Marx, morality and the global justice debate
Lawrence Wilde
Introduction
Marx is conspicuous by his absence from the burgeoning debate on global justice. Recent summaries of leading contributions, as well as edited collections, barely mention Marx.1 In the extensive Global Justice Reader, edited by Thom Brooks, he fares a little better, but on closer inspection all the references relate to the work of one theorist, Martha Nussbaum (Brooks 2008: 600–18).2 Nussbaum’s use of Marx’s philosophy of human potential raises interesting questions about the relationship between liberal approaches to global justice and Marxism, an issue that will be addressed in the final part of the chapter. First, however, I want to deal with the most obvious reason for the neglect of Marx in this field, namely, the hostility he displayed towards moral discourse from 1845 to the end of his life. In this part of the chapter, I argue that this rejection of moral discourse was a tactical choice, contingent on the particular circumstances of the time and no longer appropriate to the circumstances we face today. The second part will argue that there is an ethical viewpoint implicit in Marx’s analysis, a eudaemonistic ethics understood as a commitment to self realization through the development of key potentials. The third part will examine how Martha Nussbaum uses Marx’s philosophy to support her capabilities approach to global justice, as set down in Frontiers of Justice (2006). I argue that her selective use of Marx could be augmented by a stronger commitment to a project of de-alienation that would require the radical re-regulation of the world economy.
Marx’s anti-moralism as a tactical choice
Before 1845, there was a strong moral thrust to Marx’s central argument that capitalism is rooted in alienation and has a dehumanizing impact, not only on the working class but also on society as a whole. In The German Ideology (1845–6), Marx begins to develop a social science that has no truck with moralizing or indeed with abstract philosophical argument. His impatience with philosophy that does not take into account real social relations in their historical context was evident already in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845). Now, on the understanding that it is not consciousness that determines life but life that determines consciousness, morality, along with religion and metaphysics, is treated as epiphenomenal to the development of the social life process (Marx 1976a: 36–7). Having made this general point, Marx goes on to make a number of attacks against individual philosophers for their muddle-headed moralism, and, in an attack on Max Stirner, makes the unequivocal point that ‘communists do not preach morality at all’ (ibid: 247).
In the Communist Manifesto (1848), we find a relativist view of morality whereby all moral, religious and philosophical ideas are seen as reflections of the conditions of material existence, so that ‘the ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class’ (Marx 1976b: 503). Marx anticipates the objection that morality itself has persisted throughout history, despite historical modifications, and therefore if communism rejects ‘eternal truths’ it runs the risk of acting in contradiction to all past historical experience’ (Marx 1976b: 504), but his answer is highly unconvincing. He insists that since all the history of past society has been one of class antagonism, the common forms of consciousness must reflect, in various ways, the exploitative nature of class society. Only with the abolition of class antagonisms can these common forms of consciousness be left behind, so that communism involves the ‘most radical rupture with traditional ideas’ (Marx 1976b: 504). Marx then abruptly ends the discussion and urges the working class to win the battle for democracy. What we are left with here is an approach that feels free to criticize all moral judgements on the grounds that they reflect particular material interests, but resolutely refuses to be drawn on its own moral position. Nevertheless it should at least be conceded that the communist society of the future will have its own moral principles. At one stage in the third volume of Capital, Marx projects one aspect of what a communist moral viewpoint would look like, when he states that the private ownership of land will come to be regarded as just as absurd as the idea of slavery appears to us in liberal society (Marx 1981: 911). However, this is an isolated instance of thinking about what a socialist morality might look like, and Marx in general abjures from discussing how a revolutionary moral consciousness might develop. Instead, all is left to the revolutionary struggle, informed by theoretical analyses of the economic and political conditions.
It is not hard to gauge the reasons for Marx’s moral reticence. Put briefly, socialist arguments based on moral objections to unfairness or exclusion run the risk of blocking the emergence of analyses of the conditions confronted by the working class, and such analyses were vital to identifying the most propitious ways of organizing and intervening politically. At this relatively early time in the development of socialist thought, most of the contributions were moralistic or utopian, setting down ideal alternatives without due consideration of how revolutionary social movements could develop under existing conditions and circumstances. Marx wanted to move beyond the twin postures of outrage and yearning, towards developing a better understanding of what was possible under given conditions and circumstances. However, it is important to recognize that Marx was making a tactical choice in shunning moral argument, rather than repudiating the idea that the struggle for socialism has a moral dimension. In other words, his denunciation of specific moral positions should not be taken to mean that all moral utterances are nonsense.
