According to
Martin Hägglund, Marx provides us with “the greatest resources for developing a
secular notion of freedom.”[1] This assessment hinges on two
claims. First, a “commitment to individual freedom” is “the foundation” of
Marx’s work.[2] Second, Marx’s particular development
of the idea of freedom is more fecund for the project of caring for the secular
world than any other. In other words, freedom was central for Marx, and Marx ought to be central for our
understanding of freedom.
I am very
much in agreement with both of these headline claims, and, therefore, very
sympathetic to Hägglund’s project. But the devil is in the details, and I would
like to specify both what freedom meant for Marx and what Marx might mean for our
freedom struggles in slightly different terms than Hägglund does. To sum it up
in a phrase, I want to prise open a distinction between two interpretations of
Marx: Hägglund’s Marx, the democratic
socialist, and my Marx, the social republican. I then want to ask whether
these two Marxes might be married – or, at least, made to cohabit – without
being conflated.
In order to
do this, I will pursue three interlocking questions: one Marxological, one
conceptual, and one political. (1) Is Marx’s commitment to “the free
development of individualities” identical with his commitment to individual
freedom?[3] (2) Is the socialist critique of
liberalism fully immanent, in the sense that it simply exposes liberalism’s own
self-contradictory attachment to forms of social mediation that thwart the
liberal commitment to individual freedom? (3) Are the political institutions of
socialism best understood as “how we express our priorities and our conception
of value”?[4] I think the answer to each of these
must be “no,” and that this entails some significant – but friendly –
amendments to Hägglund’s democratic socialism.
1
As Hägglund
eloquently argues, the free development of individuals – what Marx called “real
freedom” – depends upon free time, or “how much time we have to lead our lives.”[5] Free time, as Hägglund also argues,
is not idle time, or time free from work, free from commitment, or free from
the constraints that come with work and commitment. Rather, free time is that
surplus of time in which we can commit ourselves to the work we want to do for
its own sake. Attention to this – the human use of free time – is the beating
heart of Hägglund’s book.
The only
consideration I want to add is this: being subject to a dominating power means that
your time is not your own, and that your time is, therefore, not free. This is
obviously true of the enslaved, who have no free time – even when they have no
work to do – since they are always at the beck and call of the slave holder.
But think also of the time- and attention-consuming maneuvers and activities
women undertake on a daily basis to avoid sexual assault and harassment in our
male-dominated society. Vulnerability to alien power degrades time, eating it
up with anxieties and strategies.
I introduce
this consideration in order to stave off an easy misunderstanding of Marx’s
distinction between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom. If we ask
how the line between the two realms is drawn, or what might allow people to
move it in one way or the other, there is a temptation to focus on three
factors: technology, labor exploitation, and ethics. From within this
framework, the realm of necessity may be reduced by applying labor-saving technology,
by reducing or eliminating the coercive appropriation of other people’s labor,
and by refusing to treat “all my activities merely as means.”[6]
What goes
missing from this reading of the freedom/necessity distinction is Marx’s denial
that the modern ruling class of capitalists enjoys free time, and that this
absence of freedom among the ruling class is not due to insufficient
technology, the exploitation of the capitalists’ labor, or to an ethical lapse
on their part. This class is made up of “rough, half-educated parvenus,”[7] as Marx puts it, not the free
persons of antiquity, because capitalists are market-dominated producers,
attentive to the shifting whims of supply and demand, and consequently anxious
to accumulate lest they go under.[8]
Marx wants
to turn this fact to the advantage of the workers’ movement. Labour
organizations should fight for shorter working days in order that the workers
themselves will have the time and resources to educate and develop themselves
politically, but also so as to keep the market pressure on capitalists high.
This will, Marx argues, speed both the development of productive technology, as
competition on productivity heats up, and the concentration of capital, as less
capital-intensive firms go under. This strategy hinges on the capitalists’
domination by the market and consequent lack of free time.
Market
domination, therefore, is central to Marx’s understanding of the dynamics and
harms of the capitalist mode of production. His arguments in this regard can,
and should, be extended. If domination by the market corrodes and destroys free
time, this is not because of some special quality of the market but because of
the typical quality of domination. I am dominated wherever I am vulnerable to
uncontrolled interference from another or others, whether or not they exercise
their power of interfering.[9] Being dominated gives agents a
special set of reasons to consider in their actions: how will my dominator(s)
react to what I am doing? Will they use their power against my projects? How?
