If we take the possibility of democratic progress seriously, we should therefore counter Weber’s conservative nostalgia for a premodern, enchanted world. As the critic Bruce Robbins has argued in an insightful analysis of Weber, “the suggestion that ‘genuine community’ used to exist omits any consideration of those who were excluded from such community—the slaves and women of ancient Greece, to pick at random from a long series of examples. Opinion on the genuineness of community would depend on whose experience was consulted. If you asked landless laborers in the Middle Ages, such community might have seemed less unquestionably genuine.”10 Furthermore, if contemporary workers express greater discontent with their lives than did Weber’s imagined peasant of the past, it is “a result of rising expectations rather than disenchantment—a product of democratic progress to be set against centuries of resignation by the poor to their inevitable social fate. No, there was no malaise back then. Why? Because people knew their places.”11 We can thus offer a quite different diagnosis of our predicament than the one proposed by Weber and his followers. The dissatisfactions of our current state of secularization are not due to the idea of progress. As Robbins emphasizes, the dissatisfactions are rather due to “the failure of progress,” namely, our “failure to achieve a level of social justice that the premodern world did not even strive to achieve.”12
The key to such an understanding of the promise of secular life can be found in the work of Karl Marx. Marx’s thinking is often conflated with the totalitarian communist regimes of the twentieth century, but I will argue that he is the most important inheritor of the secular commitment to freedom and democracy. In contrast to Weber and other political theologians, Marx has no nostalgia for the premodern world. Rather, he makes clear that both capitalism and liberalism are historical conditions of possibility for the emancipation that he espouses. This is why Marx, in his critique of capitalism and liberalism, takes issue with these forms of life on their own terms. He seeks to show that capitalism and liberalism require their own overcoming by virtue of the secular commitment they bear within themselves to freedom and democracy.
At the time when Marx lived—and subsequently inspired by his writings—there was a growing secular recognition that we are what we do and that we can do things differently. We do not have to be subjected to the laws of religion or capital, but can transform our historical situation through collective action and create institutions for the free development of social individuals as an end in itself.
Thus, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—during the same decades when Weber lamented the supposed loss of “genuine community”—workers formed democratic socialist organizations that provided a sense of practical identity and solidarity, as well as ethical and political purpose. The workers’ movements organized youth groups, choirs, book clubs, sports teams, and other communal activities. They pursued democracy on the ground by publishing daily newspapers and journals that provided a forum for ongoing, open debate about the stakes and goals of the movement. Workers of all stripes were offered further education, women came together to pursue their own emancipation, and there was a common cause in the shared effort to build a better society. The words of a German miner, aged thirty-three and with eight children, echo the testimony of many workers from this period. “The modern labor movement,” he said in 1912, “enriches me and all my friends through the growing light of recognition. We understand that we are no longer the anvil but rather the hammer that forms the future of our children, and that feeling is worth more than gold.”13 This sense of spiritual freedom—that we can be the subjects of our history and not merely subject to our history—is at the core of Marx’s notion of emancipation.
The growing international solidarity of the workers’ movements was largely broken by the First World War, which erupted in 1914. By the time of the Russian Revolution in 1917, the material and social conditions for creating a new form of society were largely in ruins. As the great political thinker, feminist, and activist Rosa Luxemburg observed at the time, Russia was “an isolated land, exhausted by world war, strangled by imperialism, betrayed by the international proletariat.”14 Under such circumstances, it was virtually impossible to achieve an exemplary democratic socialism. As Luxemburg put it, the revolutionaries could not be expected “to perform miracles” but must be understood “within the limits of historical possibilities.”15 Yet, already during the first stages of the Russian Revolution, Luxemburg rightly warned against the dangers of making a virtue of necessity and losing hold of the commitment to democracy. It would be fatal, she maintained, if the revolutionaries were “to freeze into a complete theoretical system all the tactics forced upon them by these fatal circumstances” and “place into its storehouse as new discoveries all the distortions prescribed in Russia by necessity and compulsion—in the last analysis only by-products of the bankruptcy of international socialism in the present world war.”16
By the time of Stalin and Mao, the bankruptcy would be in full force. No one who takes up Marx’s ideas today should make any excuses for such totalitarian regimes, which failed to grasp the insights of Marx not only in practice but also in theory. To retrieve and develop Marx’s insights in a new direction, we need instead to engage the fundamental question of freedom with which he is concerned.
The task is all the more important because the appeal to freedom in recent decades has been appropriated for agendas on the political right, where the idea of freedom serves to defend “the free market” and is largely reduced to a formal conception of individual liberty. In response, many thinkers on the political left have retreated from or even explicitly rejected the idea of freedom. This is a fatal mistake. Any emancipatory politics—as well as any critique of capitalism—requires a conception of freedom. Only in light of a commitment to freedom can we render anything intelligible as oppression, exploitation, or alienation. Moreover, only in light of a commitment to freedom can we give an account of what we are trying to achieve and why it matters.
