Hegel and Marx on Freedom

"For Hegel freedom consists in being in a certain reflective and deliberative relation to oneself, which itself is possible, so it is argued, only if one is also already in a certain (ultimately institutional, norm-governed) relations to others, if one is a participant in certain practices... Put most simply, for an action to count as mine, it must make a certain kind of sense to the agent, and that means it must fit in intelligibly within a whole complex of practices and institutions within which doing this now could have coherent meaning... On his view, all of the standard conditions of action (e.g. "doing it voluntarily, uncoerced") could be fulfilled, yet we would not want to say that the action is truly "mine" such that I could fully or truly stand behind it, own up to it, and claim ownership of it... Hegel denies that we can separate the moral-psychological, individual dimension of freedom from social relations of dependence and independence said to be equally constitutive of freedom..." Robert Pippin, Hegel's Practical Philosophy, p.4-7

There is much about this that is very attractive as a conception of freedom. Hegel rejects the impoverished "negative" liberal conception of freedom that claims that we are free to the extent that we, as isolated individuals, are not "interfered" with by external coercion. Whereas this anemic view of freedom begins from the idea that persons are asocial atoms unto themselves, Hegel's conception of freedom proceeds from the fact that we are not isolated individual atoms: the institutions, traditions, practices, norms and social relations which surround us are partly constitutive of us. To be free is, therefore, not to be cut off from these constitutive features of human life. To be free is to stand in the right kind of relation with respect to oneself and others. It is to be able to affirm the basic institutions of social life; it is to be able to see oneself and be at home in such institutions.

But, of course, life under modern capitalism is such that we cannot rationally be at home in our society. We cannot see ourselves in the basic institutions of society (e.g. the market, private ownership of the means of production, etc.), since they lord over us as something alien to us, something not under our control. As I noted in a previous post:

"Consider the well-worn idea that you 'can't buck the market'. We have become so used to things as 'market forces'...that you are just as likely to come to grief as if you ignored natural forces -gravity, magnetism and so on.... you'd better do what the market says or else you will be in trouble. But what is the market? Simply the accumulated effects of innumerable human decisions about production and consumption. It is, thus, our own product, from which it follows that, once more, we come to be dominated by our own product."

Think of the terms in which the present financial crisis is described. People in the media talk about the economy as though it were a natural disaster, completely beyond our control, laying waste to human lives in its wake. But the market is no force of nature; it is something that human beings constructed. And what we've built up, we can tear down. "The market is like a monster we have accidentally created, but which now comes to rule our lives". Capitalism is, thus, in Marx's words, "the complete domination of dead matter over men". We cannot affirm the basic institutions of capitalist societies as our own since they dominate us. They are not the products of deliberative, collectively exercised reason, as are the expressions of a democratic process. The basic institutions of capitalism are the products of a system whose basic function is to generate profit for the ruling class. The result is that work, daily life, leisure, the majority of cultural production, etc. all tend to be structured around this unsavory, inhuman end of profit accumulation. This condition of not being able to affirm and recognize our social condition as our own is what Hegel called alienation. Freedom, then, is a kind of "non-alienation", an achievement in which alienation is overcome by way of a socially-grounded self-determination.

Moving from Hegel to Marx, it's worth saying a bit more about why contemporary capitalism is both alienating and unfree. By any measure, capitalism has succeeded in developing the forces of production (e.g. technology, productive instruments and techniques, instrumentally useful technical knowledge, etc.) to a very high degree. But rather than putting this powerful productive capacity in the service of meeting human needs, developing human talents and capabilities, creating the conditions for flourishing, etc... instead, almost all human potential is subjected to, and dominated by, the need to increase profit. Growth for the sake of growth, accumulation for the sake of accumulation, profit for the sake of profit. These are the unsavory priorities that shape social life under capitalism.

Whereas a free society would be one in which the productive forces were put in the service of human interests... ours is one in which human interests are subordinated to the expansion of the productive forces for the sake of expansion. Whereas a rational society would be one in which capital was subordinated to human ends, ours is a society in which human ends are subordinated to the dictates of capital. Whereas capitalism makes us feel as though we're the playthings of larger economic and social forces beyond our control... a socialist society would be one in which we could take control over our own lives by democractizing the basic structure of society. We can only call a society our own when we are able to say of the basic goals of that society that they are the products of our collective deliberations.

