Marx criticizes Hegelian idealism because it argues that big ideas are the drivers of history, whereas Marx argues that it is human beings that drive history, specifically humans that are driven to action by material forces. If we say that Freedom or Liberty, or even that governments or specific leaders or companies, are the prime movers of events, we give power to abstract constructs that confuse the student of history and mystify the actual driving force behind every important event: humans working together to satisfy their material needs.
Marx connects this materialist critique to his ideas about alienation. We alienate humans from the fruits of their labor by attributing their good works to nonexistent constructs, giving the credit due to human beings (for revolutions and large building projects and the development of science/democracy) to Idea. If something was created by humans, we must give humans the credit, and celebrate what we can accomplish when we all work together. This is a celebration of humankind, and denigration of the practice of robbing man of his species essence and accomplishments by claiming that only states and governments and elites and ideas create great things. Humans, driven by their material needs, make history; this cooperation is part of what makes humans human! Consequently we go on to form big ideas and abstract concepts to help us understand this history, but ideas are the products of man, not man’s master. Of course the powerful elites and those who serve them use culture and ideology to convince us that we (the people) are not the drivers of history, thereby robbing humankind of one of its primal attributes. They want us to forget that all we need to accomplish great things is lots of human beings working side by side on a common goal.
Marx wishes to return our species essence to us by reminding us that we make history, we accomplish great things together. All these constructs that seem to have lives of their own, that appear to have autonomy and power over us, are actually just dead things that we have temporarily animated by lending them our species essence. If we remember that we can shape the future simply by working together on a common goal, we rob these constructs of their very life, and empower ourselves to create the change we want to see.
At the same time, Marx breathes life into capital many times, speaking of capital as if it is a living, breathing thing, or a monster, or blood sucking vampire, or a creature with an insatiable desire to grow itself. In his theory of alienation, capital (man’s invention) becomes man’s master while man becomes the slave. Capital turns man into a robot, a production machine, a surplus value generator. Capital has a personality and a reason for existing; it has goals and a mind of its own, and we are helpless under its power. Marx sees this as an empowering message because he argues that if we remember our power and work together, then we can overthrow capital and finally realize our potential.
But these two theories contradict one another. How can we claim that it is wrong to give credit to other constructs for moving events forward, while arguing that capital has a mind of its own, that we are slaves to our creation, and that capital’s desire to expand itself drives events? We must recall that capital itself is a construct that mystifies the processes of history: humans are the real movers. Therefore it isn’t capital that demands to expand itself, but human beings choosing to exploit others for profit. It isn’t capital that forces children into factories and lowers wages in order to extract more surplus value; it is humans who do these things, men who make these decisions. Capitalism is not wrecking the environment: humans are. Capitalism doesn’t alienate us from the fruits of our labor; human bosses, CEOs, managers, stockholders, consultants, consumers, marketers, etc. do. Therefore it isn’t capital we need to overthrow if we wish to create communism, but human action, human behavior, perhaps our own nature, we must overcome.
If we give credit to capital for doing so many things, we give credit to a non-existent figment of our collective imaginations. Might as well say that it is the idea of liberty that drives revolutions, rather than humans who wish for better material conditions. Marx seems guilty of the crime he lays at the feet of ideologues who want us to believe that constructs are actually running the show so that we don’t realize that when humans work together we achieve great things. This is the opposite though: Marx would rather not acknowledge that when humans work together (as exploiters must do to run large capitalist organizations) we can accomplish horrible things in the name of profit; easier to claim that these crimes are actually committed by capital, and we are powerless slaves who cannot escape the grasp of our own invention. Or that if we only could escape it’s grasp, we would finally be free to live in equality. But what are we really overthrowing but the behavior of humans with human brains? Marx’s argument depnds on the notion that there is an entity in control that can be overthrown. If we acknowledge there is no other entity, that we are the drivers of history, we find ourselves in a position where we must acknowledge that if we transition to communism we will still be the same humans, capable of the same greatness and horror. No matter where we go, there we are.
You might say that Marx is robbing mankind of part of its species-essence here, by alienating from man something which is fundamental to his nature: the desire to compete, to exploit, to hoard, to seek profit. Marx extracts those qualities from man and attributes them to an abstract, leaving man as a shell of his former self (in this case, it leaves in man only that which is good, and alienates all that is exploitative). This argument does not attempt to negate all the lovely attributes of man: his innate desire to love, to grow things, to cooperate, to help others, to build. We simply acknowledge that those rosy parts of our nature are not the only parts. To pretend otherwise is to ignore man as he really is, to take something from him that belongs to him by nature.
Marx would rather not admit that human nature has a dark side, or that profit motive and the desire to compete (maybe even exploit) might be hard-wired into us, because that casts doubt on the liklihood of us ever achieving communism (since we can’t help but exploit each other, to compete, to form factions, to seek advantage, to alienate those more vulnerable than ourselves). But if we blame capital and capitalism for this exploitation and alienation, then it becomes easier to believe that if we just overthrow capitalism, we will be free of this slavery, and humans can finally live in unity and harmony and equality and peace. It isn’t our own greed that makes this impossible; it is our invention, capital, holding us down, putting its heel on our throats. But if this turns out to be just another flavor of idealism, and greed is actually part of our nature, and we will exploit each other whether capital is abolished or not, it makes the revolution (and the violent action required to kickstart it) seem much less worthwhile. In this light communism appears a pale, utopian dream. As long as the utopia has humans in it, there will be a mixture of misery and joy, great deeds and lowly ones, kindness and greed, but never communism.
Marx is a materialist. But mustn’t a materialist reject Marx’s perspective on capital? If we can blame a construct like capital for the woes of mankind, then why not breathe life as well into the other big ideas of history like freedom and liberty, and hand them the credit for driving forward all the progress mankind has made in the past 300 years? Of course a materialist cannot accept this premise! Men did those things, and that makes men great. And so then we must admit that men did all the evil things we accuse capital of doing, and that makes men shitty. Materialism does not allow us to have one but not the other.
Utilitarianism starts with a basic premise: every person on earth desires happiness.1 Since happiness/pleasure/well-being (I will use these all interchangeably) are universally desired for their own sakes (not desired as means to some other end, but desired for themselves), they must be intrinsically good, i.e. good for their own sakes, as opposed to instrumentally good.2 If we wish to live an ethical life then, we must aim our actions toward achieving that which is intrinsically good: happiness. This does not mean happiness for ourselves only, but also (more importantly) happiness for others. In fact, it is our moral duty to maximize well-being to the greatest extent possible. If we boil utilitarianism down to its simplest message, it might read: do as much good in the world as is humanly possible.3
Utilitarianism requires us all to look outward, and judge our actions based on how they impact the community of persons affected by our decisions. But often there is a conflict between what the individual desires and what would most benefit the community. In this case utilitarianism issues a direct challenge to the individual: if you desire an end that does not maximize general happiness, you are required to abandon your desire. This turns out to be a very strict standard indeed, one that may require us to make tremendous personal sacrifices for the good of others.
If utilitarianism is supposed to be our guide for living ethical lives, we must recognize right off the bat that most of the decisions we make throughout the day do not maximize general happiness. After all, by taking the time to write this essay, I am choosing not to use that time to serve food to the homeless. Does that mean it is unethical to write this essay, because by doing so I fail to maximize utility? Must I strive to meet the utilitarian standard in all my daily actions? This forceful version of utilitarianism seems to demand that we all become saints, constantly subverting our own desires for the benefit of others. If so, then is utilitarianism even feasible as an ethical theory? If the moral requirement is so strict that normal people are incapable of meeting the challenge, is the theory practical at all?
We all have busy lives full of persons and obligations which require our full attention. Our children, our parents, our spouses, our bosses, and our friends all (rightfully) make demands on our time, leaving us very little bandwidth with which to decipher what “the general happiness” means, let alone time and energy to maximize it. For many parents with young children and full-time jobs, it can feel impossible to do anything for the community while trying to juggle such a home life. Faced with such a complex and intractable dilemma, many people ignore completely the needs of the community, and focus instead on the daily demands of life.
We could attempt to justify such a lifestyle choice (from a utilitarian standpoint) by defining a busy parent’s ‘moral community’ in a narrow way: it includes only her family and friends and colleagues; everyone outside that circle is excluded from the community and therefore excluded from the utilitarian calculus. Does a person with such a narrow moral community live an ethical life? Is it ok to define one’s community so that it only includes those persons one is actually capable of serving while still living a “normal” life? Or must a person restructure her entire life in order to expand that moral community, i.e. tailor her whole existence around service to the wider world, even at the expense of her own family’s happiness?
Really I’m asking: whose happiness should we care most about? Jeremy Bentham answers: “the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in question [is] the right and proper, and only right and proper and universally desirable, end of human action.”4 This is famously known as the Greatest Happiness Principle. J.S. Mill, a few years after Bentham, demands (in a statement which contradicts many other statements in Utilitarianism) that our moral standard be “not the agent’s own greatest happiness, but the greatest amount of happiness altogether.”5 Seems clear enough. But for the mother of young children, who has professional, familial, and domestic obligations coming out of her ears, this standard can easily comes off as impractical, useless, even meaningless.
Imagine there are three concentric circles:
The smallest circle contains only your family and closest loved one. The next circle contains all your friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and neighbors, your community, your network. The final circle includes larger populations of strangers, such as your city or perhaps even your whole country. Which of these circles are we to focus on, if we wish to live according to the utilitarian standard? If we dedicate our energies toward creating happiness for one of the circles, we use up time and energy that cannot be spent spreading happiness to the other circles, so a choice must be made. But which is the most ethical option?
If I dedicate myself fully to building the best possible life for my children, wife, and parents (my smallest circle), I will certainly do a lot of good; but such a choice requires that I neglect, to a large extent, the wider world. An afternoon spent playing with my children is an afternoon not spent working at the local food bank; a weekend trip to Arizona with my father requires money that can not be donated to a more worthy cause. Do I truly meet the utilitarian standard if I pour most of my love, care, energy, wealth, and spare time into my family, but largely ignore the happiness of the wider world? Though the happiness within my home will be maximized, and my children more likely to grow up well-adjusted and emotionally stable (compared to children who are neglected), my dedication to the ‘greatest happiness principle’ is questionable at best.
If instead I dedicate my life to spreading well-being to the largest possible number of persons (the outer circles), I might accomplish truly great things!… but at a cost. Those who make such a choice – tireless activists for the poor, traveling community organizers, dedicated and focused union leaders, political dissidents – often make huge sacrifices in the personal sphere in order to fulfill the utilitarian ethic, an ethic which they believe requires them to serve the wider world. Yes my children will be sad if I don’t return at night to tuck them in because I’m working late at the homeless shelter, but so many others will benefit from my actions. If I’m away repeatedly, over the course of many years, my children may develop neuroses and abandonment issues and anger, may grow to hate me, may even have tragic lives. But over those years I could improve the lives of thousands of people. Is this the ethically correct sacrifice: spread joy to the greatest number, at the expense of a few (who happen to be my children)?
Mahatma Gandhi faced this very question, and he chose to serve the widest circle. He was a famously neglectful father, but a saint to a nation.6 Gandhi’s work for the poor, disenfranchised, impoverished, victimized, and low-caste was the ultimate display of utilitarian action.7 He dedicated his entire life to helping the less fortunate; this included extensive travel, the founding of communes, organization of large-scale protests, hunger strikes, the construction of a political party, travel to foreign nations to negotiate with world leaders, and many other activities which demanded his full concentration and energies. In the end his sacrifices and selfless actions improved the lives of millions of people around the world,8 and his legacy continues to inspire people today. However his children felt acutely the sadness and anger that come from having an absent father. His oldest son Harilal, whose relationship with Gandhi was always strained, never forgave his father for the ill-treatment, and later became an alcoholic. It seems there is no way to dedicate our full selves to the service of our closest loved ones AND to the wider world; there will always be a sacrifice one way or the other, and so we must choose.
On the surface the ‘greatest happiness principle’ appears to teach us that the price of a few very sad and neglected children is a reasonable price to pay, if their sadness purchases happiness for thousands of others. But this feels intuitively wrong. How can I be expected to ignore the unfathomably deep love bond I share with my two children? To put it more generally, how can I be expected to care more for strangers than I do for my loved ones? The utilitarian principle seems to insist that if my mission in life is to maximize happiness, it would be absurdly unethical to give special weight to the happiness of two children over the happiness of the larger population. Mill is very clear that one must be “as strictly impartial as a disinterested and benevolent spectator” when it comes to moral questions.9 A truly disinterested spectator would never choose the well-being of her own child over the well-being of many children. But I am tempted to reply (from the gut) that if it is unethical to dedicate my time and service almost exclusively to my children at the expense of thousands of others, then I am content to live an unethical life. Is this my own selfishness at work? Is it nothing more than a self-serving desire to relish the innate, mammalian love bond I feel for my offspring? No there is more to it than that. I genuinely struggle to see the merit in a moral system that tells me it is unethical to love my children (I say love because real love requires time and dedication). I’m ready to state boldly (and obviously) that of course it is ethical to love our children! So how do we reconcile this with the greatest happiness principle?
To begin to answer this question, let’s hit this from another angle: if we universalized the duty to serve the widest circle at the expense of the inner circle, would that actually create a happier world? Imagine if humanity widely practiced such a morality. Many millions of children would wind up neglected and traumatized by parents who felt obligated to serve the world instead of care for their children. Whole generations of young people would carry around the anger, bitterness, resentment, and sense of abandonment that ill-treated children often carry. If this tipped the scales away from general happiness and toward general sadness, if this ended up creating a worse world, we will have failed in our utilitarian mission, even if we intended our actions to create a happier world (this assumes we judge the merit of actions based on actual results as opposed to intended results, which is a debatable question in utilitarian ethics). It seems good for the species if we instead give extra weight to the happiness of our children, and bad for the species to create a generation of persons who have never been taught how to love or how to build lasting relationships. A world of neglected children is a sadder and angrier world. So how can this possibly be the utilitarian standard, if the enactment of such a principle would bring more pain than happiness?
Clearly the greatest happiness principle must mean something besides “always serve the greatest number“. Either that, or the principle itself is false according to its own utilitarian standard, since its enactment would make the world worse-off. It is deliciously ironic that the Greatest Happiness Principle would, if enacted, fail to maximize happiness. It also goes without saying that such a principle would also be completely impractical in the real world, since most parents feel morally and evolutionarily driven to help their offspring flourish. A utilitarian could make a compelling argument that we more fully satisfy the utilitarian standard (we create a happier world) by spending lots of time serving the smallest of circles: our tiny, helpless babies. As Utilitarianism.com says: “As there are obviously good utilitarian reasons to want the next generation of people to grow up to be emotionally healthy and capable agents, there are thus good utilitarian reasons to endorse the social norms of parental care that help to promote this goal.”10
That all being said, there must be some part of the utilitarian standard which does indeed require us to serve people outside our inner circle. We showed above that if we universalized the duty to serve exclusively the outer circle, it would, in the end, likely fail the utilitarian standard, since it would create a worse-off world. Well the same is true if we universalize the duty to serve exclusively our inner circle. Such a principle would require us to maximize happiness for our loved ones and acquaintances, while allowing (or encouraging) us to feel complete indifference or even hatred for strangers, foreigners, the poor, and members of political parties which oppose our own. If we have no moral obligations whatsoever to persons outside our narrow inner circle of acquaintances, we adopt for ourselves an isolationist moral philosophy: my duty of care extends to my own property line, and no further. This state of affairs, which weakens community bonds and encourages a myopic and lonely outlook toward the wider world, sounds tragically like the actual world in which we live.
Clearly utilitarianism, if it is to be useful in this big, scary world, requires a bit of nuance in its application. Mill strives to make utilitarianism a workable and useful theory for every day morality, so he sometimes downplays our individual commitment to the greater good, and tells us we are free to follow our hearts most of the time. This allows us a lot of leeway, but reduces the utilitarian standard to something vague and amorphous, an ethical principle that refuses to state clearly what it requires of us. Are we allowed to substitute the greatest happiness principle for the “create whatever local happiness you feel like creating” principle?
The reality is that real humans do love their children and wish to serve the wider world. Perhaps the answer then is simple: try for a balance. We should give as much love as possible to our inner circles, and occasionally (if we can spare the time) do some work for the outer circle. This seems like a practical solution, but as a moral theory it is weak tea: you’ve got a bunch of love to give, so spread it around in whatever direction feels right. There is some power in the aphorism, “as long as you are loving somebody, you are doing the right thing,” but is this really what utilitarianism is supposed to boil down to?
This idea that at times it is morally right to serve our families, while at other times it is morally right to serve the community, delivers us to the conclusion that utilitarianism cannot be the sole guiding moral law in our lives. Since we are expected to know when it is appropriate to switch between one or the other circle, there must be a principle that we can follow to guide us to the ethically correct decision, a principle which will tell us when to serve our families and when to serve others. Importantly, this principle cannot be utilitarianism itself, because serving any of the circles seems to meet the utilitarian standard in one way or another. A pluralism of ethical theories will be needed to navigate this unending dilemma.
So it seems utilitarianism (at least as Mill and Bentham understood it) cannot properly serve as an end-all, be-all moral system; more lenses are needed if we wish to fully see and appreciate all the complexities of real life. In the meantime, I will love my children, work hard at my job, show love to my wife, and generally work to maximize happiness within my smallest circle of loved ones. Perhaps I sacrifice the Greatest Happiness Principle in order to adopt for my family an “Ethic of Care,” and maybe this is right, even if it means failing to maximize the happiness of the community (failing even to come close to that goal). The necessity, the urgency, the implacability of the love I feel for my children is something utilitarianism simply can’t resolve, unless it abandons (or severely limits) the Greatest Happiness Principle. If it refuses to abandon the principle, it is revealed to be fraudulent as an ethical theory. If it does abandon the principle, what is left of the moral theory besides: “do as much good as you feel like?”
Whenever I quote from Mill’s Utilitarianism (1863), I will cite the chapter/paragraph in the following format: Mill, Utilitarianism, II/2: “The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the privation of pleasure. To give a clear view of the moral standard set up by the theory, much more requires to be said; in particular, what things it includes in the ideas of pain and pleasure; and to what extent this is left an open question. But these supplementary explanations do not affect the theory of life on which this theory of morality is grounded- namely, that pleasure, and freedom from pain, are the only things desirable as ends; and that all desirable things (which are as numerous in the utilitarian as in any other scheme) are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.” ↩︎
In Mill, Utilitarianism, IV/8, the intrinsic goodness of happiness is a key feature of Mill’s famous ‘proof’ that utilitarianism is right: “…there is in reality nothing desired except happiness. Whatever is desired otherwise than as a means to some end beyond itself, and ultimately to happiness, is desired as itself a part of happiness, and is not desired for itself until it has become so. Those who desire virtue for its own sake, desire it either because the consciousness of it is a pleasure, or because the consciousness of being without it is a pain, or for both reasons united; as in truth the pleasure and pain seldom exist separately, but almost always together, the same person feeling pleasure in the degree of virtue attained, and pain in not having attained more. If one of these gave him no pleasure, and the other no pain, he would not love or desire virtue, or would desire it only for the other benefits which it might produce to himself or to persons whom he cared for. We have now, then, an answer to the question, of what sort of proof the principle of utility is susceptible. If the opinion which I have now stated is psychologically true- if human nature is so constituted as to desire nothing which is not either a part of happiness or a means of happiness, we can have no other proof, and we require no other, that these are the only things desirable. If so, happiness is the sole end of human action, and the promotion of it the test by which to judge of all human conduct; from whence it necessarily follows that it must be the criterion of morality, since a part is included in the whole.” ↩︎
Russ Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 120. ↩︎
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (New York: Hafner Press, [1789] 1948), 1. ↩︎
See Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India (New York: Vintage Books, 2013) for a heart-breaking look at Gandhi the absentee (yet often still over-bearing) father. ↩︎
Gandhi was actually quite critical of utilitarianism the political philosophy. He saw the ‘greatest happiness principle’ as justification for majority rule and the exploitation of minorities (happiness and economic prosperity are generated for the majority, at the cost of poverty, disenfranchisement, and unceasing labor for the minority). Instead of the greatest happiness of the great number, Gandhi preferred the greatest happiness of all, a concept which he called Sarvodaya, a Sanskrit term meaning “Advancement of All”. Despite this critique of political utilitarianism, Gandhi’s personal actions typified the utilitarian ethic, which requires immense personal sacrifice as a means to generate as much happiness for others as possible. For an example of Gandhi’s critique of utilitarianism, see his article in Indian Opinion dated May 16, 1908, which appears in The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (New Delhi: Publications Division Government of India, 1999), Vol. 8, 316-319. ↩︎
This is a debatable point. However the debatability of this point might not have bothered Gandhi. The philosophical text which most excited Gandhi was Bhagavad Gita which instructs us to focus more on intentions than outcomes. Like utilitarians, we should aim to do as much good as possible in the world, but we should not allow ourselves to become emotionally invested in outcomes outside our control. God may not allow our plans to come to fruition, and we may even be forced to endure tragedy and heart-break and loss; but we must continue to strive for a better world no matter how many times we fail. This is the key to living an ethical life and flourishing personally. This message was very important to Gandhi, who encountered many failures and set-backs and unintended consequences during his long career. For example, despite Gandhi’s best intentions, his actions as an anti-colonial activist were an indirect cause of the horrible sectarian violence that erupted after the partitioning of India in 1947. So though Gandhi made tremendous sacrifices to improve the lives of his people, the actual short-term outcome for much of the Indian people was a mixed bag. There is a lesson here for utilitarians: though a person may sacrifice much in order to maximize happiness for the many, there is no guarantee that she will be successful at maximizing happiness. If we judge a person’s actions solely according to the actual outcomes they produce, we are forced to condemn a person who sacrifices everything in order to spread happiness to the masses but ultimately fails to increase the general happiness. This would mean that Gandhi was not acting ethically any time that his actions inadvertently led to more pain than happiness (any time he failed to maximize utility). But this feels intuitively incorrect, given the sacrifices Gandhi made in the service of so many persons, and given the limited knowledge all humans have about how our decisions will affect the future. TheGita teaches that if you have an honest intention to do good in the world, you work selflessly toward your goal, and you fail, you are still living ethically. Later utilitarian thinkers have distinguished between the actual utility of a certain action (the actual outcome), versus the expected utility of that action (the outcome we expect), which allows utilitarianism to shrug off some of its consequentialist tendencies: if we judge actions based on their expected utility rather than actual utility, we really shift from focusing on outcomes and instead focus on intentions. This brand of utilitarianism teaches: “as long as we truly intend our actions to maximize the happiness of others, our actions are ethical even if we ultimately fail in our goal”. Gandhi would not have called this concept ‘utilitarianism’, but would have instead called it the message of TheGita. Regardless of what he called it, this ethic formed the foundation of Gandhi’s philosophy of action. See: Uma Majmudar’s “Mahatma Gandhi and the Bhagavad Gita” on The American Vendantist website, published Dec. 6, 2014. If you want to explore the philosophy of TheGita further, read this essay. ↩︎
This is an easy to understand and down-to-earth introduction to the major ethical theories in western philosophy. The author does not use a professorial tone, but a conversational one, which is fitting of the subject matter. So much of ethics only make sense through discussion of concrete examples and counter-examples, and so it is helpful that the author talks things out in a more casual way, offering up understandable real-world examples along the way.