Thus, we cannot understand Marx’s critique of capitalism unless we understand the notion of freedom to which he is committed. Understanding this notion requires understanding why questions of economy and material conditions are inseparable from all spiritual questions of freedom. The economic organization of our society is not a mere instrumental means for the pursuit of individual ends. Rather, our shared economy is itself expressive of how we understand the relation between means and ends. Economic matters are not abstract but concern the most general and concrete questions of what we do with our time. As I will show in detail, how we organize our economy is intrinsic to how we live together and what we collectively value.
From his early to his late works, Marx’s analyses of economic questions proceed from a philosophical grasp of what it means to be living and free. All living beings are finite, both in the sense that they are not self-sufficient and in the sense that they can die. Living beings must therefore draw on their environment to sustain themselves. A living being cannot simply exist but must do something to stay alive. The need of the living organism to sustain itself—the labor required to keep ourselves alive—minimally defines what Marx calls the realm of necessity. Because we are living beings, we must work to maintain ourselves. Yet, all the time we have is not necessarily required to ensure our biological survival and it is an open question for us what we should do with the surplus of time. This is why, for Marx, we also live in the realm of freedom. We are able to engage our life activity as a free activity, since we can ask ourselves what to do and if it is the right thing to do.
Moreover, through technological innovations (from simple tools to advanced machines) we can reduce the time we need to expend on securing our survival, by replacing large parts of our living labor with nonliving capacities for producing social goods. We can thereby decrease our realm of necessity (the time required to keep ourselves alive) and increase our realm of freedom (the time available
for activities that we count as ends in themselves, which includes time for engaging the question of what matters to us and which activities we should count as ends in themselves).
The exercise of our spiritual freedom depends both on material conditions of production and social relations of recognition. Insofar as we spend our time working a job that is not fulfilling but merely serves as a means for our survival, our labor time is unfree, since we cannot affirm that what we do is an expression of who we are. Instead of being free to engage the question of what makes our life worth living—the question of what we ought to do with our time—our lives are mortgaged to a form of labor that is required for our survival. To live a free life, it is not enough that we have the right to freedom. We must have access to the material resources as well as the forms of education that allow us to pursue our freedom and to “own” the question of what to do with our time. What belongs to each one of us—what is irreducibly our own—is not property or goods but the time of our lives.
To be clear, the emphasis on my own life—or your own life—is not in opposition to sociality. As Marx underlines: “My own existence is social activity, and therefore that which I make of myself, I make of myself for society and with the awareness of myself as a social being.”17 Hence, to “own” your life is not to be independent but to be able to acknowledge your dependence. A good example is the experience of love. When you love someone—e.g., as a friend, as a parent, as a life partner—your dependence on the other is not a restriction that prevents you from being free. Rather, your dependence on the other belongs to the life you affirm as your own. Acting on behalf of the one you love is not an alien purpose but the expression of a commitment in which you can recognize yourself, since caring for the interests and the well-being of the other is part of your own understanding of who you are. Likewise, if the work you do is for the sake of something you believe in as an end in itself—as it is for me when I teach my classes or when I write this book—then even the difficult or exhausting demands of the work are not an external imposition on a prior freedom. On the contrary, the demands of my students and the difficulties of my writing are an intrinsic part of the form of life to which I am committed. Thus, even when it is hard to sustain my work I can recognize the challenges as ones to which I hold myself.
If you cannot see yourself in the purpose of your occupation, then your labor time is alienated, even if your job entails a high salary and great social prestige. This may seem like a small problem compared with the labor conditions of most of the people who produce the commodities that populate our world. There is certainly a harrowing difference between those who assemble our computers in factories or manufacture our clothes in sweatshops and those of us who turn on our computers or put on our clothes while forgetting the labor conditions under which they were produced. Yet from Marx’s perspective these issues are all connected, since they concern how our shared economic life is organized and how it is inimical to our freedom. To be able to lead free lives and own what we do, we must be able to see ourselves both in the purpose of our occupation and in the social conditions of the labor that sustains our lives; to recognize our own commitment to freedom in the institutions on which we depend and to which we contribute. Such identification requires that all of us have the freedom to participate in possible transformations of the purpose of what we do—democratic transformations of the social institutions of labor—as well as the freedom to give up or call into question our supposed vocation in favor of different occupations.
