Marx and Morality

Ray Briggs
Is morality the opiate of the masses?

Josh Landy
Or is it the solution to capitalism?

Ray Briggs
Can Marxist thinking help us solve today’s moral problems?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
Except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALWSan Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at philosopher’s corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And from the University of Chicago, where Ray now teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today, we’re thinking about Marx and morality.

Josh Landy
Oh yeah Karl Marx—he hated morality. He called it a bourgeois prejudice. He thought it was just a way to, like, trick workers into being good, docile drones, instead of taking up arms against the system.

Ray Briggs
Nah. Josh Marx is a moralist. He’s constantly railing against capitalist business owners. He says they exploit their workers, they deprive people of dignity, and they suck the life out of society. That is moral criticism, if I ever heard it.

Josh Landy
Well, if that’s what Marx actually thought, then he was contradicting himself. I mean, he says it right out that communists do not preach morality at all.

Ray Briggs
Okay, but he didn’t mean all morality there. He meant bourgeois morality, you know, the kind that’s used to trick the workers. He thought we could do better than that. There’s a real morality out there one that’s ready to replace the fake one.

Josh Landy
But that’s not what Marx actually says. Like, I’m gonna quote the guy verbatim. Here he is. Communism abolishes eternal truths. It abolishes all religion and morality instead of constituting them on a new basis. I don’t know Ray, I feel like that’s the opposite of what you just said. He’s not saying we should make a new ethical system. He’s saying we should smash all of them.

Ray Briggs
No, you’re getting them all wrong. He’s not saying we should smash them now. He’s saying we should smash them in the future. You know, once we have a communist utopia. In that utopia, everybody’s needs will be met, so we won’t have to worry about conflicting needs anymore.

Josh Landy
I mean, gosh, first of all, I don’t know about not being conflicting needs, but even if people’s needs don’t conflict in the utopia, surely you still need to be a good person. For example, let’s say you’re in the utopia, and you promise somebody to keep their secret, and then, yeah, you decide that’s much more fun to go and blab it to everybody. Haven’t you done a bad thing. Why won’t stuff like that be a problem in the utopia?

Ray Briggs
Well, maybe in the utopia, you’ll want to keep the secret. You won’t have to be forced to by some external moral system, like some kind of angel on your shoulder whispering orders into your ear. That’s not what morality is all about. It’s a way of getting people that, sorry. That’s what morality is all about. It’s a way of getting people to do stuff they don’t already want to do. Once we’re in Utopia, everyone will just want to do what’s best for everybody else.

Josh Landy
Hey, I’ve been to Burning Man too. Ray, it’s really fun to imagine you’re in utopia for a week, but it’s just not sustainable as a long term project. Who’s going to collect the garbage?

Ray Briggs
People will take turns and they’ll want to come on. Don’t you ever do stuff for your loved ones just because you love them? That’s what it’s going to be like for everyone everywhere.

Josh Landy
Have you met human beings? We’re a selfish species. Each of us looks out for our own interests. Why should we think that that’s going to change just because the workers have seized the means of production.

Ray Briggs
Well, look how different we are now from how people were even 100 years ago, let alone 1000 or 10,000 in ancient Rome, pretty much everyone thought slavery was totally normal nowadays, pretty much what everyone would be appalled if they found out that their neighbor had a slave. We’ve come a long way. Why not think it’s going to continue?

Josh Landy
We’ve come a certain way, but you know, now we have factory farming. We’re destroying the environment. People are going bankrupt from doctor’s bills just to make the medical industry rich. Human greed hasn’t gone away. Ray, and I don’t think it’s about to.

Ray Briggs
You’re such a Debbie Downer, that’s just one side of human nature. Look around you. People aren’t just trying to fleece each other to line their pockets. They’re also building schools. They’re inventing cures for diseases. They’re painting murals just to brighten everyone’s day. We want to help each other. A huge part of human nature is the desire to contribute something new to society.

Josh Landy
Well, that is true. Ray, we do have an altruistic side to us. I just think we still have to contend with the selfish side, and I’m not sure that’s going to change, not even in your Marxist utopia.

Ray Briggs
Well, maybe our guest will convince you that change is possible. It’s Vanessa Wills, whose new book is called “Marx’s Ethical Vision.

