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What is the materialist analysis of how people are distinguished from the rest of nature, and how does this affect our understanding of the link between Marxist materialism and deontology? There is an exciting passage from Mute Compulsion by Søren Mau, summarizing Marx’s view:
1.0 - an excerpt from Mute Compulsion by Søren Mau:
If the fact of being a natural organism in a metabolic totality is what humans share with other animals, what then sets them apart from the latter? What distinguishes the specifically human form of metabolism from other metabolisms?
As we have seen, Marx endorsed a rather traditional distinction between humans and animals in the 1844 Manuscripts – one that sits rather uneasily with the emphasis on the corporeality of human nature in those very same manuscripts. Marx argues that the human being is a ‘species-being’, a ‘being for itself’ (für sich selbst seiendes Wesen) endowed with the capacity to relate to itself in a universal manner by virtue of its consciousness. He is quite unequivocal on this point: ‘Conscious life activity distinguishes man immediately from animal life activity. It is just because of this that he is a species-being.’
In The German Ideology, however, he completely abandons this emphasis on consciousness, species-being, and ‘being for itself’ while retaining the materialist emphasis on corporeality. In a crucial and famous passage, Marx and Engels write that
the first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the corporeal organisation [körperliche Organisation] of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature … Humans can be distinguished from animals by consciousness, by religion or anything else you like. They themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their corporeal organisation.
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This is a convincing analysis to me. So the materialist understanding of our conception of the self and personhood, is tied to how we reproduce our lives. That is, the actions that pragmatically and conceptually set us apart as humans is how we create our means for subsistence.
What does this mean for someone like me, who still finds value in deontological thinking? Deontological thinking emphasizes our capacity to make choices—our freedom. This is very close to that concept of “consciousness” that Marx and Engels forego. They instead emphasize what they believe is a more rigorous and useful material analysis, rooted in the metabolic process of our corporeal organization.
Is it useful to forego this entirely? In other words, can a deontological ethics usefully coexist with this material analysis? I think they can usefully coexist. The material analysis is useful for developing our analysis of capitalism. The deontological analysis can help guide the choices we make which affect the world around us, in a way that produces a more sustainable metabolic relationship with the world.
2.1 - the link between Marxist materialism and deontological ethics
The Marxist concept of exploitation—the process of society-wide material surplus being materially forced or compelled into the control of those who don’t produce material surplus—can be understood in purely Marxist materialist terms. But in deontological terms, this process of exploitation is usefully understood as structural impediments and impositions on people’s meaningful freedoms. The meaningful freedom of deontology is pragmatically defined in opposition to the same concepts of material force and coercion that are crucial to our understanding of exploitation. Deontological ethics can be characterized pretty closely as the other side of the same coin as the Marxist concept of exploitation.
Notably, Marxist exploitation is not meant to have any ethical connotations. But deontology is inherently all about ethics! If they are two sides of the same coin, does this mean that Marxist material analysis is also inherently ethical?
No, it does not. Deontology still requires one to take a further step to ascribe to some basic ethical values: that there is a normatively meaningful sense of self / free will, and that the ability to express one’s freedom is valuable. But if one ascribes to these basics, then everything falls into place—deontological ethics is essentially, by definition, ethically opposed to the existence of exploitation as described by Marxists.
Another example of this materialist-deontological connection: Our ability to express our meaningful freedoms is inherently tied to the concept of surplus value. In materialist analysis, when we go beyond the bare minimum material requirements of subsistence, we are dealing in terms of surplus value. And when we can go positively beyond worldly and socially imposed unfreedoms (of the materially necessary actions that allow us to subsist and reproduce), we are then dealing in terms of meaningful freedoms. Our meaningful freedoms are tied to our production of ‘use value’ beyond what we need to subsist.
As a note here, ‘use values’ are not themselves normative concepts, even though they mention the word “value”. Use values are merely ways that things can be interacted with—that is, used—by people. However, these are connected to the normative concepts of meaningful freedoms in the sense that we get to choose what things we want to use, and how we use them—at least when we aren’t worried about our mere subsistence or other purely biological drives that take priority over our self-expression and communal relationships. These unforced, uncompelled choices about “what to use and how to use them” are examples of our meaningful freedoms, and allows for the possibility of a level of true self-expression.
Because the materialist and deontological analyses are almost isometric, they can fruitfully help to develop each other. When we’re having an issue in a materialist analysis, switching to thinking about things in deontological terms might reveal the answer. And vice versa—the switch from a less precise normative thinking to materialist thinking was key to the development of Marxist analysis.
3.0 - disclaimer
Finally, here is my little note that I might be talking out of my ass with all of this. I feel comfortable talking about both deontology and Marxism, but I am an expert on neither. That being said, I think there’s something useful and interesting here.