What Can the Right Learn from Karl Marx?
Since at least 2014, the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has been a major “intellectual hero” of the postliberal Right. For decades an anti-Stalinist Marxist, MacIntyre abandoned the Marxist standpoint entirely in the 1970s. With the publication of his 1981 book After Virtue, he finally clawed out of “the moral wilderness” to articulate his own long-sought comprehensive standpoint, a predominantly anti-liberal and anti-modern selective recovery of the Aristotelian tradition of the virtues.
MacIntyre argues in After Virtue that modernity’s abandonment of this tradition is a “catastrophe” whose result is that “the integral substance of morality has to a large degree been fragmented and then in part destroyed.” This tradition saw that human beings have a certain potential nature that ethical life properly conceived aims to realize. Through this concept of a human telos, the tradition could justify its demanding ethical precepts: by ordering your activities and desires in such-and-such ways—starving these desires, channeling these others into these specific activities and institutions (e.g., marriage), and nurturing yet others—you’ll actualize your potential.
The liberal enlightenment projects—utilitarianism, Kantian deontology—failed in their attempts to fill the gap left by modernity’s rejection of this tradition. They couldn’t re-ground the ethical principles binding our communities together. Moderns consequently lost their comprehension of moral principles as rationally grounded or objectively true and came to see them as mere expressions of subjective preference or emotion. The world now lacked recognized ethical authorities, and moral principles became generally available as masks behind which individuals and groups could conceal, illegitimately justify, and further their non-moral interests. These included, significantly and paradigmatically, the liberal moral principles of utility and rights. In modernity, moral argument thus becomes “a matter of pure assertion and counter-assertion” of rival ungrounded precepts.
In After Virtue, MacIntyre urges a recovery of the Aristotelian tradition to show modernity the way out of its aporia on moral questions: the fact that “there is in our society no established way of deciding between” the rival moral first principles we’ve lost our comprehension of and are polarized over.
Converting to Catholicism shortly after its publication, in sequels to After Virtue MacIntyre developed its basic standpoint into a Thomistic Aristotelianism. It remains his standpoint to this day. It’s also the standpoint countless postliberal-Right thinkers claim to adopt, though their claim that they’re authentically MacIntyrean has been challenged by “left MacIntyreans.” Two issues divide the “left” from these “right MacIntyreans:” the political standpoint implied by MacIntyre’s philosophy and where it is placed on the Left–Right spectrum, and the relation of his mature standpoint to Marx’s thought and Marxist practice. But it’s not only left MacIntyreans that postliberals have to answer to.
A Right-Liberal Challenge
Recently, James Lindsay brought renewed attention to the fissure on the Right over whether it has anything to learn from Marx, and how vigilant it must be in distinguishing itself from all things Marxist. Using the alias “Marcus Carlson,” he submitted repurposed selections from The Communist Manifesto to the American Reformer, which he considers the “flagship publication” of the ascendant postliberal tendency on the right that he calls “woke right.” He replaced “the proletariat” with “the New Christian Right.” “The bourgeoisie” became “the post-war liberal consensus.” Failing to recognize the plagiarized source, the American Reformer published it, explaining in their editorial note after the hoax was revealed that it offered “a reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas.” To Lindsay’s right-liberal cohort, this proves the “woke right” is repeating the same mistaken response to communism that fascism made: fighting it by adopting communism’s own “operating system and sociopolitical architecture” and merely replacing some referents with others.
Postliberals, Lindsay teaches, take themselves to have “woken up” to the supposedly problematic nature of the liberal institutional structure they inhabit and have adopted a critical attitude toward it. They’re thus “woke” in the same way the progressive Left is, conceiving themselves as victims oppressed by an institutional structure that for Lindsay defines what America is and what makes it great. While conceding the “polemical utility” of “woke right,” he insists the phrase also accurately characterizes the movement.
Though the fact sometimes seems to confuse Lindsay, postliberals are of course quite self-conscious of their critical attitude toward liberal institutions. And on X, some online conservatives responded by confirming their sympathy with Marx’s critique of liberalism—one of the key points Lindsay’s repackaged Communist Manifesto aimed to prove. Such explicit endorsements were rare, however, and they were met with near-delirium by their right-liberal opponents, to whom such statements appeared as clear confessions from their rivals that they weren’t conservatives at all.
