take it for granted that Marxism presents us with a picture of man as a being whose behaviour is essentially predictable. But in fact it is truer to say that Marxism shows us how in class-divided society human possibility is never fully revealed. There is always more potentiality in human beings than we are accustomed to allow for. And because of this, human development often takes place in quite unpredictable leaps. We never perhaps know how near we are to the next step forward.50

Here we can still see his opposition to notions of Marxist science and the predictions that it was supposed to enable. MacIntyre was rapidly to change his views on the Stalinist states, but his conviction at this time that they represented societies transitional to socialism might have suggested that he was growing closer to Trotskyism, had his views not been decidedly hostile (“all the dogmatism of the Stalinists without any of their achievements”). Yet by June 1959, less than a year later, MacIntyre had joined one group of Trotskyist “dogmatists,” the newly formed SLL. And, as one member recalls: “He was at first full of enthusiasm; he spoke at meetings, sold papers, wrote articles and pamphlets.”51 Why had he taken this apparently unexpected step? There seem to be two reasons why MacIntyre made this particular organizational affiliation. One was that, while avoiding the orthodox Trotskyist terminology of “degenerated workers’ states,” he had effectively arrived at a similar understanding of Russia as an imperfect society but one transitional to socialism: his first published work after joining the SLL was a review of Herbert Marcuse in which he praised the author for rejecting alternative interpretations, such as state capitalism.52 The second reason was that the practical bent of MacIntyre’s Marxism in this period lent itself to a reengagement with Lenin’s political thought at the very moment when the bulk of the New Left was theorizing a break with the ideas of the leader of the Russian Revolution. In contrast with this perspective, MacIntyre’s activist interpretation of Marx informed his reading of Lenin as offering a means of escaping from the limitations of mechanical Marxism: he came to view revolutionary organizations as necessary media through which proletarian unity might be won. This perspective sharply differentiated MacIntyre from many leading figures within the New Left, whilst simultaneously drawing him toward those whose break with Stalinism had brought them into the orbit of the Trotskyist left

There were, however, also what might be called nondoctrinal reasons for the SLL to be attractive to a young militant seeking an organizational framework. The SLL was the largest of the British Trotskyist groups and had attracted many of the best ex-members of the CPGB after the events of 1956. Given the sectarian dementia for which the organization became infamous on the British left, especially in its later incarnation as the Workers Revolutionary Party, it is important to understand that it initially presented itself as an open body, keen to encourage debate and facilitate exchanges of views in SLL publications like the weekly Newsletter and the monthly Labour Review, both of which first appeared in 1957.53 This stance obviously held attractions for those who had found the regime in the CPGB intolerable. Furthermore, the SLL was able to provide an explanation for the degeneration of the CPGB that—unlike the explanations on offer from the New Left—did not see the problem as lying with the Original Sin of democratic centralism.

Its theoretical approach was however burdened by a dogmatic allegiance to some of Trotsky’s later writings that prevented certain subjects, like the nature of the Soviet Union, from being seriously discussed. Furthermore, although it was not immediately apparent to new recruits, the SLL had a deeply undemocratic structure, centred on the leader Gerry Healy and his immediate coterie. These constraints prevented the SLL from growing or developing, despite several promising initiatives. MacIntyre is captured at one of these, the “National Assembly of Labour” on November 15, 1959, which drew a claimed seven hundred delegates to St. Pancras Hall in London.54 Described in the report in the SLL paper, the Newsletter, as a “lecturer in philosophy at Leeds University and a delegate from the Leeds Branch of the Socialist Labour League,” MacIntyre welcomed the fact that the conference included teachers and lecturers as well as traditional members of the working class, but he warned his fellow-intellectuals that they “have got to learn that they are not sent from heaven or the Fabian Society in order to guide the labour movement from above with their theorising, and on the other hand, intellectuals might as well not be in the labour movement if they are simply going to be the office boys of the trade union bureaucrats.”55

Much of what MacIntyre wrote for the SLL was focused on the question of revolutionary organization. He produced his fullest discussion of the Communist Party experience in a talk delivered—incredible as it now seems—on the BBC Third Programme and later reproduced in the eminently respectable pages of the BBC magazine, the Listener, provoking a debate that ran for three months, including contributions from ex-Communists like Thompson and Hanson, and from Peter Cadogan who had recently been expelled from the SLL. In the Listener, he identified the key factors behind the decline of the CPGB as the “rise of Stalinism in the Soviet Union” and “the defeat of the British working-class in the General Strike.”56 This is possibly the most “orthodox” statement of his career and there is little in it with which members of any other Trotskyist grouping would disagree. But moving from historical analysis to the contemporary scene, it is clear that MacIntyre was conscious of the need to balance the ability to reach out to the actually exiting audience for socialist politics—whether or not they possessed the correct proletarian credentials—with the need for a revolutionary organization. This democratic approach to political leadership is similarly evident in MacIntyre’s critique of the sectarian attitude shown by some leading members of the SLL to the New Left.

Thus, in 1959, he engaged in a debate with Cliff Slaughter on the pages of Labour Review, the SLL’s monthly theoretical magazine, over the issue of the SLL’s relationship to the broader New Left milieu. Slaughter had argued that it was incumbent upon the SLL to “state sharply where we differ on basic questions of theory and method” from the New Left. Consequently, he traced and criticized arguments regarding the nature of social class in the modern world as articulated by a number of important New Left thinkers: principally, Dorothy Thompson, Charles Taylor, and Stuart Hall.57 In opposition to Slaughter’s almost wholly negative indictment of New Left theory, MacIntyre pointed out that the New Left was a more complex phenomenon than Slaughter’s essay implied, and that many of Slaughter’s own criticisms had been articulated within the New Left itself—most prominently by Edward Thompson. Therefore, while MacIntyre agreed with much of the substance of Slaughter’s arguments, he felt that Slaughter’s “polemical and sectarian style” was mistaken, for it acted to create a barrier between the SLL and all that was positive within the New Left. “The most important thing about the New Left,” he argued, “is that it exists.” Therefore, “for a Marxist the question must be: What does the existence of this grouping point to in the changing character of our political life?” On the basis of a generally positive answer to this question, MacIntyre concluded his internal critique of the SLL leadership with the argument that “the relationship of Marxists to the New Left ought not to be one merely negative and critical but one which is continually looking for those points of growth in its theory that can lead on to common political action.” More generally, he argued that, as it was at the “point of production” that people in “our society . . . begin to act and think for themselves,” then it was the duty of the SLL to argue, fraternally, within the New Left that that they should orientate themselves toward the industrial struggles of the working class. Socialists, he wrote, “can only carry through an effective educational effort as part of the industrial and political struggle.” Conversely, despite the good intentions of the New Left, its lack of focus on such struggles tended to “dissipate socialist energy and lead nowhere.” His objection to the dismissive tone adopted by Slaughter was because it acted as an obstacle to winning activists in the New Left to a more fully revolutionary politics and party commitment, not because he wanted to perpetuate its amorphous approach to organization.58

The internal SLL debate over the nature of revolutionary organization reached its highest level in an article by MacIntyre, “Freedom and Revolution,” published the following year. In part, this seems to have been an attempt to defend the theory of the revolutionary party embodied in the SLL against those who—in response to its increasingly undemocratic practice—had either left or been expelled from it. But it was also an attempt to think through his own perspective, which was beginning markedly to diverge from that of his comrades. MacIntyre argues from first principles, starting with the position of people in capitalist society, not with quotations from Lenin and Trotsky (although Lenin’s discussion of ideology in “What is to be done?” forms a ghostly backdrop throughout). Indeed, the only thinkers he mentions are Hegel and Marx. He begins his case for the revolutionary party with the apparently paradoxical notion that it is essential for the realization of human freedom—not the usual starting point in Leninist or Trotskyist discussions: “To assert oneself at the expense of the organisation in order to be free is to miss the fact that only within some organisational form can human freedom be embodied.” But the role of the vanguard party is not itself to achieve freedom, “but to moving the working class to build it.” In order to “withstand all the pressures of other classes and to act effectively against the ruling class,” it has to have two characteristics. The first, the need for constant self-education, is relatively uncontentious. But the second, which returns to the paradox of vanguardism and freedom, is more interesting. MacIntyre begins conventionally enough, noting that “one can only preserve oneself from alien class pressures in a vanguard party by maintaining discipline. Those who do not act closely together, who have no overall strategy for changing society, will have neither need for nor understanding of discipline.” Appeals for “discipline” by themselves were unlikely to win over members of the New Left, who were only too conscious of how this had been used by Stalinist parties to suppress discussion, but their alternative tended to emphasize personal choice. MacIntyre was able to show that there was an organizational alternative to both bureaucratic centralism and liberal individualism:

Those who do not act closely together, who have no overall strategy for changing society, will have neither need for nor understanding of discipline. Party discipline is essentially not something negative, but something positive. It frees party members for activity by ensuring that they have specific tasks, duties and rights. This is why all the constitutional apparatus is necessary. Nonetheless there are many socialists who feel that any form of party discipline is an alien and constraining force which they ought to resist in the name of freedom. The error here arises from the illusion that one can as an isolated individual escape from the moulding and the subtle enslavements of the status quo. Behind this there lies the illusion that one can be an isolated individual. Whether we like it or not every one of us inescapably plays a social role, and a social role which is determined for us by the workings of bourgeois society. Or rather this is inescapable so long as we remain unaware of what is happening to us. As our awareness and understanding increase we become able to change the part we play. But here yet another trap awaits us. The saying that freedom is the knowledge of necessity does not mean that a merely passive and theoretical knowledge can liberate us. The knowledge which liberates is that which enables us to change our social relations. And this knowledge, knowledge which Marxism puts at our disposal, is not a private possession, something which the individual can get out of books and then keep for himself; it is rather a continually growing consciousness, which can only be the work of a group bound together by a common political and educational discipline.59

Whether the SLL was the type of party that MacIntyre advocated was less clear. The leadership responded obliquely with an article by Cliff Slaughter, “What is Revolutionary Leadership?,” not criticizing MacIntyre by name, but identifying what Slaughter evidently saw as an inadequate conception of the revolutionary party. Slaughter’s response was also a serious contribution and one that brought into the debate not only arguments from Lenin, but from the early Lukács and Gramsci, both of whom were virtually unknown in the English-speaking world at this time. Lukács in particular was to be important in MacIntyre’s development, although there is no evidence that he had read him before this point. Nevertheless, Slaughter’s piece also contained warning signs of how the SLL was going to develop, notably in his insistence on the need to raise “discipline and centralised authority . . . to an unprecedented degree.”60

In the course of the debate in the Listener MacIntyre had written that “whether the SLL is or is not democratic or Marxist will be very clearly manifested as time goes on. I myself have faced no limitation on intellectual activity of any kind in the SLL.”61 Ironically, within months of writing these lines MacIntyre was expelled from the SLL alongside a number of other prominent activists who refused to act as mere puppets of the leadership, sent on his way with usual denunciations of petty-bourgeois revisionism and so on.62 In a letter to Gerry Healy, MacIntyre observed that it was clearly impossible for a minority to exist within the organization because of his personal dominance and the fact that he effectively owned it as private property, since the assets were in his name. His conclusion, however, was not that these problems stemmed solely from Healy’s personal malevolence—real though that undoubtedly was—but because of the small size of the Trotskyist organizations that allowed individuals to play this role.63

Around the time MacIntyre left the SLL, he wrote perhaps the single greatest essay to emerge from the first period of the New Left, “Breaking the Chains of Reason,” which appeared in Edward Thompson’s collection Out of Apathy. In a sweeping survey of the contemporary intellectual scene, MacIntyre makes the case for Marxism as a method by defending it against the criticisms of Karl Popper. Popper had claimed that Marxism was deficient on three main grounds, all of which supposedly tended toward totalitarianism on the Russian model. First, it was historicist, meaning that it claimed to have discovered the underlying trends of historical development and could therefore predict future patterns of events. Second, it ascribed views and actions to collective social actors, particularly classes, whereas in reality only individuals could be said to possess these qualities. Third, it was partisan, seeking not to discover partial scientific understanding but to justify positions to which it was already committed because of its historicism. MacIntyre briefly dismantles these positions, which were at the time treated as incontestable, not least on the right of the Labour Party.

First, Marx did not believe that he had discovered the inevitable course of human history, but a potential outcome made possible by developments within capitalism: “Knowledge of the trends that are dominant is for Marx an instrument for changing them. So his belief that he has uncovered “the economic law of motion of capitalist society” is not a belief in an absolute trend, but a trend whose continuance is contingent on a variety of factors including our activity.” Second, as an alternative to dealing with collectives, “methodological individualism” was incoherent:

You cannot characterise an army by referring to the soldiers who belong to it. For to do that you have to identify them as soldiers; and to do that is already to bring in the concept of an army. For a soldier just is an individual who belongs to an army. Thus we see that the characterisation of individuals and of classes has to go together. Essentially these are not two separate tasks.

Third, Popper is wrong in his demand for objectivity, or as he puts it, a concern for means rather than ends. On the one hand, means and ends cannot be separated in this way. On the other, his claim is “self-refuting”:

For to assert that our concern can only be with the means and to add that the result of that concern can only be limited and particular statements of social correlation is already to be partisan. An example of what Popper takes to be a genuine discovery of the social sciences is that “You cannot have full employment without inflation” (the rider “in our type of economy” is not added). If such limited discoveries are all that we can hope for from the social sciences, it follows that we cannot hope to transform society as such; all that we can hope to change are particular features of social life. To adopt this view of the means available for social change is to commit oneself to the view that the only feasible ends of social policy are limited reformist ones, and that revolutionary ends are never feasible. To be committed to this is to be partisan in the most radical way.64

MacIntyre now had two organizational choices if he wanted to remain an active revolutionary. One was IS (formerly the Socialist Review Group), which had been formed out of a much earlier split—in fact a series of expulsions—from the last unified British Trotskyist organization, the Revolutionary Communist Party, in 1950. The central position of the IS, elaborated by the group’s founder Tony Cliff in 1948 on the basis of his reading of the Marxist classics, was the very view of Stalinist states that MacIntyre had earlier rejected, namely that they represented forms of bureaucratic state capitalism. The other was the post-Leninist, post-Trotskyist, and ultimately post-Marxist organization established by other former SLL members, initially called Socialism Reaffirmed, then (from 1961) Solidarity. This group also rejected the view that the Stalinist regimes were in any sense socialist but was far less specific than the IS in giving them a positive characterization, referring to them instead as examples of “bureaucratic society.” There was another difference that was to be important for MacIntyre’s later theoretical and political development. Where the IS saw the postwar boom as underpinned by the arms economy, Cliff and its other major theoretician, Mike Kidron, did not see this as a permanent stabilization, but one that would ultimately produce its own contradictions. Solidarity, on the other hand, drew on the work of the one-time Greek Trotskyist Cornelius Castoriadis (known at the time as Paul Cardan) to argue that capitalism had definitively overcome its tendency to economic crisis.65 In terms of how these organizations saw their relationship to the working class, however, there appeared to be far fewer differences, as can be seen by comparing the statements of their respective leading thinkers.66 Cliff continued to talk about leadership, a notion that Maurice Brinton consciously avoids, but both groups had clearly distanced themselves from the kind of bureaucratic machine-Leninism practiced by orthodox Trotskyist organizations like the SLL. Solidarity and IS coexisted in a relatively fraternal manner and the early issues of International Socialism contained material by prominent Solidarity members, including Brinton (under the name of Martin Grainger) and Bob Pennington. It also published material by both Cardan and other members of his group, Socialism or Barbarism, including the later prophet of postmodernism, Jean-François Lyotard.67

What was the relationship of IS to Trotskyism at this time? In 1965 the US author George Thayer reported an interview with Kidron: “He claims that his group is not Trotskyist but Trotskyist-derived, pointing out that Socialism is his first concern and that his conclusions may only incidentally incorporate the thoughts and conclusions of Trotsky. He adds that he welcomes all Socialist thought—from Marx, Lenin, E. V. Debs, or anyone else—if it can be of assistance to him.”68 As a former member of the Fourth International Cliff identified more closely with Trotsky and the classical Marxist tradition he had done so much to preserve. There is no reason, however, to think that Cliff was not being perfectly honest in his 1959 assessment of the best model for a revolutionary party: “For Marxists in advanced industrial countries, Lenin’s original position can serve much less as a guide than Rosa Luxemburg’s, notwithstanding her over-statements on the question of spontaneity.”69 MacIntyre would therefore have regarded himself as having joined a group that had developed out of Trotskyism while rejecting some of Trotsky’s specific theoretical and organizational conclusions.