One distinct feature of this textbook is the author’s affinity for logic: he lays out tons of ethical arguments in the form of syllogisms (premise-conclusion form), and then critiques each argument to test its validity. It’s an interesting way to view ethical arguments, which in the real world are infrequently tested for logical validity. His objections to the various arguments and his defenses of them are often creative and thought-provoking. Sometimes the logical format works well with moral premises, but other times it feels oddly out of place, too strict a system for something as loosely-goosey, as slippery as human morality.
Sometimes the author, in a quest to poke holes in certain ethical theories that he seems not to agree with (such as ethical skepticism), resorts to straw-man arguments, intentionally using flawed premises (or premises that, while being easy to disprove, do not capture the full spirit of the philosophical argument at-hand) when stating the arguments he wishes to dismantle. He doesn’t do this too often, but it does stand out when he does. However, the author doesn’t talk down to the reader in any fashion. The reader is invited (required) to think critically about each of the moral arguments presented, and the author makes it clear that much more philosophical work needs to be done in all of the most controversial areas of ethics. Nowhere in the book does the author claim that there is an easy answer to difficult ethical questions or an open-and-shut case when it comes to challenging moral theories. This book is an excellent starting-off place for those who wish to do that philosophical work themselves, for those who want to walk the long and many-forked road of ethical contemplation.
Overall, the author is an even-handed referee, sorting strong arguments from flawed ones. Though I detect, despite his even-handed approach, that he embraces the theory that there are in fact objective moral truths. He spends the last couple chapters picking apart arguments that express skepticism of our ability to possess objective moral truth, and his efforts to damage skepticism are convincing though not unassailable. I walk away with a deeper uncertainty that moral truth is possible than I had before I read this. It seems that every moral rule (do not kill, do not torture, do not lie) comes with exceptions (it might be ok to kill if someone is threatening to harm your family, it might be ok to torture a terrorist if by doing so we can learn the whereabouts of a bomb that is about to detonate in a major urban area, it might be ok to lie to a Nazi officer who is seeking a family of Jewish refugees that are hiding in your basement). If there are no categorical reasons to follow any particular moral law, there may not in fact be objective moral truths. Perhaps every moral truth is subjective, based on the context of the situation, malleable. Or perhaps moral “laws” are actually just expressions of our emotions rather than objective laws (when we say “it is wrong to torture,” we actually mean “torture makes me mad, grrrrr!”). Or perhaps objective moral truth does exist, but it’s far more complicated than we realize.
This doesn’t mean there is no such thing as moral behavior in the real world (most of the time I decline to torture people), but only that perhaps morality itself is more of a human construct than many moralists would like to admit. As the author acknowledges repeatedly, there is much more work to be done on this question.
Various works by Plato: Charmides, Euthyphro, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, and Ion.
I read these all one after the other, so my head is all full of Socrates’ ancient voice. All of these dialogues show Socrates deep in conversation, challenging his friends and acquaintances in his usual insistent style. Though I too seek wisdom at the feet of the great teacher, I continue to walk away feeling uneasy whenever I drink deeply from the Socratic well.
Whenever Socrates offers up conflicting meanings of particular concepts: Charmides (temperance), Euthyphro (piety), Laches (courage), and Lysis (friendship), it seems that his main goal is to demonstrate that nobody really knows anything, or even worse, to demonstrate that those who believe they have gained knowledge are mistaken. But often all this amounts to is word-play rather than timeless wisdom. Sometimes Socrates seems to want to thoroughly confuse the conversation to such a degree that nobody is sure what is true any longer. His tactic reveals more confusion than it does truth, which may actually be Socrates’ aim.
I’ve written before about Socrates’ habit of using word-play to prove that the so-called experts are actually phonies, and that the average life of the average person is nowhere near as important or authentic or deep as the life of the philosopher. Though the quest for truth was clearly Socrates’ calling, it’s easy to see how his behavior might have annoyed his fellow citizens. He constantly questioned everyone he came into contact with. His questions often led the conversations down zany or even nonsensical paths, where words stop making sense and truth is flipped on its head. Once the victim is thoroughly confused and turned around by Socrates’ inquisition, Socrates can easily accomplish his over-arching goal: proving that people don’t know as much as they suppose.
(This is not to say that Socrates only critiques the ideas of others, and never proposes positive philosophies of his own. He certainly offers up a unique philosophy in the later dialogue Republic, and even in Euthyphro his question about pious acts – whether God loves pious acts because they are inherently right, or whether pious acts are right only because God loves them – has been a relevant question in the field of ethics for over two thousand years.)
It also doesn’t help that many of the characters in these so-called dialogues seem absolutely trusting and worshipful of everything Socrates says. So the format of the dialogue is subverted; Socrates’ logic, no matter how tortured, is rarely challenged in any substantial way. The characters that are supposed to critique, question, and counter-balance Socrates’ philosophy fail in these crucial tasks, and instead show themselves to be either pompous, one-dimensional buffoons (Euthyphro) or yes-men (Socrates’ companions in Lysis). This is fairly harmless in the low-stakes discussion about the nature of friendship, but takes a more troubling form when Socrates lectures on his political philosophy in Republic.
Menexenus has a unique format compared to the others: it’s a satire of political funeral speeches, such as the one delivered (just a generation before Socrates) by Pericles during the Peloponnesian War. Though it seems like Socrates wishes to ironically parody the Athenian tradition of giving funeral speeches (Menexenus mainly features Socrates giving a mock funeral oration), Socrates’ speech really doesn’t sound much different than a real funeral speech. In fact, Plato clearly had a knack for speech writing.
Ion is not so much a dialogue but a lecture that attempts to prove that poetry is delivered to man directly from the gods. It is pious Socrates, Socrates the teacher. His opponent Ion, the renowned performer of the poetry of Homer, has the air of a villain. He is vain and over-confident of his abilities (much like Euthyphro), the perfect target for our hero. So Socrates employs his usual tactic of trying to prove that his opponent knows nothing of that which he considers himself an expert. Ion is shown to be a phony: Socrates uses wordplay to prove that actors and performers do not actually possess an art, knowledge, or even a real skill. And though Socrates’ logic is (as usual) a bit wacky, Ion offers no competing ideas. Thus the format of the dialogue suggests this is an open and shut case by the end; Ion is rightly humiliated, and Socrates once again proves that only he understands real truth. The frustrating part for the reader is that Socrates’ argument leads to a bogus conclusion, and nobody is there to challenge it. Actors and performers do indeed practice an art form and possess a skill set. Socrates doesn’t believe this to be true because he’s got a chip in his shoulder about non-philosophers: anything of value besides Socrates’ own profession (philosopher) holds no value to Socrates, and so he relentlessly attacks any who have not chosen that path. No wonder he was widely detested.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat by Karl Kautsky
It was fascinating to read this critique of Lenin right after reading some of Lenin’s writings from the same exact time frame.
Kautsky buys into the Leninist idea that socialist transformation is inevitable. But unlike Lenin he emphasizes (in a somewhat convoluted fashion) that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Lenin was eager to abandon democracy the very moment his party seized power, and this is really the basis of Kautsky’s scathing critique of Lenin’s tactics.
In his own way, Kautsky supports bourgeoisie democracy because it lays the groundwork for (what he perceives to be) the inevitable proletarian revolution, and allows the workers to voice their grievances and form workers parties (capitalism generally comes with liberty and freedom of speech). He believes that if capitalism continues to grow, the disenfranchised proletariat must grow with it, and so capitalism will inevitably create communism, as Marx argued. The working poor will grossly outnumber the wealthy, and so they will eventually vote their way into power. Kautsky assumes that the workers in a democracy, once given the power, will unanimously demand socialism. And so he’s not so different from Lenin, in that he believes that class interest motivates all decisions (also known as vulgar materialism). Like Lenin he has an idealistic image of a united working class all sharing the same demands and motivations, without disagreements or deviations within the ranks. This is not how real politics works, which makes the idealism of Kautsky and Lenin appear particularly quaint (and in Lenin’s case, dangerously naive). Though Lenin and Kautsky subscribe to the same brand of idealism, they disagree on the timeframe: Kautsky prefers the slow and even development of socialism over time; Lenin demands a violent and immediate revolution (any who refuse to come along with his plan must be purged).
So Kautsky and Lenin both share the same end goal, only that Lenin was too hasty to get there. What is really at the heart of this disagreement over the timeframe of the revolution is a more critical disagreement about democracy. Democracy is a crucial feature in Kautsky’s imagined revolution, and in his imagined communist society that follows that revolution. To take it even further, Kautsky believes that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Without democracy the whole plan will decay into dictatorship. In this regard he was proven right by Lenin. The Bolsheviks’ first move was the dismantling of democracy, including democracy among the workers (many of whom dissented or belonged to different parties from the Bolsheviks). By the time the Bolshevik transition to power was complete, real socialism (read: equality between all classes) was dead in Russia: Lenin’s party (read: the new ruling class) controlled all facets of government, culture, and society, while the teeming masses were disenfranchised to such an extent that they were completely unable to openly voice grievances. The Bolsheviks’ so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” was just a dictatorship, not socialism.
So Kautsky is right in the sense that socialism without democracy decays rapidly into dictatorship or single party rule. However Katusky isn’t particularly clear about how democracy will inevitably lead to socialism. While Lenin squashed democracy in order to preserve his party’s power, Kautsky sees democracy as the pathway to real socialism. But this will only happen if the vast majority demand socialism, and agree on what “socialism” should mean. Lenin rightly understood that this isn’t really feasible. The democratic electorate simply cannot come together on such a large and ambiguous goal, if all citizens are allowed to vote and speak freely. And so Lenin and his small cohort of true believers staged a sudden coup rather than allowing the masses to vote him into power (which he knew they would never do), and then once in charge he destroyed all vestiges of democracy in his rise to absolute power. Was this a cynical attempt to hold onto power, or did he truly believe that by eliminating democracy he would one day create real socialism? Answer: who cares. His method led to totalitarianism, so it was wrong (call me a consequentialist if you like). It was the wrong method both for creating socialism and for governing in general.
Lenin understood, unlike Kautsky, that democracy is more likely to kill socialism than birth it, because factions within workers parties and disagreements between large swaths of the population create deadlock and stalemate and thin margins for change. Generally the most revolutionary outcomes a democracy can hope for are the sort of liberal, incremental, compromise-focused changes that we typically see in parliamentary governments. Kautsky ignores the reality of pluralism, to the detriment of his political philosophy. People hold different opinions and see the world through unique lenses, and this is true even within workers parties and unions. This is a natural facet of humanity, and cannot be ignored. It is a fantasy to imagine that something as intricate as a socialist economy could ever be democratically planned and administered, or that the entire population could even be made to agree that socialism is the correct path, or even be made to agree on one single definition of socialism. Democracy is far too messy and inefficient and factional for that. There will always be disagreements and innovations and challenges to the status quo, and economic factors alone will never be the sole drivers of human behavior. This is why democracy does work well with capitalism, which is also sloppy and unplanned and competitive. Pluralism is one of the driving forces of capitalism, which (like the gene pool) is strengthened by diversity. Lenin understood all of this well, and so (as a hater of diversity) sought to prevent any who opposed him from exercising any democratic power whatsoever. Lenin couldn’t allow factions or even small disagreements to flourish within the party, so he dictated to the party members (and therefore to the people of Russia) exactly what they needed to believe. The result certainly was not capitalism, but it also certainly was not socialism.
So allowing real democracy is unlikely to lead to socialism, but snuffing out democracy only leads to dictatorship and totalitarianism. Socialism fails when it’s undemocratic, and it fails when it’s democratic. I fear that the message here is that socialism is impossible.
Main Currents of Marxism, Volume 2: The Golden Age by Leszek Kołakowski
This book is a masterpiece of philosophical summary and deep-diving analysis. Kolakowski has an uncanny ability to break down and explain even the most complex philosophical arguments in a clear and concise manner. At times he plays the part of omniscient referee, diligently sorting the good ideas from the flawed ones. But never does he simply tell us that a writer’s theory is wrong; instead he identifies the holes in it and pries them open, exposes them to the light, lets the reader decide what to think.
In this book his main target is Leninism, a philosophical tradition absolutely bursting with contradiction and double-talk. Kolakowski’s even-handed tone and mind-bogglingly high level of erudition suggest that he did not intend to write a polemic against Leninism. But in the end Kolakowski’s even-handed philosophical critique of Leninism amounts to a withering indictment of Lenin’s method, his philosophical rigor, his honesty, and his contradictory actions once in power. Lenin is revealed to be a boor, a liar, a tyrant, a power-hungry despot. Kolakowski does not draw these conclusions explicitly, but instead allows the reader to do so. Perhaps Kolakowski is a masterful propagandist who possesses the ability to incept these opinions into the reader’s brain, but I don’t really believe that. Instead he just exposes various thinkers’ theories to the light, that’s all. This doesn’t mean Kolakowski is a constant critic; his analysis is so much more subtle and productive than that. If a theory has enough qualities to withstand the author’s scrutiny, it comes out stronger for it in the end. Kolakowski analyzes many Marxist ideas and traditions throughout his magnum opus, and a good portion of them – those based on sound reasoning, honest argumentation, and deep philosophical reflection – show their quality under Kolakowski’s scrutiny. It just turns out that when we shine this same light on Lenin’s theories, they wither, crack, and fall apart. They are revealed to be hollow and decrepit. (Oh dang I’m being too polemical again).
Kolakowski sees Lenin’s dismantling of Soviet democracy as the original sin of Bolshevism. Lenin’s critique of bourgeois democracy hinged on the notion that modern democracy is a sham: the propertied classes (who overwhelmingly benefit from capitalism and bourgeois law) trick the exploited masses into believing they are sovereign in order to pacify them and prevent revolution, though in reality the workers are largely disenfranchised. In other words, the masses are led by our culture, media, and propaganda (all of which is shaped by the ruling class) to believe in freedom, democracy, individualism, and the sanctity of private property, but all of that is a veil over their eyes that prevents them from noticing that they are slaves. This sentiment, borrowed wholesale from Marx, is compelling in itself. Here’s the sad irony: once in power Lenin banned all democratic expression (including dissent from the proletarians he claimed to speak for), imprisoned his political adversaries, and disallowed any political party but his own. A man who rose to power by arguing that only communism could bring authentic democracy to the masses turned out to be a despot who was so desperate to hold on to power that he fully and permanently disenfranchised the masses. To make it worse, while doing so he claimed that the new Soviet system was a more authentic form of democracy than a parliamentary system could ever be. Kolakowski punishes Lenin for this betrayal of his own principles, simply by laying out the actual actions Lenin took once in power. Turns out that listing Lenin’s achievements is enough to reveal his naked opportunism and staggering hypocrisy.
Kolakowski’s main argument, if one must be identified, is that Bolshevism did not deteriorate into totalitarianism because of Stalin (as is often argued, especially by Lenin sympathizers), but instead because totalitarianism was baked into Lenin’s philosophy from the start, despite all the noises he made about wanting to create a better democracy. Before he was even in power, Lenin fantasized about liquidating all his political opponents, using violent coercion to keep all dissenters in line, and dictating to the masses what was and was not in their best interest. He desired to create a new permanent elite (the communist party officials), but dressed it up as if he was actually abolishing all elites forever, as if his new elite would better represent the masses than could parliamentary democracy. Lenin described in detail his dream of conducting mass confiscations of all private land and surplus (see Lenin’s State and Revolution), and imagined that the bulk of the people would not only celebrate these actions but assist in the mass thievery. In reality, Lenin’s first economic policy of requisitioning “surplus” grain from peasants (or what the requisitioners considered to be surplus) led to widespread mistrust of Lenin’s new state, as well as bribery and coercion. The people did not want to give up their product to the state, and the officials in charge of snatching the goods were highly susceptible to bribes. Their only carrot for making the people obey was threat of force, and use of Lenin’s massive police state infrastructure. Meanwhile all political activity that did not “further the socialist revolution” was anathematized.
This was not Stalinism, but Lenin’s original ideas and policies, the tactics that he used when he (Lenin) was in charge. Modern lovers of Lenin argue that he truly fought for the good of the people, and that after his death it was Stalin who corrupted his ideas and policies, warping them into a totalitarian, violently repressive, hyper-bureaucratic police state. But Lenin was the true founder of Soviet totalitarianism. Kolakowski lays this bare without becoming overly angry in the process (something I would struggle with). In the end, his critique of Lenin is devastating, yet really he lets most of Lenin’s ill-conceived ideas and shameful policies speak for themselves.
What is to be Done? and State and Revolution by Vladimir Lenin
Having read a few of Lenin’s writings now, I can say with confidence that I don’t enjoy his written work. He is absolutely humorless in his tone, harsh and reproachful toward anyone who even very subtly disagrees with him, and uncompromising in his particular vision of how a revolutionary party must behave and the goals they must fight for. He believes he is the lone defender of the Truth; anyone who has even the slightest variance of opinion is a liar, fraud, chauvinist, opportunist, or traitor. There is no room for compromise, no point in discussing alternative views, no patience for philosophical objections to his worldview, no time to hear warnings of the dangers that lurk in his political program. In other words, he is insufferable.
He points his intense beam of hatred not just toward the obvious targets (capitalists, politicians, the czar), but also toward his fellow socialists who object to his heavy-handed and dictatorial approach to party management, and even toward workers who don’t conform to his narrow outlook. Reading Lenin, one gets the impression that he would gladly banish from the party (or perhaps from life itself) all those who don’t agree with him on every single point, including proletarians who refuse to convert (though he claims to fight for and speak for the working class). Pluralism is his enemy, which of course makes him the enemy of humanity as it really is: contradictory, sloppy, confused, slow to act, apathetic, open to various arguments from different parties, agnostic. Lenin is a utopian: he believes that one man is capable of unlocking the one single universal Truth that renders all other opinions invalid for all time, and wishes all humans to either conform to his plan or vanish. Only those who show dogmatic adherence to Lenin’s program get to be included in the citizenry, in his revolution, in his definition of “the people.” I have little patience for this kind of approach to politics. Even if he claims to fight for the lowest classes, he is actually an enemy of mankind. Real humans, with all their flaws, can never thrive under a system that requires a hive-mind mentality, requires us to shun anyone and everyone who disagrees with the Founder. Despite Lenin’s best intentions, the party and governmental machinery he hopes to construct will only become the perfect vehicle for totalitarian dictatorship. Lenin himself may not have intended that, but he was so vain and so convinced of the perfection of his own ideas, that he was deaf to this criticism.