Josh Landy
But first we wanted to know what change is possible right now via the ballot box. So we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Holly JMcDede, to consider what Marxism says about the morality of electoral politics. She files this report.

Holly McDede
August Nimtz grew up during the Cold War. Noticed how often people opposed to racial equality were also anti-communist.

August Nimtz
In my youthful enemy of my enemy kind of thinking, if the racist hated a communist, then there must be something good about the communists.

Holly McDede
His understanding of the world became more sophisticated over time. Now he’s a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota, where he specializes in Marxism. He’s also the author of the book “The Ballot, the Streets, or Both: From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution.

August Nimtz
At a very early age, it became clear to me that something radical, something fundamental, had to be done in order to address racial inequality in the United States.

Holly McDede
Exercising the right to vote is not exactly considered radical, but it can sometimes be portrayed as the most important thing, a matter of life or death, like in 1964 when incumbent Democratic President Lyndon B Johnson was running against the Republican Senator Barry Goldwater. In a Johnson TV ad from that year, a little girl plucks Daisy pedals in a field counting down to a nuclear explosion. The message beware Goldwater could lead the country into a nuclear war. Voting for the right person could save mankind.

Johnson Daisy ad
Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home.

Holly McDede
Nimtz doesn’t buy that voting in itself, often a decision between the lesser of two evils, is exercising political power.

August Nimtz
We’re exercising an important democratic right to register a preference. Registering a preference should not be confused with the actual exercise of power. Power means to impose one’s will.

Holly McDede
Karl Marx and his close friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels offer some valuable insight on that. Nymph says that the revolutions of the late 1840s required the pair to address parliamentary democracy and the electoral process.

August Nimtz
They had to deal with this problem. Should the working class vote for the liberals, or should they have their own political party and have their own candidates and so on? And Marx and Engels initial reaction was to say, No, we we’re too small. The working class doesn’t have the means and the strength to have its own political party.

Holly McDede
None other than Marx and Engels, the first time they participate in the political process, subscribe to the lesser of evils claim.

August Nimtz
Therefore it should vote for the liberals in order to make sure that the reactionaries, the reactionaries, don’t get elected.

Holly McDede
But once the Liberals are elected, they betray the interests of the working class. From that experience, Marx and Engels learn very important lessons.

August Nimtz
Elections could be used by the working class, not as an end in themselves, but as a means to an end. They could be used to do political education, to explain what their program is, what the ideas are and so on. And secondly, elections could be extremely important to determine where the strength of the working class is and what sectors of the population are voting for the working class candidates.

Holly McDede
And taking the temperature of the working class is important for that day when the revolution comes. Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Communist Party, understood what Marx and Engels were getting at for about a decade before the Russian Revolution, Lenin led the Bolsheviks in electoral work.

August Nimtz
That 10 year experience, I argue, was indispensable, using Lenin’s own words, indispensable in understanding why the Bolsheviks were able to do what they did in 1917.

Holly McDede
So for students of Marx, the electoral process is important for political education, but it’s not the most important thing, a means to an end, not the end itself.

August Nimtz
For Marx and Engels, their view was that it wasn’t enough to be outraged by evil and immoral things. The question is, how do you deal with it?

Holly McDede
In 1965 President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. But that only came in response to the masses, taken to the streets and demanding this right.

August Nimtz
It’s in the streets, on the picket lines, on the barricades, that’s where real power is exercised.

Jack the Ripper
Long live the revolution!

Holly McDede
For Philosophy Talk. I’m Holly to McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that great report, Holly. Lots to think about, especially in election season. I’m Josh Landy with me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about Marx and morality.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Vanessa Wills. She’s professor of philosophy at George Washington University and author of “Marx’s Ethical Vision.” Vanessa, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Vanessa Wills
Thank you so much for having me

Josh Landy
So Vanessa, you’ve written a lot about Marx, including. In your most recent book. But What first got you interested in his philosophy?

Vanessa Wills
I was a graduate student in the early 2000s and in 2003 the US invaded Iraq, and it struck me as totally obviously irrational and immoral, and I immediately joined whatever protests I could find, and was out in the streets and interacting with activists. But as a philosopher, I wanted to have theory. I wanted to think more deeply about what I was doing and why and what was happening. And I met socialists, and they started talking to me about Marx, and I started reading some Marx, and never stopped, kept going.

