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The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them the relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, ever-lasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Marx was a many-sided thinker, and different readerships in different circumstances have given special attention to different aspects of his writings. But a view of Marx that has seemed to many to be particularly relevant to the contemporary world is that of Marx as a witness and theorist of ‘modernity’, most memorably found in his vivid depiction of bourgeois ascendancy in the 1848 Communist Manifesto. Although this approach to Marx began to gain popularity during the 1980s, partly prompted by then current debates around the notion of ‘postmodernity’, the theme has come to dominate discussions even more as people seek to offer an explanation of Marx’s relevance after the fall of Soviet communism and the globalisation of free market capitalism. Marx has undergone a partial rehabilitation, both in academic discussions and in more popular commentaries, as a prophet of today’s ‘runaway world’ in which the forces of invention and expansion unleashed by the proliferation of market exchange break down all social, political and cultural barriers, and undermine or dissolve all established practices and institutions.
 Needless to say, this amounts to a rather double-edged revaluation of Marx’s status as a social critic, because, of course, his objective in the Communist Manifesto was not only to praise the bourgeoisie but also, ultimately, to bury it. But in the view of many today, Marx’s ideas about what might replace the capitalist mode of production have fared less well – in the standard version of events, the most significant attempts to establish communist societies in the twentieth century resulted in economic retardation and political repression. When we look again at Marx’s texts the suspicion is bound to arise that, perhaps, Marx was all too good at seeing the liberating, dynamic and progressive potential of capitalist development, and ultimately unable to make good his aim of framing political project that would follow through on this potential, rather than regress to a relatively static, stilted, ‘pre-modern’ form of social organisation. This view of Marx as a powerful critic of capitalist modernity whose proposed solutions ultimately amounted to a nostalgia for more traditional, organic, ‘communitarian’ ways of life has lately become quite widespread. An important and influential example is found in the long introduction to a new Penguin Classic edition of The Communist Manifesto by the historian Gareth Stedman Jones, himself once clearly identified with the Marxist left but now, evidently, no longer convinced of its central historical and political claims.
 In this paper I aim to address this aspect of Stedman Jones’s critique and suggest the outlines of a response. I certainly do not wish to claim that Marx produced an account of the relationship between capitalism and modernity that is immune to criticism, or that could possibly represent the final word on the issue. I do argue, however, that Stedman Jones fails to do justice to Marx’s handling of this issue, and too quickly closes off the possibility that Marx was embarked upon a theoretical path that may yet offer a rich and cogent account of these questions. I begin by summarising what I take to be the main elements of Stedman Jones’s argument that Marx accurately perceived, yet ultimately failed to keep faith with, the promise of ‘modernity’. I follow this by offering a rough working definition of ‘modernity’ and an initial account of philosophical ‘modernism’ as the theoretical exploration of its implications. In the third section I argue that a certain kind of ‘modernism’ was indeed deeply entrenched in Marx’s philosophical outlook, to an extent that even Stedman Jones may fail to recognise, taking issue in particular with his positioning of Hegel with respect to this ideal. In the fourth section I seek to draw out and emphasise the extent to which Marx’s critique of capitalism was based upon his recognition of its paradoxical nature as simultaneously an expression, and a betrayal, of modernity’s potential. In the fifth section I seek to defend Marx against the charges that his vision of communism ultimately implied a break with, or regression from, this modernist ideal, and to suggest how it is that Marx may, indeed, have legitimately seen it as its fulfilment. In the sixth and final section I address what I take to be the strongest challenge to this reading of Marx as a consistent ‘modernist’, namely his recurrent references and appeals to a ‘naturalist’ discourse, and I suggest that we may need to adopt a more complex understanding of ‘modernism’ that can help us make sense of this.

Marx as an inconsistent modernist

Stedman Jones introduces his commentary by rehearsing this now widespread appraisal of the originality, prescience and continuing relevance of the Manifesto. ‘It will remain a classic’, he suggests, ‘if only because of its brief but still quite unsurpassed depiction of modern capitalism’.