For these reasons, I find myself feeling absolutely repulsed and disgusted whenever I read his writing. I want to dismantle his philosophy, shine a harsh light on all its flaws, flay it in the public square and leave it bleeding on the pavement. Why do I care? Because there are those today who still believe Lenin’s philosophy holds the key to solving the major problems of our time: wealth inequality, climate change, etc. Though I still believe that Marxism has much to teach us about our world, and perhaps (when combined with liberal democracy) can even provide us with a workable approach toward addressing problems like climate change, I firmly believe Leninism is a dead end.
Of course, Lenin would say that my opinion here is driven entirely by my class status (I suppose he’d say I’m petty bourgeoisie). But that cop-out argument is the exact reason I detest his arguments: he can’t stomach philosophical critique of his outlook, so he side-steps it by automatically invalidating all criticism by claiming it is driven by class interest. When someone raises a valid question, he slaps him down and calls him an opportunist, as if all objectors are agents for the ruling class. Personally, I fear totalitarianism and understand the value of civil rights, which is why I raised objections to Plato’s Republic. Were those objections class-driven, or perhaps driven by a genuine distaste for dictatorship?
Lenin’s early writings are dictatorial in their approach to party politics, demanding either obedience or expulsion from the party. The society he later founded exhibited these same features on a much grander scale: demanding society-wide obedience to the party, or banishment/death. The inevitable slide into totalitarianism is all right there in his writings, nakedly apparent to anyone who stops to think about what he is actually saying. Lenin claims to speak for the worker, but he only speaks for himself and his cohort of zealots (and opportunists who will ride his coattails to power). That all being said, I think it is imperative we study his work, lest we forget how easily dictatorial thinking can slip into ideology that claims to be selfless, that pretends to serve the long-suffering masses, that promises to build a better world. Just another utopian with a thinly-concealed thirst for power, a desire to be God and remake the world according to his whim. I’ll have more to say about this guy later.
The Iliad by Homer
After reading a bunch of Plato, I felt like it was finally time to tackle this classic of the ancient world. Afterall Homer’s work plays an out-sized role in Plato’s Republic; it is the main target of Socrates’ program of censorship. I can understand why: Socrates wishes for the warriors in his polis to be fearless in the face of death, absolutely selfless in their submission to the will of the state, and incapable of pity or mercy or really any unmanly emotion. Therefore literature in the polis must not portray either soldiers, kings, or gods showing any of those negative (banned) attributes. But in the Iliad, a poem that was legendary even by Plato’s time (Socrates state in Republic that Homer was the poet who educated Greece), soldiers openly discuss their fears about death, the king’s authority is challenged by his subordinates, the childish gods bicker with each other and act in a petty and insolent fashion, and Achilles (the deadliest soldier in the army) whines and weeps and complains constantly about his sorry lot in life. He even sits out of the battle like a coward, all because he is so angry at the king for confiscating his favorite slave woman. While these situations push the drama forward and make the story so much more interesting, Plato can’t allow any of this in his polis. They insinuate that the heroes, the kings we are supposed to obey, and the god we are supposed to worship are all just a bunch of whiny, fearful, petty, contradictory jerks. In other words, they act like real people, and Plato can’t allow that because he is attempting to build something that resembles the Ideal. He can’t have his humans acting like humans! So Homer’s gotta go.
As for my thoughts on the Iliad: I’m glad I read it. The language is beautifully crafted and bursting with delicious similes. Many of these similes reference wild animals, nature, and farm life. These provide a closer look into what actual Greek life was like during Homer’s time (approx. 400 years before Plato). Here are a couple examples:
Like flies swarming around shepherds’ pens in spring, when pails fill up with milk, so the Achaeans, a huge long-haired host, marched out onto that plain against the Trojans, eager to destroy them. Just as goatherds sort out with ease the wandering beasts, all mixed up in the pasture, so through all the army, the leaders organized the troops for battle
He was like a lion slightly hurt by a shepherd guarding his sheep flock out in the wilds, when it jumps the wall into the pen. But he’s not killed it. The wound rouses the beast’s strength. The shepherd can’t keep the charging lion from his sheep, who, left unguarded, panic. Huddled in a mass, they crowd in on one another. So the lion, in his hot rage, leaps over the wide sheep-fold wall. That’s how strong Diomedes went to fight the Trojans in his angry fury.
Aren’t those fun! Honestly though, the plot of this poem is a bit thin. Reading about how the battle went back and forth and back and forth, over and over, and this guy slayed that guy and on and on, it started to feel like I was reading a written account of an Ancient Greek football game, every play written out in epic poem style. In other words it got a bit dull (try describing a football game, play by play, and see if you can keep it interesting). The poem is also surprisingly violent, full of graphic descriptions of slaughter and atrocities. The main characters are all mass murderers, many of them openly reveling in the bloodbath. They have absolutely no problem with slavery, pillage, desecration of their enemies’ corpses, and wholesale butchery. As a fan of history, I appreciate how this draws the reader back to a bygone era, revealing the warped psychology of the Ancient Greek warrior-nobility.
But in the end, I much preferred the Histories of Herodotus to the Iliad. Both are beautifully written, but Herodotus delivers so much more plot and insight into the cultures of the world, so much more varied and deep perspective on he goings-on of man. Homer’s work only gives us a single perspective: those of the warrior-nobility. Homer is blind to the plight of slaves and common soldiers, completely uninterested in the perspective of those who might view the rape and pillage of a city as gross injustices. He’s a man of his time. Herodotus offers up something that feels, at least to me, more timeless.
The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1: The Spell of Plato by Karl Popper
I’m not sure if I was just naturally disinclined to disagree with Plato’s political philosophy, or whether instead Karl Popper incepted the dislike of Plato into my brain. I feel like I probably would have disagreed with Plato no matter what (Plato is a totalitarian idealist after all), but Karl Popper gave me all the tools to turn my vague discomfort into sharpened arguments. I’m sure that a fan of Plato would tell me that it’s an awful blunder to read Popper’s scorching critique of Plato side by side with Republic. Shouldn’t I let Republic stand on its own merit without allowing a critic to tear it apart before I’ve even had a chance to enjoy it? Look, I want to give Plato a chance and all, but I’m so very glad I read Popper’s work, so glad. I am fully under his sway, I’m captivated. I lapped up his critiques like a hungry puppy! Frankly he nails it. He pinpoints exactly what is wrong with idealistic totalitarian thinking. I am so excited to read part two, where he tackles Marxism. I imagine he has much to say about philosophy’s other most famous idealist (yes I know Marx was a materialist, but I also believe he was deeply idealistic in his prophesies about the future, his opinions on human nature, and his belief that class is the ultimate defining feature on one’s life). Popper is a philosopher of science, which means he cares very deeply about scientific method, and about only using the word ‘science’ to describe actual science (not pseudo-science). For example, after reading Popper one realizes how laughable is the notion that a revolution – where so many factors all change at once – can ever be ‘scientific.’ Yet in Marxism there is a belief that if we apply the scientific tools of Marxism, we can not only orchestrate a socialist revolution, but then scientifically engineer a society that can maintain communism and radical democracy. Popper might not flatly argue that the goal itself is impossible, but only that it is absurd to imagine that any part of that chaotic process would be handled ‘scientifically.’ Popper also rejects the notion that history has patterns that, once understood, allow us to predict future historical patterns. Therefore Plato’s theory of history (that history started with the ideal Forms and degenerated over time, but if we make certain changes to society we can return to the ideal that was lost) is hogwash, as is Marx’s prophesy that eliminating capitalism will usher in an era of communism. Anyhoo, I loved this book. I haven’t read an author I agree with more than Popper in a while; I can feel his influence shaping my long-term thinking about philosophy, science, and politics.
Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics by Joli Jensen
This book is a treasure trove! Though I am not a true academic, I not-so-secretly wish I was one, and this book spoke directly to me. Here are some of the nuggets of wisdom I picked up:
Write for 15 minutes per day no matter what. If all you feel is frustration and lack of creativity, write about that. The act of writing will expunge those negative feelings and bring you closer to resolving them.
Close the door to distractions. You have to be willing to shut the rest of the world out for a brief time every day so that you can give your writing the full focus it deserves.
Aim for craftsmanship, not performance for others. You do not need to impress anyone, and your work need not be a timeless masterpiece. Think like a carpenter learning to construct a great rocking chair. It may take many iterations, and each time he learns from his mistakes and makes subtle (or drastic) adjustments to his design, process, and execution. The goal is not to create the world’s greatest rocking chair, a chair that belongs in a museum or on an alter. The goal is to improve steadily, to work on your chops, to gain experience. With this attitude always at front of mind, the pressure of performance dissipates and writing becomes fun and relaxing, a release valve for built-up tension and intellectual backlog, an activity we look forward to.
Save productive minutes for this work, don’t wait til you’re depleted. If you are most productive in the morning, spend 15 minutes writing during that time. You can spare 15 minutes. Don’t wait until midnight, when your brain is shutting down. Write when you are fresh and most productive.
In The Apology, Socrates comes off as a nearly mythical figure. He is the heroic truth-seeker who dedicates his life to exposing ignorance, corruption, and self-righteous hypocrisy; the prophet chosen by a god to enlighten and provoke the people of his city; the philosopher who asks hard questions and refuses to accept easy answers; the martyr who is willing to die for the cause. This is an inspirational story, but it misses something about Socrates’ approach to philosophy that helps to explain one of his main limitations: his personal commitment to unmask and embarrass anyone who claimed to possess wisdom. This practice, which he repeated often throughout his long career, was not only detrimental to his standing in the city, but also largely unproductive as a philosophic endeavor because it failed to bring Socrates much closer to discovering the wisdom he claimed to seek. It also helps explain why the people of Athens grew so exasperated with him.
In his own retelling, he set out at a young age on a lifelong quest to seek out any man who “was thought to be wise by many other people, and especially by himself,” so that Socrates might publicly interrogate him, and in so doing prove to the man and the surrounding crowd that the man “thought himself wise without being so”1. In order to demonstrate to the crowd that the man was less wise than he believed, Socrates would often sow confusion in the conversation, purposelessly attempting to confound the person he was questioning.2 Though Socrates did often achieve his goal of demonstrating that the man was more ignorant than he let on, the unfortunate side effect was that Socrates (to his “dismay and alarm”) made enemies everywhere he went. His uncouth behavior earned him “much hostility of a very vexing and trying sort.”
So the cost was high in this quest for philosophic truth. The problem was that though he claimed to seek truth itself, in practice his agenda was to humiliate “those who think themselves wise but are not.” His goal was not to answer hard questions, but simply to prove that anyone who claimed to know an answer was a fool.3 This reveals a certain arrogance about Socrates: as he fought tirelessly to prove that politicians, lawyers, poets, and even common laborers were, in a certain sense, frauds because they failed to acknowledge their ignorance on certain philosophical matters, Socrates meanwhile strengthened his own deeply-held belief that only he possessed true moral courage: the courage to admit that he knew nothing. In this way he could think very highly of himself and his powers as a philosopher without ever having to take up the much more challenging task of seeking actual answers to the tough questions. Afterall, if one asserts forcefully that he knows nothing (as Socrates did), it gets one off the hook from having to provide answers; instead one can spend all his time trying to prove that everyone else also knows nothing. In a sense it’s as if he set out to prove that true knowledge is impossible, that the best a human can hope for is an honest confession of his own ignorance, and that any who believes he or she has cultivated something of value deserves public scorn.
This is a low standard when it comes to philosophic knowledge, and as a civic philosophy it certainly does not make for a thriving city. A city depends on large groups of citizens cultivating and putting to good use diverse sets of skills and know-how; the city values those skills and considers them worthwhile and necessary. But Socrates believed such knowledge was a mirage, such success was hollow; the only life worth living was a life spent engaged in philosophical inquiry. He openly looked down on the beliefs, priorities, moral courage, and accomplishments of his peers, even going to far as to suggest that their unique successes were not even “real.” For example, when speaking about a champion at the Olympics, he asserted that “that victor brings you only the appearance of success, whereas I bring you the reality.” It is simply untrue that one who has trained his whole life and reached the pinnacle of his profession does not represent “real” success. There are many kinds of success, and one is not objectively more real than another – a philosopher should acknowledge that.
How is it helpful, or wise, to denigrate all professions except one’s own, to declare that everyone who has honed a craft or gained hard-earned knowledge has wasted his time and effort, that his success is all an illusion, that the only way to demonstrate “real” success is to live life exactly as Socrates lived it? Socrates failed to understand the inherent value of pluralism when it came to skills, knowledge, and perspectives, allowing himself to develop a myopic opinion of what “real” success looks like. The various and interweaving skills of the population are what made Athens what it was. No doubt most members of the jury had spent their own lives cultivating their own diverse sets of skills, skills that those jury members likely valued quite highly. In this light, Socrates’ courageous truth-telling probably came off as pretty insulting to the average Athenian who worked hard and cared about his career, family, and hobbies. (Likewise Plato failed to appreciate the importance of pluralism in his political philosophy, but that’s a topic for another essay).
We need to be able to live in the world. The world is not all just a mirage that can be destroyed simply by declaring that nothing is real; nor is it truthful to blithely declare that philosophic knowledge is the only knowledge that truly matters. If one wishes to be a philosopher, he or she should seek answers rather than merely critique anyone who values something in life besides philosophy. It is no surprise – due to his belief that his own esoteric quest was the only way of life that could possess any objective value – that Socrates neglected his own family and their needs. As he put it, “That I am, in fact, just the sort of of gift that God would send to our city, you may recognize from this: it would not seem to be in human nature for me to have neglected all my own affairs, and put up with the neglect of my family for all these years, but constantly minded your interests, by visiting each of you in private like a father or an older brother, urging you to be concerned about goodness.” It is likely that he considered the role of father far less important (less worthy, less “real”) than the role of god-appointed unmasker of ignorance; indeed he was actually trying to teach others how to be “concerned about goodness” by neglecting his own family. For Socrates it was both worthwhile and good to be a wandering philosopher, just as it would have been less good to be a committed father and husband. This is a statement not about objective value, but about what Socrates the man valued.
A true philosopher must be able to comprehend that many other things besides philosophy objectively matter just as much as philosophy, including a lawyer’s knowledge of the law, a poet’s skill with language, a mother’s ability to calm her child, and (a skill Socrates would probably mock, but one he seemed not to possess) the social skills necessary to live in a city without constantly making enemies. Socrates certainly possessed philosophic wisdom, but lacked a certain social wisdom. Is one objectively more important (more “good”) than the other, if we have to live in the world? Can one search for truth without constantly embarrassing one’s peers in the process? Can a philosopher work to uncover deeper truths while accepting that other humans value other endeavors just as highly as the philosopher values his own quest, and that those other endeavors might actually be just as “good” as his own? Or must the philosopher become so bogged down by his own self-importance that he makes it his mission to make enemies out of the whole world? If one truly seeks wisdom, valuing pluralism and diversity of opinion in this complex world is a great place to start.
Notes
I use the translation of Plato’s Apology by David Gallop, appearing in John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer, eds., Introduction to Philosophy : Classical and Contemporary Readings, Seventh Edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). All quotations above are from Apology.
Socrates himself never wrote down his own ideas nor kept records of his conversations. Therefore our only real record of the Socrates’ achievements are the dialogues of Plato, wherein the character “Socrates” often attempts to prove that a so-called wise person is actually quite ignorant. In dialogues such as Charmenides, Laches, and Euthyphro (just to name a few), the conversation ends in confusion, the only conclusion reached that nobody seems to know anything. These early dialogues might be a more accurate representation of the Socrates’ actual conversational method, since they were written when Plato was younger and still under the sway of his teacher. But ultimately we don’t really know how much of the character “Socrates” is a realistic portrayal of the actual man, and how much is Plato’s creative imagination.
This is certainly not true of every Socratic dialogue. In Republic and Phaedo, Socrates offers extended positive arguments about the formation of an ideal society, the nature of reality, the afterlife, etc. It is possible though that by the time Plato was writing these dialogues, he was no longer interested in portraying Socrates as he truly was, but instead began using “Socrates” as a mouthpiece for Plato’s own theories. If we take Apology to be a fairly accurate picture of how the real Socrates described his mission in life, then I think it’s fair to say that one of his main goals was to prove that anyone who claimed to know an answer was a fool.
In May 2021 I picked up An Introduction to Political Philosophy by Jonathan Wolff in a book box. Reading that book was like sampling heroin: I was addicted immediately, my brain permanently altered. Twenty years ago I majored in history, but I only ever took one philosophy class, and no political philosophy classes. I didn’t realize until I read this book what a lost opportunity that was. Since reading that book, I’ve read philosophy almost exclusively, and have developed a strong desire to pursue it academically, to study it to the hilt, to become a philosopher myself. For now I consider myself an undergrad. I have so very much to learn, and I’m restraining my urge to write tons of half baked blog posts based on the scanty information I’ve gleaned over the past two years. My job for now is to read and read and read some more, pausing only to process what I’m reading, take notes, think, and build a research library. My particular area of interest is Marxism, specifically to address the question of whether Marxism is at all a useful tool for solving the major problems of our time, such as income inequality and environmental degradation. But before I can form any opinions on that question (or any other), I need to acquire some background knowledge.
Background knowledge I need to acquire:
The long chain of Western philosophical texts and major ideas that span from the Ancients to today: Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Russell, etc., and the political philosophers as well. Also formal logic, philosophy of law, and studies of democracy, liberalism, anarchism, conservatism, and progressivism.
The major socialist and Marxists thinkers that span from the early 19th century to today: Precursors to Marx, Karl Marx, Engels, Kautsky, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, Marcuse, Althusser, Habermas, etc. I must study all the threads of Marxism before I undertake to analyze, critique, or judge the tradition.
Modern interpretations of Marxism: humanist, feminist, ecological, democratic, etc. How are they different from older traditions, and what do they have to say about the older traditions? What problems do these new interpretations attempt to solve? Any successes?
Style guides for academic work, argumentative best practices for works of philosophy.
The history of Marxist and non Marxist revolutions that have occurred during the last 300 years. What forces motivated them, what worked and what failed, what parties and ideologies came to the fore, what were the results?
Goals:
Study the history of western philosophy to the fullest extent possible. My goal is not to become an absolute master of the full spectrum of western philosophy, but to develop a foundational knowledge upon which I can build a more specific area of expertise.
Develop a masterful understanding of the history of Marxist ideas from the beginning to the present, including all the tentacles of this labyrinthine tradition, and where the tradition stands today. This is the critical background information. Along the way, write practice essays on whichever topics catch my fancy.
Develop specialties within the Marxist tradition, and compose a larger work (a thesis?) that pertains to that specialty. Specialty 1: Leninism and Trotskyism (the intricacies of the philosophy, how it has been applied around the world, why it has failed to achieve its goals, whether it is useful today). Specialty 2: (unknown at this time).
Develop a foundational knowledge of the international history of revolutions, from the French Revolution to today.
Construct a thorough and well organized research database that I can tap for various writing projects.
Build toward a synthesis that combines the lessons learned from a long study of Marxism (including an understanding of the weaknesses of the philosophy and the ways it has failed) and wields them against the intransigent problems of today. In other words, find a way to adapt and modernize Marxism, find and fix the weaknesses, and assess whether the tradition has anything to offer against our current problems, or whether it is a philosophical dead end.
Progress so far:
I’ve read a some of the foundational works of Marxism and well as some critical commentary on Marxism (including works by Thomas Sowell, David Harvey, and a compilation edited by Terrell Carver. Mostly I’ve focused on Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky for now, but intend to keep traveling chronologically through the history of Marxism. I consider this a modest start. See my Currently Reading page for titles. I’ve only read these works once, so my understanding of them is that of a student newly exposed to a plethora of difficult and stimulating ideas. Based on this limited first reading, I have started to formulate some embryonic responses which in intend to develop further as I read and re-read these challenging works.
My readings of classic texts from Western philosophy is even more limited. So far I’ve read Plato’s Republic, Crito, Apology, and Phaedo, and well as Karl Popper’s damning commentary on Republic. I’ve listened to a couple survey courses on Audible as well, but that’s about it. My knowledge of philosophy, especially outside the realm of political philosophy, is very limited. I’m signed up to take an Intro to Philosophy course in the autumn.
Following the advice of Umberto Eco in How to Write a Thesis, I’ve started a revamp of the research database I’ve been building over the past two years. I am starting to create “index cards” on the app Trello to document my readings and ideas, so that I can organize them use them repeatedly for various writing projects. This will also help me understand better what I actually want to say down the road.
