The reformation of capitalism through the redistribution of wealth can never achieve such a transformation of society, since the wealth to be distributed is produced by the social relations of capitalist exploitation and commodification. The more we restrict exploitation and commodification, the less wealth we have to distribute. This practical contradiction in any progressive attempt to redistribute wealth is unavoidable as long as we live under capitalism. If we are to understand the concrete challenges that will face all redistributive reforms, we need to recognize the practical contradiction and take it into account in pursuing our political strategies as well as in articulating our priorities.
Let me recall, however, that the practical contradiction does not entail that redistributive reforms are meaningless and should be abandoned. As Rosa Luxemburg argued at the beginning of the twentieth century, “the daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions”38—such reform work is absolutely indispensable. Yet, as Luxemburg went on to emphasize, reforms should be understood as means toward the end of a “social revolution,”39 which requires the overcoming of wage labor. This is why I have argued that social democratic reforms—whether in terms of a universal basic income or a stronger welfare state—should not be conflated with a solution to the basic problem of value under capitalism. Rather, social democratic reforms should be explicitly conceived and developed as means toward the end of a fundamental transformation of our economic system in terms of democratic socialism, which requires revaluation rather than redistribution.
In the last years of his life, King can be seen to be on his way toward such an insight. Rather than limit himself to advocating reforms, he repeatedly calls for “a radical revolution of values,”40 which he links to a notion of “democratic socialism.” In Montgomery in 1955, King had already declared: “We must oppose all exploitation, we want no classes and castes, we want to set everybody free.”41 Moving into the sixties, King avows his commitment to forge “episodic social protest into the hammer of social revolution.”42 He urges his followers not to “think of our movement as one that seeks to integrate the Negro into the existing values of American society,”43 and he emphasizes with explicit reference to capitalism that “we are not interested in being integrated into this value structure.”44
King does not explain at length what he means by “a radical revolution of values,” but he makes clear that it hinges on a “shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society,”45 which targets the purpose of profit in favor of recognizing one another as ends in ourselves. Moreover, there are indications that King’s vision of social revolution was more radical than his official pronouncements made it seem. At a staff meeting for his Poor People’s Campaign in January 1968, King asked for the tape recorder to be turned off before addressing his idea of democratic socialism. “He talked about the fact that he didn’t believe that capitalism as it was constructed could meet the needs of poor people, and that what we might need to look at was a kind of socialism, but a democratic form of socialism,” we learn from an eyewitness report. “I can’t say this publicly,” King told the staff members, “and if you say I said it I’m not gonna admit to it.”46
Only three months later King was shot dead in Memphis. Neither his notion of a radical revolution of values nor his vision of democratic socialism was ever elaborated. The task of such an elaboration is ours.
To this end, I have provided a philosophical, economical, and political account of why the capitalist measure of social wealth is self-contradictory and calls for a revaluation of value. Furthermore, I have specified the three principles of democratic socialism: the measure of wealth in terms of socially available free time, collective ownership of the means of production, and the pursuit of labor from each according to her ability, to each according to her need. These principles express what the revaluation of value demands in practice. The principles of democratic socialism are not posited as an ideal that is external to the lives we lead. Rather, the principles make explicit what is implicit in the commitment to equality and freedom through which we are already trying to justify our liberal democracy and our capitalist economy. The commitment to equality demands that we pursue our labor from each according to her ability, to each according to her need; the commitment to freedom demands that we measure our wealth in terms of socially available free time; and both of these demands can be met in practice only if we own the means of production collectively, employing and developing them for the benefit of our shared lives rather than for the sake of profit.
To be sure, a set of principles does not by itself entail an effective transformation of our society. Given the power relations of capitalism under which we live, the achievement of democratic socialism can only be the result of a sustained and difficult political struggle. An indispensable part of the struggle, however, is to clarify to ourselves what is wrong with our current form of life and where we are committed to going. I am under no illusion that my account of democratic socialism is sufficient to secure that it will be achieved, but I hold the account to be necessary to orient our struggle for freedom and grasp the meaning of a truly emancipatory social revolution. The probability of change is not a given fact of the world that can be observed from a neutral standpoint; the probability of change is itself something that is transformed by an account that discloses the possibility of change in a new light.