Regardless of what I want to do, a new sort of uncertainty or anxiety hangs
over my plans, intentions, and desires. Therefore, to Hägglund’s argument that
“anyone who is committed to being an agent is committed to increasing her realm
of freedom and decreasing her realm of necessity,”[10] we can add that she is equally
committed to decreasing the domination to which she is subject.
For this
reason, it is not enough for Marx to say, as he does in the manuscript for
Volume Three, that increasing the realm of freedom requires, as a prerequisite,
“socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their
interchange with nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of
being ruled by it as by the blind forces of nature; and achieving this with the
least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy
of, their human nature.”[11]
It is crucial to add, as he did in Volume One, that “the shape of the social
life-process, i.e., of the material production process, only strips off its
mystical haze when it becomes the product of freely associated human beings, standing under their conscious,
methodical control.[12]
What is
really distinctive about Marx’s political project is not his desire for
capacious and equitably distributed free time, or his belief that we should
exercise conscious, methodical control over the material production process.
These are widely held socialist goals. What is distinctive is that he holds free association among producers to be
the fundamental precondition for both of these goals. Marx’s free association evokes the free city of republican thought, an
association of people, insulated from dominating power, who cooperate in
ordering their social and natural world. This is what Marx – following the
working-class militants of 1848 – called the
social republic, or the republic of labour. It is a social republic because it extends republican government – “the
republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal
producers”[13] – into the heart of society, the
factories and workshops.
None of this
contradicts anything in Hägglund’s reconstruction of Marx. But it is absent,
and I worry that its absence betrays an apolitical tendency in Hägglund’s
democratic socialism. Individual freedom, for Marx, was both the freedom to
develop one’s powers and capacities in an open-ended way and the freedom from domination that is the prerequisite for free
development. Association free from domination is the political basis of
socialism on Marx’s account.
Hence, my
answer to the first question: individual freedom from domination ought not be
identified with “the free development of individualities,” since it is a
prerequisite of this free development.
2
Even with
this amendment, my argument supports Hägglund’s contentions that individual
freedom is of fundamental importance to Marx, and, futher, that this
underscores the proximity between Marxian socialism and liberalism. At several
points in This Life, Hägglund
portrays this proximity in Hegelian fashion: Marx’s critique of liberalism is
an immanent one that takes liberalism’s own principle – individual freedom –
and shows how this principle is incompatible with liberalism’s commitment to
capitalism. Liberals must choose, then, the true object of their fidelity:
freedom, or capitalism?
I am
resistant to this move, however. It makes liberals out to be either
socialists-who-haven’t-yet-realized-it or bad-faith actors, who talk about freedom, but actually care
only about higher rates of profit. I certainly think there are some liberals who fit each of those
descriptions, but I also think that there are liberals who understand freedom
in a genuinely different way. The disagreement between liberals (of this sort)
and socialists (of Hägglund’s sort) is deeper than Hägglund’s presentation lets
on, and, therefore, Hägglund’s critique does not, I think, touch these liberals in the way that an immanent critique aspires
to.
Hägglund’s
text betrays what I think is the real fault-line, in Chapter Six, when he claims
that Hayek “reduces freedom to liberty.” By this, Hägglund means that
Hayek believes people are free so long as they are not “directly coerced.”[14] This distinction between freedom and
liberty, however, appears nowhere else in Hägglund’s book. This passage,
therefore, seems to evince a slight anxiety about how Hayek fits in to the
immanent critique of liberalism.
This is
reinforced by the surrounding argument. Hayek comes up in the course of Hägglund’s
argument that “the major liberal thinkers of political economy – Mill, Rawls,
Keynes, and Hayek – unwittingly concede that the capitalist measure of wealth
distorts the values to which they themselves are committed.” According to Hägglund,
the tension (or contradiction) between the capitalist measure of wealth and the
values held dear by liberals is resolved, at the level of theory, by the “dream
of what Mill called ‘the stationary state.’”[15] The stationary state, according to Hägglund,
is the imaginary point at which capitalism and the profit motive will have done
the work they need to do – increasing the technological powers of production
and the wealth of the world – and can be set aside for the sake of living a
more satisfying or fulfilling life, pursuing higher and more noble ends than
making more money. Liberals like Mill, Keynes, and Rawls are compelled to posit
some such end of capital accumulation, according to Hägglund, for it is only
thereby that they can square their actual, substantive values with the
existence of a social system that subordinates all values to the pursuit of
surplus-value.
