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Libertarian Communism Also by Ernesto Screpanti the FUNDAMENTAL INSTITUTIONS of CAPITALISM Libertarian Communism Libertarian Communism Also by Ernesto Screpanti THE FUNDAMENTAL INSTITUTIONS OF CAPITALISM Libertarian Communism Marx, Engels and the Political Economy of Freedom Ernesto Screpanti © Ernesto Screpanti 2007 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007 978-0-230-01896-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28524-2 ISBN 978-0-230-59647-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230596474 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10987654321 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. There certainly are some communists who, with an easy conscience, refuse to countenance personal liberty and would like to shuffle it out of the world because they consider that it is a hindrance to complete harmony. But we have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced . that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership. (Communist Journal, 1847, 292) Hence personal freedom becomes possible only within the community. (Marx and Engels, 1845–46, 5, 78). This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction ix Part 1 A Theory of Welfare? 1 1 Communitarian Communism 3 Marx and Engels as moralists 3 Egalitarian justice 5 The New Man 10 The Hegelian origins of Marx’s New Man 13 The dialectics of communism 20 2 The Communism of Abundance 26 Marx and Engels as amoralists 26 Against utopian socialism 32 The land of Cockaigne 39 A man rich in needs 47 A digression: ‘English communism’ 53 Part 2 A Theory of Freedom 59 3 Freedom and the Individual 61 The three faces of Marx 61 The individualist foundations of communism 68 Social structure and individual agency 76 Society and the individual in Hegel and Marx 86 Which freedoms? 91 What is freedom? 102 4 The Emancipation of Labour 107 Self-management of the producers 107 To each according to his needs 116 True democracy 121 The dictatorship of the proletariat and universal suffrage 131 The liberation movement 137 vii viii Contents Part 3 A Reformulation 141 5 Foundations of the Liberation Theory 143 ‘Possibility means freedom’ 143 Freedom in the production sphere 145 Freedom in the consumption sphere 150 Liberated time 152 6 The Politics of Communism 156 Class conflict and the choice opportunities of life projects 156 The change in production relations 158 The dissolution of the State 167 Notes 170 Bibliography 190 Subject Index 200 Name Index 203 Introduction The breakdown of the ‘communist’ regimes in Eastern Europe, far from knocking down the world communist movement, has instead liberated it. A series of contemporary experiences of struggles by the people, from Chiapas in Mexico to Argentina, from Nepal to Darfur, not to mention the wider no-global movement, are showing it is no longer true that the spectre of communism is haunting Europe. In fact nowadays it is haunting not just Europe, but the entire world. Neither should one believe that Marxism is in crisis, unless one is afflicted by the breakdown of the monolithic ‘certainties’ of a Third International utopian Marxism which finally arrived at working only as an ideology of State capitalism. In reality such a kind of ‘Marxism’ had already been disparaged by many theoretical elaborations developed in relation to the liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Rather, we are today observing a proliferation of Marxisms, and especially a change in the militants’ attitudes towards political divergences. The Marxists of today tend to ascribe a great value to the richness and the diversity of inter- pretations and philosophical orientations. And this is by no means a cause of crisis. But the most interesting fact, in the communist movement landscape and the Marxist thought galaxy, is a basic characteristic of theoretical elaborations and political positions which is common to a great part of militants and activists: the libertarian vocation. And the need of redis- covering the theoretical foundations for a politics of liberation is more and more widespread. The present book is intended to meet that need; obviously not with the pretension to set out a complete and general theory of liberation, but cer- tainly in the attempt at bringing to light the libertarian components of Marx’s and Engels’ thought. Personally I consider it as a first contribution to the development of a wider scientific elaboration which can only come forward as a process of collective research. Looking back, it seems that good old utopian socialism has taken a striking revenge over scientific socialism. In the form of the theory of justice it is now taught in the best universities, and has even achieved the honour of a Nobel prize. One might be tempted to rejoice in reflecting on this product of historical nemesis, given the poor results of the Third International applications of Marxism. And it would be cold comfort for ix x Introduction anyone observing that the social-democratic applications of some forms of utopian socialism have not performed any better, at least with regard to the overcoming of capitalism. However it may be argued that what failed in the various twentieth- century attempts to build real ‘socialism’ is precisely a certain kind of utopian Marxism, namely, the humanist philosophy that dominated the international workers’ movement starting with the Second International. That same philosophy is at the core of most theories of justice and utopian socialism doctrines of the last two centuries. A theory of justice, or a utopian socialism, is a philosophy of the good society defined on the ground of a normative criterion of goods distribu- tion. The distributive criterion has a normative character in that it applies to an ideal model of society that serves as a prescriptive base for improving the real one. The strength of the normative message necessarily depends on an ethical principle that lies at the very basis of the model of society. But ethical principles must have an absolute value; they cannot be relative to social subjectivities. Otherwise they lose all capacity to justify the model of good society in universalistic terms. And precisely this is their utopian character. The main weakness of the theories of justice stems from these requis- ites of absoluteness and universality of ethical principles. Because of them, the theories of justice contradict the most fundamental axiom of modern- ity, the libertarian principle, also known as the postulate of ethical individ- ualism: each individual is free to think autonomously about what is to be considered the public good. Not only are State laity and the inde- pendence of politics from religion founded on this principle, but also the sole reasonable justification for democracy. Only if the diverse ethical opinions of citizens are considered equally legitimate, so that one head counts the same as another and is entitled to one vote, is it admissible for public choices to be made through majority rule. Any theory of justice, insofar as founded on an absolute ethic, clashes with the libertarian prin- ciple and encounters serious difficulties in justifying democracy as a method of public choice. An ideal society which is considered good because it is just will tend to generate a doctrine of the ethical State. But who can guarantee that the State ethic is shared by all citizens or even only a majority of them? Starting with the Enlightenment, many philosophers believed the problem could be solved by assuming that ethical principles are somewhat rational and therefore accessible to man with the correct use of reason, that they can even be demonstrated more geometrico. It was supposed, for instance, that they are inscribed in the ‘law of nature’, in a ‘natural human Introduction xi essence’, in an innate ‘moral sense’, in a ‘categorical imperative’ or simply in ‘Reason’. What really counts is that man can acquire knowledge of eth- ical principles by using reason or even through ‘moral intuition’. This is the sense of the cognitive approach to moral philosophy. Many of the contemporary theories of justice, both utilitarian and Kantian, implicitly or explicitly adopt a cognitive approach to justify the universal foundations of the invoked principles of justice.
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