Abstract
This book is heavy on exegesis, with (sometimes lengthy) quotations from Marx and Engels (M&E) taking up about twenty pages. But Ernesto Screpanti, a professor of political economy at the University of Sienna, Italy, goes beyond interpreting the canonical texts and aims to “rewrite” and “reformulate” historical materialism so that it satisfies “libertarian principles, also known as the postulate of ethical individualism: each individual is free to think autonomously about what is to be considered the public good.” Screpanti makes “no claim to establishing what Marx really said . . . Marx certainly says what I make him say, but he also says other things that he should not have said . . . .There is more than one Marx and each of us takes the one he deserves.”
Screpanti follows the French Marxist Louis Althusser in pronouncing an “epistemological break” separating the early humanist Marx from the mature scientific one, but more so than Althusser, Screpanti sees the early stuff—Marx’s “utopian” vision of communism with roots in Hegel, Feurerbach, Saint Simon, and Robert Owen—infiltrating the late stuff, the historical materialism of the German Ideology and its famous capsulated version in the Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Screpanti seeks to “cleanse” Marxist theory and practice from the “utopian Marxists of the twentieth century” by rejecting all talk of Man as a Species-being, distributive justice, morality, and communism understood as a teleological end governing historical development, one that provides an ethical standpoint from which earlier modes of production can be morally assessed. Screpanti reiterates this passage from the German Ideology: “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”
Deliberately sidelining all of the textual evidence to the contrary, Screpanti portrays the mature Marx and Engels (who he lumps together because they have more politically in common than not) as “amoralists” who slight concerns about justice and who reject any strong conception of human nature. Screpanti notes the “endless debates” that surround the issue of whether M&E appeal to justice in their critique of capitalism and defense of communism, saying that “in my opinion those who give a positive answer to the question are just as right as those who give a negative answer, although the latter more so than the former.” He then stipulates a narrow definition of justice as a “doctrine of the distribution of economic [and no other] resources which invokes universal moral principles” and enjoins the argument of that side of the debate according to which Marx’s critique of capitalism and avowal of communism rests on grounds other than justice. The basic theme of that side is that the justice of economic exchanges or social institutions depends on its relationships to the prevailing mode of production. These transactions and institutions are just if they harmonize with the productive mode, so that there is capitalist justice, feudal justice, slavery justice, and so on, but there is no overarching conception of justice from which to evaluate these different practices from a moral point of view. For Screpanti, M&E are ethical relativists, not only with respect to justice but with respect to morality itself, at the heart of which is the idea of impartiality, which makes M&E amoralists who share with Machiavelli the conviction that “right originates from force.” If Screpanti is right about this, then his “ethical individualism” is a form of what is called in meta-ethics “ethical egoism.”
Screpanti’s M&E also reject any left-Hegelian talk of “a vision of history as a dialectical process of self-production of man as a Species-being.” The move to communism is instead motivated by the particular class interest of the proletariat, the immense majority, not of humankind, as in the metaphysics of the young “feverish mind” of Marx. Screpanti conceptualizes “class” in terms of methodological and ontological individualism, albeit a type that is “qualified in institutionalist terms.” A class consists of an aggregate of “real, concrete” individuals who have the same interests; there is no common interest or solidarity supervening their professed individual interests. To think otherwise, as Marx sometimes did, is to flirt with the undemocratic idea that “an enlightened and active vanguard that has achieved consciousness” is better positioned than the proletariat to determine what policies and institutions render that class “free from necessity,” whether that necessity is prompted by a teleological account of human nature or the technological determinism of historical materialism. Sometimes Screpanti intimates that workers’ preferences always converge with their interests: “[The mature] Marx and Engels no longer impose their philosophical convictions on the workers’ preferences, but rather to comprehend the preferences by the workers themselves.”
The first part of the book critiques conceptions of communism based on ideas of egalitarian distributive justice—equality of resources or welfare—as well as the early Marx’s communitarian idea that the individual (the species being) realizes itself only in a communist community. The second part lays out Screpanti’s account of what he wants M&E to say about communism, and this is all about freedom, which he defines following the influential conceptual analysis of Gerald MacCallum. Freedom consists of a triadic relation: X (an agent) is free from Y (constraints) to do or become Z (what the agent desires). Screpanti oddly refers to this analysis as the result of “rigorous scientific method,” but leaving that curiousity aside, he fills in this formal analysis as follows: X is a “decision making agent” understood as a concrete being with “social, political and cultural features,” and not a metaphysical representative of “Species-being,” whose liberty is constrained by available “opportunity sets” (the “wider the set, the greater the freedom”), who chooses to do or become whatever s/he wishes. Screpanti insists—I think counter-intuitively and against the grain of most philosophical studies—that freedom, so understood, is valuable only in itself. “Freedom is not considered as an instrumental good . . . but as an end in itself.” But surely a freedom is never valued merely for its own sake, but also as a means for other ends, which is implied by that part of MacCallums’s definition referring to Z. Also, because Screpanti seeks an “objective” measure of freedom, he excludes from “constraints” anything psychological. For example, a woman who wears a chador against her will lacks freedom, but not if she desires to do so out of religious conviction. In another place in the book, however, he says the opposite, conceding to Marx’s stress on how (religious) ideology can foster false consciousness that “irrationally” limits freedom.
