By Joseph V. Femia
The cave in of the Soviet Union would appear to sound the demise knell for Marxism as a blueprint for social switch. Why has this doctrine--the repository of such a lot of hopes and dreams--failed in its grand ambition to free up the human race from poverty and oppression? via a serious and systematic research of what Marx and his interpreters needed to say approximately democracy, Joseph Femia sheds gentle at the purposes for this failure. His e-book explores the bewildering number of Marxist attitudes to democracy, and relates this range to Marxism's inconsistent pursuits: lively political participation and all-embracing crucial making plans, human emancipation and collective submission to the dialectical "truths" of heritage. Dr. Femia explains why Marxism's inner contradictions have regularly, in perform, been "solved" throughout the imposition of despotic modes of presidency. Marxism's tragic flaw, he concludes, is its unwillingness to acknowledge the individuality and independence of the individual.
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Extra resources for Marxism and Democracy (Marxist Introductions)
Example text
60 ‘The Relation of Marxism to Classical German Philosophy’, in Austro-Marxism, 63. 61 ‘Marxism and Ethics’, in Karl Kautsky: Selected Political Writings, ed. and trans. P. Goode (London: Macmillan 1983), 40–3. THE MARXIST CRITIQUE OF LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 35 their content. 62 The aim is to allow human agents to pursue their self-chosen goals in the absence of man-made constraints, whether these goals be misguided or laudable, selfish or altruistic. In Marx's opinion, this type of freedom was barely worth having: the ‘rights of man’, paradoxically, amounted to ‘the perfection of his slavery’.
Firstly, there is the descriptive or factual dimension, which singles out certain human capacities, dispositions, and properties. When, say, Hobbes informs us that human beings are innately self-seeking and aggressive, he is making a descriptive statement about actual reality as he perceives it. But the 33 ‘Toward the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Law: Introduction’, in Writings of the Young Marx, 250. See also The German Ideology (ibid. 409), where Marx maintains that the ‘nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions which determine their production’.
From the vast range of contradictory human aspirations and values, a certain subset is selected and pronounced essential to human well-being. Marx's various statements about our essential social nature seem to fall into this category. 37 But does this moral injunction not contradict the intrinsic relativism of Marx's materialist outlook, which—please recall—reduces ideas and principles to transient economic relations? Not necessarily. Although his terminology lacks rigour, we can clarify matters, on his behalf, by relating the supposed need for communal attachment to the present requirements of the evolving production process.