Kidron had greeted MacIntyre’s chapter in Out of Apathy as “a brilliant contribution.”70 By the time this appreciation appeared MacIntyre had joined both the organization and the editorial board of its newly launched eponymous journal, his first contribution appearing in the third issue.71 He was finally introduced to readers in issue six: “Alasdair MacIntyre,” the note revealed, “teaches philosophy and has experience of the Communist Party, the Socialist Labour League, the New Left and the Labour Party; believes that if none of these can disillusion one with socialism, then nothing can.”72 MacIntyre had by this point abandoned his religious beliefs, telling Twentieth Century: “Was a Christian. Am not. It is less misleading when asked if I am a Marxist to say ‘yes’ rather than ‘no.’ But other Marxists have been known to say ‘no.’”73

MacIntyre had rejected Trotskyist orthodoxy, but there was no ambiguity in his attitude to Trotsky himself. MacIntyre concluded “Breaking the Chains of Reason” with an incandescent passage establishing his admiration for Trotsky as a model for radical intellectuals:

Two images have been with me throughout the writing of this essay. Between them they seem to show the alternative paths for the intellectual. The one is of J. M. Keynes, the other of Leon Trotsky. Both were obviously men of attractive personality and great natural gifts. The one the intellectual guardian of the established order, providing new policies and theories of manipulation to keep society in what he took to be economic trim, and making a personal fortune in the process. The other, outcast as a revolutionary from Russia both under the Tsar and under Stalin, providing throughout his life a defence of human activity, of the powers of conscious and rational human effort. I think of them at the end, Keynes with his peerage, Trotsky with an icepick in his skull. These are the twin lives between which intellectual choice in our society lies.74

The fullest statement of MacIntyre’s attitude toward Trotsky and Trotskyism during this period was given in his review of the final volume of Isaac Deutscher’s biography, The Prophet Outcast (1963). His first point was that Trotsky himself never succumbed to the theoretical conservatism that later overtook most of his followers: “Throughout his life Trotsky was prepared to reformulate Marxism. The theory of permanent revolution bears striking witness to this.”75 Consequently, it was entirely in keeping with Trotsky’s own theoretical boldness to seek to understand the limitations of his positions, where necessary, and to move beyond them. MacIntyre now accepted Cliff’s version of the theory of state capitalism as an attempt to do this and raised the possibility that Trotsky himself might have come to share this view, had he been faced with the evidence that private capitalism and socialism were not the only available alternatives; there was also “the collective class rule of the bureaucracy.”

For the Trotsky of the 1930s, as for Marx, socialism can be made only by the workers and not for them. It is in part because of this that Trotsky, had he lived, would have had to treat his predictions about the aftermath of the Second World War as falsified. He could not but have concluded from his own premises that Russia was in no sense a workers’ state, but rather a grave of socialism. . . . He could never have accepted Deutscher’s analysis, which has only one thing in common with his own: the use of nationalized property as a criterion for socialism.

The failure of more orthodox Trotskyists to make comparable theoretical reconsiderations condemned them to sterility. Consequently, his attitude toward these parties in some senses reverted to an earlier dismissiveness:

So-called Trotskyism has always been among the most trivial of movements. It transformed into abstract dogma what Trotsky thought in concrete terms at one moment in his life, and canonised this. It is inexplicable in purely political dimensions, but the history of the more eccentric religious sects provides revealing parallels. The genuine Trotskyism of [Alfred] Rosmer or Natalya [Sedova] must have at most a few hundred adherents in the entire world.76

It is perhaps worth noting that, since MacIntyre was still active in IS at this time, he presumably did not regard himself as belonging to the political equivalent of a “religious sect.”

But, when all due recognition is granted to Trotsky’s political, intellectual, and moral achievements, was there some connection between the chronic irrelevance of Trotskyist organizations and his own thought? MacIntyre hinted at an answer in a review of Literature and Revolution, in which he wrote that Trotsky’s literary criticism revealed the “unity of greatness and weakness” in his thought: “The greatness lies in the grasp of actual social connections. . . . The weakness comes out in the substitution of an a priori scheme of things for the actual complex reality whenever he comes to a point made difficult by his own theory.”77 In another context MacIntyre gave a specific example of this weakness:

When, in the early 1930s, Trotsky was confronted with the facts of this growth [in working-class standards of living] by the Marxist economist Fritz Sternberg he remarked that he had no time recently to study the statistics; that on the truth or falsity of the statements involved much else that he was committed to depended he does not seem to have noticed. Nor was this attitude restricted to Trotsky, whom I select here as the most honest, perceptive and intelligent of post-1939 Marxists.78

This is less than fair to Trotsky, who wrote (in a series of notes not intended for publication): “The dialectic does not liberate the investigator from painstaking study of the facts, quite the contrary; it requires it.”79 And this scrupulousness with “the facts” is attested to by, for example, his handling of source material in The History of the Russian Revolution. What is of interest here is less the accuracy of MacIntyre’s judgment than the source he identifies of Trotsky’s theoretical weakness: “Trotsky is as helpless as anyone else imprisoned in the categories of Leninism.”80 As this suggests, MacIntyre takes a far more ambivalent position toward Lenin than toward Trotsky. What then were the characteristics of his Marxism during the period?

First, it was revolutionary: “For the question of how socialism could come about cannot be derived from the question of what it is to be. And the revolutionary case is in part that nothing worth calling socialism could come into being by reformist methods.”81 Indeed, MacIntyre went so far as to claim that the conditions for reformism no longer existed. These, he argued, were a relatively homogenous working class, a state that was believed to be relatively independent of the capitalist class (and consequently had sometimes to behave as if it was), and a ruling class prepared to compromise in order to achieve its broader objectives. None of these remained: “The working-class is far less homogeneous . . . the state . . . is now so well integrated with the key institutions of the capitalist economy that it cannot any longer be conceived of as a neutral, independent source of power that could be used against that economy. . . . the ruling class . . . do not need to accommodate themselves to the working-class now by means of parliamentary institutions.” But there was no reason to despair. The very fact of capitalist expansion would produce needs that the system could not fulfill: “Revolutions do not take place in fact against backgrounds of pauperisation and slump. They take place when in a period of rising expectations the established order cannot satisfy the expectations which it has been forced to bring into being. The new capitalism cannot avoid calling into being a new working-class with large horizons so far as not merely wages but also education and welfare are concerned.”82

Second, as this suggests, MacIntyre saw the working class as the agent of change, not any of the other forces—reformist politicians, Stalinist bureaucrats, peasant guerrillas, or students—that were increasingly being offered as substitutes by sections of the New Left. One of his criticisms of those sections of the New Left that retained a focus on working-class life was that it was fixated on culture: “What one hopes is that opening up these questions will lead one to see the basic antagonism in our society at the point of production.” Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, one of the founding texts of the New Left, “pictures the worker entirely at leisure and not at all at work. And this is to miss both the point at which people are formed in their social activities most effectively, the only point at which one can begin to understand the relation of the capitalist system to people who live within it.83 The key absences, as MacIntyre was later to write in a similar critique of Raymond Williams, were “work, class, power.”84

Third, his Marxism stressed the importance of human self-activity in transforming society:

The Stalinists believe that the inner mechanism of capitalism is such that in the long run it must automatically break down. The Social Democrats believe that the devices used by modern capitalists ensure that the machine will keep going. Both speak from the standpoint of passive observers outside the system who ask: “Will it keep going or not?” The Marxist standpoint starts from the view that this question is not a question about a system outside us, but about a system of which we are a part. What happens to it is not a matter of natural growth or mechanical change which we cannot affect. We do not have to sit and wait for the right objective conditions for revolutionary action. Unless we act now such conditions will never arise.85

This is not a voluntarist doctrine in which the exercise of human will overcomes all material obstacles, which would simply be the obverse of social-democratic and Stalinist determinism. Rather, it recognizes what many subsequent distinctions between agency and structure do not, namely that our activities (or their absence) change the conditions under which future action takes place, but are indeterminate and consequently unpredictable:

The fall of capitalism is in no way inevitable; but nor is its survival. The condition of its fall is a long-term mass change in consciousness; and there are no conditions which can make such a change either inevitable or impossible. It depends on us, but not upon us, because we are borne along by the wheel or tides of history; nor upon us, because we are leaders exempt from the workings of social systems. But upon us because with our working-class allies we may yet learn both what now makes us behave as we do, and what may transform our action until we become capable of making the transition to socialism.86

Fourth, the working class required a party; but what kind of party? It was in relation to this issue that his views underwent the greatest change between leaving the SLL and joining the IS. In an obituary for C. Wright Mills, MacIntyre reminds his readers that Mills had described himself as being a Leninist without being a Marxist.87 And it is clear that he regarded this as a common failing on the supposedly revolutionary left: “Certainly the idea of the impoverished proletariat led by the elitist party cannot be introduced upon this stage without a comic opera effect. Those who identify Leninism with this do terrible injustice to Lenin’s keen sense of the politically ridiculous.”88 What would a non-Marxist Leninism, of the sort upheld by Mills, involve? In a discussion during which he accused Sartre of effectively holding this position, he accused him of lacking Lenin’s “practical realism.”89 But is that all Leninism is? The core of Marxism is summed up in the phrase Marx wrote into the Provisional Rules of the International Working Men’s Association: “That the emancipation of the working-class must be conquered by the working-class themselves.”90 From this perspective the problem with Sartre (and Mills) is more that the working class has no independent role to play in the revolution and consequently will simply exchange one set of masters for another. Non-Marxist Leninism would therefore be the elitist, conspiratorial affair that liberals and anarchists always accused actually existing Leninism of being.

