12.01.09

A Kantian foundation for marxism

Posted in 1848+, Ultra Far Left at 1:12 pm by nemo

Marx’s thought was born under a bad star, I guess, and the result is a completely wrong-headed view on life that poisoned the well of socialism.
A dose of Kant might help/
Alasdair Macintyre’s contribution to marxism
Macintyre’s pronouncements are highly misleading, as is his history of ethics. There was no ‘Enlightenment project’ to be called a failure. And the dismissal of Kant is outrageous. Kant more than anyone else was a critic of ‘divine fiats’.
His ethical system is one thing, his transcendental idealism another.
Going back to Aristotle won’t work (although the gesture is useful).
The work of Kant is as close as anyone has come to clarifying the issues of ethics/
Sadly Marx’s prejudice against Kant made him forever unacceptable to Marxist true believers, and other idiots.
A Kantian Marxism is the best shot for a real left, with or without Kantian ethics (only one part of the Kantian foundation);
Marx was a frustrated transcendental idealist who ended up not very intelligently getting swamped in Feuerbachian positivism, with useless results.

In A Brief History of Ethics, he provided a (Eurocentric, or rather, Hellenocentric) account of transforming moral habits rooted in changes of social structure, from Ancient Greece to modern Europe. Later, in After Virtue, written after he had ceased to be a marxist and had come to view the working class as possessing insufficient resources for solving the problems of modernity, he elaborated his compelling argument as to why the Enlightenment project had failed with respect to morality, and why it had to fail. Enlightenment philsophers sought to rationally ground moral claims, but did so on the basis of an unsustainable normative commitment to individualism. Thus, in Enlightenment philosophy the attempt to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’ always fails. Either one lapses into Humean subjectivism (the default position of Anglo-American philosophy), consigning morality to an unavoidable but empirically unjustifiable sentimental response to the world, or one attempts to reproduce divine fiats at another level, as per the Kantian categorial imperative. For Macintyre, the Aristotelian tradition of deriving morality from a conception of ‘human nature’ had to be the starting point for any rationally grounded morality.

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