Ray Briggs
So Vanessa, earlier, Josh and I were arguing about Marx’s views on morality. Josh says Marx doesn’t believe in morality, and I said he does. So who’s right?

Vanessa Wills
So I actually think you’re both right in a way. So one of the sort of themes of my book is the importance of taking a historical lens to Marx. And so I think we simultaneously have Marx talking about the already ongoing abolition of morality as a separate theoretical enterprise, but at the same time, we can look at Marx himself and see that he spends hundreds and hundreds of pages writing about moral philosophy. So it doesn’t make sense to me to be dismissive of him or dismissive of that project.

Ray Briggs
So when he says so, he definitely says a bunch of things about how he doesn’t like morality and doesn’t believe in it, and then he also says things that sound like moral talk. Does he mean the same thing by morality in the anti and the pro discussion?

Vanessa Wills
So I use these two terms, moralism and morality. And moralism in German, it’s morally smooth, so it’s a very similar word. And moralism is this sort of using morality to harangue people into doing things that are contrary to their good or to the general good, right and and that in fact, serve to uphold existing repressive regimes and systems. Morality is something much broader, I think, and can be applying, at times to, you know, whatever it is that Kant is doing, you know that Bentham is doing, but also, more broadly, to just moral thinking, right, kind of an ethical conception of human beings.

Ray Briggs
So like an example of moralism would be, say, your boss telling you you need to come in and work on, like your day off, because otherwise you’ll be letting your your fellow workers down because you won’t be covering their their shift. So that that sounds like the kind of thing that Marx would be like against, but that’s not all of morality then.

Vanessa Wills
Right, we’re a family. Don’t you care about, you know, or people, actually, people do this to teachers all the time, for example, don’t you care about the children? What do you mean you want a higher salary? What do you mean? You’re going on strike? I would consider that a very moralistic way of talking to working people.

Josh Landy
So that I get right. So, you know, some employer saying, you know, be loyal to the fam, to the family. That is our company, right? That seems like just a kind of, you know, shenanigan right, to get people to be sort of docile workers, but it sounded like you were saying he’s also Marx is also criticizing someone like Immanuel Kant. Well, that’s kind of surprising, because seems like Kant wants this kind of the same thing that Marx as he wants we want. Wants us to treat other people with dignity, as ends, not means. He wants people to flourish as human beings. Why would he reject that?

Vanessa Wills
I think this is really important. The thing that most clearly distinguishes Marx from someone like Kant, for example, or someone like John Stuart Mill, who Marx actually speaks quite approvingly of at times, is not necessarily what they desire. It’s not necessarily their conception of what it would be like for people to live in sort of ethical harmony with one another. It’s the question of, how do we get there? And someone like Kant Marx thinks is promoting ethical ideals that were we to enact them, would actually prevent us from ever actually realizing the desired society or the desired end. And so the question is not so much about the you can say it’s not about the end, it’s about. Means, you know, but I think even more precisely, you can say it’s a difference between merely stating what it is that is considered ethically desirable and having what Marx would consider a scientific account of how we’re actually going to get there.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Marx and morality with Vanessa wills from George Washington University.

Ray Briggs
Do you get angry about injustice and inequality? Doing it incremental change or a global revolution? Does it even help to get morally indignant?

Josh Landy
Kvetchers of the world unite! Along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Guante & Big Cats
Punch that clock ‘til it bleeds, It feels like they’re tryin’ to break us, They tell you to follow your dreams, But your alarm is going off, wake up.

Josh Landy
Should we follow our moral dreams or wake up and smell the social reality? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about Marx and morality with Vanessa wills, author of Marx’s Ethical Vision.”

Josh Landy
Got questions about Marx’s moral thought. Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org or comment on our website, and while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and seize the means of listening to our library of nearly 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Vanessa, you were just saying that, according to Marx, if we were to enact the ideals of a philosopher like Immanuel Kant, we’d actually never get society to sort of the place where it ought to be. Why not? Why does Why does Marx think that that wouldn’t work.

Vanessa Wills
So Kant’s categorical imperative, of course, you know one of its formulations is that you act in such a way that you can will through your acting, that everybody else do the same thing, basically, that you can, sort of, that can make some kind of coherent, rational sense. And in a divided class society, where you have groups of people whose interests are completely opposed to one another, will sort of necessarily hamstring the proletariat, the working people, from doing the things that they need to do in their own interest. I mean, another way of putting this is that it’s mistaken or premature to theorize from the point of view of a kind of universal collective humanity that doesn’t exist yet, and that still is in the process of hopefully being forged into being precisely by the proletariat’s struggle and conflict and opposition to capitalists right to the ruling class.