Marx was the first to evoke the seemingly limitless powers of the modern economy and its truly global reach. He was the first to chart the staggering transformation produced in less than a century by the emergence of a world market and the unleashing of the unparalleled productive powers of modern industry. He also delineated the endlessly inchoate, incessantly restless and unfinished character of modern capitalism as a phenomenon. He emphasized its inherent tendency to invent new needs and the means to satisfy them, its subversion of all inherited cultural practices and beliefs, its disregard of all boundaries, whether sacred or secular, its destablization of every hallowed hierarchy, whether of ruler and ruled, man and woman or parent and child, its turning of everything into an object for sale.

What was distinctive and radical about the Manifesto, he continues, ‘was its unflinchingly modernist vision, in which the capitalist world market was not simply identified with destablization and exploitation but also with a liberating power, the power to release people from backwardness and tradition-bound dependence’.
 Despite this appreciation of Marx’s power as a social thinker, Stedman Jones proceeds, by way of a careful and historically sophisticated archaeology of the various intellectual currents and ideas that came together to underpin Marx’s theories, to the conclusion that his attempt to construct a political project that could point to a fully emancipated society beyond capitalism must be judged a failure. And this failure is pinpointed by Stedman Jones as precisely a ‘failure to produce a theory of modern communism’ [emphasis added], and as a reversion by Marx to a spurious and pre-modern conceptualisation of ‘nature’ upon which to ground his ideal of communist society. Stedman Jones claims to detect this reversion in Marx’s characterisation of communism as a recovery of ‘immediate’ relationships, among individuals and with nature, regulating production according to ‘use value’, understood as the ‘direct and authentic characterization of human need’ or ‘the natural relationship between things and men’, which would impose a ‘natural limit’ upon production. For Stedman Jones this represents a kind of betrayal by Marx – ‘his communism had supposedly started from the dynamism of the modern exchange economy and its capacity to satisfy the needs of the all-round human personality’. But the ‘resort to use value threaten[ed] the modernist stance from which Marx had first started out’, its language ‘uncomfortably close to the language in which he recalled the merits of pre-capitalist societies’. Stedman Jones suggests that this ‘resort to a normative language of the natural’ must be considered either an ‘intellectual defeat’ or a ‘resurfacing of an ambiguity in his thinking from the beginning’.
 It should be stressed that this argument is presented in a relatively sketchy form by Stedman Jones, who devotes the larger part of his commentary to an essay in the history of ideas leading up to the Manifesto that will remain an invaluable starting point for readers and scholars for many years to come. But I think that the assessment of Marx’s oeuvre offered by Stedman Jones is worth addressing at some length, partly because it now occupies so prominent a place as the introduction to what is likely to be the most popular and widely read edition of Marx’s most popular and widely read text, and partly because different elements of his argument have become quite influential and widespread concerns over the coherence and appeal of Marx’s political and social thought. Thus David Miller has argued, as part of his influential argument for the merits of ‘market socialism’, that while Marx intended ‘that communism will not involve a return to the personal engulfment of pre-capitalist societies, and that the expansion of powers and needs will continue’, in fact he has no answer to the problem of ‘how developed individuality is to be preserved in the absence of the market mechanism that first brought it into existence’.

There is a serious risk that communism, as Marx describes it, will be a stagnant and stultifying society. It carries the danger that people will become immersed in particular lines of production, and that production itself will be conservatively organised … Communism lacks any institutions with an inbuilt dynamic thrust; it cannot plausibly be seen as the inheritor of capitalism’s revolutionary character.

For many commentators this worry about the fate of individual freedom under communism is linked to the role played in Marx’s thought by appeals to ‘nature’ against capitalist excess and artificiality, and to his refusal to engage in conventional forms of moral and political theorising. Thus Bob Cannon has written that

scientific Marxism comprises a premodern account of morality, grounded not in the intersubjectively expressed ends of social agents, but the natural attributes of labour … Kant refers to such an account of morality as ‘heteronomous’, because it is imposed upon social agents by another – although a better term might be authoritarian. Kant contrasts this with a modern account of morality, grounded in the norm of ‘autonomy’, in which agents create their own moral identities.

