Absolute Ethical Life II
The Universal and The Particular
In 2024, Marxist scholar Kohei Saito delivered a lecture at U Chicago. Analyzing Marx’s understudied ecological notebooks, Saito argued that as Marx perceived the devastating effects of industrialization on the natural world, he abandoned the notion that societies must pass through a stage of industrial capitalism in order to reach communism. Looking to agrarian peasant societies such as existed in Russia, Marx began entertaining the possibility that communism might issue organically from contexts that had not yet industrialized.1 In Europe, already stricken with the forces of bourgeois capitalism, it would have to erupt from the ashes of industry. Perhaps later, Marx suggested, the communism that emerged from these radically different contexts might join up together in common cause.
In attendance was renowned post-colonial thinker Dipesh Chakrabarty whose seminal book Provincializing Europe (2000) had challenged the Enlightenment conception of a universal human experience culminating in a shared secular modernity. This triumphal historical frame, which he calls “History 1” had posited modernity, civilization and capitalism as epochal ruptures that first occurred in Europe and then, later, were adopted elsewhere. Such a narrative, he argued, had the effect of erasing the particular experiences of the non-West, as footnotes or prehistories to an inevitable homogenization of historical time and experience. In contrast, Chakrabarty proposed an alternative reading of history, termed “History 2,” that would be attentive to forms of life that were not uniformly subsumed into capital’s hegemonic logic. Instead of teleologically assuming the supremacy of Europe’s particular self-understanding, such an expansive approach to history would trace the practices and lifeworlds that persist alongside global capitalist hegemony.2
It should come as no surprise, then, that Chakrabarty bristled at Saito’s presentation. During the Q&A he asked: Even if Marx no longer disparaged the non-Capitalist world, didn’t he nonetheless presume that there would be a universal political vision that would subsume it?
Here there are echoes of Rubashov’s lamentations at the end of Darkness at Noon discussed in Part I. For Rubashov, his revolution had failed because, in pursuing abstract goals of human emancipation, it became indifferent to the particular experience of individuals. For generations reared on Cold War-era anti-communist propaganda, this critique of the Soviet Union should be familiar: perhaps motivated by noble aspirations, it lacked the dynamism of liberalism and succeeded only in bulldozing its particularities into a dreary, monolithic mass, stupefied by ideological group-think.
It should maybe come as a surprise that Saito’s cheerful response to Chakrabarty’s question was “I don’t have a problem with that because I am a communist.”
He might have expanded on that answer by saying that communism is the material precondition that allows for the flourishing of particulars, a condition which I will argue is coterminous with what Hegel called “absolute ethical life.” Capitalism may permit indigenous cultural practices and belief systems to the extent that they do not interfere with the ruthless conscription of the masses into a regime of wage labor. Communism, by contrast, directs surpluses towards communally determined ends, not advances in production to outpace competitors. Transforming production in this way has the significant effect of liberating us from ceaseless battle with owners of capital for scraps of free-time. Because communist production would not be driven by capitalists who are in existential competition with one another for shares of the market, there would not be a structural incentive to deny workers free time, one of the only means through which capitalists increase productivity. Socializing the production that we need to survive–what Marx called “the realm of necessity”–gives us both the time and resources to expand what Marx called “the realm of freedom.” No longer driven by structural forces that appear to operate outside of us, we are liberated to develop our aptitudes and author our social relations according to our own prerogatives. In short, through communist universality, we’d have more time to cultivate ourselves as particular human beings in ways that are distinct from the necessities of subsistence.
Those familiar with Hegel may take issue with my applying his ideas to arrive at Marxist conclusions, but I want to suggest that by reading Hegel historically we can get a sense of why he was unable to arrive at those conclusions himself. Further, as Terry Pinkard and Michael Lazarus have argued, there is good reason to suspect that a socialist or communist politics much more readily addresses Hegel’s antinomies than the proto-Keynesianism he espoused. Like his near contemporary Adam Smith, Hegel envisioned an ideally functioning economy of small producers exchanging use values - goods produced to be consumed, not exchanged. They were writing as what we now recognize as capitalist forces were just starting to accelerate and so could not yet envision a condition, such as ours, where the forces of production have superseded the power of the state. It is partly for this reason that Hegel appealed to state-power (and Smith hoped for “far-sighted lawmakers”) to check the growing unwieldiness of market forces.