I have developed some very preliminary hypotheses, namely this:
Marx's critique of capitalism, though slightly dated, still has much to teach us about modern capitalism, and has applicability especially in the face of growing income inequality and climate catastrophe. At the very least it is useful as a set of analytical tools that helps us understand the world in which we live. That being said, his prophesies about the future revolutionary collapse of capitalism and abolition of alienation appear both idealistic and far-fetched, very different from the materialist, scientific criticism of capitalism that he developed over the course of multiple decades and presented so forcefully in Capital. So to summarize: Marx’s critique useful, Marx’s prophesies not so much.
Later, Vladimir Lenin mistook Marx's prophesies as scientific proofs, and so dismissed all critics of Bolshevism as opportunists, liars, frauds, charlatans, and traitors. Armed with the certainty of a religious martyr (and a certain blindness in regards to the weaknesses and contradictions of his own philosophy), he sought to engineer a utopia via authoritarian tactics, paving the way for all the debauchery and mass murder that defined the Stalin era. One of the key mistakes in Lenin’s approach was his cavalier dismissal of liberal democracy as "bourgeoisie democracy,” and his preference instead for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that would somehow eliminate all classes, purge out all the capitalist elements (and capitalist people), and then finally dissolve their own dictatorship; the state itself would disintegrate into nothing. And so, through violence and the complete annulment of civil liberties, he would establish mankind's communist utopia.
From his safe haven in London, Lenin argued that the very concept of civil liberties was a sham; all the hard-fought progress mankind had made toward the sanctification of democracy was recast as a grand conspiracy perpetrated against the workers by the propertied classes. Therefore it was in the working class’s best interest to abolish civil liberties in order to accomplish their singular goal: the destruction of all classes and the state (Lenin assumes this is the singular goal of all good and honest proletarians). This was a vulgarization of Marxism. Marx understood that the world is a complex place, and his analysis is filled with endless caveats, disclaimers, and footnotes that demonstrate that he did not believe there were any easy or simple solutions to the world's problems, and neither was it useful to categorically blame the world's problems on one single class. Lenin, on the other hand, has no problem pointing out who the enemies are. He paints a grotesque portrait of human history wherein the bad guys (elites, liberals, intellectuals, capitalists, and even the middle class) cheat and swindle the good guys (the workers) out of their rightful inheritance: a world where no man possesses any power over any other man. Counterintuitively, in order to usher in this perfectly egalitarian world, we must first conduct a violent purge of any who disagree with this interpretation, a holocaust of all "bad guys." In other words, if we just murder enough people, we can finally have our utopia.
Lenin pulled the lever so hard toward the “idealism” direction that his Marxism, once rooted in a scientific analysis of “the now,” lost touch with reality and forgot what real people are like. In his writings, Lenin seemed to expect the workers to all think with one mind and fight ceaselessly for one singular goal, as if the real life proletariat was capable of embodying the ideal Form of “proletariat” that existed in Lenin’s mind. Lenin's ideal proletariat is incapable of pluralism; they have no differing opinions on matters of economics, government, or human morality. Instead they exhibit a hive mind mentality, and dream only of accomplishing Lenin's own goal: the establishment of perfect communism. These ideal workers will joyfully limit democracy in order to expand it, they will violently seize full dictatorial power in order to one day voluntarily dissolve their own power, and they will nullify civil liberties in order to create a more egalitarian society. At best, these contradictions render Lenin's theories incoherent; at worst, they provide a ready-made philosophical justification for totalitarian government.
Lenin's vision of "the people" is highly idealistic. Those who agree with Lenin are “the people” and “the masses.” Those who do not agree - perhaps those who disdain violence in general, or wish to shield their families from war, or voice alternative political/philosophical opinions, or oppose revolution on religious/nationalist/constitutional grounds, or believe that Lenin's narrow road to utopia might contain some potentially catastrophic flaws, or simply hold a different interpretation of Marxism - are not "the people." Since only those who agree with Lenin count as people, many millions of proletarians (the group Lenin claims to speak for) who dissent to Lenin's program will need to be dealt with if the revolution is going to proceed. This will mean mass disenfranchisement, exile, imprisonment, and murder of proletarians. In this way Lenin reveals that, regardless of his claims to the contrary, he cares less about one's class status than about one's agreement with his program. In other words, his version of the "proletarian" dictatorship isn't actually FOR proletarians; it's actually only for people who agree with Lenin. It's a classic one party state - the only thing that matters to the party is that you agree with the party. Agreement with Lenin is the sole real criterion for citizenship; all who dissent must be purged. Thus, "the people" is transformed into "those who agree with the party," which is how Lenin can technically argue that his state is the first state in human history that actually serves "the people" - all persons who aren't part of "the people" are made to vanish entirely.
And so Lenin's new idealistic Marxism predictably dissolved into a totalitarian nightmare; permanent single party rule instead of worker democracy, a new ruling elite instead of a classless society, a totalitarian bureaucracy instead of a dissolved state. It was all right there in his writings, clear as day, before he and his clique ever grabbed the reins of power. Today most people blame the disaster of Soviet totalitarianism on Stalin, but Lenin provided it with philosophical grounding, and certainly got the ball rolling during the brief few years he wielded power.
There must be a way to preserve what is great about Marxism while discarding what is disastrous in Leninism. Most importantly, a synthesis between democracy and socialism must occur if Marxist philosophy is to outlive the revolutionary disasters of the 20th century. We have to drop the notion that a dictatorial “vanguard party” can ever violently establish a classless society, without themselves devolving into a new ruling elite. Without democracy and civil liberties, Marxism presents a recipe for dystopia. But really this assertion demands that we either abandon Marxism altogether (which I do not wish to do), or find a way to combine Marxism with liberalism, without destroying the essence of either.
I believe Marxism may still have a role to play in helping us solve our most intransigent problems, but only if real democracy (not the sham “revolutionary democracy” Lenin promises) plays a key role in the process. Perhaps this amounts to no more than progressivism, or perhaps it will mean more than that. I’m not even close to convinced that it’s possible for humans to transcend capitalism entirely; perhaps progressive capitalism is the closest thing humans will ever achieve to communism, while still preserving democracy. But is modern day progressive capitalism a powerful enough tool in the fight against (capitalism-induced) climate catastrophe? And to question this from another angle, does progressivism actually even lead to increased democratic control over the economy, if the end-result of progressivism is government takeover of industry? If the government is currently run by elites, than transferring ownership of key industries into elite hands doesn't sound particularly democratic either? Is there actually a way to create a more democratic economy, without simply giving in to laissez faire capitalism (which seems to be leading mankind toward climate disaster)?
I’d like to explore ways that we can use Marxism (in one form or another) to address the big problems of our time, but I intend to stay focused at all times on the way humans really are in the real world, and keep idealism out of my analysis. I believe that anyone who promises a utopia and a permanent end to human suffering (especially if this goal can only be attained through violence and repression) is either misguided or a cynical, power-hungry opportunist. But I also don't believe that liberal democracy holds all the keys either. No system is perfect, and costs must be weighed at every turn.
Ok so that’s my rough hypothesis, as it stands today.
“Democracy for the vast majority of the people, and suppression by force, i.e., exclusion from democracy, of the exploiters and oppressors of the people–this is the change democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism. Only in communist society, when the resistance of the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes (i.e., when there is no distinction between the members of society as regards their relation to the social means of production), only then ‘the state… ceases to exist’, and ‘it becomes possible to speak of freedom’. Only then will a truly complete democracy become possible and be realized, a democracy without any exceptions whatever.”
The quote above does not sit right with me. I’ve been developing a hunch, or perhaps it’s better to call it a question: can democracy ever realistically thrive under a communist regime? Lenin, quoted above, promises that communism and democracy will support and reenforce one another, that both will thrive together. He argues that by limiting democracy (disenfranchising the “oppressors”) we can eventually create a fuller democracy than any the world has yet seen. But I remain skeptical that a fuller democracy can ever realistically blossom within a communist society, despite Lenin’s promises. Lately I’ve been reading Lenin (State and Revolution and What is to be Done), Trotsky (History of the Russian Revolution), Richard Pipes (The Russian Revolution), Kolakowski (Main Currents of Marxism), Karl Popper (The Open Society and its Enemies), and some Plato too. These writers have greatly influenced my thoughts on this subject. Here’s the way I see it at this moment:
Lenin (and Marx to a certain extent) promise that the coming era of communism will usher in a much more complete democracy than what is possible under capitalism. Yet in order to reach that goal, Lenin openly argues that democracy (for the exploiters and oppressors, and their allies) will need to be curtailed. This appears to be a strange and contradictory argument: we can only expand democracy by limiting it. Personally I get stuck on this point, even if I agree with much of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Lenin’s reasoning sounds so much like some Orwellian parody of totalitarian logic (we can only have freedom if we all become slaves, we can only eliminate the state if we usher in a dictatorship), that my mind struggles to accept its validity. Something here isn’t right.
How can we expect democracy to expand if the first step toward expanding it is the disenfranchisement of “the exploiters”? Afterall, who are these “exploiters?” Such a vague and malleable term, easily abused and manipulated in the hands of a revolutionary tribunal. We must go even further than asking how we will define exploiter, and ask who will decide the definition? This is not a semantic question; the answer to my question will determine who loses their right to participate in this so-called expanded democracy. It’s easy to picture the exploiters as some small cohort of Wall St. fat cats and billionaires, the top echelon of the 1%. To Lenin, these are obviously the “bad guys,” those most responsible for income inequality and exploitation, the first on Lenin’s list of citizens to be purged from the voter rolls (perhaps purged from life itself). But I think any revolutionary party would find that many, many more people than just the top 1% will need to be disenfranchised before the revolution can proceed.
So who is to be robbed of political power? I think the answer would turn out to be: whoever stands in the way of the revolutionary party’s agenda. Realistically, it wouldn’t only be the top tier capitalists who stand in the way of revolution, but also the millions of citizens who align philosophically and ideologically with conservatism, i.e. anyone who believes we should not overthrow capitalism, any one who values the concept of private property. Lenin’s program is so extreme, many left-leaning liberals (who might, in different circumstances, support a progressive government) would flock to conservatism’s banners if private property itself (the concept) was threatened. If democracy were allowed, Lenin’s agenda would face serious, united opposition. To complicate things further, a significant portion of these dissenters would likely be workers.
How can a revolutionary party tolerate these dissenters, if the primary goal is to instigate revolution? I believe the revolutionaries would feel the need to persecute these conservatives regardless of their class status, meaning that working class conservatives (many of whom would certainly resist a communist revolution) would need to be disenfranchised, despite their proletarian status. Whether or not these people are correct for opposing revolution is beyond the scope of this essay. All I mean to say here is that not only the “fat cats” will be disenfranchised, but also many lower-class proletarians as well. This truth uncovers a flaw in Lenin’s materialist logic: economic forces cannot be the sole driver of human action if so many proletarians oppose communist policies. In the real world, it forced Lenin to admit (through his actions) that this corollary is true: Lenin and his Bolshevik Party did not actually fight for benefit of the working class; instead they fought only for the benefit of those who ideologically agreed with Lenin’s philosophy and Bolshevik policies. Essentially Lenin was offered a choice that amounts to the ultimate test of his philosophical integrity: a) allow all proletarians to vote on government policy, thereby sacrificing his communist dream at the altar of proletarian democracy, or b) hold onto power all costs, which entails labelling all dissenting proletarians as class traitors and terrorizing/purging them via a network of informants, secret police, and concentration camps. Of course he chose B, and set the stage for Stalin’s later perfection of the method.
What else could Lenin mean by “exploiters and oppressors” besides those who oppose the revolution? If a large bloc of proletarian conservatives stood in the way of revolution, Lenin would either be forced to purge them from the revolutionary party, or accept that when these citizens vote they will vote against communism, which will likely doom the whole revolutionary effort. Lenin imagined in his pre-revolution writings that it would be easy to identify who deserves to be purged (basically all non-proletarians). In other words, he had a failure of imagination when picturing in his mind his beloved proletariat (or perhaps he idealized them). Either way, he failed to notice that many, many proletarians opposed the Bolsheviks. Thus upon his assumption of power in Russia, he was faced with an unexpected backlash from his own constituency.
And so, predictably, he purged dissident workers right alongside dissenters from other classes. This embarrassingly reveals that class is actually not the most important defining category for Lenin; what he actually cares about even more than class is orthodox agreement with his own political views. Any who can’t meet that standard must be disenfranchised – regardless of class – otherwise the revolution will fail. So the revolution cannot proceed without massive disenfranchisement across all the classes, a disenfranchisement based solely on political beliefs, not on class status.
Thus the quote at the top of this article is proven false. Under Lenin’s revolutionary program, classes do not disappear. The new ruling elite are not proletarians as Lenin promised, but Party Men. One’s class status is determined by one’s obedience to the government and affiliation with the party that rules it. The quote above is also false in its assertion that a truly complete democracy can be realized under (Lenin’s) communism. Lenin’s program can only be implemented if all who disagree with it are labelled as “oppressors” and disenfranchised. How could the disenfranchisement of all citizens who hold ideas contrary to those of the ruling revolutionary party really be the first logical step toward expanding democracy? And how can Lenin claim to rank proletarian status as the ultimate defining feature of his ideal citizen if he does not have a plan for how to deal with proletarians who disagree with him?
If we assume, as Lenin did, that all proletarians will unanimously agree with Leninism, then the question of whether or not to purge proletarians who disagree with Leninism becomes a non-issue. But by doing so, we imagine a world that does not exist today and, given the realities of life in a pluralistic world, is unlikely ever to occur. Though that doesn’t stop utopian thinkers like Lenin from imagining that the proletariat is capable, as if they were one singular body, of absolute unity of thought and purpose, of hive-mind behavior. Perhaps if economic and social circumstances in the USA degraded to such a horrendous extent (as they had in Russia during WWI and after the February Revolution) that a majority of Americans were going on strike, marching in the streets, and demanding urgent and dramatic changes, then Leninist parties might be able to claim large-scale buy-in by the workers. But even then, there would still be workers who believe that parliamentary democracy is the most feasible solution to the country’s problems, and many others who rally to right-wing banners, and many others that would consider themselves progressive while refusing to reject the concept of private property (these types also reject the Bolshevik’s violent methods in favor of constitutional, legislative reforms). This was all true of the Russian proletariat in 1917. In other words, the only way to assume that Lenin wouldn’t need to fight against, disenfranchise, silence, and persecute members of the working class is to assume that all members of this enormous and diverse class are capable of rejecting all but one economic-political theory, of fighting for one singular economic goal (at the expense of all other goals). Humanity doesn’t work like that, not ever.
Pluralism in political thought must be acknowledged by any political theory who wishes to do more than construct utopias in his mind. There are countless reasons why many proletarians, despite sharing with the Bolsheviks a sincere desire to improve the lives of the poor, would reject Leninism entirely. Many proletarians are religious people who might fear losing their freedom to worship, while many others are parents who may oppose revolution simply for the sake of maintaining a peaceful world for their children, while others are patriots who would remain loyal to their countries and therefore oppose an international communist revolution, and others still are modern constitution-loving liberals who consider incremental change to be the ideal way to reform capitalism. Turns out there are many reasons why a proletarian might oppose revolution, and many reasons why their class status might not be the most important motivator behind their ethical and political decisions.
Lenin assumes in a cavalier fashion that the dissenters will be a tiny minority, and all of them complicit in the evil doings of capitalism (i.e. they’re bad guys, and there aren’t a lot of them, so we don’t need to feel bad purging them. In fact, once we purge them, we can finally have the communist society that we, the good guys, all secretly long for). And so when Lenin claims that class status is the most important defining factor in a human’s life, the factor that determines one’s inner-most desires, the factor that determines whether one gets a voice in the new society, he is constructing an “ideal” version of the proletariat, a perfect version. When Lenin discovered that this ideal proletariat did not really exist, he determined that must never allow democracy to fall into the hands of the workers.
So either:
Proletarian status matters more than anything else, in which case the revolutionaries would need to allow proletarian dissenters (conservatives and liberals) to vote, and Lenin’s vision of revolution will likely fail, since class status does not directly determine one’s political beliefs, and the whole body of workers hold so many conflicting opinion about economics, revolution, democracy, politics, religion, etc.;
Or orthodox adherence to the revolutionary party’s goals matter most, which will mean Lenin will be forced to disenfranchise many proletarians, which will reveal the lie behind Lenin’s claim that under communism democracy will be in the hands of proletarians – in fact it will actually be in the hands only of those who agree with Lenin.
Neither scenario gives us a situation where a communist revolution ushers in fuller democracy, or for that matter a democracy in the hands of the proletariat.
I don’t think Lenin would be ready to admit that he ranks “orthodox acceptance of his ideals” higher in importance than class status. He avoids facing this question by instead simply believing that all proletarians are capable of relentlessly pursuing the same political and economic goals; any who oppose these goals must necessarily be in a different class (the oppressive classes), or are perhaps just brainwashed puppets of the oppressive classes (and so must be purged for the common good). True proletarians are incapable of supporting capitalism, representative democracy, or incremental reform on their merits alone. So any proletarians who do support these things must not be true proletarians. In this way Lenin can claim to rank class status first in importance: he defines one’s class not according to one’s material conditions but according to whether that person agrees with Lenin’s views. One simply cannot be a proletarian unless one agrees with Lenin.
I don’t believe all of this was conscious for Lenin; he really does seem to believe that “true proletarians” will all support his personal political goals. Like a Platonic idealist, Lenin appears to believe in a sort of divine category called “proletarian.” All who fall into this category share the same goals, beliefs, desires, and dreams. If given the opportunity, they will prioritize the needs of their class above all other priorities, including religious, familial, national, and of course political. All we need to do is cleanse society of the poisonous residue of capitalism, and the true proletarians can finally come together and achieve their full communist potential. Therefore, according to this idealist-Marxist logic, the proletarians will never fight amongst themselves or disenfranchise one another because they will all agree on the efficacy of disenfranchising the oppressors (and it will be obvious who those people are). The elimination of inequality, exploitation, and profit-motive is the dream of every hard-working proletarian. In fact, Lenin extends this “theory of forms” to all the classes: not just proletarians but also capitalists and middle class people all think a certain way. They are predictable in their ideologies and desires, likely to act a certain way according to their class status. Therefore a figure like Lenin, who can see into everyone’s minds and hearts with the clarity of a god (much like Plato’s philosopher kings who alone understand the nature of the divine Forms), can steer large populations of people according to his almost divine will, and shape society along those hard and unbreakable class divisions.
Or so Lenin might have imagined it.
And then beyond that, I struggle with the question of how, assuming a communist society is able to survive this dictatorial phase of the revolution, democracy can be maintained under communism. Remember, Lenin openly admits that democracy will be curtailed to a certain extent during the revolution, but the second part of his prophesy is that after the revolution, once communism is established, democracy will expand to an even greater level than was possible before the revolution (this promise is made throughout State and Revolution). So Lenin’s promise for post-revolutionary democracy is even grander than his promise about the revolutionary proletariat persecuting the exploiters: he promises that communism will allow us to build “a democracy without any exceptions whatever.” But my intuition tells me that Lenin’s party-driven communism can only thrive if democracy is limited for good, and that the promise of an expanded democracy under communism is a misguided promise that can never be fulfilled.
Democracy cannot expand under communism because that would allow those opposed to communism to dismantle it, simply by exercising their right to vote (or voting representatives into office who will oppose communism). And even after the revolution, when capitalism has been dismantled and relegated to the dustbin of history (assuming it is even possible to do so), there will still always be citizens who wish to try new things, innovate, and challenge the ruling cultural and governmental paradigm. This will be true even if (especially if) communism is in place. Voters who wish to experiment with capitalism, question whether communism is the best method for running an economy, or desire the freedom to practice profit-seeking activities, might vote for policies that undermine communism. And since communism can only be maintained if capitalism is absolutely disallowed from seeping into the system, this sort of “chipping away” would destroy the entire communist effort. Only by purging from the voter rolls those who dissent can communism be maintained (or by disallowing voting altogether, as so many actual communist regimes have done). This of course can be done, but it certainly will not lead to an expansion of democracy. In fact, if this democracy can only allow those who agree with the communist party to vote, this really isn’t a democracy at all; it’s single party rule.
Entropy is the enemy of communism. Communism can only be maintained if the society is united in favor of it, or if those who oppose it are disenfranchised and prevented from practicing capitalism. Every time a free market is allowed to blossom under the communist regime, it weakens communism. But experimentation and profit seeking seem to be natural human behaviors. In any society there will be those who wish to challenge authority, experiment with activities that are banned, or simply try new things. Sometimes these behaviors are driven by profit-motive, but other times those who undertake these risks do so despite the fact that even if they succeed there will be little personal gain (picture Galileo experimenting with physics under the watchful gaze of the authoritarian Catholic church). No matter what social, cultural, or economic system is installed, there will always be humans ready to challenge it. Therefore communists will constantly need to fight entropy to maintain the communist vacuum (i.e. they will constantly need to prevent anyone with ideas that oppose or undermine communism from practicing or voicing those ideas, or voting at all in the “expanded” democracy). Only by eliminating dissenters can communism be maintained, as dissent only introduces cracks and flaws into the system. But if it can only be maintained by purging dissenters and maintaining single party rule, that means democracy is opposed to communism.