I do not wish to pretend that the arguments made by these different writers are all the same – they certainly are not – only that some of these strands can be seen as intertwined in Stedman Jones’s account, which to some extent presents a fairly typical encapsulation of current criticisms of Marx.  Putting them together and simplifying them, we arrive at the following basic story: Marx’s implicit portrayal of communism as a ‘natural’ way of life, or one allowing us to better realise our true ‘natures’, marks a return to traditional forms of legitimation that is in conflict with ‘modern’ expectations that we are free to choose our ‘ends’, and that social orders must somehow be justified by reference to this freedom. This suggests that communism could only be achieved as the imposition of a particular form of life that would restrict our freedom and reign in the productive proliferation of human goals and capacities that has followed from the break-up of traditional practices and institutions.

Modernity as a philosophical problem

Before engaging with this critique it must first be emphasised that ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ are notoriously slippery and polyvalent terms which, moreover, were never explicitly thematised by Marx nor, indeed, other writers of his time. Many will be understandably resistant to any discussion of Marx’s thought in these terms, for reasons of both historiographical propriety and philosophical clarity. Without being able to cover the vast literature and range of debates that the notion of the ‘modern’ raises, I want to begin by defining more clearly what I will take the terms to mean in this context, and offering a provisional case for their applicability. I think there are serious problems and pitfalls with discussion Marx in these terms, but such a discussion is now underway, and there are enough real issues at stake for it to be worth addressing rather than simply dismissing out of hand.
 At the risk of crudeness, then, for present purposes I wish to define ‘modernity’ as a realisation of human freedom and a widening of human possibilities. In its passive aspect, it is associated with the experience of dizzying and disorienting change; in a more active mode, it can be identified with the project of consciously making and remaking our world. I contrast this with an (also crude) notion of ‘tradition’, as denoting a more restrictive delimitation of human projects and forms of life, typically, on the understanding they are somehow dictated by ‘nature’. To be modern is this sense is to recognise that we are no longer bound by such restrictions, an experience which may be felt as a liberation but also as a crisis, as we wonder on what basis to proceed. In what has become a classic exploration of the theme, itself inspired by Marx’s Manifesto, Marshall Berman wrote

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to part of a universe in which, as Marx said, ‘all that is solid melts into air’.