Hayek,
however, does not dream of a stationary state. And so, when Hägglund come to
Hayek, he is forced to change tack, and he introduces the freedom/liberty
disjunction in place of a discussion of Hayek’s imaginary resolution of the
contradiction. This should make us pause. After all, Hayek is not the only
liberal thinker of political economy that refuses the stationary state. Adam
Smith saw the stationary state – a country that had attained the “full
complement of riches which … its situation … allowed it to acquire” – as a
fateful eventuality, in which “both the wages of labour and the profits of
stock would probably be very low.” For Ricardo, the stationary state was a threat, something to be avoided by
liberalizing the economy and increasing the volume of trade. For Herbert
Spencer, social evolution had no upper limit, and liberal policy would ensure
continuous growth and progress. For Chicago School neo-liberalism, the growth
of value is synonymous with innovation, and a steady-state economy is,
therefore, synonymous with a world in which there are no new ideas, or no opportunity
to communicate new ideas. Paul Romer, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economics last year and currently heads the World Bank, has pushed this line of
argument the furthest.
In short,
there is a long tradition of liberal thinkers of political economy – a
tradition of which Hayek is in many respects representative – that do not
evince any of the conflicted feelings about perpetual economic growth that Hägglund
finds in Mill, Keynes, and Rawls. Even if the socialist critique of the
Mill-Keynes-Rawls line of liberalism is wholly immanent, it does not follow
that the socialist critique of the Smith-Spencer-Hayek line will be. I think
this is what lies behind Hägglund’s sudden introduction of the freedom/liberty
distinction: the intuition that the liberal commitment to individual freedom is
not, in the case of Hayek, et al., at odds with the liberal
commitment to capitalism.
So what is
going on here? If I were to briefly characterize this other liberal tradition,
I would say that it’s center of gravity is a categorical opposition to private coercion and violence. It
accepts the need for a central state because centralizing coercive force allows
for its deployment to be regulated by commonly-acknowledged laws. When the
rules for deploying force are simple, universal, and public, and discretionary
coercion is minimized, then two things happen. First, people are compelled to
enter into voluntary exchanges and contracts in order to pursue their aims.
Second, concentrations of power and resources become not only harmless but
salutary, since they allow people to do new and creative things even while they
do not– since the private use of force is off the table – give the wealthy and
powerful the ability to hold sway over the poorer and less powerful. Even
monopoly power, on this view, is not a problem – unless it is over basic
necessities – since, in an otherwise competitive market environment, monopoly
prices spur innovation and the entry of other suppliers into the market. State
capture is a consistent concern, however, since that is where the coercive
power lies.
This strand
of liberalism is not obviously touched by Hägglund’s immanent critique, for Hayek
is neither half-hearted in his embrace of the profit motive nor disingenuous in
his commitment to individual freedom. So long as profit-seeking behaviour
remains within the bounds set by the law, Hayek does not think it is
incompatible with any liberal values at all. So long as the state is restricted
to promulgating simple, universal rules and providing basic public goods, Hayek
thinks that the freedom of each is compatible with a similar freedom for every
other.
To be
absolutely clear: Marx is critical – highly critical – of this sort of
liberalism! But his critical confrontation with it takes place on the grounds
of the historical dynamics of the capitalist economy and of political struggles
over power, not at the level of its adherence to shared principles. Marx and
Hayek disagree about how the world works. This disagreement – and the
conditions under which it might be adjudicated – are obscured, I think, by
focusing on the supposed contradiction between the value of free time and the capitalist
measure of social wealth. And this has consequences for how we think about
socialist politics, consequences to which I will now turn.