The communist tribunal in charge of determining who will be disenfranchised will have some tough questions to wrestle with: shall we allow free-thinkers to speak and act as they please, even if their ideas might undermine communism? Should we allow their ideas into the public forum, where others might debate the ideas or even build upon them? Or do we need to follow Plato (in The Republic) and ban dangerous ideas in order to maintain the purity of the people (to keep people in their ideal categories)? Do we need to disenfranchise or purge any who seem naturally inclined toward profit seeking? Or do we allow any and all to vote, even if the citizenry votes for economic liberalism? How can communism be preserved if regular citizens are allowed to question it, to convince others that it is worthwhile, to allow more income-inequality into society for the sake of upward mobility and innovation, and to accrue wealth and speak publicly about the merits of the profit motive? Either democracy or communism will need to give way.
Perhaps, one could argue, experimentation of this sort is not part of human nature and that it can be expunged if we change the cultural and material forces, if we engineer an ideal society. Perhaps under communism the people will be so content and well-fed, so fulfilled and self-actualized, so full of species-essence, that there will be no need to experiment with the profit motive ever again. All members of society can live their lives in peace, blissfully content with the eternal and unchanging status quo (and so communism would make conservatives of us all). Again, this is just Platonic thought lurking behind the facade of Marxism: the citizens of the ideal polis will all be perfectly content in their categories for all time; the polis will provide all citizens with everything they need to thrive and to fulfill their respective roles in the collective. Who in his right mind would fight or even dissent against the ideal polis (except perhaps one of those nasty exploiters we discussed earlier, but they’re all gone now). Ah Plato, that great enemy of democracy, shows up in the strangest places. Lenin promises democracy, but secretly, quietly, he whispers: why do we even need democracy, since under communism everyone will agree? And so communism will be Lenin’s ideal polis, where justice will be defined as a man fulfilling his role in society without complaint, and where innovation will become unnecessary because perfection has already been achieved. We can even do away with voting because unanimous consent among the entire citizenry will reign. Once communism is established we can arrest all change. There will be no dissent, so there will be no need of democracy or the state. We will all live like brothers and sisters, just as Plato’s guardians would live, if they truly all believed they were gold-souled.
So during the revolution we will need to limit democracy in order to dethrone the bad guys. Then after the revolution, democracy will only be granted to those who agree with the ruling party. Lenin believes this will be just about everyone who is left. Because he believes this, he prophesies that democracy and the state itself will wither away since there will be no need of them (who needs a state, or voting, or politics for that matter, if we all live in eternal peace, agreement, and brotherhood). It’s obvious by now that I consider this prophesy to be an overly optimistic statement of faith. All dissenters will lose their rights to vote (or their lives), and only through severe limitation of the electorate can Lenin be proven true: all voting citizens will agree that communism is the best and most glorious goal for society to pursue because in the end only party members are allowed to vote (and even party members can be easily purged if they disagree with the head man). Or to put it another way: kill everyone who disagrees with us, and we can finally live in a world where everyone agrees on everything (or pretends to agree, out of fear of the purge).
I don’t claim to know the hearts and minds of other men and women. All I can really know is my own mind, and even that can be slippery. So I’m not trying to build some grand theory about human nature. This essay is about the insolubility of democracy in a communist society. I do not consider this question solved for me, nor is my mind made up. In fact I am eager to be convinced otherwise! I ask: can we establish a society with more social and economic equality AND expanded democracy? More work to be done on this front. I’ll note that I do not wish to assassinate Marxism at this time, but only Lenin’s claims about democracy. I hold Marx’s critique of capitalism in the highest regard; he cuts right to the core of what is wrong with capitalism (just as Plato did to democracy). But though Plato, Marx, and Lenin were all expert critics, their proposed solutions were extreme and far-fetched, so I challenge them. Despite their genius and the raw power of their analyses, I challenge them. I reject the parts of their philosophies that endanger democracy, even if I fear where capitalism is taking us. If anything I want to distill the best and most useful parts of Marxism (not so much Platonism), and discover ways to apply those Marxist ideas today, to contribute toward solutions to the pressing problems of our time. But I fear the uncertainty, danger, and authoritarianism of open revolution, and I do not wish to throw democracy in the trash can in the name of overly optimistic experimentation. I worry that Marxism creates too slippery a slope toward authoritarianism.
I should note that I am writing this in the USA, where we currently have a representative democracy. Flawed as it is, it is still a democratic state, which sets a high bar for any revolutionary party hoping to overthrow the current system. Whatever new system they establish would need to include more and better democracy than what we have now, otherwise it will be tough to recruit enough Americans (liberty-minded and democracy-loving as they are) to join the revolution. If I was instead writing from a country with little or no legitimate democracy, or a country still mired in feudalism or facing widespread famine and deprivation or crushed under an imperialist regime, then perhaps the Leninist proposal would carry more wide-spread appeal. Afterall, any democracy would be better than none, and at least the Leninists promise some democracy. But if Marxists can’t find a revolutionary model that appeals to Americans (which will likely mean maintaining high levels of liberty and democracy), then they guarantee that the American people will fight valiantly against the revolution. So either democracy, economics, politics, and culture have to degrade considerably in the USA, or Leninists need to come up with a plan that actually appeals to citizens in a modern democracy, otherwise Leninism is a dead-end in America (and the entire western world I’d wager). Or perhaps Lenin would argue that all citizens of modern-day America are “oppressors” who deserve to be purged by the world-wide proletariat. He might get some support for that one.
Addendum: Review of Karl Kautsky’s Dictatorship of the Proletariat:
Kautsky buys into the Leninist idea that socialist transformation is inevitable. But unlike Lenin he emphasizes (in a somewhat convoluted fashion) that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Lenin was eager to abandon democracy the very moment his party seized power, and this is really the basis of Kautsky’s scathing critique of Lenin’s tactics.
In his own way, Kautsky supports bourgeoisie democracy because it lays the groundwork for (what he perceives to be) the inevitable proletarian revolution, and allows the workers to voice their grievances and form workers parties (capitalism generally comes with liberty and freedom of speech). He believes that if capitalism continues to grow, the disenfranchised proletariat must grow with it, and so capitalism will inevitably create communism, as Marx argued. The working poor will grossly outnumber the wealthy, and so they will eventually vote their way into power. Kautsky assumes that the workers in a democracy, once given the power, will unanimously demand socialism. And so he’s not so different from Lenin, in that he believes that class interest motivates all decisions (also known as vulgar materialism). Like Lenin he has an idealistic image of a united working class all sharing the same demands and motivations, without disagreements or deviations within the ranks. This is not how real politics works, which makes the idealism of Kautsky and Lenin appear particularly quaint (and in Lenin’s case, dangerously naive). Though Lenin and Kautsky subscribe to the same brand of idealism, they disagree on the timeframe: Kautsky prefers the slow and even development of socialism over time; Lenin demands a violent and immediate revolution (any who refuse to come along with his plan must be purged).
So Kautsky and Lenin both share the same end goal, only that Lenin was too hasty to get there. What is really at the heart of this disagreement over the timeframe of the revolution is a more critical disagreement about democracy. Democracy is a crucial feature in Kautsky’s imagined revolution, and in his imagined communist society that follows that revolution. To take it even further, Kautsky believes that socialism cannot exist without democracy. Without democracy the whole plan will decay into dictatorship. In this regard he was proven right by Lenin. The Bolsheviks’ first move was the dismantling of democracy, including democracy among the workers (many of whom dissented or belonged to different parties from the Bolsheviks). By the time the Bolshevik transition to power was complete, real socialism (read: equality between all classes) was dead in Russia: Lenin’s party (read: the new ruling class) controlled all facets of government, culture, and society, while the teeming masses were disenfranchised, impoverished, and completely unable to openly voice grievances. The Bolsheviks’ so-called “dictatorship of the proletariat” was just a dictatorship, not socialism.
So Kautsky is right in the sense that socialism without democracy decays rapidly into dictatorship or single party rule. However Katusky isn’t particularly clear about how democracy will inevitably lead to socialism. While Lenin squashed democracy in order to preserve his party’s power, Kautsky sees democracy as the pathway to real socialism. But this will only happen if the vast majority demand socialism, and agree on what “socialism” should mean. Lenin rightly understood that this isn’t really feasible. The democratic electorate simply cannot come together on such a large and ambiguous goal, if all citizens are allowed to vote and speak freely. And so Lenin and his small cohort of true believers staged a sudden coup rather than allowing the masses to vote him into (which he knew they would never do), and then once in charge he destroyed all vestiges of democracy in his rise to absolute power. Was this a cynical attempt to hold onto power, or did he truly believe that by eliminating democracy he would one day create real socialism? Answer: who cares. His method led to totalitarianism, so it was wrong. It was the wrong method both for creating socialism and for governing in general (call me a consequentialist if you like).
Lenin understood, unlike Kautsky, that democracy is more likely to kill socialism than birth it, because factions within workers parties and disagreements between large swaths of the population create deadlock and stalemate and thin margins for change. Generally the most revolutionary outcomes a democracy can hope for are the sort of liberal, incremental, compromise-focused changes that we typically see in parliamentary governments. Kautsky ignores the reality of pluralism: people hold different opinions and see the world through unique lenses, and this is true even within workers parties and unions. This is a natural facet of humanity, and cannot be ignored. It is a fantasy to imagine that something as intricate as a socialist economy could ever be democratically planned and administered, or that the entire population could even be made to agree that socialism is the correct path, or even be made to agree on one single definition of socialism. Democracy is far too messy and inefficient and factional for that. There will always be disagreement and innovation and challenges to the status quo, and economic factors alone will never be the sole driver of human behavior. This is why democracy does work well with capitalism, which is also sloppy and unplanned and competitive. Pluralism is one of the driving forces of capitalism, which (like the gene pool) is strengthened by diversity. Lenin understood all of this well, and so (as a hater of diversity) sought to prevent any who opposed him from exercising any democratic power whatsoever. Lenin couldn’t allow factions or even small disagreements to flourish within the party, so he dictated to the party members (and therefore to the people of Russia) exactly what they needed to believe. The result certainly was not capitalism, but it also certainly was not socialism.
So allowing real democracy is unlikely to lead to socialism, but snuffing out democracy only leads to dictatorship and totalitarianism. Socialism fails when it’s undemocratic, and it fails when it’s democratic. I fear that the message here is that socialism is impossible.
Ok so Plato’s Republic is pretty much the most influential philosophy book in history. As one might expect from a book with that kind of reputation, it’s an impressive and challenging work whose elegant structure and powerful writing lay open before the reader an absolute buffet of thought-provoking ideas. Before I proceed with any criticism, I must pause to openly acknowledge Plato’s brilliance as a writer and philosopher.
Now that the brilliance has been acknowledged, I’ll be frank: Plato turns out to be utopian-minded totalitarian elitist obsessed with establishing a caste-based society wherein the vast majority of the people are treated like human cattle while a firmly entrenched class of “guardians” rules over them with an iron fist. In order to keep the lower classes docile and unquestioning, the guardians will block them from obtaining an education (only the guardians will be educated), and will institutionalize a set of lies designed to prevent revolt – for example, the lie that workers are predestined to remain powerless and poor because they were born with “bronze souls” that make them incapable of ruling, while the guardians possess “gold souls” that predestine them for positions of power. Plato, when he imagines his perfect society, envisions an ignorant and powerless lower class who, indoctrinated since birth to believe they are inferior, builds and slaves and carries their burden in silence, leaving the “philosopher kings” to rule the city as they please. This dystopian nightmare is Plato’s plan for maintaining political stability…. so that alone is troubling and worthy of discussion. But my particular beef (at this moment anyways) isn’t about Plato’s totalitarian blueprint, but instead that he uses the ‘dialogue’ format as a cover to trick us into thinking his terrible ideas are actually good ones.
When I picture a philosophical dialogue, I imagine a conversation where each participant has something substantial to contribute, where characters challenge each other, and good ideas provide counterpoint to other good ideas (and bad ideas are dismantled), where the conversation morphs and changes and weaves in unexpected directions, and as a result new conclusions and deeper truths are discovered. But in Republic one main character, Socrates (who represents Plato), is free to heroically spin out all of his wacky ideas on government and morality, while his companions obsequiously nod their heads and shout their agreement at every possible opportunity. In other words, Plato tells us this is a dialogue, but doesn’t allow his characters to challenge Socrates at any of the most crucial moments, such as when he tries to convince us that an ideal society would require strict censorship, government-sponsored lying on a massive scale, and the disenfranchisement of the vast majority of people. Sure Socrates’ companions challenge him on other points, but not when it really matters. They banter over other questions, but they don’t scrutinize his political blueprint at the level I would expect from a philosophical discourse. Nor do they forcefully protest when Socrates lays out his conception of justice, which looks something like this: every member of a particular caste does his job without complaint, we all mind our own business, and most importantly we sacrifice our personal desires and needs to those of the totalitarian state.
Why does Plato use the dialogue format if not to challenge these controversial ideas? He uses the dialogue format to make us, the readers, think that his political program has been probed and challenged at every turn, when in fact it skated right by unscathed. Since the characters do offer occasional resistance to Socrates and quibble over other philosophical questions, the reader is misled into thinking that Socrates’ political logic has been tested thoroughly over the course of this conversation. In the end we are supposed to feel as if his logic was so impregnable that no reasonable person could come up with a valid objection. After all, if a reasonable objection to Socrates’ scheme could be found, wouldn’t one of these bright young men in the dialogue find it?
And so Plato (with Socrates as his mouthpiece) constructs his “perfect” society where most people would be no better than slaves, and dresses it up as objective truth discovered via the Socratic method. Even when the other characters are offered ample opportunities to object or challenge this vision, they decline. In Book IV, after Socrates has laid out his whole plan for creating his totalitarian state, he announces that he wishes to pivot the conversation so he can discuss justice in his state. He turns to one of his companions and says, “I mean to begin with the assumption that our State, if rightly ordered, is perfect.” His companion simply replies, “That is most certain.” He doesn’t question the political blueprint at all, but goes along with Socrates in total agreement their new society would indeed be perfect. This is a brief but pivotal moment. Socrates is attempting to move forward in his argument, so that he can build on the foundation he has already established. This is the ideal moment for someone to step in and say, “actually Socrates, before you work out the finer details of your society, I feel obligated to say that your plan so far sounds like it would just result in despotism. I know you claim to hate tyranny (Socrates states this openly in Book VIII), but aren’t you in fact providing philosophical ammo to any group of despots who wants to entrench their own power? Haven’t you not only given them a useful plan that describes exactly how best to lie to the people in order to maximize the power of the ruling class, but haven’t you also provided philosophical justification for this despotic behavior by calling it just? Though your plans are supposed to describe an ideal state, don’t you see that any real humans who attempt to use your framework will end up no better than slave-masters ruling over a broken people?”
Or perhaps, “How can a state be ‘perfect’ if the rulers have to use constant deception to maintain their power? Don’t you, Socrates, believe that it is a moral act to seek and teach the truth, as you yourself have done throughout your career as a philosopher? Yet your society makes it illegal for any member of a lower class to do just that, and illegal for a member of any class to challenge the political order you hope to establish. Isn’t that a contradiction? How can you, a philosopher, embrace a society where real philosophy would become impossible, a society where so-called “philosopher kings” would force their citizens to live in ignorance? What kind of philosophers would these kings really be, if they behaved that way?” This seems to me an obvious objection.
Honestly I’m kind of astounded with Plato. He seems to want us to believe that his beloved teacher Socrates, the mythical lover of truth, would (if he had the power to do so) make it illegal for anyone but the most powerful elite to seek knowledge? It doesn’t even make sense that a man who literally martyred himself for the cause of philosophy would wish to ban philosophy! It’s important to remember why Plato demands that the lower classes remain ignorant: the stability of the whole society depends on it. Since the laborers, artisans, merchants, builders, slaves (and anyone else not born into the guardian class) will be deprived of all political power, the only way to keep them from revolting is with deception and force. Political stability is very important to Plato; after all he grew up during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, during which Plato witnessed the horrors of war, along with all the plagues and political upheaval that come with it. After surviving that series of catastrophes, it makes sense that Plato considers stability to be of chief importance, and we can even understand why he sought to convince us that stability is the most important aim of the perfect state. But to put into the mouth of Socrates the opinion that deception is superior to truth if it maintains stability…. that feels like a low-brow move. It’s as if he is attempting to exploit Socrates’ credibility as a philosopher and truth-seeker in order to lend credibility to a doctrine Socrates (the real Socrates) would have rejected whole-heartedly. Plato claims to want philosophers to rule, but a true philosopher (like the real Socrates) would never be allowed to rule in Plato’s state because of Socrates’ unflinching commitment to truth. What is a philosopher, if not a person who values and hunts for unadulterated truth? Perhaps Bertrand Russell1 was right when he said of Plato’s philosopher kings, “a philosopher is to be, for all time, a man who understands and agrees with Plato.”
Plato’s assumption that stability should be our ultimate political goal is actually itself another claim that goes unchallenged in the dialogue. Plato treats his contempt for diversity as an obvious, universal truth. In Book V Socrates asks, “Can there be any greater evil [within a state] than discord and distraction and plurality where unity ought to reign? or any greater good than the bond of unity?” His companion Glaucon answers without hesitation, “There cannot.” They then proceed to examine whether their proposed state lives up to this timeless standard. However it seems prudent to pause and question whether pluralism is indeed such a great evil. Diversity of thought, difference of opinion, unique ways of seeing the world – these are qualities that can contribute to innovation. As more and more persons contribute their ideas to the hopper, the ideas/philosophies/wisdom/culture/science of the society are elevated and transformed. I do not intend to argue here that pluralism is some kind of ultimate good (or that it is a higher good than stability); instead I would just like to point out that Plato does not pause to ask that question. He barrels forward, and none of his characters have any problem with that; they all automatically accept his premise that diversity of opinion is a great sin.
Likewise Socrates’ companions fail to properly challenge the claim that mass deception is the appropriate way to keep the disenfranchised multitude from demanding political power. Plato and his companions appear to be united in agreement: the ends justify the means. As long as the guardians maintain a perfectly stable society that never changes they are acting justly, no matter how many lies they need to tell. In this light, the famous allegory of the cave (Book VII) smells faintly of hypocrisy. Plato argues that the unenlightened individual lives in a metaphorical cave. He is chained to the wall, and what he perceives to be reality as it really is, is actually just shadows on the wall cast by the fire in the cave. Most people are trapped in this pathetic state and don’t even realize it. Only the philosopher, the seeker of truth, can unchain himself and escape to the true world above, to see the world as it really is in the light of the sun. It is then his duty to return to the cave and free the others. That’s a lovely image. But then upon reflection Plato’s blueprint for a society – where the philosopher kings use lies and deception to convince the majority of people that they have “bronze souls” and are fit for nothing better than manual labor – contradicts the image of the philosopher as liberator, and instead transforms him into philosopher as slave-master. Perhaps Plato actually sees the allegory like this: when the enlightened person returns to the cave, instead of freeing the others he should reinforce their chains so that he may rule over them like a god. Only he possesses knowledge of the truth and freedom of movement, so shouldn’t he become the overseer in the cave of lies rather than breakers of chains?
I believe that in Plato’s ideal society, a man like the historical Socrates (the real life lover of truth, not the warped version presented in Plato’s dialogue) would have been very unhappy. After all he was a breaker of chains, a man whose main concern in life was teaching others how to seek the truth. But in Plato’s state, Socrates (unless he happened to be born into the guardian class) would have not only been prevented from seeking and teaching the truth, but would have been brainwashed by the state in order to turn him into a hard working sheep, a man who never questions the rulers or the order they maintain, a man incapable of obtaining knowledge of his own world, a man chained to a cave wall. How could Plato, a teacher of philosophy, advocate such a fate for his own teacher? And why don’t the other characters in the dialogue point out this hypocrisy?
Another example: Republic is intended to be a prolonged search for the true nature of justice, and throughout the work Plato toys with many definitions of justice. But as Karl Popper2 points out, Plato fails to present, in any capacity, a concept of justice where all citizens are treated fairly and equally under the law. This understanding of justice happens to be the one to which many if not most Americans likely subscribe. Many in the West have come to understand that justice can only exist if all members of a society are treated fairly in the eyes of the law (and perhaps also economically equal, though that is hotly debated). Plato, who seems eager to explore every possible definition of justice, doesn’t even pay lip service to this egalitarian vision of justice.
