John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism

Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world. Most of this work was being done under the banner of “analytical Marxism” (aka “no-bullshit Marxism”), following the publication of Gerald Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History: A Defence (and his subsequent elevation to the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Philosophy at Oxford). Meanwhile in Germany, Jürgen Habermas’s incredibly compact Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus promised to reinvigorate Marx’s analysis of capitalist crises in the language of contemporary systems theory. It was an exciting time to be a young radical. One could say, without exaggeration, that many of the smartest and most important people working in political philosophy were Marxists of some description.

So what happened to all this ferment and excitement, all of the high-powered theory being done under the banner of Western Marxism? It’s the damndest thing, but all of those smart, important Marxists and neo-Marxists, doing all that high-powered work, became liberals. Every single one of the theorists at the core of the analytic Marxism movement – not just Cohen, but Philippe van Parijs, John Roemer, Allen Buchanan, and Jon Elster – as well as inheritors of the Frankfurt School like Habermas, wound up embracing some variant of the view that came to be known as “liberal egalitarianism.” Of course, this was not a capitulation to the old-fashioned “classical liberalism” of the 19^th century, it was rather a defection to the style of modern liberalism that found its canonical expression in the work of John Rawls.

If one felt like putting the point polemically, one might say that the “no-bullshit” Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism. This is not quite right though, because what they actually discovered was that the new, modernized, reinvigorated liberalism propounded by Rawls was both expressively and rhetorically superior to the reconstructed Marxism they had been trying to defend. So they switched allegiances (sometimes with fanfare, more often without).

I sometimes teach a seminar course in which we read all three of the books that Rawls published during his lifetime. I always start by cautioning students that the biggest challenge in reading Rawls’s work is figuring out why it is so important – because it seems incredibly dull (normie, basic, etc.). My best suggestion for overcoming this challenge, when reading A Theory of Justice, is to go into it thinking “this is the book that killed Western Marxism,” and then focus on figuring out how it managed to do so. (The fact that Rawls never directly criticized Marx adds to the mystery.)

To make this long story short, one must start with the most important piece of bullshit in traditional Marxism. Marx always insisted that the major difference between his view and that of the “utopian socialists” was that he was not engaged in any sort of moral criticism of the capitalist system, nor was he claiming that capitalism was unjust. He was merely predicting the downfall of the capitalist system, based on his scientific understanding of the laws of historical development. So, for example, his use of the term “exploitation” was not intended to imply any sort of moral condemnation, it was merely a technical term used to describe the extraction of surplus value from labour.

This was obvious bullshit – indeed, at various points where Marx makes this claim, he sounds like he is, as the British like to say, “taking the piss.” Nevertheless, early Marxists (and Marxist-Leninists) found it a useful claim to keep around, in order to avoid getting into certain arguments that they didn’t want to get into. Over the course of the 20^th century, however, the claim became increasingly less useful, because the prospects for the collapse of capitalism came to seem increasingly remote. Most importantly, workers did not become “immiserated,” as Marx predicted, but rather experienced robust wage growth, so that by the beginning of the 1970s it was really not obvious to anyone that workers had reasons of self-interest to support socialist revolution.

By this time most Marxists had also realized that they needed a moral critique of capitalism, because the whole “predicting its downfall” angle had basically outlived its usefulness. So the number one piece of bullshit that got purged, at the very first meeting of the no-bullshit Marxism group, was the claim that Marxism could get along without a normative critique of capitalism. One of the tasks that the group set itself was therefore to offer an analysis and defence of such a moral critique. The obvious place to start was with the concept of exploitation. So they set out to answer a series of questions: what is exploitation? why is it unjust? does capitalism necessarily exploit workers? what would a non-exploitative economic system look like?

Over time, however, it became clear that every attempt to answer these questions was running into massive problems. One could write an entire book explaining why, but suffice it to say that several of the greatest philosophical minds of their generation took a crack at the problem, and none of them was able to generate a coherent critique of capitalism that took exploitation as its normative foundation. (For an accessible summary of these efforts, see van Parijs’s, “What (if anything) is intrinsically wrong with capitalism?”) For me, the watershed event was the publication of Roemer’s A General Theory of Exploitation and Class. For Cohen, by contrast, the problems were caused by Robert Nozick – and since Cohen’s story is the more entertaining one, I’ll focus on that.

The most natural way to specify the wrongness of exploitation is to say that workers are entitled to the fruits of their labour, and so if they receive something less than this, they are being treated unjustly. (This is why Marxists are wedded to the labour theory of value – because it makes this normative claim seem intuitively natural and compelling.) But as Nozick observed, if this is your view, then you can’t really complain about certain economic inequalities, such as those that arise when individuals with rare natural talents are able to command enormous economic rents for their performances (this is the famous “Wilt Chamberlain” argument in Anarchy, State and Utopia). Furthermore, taxing away any part of this income looks a lot like exploitation.