An example of Marx denouncing bad moralizing without rejecting the validity of all moral thinking as such can be found in those parts of the Critique of the Gotha Programme in which the German Social Democratic Party claims for all members of society ‘an equal right to the undiminished proceeds of labour’ and ‘a just distribution of the proceeds of labour’ (Marx 1974: 341–7). On the ‘just distribution’ argument, Marx repeats his relativist position by stating that the bourgeoisie would claim that the present system of distribution is just and that they would be right to do so within the present relations of production (Marx 1974: 344). However, Marx makes it clear that by ‘just’ he refers to a legal concept of right, thereby leaving open the possibility that it may be considered unjust by some socialist standard that anticipates a post-capitalist future. The argument against the ‘equal right to undiminished proceeds’ is simply that if all people had equal right, that would include those who do not work, and if that was the case then the proceeds of labour would not be ‘undiminished’. Marx then goes on to make a number of points about how part of the proceeds of labour must be set aside for public services, including looking after those who are not able to work. Marx terms these demands ‘obsolete verbal rubbish’ (Marx 1974: 347), but this judgement is quite specific to the cases discussed and should not be construed as a general repudiation of morality per se. Not only does Marx concede that ideas of this sort may have ‘made sense’ at a particular time, but he also endorses a principle of distributive justice for the future communist society, already well established in socialist circles – ‘from each according to ability to each according to needs’ (Marx 1974: 347).
Along with his aversion to moral discourse, then, is an acknowledgement that moral statements can make sense and that moral ideals are an inevitable part of class struggle. When he wrote the Provisional Rules of the First International in 1864, he included a commitment that the members of the International ‘will acknowledge truth, justice and morality, as the basis of their conduct towards each other and towards all men, without regard to colour, creed or nationality’, followed by a claim for the rights and duties of man and citizen (Marx 1974: 82–3). In a letter to Engels, Marx reveals that he had been ‘obliged’ to insert these sentences by the sub-committee, adding that ‘these are so placed that they can do no harm’ (Marx 1987: 18). So, although he would not have adopted this language if left to his own devices, he was quite willing to put his name to these moral commitments. Indeed, in his own Inaugural Address to the International, he urged the working class to oppose the predatory foreign policies of the various governments, in order to ‘vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice’ which ought to govern both relations between individuals and relations between states (Marx 1974: 81).
Marx never denied that workers were motivated by ideals, despite the passage in The Civil War in France in which he argues that the working class did not expect miracles from the Paris Commune and were not trying to introduce a ready-made utopia overnight. He claims that the workers ‘have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant’ (Marx 1974: 213). Geras has interpreted this to mean that Marx denied that the workers had ideals at all (Geras 1986: 55), but if we read the ‘but’ in the sentence as ‘except’ then it becomes clear that setting free elements of the new society from the status quo is just such an ideal, an ideal of emancipation. This becomes apparent in the relevant passage of the first draft, in which Marx argues that from the moment the workers’ struggle became real, the ‘fantastic utopias evanesced, not because the working class had given up the end aimed at by these Utopians, but because they had found the real means to realize them’ (Marx 1974: 262). It is perfectly clear from this that Marx acknowledges that the workers have ideals, and indeed in the closing paragraph of The Civil War in France, Marx declares that the martyrs of the Commune will become part of the collective memory of the working class, fired by outrage against those responsible for their deaths, who will be ‘nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priests will not avail to redeem them’ (Marx 1974: 233).