This highlights the ambiguity in MacIntyre’s position. In certain places he implies that the charge of elitism falsely identifies Lenin’s politics with those of Stalin, and he instead links Trotsky and Lenin together as proponents of socialism from below: “Trotsky’s emphasis that socialism can only be built consciously and Lenin’s that it cannot be built by a minority, a party, together entail that a pre-condition of socialism is a mass socialist consciousness.”91 In other places, however, he suggests that Lenin’s politics were genuinely elitist, in other words, non-Marxist, and he invokes other Marxists to remedy this apparent defect in Lenin’s thought. In particular, he claims that James Connolly had been truer to Marx’s notion of political movement of the working class arising in the “transition . . . from the trade union movement concerned with purely isolated economic issues to the trade union movement concerned with the political issue of class power.”92 Here MacIntyre retreats from his own earlier insights in “Freedom and Revolution.” The party cannot be an expression of the class because the class itself is uneven in terms of consciousness; instead, it is a political selection of individuals to develop and maintain class consciousness.93 A trade union cannot fulfill the function of a party precisely because it has to include all eligible workers regardless of their politics. Consequently, unions can be more or less militant in their behavior, more or less progressive in their policies, but inevitably they must embody rather than overcome unevenness. Since MacIntyre does not accuse Trotsky himself of elitism, this reading suggests that the one problem of Trotskyism was the attempt to maintain organizational forms that perpetuated bureaucratic elitism. Whatever there is to be said for this, it is quite clear that, from the point at which Trotsky became convinced of Bolshevism in 1917, he never wavered in his insistence that a revolutionary party was required for the success of the socialist revolution.94 There may be circumstances in which building the party may not be immediately feasible, which seems to be the conclusion Cliff and his comrades drew in the aftermath of the Second World War; there may be attempts to build the party that in practice reproduce Stalinist rather than Leninist norms, which was ultimately the case with the SLL; but it would be difficult for anyone claiming fidelity to Trotsky’s thought to rule out building a vanguard party as a matter of principle, which was one of the reasons why the members of Solidarity no longer considered themselves Trotskyists. Paraphrasing his own judgment on Mills and Sartre, we might therefore say that MacIntyre regarded himself as a highly idiosyncratic Trotskyist without being a Leninist—a position that Trotsky himself would have regarded as an highly improbable, to say the least.

The problem that he thought Lenin and Trotsky had in common lay in what he came to think of as their voluntarism. This was explicable, he acknowledged, as a response to the Mensheviks’ “mechanical view of social development,” but did not provide a coherent alternative since it did not take account of “the objective limitations of possibility.” So Menshevik automatism led to Bolshevik voluntarism; Stalinism’s mechanistic philosophy to Trotskyism’s voluntaristic talk of crises of leadership; even the orthodoxy of the British CP to the voluntarism of the New Left.95 In some circumstances it is of course correct to say that the “possible alternatives” are limited: “We may become conscious of the laws which govern our behaviour and yet be unable to change it; for there may be no alternative to behaving in the way that we do. Or again there may be alternatives, but not ones that enough of us would prefer to the present social system.”96 And later he was to point to a specific example from the degeneration of the Russian Revolution: “The key lies in the nexus between Stalin’s economic policies—which were directed toward problems for which, as Trotsky never fully understood, there were no socialist solutions—and the political need for purges created by the failure to acknowledge that socialist theory had perforce been left behind when these policies were adopted.”97 By contrast, in his earlier writings MacIntyre had emphasized precisely how the subjective intervention of revolutionaries helped shape what would, in due course, become a new set of objective conditions.

Reading MacIntyre’s work during the period of his IS membership can produce a dizzying effect as one follows the author moving back and forth between one assessment and another, often in quick succession, suggesting at the very least uncertainty on his part as to his own conclusions. What is interesting about MacIntyre’s positive reading of an “activist” reading of history is how closely it echoes some of the positions taken by Georg Lukács in his works of the early 1920s, History and Class Consciousness and Lenin: A Study in the Unity of His Thought. MacIntyre was soon to revisit the theme, decisively, in the terms set out by Lukács and his pupil, Lucien Goldmann.98 In his outstanding study of Pascal and Racine, The Hidden God (1964), Goldmann wrote:

Marxist faith is faith in the future which men make for themselves in and through history. Or more accurately, in the future that we must make for ourselves by what we do, so that this faith becomes a “wager” which we make that our actions will, in fact, be successful. The transcendental element present in this faith is not supernatural and does not take us outside or beyond history; it merely takes us beyond the individual.99

MacIntyre now expanded on the parallel that Goldmann drew between “Pascal’s wager” and the Marxist understanding of the relationship between theoretical understanding and action in the world:

If tragic thought and dialectical thought differ in . . . crucial respects, they also resemble each other at key points. Both know that one cannot first understand the world and only then act in it. How one understands the world will depend in part on the decision implicit in one’s already taken actions. The wager of action is unavoidable. . . . Not eternity but the future provides a context which gives meaning to individual parts in the present. The future which does this is as yet unmade; we wager on it not as spectators, but as actors pledged to bring it into being.100

Other Marxists, unknown to MacIntyre, had framed the issue in similar terms, notably Gramsci and Benjamin.101 But it is important to understand that when MacIntyre invokes the notion of tragedy in this context he means this quite literally, for what seems to be entering his work at this point is a view that the basis of the Marxist wager—the revolutionary capacity of the working class—might have been mistaken. Consequently, Marxists tended to invest the actual working class with the characteristics it does not possess, at least to the extent that would allow the revolutionary project to be realized. He sees this as a major theoretical reason for Lukács’s collapse into Stalinism.102 But why was the working class—whose self-activity MacIntyre had hailed only a few years before—now deemed to be incapable of successful revolution?

Disengagement: 1964–1968

MacIntyre was not to state his views on the incapacity of the working class and consequently the validity of Marxism until 1968, but his position began to shift from several years beforehand. 1964 seems to have been a turning point, since that year saw his last contributions to any IS publication. The emergent differences between him and his comrades only surfaced, however, in a public meeting in London on June 5, 1965, organized by Solidarity, which had asked MacIntyre to represent the IS position in a debate with Cardan without however formally approaching the other organization. As we have seen, Solidarity and IS had coexisted in a relatively fraternal manner since their respective organizations emerged in 1960. Both had rejected not only Stalinism but the orthodox Trotskyism of the SLL, from the ranks of which many members of Solidarity had emerged. But Solidarity increasingly rejected Trotskyism as such, Leninism, and, as the sixties wore on, Marxism in any form. In this, they broadly took their theoretical lead from Castoriadis, whose positions were outlined at length in his then newly translated book, Modern Capitalism and Revolution. On the one hand, he stressed the importance of the formation of revolutionary consciousness rather than the material development of the forces of production; on the other, he claimed that the nature of the crisis was the inability of the society to function rather than economic breakdown.103

The outcome of the debate seems to have surprised everyone, although MacIntyre’s recent writings had contained similar themes. In 1963 he had noted that, post-war: “Capitalism was transformed by conscious, intelligent innovation, while working-class consciousness suffered diminution after diminution.” There were three components to this transformation: “The first—which perhaps came last in time—is growth in economic expertise. . . . Secondly . . . the role of technological innovation. . . . It was this and not the permanent war economy alone which stabilized post-1945 capitalism. . . . Thirdly—and this came earliest in time—the rise of the trade union movement was accompanied by a realization by capitalists that to maximize the rate of exploitation was to create labour trouble in future.” His conclusion was that “there are no longer slumps for the same reason that the pig-cycle is no longer with us: the changed self-consciousness of the participants.”104 MacIntyre had previously argued that there were three components of a revolutionary perspective: “The first is the deep and incurable dissatisfaction with social life which capitalism breeds. The second is the recurrent state of objective crises in capitalist social order. The third is socialist theory. Without the third the first does not necessarily come into relation with the second at all, or only in the most fortuitous way. With the third, dissatisfaction can become creative in that it is presented with a radical alternative to the present social order.”105 But as he argued in the “debate” with Cardan, the capitalist class was now in a position to effectively regulate the economy and thus prevent the recurrence of crisis. If that was the case, then revolution depends solely on the possibility of working-class dissatisfaction and socialist theory. This explains the emphasis he began to place on the activist elements of Marx’s career, at the expense of his theoretical writings:

[Marx] cannot allow for the possibility of the capitalist coming to understand the system and taking steps to prevent the system collapsing in the way that Marx predicts. . . . What prefigured socialism to him in later years was much more the activity of workers in the Paris Commune and the rise of German social democracy than any pure reliance on a theory which was to prove highly vulnerable to Keynes and to others.106

In some senses then, it was not surprising that, as the account of the meeting in Solidarity’s own journal stated: “The two main speakers, although approaching the problem from different angles, did not disagree on fundamentals. The similarity of many of their views led one comrade, who had come ‘expecting a debate,’ to deplore the presence of ‘two Cardans.’107 The comrade was Kidron, whose contribution was one of the more measured from IS contributors. In his response to the discussion MacIntyre detected “a very bad tone in what Kidron and Cliff had said . . . because it was translated from the Russian, about the year 1905”:

The crucial difference between those who managed capitalism in the 19th century and those who manage it today was that the latter had achieved a degree of consciousness as to what they were doing. . . . this doesn’t mean—and Cardan never alleged that it meant—that there weren’t innumerable obstacles, limitations, etc., to the functioning of the bureaucracy . . . Understanding the movements of the bureaucracy was a question of understanding partly the economic setting in which it operated, partly the history of the bureaucracy which has made it what it was, and partly the fact that it has a dynamic of its own. To define it as simply a reflection of need to control the anarchy of the national or international markets was to ignore the important self-moving aspects of bureaucracy. . . . there is a problem posed here between the bureaucratic political forms and the economic transactions of our society which isn’t in traditional Marxism and which Cardan’s book poses very sharply.108

Ian Birchall, who had known MacIntyre as a member of the Oxford branch of IS, writes of the aftermath of this episode: “I don’t think I ever saw MacIntyre again after that day. I’m fairly certain he didn’t contribute to the group press or attend any further meetings. However, there was never any suggestion of disciplinary measures against him.”109

It was clear from the debate that MacIntyre’s own position was far closer to that of Solidarity and Socialism or Barbarism than it was to the organization to which he ostensibly belonged, but with one crucial difference: whereas Brinton and Cardan still maintained that the working class was a revolutionary force, this position was precisely what MacIntyre was increasingly coming to reject. MacIntyre’s rejection of Marx’s crisis theory, alongside his argument that the modern capitalist division of labor increased the fragmentation of the working class, implied that the workers’ cries for freedom would remain atomized and therefore that the tasks facing socialists were much more daunting, indeed overwhelming, than more orthodox Marxists allowed. This is the conclusion implied in his works of the later 1960s, which, while written when he was still formally an editor of International Socialism, universally suggested little or no hope for revolution. Thus, in his introduction to Marx’s ideas for an academic audience, while he argued that “the most crucial later activity of Marx” was not to write Capital, but was rather through his actions in “helping to found and guiding the International Working Men’s Association,” he concluded that Marx “still leaves the question of working-class political growth obscure.”110 Whether or not this observation was correct of Marx, it certainly appeared to be true of MacIntyre, who was unable to conceptualize any contemporary conditions under which a mass movement might realize his vision of socialism. In fact, MacIntyre now extended his political pessimism back into the nineteenth century. In a series of lectures originally given in 1964, but published some three years later as Secularisation and Moral Change, he argued that Engels had been mistaken in his overly optimistic perspective for the future secularization of British society, and that this was a corollary of his overly optimistic perspectives for socialism. MacIntyre went on to suggest that “the inability of men to discard Christianity is part of their inability to provide any post-Christian means of understanding their situation in the world.” Moreover, while he suggested that this failure was by no means “ultimate,” he noted no inherent tendencies with which socialists might engage that could, belatedly, help them to prove Engels correct.111

Another reason why MacIntyre was drawn to such a pessimistic conclusion was that by the mid-1960s he moved to reject not only Marx’s but also all other competing theories of human nature that might act as a humanist basis for revolutionary politics. This position was made explicit in his classic A Short History of Ethics (1966), where, despite some tangential remarks as to the relationship between morality and desire, his own moral standpoint seemed disjoined from any either historical or materialist premises to which he had earlier been committed.112 Consequently, he rejected the idea of human nature as a benchmark from which to adjudicate moral claims and reduced individual morality to an existential choice.113 While he still chose Marxism in 1966, he refused any criteria by which this choice could be rationally defended. Therefore, without a theory of human nature with which to underpin it, his theory of revolution, at least as he had outlined it in “Freedom and Revolution,” remained baseless. MacIntyre’s socialist morality, in this context, could boast no more compelling foundation than any competing moral claim. Indeed, by the late 1960s it appeared that he had ceased to view Marxism either as a science or as a guide to action, but rather saw it as just one competing worldview among many others. One memoir of his academic performances at the time contains the following description:

In 1965–66 MacIntyre delivered a lecture course at Oxford University entitled “What was Morality?” to a packed room in the Examinations Schools. My image is of a short, jowelled figure in a corduroy suit, the latest in radical chic. The style was at once magisterial and provocative, deadpan but destructive. . . . Like Nietzsche and Sartre, MacIntyre saw “the death of God” as a cataclysmic event in the history of moral systems which had, since the Enlightenment, become a series of failed attempts to attain the objectivity of theism without the embarrassment of theistic doctrines, an objective moral code without God as the author. In the heady 1960s MacIntyre was content to leave us with this deconstructed ruin of history. He viewed the situation with a cheerful irony and ended his lectures with a nod towards the Marxism then propounded by Sartre, which allowed us to seek the ephemeral community of the “group in fusion,” while keeping our distance from the supposed errors of historical materialism. If this was “frivolous,” said MacIntyre, perhaps that was not a vice. In any case, it was all that we could hope for.114

MacIntyre sees two moral issues with Marx’s work. First, Marx gives no reasons for why a class formed under capitalism will find the resources to reject it in favor of socialism: “Hence we remain uncertain as to how Marx conceives it possible that a society prey to the errors of moral individualism may come to recognise and transcend them.” The second is that he does not explain how the morality of Communist society will function. The only alternatives that have been offered are Bernstein’s retreat to Kantian moral imperatives or Kautsky’s return to utilitarianism.115 MacIntyre had a long hatred of utilitarianism.116 What problem did he see with it? There were two. One is that we can never assess what the good is because there are always alternative conceptions of the good and it is necessary to be able to choose between them, but this cannot be done as if they were rival sets of commodities. The other is that goods can be divided between those that are beneficial in themselves and those that are so because they point toward the future; but in Marxist terms, all goods fall into the latter category. Marxism is forever postponing the attainment of the good until the future.117 In 1967 he had conceded two points to critics of Lenin. The first was that he was always prepared to make tactical retreats from socialist principle. “The second was that it was certainly true that underlying such Leninist retreats was a crude utilitarianism: the end of socialism justifies any necessary means.” MacIntyre is not accusing Lenin here of personal cruelty, but: “It remains true that such utilitarianism corrupts and corrupted, that it formed the moral link between Lenin and Stalin.”118 This became a recurrent theme in the late sixties and early 1970s and suggested that MacIntyre had retreated to before the positions set out in “Notes from the Moral Wilderness,” in that the solutions he had proposed there were no longer adequate.119

1968 and after

MacIntyre has referred many times to the change that occurred in his work as a philosopher after moving to the US in 1971.120 In some respects however, a more significant shift in his position had already taken place three years before his relocation across the Atlantic. Nineteen sixty-eight was as important a year in the development of his thought as 1956, although for the opposite reason: if the earlier date opened the period in which he considered himself to be a Marxist, the latter brought it to a close—a renunciation that naturally had political implications. In a revised version of Marxism: An Interpretation, published in 1968 as Marxism and Christianity, MacIntyre wrote: “Clearly someone who has been a Marxist may alter his beliefs on some point in such a way that common action with his former comrades becomes impossible.”121 He had recent experience of precisely this situation. The summer 1968 issue of International Socialism, the first since the May Events in France, contained a rather bemused editorial note on a departure from both the journal and its parent organization: “Alasdair MacIntyre has resigned from the Editorial Board of IS. He offers no extended account of why he is resigning now, rather than earlier or later, nor has he accepted our invitations to lay out his criticisms of the journal in our columns. But resign he has.”122 What had happened?

MacIntyre’s rejection of Marxism as a theory of revolutionary socialism as a practice had coincided with the greatest upsurge of interest in historical materialism for half a century, an intellectual reorientation inspired by great struggles that began in or around that year, and of which the combined French student revolt and general strike was one of the first and most spectacular examples. These events filled many Marxists with enormous hope that there might be a future for genuine socialism, distinct from that of both the social or liberal democratic societies of the West and the Stalinist societies of the East, as can be seen from the response of one of MacIntyre’s younger comrades, David Widgery, to the events of 1968. Widgery was born in 1947, nearly twenty years after MacIntyre; but in other respects the men had comparable backgrounds. Both men were born into religious families; MacIntyre’s parents were Episcopalians, Widgery’s were Quakers. More importantly, perhaps, both men gained their education in left politics as members of the same organizations: the Communist Party of Great Britain, the ultra-orthodox Trotskyist Socialist Labour League, and finally, the International Socialists, which Widgery joined at the very point MacIntyre left.123 Widgery recalled the atmosphere of the time ten years later: “It was as if an international pageant was being acted out—the ideas we had treasured in pamphlets and argued about in tiny pub back rooms were now roaming, alive, three dimensional. Marxism had come out of the cold.”124 How could the same experience impact so differently on people who, nominally at least, had the same politics?