Ray Briggs
So Vanessa, I really like your point that in a class society, different classes are going to have different interests, and they’re going to develop they’re going to develop maybe moral theories that fit those interests. So like, if you’re a boss, you’re going to think that the right thing to do is for everybody to work really hard and not take so many sick days or vacation days, because that’s what suits you. So that’s the boss’s morality. It’s not like every morality, and if everybody obeyed that morality that would be bad because workers would stay oppressed and they’d never come out on top. So Marx thinks that, like Kant and his universal morality, is just kind of too close to this way of thinking, that like everybody should have the same morality regardless of their interests. So that all makes sense to me, but I still want to know more about the workers’ moral system. So sometimes it sort of seems like Marx is saying that even that moral system is a kind of ideology. So what am I supposed to think about that? Does that mean that ideology isn’t always bad?

Vanessa Wills
So I definitely think that ideology is itself a neutral concept. There’s places where Marx will use it in a way that has a pejorative cast, but he’s in those places describing the way that ideology can sometimes conceal its own character as being produced by one’s circumstances, rather than just being a kind of spontaneous genius, you know, Like like ideas that just occur to one without being a reflection themselves of the circumstances in which one is living, but ideology itself. In the book, I describe it as a system of ideas that allow one to make. Sense of a society that is Riven with contradiction, and in particular, class conflict and class struggle, but there’s no sort of mechanical correlation between the class a person’s class membership and the beliefs that they all hold.

Josh Landy
So let’s think about exploitation of workers, because that’s obviously something that Marx thinks a lot about, and he’s worried about ideological justifications or pseudo justifications for it. What’s morally wrong according to Marx with I mean, yeah, seems like it’s obviously wrong to exploit people, but give us an account of what, how Marx explains that it’s morally wrong and not just somehow, I don’t know part of the natural evolution of human society, or something like that.

Vanessa Wills
So I actually think that exploitation is a relatively neutral concept in and of itself, that because exploits, when we talk about exploitation, we’re talking about the extraction of value from workers activity, from their labor. And so I actually don’t think that that concept itself can tell us much about what’s wrong with it, or that we’re going to get much off of a sort of reading of the concept itself. But when we add in other pieces of Marx’s picture, like his concept of alienation and the fact that the exploitation that workers experience figures into this larger story of how their activity, their own labor, their essence, their active essence, if you will, then confronts them as a alien and hostile force right, opposing them and making their lives worse, degrading them. That’s when we really get into the more sort of normative and ethical part of the picture grounded in a conception of human nature.

Ray Briggs
So when I, when I think about this, like, I kind of have a picture of like factory workers in my in my mind. So like, you’ve got a textile worker, and like, having clothes is really cool, and creating clothes is really cool, and you’ve got this like product that, like, somebody could be proud of making and excited about making, but the textile worker is just like, Well, I’m gonna starve if I don’t work as hard as possible to sew as many things as possible. I don’t really care about the clothes. I care about getting my money so that I don’t starve, and then I’m gonna go home and be too exhausted to do anything fun for the rest of my life. So this is, like, kind of my, like, mental picture of alienation. I’m curious about how this applies to sort of other workers who aren’t the textile worker, who might have, like, different degrees of control over their work. So like, I have, like, a pretty cushy gig where I get to, like, ask questions that excite me and teach students and so, like, am I alienated? And if so, why?