Marx chose to downplay moral argument because he considered that it would detract from the imperative tasks of analysing the contradictions of capitalism and formulating an effective political strategy. Yet even if we accept Marx’s moral relativism, we are still entitled to ponder what precepts of justice would be appropriate to communist society, and, furthermore, we should be able to identify how those feelings for justice are developing in late capitalism. Marx did not consider it important to dwell on such issues in the nineteenth century, instead relying on a conviction – indeed a faith – that the working class would achieve a consciousness of its own position and create effective revolutionary movements. Despite his frequent observations about competition among the workers, the baleful effects of national and racial prejudice and the moderating effects of parliamentary politics, he had an unwavering conviction that working class political action would replace capitalist society with communist society. Implicitly, there was an assumption that socialist consciousness would grow in step with the growth of the proletariat and its organizations. These hopes have not materialized, and, furthermore, the failure to realize Marx’s injunction in the eleventh of the Theses on Feuerbach to change the world should prompt a critical reappraisal of his rejection of philosophy and morality. As Adorno (1990: 3) rightly comments at the outset of Negative Dialectics, not to do so would constitute ‘a defeatism of reason’. Such reappraisal is made all the more urgent by the fact that, in the twentieth century, Marxist movements actually adopted a default moral position of ‘the end justifies the means’ without any serious consideration of either means or ends, with disastrous consequences, as Steven Lukes argues in Marxism and Morality (Lukes 1985: 100–38). Marx’s work provides a rich resource for the development of arguments that disclose global exploitation not simply as the manifestation of global class struggle, but also as global injustice. Struggles for economic re-regulation are also struggles for human freedom. It is incumbent on those who accept the truth of Marx’s analysis of capitalism and who share the normative goals that are clearly present in his work, to engage in this moral discourse. The moral debate is also a political debate, and, through the process of ‘normative framing’, radical forces in civil society can mount a serious challenge to neoliberalism. If Marxists have only negative criticisms to offer in relation to the arguments about global justice, they will effectively be adopting the sort of ‘political indifferentism’ which Marx condemned the anarchists for at the time of the First International (Marx 1974: 327–32).
Marx’s implicit eudaemonistic ethics
Having established that Marx’s hostility to moral discourse does not involve a rejection of morality per se, the question arises as to what sort of ethics can be extracted from Marx’s work. What is clear is that there is plenty to work with, for his analysis of capitalism is replete with morally committed references to the extraction of surplus value as robbing, stealing, embezzling or ‘pumping booty’ out of the workers, and elsewhere as theft and loot (see Peffer 1990: 145). The literature on the implicit ethics of Marx is extensive and has been expertly reviewed by Rodney Peffer in Marxism, Morality, and Social Justice (1990), where he identifies two approaches. The first is to attempt to reconstruct Marx’s own moral viewpoint, making explicit what is implicit in his work. The second is to re-frame Marx’s social theory through the lens of existing moral theories such as Kantianism or utilitarianism; Peffer himself constructs a Marxist moral theory along the lines of Rawls’s theory of justice. This second approach has the merits of opening a dialogue with mainstream moral philosophy, but loses the richness of Marx’s original perspectives, developed out of his immersion in the ethics of Ancient Greece. So, I opt for the first approach, and, following scholars such as John Somerville, Alan Nasser, Hilliard Aronovitch and Richard Miller (discussed in Peffer 1990: 100–6), argue that Marx’s implicit moral position remains as it was in the early writings, firmly in the eudaemonistic tradition (Wilde 1998: 1–50).3 What is required here is a clarification of what Marx considered human beings in capitalism to be alienated from in order to illuminate his normative conception of human emancipation.
The alienation thesis is the leitmotif of the Economic and Philosophical Writings. Marx bemoans the fact that work is experienced as deadening compulsion, with the worker feeling free only in functions such as eating, drinking and making love, which, taken abstractly, are animal functions (Marx 1975: 275). The fact that these functions are shared with animals does not mean that they are not also human needs which are being met, but clearly for Marx there must be more to human life than this. In discussing alienation from species-being, Marx elaborates on the difference between humans and animals, much as Aristotle had done when discussing human essence (he had just translated Aristotle’s De Anima – ‘On the Soul’ – into German). According to Marx, ‘conscious life activity’ distinguishes humans from animals, for whereas animals are ‘immediately one’ with their life activity, humans make their life activity the object of their will and consciousness. This emphasis on rational planning of our ‘activity’ is followed by a sharper focus on the human capacity for social production, creating products for each other in a consciously planned way. ‘It is just because of this that he is a species-being’, comments Marx, a conscious being for whom ‘his own life is an object for him’ and ‘his activity free activity’. His argument is that by creating a world of objects, humans prove themselves to be conscious species-beings, or, in other words, they demonstrate their essence. Animals too produce, but only for what they or their young immediately need; they produce only to meet their immediate physical need, while man produces even when he is free from physical need. Indeed truly free production occurs only when immediate needs are taken care of, and humans gain knowledge of how to produce in accordance with the standard of every species and how to produce what we think of as beautiful (Marx 1975: 276–7). In other words, animals can adapt to their environment by changing themselves – autoplasticity – but humans can change the environment – alloplasticity. However, under alienation, the objective demonstration of human essence is contradicted by the subjective experience of the mass of producers, who are condemned to adaptation rather than self realization.