For the same reason, I do not regard my philosophical account as external to the struggle for social revolution but as itself being part of such revolution. A philosophical account of what is entailed by our commitment to leading a free life—the kind of account I have sought to provide in this book—is not detached and observational but is itself expressive of a practical commitment to transform our sense of who we are and who we can be. Indeed, there can be no detached standpoint from which we merely observe ourselves or the world. All activities are practical—including the activity of observation—and like all practical activities, philosophy cannot leave the world unchanged but necessarily transforms the terrain it explores. Marx’s famous claim (“the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”)47 is therefore misleading. Strictly speaking, any interpretation of the world already changes the world, if only by recognizing or misrecognizing where we find ourselves and who we are trying to be. Many philosophers have certainly taken themselves to be merely interpreting the world, but in doing so they were mistaken. The point is that philosophy changes the world.
The question, then, is not if philosophy changes the world, but how it changes the world. As Marx makes clear in one of his most important declarations of intent (the public letter to his friend Arnold Ruge), “we do not attempt dogmatically to prefigure the future, but want to find the new world only through criticism of the old.”48 Such a critique proceeds “by taking any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and developing from the unique forms of existing reality the true reality as its norm and final end.”49 The true reality in question is not an abstract ideal but derives from the historical achievement of our commitment to freedom and equality, which is why Marx maintains that “we develop new principles to the world out of its own principles.”50 This critical practice undertakes what Marx calls “the reform of consciousness,” which consists in “enabling the world to clarify its consciousness, in waking it from its dream about itself.”51 The task is to “show the world what it is fighting for” by pursuing “the work of our time to clarify to itself (critical philosophy) the meaning of its own struggle and its own desires.”52
The two forms of consciousness that Marx identifies as the main subjects of critique are religious and political. Our religious and political self-understanding are the main subjects of critique for Marx—as they are for me in the chapters of This Life—since religion and politics are the dominant f
orms in which we express our understanding of what we struggle for, what we are dreaming of, and what we desire. To transform our understanding of our struggles, our dreams, and our desires, we must therefore transform the practice of religion and politics. As Marx explains in the letter to Ruge:
Our whole aim can consist only in bringing religious and political questions into self-conscious human form….Our motto must therefore be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through analyzing the mystical consciousness, which is unclear to itself, whether it appears in religious or political form. Then it will be shown that the world has long been dreaming of something that it actually can make its own, if only it becomes conscious of it. It will be shown that it is not a matter of drawing a great dividing line between past and future, but of carrying out the thoughts of the past. And finally, it will be shown that mankind begins no new work, but consciously accomplishes its old work.53
This is Marx’s version of King’s “I Have a Dream.” The commitment to freedom and equality is a promise that was made in the past but never fulfilled, a dream bequeathed to us by previous generations who were not able to make it a reality, a work that was begun but remains to be done and that we have to carry out as we turn toward the future. As Marx emphasizes, the key to waking up—the key to making the dream an actual reality—is the form of self-consciousness: the recognition that it is our dream and that we have to make it our own through our practical activity. Making the dream come true is a matter of our work because it is a secular dream of freedom (the liberation of finite life) rather than a religious dream of salvation (the liberation from finite life). The lives we lead, the form of society we sustain, will always depend on us and on what we do with our time.
II
The difference between the secular and the religious may seem to be a decisive difference between Marx and King. In his Christian writings, King himself draws a sharp line between his own religious faith and Marx’s secular commitments. While King expresses sympathy with Marx’s passion for economic justice, he believes that Marx is a material determinist who denies the “spiritual” aspects of life. Moreover, from his religious standpoint, King takes issue with what he calls “the grand illusion that man, unaided by any divine power, can save himself and usher in a new society.”54 In contrast, King affirms his Christian faith that “at the heart of reality is a Heart, a loving Father who works through history for the salvation of his children. Man cannot save himself, for man is not the measure of all things and humanity is not God. Bound by the chains of his own sin and finiteness, man needs a Savior.”55
As we shall see, however, such a notion of God plays no role in King’s political speeches. His religious sermons avow the existence of “a wise and loving God” who ensures that “this universe is not a tragic expression of meaningless chaos but a marvelous display of orderly cosmos”56 and will lead us “through death’s dark night into the bright daybreak of eternal life.”57 Yet there are no such invocations of supernatural agency and otherworldly redemption when King addresses the struggle for emancipation and the possibility of social change. On the contrary, I will show that the apparently religious rhetoric of King’s political speeches is better understood in terms of secular faith. What matters is that we can overcome our alienation and be emancipated in this life. By the same token, we will see in practice how our spiritual freedom is inseparable from our dependence on material conditions and a fragile form of social recognition. Our finitude is not a chain from which we need to be released by an eternal Savior but the condition of possibility for our freedom and our care for one another.
