Abstract

In this article, I argue that Marx’s philosophy does not commit us to Worrell and Krier’s claim that a post-capitalist society will be a social formation in which all social relations appear unmediated to their agents. Quite the opposite is true: given his Hegelian background, which Marx never gives up, social relations are in principle to be mediated by the results of human productive acts, and although a socialist society no longer is mediated by capital, it still cannot be thought without a legal, ethical, and political form of these relations. Those meditations (which Worrell and Krier do not separate clearly from social-economic aspects) will be universal. Accordingly, the authors’ claim that Marx is opposed to the concept of the universal is baseless. In addition, I demonstrate that Worrell and Krier’s interpretation of Marx’s concept of alienation as a romantic concept is misguided and, instead, that we would do well to focus on the concept of private property. Finally, I show that they do not properly grasp Marx’s concepts of democracy and communism.

Keywords

Alienation, class conflict, communism, democracy, Hegel, Marx, universal

From: Critical Sociology 2018 44 (2)

Editor: Wang Yi