Like Aristotle, Marx holds firm to the idea that we are fundamentally social beings. He expresses this at length in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and reiterates it in the Grundrisse and the first volume of Capital by quoting Aristotle’s conception of man as a zoon politikon. Marx therefore conceives human essence as conscious and social life activity, but with the development of alienated labour our human essence is deformed into nothing more than a means to our existence. He talks about workers losing their freedom ‘in the service of greed’, becoming ‘depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine’ (Marx 1975: 237–8), a metaphor that recurs in the Manifesto and also in the first volume of Capital (Marx 1976b: 490–1; Marx 1976c: 799). Although the roots of alienation are located in the purchase and sale of labour power, the malaise is not confined to the world of work. Rather the perversion of human potential is achieved through the medium of money, raised to a position of omnipotence, where it confounds and confuses ‘all natural human qualities’ and turns the world upside down (Marx 1975: 326). It is not only workers who are alienated in the despotism that is the money economy, but it is also the entire society. The task of the communists is to lead society away from this alienation, so that our essential human potentials can be realized. Communism is the ‘real appropriation of the human essence by and for man’ and ‘the return of man to himself as a social being’ (Marx 1975: 296).
Paradoxically, while capitalism denies human self realization to those dependent on the sale of their labour power, it simultaneously exhibits the immense capacity of human creativity. The development of industry demonstrates the ‘open book of man’s essential powers’ while at the same time it furthers the ‘dehumanization of man’ (Marx 1975: 302–3). This conception of dehumanization is present throughout Marx’s works, as a loss to be recovered through social struggles. In order to combat it, a communist consciousness must develop in revolutionary activity, through which the working class rids itself ‘of all the muck of ages and becomes fitted to found society anew’ (Marx 1976a: 52–3). The exploitation of the worker is seen as the deprivation of the worker’s social creativity, its perversion into a form of wage slavery, to be redeemed only through revolutionary transformation that will deliver what he envisions in the third volume of Capital as the ‘true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself’. In this projection real freedom can be developed only when producers have full control over the process of production and work-time has been minimized (Marx 1981: 959). The goal is one of self realization, where the self is understood always as a social self (Marx 1973: 611–12; Wilde 1998: 24–9).
Perhaps the clearest indication of Marx’s awareness of the centrality of human essence to moral judgement occurs in a footnote in the first volume of Capital in which he derides Bentham for applying the principle of utility to human needs without first specifying a theory of ‘human nature in general’. Marx, of course, recognized that human nature is also constantly in the process of being ‘historically modified’, but here he explicitly endorses a eudaemonistic conception of a distinctive human essence. He makes a comparison with the animal world, stating that just as ‘to know what is useful for a dog one must investigate the nature of dogs’, so too we must consider the nature of humans (Marx 1976c: 758–9n). For all that Marx emphasizes the changing historical dynamics of human needs, he maintains this Aristotelian commitment to human nature ‘in general’ as both descriptive and normative, looking forward to a future in which alienation is overcome and human potential can be realized to the full by all the peoples of the world. Marx, of course, never developed these insights into an ethical theory, but it is possible to do so, and I have argued elsewhere that the ethical work of Erich Fromm is the closest we have to a developed eudaemonistic ethics in the Marxist tradition (Wilde 2004, 2007; Fromm 2002, 2003). From this ‘radical humanist’ perspective, moral progress can be assessed – and struggled for – according to the positive development of our potentials for reason, productive work, care and solidarity. Such an approach carries similarities with the capabilities approach to global justice developed by Nussbaum.