One might accuse me of being anachronistic here. In other words, am I admonishing Plato for failing to grasp a definition of justice (all men are equal under the law) that only developed thousands of years after his death? To this accusation I say phooey! This egalitarian view of justice was not only present in democratic Athens, it was in vogue! Just take as one example the most famous speech to ever come out of this period, the Funeral Oration of Pericles. This great Athenian leader delivered his ringing defense of democracy just one generation before Plato, and in his speech he takes a moment to admire Athens’ devotion to the very type of egalitarian justice of which Plato seems so ignorant:
“Our constitution does not copy the laws of neighbouring states; we are rather a pattern to others than imitators ourselves. Its administration favours the many instead of the few; this is why it is called a democracy. If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if no social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbour for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty. But all this ease in our private relations does not make us lawless as citizens. Against this fear is our chief safeguard, teaching us to obey the magistrates and the laws, particularly such as regard the protection of the injured, whether they are actually on the statute book, or belong to that code which, although unwritten, yet cannot be broken without acknowledged disgrace.”
Excerpt from Pericles’ Funeral Oration3
So clearly the idea that justice requires equal treatment for all men under the law was a prevalent idea in Plato’s time, yet Plato fails even to touch on it in Republic, his supposed inquiry into the nature of justice. I will note that despite Pericles’ beautiful words, his sentiment did not exactly match the reality on the ground. Athens’ economy was built and sustained by slave labor, and very few people in the city qualified for the “citizenship” that Pericles mentions in the excerpt above. So no, Athens’s law code did not actually treat all men (or women) equally, far from it. But at least we can confirm that this idea of justice not only existed, but seems to have been a cornerstone of Athenian culture, and the way Athenians thought and spoke about themselves.
Plato seems more interested in promoting his own world view than uncovering the honest truth about justice, or exploring perceptions of justice that oppose his own. If he was after the truth, he would allow at least one of his characters to put voice to an equality-focused notion of justice, to give it just a moment to shine before Socrates dismantles it. But this kind of justice doesn’t surface in the dialogue, and nobody involved in the dialogue seems particularly concerned by that. When Socrates proposes a “just” state where most of the people are told they have bronze souls, none of his companions find it worthwhile to ask something like, “If the majority of the citizens in our state are deceived and barred from ever seeking the truth or wielding power, isn’t it possible we treat the majority of citizens unjustly? Shouldn’t we at least consider whether justice could be found instead in a state that offers equal treatment under the law to all citizens, regardless of their wealth or caste?” It seems a reasonable enough question. There were certainly plenty of democracy-loving Athenians who would have wanted to ask just such a question of Plato if given the chance. But nobody in the dialogue asks it. When Socrates paints a picture of justice that requires the disenfranchisement of the masses, his companions simply nod along. The more I ponder these weaknesses in the dialogue, the more I question Plato’s intellectual honesty, despite his unqualified brilliance as a writer and thinker.
How about yet another example: throughout the work Socrates speaks on behalf of collectivism; he wishes to form a society where individuals are universally expected to sacrifice in order to benefit the society as a whole (individual desires and needs are subservient to the desires and needs of the state). The only character to espouse anything resembling individualism is Thrasymachus at the very beginning of the book, but he’s such a cynical, selfish nihilist that Socrates is easily able to equate individualism itself with selfishness, and (after handily beating Thrasymachus) proceed as if all arguments for individualism have been defeated. For the rest of the book individualism is only mentioned briefly, when it is ridiculed as the very embodiment of egoism and selfishness.4 For one so intellectually powerful as Plato to create a ‘dialogue’ that, though it claims to seek a perfect society, ignores completely the very concept of individualism (except to periodically ridicule it) reeks of pre-meditated concealment of the truth. Individualism, the notion that our personal desires/needs/beliefs/accomplishments/freedoms do matter, and can even outweigh the needs of the state as a collective whole, is one of the bedrocks of western culture, and I imagine that in Plato’s day many citizens of democratic Athens would have believed that individualism had a crucial role to play in any functional society. Plato does not really wish to tackle the positive aspects of individualism head-on; after all, the more positives there are, the more difficult it will be for him to maintain his collectivist society. So instead he simply asks the characters in his dialogue to remain silent on this point, and refrain from arguing in favor of individualism in any meaningful way.
(Note: it could be argued that I am fully under the spell of Plato-critic Karl Popper. It’s true that I did read Popper’s classic critique of Plato while I was reading Republic, and perhaps that was a mistake. I was so taken with Popper’s argument that Plato’s ideal society contains totalitarian elements, and it gelled so well with my own natural inclinations against Plato’s brand of idealist political philosophy, that it was difficult for me to read Plato with a completely open mind, though I certainly tried! So yes, I eagerly added the lens fashioned by Popper to my little bag of lenses. But the main argument of this essay – that Plato’s dialogue-style of writing is a cover for his faulty political theory – is my own, not Popper’s… at least I think it’s mine).
Here’s a slightly longer example: in Book II Plato builds an extensive argument that it is wise and just to censor from the great works of ancient poetry any mention of the gods misbehaving, or acting cowardly or foolish, or fighting one another, or changing shape, or anything that makes the gods seem less than perfectly good. His reasoning for this is that only through censorship of these negative portrayals of the gods can we create a truly just society full of just men. We need our gods to model virtuous behavior in order to inspire men to do the same, and therefore any tales of mischievous or naughty gods must be expunged and banished, never to enter the sweet, innocent ears of our children. Afterall if the gods act like fools, why shouldn’t we? But what’s surprising here is that for Plato this censorship is not actually a deception. In fact it’s built on a fundamental truth, the starting place of a long chain of reasoning: that the gods themselves, in the real world, must actually be perfectly good:
Socrates: God is always to be represented as he truly is, whatever be the sort of poetry, epic, lyric or tragic, in which the representation is given.
Adeimantus: Right.
Socrates: And is he not truly good? and must he not be represented as such?
Adeimantus: Certainly.
Socrates: And no good thing is hurtful?
Adeimantus: No, indeed.
Socrates: And that which is not hurtful hurts not?
Adeimantus: Certainly not.
Socrates: And that which hurts not does no evil?
Adeimantus: No.
Socrates: And can that which does no evil be a cause of evil?
Adeimantus: Impossible.
Socrates: And the good is advantageous?
Adeimantus: Yes.
Socrates: And therefore the cause of well-being?
Adeimantus: Yes.
Socrates: It follows therefore that the good is not the cause of all things, but of the good only?
Adeimantus: Assuredly.
Socrates: Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.
Adeimantus: That appears to me to be most true, he said.
Socrates (Plato) doesn’t attempt to prove that God is perfectly good, but instead he simply assumes it to be true. It is a theological statement of faith, not a philosophic inquiry into the true/untrue nature of the statement. And because God is perfectly good and incapable of evil, therefore all stories of God doing otherwise must be lies, and so it is just and correct to purge them from our society. Plato’s extensive program for properly educating the guardians begins with an unfounded religious sentiment dressed up like unimpeachable truth, a wild guess about the nature of the divine, an unquestioning statement of faith. From that starting place Plato constructs his ideal state, always with this ideal image of God in the background providing a foundation for the state’s theology and culture, and justification for censorship and religious persecution.
What really surprises me is Adeimantus’ behavior: he wholeheartedly accepts all of Socrates’ unfounded assumptions about the gods, and confirms without question that many beloved poems and tales are actually corruptive and evil. Though he questions Socrates elsewhere in the dialogue, here he only acts as Socrates’ hype man, confirming with certainty everything Socrates asserts. Plato needs this assumption to proceed unchallenged, since it is the first crucial building block in his political program, a program that culminates in the guardians taking firm control over all cultural, moral, and theological matters. Since this first point is so crucial, Plato refuses to allow even his most inquisitive characters to question it, even for a moment. It is taken for granted that gods must be good, and therefore the guardians’ coercive actions are just, moral, and pious. Plato constructs a totalitarian state and calls it just because it aligns with an unfounded religious claim. Why bother hosting a dialogue on these sorts of issues if not to question just this kind of underlying assumption? This is more evidence that Plato had no intention of using the dialogue format to discover fallacies in his own reasoning, but instead only to make it appear that he did so. Or as Adeimantus puts it in Book II: “…we shall say that you do not praise justice, but the appearance of it.”
Irony alert: the historical Socrates was put to death for impiety and blasphemy. In TheRepublic Plato transforms his beloved teacher from the real man who stood up for his own unique interpretation of the gods into a militant religious fundamentalist who seeks to establish a theocracy. Plato’s version of Socrates would never allow individuals to discover their own unique interpretations of the divine, but would instead dictate to the citizens which portrayals of the gods are acceptable and which are forbidden. If the real Socrates, despite the persecution he faced for disagreeing with certain established religious customs, truly believed that the theocracy Plato constructs in Republic would be a just society, I’d consider that an act of hypocrisy. Wouldn’t the real Socrates, the man who always claimed not to know anything, hesitate before making a decree about the true nature of the gods? Wouldn’t he instead wish to question someone who made just such a statement, and probe their reasoning to uncover hidden fallacies? It seems far-fetched that the real Socrates would ever condone a society that forces everyone to think a certain way. Yet Plato seems to have no qualms about warping Socrates from a free-thinker into a puppet, from a man who claimed to know nothing into a character with all the answers, from an honest seeker of truth into a totalitarian whose favorite tools are censorship and outright deception. (It is also easy to see how Platonism became not only the foundation for Christianity, which shares with Platonism the vision of God as being perfectly good, but also for the autocratic theocracies of the Middle Ages, which considered it sacrilege to believe anything counter to official church doctrine).
My anger here isn’t really because the word ‘dialogue’ is being misused, but because Plato’s far-fetched ideas are presented as highly logical, tightly-argued, and well-proven, when in fact the most destructive ideas are hardly given any scrutiny or face any push-back. I am bothered that there is a kind of “lie” baked into the dialogue. The lie is that Socrates/Plato have so well-argued their points, and so thoroughly defeated any counter-arguments, that their blueprints for society must be based on objective truths. Under this guise, a cock-eyed scheme is dressed up as proven science. This lie can still impact readers to this day, and the mythical status of Plato only exacerbates this; after all, who would have the audacity to challenge the world’s greatest and most famous philosopher on his most well-argued points? Who would dare tell Plato that his concept of justice is hopelessly misguided, that his arguments will only provide useful material to despots who aim to entrench their own power by using deception and force, and that his philosophy at its core represents the enslavement of mankind? I would hope that Plato would have the intellectual honesty to allow one of his characters (perhaps one who admires Athens’ democracy) to speak these words. But alas, he does not.
Ok that’s my beef with Plato. Seriously why did I even bother to write this? I feel like a gnat picking a fight with a giant.
And this all being said, I do not mean to argue that we must reject this entire dialogue, far from it. There is so much depth and richness in this dialogue, so much that provokes and inspires. It is a timeless work of genius that should be read and studied by every generation. I just personally have a problem with any political philosophy that comes with a built-in assumption that all of mankind must either accept the exact beliefs of the philosopher, or be violently suppressed. The human race is far too complicated and varied to ever subscribe to one single worldview or philosophy. So any author who wishes to force his ideas upon the whole world is really just using coded language: what he really means to say is that he wishes to be God over all of mankind, with the power to smite anyone who disagrees with his perspective, and the authority to remake the whole world as he sees fit (the way a child pretends to be the God of the make-believe world he creates out of his toys). This is my issue with Plato, with Lenin, and with anyone else who truly believes his ideas are so perfect that he can speak for the whole world: their philosophies try to force the whole human race to see things a certain way, and in the end their political programs would amount to nothing less than the wholesale persecution of the vast quantities of human beings who see the world through different lenses.
Another similarity between Plato and Lenin is that both are utopian thinkers. What makes both of these authors utopian is their failure to remember that power corrupts: both wish to arm their preferred classes (philosopher kings for Plato and proletarians for Lenin) with unmitigated power, and both expect this to go well. Plato seems to believe that if he is able to implement his ideal educational program (and of course dabble in a bit of “noble lying”), he can cure men of that disease that makes us so corruptible, or at least discover/breed just enough men in the city who can be cured of this to put together a junta. If this initiative fails, the city fails. This means that if Plato isn’t able to create (through eugenics and indoctrination) a race of super-humans who are utterly impervious to the corruptive influence of power, and who, through their study of philosophy, are no longer willing/able to use their absolute power for selfish reasons, his ideal city will collapse into tyranny. This seems to be a fragile arrangement, easily corrupted. But Plato believes that philosophy and proper education can be that cure, and he’s willing to stake everything on that. That’s what makes him a utopian.
To put it another way, he is willing to arm the rulers of his city with the Ring of Gyges (see Republic 2:359a–2:360d), to give them the power to do whatever they want and get away with it. He expects that they will behave because they are philosophers. At the same time he wishes to deprive the workers of all of the their political power, and expects them to behave because they will be subdued by the noble lie. This sort of far-fetched, utopian theory doesn’t appeal to me because of the mind-bogglingly high risk involved in arming ANY group of humans with absolute power (and depriving the majority of theirs). I just wish that in Plato’s dialogue, someone had voiced this obvious concern with the same sort of penetrating seriousness that Plato uses to lay out his political blueprint.
Really though, I might have this whole thing wrong. After all there are many ways of reading and interpreting this long and complex dialogue, so maybe I’m trying to slay demons that aren’t even there. Plato scholar David Roochnik5 argues that Plato’s main purpose in writing Republic is not to provide a blueprint for any kind of realistic city, but instead to prove that philosophy in general is a worthwhile activity (or perhaps even the highest form of good). Throughout the dialogue, Plato argues that only philosophy can turn our heads away from the shadowy world of false images and reveal the sun in all its splendor. So when he argues that the philosophers should be kings, maybe he’s just making a point about the power of philosophy, rather than developing his philosophy of power. As for Plato’s lengthy and detailed plan for his ideal city, perhaps it’s no more than an allegory for the ideal human soul, where reason and philosophy (the guardians) rule over passion (the rest of society). If this is the case, and Plato didn’t actually mean to suggest that his blueprint should ever be implemented, then I’ll hold my fire. I can never agree that what he describes could ever be an ideal city, but as an allegory for the soul it works better (at least it isn’t patently absurd like the political theory). But I don’t think Plato is clear on this point, which means that many would-be dictators could misconstrue his meaning and arm themselves with philosophical justification for developing a totalitarian regime (in the name of building an ideal state).
Frankly I consider it far-fetched that the political theory expressed in Republic is nothing more than one giant allegory, and that Plato isn’t at least partially serious about his plans. I struggle to believe that when he speaks of destroying private property and the family, of initiating a strict and pervasive program of censorship, of robbing the vast majority of citizens of any political power or upward mobility, of using dishonesty (the noble lie) to fully subjugate and pacify the public, that he is actually just being symbolic. While I agree that he is making a symbolic point about the soul and that his ideal city is an allegory, I firmly believe that he ALSO wishes to see his political program enacted in the real world. When he says his proposed city is an ideal one, I must assume he isn’t just speaking in code or constructing a puzzle that can only be solved if we assume he doesn’t mean anything he says about politics in the real world.
In the end, this dialogue is still provocative 2,500 years after it was written. It is challenging, controversial, and asks more questions than it answers. Plato clearly understands that his words can be interpreted in many different ways, and he seems to revel in this. This is one of the features that makes this dialogue so enjoyable and frustrating to read. Plato isn’t clear whether he is serious about his proposals or simply being ironic, or if his political program is one giant symbol, or whether is believes that his ideal city would be beneficial to mankind but is sadly unattainable, or whether his intention is actually to initiate his proposed policies. He lets the reader decide, which leads to the conclusion that the real point of this dialogue is to make people think (and to inspire people to write articles like this one). So please do read Plato, and let him provoke you. His ideas will certainly get you thinking, and may open many doors in your mind! But when you read it, don’t think that just because Plato says something it must be true. He was, after all, just a man. He had his own agenda, his own shortcomings, his own fears, his own pride. His ideas are just one small piece of the infinite tapestry composed of all the ideas generated by mankind across the centuries. So read his work, let it challenge you, but for goodness sake challenge it right back whenever you spot something that doesn’t add up. Plato’s characters don’t really challenge most of the far-fetched plans laid out over the course of the dialogue, but I hope that Plato the philosopher would be appreciative if we, the readers, do just that.
Notes:
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), 115.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Volume One: The Spell of Plato, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971), Ch. 6.
Pericles, “Funeral Oration” in The History of the Peloponessian War by Thucydides (431 BC), Ch. 6.
Popper, 100-106.
David Roochnik, “Book X – Philosophy versus Poetry,” The Great Courses: Plato’s Republic, (The Teaching Company, 2005), Lecture 21.
At the opening of the short dialogue Crito, Socrates is found sleeping peacefully in his jail cell as his execution day draws near. When his friend Crito arrives (after bribing the guard), Socrates greets him joyfully, and Crito is surprised by Socrates’ serenity in the face of death. Crito then passionately attempts to convince Socrates to escape with him. Crito makes it clear that with his wealth and influence he can easily sneak Socrates out of prison and whisk him away to a foreign land where he can live out his days in safety, far from the Athenian authorities who wish to see him dead. It will be no trouble at all to escape, if Socrates will only allow his friends to save his life.
Crito offers a variety of arguments for why Socrates should flee, chief among them that Socrates has been unjustly convicted by the state and wronged by his countrymen, so therefore he has no obligation to submit meekly (perhaps even shamefully) to their judgement. The honorable action would be to disregard Athenian law and escape while he still can. He could then continue his teaching as a fugitive and exile. One additional perk to this plan would be that by staying alive he would allow his friends and students to have more time with their beloved Socrates, whom they honor above all others.
Despite his friend’s urging, Socrates remains unconvinced. He proceeds (in his typical fashion) to thoroughly dismantle Crito’s arguments, and instead posits that the truly moral act is to stay in prison and face his impending death. Along the way, Socrates makes an argument that has sparked 2,500 years of further debate among political philosophers: it is a moral and just act to obey the laws of one’s country at all cost, even if those laws appear unjust; to disobey an unjust law is in itself an immoral, shameful, and unjust act.
Socrates argues the following: If one is born in a country and chooses to live there rather than flee to a foreign country, he is bound by a sacred vow (or at least, an implied contract) to obey the laws of that country. This is like an early and extreme version of the social contract: if one chooses to live in a country and reap the benefits of citizenship, one thereby agrees to obey all laws, decrees, verdicts, and orders issued by the government of that country, regardless of whether they are just or moral. If one does not consider the laws of his country to be just, he should renounce his citizenship and move elsewhere. Since Socrates had lived his whole life in Athens, married his wife and raised his children in Athens, fought in the Athenian military, and never once thought of renouncing his citizenship all those years, he must not turn his back on his country the moment a judgement doesn’t go his way. After everything the city had done for him all these years, it would be dishonorable to disobey and abandon her in the end, simply to save his own life.
At the same time Socrates argues that one’s country is like one’s father. He raises the child up and nurtures him, directs the child’s education (both moral and scientific), and gives the child a share of his own hard-earned wealth; the child in return must obey and honor his father, thereby acknowledging the debt he owes to the man who raised him. So it is with one’s country, which nourishes and educates its citizens, and therefore deserves the same honor one bestows upon his father.
My first thought upon reading Socrates’ argument that any citizen who chooses to live in a country enters into an agreement with that country to obey all laws whether they are just or not was that this line of reasoning would render all forms of civil disobedience immoral. If a citizen (or second class citizen) falls prey to a discriminatory or persecutorial law (for example a Jim Crow or Apartheid law), Socrates might argue that this citizen is morally bound by justice to obey the discriminatory law, simply because that citizen failed to flee to a new country when he had the chance.
In a world where some citizens are treated differently than others (due to poverty, ethnicity, social status, employment status, etc.), and various groups of citizens fall victim to discriminatory laws, it seems absurd to argue that those most harmed by such laws are morally required to obey them, and that by choosing to live in a country one forfeits his right to publicly object to or protest whatever injustices might be baked into that system. Would it have been a moral act for an African American citizen living in the southern United States in the 1950s to silently accept the gross injustices of Jim Crow, and immoral for him to disobey a racist law? One could argue the opposite: it is shameful to acquiesce to unjust treatment, and honorable (moral) to protest such a system, even if (especially if) that system was legally created by the duly elected parliamentary body (the body that also, of course, makes the rules on who gets to vote on the members of that body).
