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Reply to Brenkert's “Marx & Utilitarianism”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Derek P. H. Allen
Derek P. H. Allen*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 1976 , pp. 517 - 534
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Copyright © The Authors 1976

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References

1 “The Utilitarianism of Marx & Engels,” American Philosophical Quarterly, X, 3 (July 1973), pp. 189–99.

2 Brenkert, p. 433.

3 Ibid., p. 424.

4 Marx, Karl & Engels, Friedrich The German Ideology(MOSCOW: Progress Publishers, 1964), p. 93Google Scholar; d. p. 87.

5 Marx, Karl Capital (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970–72), I, p. 10Google Scholar; (The Preface in question is to the first German edition.)

6 From Engels, ’ 1892 Preface to his book The Condition of the Working Class in England, eds. & trans. Henderson, W. O. & Chaloner, W. H. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), p. 364Google Scholar. Cf. German Ideology, op. cit., pp. 49, 82-6; and Marx, & Engels, The Holy Family in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy & Society, eds. & trans. Easton, L. D. & Guddat, K. H. (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1967), p. 368.Google Scholar

7 The distinction between the personal and the class interests of the bourgeois did not emerge clearly in my original article. There I showed that Marx and Engels approved certain policies which they believed would promote the communist revolution but which they knew to be in the interests of the bourgeoisie, and I concluded that therefore they did not discount bourgeois interests. But, from my premise, which Brenkert grants, it does not follow that Marx and Engels took the benefit to bourgeoisie of the policies in question to be a reason for adopting them, and thus it does not follow that they did not discount bourgeois interests. Brenkert does not make this point. Instead he objects that the term “bourgeois“ is not, as I suggested, “value-neutral.” But this objection is irrelevant to the matter at hand in this Section.

8 Thus I assume, for present purposes, that utilitarianism is compatible with any theory of value. In my original article I implicitly attributed eudaimonistic utilitarianism to Marx and Engels. Below I raise the possibility that Marx's theory of value is non-eudaimonistic. But otherwise the sort of utilitarianism in question in this paper is eudaimonistic.

9 Brenkert, p. 430.

10 “Within communist institutions, the actions one is to perform are those which are intrinsically morally right.” (Brenkert, p. 434). Communism not only supports the possibility of performing such “higher activities,” its achievement brings about their “sole performance” (p. 432). For this reason men in capitalist society are morally obligated to promote communism (p. 433).

11 Cf. Williams, B.“ A Critique of Utilitarianism,” Utilitarianism: For & Against, Smart, J.J.C. & Williams, B. (Cambridge: University Press, 1973), p. 87.Google Scholar

12 It was of course because, in Marx's view, Benthamite utilitarianism prescribed the satisfaction of the given desires of the “normal man” ― for Bentham “the modern shopkeeper, especially the English shopkeeper” ― that, but for want of courage, Marx would have called Bentham“ a genius in the way of bourgeois stupidity.” (Capital, op. cit., I, n. 2, pp. 609–10.)

13 Ibid, p. 79.

14 Ibid., pp. 75, 80. A further point. Under socialism “the determination of value continues to prevail” (cf. Capital, op. cit., Ill, p. 851.); hence so does the possibility of fetishism. And under communism fetishistic treatment of products is at any rate logically possible. (Socialism is the first, and transitional, phase of postcapitalist society, communism the second: on this periodization, with reference to Marx, cf. Lenin, V.I. “The State & Revolution,” Lenin: Selected Works (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968), p. 334.)Google Scholar

15 Brenkert, pp. 430. 16 Ibid., pp. 428.

17 “Marx refers to the function of the worker in the modern workshop as a moral strike against the worker.” (Brenkert, p. 430) But the passage he cites in support reads: “After striking the worker morally by a degrading function [in the modern workshop) … he [Proudhon]lays the blame … ” (Marx, K. The Poverty of Philosophy (New York: International Publishers, 1963), pp. 132-3.Google Scholar) Thus Marx is saying that it is Proudhon who strikes the worker morally. Indeed he goes on to say that conditions in the modern (“automatic”) workshop are not degrading but have a “revolutionary side” (ibid., p. 144.), which Proudhon overlooks. If workshop conditions were as Proudhon describes, Marx would certainly agree that they were degrading. But it is important to notice that it is Proudhon, not Marx, who uses moral vocabulary as such, for part of Marx's point in the Poverty is that a critique of capitalism which, like Proudhon's, is specifically moral, is insufficient by itself.

18 Brenkert, p. 430, cf. Bottomore, T. B. Karl Marx: Early Writings (London: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 193-4.Google Scholar (Henceforth “Bottomore”)

19 Marx Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1968), Supp. Vol. 1, p. 567. (The modal auxialliary verb in the second clause of the passage Brenkertquotes is müssen, in the third person singular.)

20 Bottomore, p. 194. Marx makes this remark in the sentence which immediately follows the passage Brenkert quotes.

21 Brenkert, pp. 428.

22 E.g., Marx, K. Grundrisse,tr. Nicolaus, M. (London: Penguin Books, 1973), p. 712.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., p. 706. Brenkert does not explain why he puts the expression “higher activities” in inverted commas. I did so in my original article in the course of arguing that Marx quite probably would not have regarded any kind of activity as higher per se.