In his 1994 paper “The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken” and elsewhere, MacIntyre clarifies how his own mature standpoint relates to Marx’s thinking. It’s a good place to turn for a clearer statement of what the faction Lindsay targets endorses in Marx and what it rejects, given how many postliberal luminaries are grounded in this same standpoint.
MacIntyre and Marx
On X, many who felt targeted by Lindsay’s hoax tried to defuse its force by endorsing Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism’s defects while rejecting Marx’s “solutions” as a cure worse than the disease. MacIntyre’s relation to Marx fits this mold, but a MacIntyrean Right diverges sharply from right-liberalism in its way of rejecting Marx’s solution. Right-liberals reject Marx’s socialist thought from the moral first principle that human beings possess natural rights that governments ought to protect and not infringe. MacIntyreans do not follow them in this reassertion of liberal morality. They agree that the Right shouldn’t be Marxist, but for them, the only way is through.
In the preface to After Virtue, MacIntyre recounts his journey out of Marxism into his new Aristotelian standpoint. While always anti-Stalinist, for decades he’d been dissatisfied with those who reject Stalinism
by reinvoking the principles of that liberalism in the criticism of which Marxism originated. Since I continued, and continue, to accept much of the substance of that criticism this answer was not available to me. One cannot . . . revive the moral content within Marxism by simply taking a Stalinist view of historical development and adding liberal morality to it.
To understand (and authentically adopt) MacIntyre’s mature standpoint, it’s essential to recognize the force of this statement that Marx’s criticism of liberalism (the political philosophy that attends and defends capitalism) is morally superior to liberalism itself. As the left MacIntyreans have made plain, the project MacIntyre turns to Aristotle to complete is continuous with Marx’s project against capitalism and liberalism. MacIntyre closes his 2006 prologue to After Virtue by confirming that “although After Virtue was written in part out of a recognition of those moral inadequacies of Marxism which its twentieth-century history had disclosed, I was and remain deeply indebted to Marx’s critique of the economic, social, and cultural order of capitalism.” While Lindsay sees the liberal institutional structure as defining the American way of life, the mature MacIntyre continues to share Marx’s view that liberalism/capitalism disrupts people’s ways of life and tears at the ethical bonds embodied in their communities’ social structure. He also shares Marx’s goal to arm people, theoretically and practically, to resist this assault.
So how is MacIntyre’s standpoint a rejection of Marxism? The 1981 preface to After Virtue continues,
Marxism’s moral defects and failures arise from the extent to which it, like liberal individualism, embodies the ethos of a distinctively modern and modernizing world, and that nothing less than a rejection of a large part of that ethos will provide us with a rationally and morally defensible standpoint from which to judge and to act.
The “road not taken” of MacIntyre’s 1994 paper is precisely the road against modernity. Here, MacIntyre examines how Marx works through Hegel’s and Feuerbach’s philosophies in search of a more adequate criticism of liberalism (“the standpoint of civil society”). This culminates in Marx’s 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, after which Marx “rejected philosophy” for more plainly historical and economic analyses of modern capitalist economies. In MacIntyre’s reading, the Theses “are in part a successful, but in part an unsuccessful attempt to identify what is involved in transcending” liberalism. Successfully expressing Marx’s own thoughts requires expressing them “in an Aristotelian vocabulary, vocabulary which he did not in fact use and some of whose presuppositions he had rejected.” In other words, the insights Marx was himself striving for can only be adequately articulated from MacIntyre’s antimodernist standpoint.
What are these insights? Why does Marx’s modernism (his rejection of Aristotelian teleology) thwart his articulation of them?
What Marx sought to express was that liberalism/capitalism unreflectively holds an impoverished view of human goods, the things humans aim for in their actions and that politics should concern itself with. One characteristic of liberalism’s individualism is that it implicitly supposes that all goods can be characterized as the satisfaction of the wants and needs of individuals prior to and independently of their relations to each other. It conceives society as already-completed individuals with an already-completed conception of their good coming into relation. The only “common goods” conceivable are thus sums of individual goods. The liberal concept of “utility,” for instance, involves summing such goods (“preferences”). These are goods like money, status, power, and the production of food.