It should be obvious why so much of Hegel's conception of freedom appealed to Marx. To be sure, Hegel did not properly understand what the institutions and basic structure of modernity are like. Moreover, whereas Hegel claimed that modern capitalism was a product of a rational historical process, Marx was unrelenting in showing this to be false. History, Marx argued, is not the gradual unfolding of reason, culminating in modern capitalism. History is a political struggle among different groups, framed by the way in which the social surplus is produced. Capitalism, therefore, is not the rational overcoming of alienation, but merely another form of alienation, another class society like those that preceded it. The difference, however, is that capitalism, for the first time, creates the conditions for a free society in a way that previous societies did not. Whereas a free, egalitarian society may not have been possible in the Bronze Age, capitalist societies have made possible such a high degree of productivity that we can satisfy all basic human needs without working ourselves to death doing it. For the first time in human history, the high level of development of the productive forces under capitalism make possible a society free from alienation, class domination and objectively necessary poverty and suffering.

Freedom would not be to walk through a supermarket perusing 20 different brands of toilet cleaner without "external interference"... freedom would be to see in basic social institutions the mark of human, democratic reason. It would be to see oneself, as a member of a modern democratic society, in the basic structure of society and, thus, to be able to reflectively endorse and affirm that society. Such is not possible when the iron law of profit dictates what is to receive investment and what is to wither on the vine. It is not possible to reflectively endorse and affirm what is imposed upon us in the interests of inhuman ends. That is to say, it is not possible to be fully free in a society in which the commanding heights of the economy is governed by the demands of profit and controlled by a small class of capitalists.

In light of the above we can make sense of Alasdair MacIntyre's claim that "...at least one philosophy course, and, more adequately two, should be required of every undergraduate. Of course an education of this kind would require a major shift in our resources and priorities, and, if successful, it would produce in our students habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world. But to unfit our students for the contemporary world ought in any case to be one of our educational aims." To "unfit" students for the modern age, as I'm reading it, means to get them to think critically, i.e. to become aware of alienation (to see clearly the sense in which we cannot truly be at home, and hence free, in modern capitalism). A good education would not be one that subordinated all curricula to the capricious demands of the labor market. A good education would be one which produced in us "habits of mind which would unfit them for the contemporary world" in such a way that they would come to demand that the world itself change. Rather than pandering to the world as it is, good education would challenge us to think seriously about how to change it for the better and truly make it our own.

It should be obvious, but it's nonetheless worth saying, that bureaucratic central planning is equally condemned by this view of freedom. The mechanistic distortions of Stalinism are anathema to freedom. If the basic institutions of society are under the control of a bureaucratic nomenklatura, this is hardly better than capitalism. In such a case we would still feel that we were subject to forces beyond our control, forces which were emphatically not the products of collective, democratic deliberation. For if the state, rather than private capitalists, dominates production there is still the question: but who controls the state? Thus, it should be obvious that taking this Hegelian-Marxist view of freedom leaves only one route to overcoming alienation and class domination: the most radical form of democracy. Only when we're all able to interact with each other as equal co-legislators are we fully free. As long as social relations of domination exist, freedom is not possible. Thus, freedom and equality are not antagonistic others, but mutually constitutive aspects of the same goal.

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Bernstein's Hegelian Argument for Regulation Misses Mark

Setting aside the absurd framing of the TARP bailout scheme at the beginning of the article (i.e. either bailout or do nothing), there are interesting things to say about the Hegelian argument J.M. Bernstein examines in his recent NYTimes article for "The Stone".

But first, let me say why the framing of the issue at the beginning of the article misses the mark. It insinuates that we had only two choices: a) undertake some kind of bailout scheme or other, or b) do nothing and let the "market take care of itself". This is absurd: it rules out so many other things we might have done at the time, especially nationalization. Many commentators, not all of whom were on the Left, considered the possibility of nationalizing some of the banks. Even Bush was entertaining the idea. One of the most emailed NYTimes articles at the time was this. This isn't a far-Left idea, though I wish more of those were on the table. Paul Krugman's proposal was for short-term nationalization, which is a pretty standard procedure in Western Europe. The idea is simple: if the public is going to bailout a bank that has driven itself in the ground, the people who drove it into the ground should be shown the door and the company should be placed under public control (this includes the company's assets). And at some point the company may be re-soled to capitalists and the public coffers see a net gain as a result of this transaction. Yet in the US, our ruling class likes to pretend that we have the distinction of "maintaining private ownership" in cases like this, so such options weren't pursued.

So, setting aside the manifest stupidity of the "do nothing and let markets work their magic" option, there were plenty of non-bailout options on the table that are blotted out of the analysis in this article. Yet, despite all of the other options, Berstein's whole piece is about whether the bailout was good qua bailout (and I agree, that even qua bailout it was a fucking lemon).

This leads us into our first objection to the bit about Hegel. I like very much Bernstein's rather clear and succinct summary of some of Hegel's arguments in the Phenomenology. But his application of these ideas here seems imprecise.