Vanessa Wills
So you definitely are alienated. And Marx thinks even capitalists are alienated. So even I don’t know, maybe it’s sort of obvious that Elon Musk is alienated from humanity. It doesn’t seem happy, right? But, but yeah, you know, this is a great question, because I think people often do assume that alienation is primarily a subjective experience, and it can include the subjective feeling of not being at home in your work or at home in your life in general, but it needed you might feel. You might love it, right? But, you know, alienation, I think it’s also problematic to think about alienation in very individual terms, because, you know, I alone, you know, I have a tenured professor, I get to think about Marx, right? It’s great. But that doesn’t dissolve the fact that, because I live in a world where human beings are treated the way that they are treated, or where human beings live and the conditions that they live in. It’s impossible to live in a material reality like that and actually be able to represent to yourself a full conception of what it really means to be a human being. And so you know, even the most privileged you know, well kept workers you know, or and even capitalists you know, cannot escape the fact that we are as a species, alienated from what it is to be a human being.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about Marx and morality with Vanessa wills. From George Washington University. So Vanessa, you know, there’s a lot of this that I like, but I have some worries about it too. I mean, so the way that Marx put this is, in modern bourgeois society, all relations are subordinated to the monetary, commercial relation. So he wasn’t just saying the kind of abstract thing of, well, we can’t be fully I, you know, can’t living. We’re not living a fully ideal life, and we’re not taking care of everybody. He’s saying all relations are subordinated to a monetary, commercial relation. I want to say I don’t think poetry really is, I think love is, you know, there are communes. That’s Burning Man. I think there’s lots of things that aren’t subordinated. And I think, you know, in everyday interactions with the people we love and care about, with our wonderful students, with our colleagues, and so on and so on, we can actually have pretty decent, good, altruistic, caring and and sort of, you know, mutually fulfilling relationships. And so I sort of worry that there are kind of these two big exaggerations. One is everything in capitalism is terrible, and the other is everything in Utopia will be great. So you know what’s going on there is Marx just being kind of rhetorical when he makes these big, grand statements that you know, all relations and capitalism are just about money. And on the other side in the utopia, don’t worry, we’re all going to want to, you know, take out, you know, be the garbage collectors and so on. Or do you think? No, we should take those claims literally and it makes sense?

Vanessa Wills
To say that all human relations, all social relations, are subordinated to the monetary system. Is not to say that they’re all just crass calculations, right? So the relationships that I have with my students are very much subordinated by the if they can’t pay, they’re not coming, you know, like, if this, if the university stops paying me, I ain’t going right?

Josh Landy
But there’s poetry that people are writing and not selling, they’re just giving it away. And there’s communes, and there’s love, and come on, not everything is subordinate.

Vanessa Wills
Yeah, I think it doesn’t mean that we have nothing like good, interesting, loving, real connections to one another. It just means our access to those connections, our ability to have the time to write poetry, much less read it. It depends on our relationship to capital, and that sucks, you know, but actually, I do often use this example with my students, if there’s a tendency to have the more extreme read, well, nobody does anything except for profit. It’s strictly speaking, irrational and shocking that even under a capitalist society, just like you’re saying, Josh, people do things all the time where they you know that, where they lose money on them, right? But I guess I would stand by that statement that you’ve got to have capital.

Ray Briggs
So Vanessa, Joel on Twitter mentions a recent article which says that a lot of philosophers who started out as Marxist ended up becoming followers of John Rawls, and kind of traded in their communism for liberalism. So the article says that Rawls book, A Theory of Justice, is quote the book that killed Western Marxism, because Rawls, unlike Marx, didn’t pretend not to be a moralist. And the article also suggests that Rawls did a better job of explaining what was morally wrong with capitalism, which wasn’t exploitation, but inequality. So what do you think of all that?

Vanessa Wills
Well, one place to start is that there’s a question of whether it’s really true that these folks started out as Marxists. And I say that not just to be sort of sectarian and snarky. I mean, Rawls has been put to the use of satisfying the egalitarian impulses of well meaning left liberals, which is not a bad, I mean, great, but it’s what is distinctive about Marx is not that he wants equal, you know, equality, or wants people to live in conditions of brotherhood. I mean that, you know, Jesus got said it first, right? You know, so. So that’s not what anyone would need to look to Marx for. What’s distinctive about Marx is a particular claim about how we might bring those things about, and that is a claim rooted in an analysis of the role of the working class under capital. Well. So now that’s important, because if it turns out that what the analytical Marxists were doing was just sort of casting around for moral arguments to bolster a belief in egalitarianism, you don’t, you know, shouldn’t have taken them years to realize, of course, you don’t need marks if that’s all you’re trying to get. And maybe Rawls is a bit handier.

Ray Briggs
Right, to maybe take the side of the article for just a minute. Didn’t Rawls have just really good arguments for why we should have equality?

