In “White Psychodrama” (2023, Journal of Political Philosophy), Liam Kofi Bright self-consciously echoing Rawls’ Hegel hopes that “philosophy could reconcile us to our social world and each other.” (p. 198; Bright cites Rawls in his first footnote.) As Rawls emphasizes, by ‘reconciliation’ Hegel does not mean mere resignation. Rather, (and now I quote Rawls), “reconciliation means that we have come to see our social world as a form of life in political and social institutions that realizes our essence—that is, the basis of our dignity as persons who are free. It will “thereby appear justified to free thinking.”” (
In Bright's "How I Am a Marxist" post at https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2023/10/how-i-am-marxist.html he has a section on "alienation and flourishing", commenting on the notion of flourishing that "Typically Marxists think of this as one in which we can throw ourselves wholeheartedly into (often shared) projects that we value and genuinely identify with our activities, feeling a sense of connection to both the process and output of our work -- that it expresses our genuine desires, reflects our will, and is what we would want to have spent our time upon." It seems to be a common perspective on the left to think of human flourishing in terms similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where "higher" needs like creative activity in artistic and intellectual spheres depend to large degree on freedom from worrying too much about more "basic" needs like food and shelter and health care. From this perspective, spreading such flourishing as widely as possible requires restructuring society so that there are no longer large classes of people who have to spend most of their time on rote manual labor in order to avoid the threat of starvation, homelessness etc. And achieving the widespread freedom to spend time on such higher pursuits may require a society with forms of production technology and organization of production and distribution very different from contemporary society.
This sort of idea is central in classical Marxism, as in Engels' paraphrase of Hegel in chapter XI of Anti-Duhring that "freedom is the recognition of necessity" and that such freedom is "necessarily a product of historical development", where Engels would have been referring to the development of the means and mode of production in particular; or Marx's comment at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/capital/vol3-ch48.htm that "In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite."
I suppose a main reason the classical Marxist vision seems outdated to many with left-wing sympathies is that although Marx and Engels avoided saying too much about how communism would work, it's fairly clear from various incidental comments that they did think a planned economy could provide for everyone's material needs far more efficiently than capitalism, but 20th century experiments with planned economies suggested they don't work so well (and Marx and Engels had not considered the basic computational difficulties of fully planned economies like those discussed by Cosma Shalizi at https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ ). But there is also the distinct idea that dramatic advances in automated production technology might be critical to providing everyone with the freedom to spend a lot of time on more creative pursuits, found in some non-Marxist socialists (Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", Murray Bookchin's "Towards a Liberatory Technology" in his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism), liberals (Keyne's "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"), and the occasional heterodox Marxists (see the third from last page of Huey Newton's piece at http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Huey_P_Newton/pdf/Huey.pdf , or Mark Fisher's thoughts on highly automated "luxury communism" in his piece in the book Futures & Fictions from Repeater Books). Marx himself sort of hinted at such an idea in the "fragment on machines" from his Grundrisse although he didn't develop the idea. And of course it's not an uncommon idea among futurists and science fiction writers that we might someday have a "post-scarcity" society where fully automated manufacturing machines are either compact enough that each household or small community can have their own (like some visions of nanotechnology, or the replicators in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Next Generation which were probably inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's discussion of a such a hypothetical device in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future, with the notable comment that "A society based on the Replicator would be so completely different from ours that the present debate between Capitalism and Communism would become quite meaningless"), or larger automated manufacturing facilities which could be operated by governments as a kind of public utility.
With advances in the functionality of robots and 3D printing it seems to me not so implausible that within the next century or two we could automate all the rote manual labor involved in mass production, so a sort of flexible automated production on demand economy, with public ownership of at least some significant fraction of the production machinery, might become possible even if planned economies are unworkable. Perhaps future generations will come to think of Marx as broadly correct in his views on the "realm of freedom" only being widely attainable once technology has developed sufficiently to let our lives become relatively independent of the "realm of necessity", even if major aspects of his vision of the path to get there turned out to be wrong in many ways. (Also, since you have occasionally posted thoughts on science fiction books, I'd love it if you would someday consider writing something on the politics of various works of "post-scarcity" science fiction along these lines, like Star Trek, or Iain Bank's Culture series, or Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway")
Thank you for this. I think I blogged once on the Culture serie. But it sounds like you may have more interesting things to say. You should try it or guestpost!