Take Bernstein's own summation of one of Hegel's arguments, and you'll see what I mean:

What makes the propounding of virtue illusory — just so much rhetoric — is that there is no world, no interlocking set of practices into which its actions could fit and have traction: propounding peace and love without practical or institutional engagement is delusion, not virtue. Conversely, what makes self-interested individuality effective is not its self-interested motives, but that there is an elaborate system of practices that supports, empowers, and gives enduring significance to the banker’s actions. Actions only succeed as parts of practices that can reproduce themselves over time. To will an action is to will a practical world in which actions of that kind can be satisfied — no corresponding world, no satisfaction. Hence the banker must have a world-interest as the counterpart to his self-interest or his actions would become as illusory as those of the knight of virtue. What bankers do, Hegel is urging, is satisfy a function within a complex system that gives their actions functional significance.

I endorse most all of this. And I endorse the Hegelian claims about practices, the dialectical relationship between agency and institutional structure, the sense in which actions come to have meaning only in certain institutional contexts, etc. But here's the rub: it is not clear that upshot of Hegel's arguments is that we simply need more regulation.

If the problem is the "interlocking set of practices" and institutions that constitute contemporary capitalism, then it is unclear that a modest change within those very institutions could resolve the problems Bernstein draws our attention to. It seems like the obvious inference to draw after reading the summary of Hegel here is that the basic institutional structure of capitalist societies are the problem. And if that's right, then we can't very well accept a putative solution to the problem that begins by accepting the very legitimacy of those institutions.

In fact, the idea that a couple of regulatory tweaks could solve the problems raised by the present crisis seems as delusional as the moralistic "knight of virtue", for similar reasons. The moralist is delusional precisely because she fails grasp that without institutional reconfiguration, her pleas for different practices have no possibility of being effective. But in a similar fashion Bernstein expects a couple of regulatory tweaks to do the trick, without even so much as giving a passing thought to serious institutional reconfiguration of the basic structure of contemporary capitalism. This evinces a misunderstanding of the real upshot of the Hegelian claim here: that as long as we have a set of interlocking institutions and practices that make it rational for capitalists to continue doing what they're doing, we will continue to face instability, crisis, social misery, overproduction, and system-level irrationalities.

Bernstein's argument tacitly assumes that financial regulation (helpful thought it would be as opposed to doing nothing) is all that can be done to curtail the instability of capitalism. But even Hegel, who certainly had lapses in political judgment, gave us reason to think that the deep problems of modernity could not be solved within the liberal state. This thought also emerges in Hegel's Aesthetics, where he rejects early bourgeois societies as "prosaic", non-beautiful, and alienating. Marx drew heavily on these arguments when he wrote some of his most brilliant early works, particularly "On the Jewish Question".

The argument in "On the Jewish Question" is Left-Hegelian through and through. One of the most interesting arguments is that the liberal state is a form of alienation. The argument runs as follows. Human beings are social, and we have lived for most of our history in various kinds of social formations. But in liberal capitalist societies, our social aspects are disavowed, even as they are manipulated and relied upon to make capitalist societies function (i.e. they require elaborate schemes of social cooperation and coordination). In liberal capitalist societies, we bifurcate society into two realms: public and private. We think that the public realm of the state is the realm of the social, of politics, etc. In this realm we are citizens, equal before the law, etc. But in our "private" existence, our actions take shape within the interlocking set of capitalist institutions and practices that Bernstein describes in his article. That is, in our "private" lives we are encouraged to be all the things capitalism encourages us to be: self-interested, competitive, exploitative, etc.

But it turns out, Marx argues, that although this is the way things appear in capitalism, they are really upside down in this picture. In fact, the so-called atomistic private level of our society is the level of our "real existence". The public realm, on the other hand, is the alienated form which our social nature takes in capitalism. That is to say, the State is merely an abstraction, a collective fantasy of sorts. To think that our actions only have political or social weight when acting in our capacity as citizens, in and through the institution of the state, is to radically misunderstand contemporary societies.

To carry forward this critique, Marx draws a distinction between political emancipation and human emancipation. Political emancipation refers to a catalogue of individual rights, that is, a series of legal provisions that weren't applicable to all in feudal societies. But political emancipation, Marx argued, wasn't enough. In short, political emancipation was merely emancipation on paper. Marx didn't think that we could really be emancipated as long as the basic configuration of institutions in capitalism remained as they were. Political power could not be equally distributed unless economic power was equally distributed. Thus, human emancipation meant somethings far stronger than mere political emancipation. Human emancipation means an end to the institutions and objective conditions that produce alienation. It means an end to an irrational system marred by deep internal contradictions.

If the problem is really the basic structure of social institutions in our society, as Bernstein suggests, it is unclear that regulation is the obvious remedy. I am with Marx here in thinking that the basic upshot of the Hegelian setup that Bernstein describes is that we need radical transformation of the basic structure of capitalist societies, rather than superstructural tweaking.

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