The capabilities approach
Nussbaum first sets down her account of the basic human functions in a long polemical article in Political Theory in 1992 entitled ‘Human Functioning and Aristotelian Justice: In Defence of Aristotelian Essentialism’. At the head of the article is a quotation from Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in which he extols the virtue of the rich human being in need of the totality of human life, for whom self realization exists as an inner necessity and for whom the greatest wealth is the other human being (Nussbaum 1992a: 202, cf. Marx 1975: 304). She introduces her argument by recounting experiences at conferences at which papers by postmodernists defended a variety of traditional cultural practices that would be intuitively deplored by defenders of human rights. The postmodernist view maintained that we should respect the traditions of others, having no right to impose western values or make essentialist judgements about those traditions. At one such event the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm responded with a blistering attack on this cultural relativism and was angrily asked to leave the room. Nussbaum objects that these anti-essentialist postmodernists are ‘people who think of themselves as progressive and feminist and antiracists’, but ‘are taking up positions that converge, as Hobsbawm correctly saw, with the positions of reaction, oppression and sexism’ (Nussbaum 1992a: 204). She adds that in her own essentialist way she commits to life over death, freedom over slavery, nutrition over starvation and knowledge over ignorance. Here she makes common cause with a Marxist committed to ‘a determinate conception of human need and human flourishing’ resolutely opposed to what she then termed ‘the new subjectivism’ (Nussbaum 1992a: 212).
Nussbaum then, exasperated by the sanctification of difference, wants to emphasize what we share in common as human beings. Capabilities are regarded as what people are able to ‘do’ and to ‘be’ (Nussbaum 2000: 71; Nussbaum 2006: 70). Her purpose is to identify the most important human functions so that we can make demands on our social and political institutions for their promotion (Nussbaum 1992a: 214). She lists ten ‘functional capabilities’ in the 1992a article (Nussbaum 1992a: 215) that are substantially retained in later works, in particular Women and Human Development (Nussbaum 2000: 78–80) and Frontiers of Justice (Nussbaum 2006: 71–6). Table 1 is a summary of her human capabilities, using the headings adopted in the two books:
Table 1 Nussbaum’s capabilities
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1. Life. Being able to lead a full life. |
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2. Bodily Health. Being able to have good health. |
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3. Bodily Integrity. Being able to have physical security, sexual satisfaction and choice about reproduction. |
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4. Senses, Imagination and Thought. Being able to use the senses in a truly human way through education and guarantees of free expression. |
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5. Emotions. Being able to develop our emotions of love, grieving, longing and gratitude. |
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6. Practical Reason. Being able to form a conception of the good and to plan one’s own life. |
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7. Affiliation. Being able to live with and for others. Being free from discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, caste, religion or national origin. |
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8. Other Species. Being able to live with concern for animals, plants and the world of nature. |
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9. Play. Being able to laugh and play. |
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10. Control Over One’s Environment. Being able to participate politically, being able to hold property on an equal basis with others and being able to work with meaningful relationships of recognition with other workers. |
It should be noted that two of the capabilities, practical reason and affiliation, are held to play a special, architectonic, role, holding the project together and making it human.
In proposing her capabilities approach, Nussbaum is determined to stay within the camp of political liberalism, and she sees her contribution as complementary to contractarian and human rights perspectives (Nussbaum 2006: 7). She emphasizes that the approach builds in a respect for pluralism in a number of ways. The list is open-ended and subject to revision, and its abstract and general nature allows for different applications of the same principles. In the most recent version, she is careful to specify that she is talking about capability rather than functioning, so that people may be enabled to do something but may not necessarily choose to do it. For example, a person may have the right to vote but may choose not to participate in the particular polity in which they reside for various reasons. She gives the major liberties of speech, association and conscience ‘a central and non-negotiable place’, but she also insists that, while her approach provides a good basis for global political principles, it is not intended to justify implementation by force or sanctions (Nussbaum 2006: 78–80).