Socrates was unjustly convicted, but his conviction was done in a lawful fashion. Thus Socrates believes he must obey the sentence and give up his life. But what if an entire legal system or economic system are inherently unjust or imperfect, as all such systems are to various degrees? How could obeyance of such an imperfect system be a perfectly moral act, so moral in fact that the morality defies all context: no matter how unjust the law may be, it is always moral and required that citizens obey it? It seems to me that it can never be a 100% moral act to obey any human institution, since every human institution will be flawed or corrupted in some way and to some degree. There is always nuance, always context. Perhaps it is moral to obey a law that orders one not to kill his child, but it is immoral to stand silently by while an innocent man is sentenced to death because of his ideas, as Socrates was.
Perhaps by protesting such a verdict Socrates could have introduced the idea to the public that one should not be sentenced to death for his ideas, that there should be protections for free speech that even the government (even the democracy) cannot override. And perhaps by spreading this idea, Socrates could have persuaded enough of the populace to actually initiate some reforms. Though this is far-fetched, it proves a point: in this example Socrates would have made his legal system moremoral by disobeying the law. This shows that there are examples where it is more moral to break a law than follow it. After all, if by protesting or disobeying an unjust system we make it more just, how could that protest be an unjust act? In this light, civil disobedience can be a moral act, since it can help a country shed some of its more egregiously unjust laws. (Then again, perhaps by martyring himself Socrates accomplished the same goal: to spread awareness of just how grossly unjust and absurd it is to execute a man for his ideas).
Oftentimes (even in democracies) minorities are left with few options when the laws are stacked against them. When the duly elected legislature fails to dismantle these laws, perhaps because of economic/racist/sexist/religious/political motives, it is up to the citizenry to take action. But if a majority of the citizenry supports discriminatory laws, the minority may find themselves in an impossible situation. When all the mechanisms of power are locked away and all the “legitimate” avenues of change are blocked by an elite (or by a majority) determined to keep certain groups out of the halls of power, citizens who are oppressed by the laws have little recourse other than to protest, to disobey, to interfere. Rob them of this tactic (by branding their protest as inherently immoral or even illegal), and they are left only with silent acquiescence. They are to become slaves.
One might argue that if a law is truly unjust it should be left to the democracy to legally overturn it (and therefore we do not need civil disobedience at all), but this leaves minorities at the mercy of the majority. If a black citizen in Mississippi has been “lawfully” convicted by a racist jury and condemned to die by a racist judge (following to the letter the laws written by racist legislators, who were voted into office by racist voters), it is not shameful or unjust for that man to flee in the dead of night (if he is able to do so) and evade his executioners (as Socrates might have done). One only has one life to live. By living in a given country, one does not automatically agree to silently forfeit that life in the event some powerful, entrenched elites wish to see him dead.
It is of course difficult to objectively state which laws are just and which are unjust. A gun lover who believes it is unjust for the state to tell him he can’t bring a rifle to a preschool might believe it is a moral act to protest that law by bringing a rifle into a preschool. Without a clear conception of “justice” we easily sink into relativism: anyone who disagrees with a law can label it unjust and disobey it, and by doing so he is acting justly (from his point of view). I am not trying to argue that an individual has the moral right to disobey any law he wishes, nor that any law a person disagrees with must be an unjust law. Clearly we need a clearer picture of the difference between a truly unjust law and a regular law that certain citizens disagree about.
I’ll have to save the laborious process of defining justice for another day. For now I’ll just say this much: breaking a law is not an inherently unjust act. Laws are human institutions, not some higher, heavenly ideal before which we all must bow. If a law is wrong it must be fixed; if the democracy refuses to do so, then the democracy absorbs the immorality that was formerly localized in that unjust law. In this situation, the oppressed citizen might be acting morally by working (in a legal or extra-legal fashion) to purge the injustice from the system.
The context is key: what is the law, who is affected by it, why was it created, who benefits from it, and who is harmed? We mustn’t ignore those questions when assessing the morality of a political action, as Socrates does. Also: do those affected by unjust laws have any legal remedy, or are all legal and “legitimate” mechanisms closed to them, leaving protest or civil disobedience (or even violence) as the only options? If so, then we should hesitate before calling their attempts to overthrow systemic injustice “immoral.” The real key here is that context matters; questions of immorality are never black and white.
I believe that those who are abused by the state (as Socrates was) have no moral obligation to silently obey their abuser, just as an abused child has no moral obligation to obey an abusive father (to use Socrates’ own metaphor). The state, like a parent, needs to earn our loyalty by acting justly towards us. If a father acts justly some of the time, a child acts morally by obeying in those moments; when a father acts unjustly (for example, by beating his child), the child is not immoral to disapprove of or disobey or flee from his father. The shock of this protest against injustice may even prove to be a learning opportunity for the father (or the state, in the event of a protest against an unjust law). It is difficult for me to see how the very act of protesting injustice could, in all contexts, be unjust.
Socrates makes a further argument: a man who disobeys one of his country’s laws seeks to destroy his country. In other words, any single act of disobedience against the state is the same as declaring war against that country’s entire legal system. Socrates conflates the protest against one single unjust law with the complete destruction of the city, as if recognizing the injustice of one law automatically makes one a traitor to his country; so if Socrates were illegally to flee from his unjust execution, this action would actually be an attempt to destroy Athens itself, just as a child who disobeys his father one time must be trying to kill his father. And since it is usually wrong to seek the destruction of one’s own country (or the death of one’s father), we must therefore offer up our complete submission in all matters to both city and father. Even if one’s father is insane, we must submit; even if a country’s laws are insane, we must submit.1 We must be slaves to both, because to ever disobey either would be the same as treason and murder.
This is a common conflation in Plato’s work: we are forced to consider the city as a whole, rather than thinking clearly about its component parts (which are single laws or individuals). In Republic Plato tells us we are supposed to aim for the happiness of the city at the expense of the individual. Individuals are asked to sacrifice their freedom, political power, and social mobility all for the sake of making “the city” happy, whatever that means. The component part is asked to sacrifice all for the good of the abstract whole; the component part (in this case, a human individual) does not matter at all, only the city matters. In Crito we are asked to accept the entire law code our city puts forth, or else accept the premise that we hate the city and wish to see it destroyed. Again we must ignore the component parts (the individual unjust laws) and focus all of our love and devotion on the abstract whole (the city). An attack on one part is the same, in Plato’s eyes, as an attack on the whole. This is faulty reasoning that demands we only take notice of abstracts, and completely ignore the concrete component parts that actually affect our real lives as humans. We know from experience that this way of thinking is dangerous: a country’s legal code can be full of both just and unjust laws, but if we label as treason any attempt to improve those unjust laws, we will fail ever to innovate, to improve, to grow. The injustice within the system will breed and grow, safe and sheltered from all harm by an ideology that makes citizens too fearful ever to question the morality of any single law, since those citizens will be labeled as traitors and city destroyers. Socrates seems to believe that instead of protesting unjust laws, the best remedy for an oppressed person is simply to renounce one’s citizenship completely and seek citizenship elsewhere. Afterall, as Socrates argues, if one stays in the country with unjust laws, he tacitly agrees that all the laws in that country must be just. It’s all or nothing for him.
Side note: Can I just mention also that it is pretty cavalier for Socrates to state that if one wishes not to follow the laws of his country, that he should simply pack up and leave it. He makes it sound so obvious that one who disagrees with his country’s laws can easily uproot himself, abandon his family, friends, and career, and set off for a new land in search of laws that are more just (and that the persecuted citizen must flee before he has been officially convicted of a crime; once convicted he is bound to stay put and face his sentence bravely). In reality not everyone has the option to flee if one’s country has unjust laws. David Hume once wrote: “Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners, and lives from day to day, by the small wages which he acquires? We may as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment he leaves her.”2 Socrates seems to forget, or not notice, that most people who are oppressed by the state don’t have wealthy friends like Crito who can simply whisk them away to safety, and that choosing to become an emigrant is an uncertain, heart-breaking, and dangerous adventure that most people choose only out of sheer desperation. Emigration is not the handy solution that Socrates makes it out to be. By ignoring this reality, he finds it easy to condemn anyone who refuses to either leave their homeland prior to a conviction or to obey unjust laws.
Then again maybe I have this whole thing wrong. Maybe Socrates isn’t making a grand statement that following the law is always a just act if one loves his country. Perhaps instead he is only making a personal statement: for him personally, it would be unjust to break the law because of his own unique feelings about his country and his own unique situation. Perhaps for Gandhi civil disobedience was a just act because of his own unique situation. In other words, maybe Socrates isn’t making a blanket statement, but instead arguing that justice is in the eye of the beholder. Therefore it isn’t universally unjust and immoral to flee from prison; it is only unjust for Socrates to do so because of his own beliefs and intuitions. According to this view, we each choose our own version of justice and live our lives accordingly; we will all be judged according to our own internal metrics of justice.
I don’t really think he’s arguing that way in Crito. His language in the dialogue suggests he has a more universal view of law and morality (disobeying the laws of one’s country is always immoral), not that he’s just sharing his own personal take on his own unique situation. In fact the “eye of the beholder” argument is an argument for relativism, which flies right in the face of Plato’s theory of forms (expressed in other dialogues such as Republic and Phaedo). This theory states that there are certain ideal and perfect phenomena (such as Justice) which are more real than our own reality, and pre-date our reality. These ideals provide the meaning behind the words we use, even if we often use the words incorrectly (for example by labeling an unjust act as just). They also demonstrate just how hollow and paltry man’s real-world understanding of justice truly is, and how often we fall short of the ideal. In fact, humans never experience ideal Justice in the real world; the only reason we have any understanding of this concept whatsoever is because of a deep-seated memory of the ideal from a past life, when the world was younger and humans were closer to the gods (this is part of Plato’s proof that the soul is eternal, in Phaedo). It is the philosopher’s job to contemplate the true meaning of Justice and teach others to seek objective and universal truth as well. Philosophers must avoid getting wrapped up in day to day situations and particulars (the way most people do as they go through their daily routines and the challenges of life), and instead keep their eyes aimed up toward the heavens, always seeking universal understandings and higher truths. Since Socrates seems to think of himself as just this kind of philosopher, it seems out of character for him to apply the word “justice” to the narrow context of his own execution, while leaving room for others to follow a different standard and remain just in his eyes. No, when Socrates uses the word “just” he is making a universal claim (he’s no relativist). Therefore disobeying the laws of one’s country is flat-out wrong; civil disobedience is immoral.
Yet I still hesitate to believe that Socrates really thought this way about the law. In another dialogue, The Apology, Socrates argues that divine authority (and Socrates’ own quest for truth) supersede the laws and decrees of Athens. The authorities wish him to stop being a philosopher, but he refuses. That version of Socrates makes it clear that even if the government legally enacted a law banning him from philosophizing, he would be compelled by a higher power (perhaps his sense of justice?) to disobey that law. His purpose on this earth is to help men discover truth, to question, to teach; through these actions he lives a moral and just life. So in this case he is willing to ignore the man-made authority of the city in favor of his own sense of what is right and moral: he will never cease to question authority, search for truth, and practice philosophy, no matter what the laws of Athens may require. It seems then that Socrates does not consider civil disobedience to be an inherently immoral act, since he would in fact be willing to disobey a law if, by so doing, he was honoring his commitment to moral behavior.
So does he contradict himself between these two dialogues? Maybe so. But I think we should let him off the hook. After all, how consistent and calm would I be if I was put on trial for my life, found guilty, and sentenced to death, all because of my personal beliefs and ideas. I find it difficult to judge a man for his beliefs on justice when he has been unjustly condemned and faces his own immanent death. But due to this contradiction, maybe we shouldn’t try to pull some timeless truth about morality and law from Socrates’ words; perhaps it’s pointless to take ideas that are over two thousand years old and attempt to make them seem relevant and true today. Perhaps instead the point of reading Plato is just to allow our thoughts to be provoked. If it gets us all thinking and questioning, that’s worthwhile!
Notes
This paragraph was inspired by Leo Strauss’s essay, “Plato’s Apology of Socrates and Crito,” in Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 61-62.
David Hume, “Of the Original Contract,” in Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1777), paragraph 24, accessed online at https://davidhume.org/texts/empl2/oc.
Main Currents of Marxism, Volume One: The Founders by Leszek Kołakowski
Tony Judt refers to this author, Leszek Kołakowski, as “the last illustrious citizen of the Twentieth-Century Republic of Letters.” That is an apt slogan. The depth of this author’s knowledge of both Marxism and philosophy in general is astonishing. He analyzes and penetrates all the main Marxist principles, picks them apart so we can see their component parts and what makes them tick. This is not an easy book. It’s dense, very dense, but immeasurably rewarding if one wishes to understand the philosophical underpinnings of Marxist thought, the ways in which Marxism was and is innovative and useful, and where Marxist theories fall short (or even disastrously short). Among other things, this book contains the most elegant dismantling of Marx’s theory of historical materialism that I have ever read. After reading it, I struggle to find a counterpoint that can stand against Kolakowski’s analysis. I feel as if I am looking upon the very pinnacle – the mountaintop – of erudition and scholarship, and I have to bow my head and acknowledge the greatness of it. I feel like an amateur composer listening to a Beethoven concerto (but then again, I’m actually pretty used to that feeling). Kolakowski does not set out to embarrass Marx, but instead respects him for the pioneer that he was, and for his far-seeing vision. But Marx’s theories are subject to a forensic analysis that lays bare all the gaps and missteps, and opens up many questions with which Marxists must wrestle: Does Marxist analysis have any scientific value? Do Marx’s ideas on value and history have anything useful to tell us about the real world? Does Marxism invariably slip into totalitarianism? These are questions Marxists have been exploring for a century, and I intend to do the same.
This is a masterpiece! The author, Herodotus, is often nicknamed the “father of history” (or alternatively, the “father of lies”), and when you read this book it’s easy to see why. On the surface what makes this book remarkable is that it’s the first systematic historical chronicle in the western world. Herodotus, who composed this history around the year 430 BC, tells with vivid detail the stories of all the major battles of the Greco-Persian wars, including the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. But at heart this book is so much more than a history. Herodotus traveled extensively through the Greek world, and everywhere he went he collected stories, interviewed priests and historians and seers, visited battlegrounds and famous monuments, and most importantly absorbed the cultures, customs, and myths of the diverse peoples he encountered. He then poured all of this knowledge (both factual and mythical) into his Histories. Thus his tale opens up the entire ancient world to the reader, rendering it personal, intimate, and real. One can luxuriate in all the local myths, oracular visions, religious customs, and superstitions that permeate the story. The author clearly believes in the visions of oracles and the awesome power of the Greek gods, so when he tells of prophesies that were proven true, or desecrations of temples that angered the gods and invited their wrath, or battles that were won due to the favorable omens obtained through human sacrifice, it becomes impossible for the reader to disentangle fact from fiction in his narrative. But the writing is so delicious that the reader need not care about this! Instead it is best to let oneself become completely submerged in the story, and take the entire narrative as it comes. The author’s knowledge of the ancient world (and even of the back-room dealings of the various monarchs) borders on omniscient, which makes him the perfect guide on this whirlwind tour of a long-lost place. Though perhaps it’s not so lost as one might think. The characters within are at once so fascinatingly foreign, and yet simultaneously so relatable, so human. When the leaders of Persia debate whether democracy is superior or inferior to monarchy, the arguments they make (on both sides) are still potent today; they still ring true (including the critique of democracy). When the best laid Persian war plans are spoiled by poor weather, the soldiers who attribute the outcome to divine intervention sound much like modern believers who see divine planning in every historical event. When ancient politicians take bribes, or parents flee with their children from war zones, or enslaved tribes revolt to regain their freedom, or powerful oligarchs lobby for government hand-outs, or leaders in times of crisis choose pride instead of compromise and so perish, I see the modern world in ancient dress. Though much has changed, much remains as it was. Humans are still just as human today as they were then, and in many ways their problems are our problems: How can we best govern ourselves? How can we best share scarce resources? When is it best to compromise and make common cause with our enemies, and when is it best to fight? In times of war and crises, when we are beset by danger on all sides, what is the best and most ethical path for one to take? How can one live a good life, find happiness, and survive the seemingly random perils that each person faces in life? These questions all still matter today, and we as a species still do not agree on the correct answers. What a fun book to get a person thinking! I never thought a book this old would hold such sway over me, but that’s the power of timelessly excellent writing.
July – August 2022
The Cambridge Companion to Marx edited by Terrell Carver
I feel quite sad to reach the end of this lovely book, though also immensely satisfied with the experience of reading it. A collection of gifted philosophers/writers gather to examine Marxism from a variety of angles. These scholars are not necessarily “Marxist” scholars, so we hear critiques of Marx’s vision as well as agreement with it. But all agree that Marx contributed in profound ways to the history of thought. Furthermore, if we examine that contribution through various lenses and expand it in new directions, we can reveal many hidden truths about humanity and the world we inhabit. How does moral philosophy challenge Marxist thought, and how does Marxist thought challenge moral philosophy? How did Marx’s theory of history become so mainstream that modern historians who are very far from being Marxist still unwittingly deploy Marx-style materialism when explaining how societies change and adapt over time? Can Marxism go hand-in-hand with feminism, and what are some areas that Marxist feminism can be expanded by future thinkers? Is Marxism a science, and if so then what part of it is scientific: the critique, or the prophesies, or both? Has Marxism been debunked by the events of modern history (such as the fall of the Soviet Union), or does it still have much to offer us? Or perhaps it was only Lenin who was debunked, but Marxism lives on? So much to ponder, if one cares to explore a controversial field of study. This book is for readers possessing a mind already open, who wish to expand it further. Caution: one must enter with the understanding that this book will not draw the conclusion that Marxism is irrelevant, or that capitalism has ultimately been proven victorious for all time and forever amen. While these authors don’t slavishly praise Marx (and they certainly don’t treat him as a saint beyond reproach, nor do they respect the sanctity of Marxist orthodoxy as an unchanging and timeless series of truths), they all recognize that the school of thought he founded still has much to offer our sick, sad world. In fact, while reading this book the thing that struck me most about Marxism was its sheer applicability. Despite the failures of many “Marxist” experiments during the 20th century, the Marxian worldview still holds many keys to understanding what really makes society tick, and why we humans keep finding ourselves in such serious jams (I’m looking at you climate change). But even though Marx helps us understand our jams and how we wound up in them, it does not necessarily follow that Marxism holds to key to solving them. I hope to study many more sources to find out any way this worldview can contribute to a workable solution to climate change. I consider Marxism a premier lens to apply when seeking to understand our world, but remain skeptical that Marxism can rise above being a system of critique and finally assume the mantle of “problem-solving tool”. But anyways, this book put me on the right track. Highly recommend!
Marxism: Philosophy and Economics by Thomas Sowell
Most of this short book is plain summary of Marx’s and Engels’ work, but not the clearest summary I’ve ever read. In the end Sowell comes around to his critique. Though at times his critique is on point, he distracts the reader with underdeveloped arguments that detract from his more substantive points. For example, Sowell tries to draw a connection between Marx’s “dictatorial” personality and later dictatorships that claimed to be in the Marxist tradition. I find that connection to be tenuous since Sowell himself argues that one must look to the main body of an author’s work (not the author’s side comments) if one wishes to unlock the real meaning of that author’s philosophy, and Marx’s writings on the whole do not advocate dictatorship. Sowell also argues weakly that it can’t be true that workers in America are alienated at work, because so many people flee to America from totalitarian countries. So because people flee worse situations, that proves Marx was wrong about capitalist alienation? Sowell, following this kind of logic, might say: “how bad could skin cancer really be if you would choose it instead of AIDS?” Just because AIDS is worse does not mean skin cancer is just fine. Sowell doesn’t really wish to tackle alienation head on, so he offers a brief argument that it doesn’t exist at all; in other words, he skirts the issue and moves on quickly. I was especially disappointed in Sowell’s mini biography of Marx, where he went out of his way to denigrate Marx’s personal character, highlighting with great relish all his character flaws and personal weaknesses. I’m not here to defend Marx the man, but this book claims to be about philosophy and economics, about Marx the “ism” not Marx the dude. It’s as if Sowell didn’t have enough ammo to take down the “ism” so he resorted to painting Marx the man in a negative light, as if that alone could weaken Marx’s philosophy. In the end, Sowell’s real mission in this book is to equate Leninism with Marxism, to blame Marx for all the 20th century bloodshed and horror perpetrated by his intellectual descendants, by those who (long after Marx was dead) committed mass murder in Marx’s name. This is another weak argument that ignores all the strains of Marxism that sharply criticize Leninism, not to mention the fact that most of Marx’s Marxism consists of critique of capitalism (still valid and true in our modern time), not prophesy of what future communist societies must look like. Lenin took Marx’s critique and developed his own vision for what a communist society should look like, but that is just one man’s interpretation. Many many other Marxist scholars have gone down entirely different roads than Lenin, repudiating him altogether, and developing visions of communism that differ greatly from Lenin’s. It requires an impressive feat of feigned ignorance for Sowell, a scholar of Marxism, to claim that Leninism equals Marxism. But then to extend that argument further – to conclude that therefore all of Marxism is not only dangerous but also invalid, debunked, and not worth serious study – is an approach that abandons scholarship and sinks to the level of propaganda. Ultimately Sowell reads like a man who loves and admires capitalism, and therefore seeks to hamstring the philosopher who developed the most potent and relevant critiques about capitalism, critiques that many scholars (and regular people) today still find quite compelling. But rather than attack those critiques head-on and attempt to reveal their flaws in a careful and serious way, Sowell instead uses ad hominem attacks, and attempts to blame the philosopher for the actions of those who lived long after his death. He boils down a varied and diverse school of thought (Marxism) until all that remains is the vulgar totalitarianism perpetrated by Stalin. Where other students of Marxism see a large tree with many interlocking branches, Sowell sees only one branch – the sickly one. He’d like to use this branch to condemn the whole tree. One has to ignore a lot about Marxism to arrive at the conclusion that because Leninism was a philosophical monstrosity in the end, therefore Marx’s analysis of capitalism, his critique of ideology and culture, and his discovery of dialectical materialism are worthless. Sowell wishes to use Lenin as a tool to rob Marx’s critiques of their splendor, their relevance, their power. I would expect this from a Fox News commentator, for whom ignorance of Marxism is a prerequisite for the job, but not from a serious scholar of Marxism, one who has read and read on this subject, one who understands just how diverse the Marxist tradition has become, one who is informed enough to recognize the validity lurking beneath Marx’s 150 year old critique. I wonder if Sowell would blame Martin Luther for the Salem Witch Trials (which took place 150 years after Luther’s death), and therefore condemn the entire Protestant worldview? Or perhaps we must blame Jesus himself for those crimes, since it was ultimately his message that Luther was interpreting. Yes Jesus is directly responsible for the witch trials! This is fun game to play, but it’s not serious scholarship. It would be difficult to take seriously a thesis that argued the teachings of Jesus are proven false (or irrelevant or dangerous) by the simple fact that many have misinterpreted or warped them. This is essentially Sowell’s thesis about Marx. Frankly I expected better from a writer/thinker of Sowell’s caliber.