Hegel was concerned that market societies had the innate propensity to develop both ultra wealthy, and ultra poor populations. Both, he observed were constitutionally de-socialized: denied the opportunity to productively contribute to a social whole, thereby foreclosing recognition of their interdependence with others. For Hegel, this ostensible paradox is the crucial dialectic between individual and society: only in the free recognition that one is dependent on the whole is one capable of becoming a self-sufficient individual. Work for one’s own needs is actually work that sustains others, so by sublating ones individuality into the social whole, one also sustains oneself.3 This reciprocated recognition that reconciles particular and universal is one key attribute of what Hegel termed sittlichkeit, often translated as “ethical life.” In a society of small scale butchers, bakers and brewers (held in much greater esteem by Adam Smith than landlords or merchants), it is easy to see how the market could become a space where needs and human efforts might harmonize and where social forces might seem cohesive, intelligible and neatly reciprocal. But already in Hegel’s time, he observed that the realm of particular interests, which he termed Bürgerliche Gesellschaft or civil society, required constant shepherding by a class of bureaucrats. He called these a “universal class” because they harmonized society’s particular interests toward shared ends, preventing de-socialized “rabble” from festering at its margins. To this end, he envisioned social welfare programs that would bring the poor back into the fold and give them the leverage needed to productively reengage with the social whole. The upper echelons of society, meanwhile, would be driven towards universal ends by the sovereign– for Hegel, a constitutional monarch.
Above all, though, Hegel put great stock in “intermediary” organizations like municipalities, guilds and scholastic corporations, which he hoped would offer a fuller, concrete integration of individuals into ethical community within civil society, by orienting them to the universal through shared rules, welfare and education. He even envisioned people voting through these “corporations” instead of as individuals, since it was through our collective labor that our relation to the social is made real and not as isolated individuals.
In Mutual Aid (1902), anarchist Peter Kropotkin also looked to guilds as exemplary of the human propensity towards cooperative (not competitive) social organization. Analyzing medieval guild contracts, he observed that they demonstrated a durable non-state organization which anchored communal life while delivering social and economic security to its members. Ultimately, though he saw them as an artifact of a bygone era, tragically undone by the consolidation of monarchical power and the hegemony of the modern state.4
Like Kropotkin, Marx recognized the historical specificity of the institutions that Hegel’s argument relied upon. For this reason, he challenged Hegel’s faith in the state to correct the hyper-individualism of the market. The Prussia of Hegel’s day still retained vestiges of this organic feudal order and so it was easy for him to arrive at the conclusion that emboldening institutions like guilds might stave off this market society’s excesses by forging greater cohesion. But Marx observed that the advent of market society had already dissolved this corporate unity between state and society, collective and individual. As Lucio Colletti writes:
In modern ‘civil society’ the individual appears as liberated from all social ties. He is integrated neither into a citizen community, as in ancient times, nor into a particular corporate community (for example a trade guild), as in medieval times. In ‘civil society’ – which for Hegel as for Adam Smith and Ricardo was a ‘market society’ of producers – individuals are divided from and independent of each other. Under such conditions, just as each person is independent of all others, so does the real nexus of mutual dependence (the bond of social unity) become in turn independent of all individuals. This common interest, or ‘universal’ interest, renders itself independent of all interested parties and assumes a separate existence; and such social unity established in separation from its members is, precisely, the hypostatized modern state.5
Under capitalism, people understand themselves to be fundamentally self-interested independent actors, even though in fact we are materially dependent upon one another. Our social unity appears not as a product of our collective life, but as something outside of us, embodied in the modern state. Marx argues that this is why Hegel looks to the state as the locus of universality capable of reconciling the particular differences of market society. The universality already existed in civil society itself but had become estranged from us as an epistemological effect of the market. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, exemplifies this estrangement.
In order to achieve a reconciliation of the universal and the particular, then, it is not enough to retreat into pre-capitalist forms. The answer must somehow come from civil society itself.
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Very interesting description of a neighborhood council social experiment in Cincinnati in the 1910s from Cincinnati Curiosities:
Honest, perfectly crafted folk songs from the Bard of Ludlow, KY:
Most famously in this oft-cited letter to Vera Zasulich for which Marx drafted numerous replies, suggesting his earnest engagement with the question.
The most serious Marxist critique of Provincializing Europe was Vivek Chibber’s 2013 Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital which argued that capital does not need to bulldoze indigenous practices and beliefs, and has indeed happily existed alongside them, so long as it imposes economic coercion that compels people to sell their labor to survive.
Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Guide, (New York, OUP, 2023) 116.
Lucio Colletti, introduction to Karl Marx, Early Writings, (New York, Penguin, 1992), 34.