My secular reading of King draws on the insights of a philosopher whose work we first encountered in chapter 5. In addition, he is the philosopher whom both Marx and King acknowledged as their most important influence: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. In an interview during the bus boycott in 1956, King told the Montgomery Advertiser that Hegel was his favorite philosopher58 and references to Hegel recur throughout his work. Already as an undergraduate at Crozer Theological Seminary, King had read Hegel, and while pursuing his doctorate at Boston University he studied Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as well as his Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right. Indeed, the philosophical discussion group that King hosted in his Boston apartment was called “the dialectical society,” named after the dialectical method of philosophy that Hegel articulated and that Marx sought to develop in his own way.
From the beginning to the end of his work, Hegel is concerned with grasping the conditions of our freedom as social individuals. Hegel lived in Europe during a historical period (1770–1831) characterized by great political revolutions and profound transformations in the understanding of what it means to be free, stretching from the American Revolution in the 1770s to the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and economic globalization in the first decades of the 1800s. For Hegel, the two most important events were the publication of Immanuel Kant’s revolutionary philosophical trilogy—Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of Judgment (1790)—and the French Revolution that began in 1789. Both of these events disclosed the stakes of a modern, secular conception of freedom that Hegel pursued throughout his philosophical trajectory. 59
Kant’s revolutionary move is to argue that the question of authority cannot be settled by appeals to religion, tradition, or the given laws of the state. For a given law to be binding, we must hold ourselves to be bound by it. A given law cannot have authority automatically and by itself—it must be taken as authoritative by us to have authority over us. For the same reason, a given law can lose its hold over us or be called into question by us, which was dramatically demonstrated by the French Revolution and more generally by the transition from monarchy to democracy.
Such dramatic transformations illuminate that we are always acting “under the idea of freedom,” as Kant famously puts it. As practical agents we have always been free implicitly, but the Enlightenment commitment to freedom (which Kant memorably describes as our emergence from “self-imposed immaturity”)60 makes our freedom explicit. In articulating the philosophical ground for our freedom, Kant is not trying to prove from a third-person standpoint that we have free will. Rather, he is trying to show us that we necessarily understand ourselves to be free from our first-person standpoint. Our freedom cannot be refuted by theoretical doubt, since it is presupposed by the first-person standpoint of anyone who is engaged in the practical activity of leading her life.61 Being free is not a matter of being unconstrained but of being confronted with the question of what you ought to do and what you ought to believe. From your first-person standpoint, such a question is always at work, if only implicitly. In doing anything—and you are always doing something—you are engaged in the process of responding to the question of what you ought to do and what you ought to believe. If there were no such question involved—if it were immediately given what to do, without any possible hesitation, deliberation, or alteration on your part—you could not understand yourself as an agent, since there would be nothing for you to do; it would all be automatic.
Our freedom is therefore inseparable from our self-consciousness as actors in the world. Our self-consciousness does not have to be explicit but is inherent in everything we do as practical agents. Following the pathbreaking Hegel scholar Robert Pippin, we can see how Kant’s insight regarding self-consciousness is deepened and radicalized by Hegel.62 As Hegel makes clear, that we are self-conscious does not mean that we can retreat to a detached reflection on ourselves and on the world. We are never merely aware of the world but necessarily self-aware as being engaged in the world and committed to a practical activity. For the same reason, the notion of self-consciousness or self-awareness should not be understood in terms of an inner self that is available through introspection or observation. That we are self-conscious does not mean that we are transparent to ourselves, but that we always act on a conception of ourselves and of th
e world, a conception that may be self-deceived and may need to be revised or called into question.
To take a simple example, if I perceive the color blue, I am not merely perceiving blue; I take myself to be perceiving blue. This self-awareness is built into the form of the perception itself, rather than added to the perception in a second step of reflection. Likewise, if I perform an act of friendship, I am not merely doing something; I take myself to be acting as a friend and this self-understanding is built into the act itself. That I take myself to be doing something does not mean that I can be certain that my color perception is correct or that my self-understanding as a friend is adequate. On the contrary, it is by virtue of the form of self-consciousness that I can be receptive to being corrected regarding my color perception or challenged regarding my self-understanding as a friend. If my perception of blue was immediate—if no form of self-consciousness was involved in the act of perception—it would be inconceivable to me that my perception could be mistaken, since I would not understand that any activity of my own was involved in the perception. Likewise, if my act of friendship was immediate—if no form of self-consciousness was involved in my being a friend—it would be inconceivable to me that my act could fail to be an act of friendship, since I would not understand that I am answerable for what I do. The form of self-consciousness is therefore the condition for being beholden to others, as well as for the possibility of self-correction and self-transformation. It is because I take myself to be perceiving blue that I can hold myself open to being mistaken about the color of what I perceive; and it is because I take myself to be a friend that I can hold myself open to being mistaken about what the friendship requires.
This Life Page 40