Screpanti’s “theory” of communism consists of “four definitions”: (1) self-government of the producers; (2) capacity for self-realization; (3) faculty of choice; (4) self-government of the commune. The first consists of self-managed firms. The second refers to actions and policies chosen by workers and not “hypostasized as an intrinsic property of [an imaginary] human nature.” Central to actual human nature is the ability of human beings to determine who they will be, producing their way of life and even producing themselves. The third refers to “the sphere of the capacity to choose the goods to enjoy.” The last consists in the legislative primacy of radical democracy that Marx praised in the Paris Commune, “converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it.” With respect to the last “definition,” Screpanti thinks, paradoxically, that when the minority loses out to the majority in the making of public policy, it is just as free as before the vote; this is because it has the opportunity to participate in voting. How this squares with MacCallum’s conception escapes me.
The economic institutions that suit libertarian communism are market socialism combined with a regulatory state. “Beginning with the years following the Second World War, scientific research has clarified that self-management and ‘market socialism’ are fully compatible with a communist approach.” This is Screpanti’s alternative to the early Marx’s “Land of Cockaigne,” a clever reference to a medieval parody of paradise, a land of plenty, leisure, and community. The distributive principle of that land is “to each according to need.” But this is an unrealizable ideal because “even the growth of productivity ad infinitum cannot fully satisfy all human needs . . .which implies that goods are scarce. . . [in the face of limited natural resources].” “Therefore higher-phase communism is not the kingdom of over-abundance” and so the need to allocate resources as efficiently as possible. Markets are preferable to planning on efficiency grounds (the “calculation” problem) and because planning interferes with the self-management of cooperatives. Still, because markets yield bad externalities and fail to produce goods that only the state can, there is an important place for the provision of public goods. Another obligation of the state is to “redistribute incomes in an egalitarian way and thus raising those of the poorer classes. This is a case of redistribution of freedom.” There is, then, inequality in libertarian communism which serves as an incentive to get “necessary labor” performed.
The last chapter of the book forges a political strategy to get from capitalism to libertarian communism. “There can be no radical change in production relations without seizure of political power, accomplished though electoral means in combination with “extra-constitutional weapons” such as “movements and organizations of protest, mobilization, struggle.” At the heart of this struggle is the formation of self-managed worker cooperatives which can succeed only if the state pursues policies (banking, fiscal, taxing) that favor them over capitalist enterprises. State assistance is essential because worker co-ops in a capitalist context invest less efficiently in both labor and capital than capitalist firms. Also, to prevent the tendency of co-ops to revert to capitalist firms “the use of wage labor should be forbidden in co-operative firms.” The “most courageous reform would be one aimed at the constitution of self-managed firms which are entirely State owned.”
This is a lively book written with polemical flair but whose manner of presentation is hampered by grammatically awkward prose and nebulous conceptual analysis of freedom, justice, and morality. A more philosophically astute defense of the view that Marx eschews morality can be found elsewhere, e.g., in the work of Allen Wood who, unlike Screpanti, confronts rather than ignores the other side of the debates. But even if Wood and Screpanti are right that Marx is more interested in freedom than justice, why is that not a moral concern? Does not Marx’s call for the maximization of freedom count as a moral plea, something that constitutes a moral good for humanity? And does not Marx also demand the equal distribution of freedom, not just its maximal aggregation: “In the place of the old bourgeois society . . . we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the development of all” (Communist Manifesto), or as Screpanti says, “communism is a system of maximal equal freedom for all.” This suggests that both Marx and Screpanti implicitly harbor some notion of egalitarian fairness or justice. And they pay attention not just to “formal” freedom but to what Screpanti, in the last part of his book, calls “real freedom,” by which he means that “citizens are endowed with the means to obtain the [economic] goods in which that freedom can be manifested.” So it seems that Screpanti concedes that communism is about a just distribution of economic goods after all.