Vanessa Wills
I mean, sure, like, I’m not. I’m not. I actually kind of like Rawls. I mean, I find Rawls interesting. I still remember the first time I read Rawls. I mean, you know, of course, there’s some interesting arguments in there, even good ones, right? But the claim that Rawls thereby sort of obviates Marxist analysis, seems like there’s some sort of category mistake there, right? Because the thing that Rawls is said to have provided to this particular milieu of analytic philosophers who dallied with Marxism is just something other than what Marxism ever claimed to offer. I often say that I am myself a strange, sort of, well, sort of, obviously a strange sort of moral philosopher, ethicist, because I’m constantly trying to actually downplay the role of ethics. I mean, the reason to think about ethics is as part of a holistic account of human, social being. It’s not because I think there’s an argument in there that’s going to change the mind of Jeff Bezos, if only he will see reason, right? Like, that’s sort of not the project, but it is, in fact, the project of much of mainstream analytical philosophy. It’s, I mean, that literally, is the project to sort of give these quote, unquote, objective moral arguments that are compelling to any rational person.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Marx and morality with Vanessa wills, author of “Marx’s Ethical Vision.”

Ray Briggs
Do you feel alienated at work? What would make you feel better a Marxist revolution? Or would a new coffee machine be enough?

Josh Landy
Corporate contentment or radical reform? Plus commentary from Ian Scholes, the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

The Interrupters
What’s your plan for tomorrow? Are you a leader, or will you follow? Are you a fighter, or will you cower? It’s our time to take back the power?

Josh Landy
if We took back the power, would we become better people? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Vanessa Wills from George Washington University, and we’re thinking about Marx and morality.

Josh Landy
So Vanessa, you’ve been arguing really convincingly that Marx does, in fact, have a moral vision. He’s not just calling for a revolution in the future. He’s calling on us to act differently, even now, even within the capitalist system. So so I’m kind of wondering what he’d say about some of today’s issues, like, what would he say about factory farming, for example,

Vanessa Wills
I think factory farming is a great example of a way that capitalism has allowed us to produce beyond our wildest dreams in the past, the ability to put food on people’s Tables, to use science to maximize our capacity to satisfy our needs, but of course, in this highly distorted form, right? So from the ways that the animals are treated, the unnecessary suffering that serves no role except for the maximization of profit, the ways that the work even affects the human beings who do it right, whether it is physical health problems, the terrible pay and the abuse of workers, it’s connected to a whole set of issues and so, yeah, I think it’s prime for us to think about, is there a way to utilize what we know about, how to feed people and take care of people, but not in a way that has this sort of fun house? Mirror, hypercap. List abusive way of treating animals.

Ray Briggs
So that’s a really neat Marxist take on factory farming. So what about the gig economy? Because that one seems like it might be pretty tricky, because you might think like, oh, somebody driving an Uber around, they have more control over their life than somebody with a boss. They’re their own boss. But like, I think that there would be something that marks to be uneasy about there. So, like, is the gig economy? Like, the way to overcome alienation, and if not, why not?

Vanessa Wills
Yeah, it’s interesting. Gig economy jobs are often sort of sold to working people as an opportunity to control your own hours, to make decisions about the kind of work that you’re doing, and to do it out from under the watchful eye of a boss who’s there counting how long you’ve been in the bathroom, or, you Know, all the sorts of ways that people get micromanaged in everyday working environments. But of course, it’s a promise that doesn’t quite cash out in terms of people actually getting the kind of independence and freedom that they expect they might not report to a particular boss, but unclear whether it’s less alienating to respond to a unblinking app you know on your phone that is sending you hither and thither to work These excessive hours and often under very difficult circumstances. And we see people who do this kind of work sometimes finding ways to break out from the kind of individualistic isolation of being a quote, unquote, small proprietor and banding together. We saw that, for example, in the early days of the covid 19 pandemic, where people working for Instacart, for example, were organizing together to strike. So I think it further shows that the strength that people have comes from their role as workers, the role of sole individual proprietor in competition, abstract competition with everyone else’s turns out, is not that useful for dealing with the demands of capital.

Josh Landy
Okay, so we’ve talked about a couple of economic issues, Factory Farming, the gig economy. It makes sense to think that Marx would have something to say about those does he have anything to say about race? Is his philosophy a good resource for thinking about race issues, or does it leave them to the side?