Why, then, does she consider the capabilities approach superior to that of the contractarian approach? In one sense she is trying to take care of issues which Rawls himself admits are not dealt with adequately by his approach, namely, what is owed to people with disabilities, what is owed to animals, the problem of justice across national boundaries and the problem of saving for future generations (Nussbaum 2006: 23; Rawls 1996: 21). These problems flow from the setting up of the framing of the contract, whereby the framers are considered to be more or less equal abstract individuals within a nation state who are also going to be the recipients of the justice outcome. However, the key moral element that Nussbaum is unhappy with is the presupposition that the pursuit of mutual advantage is the justification for social cooperation. Supporters of contractarianism would view this is a strength because it provides rational grounds to support whatever agreements are reached, where rationality is assumed to equate with narrowly conceived self interest. In other words, it dispenses with altruism, which is intuitively taken to be irrational and simply too demanding. Although versions of the contractarian approach try to build in consideration of others to avoid egoism, the ghost of Hobbes continues to haunt all contractarianism. Nussbaum comments that the pursuit of mutual advantage is not ‘less’ than a compassionate commitment to the well being of others, ‘it is just different’, and she considers that adopting the ‘parsimonious’ starting point of mutual advantage is likely to lead in a different direction than an ‘other-committed’ starting point (Nussbaum 2006: 35). Nussbaum’s intuition here is that this ruling out of sociability and benevolence as a part of what it is to be human leads rather too easily to an acceptance that humans are by nature egoistic utility maximizers. As an Aristotle scholar, she prefers a different starting point, that we are by nature social beings, and she finds support in this view from the young Marx.
On the specific issues of global justice, Nussbaum begins by describing the gross inequalities between the peoples of rich and poor countries (Nussbaum 2006: 224–5). She is sceptical of the efforts of contractarian theorists to deal with this issue. Rawls admits that his original position does not translate to the global sphere, and when Beitz (1999) and Pogge (1989) try to extend it, they ignore the ‘circumstances of justice’ assumptions that are crucial to the origin of the contract (Nussbaum 2006: 268).4 The capabilities approach endeavours to identify human needs that have to be met, in a variety of ways depending on cultural difference, if we are to create a more just world. In terms of advancing the development of her capabilities to a minimum threshold, Nussbaum develops another list, this time specifying ten principles to guide our pursuit of global justice:
Table 2 Nussbaum’s ten principles for the global structure
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1. Overdetermination of responsibility: the domestic never escapes it. All nations, rich and poor, must take responsibility to promote human capabilities up to some reasonable threshold level. |
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2. National sovereignty should be respected, within the constraints of promoting human capabilities. |
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3. Prosperous nations have a responsibility to give a substantial portion of their GDP to poorer nations. |
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4. Multinational corporations have responsibilities for promoting human capabilities in the regions in which they operate. |
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5. The main structures of the global economic order must be designed to be fair to poor and developing countries. |
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6. We should cultivate a thin, decentralized and yet forceful global sphere. |
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7. All institutions and (most) individuals should focus on the problems of the disadvantaged in each nation and region. |
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8. Care for the ill, the elderly, children and the disabled should be a prominent focus of the world community. |
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9. The family should be treated as a sphere that is precious but not ‘private’. |
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10. All institutions and individuals have a responsibility to support education, as key to the empowerment of currently disadvantaged people. |
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(Nussbaum 2006: 315–24) |
The contentious issue is the extent to which these principles seek only to ameliorate current distress rather than confront the structural causes of oppression.
Nussbaum’s approach reflects her Aristotelian heritage, with the emphasis on good functioning leading to eudaemonia or human flourishing, but she also draws also on Marx and assumes an affinity between the two philosophers. In a collection edited by George McCarthy, Marx and Aristotle, Nussbaum outlines the Aristotelian basis of the emphasis on function and capability, and at the end of her article, originally presented in 1986, she points out the similarities with the views on fully human functioning expressed by Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, citing the passage in which Marx points to the different conceptions of food held by a starving man and one who eats for sensual enjoyment (Nussbaum 1992b: 204–5). The point here is that the capability to function in a truly human way, in this case to express discernment and taste, cannot be fulfilled by those deprived of the requisite material resources. Nussbaum cites Geoffrey de Sainte Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World in support of the view that Marx was strongly influenced by Aristotle in the development of his theory of class struggle. She also argues that Marx shifts allegiance from the Hellenistic philosophers (particularly Epicurus) to Aristotle around 1844 (Nussbaum 1992b: 211n47) as part of a move towards a total commitment to political activism. Whereas Epicurus preached withdrawal from public life, Aristotle charged us to make our social institutions consonant with justice (Nussbaum 1994: 11).