In short, our freedom requires that we can own the question of what to do with our time. For Marx, political progress is measured by the degree to which it allows for such freedom. This is why all readings of Marx that posit a final resolution as the goal of politics—either in the form of a totalitarian state or a utopian life that would overcome finitude—betray the most important insights of his work. The goal is not to overcome finitude, but to transform qualitatively our ability to lead free lives. Even in their most ideal state our lives will have to reckon with the risks of finitude—the risks of losing what we love and losing our ability to do what we love—since these risks are intrinsic to freedom itself.
Moreover, there is no question of leaving the realm of necessity behind. How we lead our lives in the realm of freedom is inseparable from how we live our lives in the realm of necessity. As living beings, we will always have to do some form of work to maintain our lives, and labor is not in itself something bad. On the contrary, all forms of free activities—as in my examples of teaching and writing—are themselves forms of labor. An emancipated life is not a life that is free from work, but a life in which we pursue work on the basis of our own commitments. Even our socially necessary labor can be an expression of our freedom if it is shared for the sake of the common good. The aim, then, is to decrease the realm of necessity and increase the realm of freedom by making the relation between the two a democratic question. We will always have to work—for better or for worse—but what will count as necessary labor and what will count as free labor is a matter of our commitments and our social organization. For the same reason, the relation between necessity and freedom cannot be settled once and for all but must always be negotiated. There are no definitive political solutions in Marx but rather the clarification of a vital problem. What we need to negotiate—both individually and collectively—is how to cultivate the finite time that is the condition of our freedom.
We can thus understand why the advent of capitalism is a form of progress for Marx. Wage labor under capitalism is historically the first social form which in principle recognizes that each one of us “owns” the time of our lives and that our lifetime is inherently “valuable.” Unlike slaves—who are systematically denied ownership of their time—we are “free” to sell our labor to someone who is willing to buy it. Moreover, wage labor is explicitly conceived as a means for us to achieve the end of leading a free life.
The promise of achieving freedom through wage labor is necessarily contradicted, however, by how we measure the value of our lives under capitalism. Marx’s critique of the measure of value under capitalism is the most important argument in all of his work, but also the most misunderstood. Contrary to a widely held assumption—among both his followers on the Left and his critics on the Right—Marx does not subscribe to a general labor theory of value, which holds that labor is the necessary source of all wealth. Rather, Marx argues that the production of wealth under capitalism entails a historically specific measure of value (socially necessary labor time), which contradicts the value of free time and must be overcome for the sake of our emancipation.
In developing Marx’s critique of the capitalist measure of value, I argue that it calls for a revaluation of value. The revaluation in question requires not only a theoretical but also a practical transformation of the way we lead our lives. All the way from our social organization of labor and our technological production of goods to our forms of education, we need to pursue a revaluation that acknowledges our finite lifetime as the condition for anything to matter and for anything to be valuable. Marx himself has notoriously little to say about how we would be able to lead our lives beyond capitalism. Drawing on what Marx calls communism, however, I outline a new vision of democratic socialism that is committed to providing the material and spiritual conditions for each one of us to lead a free life, in mutual recognition of our dependence on one another. Through a critique of capitalism and liberalism on their own terms, I specify the general principles of democratic socialism and elaborate their concrete implications. What I call democratic socialism is neither an imposed blueprint nor an abstract utopia. Rather, I derive the principles of democratic socialism from the commitment to freedom and equality that we already avow.
The political project of democratic socialism requires secular faith. To have faith in the possibility of actualizing freedom is not to believe that it is guaranteed or that it can be secured. To have faith
in the possibility of freedom is to have faith in something that will always be precarious and contestable, even in its fullest actualization.
The struggle for freedom is an act of secular faith because it is committed to a form of individual and collective life that is essentially finite. This commitment to a free, finite life is implicit in all forms of resistance to exploitation and alienation. The only ability that can be exploited or alienated—and the only one that can be liberated—is our ability to own the question of what to do with our time, since that ability is presupposed by all forms of freedom. The ability is certainly developmental and in need of cultural formation, but without faith in such an ability the idea of freedom is unintelligible. To be responsive to the exploitation or alienation of someone’s life, you have to believe in the fragile possibility and the intrinsic value of her ability to own her time. The same secular faith is exhibited by anyone who takes up the struggle against her own oppression. To understand yourself as being exploited or alienated, you have to believe that you have a finite, precious time to live and that your own life is being taken away from you when that time is taken away from you.
Accordingly, the cultivation of secular faith is indispensable for progressive politics. The pursuit of emancipation requires that we are committed to improving the material and social conditions of freedom as an end in itself. This is why Marx emphasizes that the critique of religion must be accompanied by a critique of the existing forms of our life together. That those who are enslaved or live in poverty may need faith in God to carry on with their lives is not a reason to promote religious faith but a reason to abolish slavery and poverty.
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