3
One of the
most important contributions of Hägglund’s book is that it demonstrates how
central the economy of time is to Marx’s thought. This has been neglected on
the Left, and its neglect has given rise, as Hägglund points out, to the
theoretically and politically disastrous conflation of overcoming capitalism
with overcoming finitude. Adorno is not the only critical theorist to pine for
the utopia of absolute plenitude, or to treat scarcity as the necessary and
sufficient cause of class domination. As Hägglund rightly argues, this
particular species of utopia is not merely unattainable, but “undesirable and
incompatible with the fragile possibility of freedom.”[16]
An
interesting side-effect of Hägglund’s reading of Marx is that it highlights a
heretofore neglected point of contact between Marx’s critique of political
economy in the 1850s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, and the marginal utility theory that was simultaneously
revolutionizing bourgeois economics. Marginalism, and the neo-liberal economics
that grew out of it, take the scarcity of time to be one of the most
fundamental axioms of economic analysis. Perhaps Marx and the marginalists are
much closer to one another than anyone has appreciated. (Even I.I. Rubin, who
undertook the best examination to date of the relation of Marxism to
marginalism, says nothing about time as a category.[17])
I am not in a position to stage this confrontation here, but I do want to
explore a political dimension of the
question.
The economy
of time does not work the same way in all contexts. In particular, it matters
whether we are talking about (a) an individual agent prioritizing and pursuing
their own projects, (b) a group of agents agreeing to prioritize and pursue a
set of common projects, or (c) a number of agents, individual and/or
collective, trying to accommodate one another’s various projects without agreeing upon an overarching set
of priorities or a common project. Call these, respectively, the situations of (a)
individual action, (b) collective action, and (c) coordination. My concern is
that Hägglund’s construal of democratic socialism tends to treat the economy as
a problem of collective action, and thereby covers over the special problems of
coordination. In this way, Hägglund’s democratic socialism reproduces, in
inverted form, one of the major shortcomings of neo-liberal theory. Neo-liberals
often act as if coordination can and should crowd out all collective action. Socialists
should not make the opposite error of thinking that collective action can and
should crowd out all coordination.
The basis
for my concern is that Hägglund seems to presume a correspondence between the
purposes pursued by subsystems in the economy and the purpose of the economy as
a whole. So, for example, Hägglund slides from saying that, “under capitalism,
the purpose of our economic production is already decided,” to saying that
“what matters above all is to generate a ‘growth’ of capital in the economy.”[18] However, the purpose of production
at the level of the individual firm is not
to generate growth in the economy as a whole, but to secure a profit sufficient
to stay in business for another quarter, or to increase market share, or the
like. The growth of capital in the economy as a whole is supposed to be a by-product
of good institutional design and a free market, not an additive result of
everyone pursuing and attaining profit. Individual producers and firms are just
as profit-motivated during a depression as they are during a boom, but the
depression is marked by a contraction of capital in the economy. Even in a
booming economy, many businesses will fail to make a profit, and many people
will pursue projects that are not even remotely likely to realize a profit.
Macroeconomic policy and performance are not tightly chained to – much less
epiphenomenal of – microeconomic motivations.
The
imperative of economic growth is strong, I agree, but it is not due to a isomorphism
between subsystems and system. Rather, it is a governmental imperative. On the one hand, liberal governance only
seems to work under conditions of economic growth. Recession and stagnation
bring increased social conflict, and, with them, increasingly authoritarian and
conflictual politics. On the other hand, securing the conditions for capital
accumulation are necessary in order to prevent capital flight and the collapse
of both tax revenues and the ability of the government to finance its
operations on the bond market.
As a
consequence of seeing the macroeconomy as an expression of the microeconomy,
when Hägglund turns to outlining the case for and principles of democratic
socialism, he often writes as if democratic socialism will require both an
ethical transformation on the part of everyone and a single collective
decision-making process about how to structure the economy. Thus, he tells us
that “the first principle of democratic socialism is that we measure our wealth
– both individual and collective – in terms of socially available free time.”[19] This seems to imply that everyone in
a democratic socialist state must be a democratic socialist, or that every
individual measure their wealth in terms of socially available free time. Similarly,
the second principle of democratic socialism – collective ownership of the
means of production – implies, for Hägglund, that “we cannot have private
property in the abstract sense that transforms property into a commodity that
can be bought and sold for profit.”[20]
Hägglund rightly
criticizes Frederic Jameson for excluding “institutions of freedom” from his vision
of socialism.[21] But I would challenge Hägglund to
amplify this insight. Institutions of freedom do not simply decide upon common
purposes, and are not, therefore, exhausted by “collective projects of
self-determination.”[22] Institutions of freedom also include
processes by which we negotiate not to collectively determine our purposes,
and come to terms with one another’s projects without trying to fit them into
some over-arching common pursuit.