Vanessa Wills
It’s Marxism is my main resource for thinking about race issues anyway, and I think it is a good one. So it’s important to think of Marxist theory as one that’s based in a conception of human beings as producing their own social world, and so race and racism, I think about them in this way, as opposed to think about them as sort of natural, necessary, eternal features of human existence, they have been produced as social forms, historically and can be done away with. And the question of how they’ve come into being and how we could do away with them, are questions that are best answered by asking how it is that human beings are producing their world and all of its various features.

Ray Briggs
So if we get rid of class as a kind of division in society, will that automatically get rid of other prejudices like racism and sexism, or will there be more to do?

Vanessa Wills
I think there’ll be more to do. I expect there’ll be more to do in his critique of the Goda program, Marx talks about socialism and this notion of what future post capitalist societies might look like. And one of the things he says is that an immediately post revolutionary society would still have the stamp of capitalism on it. And so there’s nothing automatic about doing away with class society and then immediately having all of the terrible things that class society has brought about disappear. There’s there would still be work to be done, but there’s all sorts of opportunities to build power, build awareness, build organization, and to be in solidarity with people who look at the world we’re in and say that they’ve had enough for whatever reason.

Ray Briggs
So I have trouble picturing the world where morality is abolished altogether, which makes sense, because I have never seen. It, and I live in a society where it’s unthinkable. How does Marx think that any of us get to know anything about that world that we’re all kind of trying to aim at from here? Because, like, the current situation is unsatisfactory, but like, how do we even figure out where we’re going?

Vanessa Wills
So this is one of the places where I think dialectics comes in. And when I say dialectics, I mean, well, I mean lots of things. I could speak for a couple hours about that. But in particular here the notion of the world as containing contradictions, right, like real material contradictions. And so we live in this world that is beset by alienation and exploitation and division and so on. But we do also live in the world. You know that Josh described in some of his comments, right? We do live in the world where people help one another. They create, they spend their time working very, very hard at things that are never going to make them a dime just because they want to amuse themselves, please others, right? People do these things, and so that is some of what we see as an actually, already existing reality in the current world that allows us to have a glimmer of what it would be like if we could have those elements of human life unshackled from all of the impediments to them?

Josh Landy
So that’s the big question for me, right? Because, in a way, Marx is asking us to make this gigantic gamble, right? So he’s saying that, first of all, we’re going the massive violence, overthrow the system. People are going to die, then there’s going to be a kind of transitional phase of despotism, the dictatorship of the proletariat. But it’s all going to be worth it, because in the utopia, everyone’s going to be unalienated. We won’t need morality, because we’ll naturally do the right thing. It’ll feel good. It’ll be kind of self realization, not sacrifice. Is that realistic? I mean, there are going to be cases where, you know, not everyone can have the same thing at the same time, like a spending time with a friend or something you can’t, you know, not everyone can have that one on one time at all times, there’s the unpleasant shores, like I visited a friend on a commune at one at one point, nobody wanted to muck out the turkeys. Like you took your turn mucking out the turkeys, but you didn’t love it, even on a commune which is totally self selecting for communitarian kinds, there are going to be all these necessary jobs. So why should we go for this gigantic gamble? Right? It’s a big risk to say we’re going to sacrifice a bunch of lives. It’s going to be worth it, because the utopia is going to be perfect. Why should we believe that?

Vanessa Wills
So I think this question goes to why many very serious readers of Marx and serious Marxist activists bristle at the notion that his is a moral project, or that he has moral kind of arguments to offer, because he probably has no argument that will satisfy the person for whom it is a gamble. Not to put too fine a point on it, right? In order to gamble, you’ve got to have you can’t gamble unless you have something to gamble, right? But his his his arguments are directed towards those who have nothing to lose, which is not a gamble. It is an act of survival, of desperation, of of seeing that there’s nothing for us here.

Ray Briggs
So for those of us who are persuaded that this is a good project. What is one piece of advice you’d give to kind of bring about a less alienated world?

Vanessa Wills
I think it’s really important as much as possible to look to the struggles of poor and working and oppressed people, and to learn from those, to take those as our teachers. And I think it’s one of the things that, as you know, for myself as a philosopher, for academics, but for lots of people, we work in realms that encourage us to to be like independent thinkers, which is good, right? But we don’t necessarily learn enough about the importance of following, right? I think following working struggles, following working people, following poor people, following people who are hungry and tired and losing their loved ones to war, I think that is the most important thing that an intellectual can do. It’s what I try to do.