History is full of radicals who abandon their opposition to the existing order during periods of political defeat. In the United States, members of an earlier generation of socialists, usually referred to collectively as the New York intellectuals, had been part of the anti-Stalinist left in the 1930s and early 1940s, and in many cases they put their beliefs into practice by joining Trotskyist organizations. From the late 1940s onward, as the trade union movement was beaten and depoliticized, and the political left broken by McCarthyism for two decades, most began to move right, albeit to different points in the spectrum—there was obviously a difference between the social democracy of an Irving Howe and the neoconservatism of an Irving Kristol.125 A similar trajectory was followed in France from the mid-1970s, after the revolutionary period had passed. Here too a group of militants, opposed as much to Stalinism as Western capitalism (usually on idiosyncratic Maoist rather than Trotskyist grounds) shifted rightwards, although in far more consistent fashion than their US predecessors, with many forming the nucleus of the so-called New Philosophers.126 In both cases, the groups involved claimed to be maintaining consistent anti-Stalinist positions while eliding the fact that these were now on the right rather than the left, with the most right-wing claiming to have discovered that Stalinism was a—in fact the only—genuine expression of Marxism, rather than a betrayal of it.

This type of adjustment to an apparently unyielding system is only to be expected in periods during which the left is in retreat; but MacIntyre rejected Marxism in a period when left-wing and working-class movements were in the ascendant. The only other serious Marxist to abandon political activity at this time was the American Hal Draper, a figure with positions close to MacIntyre’s own, who left the US International Socialists and active politics in January 1971.127 But he did not abandon his Marxism; indeed, Draper went on to write one of the great studies of Marx’s own thought in Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution. MacIntyre’s position was therefore sui generis at the time. What led him to adopt it? Of course, several “Western Marxists” behaved ambivalently toward the new forces that emerged in 1968, which left their reputations greatly diminished among activists, but most did not entirely renege on their Marxist views. Those who were members of the Communist parties, such as Althusser in France, tended to defer, albeit with greater or lesser reservations, to the deeply conservative positions taken by these organizations.128 Those who were politically unattached, like the members of the Frankfurt School in Germany—above all, Adorno—actively opposed the activities of the students.129 In this respect Marxist academics were simply experiencing the same discomfort as others in their profession. One starting point for explaining MacIntyre’s course in 1968 might therefore be his reaction to the student rebellion.

Eight years earlier MacIntyre had discussed the situation of students in “Breaking the Chains of Reason.” After reviewing the different generations of students that had passed through the universities since the war, he then set out alternative trajectories for the cohort of 1960:

All that tremendous adolescent energy, which the very rawness of the emotion makes so impressive, is still looking for intellectual satisfaction at the political level. If no coherent answers are found, then as the student generations pass on they will become all the more frustrated and disillusioned for having been so hopeful in the past. And this is what reactionaries hope for. “I was a socialist when I was young too.” The unspoken completion of this—“How good to grow middle-aged, conservative and self-satisfied like me”—points to the danger of silting up the poetry of adolescence into the prose of bourgeois middle age. All the pressures are there: the need to get a job, to succeed in it, to bring up a family, to pay for a house. Not to succumb to these feelings and the questioning must find a theory and a way of life which will transmute the poetry of adolescence into continuous life-long activity.130

Now Macintyre appeared to be hostile even to the poetry of adolescence. When the convulsive events of 1968 began to unfold MacIntyre was employed as a Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex at Colchester, where he also acted as Dean of Students. Essex was one of the postwar new universities. It had opened in 1964 and was now experiencing a period of rapid growth. Essex did not escape the general mood of insurgency—indeed, given that it was constructed and run precisely as one of the “knowledge-factories” whose conditions had helped produce the student revolt, it would have been surprising if it had. A body calling itself the Union Reform Committee had been active at least since January, and some of its members produced a pamphlet that month criticizing both the undemocratic nature of the university and the way in which the local Students’ Union was integrated into its structures. At least one member of the committee (Mike Gonzalez) was also in the IS.131 Student unrest grew from February onward, but open revolt was precipitated by the announcement of a campus meeting to be addressed by Dr. T. A. Lynch on May 7. Lynch was a scientist employed at Porton Down, the experimental laboratory at which research was carried out into chemical and biological warfare (or “defense,” in the Orwellian terminology of the British state). One hundred and fifty students broke up the meeting, an act to which the vice chancellor responded by calling in the police and their dogs, and suspending three ringleaders without a hearing. The subsequent campaign to reinstate the three, galvanized by the return of visitors to the Paris events, was finally triumphant on May 17 following a student strike supported by a large minority of the lecturers. The strike was, however, opposed by MacIntyre, who commented shortly afterward: “Ironically, our mistake was to be so liberal . . . They [the students] have no real practical injustices to fight against; so they had to rebel on ideological grounds like germ warfare and Vietnam—and these we were powerless to alter.”132 Leaving aside that the university was not powerless in the matter of inviting Lynch to speak, these comments are striking, from a Marxist perspective, for two reasons.

One is the idea that it was inappropriate for students to protest against the involvement of universities in arms production and imperialist war, simply because this did not directly impact on their conditions, particularly since only months later MacIntyre was to defend student opposition to the Vietnam War: “ . . . when [George Kennan] condemns civil disobedience outright and when he supposes that what the student Left dislike about the Vietnam War is that they might be killed in it, he exhibits an ignorance of the contemporary student scene which is disgraceful in a member of a university. . . . what he does not begin to grasp—and what his dreadful paternalistic style must obscure from him—is that in Vietnam war crimes are being committed and that resistance to the Vietnam War by acts of civil disobedience is therefore not a right, but a duty.”133 But this was in relation to Berkeley, not Essex.

Second, and even more bizarre from someone with MacIntyre’s intellectual history, was his implication that both what is taught and the way it is taught are separable from the society in which they take place. MacIntyre was contemptuous of what he described as “Marcuse’s idealised students who have produced the first parent-financed revolts in what is more like a new version of the children’s crusade than a revolutionary movement.”134 Marcuse was in fact far less influential on the British student movement than is often assumed.135 It is clear, however, that for MacIntyre the name “Marcuse” only partly refers to that individual, but also acts as a collective label for those who would undermine or overthrow the autonomy of the university: “The defence of the authority to teach and research as it will is in more danger immediately from Marcuse’s student allies than from any other quarter—even though Marcuse himself has on occasion exempted the university from his critique.”136 MacIntyre writes of the need for awareness of “the influence of false sociological theorizing and of misinformation”: “This is most obvious on a large scale in the Marcusean belief of SDS theorists that they are confronted by a total well-integrated social order in which higher education serves the purposes of the system as a whole.”137 His retreat from the concept of totality now even extended to the Vietnam War:

The myth of American imperialism in Vietnam is the product of a coalition between the sternest critics of the war and its sternest supporters. In actual fact American involvement in South Vietnam came about through a series of improvisations and ad hoc measures in which Kennedy and Johnson continuously produced larger and larger unforeseen effects; then they identified themselves with what they had produced and ended by producing a war which has been destructive for every party engaged in it and from which no good can result.

Both supporters and opponents of the war “work within frameworks which demand of social life that it have a coherence which it in fact no longer possesses.”138 But one does not have to believe that capitalist society in the age of imperialism possesses coherence, only that, in geopolitics as much as in markets, it follows the logic of competitive accumulation.

At one level, MacIntyre’s hostility to Marcuse and those influenced by him is entirely justified, as a rejection of the implied—indeed, often completely explicit—elitism of their position in relation to the working class. In this respect, his polemics from this period show some of the last flashes of his earlier politics, particularly in this entirely realistic dissection of the various movements and groups that were often thoughtlessly lumped together in the 1968 period:

There are the genuinely aspiring poor of America and peasants in Vietnam and elsewhere who must not be confused with their self-appointed spokesmen; there are the middle-class whites of SDS and their counterparts in Britain, Germany and France who in their combination of insurrectionism and anarchism exemplify what Lenin diagnosed as left-wing communism, an infantile disease; and there are the representatives of the communist bureaucracies in China, Cuba and Vietnam who represent right-wing Communism, an oligarchical disease. These forces have only one thing in common: they are all in conflict with the governments of the advanced industrial societies. But, as both Marx and Lenin knew, to be in conflict with the established order is not necessarily to be an agent of liberation.139

But perhaps MacIntyre’s rage at Marcuse is also partly symptomatic of the fact that he too had decided that the working class was incapable of liberating itself. Shortly after the events at Essex, on June 20, 1968, MacIntyre gave a broadcast talk on the BBC Third Programme, as he had many times before. Here MacIntyre announced “the death of social democratic England,” a judgment that, in retrospect, seems not so much wrong as premature:

And working-class people will gradually learn that they are still to be excluded, and that in streamed comprehensive schools and expanded universities, it will still be the case that all the advantages lie with the children of middle-class parents. If they learn also that no conventional political remedy can help them, then they will have the choice between a kind of non-political subservience that has been alien to them even at their most apathetic and a new politics of conflict. For my part, I hope that they learn both lessons fast, and if it is said that I’ve been presenting something akin not so much to a personal view as to a partisan political broadcast, let me point out that I am talking for and of a group that has no party, the British working class.140