I believe
that Hägglund would agree with this inclusion of institutions of coordination
among the institutions of freedom. He is explicitly sensitive to the fact that
“our practical identities and their order of priority … must remain at issue
and possible to change.”[23] He also insists, rightly, that “the
exercise of spiritual freedom must include the possibility of criticizing or
rejecting the established forms of participation.”[24] Both of these principles imply that
consideration of the public good must be agnostic about certain elements of
individual and collective agents’ pursuits.
But what I
want to push is (a) that this public agnosticism about how people lead their
own lives is going to have to extend to people buying and selling property for
profit, and (b) that this – buying and selling property for profit – should not
be made into the substance of capitalism. There is every difference in the
world between saying that socialism is incompatible with commodities beings the
general form of wealth, and with labour-power being a commodity, on the one
hand, and saying, on the other, that socialism is incompatible with the
existence of commodities, buying and selling, and profit. The former is
compatible with the perspective of spiritual freedom Hägglund defends. The
latter is not – it is too perfectionistic and moralistic in its conception of
what makes capitalism and socialism the systems they are.
4
This brings
me, finally, back around to Marx’s relation to liberalism. In the second
section of this paper, I emphasized liberalism’s categorical opposition to
private coercion. Implicit in the third section was another feature of
liberalism: its specification of the public sphere as the sphere in which
divergent projects are accommodated. This is just the flip side of the
abhorrence of private coercion, since it attempts to remove the power of
coercion from any agent or group pursuing any particular project, and to reserve it for the public authorities
who are supposed to ensure only that
everyone can go about their own business.
Marx’s
social republicanism – which I outlined in the first section – relaxes the
liberal stricture against non-state actors using coercive force; it is
hospitable to the collective efforts of the dominated to coercively oppose
their domination. But, for the same reason, it is congenial to the liberal notion that the public authority should
not be treated like an enterprise association of the whole population. The
state’s claims to manifest the popular will evince, in Marx’s words, a “cult of
the people” that occludes the forms of social domination that divide the people
against itself.[25]
In this way,
Marx’s social republicanism pulls against
democratic socialism. We can put it in the form of a dilemma. If the democratic
state exists, with its invocations of popular self-determination, then so does
capitalism, with its particular form of class domination. If, on the other
hand, social life is permeated by democratic decision-making, then the state,
with its fictive unity and its attendant imaginary of the sovereign people, withers
away. The various local communities, and their federation under higher national
and international elected bodies, will differ from one another in what they
want to pursue, and these local, national, and international authorities will
also come into conflict with the various democratically managed workplaces.
There will be no single, unitary forum in which these conflicts will get ironed
out, by democratic deliberation, into one plan for the economy.
This, to me,
is the blind-spot of all democratic socialism, a blind-spot it shares with much
democratic theory. Neither before nor after the construction of socialism is
there a single forum in which “we” would take definitive decisions about “the
form of our life together” or about “the purpose and practice of our economy.”[26] Institutions of coordination –
markets, constitutions, electoral parties, contestatory elections, bargaining
fora – will have to knit together the various collective and individual agents.
Democracy, from this perspective, is critically important as a check on these institutions of
coordination, to keep them from dominating the forms of life that they are
supposed to enable, just as it is crucial within the various collective
projects. But democracy cannot constitute a single collective agent,
“responsible for organizing and legislating the form of our life together.”[27]
At its best,
political democracy allows the organized masses to control what political
office-holders can or cannot do with their institutional power. This is a
wonderful thing, for it frees the organized masses from the political
domination of the state, “replacing the haughty masters of the people by always
removable servants.”[28] But democracy always remains a way
of checking and controlling power; it is never a mode of collective
self-legislation or self-expression.
[9] Einspahr, “Structural
Domination and Structural Freedom: A Feminist Perspective”; Memmi, The
Colonizer and the Colonized; Pettit, On the People’s Terms; Scott, Domination
and the Arts of Resistance; Wartenberg, The Forms of Power.
[11] Marx, MEW, 828. Marx: “der vergesellschaftete Mensch, die assoziierten
Produzenten, diesen ihren Stoffwechsel mit der Natur rationell regeln, unter
ihre gemeinschaftliche Kontrolle bringen, statt von ihm als von einer blinden
Macht beherrscht zu werden; ihn mit dem geringsten Kraftaufwand und unter den
ihrer menschlichen Natur würdigsten und adäquatesten Bedingungen vollziehn.”