This argument made Cohen extremely uncomfortable, because it constituted a direct challenge to the normative foundations of Marxism-as-critique-of-exploitation. He spent the better part of a decade agonizing, and wrote two entire books trying to work out a response to Nozick, none of it particularly persuasive. Then one day (as he tells the story) he decided to leave Oxford and spend some time at Harvard. Upon arriving in America, he discovered that none of his fellow left-wing political philosophers had been losing any sleep at all over Nozick’s arguments. Why? Because they were egalitarians. They didn’t care about either self-ownership or exploitation, so they simply rejected the premises of Nozick’s argument. (Unlike Cohen’s sprawling efforts, Rawls’s response to the Wilt Chamberlain argument is less than two pages long and quite persuasive.)

This created something of a “road to Damascus” moment for Cohen. It forced him to ask the basic question: what is it that I dislike most about capitalism? Is it that, according to some (increasingly arcane) formula, not everyone is getting paid the full value of what they produce? Or is it that some people live in poverty, unable to afford the essentials of a dignified life, in the midst of a society overflowing with riches? What Nozick showed is that fixing the exploitation problem may not fix the inequality problem. (Roemer actually proves the point more forcefully, constructing a model economy in which the poor systematically exploit the rich, and yet remain poor.) So one really is forced to choose which flaw in the system one cares about most.

Why were Cohen’s American colleagues so quick to embrace egalitarianism? Because they were Rawlsians. What Rawls had provided, through his effort to “generalize and carry to a higher level of abstraction the familiar theory of the social contract,” was a natural way to derive the commitment to equality, as a normative principle governing the basic institutions of society. Rawlsianism therefore gave frustrated Marxists an opportunity to cut the Gordian knot, by providing them with a normative framework in which they could state directly their critique of capitalism, focusing on the parts that they found most objectionable, without requiring any entanglement in the complex apparatus of Marxist theory.

This led Cohen to the realization that, when push came to shove, he cared more about inequality than he did about exploitation, because how we relate to one another as human beings is fundamentally more important than our right to exercise ownership over every last bit of stuff that we make. So he switched foundations and became an egalitarian (and – though he would have hated the description – a liberal).

So nowadays, when kids like Freddie deBoer come along insisting that “Marxism is not an egalitarian philosophy,” I nod my head in agreement, but I want to respond “Yes! That’s why nobody is a Marxist any more.” Again, I want to emphasize that several of the greatest minds in political philosophy of the 20^th century spent the better part of two decades working the salt mines of Marxist theory, trying to make the “exploitation” critique of capitalism work and every single one of them gave up and became an egalitarian. Surely that should count for something! Anyhow, there’s no need to take my word for it, the library is full of books.

It is, of course, a slight exaggeration to say that no one is a Marxist anymore. Some people have not yet received the memo. There are also the “left libertarians,” who are the rump of 20^th century academic Marxism (these are people who cling to the self-ownership claim, while seeking to block the anti-egalitarian conclusions that Nozick derived from it). There is also a recent mini-trend of “neo-Republican” Marxists, but they are basically just liberals, who instead of appealing to Rawls’s egalitarianism, instead want to rely on Philip Pettit’s “non-domination” norm (which I take to be just another flavour of liberalism) to reconstruct Marxism.

But beyond this, the collapse of academic Marxism – as a body of normatively motivated social criticism – has been complete. Hence the fundamental unseriousness of contemporary Marxism in public discourse. Popular Marxism (along with the sort of Gramscian or “cultural” Marxism one finds in critical studies departments) has become a religion without a theology. I can understand why some people might be reluctant to read serious Marxist theory, if the primary upshot is that it turns you into a liberal, but if the alternative is the style of aggressive, in-your-face stupidity found in Jacobin magazine (i.e. “I’m going to talk like a Marxist, even though none of it makes any sense, because you can’t stop me!”), then it seems to me a price worth paying.

Some people have failed to notice these trends, unfortunately, because there was no point at which any one person “refuted” Marxism. Serious thinkers, for the most part, just slowly drifted away from it, the way that guests at a party filter out of the living room into the kitchen, where the conversation is livelier. In this case, the conversation that they drifted toward was Rawlsianism. That is how Rawls wound up triumphing over Marxism – by rendering it superfluous, making it so that no one needed to be a Marxist any more.

Rawlsians, by the way, are really bad at explaining any of this, which I why I thought I might try.