MacIntyre makes the assumption that, although the class struggle goes on and the working class is right to defend its interests (for example by unofficial strike action), there are limits to it that are set by the structural incapacity of the proletariat to overthrow capital. As he was shortly to write (in an important passage to which I will return): “one might write the history of the age which Marxism illuminated so much more clearly that any other doctrine did, the period from 1848 to 1929, as one in which Marx’s view of progress of capitalism was substantially correct, but at the end of which, when the Marxist script for the world drama required the the emergence of the European working-class as the agent of historical change, the working class turned out to be quiescent and helpless.”141 In other words, far from reformism as strategy no longer being possible, as he had once argued, it was now the only option for the working class. He still retained the view that the Labour Party, which at one level had once represented the working class, no longer did so, but this meant that other forces had to play that role. Indeed this might be the real role for revolutionaries. As he wrote later in 1968, in a review of a book by his former comrade, Paul Foot:

One of the true lessons to be learnt from his narrative is the law of diminishing socialist returns, a little-known law which states that in the normal conditions of capitalist society everyone’s actions tend to be to the right of their principles. From liberals one gets mildly conservative actions, from Right social democrats liberal actions, from Left social democrats right-wing social democrat actions, and so on. From this law it follows that only those with a revolutionary perspective are likely to promote genuine left-wing reforms. If revolutionary critics of society neglect their responsibility here, no one else is likely to assume it.142

The closest MacIntyre came to a contemporary articulation of his differences with IS is to be found in Marxism and Christianity. MacIntyre’s expert analysis of the lineages of Marx’s ideas through Feuerbach and German Idealism and into Christian theology remained from the original 1953 text; expunged, however, was any suggestion of the practical, Christian-socialist purpose of the original. Reviewing the book for International Socialism Richard Kuper bemoaned the rewrite, arguing that while the second edition, as a work of theory, was formally closer to classical Marxism than the first edition, the activist core of the first edition had made that much the better of the two books.143 A similar point was later made by MacIntyre himself in his 1995 introduction to the book: “In the first version of this book there was a chapter on philosophy and practice that was omitted when I revised it in 1968. That chapter was originally included because it attempted to pose what I had rightly recognized as the fundamental problem. It was later omitted because I had by then learnt that I did not know how to pose that problem adequately, let alone how to resolve it. So in 1968 I mistakenly attempted to bypass it.”144

In 1968, while MacIntyre had reached the negative conclusion that Marxists had not adequately theorized the problem of revolutionary practice, he failed to formulate a viable alternative. He concluded Marxism and Christianity with the suggestion that the desires of workers were irredeemably constrained by their fragmented practices, and that, in such a context, Lukács’s defense of Lenin’s politics amounted to a “deification of the party” that was merely the flip side to Kautsky’s earlier “deification of history.”145 The failure of Marxism was that it had accepted the division of the economic, political, and social characteristics of capitalism and the way these divisions were reproduced in the categories of liberal theory. This failure led most Marxists to misunderstand how a class could arise in Russia that had apparently abolished capitalist property relations and used Marxist vocabulary to cover their continued exploitation of the working class.146

MacIntyre’s version of the Pascalian “wager” depended on the possibility of the working class performing a revolutionary role, but he now no longer believed that this was possible. Ironically, given his earlier critique of Popper, he seems to have treated this failure in Popperian terms as an empirical refutation of the theory of proletarian revolution. MacIntyre argued that hitherto Marxists had explained away the failure of Marx’s predictions either by claiming that the time scale was simply longer than had hitherto been supposed or by a series of “supplementary hypotheses,” including those of the labor aristocracy and “doctrinal corruption,” but these were ways of avoiding two painful facts: “The first of these was that the working class—not just its leadership—was either reformist or unpolitical except in the most exceptional of circumstances, not so much because of the inadequacies of its trade union and political leadership as because of its whole habit of life.”147 Lukács had written in History and Class Consciousness that “historical materialism both can and must be applied to itself. . . . Above all we must investigate the social premises of the substance of historical materialism just as Marx himself scrutinised the social and economic preconditions of the truths of classical economics.”148 Cardan subsequently made similar claims in a series of articles first published between 1961 and 1964, which were gradually translated by Solidarity throughout the 1960s and 1970s.149 But for Cardan, the self-investigation called for by Lukács would reveal that Marxism had to be abandoned, not least because of the ways in which it treats as permanent aspects of human society features that are particular to capitalism. MacIntyre adopted this version of the argument as the sixties drew to a close: “It would be inconsistent with Marxism itself to view Marxism in any other way: in particular, what we cannot do is judge and understand Marxist theory as it has really existed with all its vicissitudes in the light of some ideal version of Marxism. It follows that by the present time to be faithful to Marxism we have to cease to be Marxists; and whoever now remains a Marxist has thereby discarded Marxism.”150 The point therefore, was not that Marxism had never been true, but that it no longer was:

[Marx] envisages the concentration of workers in large factory units and the limits set upon the growth of wages as necessary conditions for the growth of [political] consciousness; but he says nothing about how or why the workers will learn and assimilate the truths which Marxism seeks to bring to them. . . . Indeed, one might write the history of the age which Marxism illuminated so much more clearly than any other doctrine did, the period from 1848 to 1929, as one in which Marx’s view of the progress of capitalism was substantially correct, but at the end of which, when the Marxist script for the world drama required the emergence of the European working class as the agent of historical change, the working class turned out to be quiescent and helpless.151

The second painful fact that had contributed to the “quiescence” was that living standards had generally improved, if unevenly and inconsistently, especially after 1945, when “the ability of capitalism to innovate in order to maintain its equilibrium and its expansion was of a radically new kind. Consequently, not only has the future crisis of capitalism had—for those who wished to retain the substance of the classical Marxist view—to be delayed, there had to be additional explanations why, in the new situation, capitalism is still liable to crisis in the same sense as before.” The resulting degeneration can take two main forms. On the one hand, those who “flee from the realities of that society into the private cloud-cuckoo lands of Marxist sectarianism where they tilt at capitalist windmills with Marxist texts in their hands, the Don Quixotes of the contemporary left.” On the other, those who “embrace what Lenin called the worship of what is . . . allowing Marx’s notion of revolutionary working class power to be confused with that of the administrative manoeuvres of the Soviet bureaucrats.”152

As a result of these changed conditions, those who continue to describe themselves as “revolutionaries” are, according to MacIntyre, likely to have five main characteristics. First, an “all-or-nothing existence,” whose activities allow them, second, to “sustain a plausible social existence.” Third, they must believe that their activities have “world-historical significance,” justification for their revolutionary beliefs, despite their apparent lack of significance in the world: “In this way miniscule Trotskyist groups can represent their faction fights as a repetition of the great quarrels of the Bolshevik party.” Fourth, the tension between activity and aspiration gives their lives an inevitable precariousness: “Joseph Conrad understood this; so did Henry James; so, in his own way, did Trotsky.” Fifth, and finally, revolutionaries must feel their activities are justified by both history and their own activity, but since both are refutable by counterexamples: “This requirement is in obvious tension, however, with the revolutionary’s commitment to make the predictions derived from his theory come true.” MacIntyre claims that a comparable elitism links the revolutionary with the industrial manager and the professional social scientist: “The ideology of expertise embodies a claim to privilege with respect to power.” Consequently, the “contemporary revolutionary” is “antidemocratic.”153

Examples of “antidemocratic” revolutionaries abounded in the late sixties, of course, not least in the Third World. Yet even at this stage, MacIntyre still counterposes Trotsky the revolutionary democrat against them and their sympathizers in the developed world: “One can well understand why Trotsky’s ghost haunts Sartre and Debray. For both Sartre and Debray have a peculiar conception—far more élitist than that of Leninism—of an inert mass of be it workers, be it peasants, who need a leadership of particular gifts to rouse them to revolutionary activity.” This does not see Trotskyism as an alternative strategy for revolutionaries in the Third World but an analysis that identifies why they are bound to fail:

Che himself could not avoid facing dilemmas which in other contexts were responsible for creating Trotskyism, and he could not avoid making choices which were incompatible with Trotskyism. This is because Trotsky himself had had to face at successive points in his career all the dilemmas of those who wish to make a Marxist revolution in an underdeveloped country and because, too, the failure of Trotskyism to provide a recipe for successful revolutionary practice in the face of those dilemmas is an inescapable fact.