The German Ideology by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
I enjoyed this one much more than I expected. It seems that when Marx and Engels set out to write this book, they intended it to be a polemic against a certain group of German philosophers who have long since been forgotten by all but a few experts in 19th century German philosophy. So I figured this work would probably be largely irrelevant, or at least lacking in modern applicability. But as I read the Cambridge Companion to Marx, this book kept coming up! Clearly it made an impact on a variety of scholars, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. Turns out the real core of this book is something much deeper and more interesting than a pure polemic: it’s a clear and eloquent exposition of Marx’s and Engels’ philosophy of history, otherwise known as dialectical materialism. Here is my brief attempt to sum it up: on the one hand, our culture, philosophy, ethics, state, and system of laws are all results of the intermingling of the economic and material conditions we find ourselves in during our particular historical epoch, the ever-changing state of technology, and the on-going and never-ending struggle between the different classes (workers vs. bosses, peasants vs. nobles, slave vs. slave owner, etc.). But at the same time those same contingent forces (culture, philosophy, ethics, state, laws) turn around and impact the very economic systems and material forces that created them in the first place. So material forces are ultimately the true drivers of history, but the structures those material forces create come back to alter the material forces themselves. There is a perpetual conflict between causes and effects, and each of these conflicts shapes the world around us. Example: the proliferation of the internet alters the economic landscape, generating entirely new sectors, such as same day delivery of groceries. These new sectors come into conflict with older ones (brick-and-mortar book stores). The daily lives of workers are shaped and altered by these changes (employees at bookstores lose their positions, and become drivers for Amazon Prime). These changes to workers lives cause conflicts with the pre-existing culture (the previous generation, who lived a different way, struggles to comprehend the changes happening around them), and eventually the culture itself changes, taking on the role of perpetuating and justifying the system as it exists today. In time these cultural and economic changes spawn further technological advancement and cultural change, which impacts the economic system, and on and on in a never ending dance. This is the dialectic at work: endless processes of conflict and contradiction spawning new outcomes that then generate new contradictions. But Marx’s dialectic is materialist, because it imagines economic forces and class struggle to be the primary drivers of events. These material causes are then shaped by the forces they unleash, but ultimately the material forces are the the root causes and main shapers of all the other forces. So ideas do not create revolutions; material forces do – in fact material forces create those very ideas that often get the credit for the revolution. This vision of history offers a different way to understand why human events occur the way they do. These ideas can be quite challenging for those of us who live in cultures that place so much emphasis on groundbreaking ideas (freedom, liberty, equality, democracy), and imagine that those ideas are true drivers of history. In reality, as Marx argues, the liberty-obsessed ideology that we witness in America is just an off-shoot of the economic forces already at work; in fact our liberty-obsessed culture is a defense mechanism that keeps the economic status quo in place. Much more to explore on this front, but it’s fun to feel my mind expanding.
April – June 2022
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume One by Karl Marx
I’ve officially started my long-awaited deep dive into Marxism, and what better way to begin than with Marx’s magnum opus, the work he spent 20 years researching: Capital. This is a truly remarkable work, unlike anything I have ever read. All at once it is a deep analysis and critique of capitalism, a scathing polemic directed against “bourgeois” economists who fail to see the underlying exploitation that drives capitalism, a journalistic expose of the disgusting treatment of the working class by capitalists, and a philosophical treatise that melds the dialectical tools of Hegel to economic/historical analysis. Marx puts on a very impressive performance here. He creates an entirely unique and complete worldview – a timeless lens which can be applied to capitalism/economics/the state/history – and manages to encapsulate it in one book. There isn’t much talk of solutions to the problems Marx reveals, but this book isn’t about solutions; it’s about critique. And I have never read a more well-thought out, deeply researched, and expertly reasoned critique of capitalism in my life. Engels once said that nobody saw as far or understood as much as Marx did, and I am inclined to agree. Though this is a difficult work to get through, I understand why it is considered Marx’s masterpiece, and why Marx is hailed as one of those few timeless geniuses who understood and revealed what nobody else had seen up to that point. Now so many of us take Marx’s reasoning for granted, which is a testament to the power of his analysis.
A Companion to Marx’s Capital by David Harvey
This was the perfect book to pair with Capital. Harvey brings a unique perspective as a Marxist geographer who has spent decades teaching a course on Capital. Even though on the surface Capital is an economic text, Harvey reveals the deep philosophical current that provides the foundation for the entire book: the plethora of contradictions contained within our capitalist system. Labor nowadays is social (for example: all the laborers in a factory work together to create products), yet the fruits of the labor are privately owned (owned by the laborers). Production is in a state of anarchy, governed only by the laws of supply/demand/competition, yet within a factory production is under the strict control of the capitalist. The vast majority of people own nothing but their own labor power, yet they are forced to give much of it away for free in the form of surplus value, which is extracted and owned by the capitalist. Capitalists make all their profits from this extracted labor, which they then use to generate more capital (factories, labor, machines, etc) so that they can produce even more wealth for themselves, at the expense of the majority. In the end the capitalists generate more wealth than a human could ever actually spend, so the wealth becomes simply a means for generating more capital, and therefore more wealth, until the gap between rich and poor becomes an unbridgeable chasm. A country’s economy (i.e. capitalists, stock market, property market, etc.) might be thriving, while the vast majority remain impoverished, without equity, possessing only their labor power which they are forced to sell so that capitalists can generate more profit. These examples of contradictions demonstrate why there is a constant struggle between laborers and the owners of capital. Harvey lays this all out perfectly, and shows how Marx was a master of the dialectic style (a philosophy that focuses on the unending contradictions in life, and the unexpected results that these contradictions generate).
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
In every way that Capital is careful and detail-oriented, in every way that Capital uses a fine tooth comb to examine issues from every possible angle and probe each question to reveal its hidden secrets, in every way that Capital thinks things through to the very core so that no stone is left unturned and no logical fallacy is left in tact, the Communist Manifesto takes the very opposite approach in all of these regards. This is a political work through and through, not a deep work of philosophy. This work is intended for mass consumption and not for someone who wants every angle examined. Marx here uses a mallet instead of a scalpel, and makes grand, sweeping prophesies that are not to be found in his masterwork, Capital. For that reason, the Manifesto has had a much broader appeal than Capital, and remains a powerful call to action for all oppressed people, while Capital is a slow and monotonous climb to the heights of philosophical discovery. The Manifesto predicts unprecedented social and economic change, massive movements of whole populations, the abolition of the ruling class and capitalistic freedom of exchange, and the overthrow of exploitation if only the workers can unite. It’s a stirring read, though it lacks almost entirely the scientific basis that Capital carefully constructs, and contains none of the scrupulous detail Marx is so careful to include in his critique of capitalism (details, for example, about what exactly these unprecedented changes will look like in real life, or how they can be accomplished). It seems to reveal (to me anyhow) how Marx’s critique of capitalism rose to the level of true science, whereas his predictions about how capitalism will be abolished remained undeveloped, overly general, full of unexamined assumptions – in other words the very opposite of what I admire about his work in Capital.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels
Engels wrote this book with the intention of distilling the main arguments contained in Marx’s Capital down to a short and clear book for mass audiences. In that regard, it does an decent enough job. Engels does add some bits of his own, which I find pretty interesting, though I do not necessarily agree with his conclusions. He starts by analyzing the beliefs of some of the socialist thinkers and activists who pre-dated Marx, and concludes that their brand of proto-socialism was “utopian” because it lacked a scientific basis for analyzing capitalism (Marx would create this scientific basis by publishing Capital). Engels goes on to argue that his and Marx’s brand of socialism is not utopian because they have successfully unlocked and revealed the real mechanisms that drive capitalistic oppression. This is all fine and true, but then Engels goes on to lay out a very unscientific and overly general prophesy about how the demise of capitalism and the advent of communist society is inevitable. He predicts that ruling classes, capital, and the state itself will become superfluous and will fall away over the course of the communist revolution. He believes that the proletariat can unite to such a degree that they can finally free mankind from exploitation, and make man a master of his own history and destiny by eliminating competition and instituting a planned economy. I find this prediction to be thoroughly utopian because it assumes that the revolutionaries who establish this communist society – the planners who run the new command economy, the spearheads of the revolution who are now placed in a position to organize and design a new system – will not themselves simply become the new ruling class. Won’t, under communism, the vast majority of people still need to take orders from these planners, if a command economy is to exist? Engels assumes that humans are capable of functioning (and running large-scale economies) without automatically developing into ruling class and exploited class, but how can a planned economy exist without planners? And if these planners are ever tempted to organize production in self-serving ways, or allocate resources in such a way as to benefit courtiers, or if they use their positions as planners to consolidate power, a ruling class will organically develop. The notion that we can eliminate exploitation by instituting a world-wide planned economy is something that is utterly untestable, has never been observed, and seems not to match what we know about humans (power corrupts us). Therefore this prediction appears to be unscientific, though Engels claims that his prophesy is the result of scientific socialism. Once again, Marx’s critique of capitalism appears to be scientific – testable, backed by tons of data, applicable across the globe and throughout time – but the predictions about what will follow capitalism are nothing more than hunches dressed up as science. I find that sort of pseudoscience to be very weak, despite my hatred for exploitative capitalism. I am very eager to find a socialist writer who spends the majority of his time focusing on solutions instead of critique. If someone can take the same level of rigor, research, deep thought, philosophical excellence that Marx used in Capital, and apply it toward creating a real-life workable solution to capitalism (instead of easily digestible platitudes and grand utopian promises), we may actually get somewhere with all this. Without that piece, we are left with only a critique; we can describe in incredible detail the prison in which we are trapped (down to the very atoms that comprise the bars of our cell), without getting any closer to understanding how to escape the prison.
March 2022
Great Courses: The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas by Lawrence Cahoone
This course is a guided tour through a universe of ideas. The guide is omniscient: he understands and knows intimately every bud on every twig on every branch on the tree of philosophical knowledge. He takes in his hands the countless competing worldviews and myriad conceptions of justice of so many illustrious scholars across so many years and spins them into a web. The web doubles and redoubles back on itself, and spreads out in new directions, and those new branches double back and connect with the old, and soon it resembles a galaxy. Is there some ultimate truth that guides all the twisting strands of that galaxy, that unites them? The way the ideas all connect and intersect and branch off into new ideas is a very visually pleasing image in my mind. It lights up my pattern recognition software, and soon where I once only saw scattered ideas I now see a superstructure, a framework. But is that superstructure real, or is the galaxy itself simply an optical illusion? Perhaps there is no superstructure, and what appears to my human eyes to be a solid thing is instead nothing more than a collection of bright stars, many light years away from one another, all alone in the darkness of space. Or I should say a collection of bright minds, each striving in its own way to understand how exactly we are all supposed to cope with the fact that we are all alone, clinging to this rock while we fly around our little sun, surrounded on all sides by endless darkness and cold. Then again, the very fact that we all share this sense of mortality does indeed provide at least one thread, one hint of a superstructure, one bond that unites me with every other human, and even every other living creature. So I guess I won’t be so quick to dismiss the notion that the superstructure could be real, that there may be some over-arching shape and unity to the vast history of political thought, or even some ideas that may one day unite us all. If there is one truth or guiding idea that could accomplish such a task, it would have to be based on something we all have in common, so mortality is at least a good place to start, if one is trying to puzzle out worldviews and conceptions of justice that can bring humankind together. But I digress. This was an excellent course, highly recommend!
February 2022
India After Gandhi by Ramachandra Guha
Here is what this book taught me: in a truly diverse and pluralistic land, it is damn near impossible to get everyone (or even a strong majority) on the same page. People can derive their values and sense of community from their class status, religion, business, geographic region, ethnicity, tribe, party, hobbies, philosophy, etc., and these various avenues can create contradictory and overlapping sets of values, often within the same person. A poor Pathan farmer living on the border of Pakistan might identify as a member of the lower class and push for Marxist policies and a strong centralized government that can institute sweeping land reform, while simultaneously identifying as a tribal Pathan who wishes to push back against the centralized Indian government that is encroaching on tribal sovereignty (even if this same government might provide the sought-after land reform); meanwhile the farmer also identifies as a Muslim, which will come with a whole host of other crucial values and community ties. The possible combinations are endless! In a country with a billion people, the electorate becomes thoroughly unmanageable, and the enormous diversity of belief adds an unfathomable layer of complexity to every political/economic/social/philosophical issue. Any time I hear someone claim to have an all-encompassing theory of The Good, or a theory of humanity that all humans across the world and across cultures can rally behind, or one single avenue of values that is objectively the most important above all the others (for example that all people should identify above all else with their class status), I find myself thinking that the person making these claims has not looked hard enough at the real diversity that exists on this planet, and the myriad ways people can construct their belief systems and build their communities and their senses of self. In other words, theories like that (with that level of totality) just don’t seem feasible to me. That’s what I learned from this wonderful book.
January 2022
Great Courses: A Historian Goes to the Movies: Ancient Rome by Gregory S. Aldrete
A very light topic and a fun escape! It gave me a good excuse to finally watch Cleopatra. I’ve listened to a few of this professor’s courses, and he always does a great job. I wouldn’t say this particular course teaches a whole lot about Roman history, but it is a lot of fun! I’ve been curious about whether Gladiator was historically accurate, ever since I first saw it in the theaters when I was 15. Personally, I have been shying away from straight-up history lately (recently I’ve turned more toward philosophy instead), so this course was a way for me to dip my toe back in the “historical” waters, without going very deep at all.
The great philosopher Socrates, on trial for his life, faces the jury and prepares to defend himself. An array of trumped-up charges have been leveled against him, namely impiety, corrupting the youth, and turning “the weaker argument into the stronger.” The entire affair is a thinly-veiled attempt to silence a steadfast and incorruptible voice that has been speaking truth to power for decades. The accusers are powerful and well-connected Athenians who eagerly hope he will be exiled (or, fingers-crossed, put to death). The nature of the charges are irrelevant; the point is to destroy Socrates by whichever means are available. A trial seems a most expedient tactic.
It’s no big surprise that Socrates is on the receiving end of this indictment: he has spent his whole career making enemies of powerful citizens with his incessant habit of publicly cross-examining anyone who considers himself to be wise or moral. Socrates openly acknowledges as much: “The effect of this questioning, fellow Athenians, was to earn me much hostility of a very vexing and trying sort, which has given rise to numerous slanders.”1 The more citizens he interrogated – whether they be politicians, priests, lawyers, poets, or craftsmen – the more he discovered ignorance masquerading as wisdom, and also (to his “dismay and alarm”) the more enemies he made. Now during the great political upheavals taking place in the aftermath of Athens’ devastating and humiliating defeat by Sparta in the Peloponnesian War, the enemies of Socrates see a golden opportunity to finally take their revenge on the annoying old trouble maker, by painting him not just as a public nuisance but as a scapegoat for all of Athens’ woes.
Socrates’ main defense against the accusation of impiety is that the gods themselves commanded him to do as he had always done: to perform philosophy, cross-examine any who claimed to be wise, and point out flawed logic wherever he encountered it. Socrates explains: “Why then, you may ask, do some people enjoy spending so much time in my company?… My listeners enjoy the examination of those who think themselves wise but are not, since the process is not unamusing. But for me, I must tell you, it is a mission which I have been bidden to undertake by the god, through oracles and dreams, and through every means whereby a divine injunction to perform any task has ever been laid upon a human being.” This was a divine command, so therefore Socrates must continue these activities at all cost, even if in the process he makes enemies out of the most powerful and influential Athenians – even if in the end it costs him his very life.
By following this command, Socrates is in fact demonstrating every day his devotion to the gods, proving his piety through the very actions for which he has been condemned: practicing philosophy, teaching, and questioning the powerful. Socrates makes it clear that he will continue to follow this command even unto death, that the gods must be obeyed. When he ponders aloud what his reaction would be if the jury decided to free him on the condition that he give up philosophy forever, he declares, “I have the greatest fondness and affection for you, fellow Athenians, but I will obey my god rather than you; and so long as I draw breath and am able, I shall never give up practicing philosophy… and you may let me go or not, as you please, because there is no chance of my acting otherwise, even if I have to die many times over.” Socrates is willing to sacrifice his very life in order to pursue what he perceives to be a religious agenda, an order from heaven to practice philosophy. Following this logic, he should not only be set free but honored, because clearly he is one of Athens’ most pious men.
Of course this defense doesn’t work against the jury, who ultimately condemn him to die by poisoning. When his sentence is proclaimed, Socrates makes it abundantly clear that he has no regrets, that he is not scared, and that he will never stop. After all, why should a death sentence scare an old man, when death is already close at hand? And why should the condemnation by a group of small-minded individuals bother a man who perpetually seeks truth and wisdom at the behest of the gods themselves? The unending search for truth and the endeavor to truly understand our world (and make others understand too) are divine imperatives, and Socrates will be blessed for having dedicated his life to these efforts. In the end, philosophy is not just a noble profession, but a mission worth dying for, and one that is sanctioned and encouraged by the gods.
And thus in this light, the book reads like prophesy. The gods order Socrates never to stop questioning the powerful, never to stop teaching, even if the authorities put him to death. This execution (which Socrates could have easily avoided by simply agreeing to stop being a gadfly, or by accepting exile) stunned and mortified his disciples, especially his brilliant student Plato. Plato was so affected by the death of Socrates, that he wrote a series of dialogues wherein Socrates takes the starring role, representing the ultimate seeker of truth and wisdom, the figure who exists to unmask the liars and those who fool themselves, the teacher who shows us a whole new way of understanding reality: through the lens of the Socratic method. Plato’s vision of the legendary Socrates (which is the Socrates we encounter in this very book) went on to inspire and guide philosophers across the globe for the next 2,500 years, making Socrates one of the most influential men who has ever lived. In this way the prophesy of the gods was fulfilled, since only through his unjust execution could Socrates ultimately spread his crucial message to such a wide audience that transcends time itself.
Would we even know the name of Socrates, if he had agreed to stop teaching to spare his own life? Would Plato have turned him into a symbol of truth and justice if he hadn’t followed the gods’ orders? Would the message that philosophy and the search for truth are worth dying for have taken root among the countless thinkers who have dedicated their lives to that endeavor, if Socrates had chosen not to martyr himself for the cause? The gods seemed to know from the start that the only way to teach mankind that we must never abandon the search for truth was to ask a man to lay his own life on the line for that very purpose. Only through that example could the lesson be brought home, and a whole world of philosophers be inspired enough to dedicate their lives to that same effort. That’s the prophesy that Socrates, who seems to me to be more pious than any of his accusers, fulfilled.
Notes
I use the translation of Apology by David Gallop, appearing in John Perry, Michael Bratman, and John Martin Fischer, eds., Introduction to Philosophy : Classical and Contemporary Readings, Seventh Edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