Broadly speaking there are two aspects of the young Marx’s humanist philosophy that she commends. First there is the commitment to the idea of truly human functioning, involving a wide range of human life activities (Nussbaum 2006: 74). As essentially rational beings we need to exercise our human potentials, and a life reduced to survival is stripped of its humanity. Nussbaum argues that the capabilities approach shares with Aristotle and Marx the view that it is tragic waste when people are not enabled to develop (Nussbaum 2006: 346–7). She also credits Marx’s understanding of humans as creatures in need of ‘the plurality of life activities’, seeing rationality as only one of our functions, and respecting the fact that we share other functions with other animals (Nussbaum 2006: 159–60). In general then, Nussbaum takes from the young Marx the appreciation of ‘rich human need’, prominently including needs for other people (Nussbaum 2006: 132).
This conception of humans as quintessentially social beings is the second insight she takes from Marx, as well as Aristotle:
the capabilities approach takes its start from the Aristotelian/Marxian conception of the human being as a social and political being, who finds fulfilment in relation with others. Whereas contractarians typically think of the family as ‘natural’, and the political as in some significant sense artificial, the capabilities approach makes no such distinction (Nussbaum 2006: 85–6).
One of the most important of what Marx termed ‘rich human needs’ is the need for others (Nussbaum 2006: 132). In Women and Human Development Nussbaum refers to a discussion of Marx’s view on human nature by Daniel Brudney, which draws attention to the significance of reciprocity in Marx’s vision (Brudney 1997: 388–99). The most relevant passages are those from the Comments on James Mill when Marx talks about production in communist society ‘as human beings’, when our production doubly affirms both the producer and the recipient. Marx talks about the satisfaction that the producer would feel in knowing that their products were enjoyed by others, and, in that knowledge, grasping our communality as a completion of our nature (Marx 1975: 227–8). This insight, with its emphasis on the liberating implications of working in a way that arouses awareness of our deep complementarity, is very important for Nussbaum. In her final chapter, she emphasizes the need to cultivate our moral sentiments through education and culture (Nussbaum 2006: 408–15), and this is very much in line with her previous work on the role of art and literature in creating a more human world and about the development of the emotions (Nussbaum 1992c; Nussbaum 2001).
Although she shares Marx’s commitment to the fulfilment of human potentials, Nussbaum eschews reliance on any ‘deep metaphysics of human nature’ which she regards as incompatible with political liberalism (Nussbaum 2006: 86). She insists that she uses the Marxian idea of truly human functioning ‘for political purposes only, not as the source of a comprehensive doctrine of human life’, adding that Marx made no such distinction (Nussbaum 2006: 74). We may ask why Nussbaum considers the stronger version of human freedom inimical to her substantive goal. It could be argued that this distancing herself from the ‘deeper’ view of what it is to be human makes it more difficult to ground her own list of capabilities, which might otherwise be considered subjective and arbitrary. After all, she has moved away from moral justification based on mutual advantage and therefore needs to answer the question as to why people should be moved to support these capabilities. Nussbaum’s reluctance to support a strong view of human nature reflects an anxiety to preserve a commitment to openness to change or flexibility, but it appears to be a retreat from the spirited defence of essentialism contained in the Political Theory 1992 article.
