The First Marx by Peter Lamb Douglas Burnham

Author:Peter Lamb,Douglas Burnham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

In this case the structure of the system built on the institution of private property involves exploitation – one need not identify specific examples of unfairness in relations between individuals. Furthermore, if people in some cases exploit one another, even though we would not suggest this is unfair in a narrow sense, they are each making each other worse off because a life of purely self-interest does not allow one to achieve human flourishing as a member of the species-being. Systematic exploitation, where founded upon alienation, is thus difficult to identify – for example, as we shall see it disguises itself as ‘common sense’ – because it avoids categorization under the standard categories of moral infraction between individuals. Instead, exploitation qua some form of harm becomes an exacerbated alienation of stunted forms of human life from the full potential of the human.

Another, specifically humanist, way of grasping the significance of systemic exploitation as a form of harm, and as a problem that could be overcome, can be illustrated by looking at one of Marx’s very earliest extant writings. Let us turn to an essay he wrote at the age of 17. In it one can detect the effect of the humanist education he had received at a high school in which the German Enlightenment, in particular the work of Kant, was hugely prominent (McLellan, 2006: 7–8). This influence appears to have shaped Marx’s view. Kant was well aware of broadly utilitarian approaches to moral philosophy, particularly in Hume, as well as the so-called enlightened egoism tradition in moral thought; he argues explicitly against them both in the second section of Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Kant, 2002: 53–62). Likewise, as we mentioned earlier, Kant’s formulation of the moral law in terms of persons as ends in themselves is one essential ingredient in the general meaning of exploitation. However, more to our purposes, in one of his lectures on pedagogy, published as a collection in 1803, Kant (1900: 10) had expressed the following view:

In times past men had no conception of the perfection to which human nature might attain – even now we have not a very clear idea of the matter. This much, however, is certain: that no individual man, no matter what degree of culture may be reached by his pupils, can insure their attaining their destiny. To succeed in this, not the work of a few individuals only is necessary, but that of the whole human race.

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