In Bright's "How I Am a Marxist" post at https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2023/10/how-i-am-marxist.html he has a section on "alienation and flourishing", commenting on the notion of flourishing that "Typically Marxists think of this as one in which we can throw ourselves wholeheartedly into (often shared) projects that we value and genuinely identify with our activities, feeling a sense of connection to both the process and output of our work -- that it expresses our genuine desires, reflects our will, and is what we would want to have spent our time upon." It seems to be a common perspective on the left to think of human flourishing in terms similar to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where "higher" needs like creative activity in artistic and intellectual spheres depend to large degree on freedom from worrying too much about more "basic" needs like food and shelter and health care. From this perspective, spreading such flourishing as widely as possible requires restructuring society so that there are no longer large classes of people who have to spend most of their time on rote manual labor in order to avoid the threat of starvation, homelessness etc. And achieving the widespread freedom to spend time on such higher pursuits may require a society with forms of production technology and organization of production and distribution very different from contemporary society.
This sort of idea is central in classical Marxism, as in Engels' paraphrase of Hegel in chapter XI of Anti-Duhring that "freedom is the recognition of necessity" and that such freedom is "necessarily a product of historical development", where Engels would have been referring to the development of the means and mode of production in particular; or Marx's comment at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/capital/vol3-ch48.htm that "In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite."
I suppose a main reason the classical Marxist vision seems outdated to many with left-wing sympathies is that although Marx and Engels avoided saying too much about how communism would work, it's fairly clear from various incidental comments that they did think a planned economy could provide for everyone's material needs far more efficiently than capitalism, but 20th century experiments with planned economies suggested they don't work so well (and Marx and Engels had not considered the basic computational difficulties of fully planned economies like those discussed by Cosma Shalizi at https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimization-problem-solves-you/ ). But there is also the distinct idea that dramatic advances in automated production technology might be critical to providing everyone with the freedom to spend a lot of time on more creative pursuits, found in some non-Marxist socialists (Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", Murray Bookchin's "Towards a Liberatory Technology" in his book Post-Scarcity Anarchism), liberals (Keyne's "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren"), and the occasional heterodox Marxists (see the third from last page of Huey Newton's piece at http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/Huey_P_Newton/pdf/Huey.pdf , or Mark Fisher's thoughts on highly automated "luxury communism" in his piece in the book Futures & Fictions from Repeater Books). Marx himself sort of hinted at such an idea in the "fragment on machines" from his Grundrisse although he didn't develop the idea. And of course it's not an uncommon idea among futurists and science fiction writers that we might someday have a "post-scarcity" society where fully automated manufacturing machines are either compact enough that each household or small community can have their own (like some visions of nanotechnology, or the replicators in Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Next Generation which were probably inspired by Arthur C. Clarke's discussion of a such a hypothetical device in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future, with the notable comment that "A society based on the Replicator would be so completely different from ours that the present debate between Capitalism and Communism would become quite meaningless"), or larger automated manufacturing facilities which could be operated by governments as a kind of public utility.
With advances in the functionality of robots and 3D printing it seems to me not so implausible that within the next century or two we could automate all the rote manual labor involved in mass production, so a sort of flexible automated production on demand economy, with public ownership of at least some significant fraction of the production machinery, might become possible even if planned economies are unworkable. Perhaps future generations will come to think of Marx as broadly correct in his views on the "realm of freedom" only being widely attainable once technology has developed sufficiently to let our lives become relatively independent of the "realm of necessity", even if major aspects of his vision of the path to get there turned out to be wrong in many ways. (Also, since you have occasionally posted thoughts on science fiction books, I'd love it if you would someday consider writing something on the politics of various works of "post-scarcity" science fiction along these lines, like Star Trek, or Iain Bank's Culture series, or Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway")
Thank you for this. I think I blogged once on the Culture serie. But it sounds like you may have more interesting things to say. You should try it or guestpost!