24 Bottomore, p. 127.

25 Ibid.

26 Thus, “production for its own sake means nothing but … the development of the richness of human nature as an end in itself.” Marx, K. Theories of Surplus Value (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1969), Part II, pp. 117-8.Google Scholar Cf. Cohen, G. “Bourgeois & Proletarians,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XXIX, 2 (April-June 1968), p. 223.Google Scholar

27 Ibid., p. 227.

28 Bottomore, p. 127.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., p. 128.

31 Marx suggests other differentiae between the productive activity of men and of (other) animals. For example, men's production involves advance planning, and men produce instruments of production, (Cf. Capital, op. cit. I, p. 178; Bottomore, p. 128.) But these other differentiae are not specific to the productive activity of man as man, for they also characterize productive activity in which a man engages as a means to ends other than producing.

32 Bottomore, p. 127; cf. German ideology, op. cit., pp. 54–5.

33 Cf. Cohen, op. cit., pp. 212–3.

34 Men, needs, activities, and relations are among the things that can be human in this sense. Cf. Bottomore, pp. 154, 159, 160, 168, inter alia.

35 Brenkert, p. 431.

36 Ibid.

37 Mill, J. S. “Utilitarianism,” Mill's “Utilitarianism,” ed. Smith, J. M. & Sosa, E. (Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1969), p. 45Google Scholar; cf. pp. 58–61. Here is Bentham on the same point: “ … in the moral field it cannot be a man's duty to do that which it is his interest not to do. Morality will teach him rightly to estimate his interests and his duties; and examination will show their coincidence.” (J. Bentham, Dentology, ed., J. Bowring (London: Tait, 1834), Vol. I, p. 11.)

38 Cf. below, p. 531.

39 Brenkert, p. 431.

40 Brenkert appears to take it to be specific to utilitarianism, rather than definitive of consequentialism, to construe right actions as maximizing actions.

41 Brenkert, p. 433.

42 Ibid.

43 K. Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade,” Poverty, op. cit., p. 224.

44 Brenkert, p. 431.

45 Brenkert, p. 432; cf. German Ideology, op. cit., p. 83.

46 Bottomore, p. 168.

47 Ibid., p. 165.

48 Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 488.

49 Ibid., p. 325.

50 Ibid.

51 Poverty, op. cit., p. 144.

52 At least so the capitalist is represented in the Manuscripts and in The Holy family, although not in the Communist Manifesto; cf., Bottomore, pp. 191–3, and Cohen (op. cit., pp. 223–8), who elaborates this thesis in detail.

53 Here I follow the phenomenological study of the abstract capitalist which we find in the Manuscripts. Marx is not committed to the claim that actual capitalists will become human, only to the claim that their descendants will, and that they themselves will begin to be humanized through, inter alia, engaging in productive activity in postcapitalist society. (My references here, as at the end of Section II, are mainly to the Manuscripts because this is Brenkert's main source.)

54 Bottomore, p. 157; ct. Brenkert's third kind of “higher activity.”

55 Bottomore, p. 165.

56 Cf. Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 708.

57 Ibid., p. 712. Translation corrected; ct. Marx, K. Grundrisse Der Kritik Der Politischen Okonomie(Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1953), p. 599Google Scholar; and Mclellan, D. Marx's Grundrisse(London: Macmillan, 1971), p. 148.Google Scholar

58 Ibid., p. 611.

59 His intentional and attitudinal preferences correspond. As Marx presents him, however, he does not deliberate.

60 It is irrelevant to inquire here what are Marx's criteria of “higher activity,” because Brenkert's list of “higher activities” is not Marx's. My views on the question are in my original article.

61 I do not consider here whether the individual's self-development occurs to any extent during his socially necessary labour time, but even if it does, nevertheless at least some of his capacities ― e.g., to compose music ― evidently are not realized then; and if it does not: if for man as man socially necessary labour is only a means of satisfying subsistence needs and not also an end-in-itself, nevertheless, if wealth, as understood in a socialist perspective, is the aim of production (cf. Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 488) then the ultimate reason that a man as man labours is that he may produce in his free time for the sake of so doing and for the sake of the other.

62 Brenkert, p. 432. Brenkert emphasizes “complete” because he is arguing at this point that what makes communist institutions morally required for Marx is not that under communism man's capacities are more fulfilled than under any other system, although they are, nor that the individual is more satisfied, although he is, but that man's capacities are completely fulfilled.

63 Poverty, op. cit., p. 63.

64 Marx, K. & Engels, “The Communist Manifesto,” Marx, K. & Engels, F.: Selected Works(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), Vol. I, p. 121.Google Scholar

65 Hobsbawm, E.J. ed., Karl Marx: Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1964), p. 85Google Scholar; cf. Grundrisse, op. cit., p. 488.

66 I do not claim that this is the only sense in which Marx uses “human” in the Manuscripts, but that it is one sense. The early writings obviously also contain a Feuerbachian notion of the human essence, which is not to be elucidated simply in terms of human ends. Doubtless, then, there is a moral point of view in the Manuscripts which is not entirely utilitarian.

67 “The individual as man” designates an abstraction. Marx is not committed to the claim that all men under communism develop all their capacities to the utmost, but to the claim that they become versatile, no doubt some more so than others.

68 Cf. n. 8, sentence 3.

69 I have benefited from Dan Goldstick's comments on an earlier version of this paper and from discussions with Gerald Cohen and Anthony Quinton.