BOOKS
490
lutionis suprema lex" - whatever promotes the progress of the revo–
lution is morally right. This simply abolishes political morality. It's
not even Machiavellianism, for Machiavelli readily acknowledged
that lying, meanness, and violence were immoral and thought that
the tragedy of politics lay in the fact that wickedness was sometimes
necessary. Marxist instrumentalism is repulsive because it treats
everyone and everything only as a means to a distant end.
It
cannot
handle the thought that people who have been betrayed or injured
have been wronged, and that the benefits eventually going to others
cannot compensate them. Utopianism adds an hysterical overtone to
this ugly utilitarianism, but it is the ugly, utilitarian character of offi–
cial Marxism that Lukes insists on.
So Lukes argues that when Marx denounces exploitation as
"robbery" and yet points out that when the capitalist hires a laborer
he gets no more than he's entitled to, he isn't invoking a Marxist
view of justice. Marx was pointing out that in a social order as rid–
dled with contradictions as capitalism was, any appeal to "justice"
yields contradictions too. The achievement of justice was no part of
Marx's ideals. The ideal was the creation of a society in which man
controls both nature and the productive process, where free creation
replaces constrained labor. The abolition of exploitation is a precon–
dition of that goal- but the goal itself is freedom . In practice, Marx's
unconcern about rights turned out to be disastrous, because he and
his followers chronically underestimated the temptations of the exer–
cise of power; philosophically, it's defensible enough, for it mostly
amounts to a demolition of doctrines of natural rights, and contains
nothing a pupil of Bentham would have flinched at.
That Marx was not interested in "justice" seems plain; what's
distinctive in Marx is his conception of freedom, which unites a ro–
mantic passion for creativity and a rationalist passion for an uncoerced
orderliness. All this Lukes gets right - and some very distinguished
commentators on Marx chronically get it wrong. The one gap in
Lukes's account is that he doesn't explain just how Marx could have
thought that in attacking part of morality, he was attacking morality
as such; that, of course, leaves it rather mysterious that Marx really
espoused a morality of freedom and emancipation but thought it
wasn't a morality at all. There is an answer- if not a simple one. It
lies in Marx's belief that once religion, politics, and morality had lost
their grip, we should be left with the single idea of "the practical."
The desire for freedom was "practical" in the same way as the desire