Josh Landy
Vanessa, those are really inspiring words, and this has been an inspiring conversation throughout. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Vanessa Wills
Thank you so much.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Vanessa Wills, professor of philosophy at George Washington University, and author of “Marx’s Ethical Vision.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
I’m thinking that, you know, everybody should join their local Mutual Aid Society and put this into practice.

Josh Landy
And, you know, do all those other little things that we can do right, either for those of us who want to bring about a future revolution or those of us who don’t, either way, there are lots of powerful, ethical demands that are just calling out to us to do something. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org where you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of nearly 600 episodes,

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you, send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now… the mile a minute Marxist: It’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… The ethics of Marxism is apparently hard to define.  Put another way enthusiastic outbursts of morality are not normative features of a Marxist system.  This is because there is no spirit in Marxism, or Marxist Leninism, which seems to be the Marxism to beat, still, after all this time.  Capitalism, however, seems to be holding its own.  Even late stage capitalism, which includes price gouging, crypto currency, artificial intelligence, and so many other bells and whistles, it has erected a tall noisy yet flimsy tower, in which we all cower, streaming bad movies, because capitalism has destroyed movie theatres, along with internal combustion, recorded music, and the hula hoop.  The buck giveth, and the buck taketh away.  Marxism has no spirit, because it is materialistic and godless, which is rather a strange thing to insist upon, in my opinion, and has led to all kinds of unpleasantness, not only between East and West, but internal commie schisms as deep as between anabaptists and Jesuits.  The Marxist claim is that everything humans do is in service of production of that which fills our needs, both natural (food, shelter, say), and manufactured (a nice piece of music, a half baked movie on Netflix, the need for speed, for example).  We’re just appetite, people, a never ending gaping maw, nothing more.  This premise is the main thing that freaks out anti communists.  Even though it seems to be the foundation of capitalism as well, really.  But from Marx’s point of view, it seems to me, communism turns that bug into a feature, and if we’re honest with ourselves, it can lead eventually to … well, not utopia exactly, if history’s any indication, but paranoid nation-states, who may have enough to eat, but lack big screen televisions and motor boats.  Capitalism, on the other hand, is still the ism to beat, even though it leads to anxiety and alienation.   Luckily, capitalism, though it phased out counselling, more or less, has come up with an incredible variety of pills that can bring a mood up or down with one little swallow, and reasonably priced, unlike psychiatrists.  This is because capitalism, like Marxism, is also materialistic.  It’s all just mechanics.  Marxism even  called itself a science, which led it into many logical blunders, including a belief, held in the golden age of Lenin Marxism, that evolution was just a biological form of class warfare.  Of course capitalists, before the Depression, also believed that.  Another strange thing about capitalism is that adherents believe laisseiz faire is the only way to go.  Regulations inhibit innovation.  How many times have you heard that?  Okay.  But who doled out loans, never repaid, I don’t think, to help build the railroads?  Who paid for rockets to the moon?  The U.S. government did.  Capitalism, if left to its own devices, has put children on the factory floor, slaves in the field, lead in the paint, asbestos in the insulation.  The planet’s on fire!  Why?  I dunno.  Could capitalism have something to do with it?  But it also seems like Marxism, intended to be the sensible conclusion to civilization, the fluorescent light at the end of the tunnel, is just another externality, a barrier to capitalistic bliss.  But Russia got subsumed by the oligarchy, and China is pretty much what capitalism would look like if Lenin had decided what the proletariat really needed were more motor boats.  Both systems are punitive if you get in the way of what the committee has decided is the path forward.  Marxism leads to prison camps and exile.  Capitalism leads to bankruptcy, legal fees, rampant drug use, and artificial intelligence, an innovation none of us requested or desired.  Bottom line.  Capitalism, Marxism are the same, in that everything can be fixed or made better if we just get out of the way and let it work.  Or else.  Ask your doctor if capitalism is right for you.  Actual Marxism may vary. I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyrightcopyright 2024.

Our Executive Producer is James Kass.

The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovich. Laura McGuire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from subscribers to our online community of thinkers.

Josh Landy
And from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. That conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org where you can become a subscriber and explore our library of nearly 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.