A consequence of that failure is an endless repetition of the experience of Socialism in One Country:

One paradox of post-Stalin Stalinism is that it may be those who are most repelled by the surviving Stalinist features of the Soviet Union who therefore try to build a socialist revolution in isolation from the Soviet camp or at least in the minimum of contact with it. But in so doing they revive the very thesis of ‘socialism in one country” on which Stalinism was founded and in this way reject Trotskyism.154

His description, “Marxism of the Will,” indicates that MacIntyre sees the Marxists he is criticizing as succumbing to the illusions of voluntarism. Yet it is Trotsky—whom he had in some contexts accused of the same failing—that he now invokes against them. MacIntyre is not, of course, arguing that Trotsky was a secret gradualist, but rather the supreme realist in the Marxist tradition. In effect, MacIntyre is arguing that Trotsky has demonstrated that there can be nothing beyond capitalism. This general conclusion is brought out with the greatest clarity in the closing pages of After Virtue:

If the moral impoverishment of advanced capitalism is what so many Marxists agree that it is, whence are these resources for the future to be derived? It is not surprising that at this point Marxism tends to produce its own version of the Ubermensch: Lukács’s ideal proletarian, Lenin’s ideal revolutionary. When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy. One of the most admirable aspects of Trotsky’s cold resolution was his refusal of all such fantasies. A Marxist who took Trotsky’s last writings with great seriousness would be forced into a pessimism quite alien to the Marxist tradition, and in becoming a pessimist he would in an important way have ceased to be a Marxist. For he would now see no tolerable alternative set of political and economic structures which could be brought into place to replace the structures of advanced capitalism. This conclusion agrees of course with my own.155

But is it legitimate to infer this conclusion from Trotsky’s last writings? A passage that seems to have had particular importance for MacIntyre occurs in Trotsky’s last sustained discussion of the nature of the Soviet Union before his assassination: “The historic alternative, carried to the end, is as follows: either the Stalin regime is an abhorrent relapse in the process of transforming bourgeois society into a socialist society, or the Stalin regime is the first stage of a new exploiting society. If the second prognosis proves to be correct, then, of course, the bureaucracy will become a new ruling class.”156 This is how MacIntyre interpreted these words in “Trotsky in Exile”:

Although Trotsky continued to defend the view that in some sense the Soviet Union was a workers’ state, he had committed himself to predictions about the results of the Second World War, the outcome of which would for him settle the matter. If his view were correct, the Soviet bureaucracy after a victorious war would be overthrown as a result of proletarian revolution in the advanced countries of the West. If the view of those Trotskyists who held that a kind of bureaucratic state capitalism existed in Russia were correct, they would be vindicated by the failure to occur of such a revolution and such an overthrow. It was with this question still before him that Trotsky died.157

And here is how he interprets it a superficially similar passage from After Virtue:

Trotsky, in the very last years of his life, facing the question of whether the Soviet Union was in any sense a socialist country, also faced implicitly the question of whether the categories of Marxism could illuminate the future. He himself made everything turn on the outcome of a set of hypothetical predictions about possible future events in the Soviet Union, predications which were tested only after Trotsky’s death. The answer they returned was clear: Trotsky’s own premises entailed that the Soviet Union was not socialist and that the theory which was to have illuminated the path to human liberation had in fact led to darkness.158

Between these two texts the position MacIntyre derives from Trotsky has shifted from the outcome of the war deciding whether or not the Soviet Union was a form of bureaucratic state capitalism to deciding whether socialism is possible. The first vindicates Marxism because it is capable of explaining this outcome; the second condemns Marxism as being responsible for it. Given that MacIntyre dismissed in “Trotsky in Exile” those Trotskyists who transformed “into abstract dogma what Trotsky thought in concrete terms at one moment in his life,” there is a certain irony in that this is precisely what he does in After Virtue. The position that Trotsky took toward the Soviet Union in the last years of his life is clearly bound up with his “now or never” attitude to the entire world situation on the eve of the Second World War—a perspective that also included the irreversible decline of the capitalist economy, the collapse of social democracy, the impossibility of Third World development, and many other predictions that turned out to be false. The source of MacIntyre’s error actually occurs in the first quoted passage, for Trotskyists who identified the Soviet Union as state capitalist did not argue that revolution was impossible in Russia, simply that the state was not an unstable, temporary formation that would shatter under the impact of war, as Trotsky and his orthodox epigones claimed. Indeed, Cliff ended his initial statement of the state capitalist case by predicting “gigantic spontaneous upsurges of millions” in a forthcoming revolution.159

At the end of World War II orthodox Trotskyists found that reality did not correspond to what their theory had predicted. Their initial response was to deny reality, then to revise their theory to such an extent that it lost contact with the notion of working-class self-emancipation that had been at heart of both Trotskyism and the classical Marxist tradition it sought to continue. MacIntyre, in effect, did the opposite. He too understood that the world had changed, but was too intellectually honest to produce endless “auxiliary hypotheses” to protect the theory. If MacIntyre had simply overestimated the extent to which these changes signaled permanent shifts in the nature of capitalism, reality would soon have provided a check with the onset of crisis from the mid-seventies. Yet this was not the only or even the main reason why MacIntyre abandoned Trotskyism and, with it, Marxism as a tradition, rather the source of individual insights. He has restated that second reason, working-class incapacity, on several occasions since, most recently in “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken.” Here MacIntyre contrasts the world of the handloom weavers documented by Edward Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class and the Silesian weavers whose struggle Marx himself noted in 1844, contrasting both of these with the situation of the contemporary working class: “But [Marx] seems not to have understood the form of life from which that militancy arose, and so later failed to understand that while proletarianisation makes it necessary for workers to resist, it also tends to deprive workers of those forms of practice through which they can discover conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance.” 160

Conclusion

MacIntyre began his literary career in 1953 with Marxism: An Interpretation. According to his own account, he attempted in that book to be faithful to both his Christian and, in so far as he regarded it as a Christian heresy, his Marxist beliefs.161 By 1968, he had abandoned both, although in the case of Christianity he seems to have done so as early as 1961. At any rate, by 1971 he was able to introduce a collection of his essays by rejecting these and, indeed, all other attempts to illuminate the human condition.162 Since then, MacIntyre has of course reembraced Christianity, although that of the Catholic Church rather than the Anglicanism to which he originally adhered. It seems unlikely, at this stage, that he will undertake a similar reconciliation with Marxism. Nevertheless, his insights into the historical origins of moral concepts in specific forms of social life would be unthinkable without it.163 As late as 1991 he said:

Even if Marxist characterizations of advanced capitalism are inadequate, the Marxist understanding of liberalism as ideological, as a self-deceiving mask for certain social interests, remains compelling. . . . it was Marxism which convinced me that every morality including that of modern liberalism, however universal its aims, is the morality of some particular social group, embodied and lived out in the life and history of that group. Indeed, a morality has no existence except in its actual and possible social embodiments, and what it amounts to is what it does or what it can amount to in its socially embodied forms.

Yet moments later in the same interview, when invited to describe himself as a Marxist, MacIntyre refused, on the grounds that “if I had gone on being a Marxist this lesson would not have been much good to me. For Marxism is not just an inadequate, but a largely inept, instrument for social analysis.”164 Nevertheless, as MacIntyre has frequently reminded his readers, most recently in the prologue to the third edition of After Virtue (2007), his rejection of Marxism as a whole does not mean that he rejects every insight that it has to offer: “although After Virtue was written in part out of a recognition of those moral inadequacies of Marxism which its twentieth-century history had disclosed, I was and remain deeply indebted to Marx’s critique of the economic, social, and cultural order of capitalism and to the development of that critique by later Marxists.”165

As MacIntyre’s response to the debates over After Virtue, and his subsequent writings, have shown, his pessimism has not moderated his hostility to either capitalism or its liberal ideologues, which remains as intense as ever. According to MacIntyre’s current Aristotelian position “the costs of economic development are generally paid by those least able to afford them,” but politics offers no alternative:

Attempts to reform the political systems of modernity from within are always transformed into coalitions with them. Attempts to overthrow them always degenerate into terrorism or quasi terrorism. What is not barren is the politics involved in constructing and sustaining small-scale local communities, at the level of the family, the neighbourhood, the workplace, the parish, the school, or clinic, communities within which the needs of the hungry and the homeless can be met. I am not a communitarian. I do not believe in ideals or forms of community as a nostrum for contemporary social ills.166

For MacIntyre, “there are no remedies” for contemporary capitalism: “The problem is not to reform the dominant order, but to find ways for local communities to survive by sustaining a life of the common good against the disintegrating forces of the nation-state and the market.”167 But if reform is impossible, so too is revolution: “I do not see any prospects of overthrowing the dominant social order. But perhaps it can be outlived; and even if it cannot be overthrown, it ought to be rejected.”168

The difficulty is that it looks increasingly likely that the dominant social order may not allow us the luxury of outliving it. If we do not succeed in overthrowing it, then things will not simply continue in the old oppressive way, perhaps getting a bit better, perhaps a bit worse. Socialism is necessary simply to remove the threats to existence for millions from starvation, epidemic, and war, and for everyone, including the capitalists themselves, of environmental catastrophe. It may be that one of the other Marxists who understood revolution as a form of “wager” was belatedly right in his assessment. “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history,” wrote Walter Benjamin in 1940. “But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.”169 In these circumstances, revolution appears not as a sectarian indulgence but as the only serious option, so we had better find a way to make it work without reproducing the very forms of oppression that make it necessary. In periods of crisis and social upheaval Marxism—or rather, Marxisms—always experience a revival in interest. The variants that attain the greatest popularity are not always those that embody the emancipatory heart of the tradition. And if MacIntyre’s critique, of which his engagement with Trotsky was such a central part, cannot be accepted as a whole, it may still alert us to potential dangers and indicate the roads not to take.