A constructive Marxist criticism
In using Marx to justify her entitlement thesis, Nussbaum expresses only his positive view of what liberated humanity could be, setting to one side the alienation thesis from which this view is taken. Marx is primarily concerned to show that capitalist relations of production distort human relations and de-humanize the producers. A radical humanist perspective grounded in a Marxian ethical framework would point up the structural obstacles to the fulfilment of human potentials, without using that analytical insight to reject the possibility of any progress towards social justice in the conditions which confront us today. The elucidation and demand for human potentials is a worthy goal, and one that is more consonant with non-Western ethical approaches, but its association with political liberalism is in deep tension with liberalism’s attachment to private property. Nussbaum’s approach is having a practical impact on UN development strategy in pursuit of the UN Millennium Goals, but the danger is that the demands for fulfilment can become detached from the political imperative of challenging the fundamental direction of global economic governance.5
The radical humanist perspective on global justice is concerned that Nussbaum’s approach pays inadequate attention to the structural causes of the injustice she wants to redress. This is evident when we look at Nussbaum’s principles for the global structure. Although Nussbaum’s aims are clearly designed to redress world poverty, some of the principles indicate an unwillingness to confront the structural causes of that poverty. For example, the third principle asserts the need for rich states to give money to the poor, but it does not make the point that ‘their’ GDPs have grown from the exploitation of the poor. It reads like a moral appeal to charity rather than a ‘pay back’ demand, and, on this issue of moral responsibility for global poverty; Pogge’s negative rights approach and his suggestion for a Global Resources Dividend is more convincing (Pogge 2002). The fourth principle demands that multinationals have responsibilities for promoting human capabilities in the regions where they operate. But what does this mean? All the major global corporations have codes of ethics, and no doubt their spokespersons would claim that they take their responsibilities very seriously, but in practice this is not what they are in business for, and self regulation has been wholly inadequate (Fisher and Lovell 2008). The principle should not be to ask them to accept responsibility, but to insist on it through regulation. Although the fifth principle calls for the main structures of the world economy to be designed to be fair to poor and developing countries, it does not mention how the issue of power in those institutions that control those structures is to be met. And even if some of the glaring inequities were to be removed, such as the huge subsidies employed by the United States and the European Union, what is to prevent global corporations dominating the economies of those poorer states? The ‘fairness’ demanded would require a level of regulation much more authoritative than that envisaged in the ‘thin’ global sphere referred to in the sixth principle.
These criticisms of the ‘Principles of the Global Structure’ are not intended to damn the capabilities approach to global justice. The radical humanism I advocate is not averse to the ethical universalism of Nussbaum, and shares her view of the ethical significance of Marx’s conception of the self-realized social being. It also shares her critical observations on the ‘mutual advantage’ assumptions about human motivation adopted by contractarians since Hobbes. However, although she clearly sees her approach as offering a less ‘cynical’ view of human nature than that implicit in the contractarian reliance on ‘mutual advantage’ (Nussbaum 2006: 414), she leaves unanswered the question of the relationship between political liberalism and economic liberalism. Nussbaum, in common with most liberal political theorists, tends to conflate liberalism and democracy, using liberalism in a purely political sense without delving too deeply into its intimate attachment to private property. In doing so she avoids the big questions about how a democratic political culture can emerge to promote human capabilities, if to do so runs against the interests of global corporate capital. Nussbaum has promised to discuss how we might develop the resources to advance the normative goals of the capabilities approach in a forthcoming study, Capabilities and Compassion, and perhaps then we will be able to form a clearer picture of the distance between her approach and more radical, anti-systemic perspectives.
Notes
1 More precisely, there is one throwaway reference in Simon Caney’s Justice Beyond Borders (Caney 2005), a single mention in Charles Jones’s Global Justice (Jones 2001), none at all in Kok-Chor Tan’s Justice Without Borders (Tan 2004), and two passing remarks in the collections of articles edited by William Sullivan and Will Kymlicka, The Globalization of Ethics (Sullivan and Kymlikca 2007) and by Pabo De Greiff and Ciaran Cronin, Global Justice and Transnational Politics(De Greiff and Cronin 2002) .
2 Since The Global Justice Reader appeared in 2008, Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice has appeared, and he makes use of Marx in a rather different way (Sen 2009: 163–4; 245). Sen, like Nussbaum, operates a capabilities approach.
3 Lukes accepts that there is ‘much evidence’ to support the view that Marx was implicitly committed ‘to an aristotelian realization of distinctively human potentialities and excellences’ (Lukes 1985: 87)
4 Nussbaum does not discuss Pogge’s negative rights approach adopted in World Poverty and Human Development (2002), which demands that we take moral responsibility for the structure of the world economy that systematically deprives people of their rights.
5 Nussbaum’s contribution has been criticized from a postcolonialist perspective which invokes Marx structural analysis of the economy, but goes further in rejecting her essentialism, which I do not. See Charusheela (2009).
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