What’s missing from this picture? As humans mature, they come to engage in certain practices. As they do so, they aim at different kinds of goods, like the excellence in communal activity achievable in string quartets, fishing crews, football teams, or farming cooperatives. To achieve these goods is to realize the human essence in specific ways. As humans aim at them they must submit to the practices’ norms. As they learn what’s required to excel in these practices, they transform their desires or preferences. They are not conceived as possessing a complete understanding of their own good prior to their participation in society. What really happens is that they learn from each other what their good is and come to aim at different goods as they participate in practices in society with one another. They attain moral maturity by participating in such practices. As MacIntyre writes in his 1999 paper, “Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good,” “It is characteristic of such practices that engaging in them provides a practical education into the virtues.”
These concepts of “goods internal” to practices, a common good constituted by cooperative activity, and of virtues as characteristics required to achieve such goods, are the key “moral resources” MacIntyre sees Marx striving to arm people and communities with to resist capitalism’s destruction of their ways of life. But unlike Marx, MacIntyre sees that it’s because modernity abandoned teleology that it doesn’t see such “goods” as real. It’s why liberals hold their constricted conception of goods. He similarly sees how Marx’s acquiescence in this rejection prevents him from attaining the insights for which he strives.
Postliberals and Marx
Liberalism’s constricted conception of goods is an implicit assumption, not a thesis liberals choose to commit to. Presented with it, liberals can of course respond otherwise than by abandoning liberalism.
MacIntyre doesn’t think his theory can defeat liberal theory. Only a nonliberal practice, and the subsequent theory of that kind of practice, can do that. In his 1994 paper, he offers Edward Thompson’s description of “the communal life of the hand-loom weavers of Lancashire and Yorkshire” as an example of such a practice. Attempting to preserve their virtue-inculcating way of life, they resisted “the economic and technological triumphs of the age.” They failed, however, for they lacked the theory needed to explain what was inadequate in the liberal arguments for change they confronted: the “conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance.”
In his 1999 paper, MacIntyre examines another nonliberal community’s failure to resist capitalism’s destruction of its way of life: that of the family or household farm that was destroyed in the transformation into multinational agribusiness. Wendell Berry gave significant voice to the good that was sacrificed in this transformation: a way of life inculcating “virtues that are central to all human life, and not just to farming.” But his statements went “politically unheard,” for such actualizations of the human essence do not register as goods in our liberal institutional order. To this order, the only real good in question is the production of food, and this is maximized by the transformation into multinational agribusiness. MacIntyre teaches his expanded Aristotelian conception of goods so communities can resist such transformations in the future. Again channeling his Marxist past, he concludes by noting that, between his own “revolutionary Aristotelianism” (his name for his politics) and “the politics of state and market economy . . . there can be only continuing conflict.” In his 1994 paper, similarly, he distinguishes his “revolutionary” Aristotelianism from “those concerned to reform the institutions of civil society, without however abandoning its basic beliefs.”
By articulating his theory of virtue-inculcating practices, MacIntyre hopes to arm nonliberal communities with moral precepts whose objectivity is restored: beacons of light in modernity’s emotivist sea. He tells us in his 1994 paper that he abandoned Marxism for Aristotle because
Marxists have generally supposed that an historical and sociological understanding of moral concepts and precepts as articulated within practices was incompatible with an appeal to objective standards of goodness, rightness and virtue, standards independent of the interests and attitudes of those engaged in such practices.
That objectivity derives from the goals of those virtue-inculcating practices that realize the human essence in specific ways. Armed with this moral standpoint, nonliberal communities can challenge the protagonists of the state and market to, as MacIntyre writes, “provide the kind of justification for their authority that they cannot in fact supply.”
In a sense, then, Lindsay is right: postliberals are “woke” to the way the protagonists of the modern state and market impose an impoverished conception of human goods on us all to further their non-moral interests in the material and social worlds. They’re “woke” to the ways we can hinder rather than facilitate the flourishing of the objective human essence by letting society be guided by the free market. They’re “woke” to how human goods of real value are lost in modernity’s upheavals and transformations. And insofar as they’re adopting MacIntyre’s revolutionary Aristotelianism, they’re indeed developing a critical consciousness against it.
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