Utopia and its Opposites

Abstract

What is most truly utopian about the thought of Marx, so one might claim, is its distaste for the instrumental. Marx is pained by the notion that what he calls human powers and capacities should be subjected to a dreary means/ends rationality, and looks to a social order in which men and women would be able to realize such powers and capacities as self-delighting ends in themselves. They would no longer be called upon to justify themselves at the lofty tribunal of History, Geist, Duty, Party or Utility, but would live instead as though their energies were self-grounding and self-legitimating, which for Marx, as a good Romantic humanist, they are. To attend to the use-value of persons, rather than to their exchange-value, is just another way of putting the same point. Human beings for Marx do indeed, by virtue of their 'species being', have a sort of function, which is to realize their powers and faculties as sensuous ends in themselves. But this is in a way to claim that their function is to be functionless at least if you see 'function' as the abstraction from the particularity of a thing for the sake of some end external to it. It is one of Marx's most precious insights (though by no means one unique to his work) that what we call morality just is this constant unfolding of creative human powers and capacities, not some grim set of strictures hedging it round. In this, indeed, he is a thoroughly traditional moralist in the tradition of Aristotle, as opposed to a Kantian moralizer. One of the many ironies of Marx's thought, however, is that in order to achieve a society in which the grip of instrumental reason might be somewhat relaxed, we stand in need of the most rigorously instrumental forms of thought and action.