In a similar vein Peter Osborne suggests that ‘modernity is the name for a particular experience of historical time, a restless temporal logic of negation that prioritizes the present over the past, and the future over the present – in a word, a logic of the new’.  Again, on this understanding, the central feature of ‘modern’ experience is change, the world being a different place than it was yesterday, and the possibility that we ourselves might act and live differently today than we did yesterday.
 At a philosophical or political level this moment generates a host of special problems concerning the construction of moral and social orders in ways that will be found legitimate or authoritative – in contemporary theoretical discussions such concerns are perhaps best pinpointed as the problems, or challenges, of ‘normativity’. This link has been explicitly thematised by the American writer Robert Pippin, who argues in Modernism as a Philosophical Problem that the ‘common basic issue at stake’ in most discussions of modernism and modernity is ‘one I shall designate simply as the problem of “autonomy”, or of genuine self-determination or self-rule’.  The question arises: if traditional claims about our place in the natural order no longer seem compelling or authoritative to us, if the parameters they placed upon human possibility no longer seem fixed, how are we to live? Or how are we to justify the ways in which we do live? This link between modernity, autonomy, and the problem of justification is also recognised by contemporary philosophers of normativity such as Christine Korsgaard: ‘there has been a revolution, and …the world has been turned inside out. The real is no longer the good … If the real and the good are no longer one, value must find its way into the world somehow … the ethics of autonomy is the only one consistent with the metaphysics of the modern world’.
 The idea of actually locating ‘modernity’ thus defined within the chronological history of Europe (or anywhere else) raises a whole host of problems and may well be a fundamentally wrongheaded or mistaken endeavour. The more limited (though still no doubt controversial) claim I wish to take on is that, in some plausible sense, through a series of historical transformations running through the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolutions of the seventeenth century and the ‘Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth, many European thinkers and writers did indeed come to see themselves and their societies in this way. In short, they became increasingly aware that human practices and institutions were not imposed in some fixed way by ‘nature’ or divine law but were ultimately chosen or constructed by human beings, and that this required us to elaborate ways of making these choices and justifying them to each other.
 A classic statement of this view can of course be found in Rousseau.  In the second Discourse Rousseau sought to explain the observable fact of human historicity – the changeability of human societies and, in some sense, human nature itself – on what he (somewhat ironically) called humanity’s ‘perfectibility’. This is grounded in the observation that while non-human animals follow the laws given them by nature, even when this is to their disadvantage – ‘thus a pigeon would starve to death next to a bowl filled with the choices meats, and a cat atop heaps of fruit or grain’ – humans are ‘free agents’, possessing the capacity at any time to act otherwise, and thus find new ways of doing things and even (according to Rousseau’s narrative) develop new physical and psychological needs. This ‘perfectibility’, says Rousseau, ‘is the faculty which, by dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would spend tranquil and innocent days … it is the faculty which, over the centuries, causing his enlightenment and his errors, his vices and his virtues to bloom, eventually makes him his own and Nature’s tyrant’.  In The Social Contract, of course, Rousseau proposes a means by which, despite the ‘chains’ of social dependence which man has acquired through its historical development, he might recover in social form the original ‘freedom’ with which he was born. The answer is by participating in and submitting to the formation of the General Will – in effect, agreeing to act only under laws that have (or should have) received universal assent.
 Rousseau’s ascription to humanity of a radical freedom from the dictates of nature, and initial elaboration of a method by which legitimate moral and political orders might nevertheless be constructed, formed a crucial starting point for the philosophy of Kant and the German Idealist thinkers who followed him. At the heart of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophies, it can be argued, is this radical freedom – the spontaneous apperception of self-consciousness, and, in the practical domain, the autonomy of the rational will. As Terry Pinkard has recently put it, ‘Dominating the Critique [of Pure Reason] is the sense that, from now on, “we” moderns had to depend on ourselves and our own critical powers to figure things out’.  On this account

The upshot of Kant’s rather dense argument was startling. Behind all our experience of the world is an ineluctable fact of human spontaneity, of our actively taking up our experience and rendering it into the shape it has for us. Neither nature nor God could do that for us; we must do it for ourselves.

And in his famous 1784 essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant characterised his own age as one that was beginning to become aware of and try to live up to this freedom and the responsibility that came with it – as Pinkard puts it, ‘Kant’s words captured a deep, almost subterranean shift in what his audience was coming to experience as necessary for themselves: from now on, we were called to lead our own lives, to think for ourselves’.  Soon afterwards this ‘subterranean shift’ had burst into the open, producing the volcanic eruption of the French Revolution – in Stathis Kouvelakis’s account, the historical corollary to Kant’s philosophy of self-determination: ‘the founding moment in which all the cluster of questions, conflicts and historical tendencies called “modernity” first emerged’. For Kouvelakis, Kant saw the Revolution as ‘attesting to a possibility immanent in the human species: autonomy, or the subject’s capacity for self-development’.
 It is important to my argument to emphasise the extent to which this concern remains central to the philosophical debates that followed in Kant’s wake – the Idealist systems of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all of whom aimed, in different ways, to ‘complete’ Kant’s philosophical project. The major post-Kantian thinkers have often been seen as marking a philosophical regression from the ‘critical’ moment of Kant’s thought and the revolutionary enthusiasms of the 1790s to a metaphysical rationalism, or romantic organicism, with more conservative political implications, notably a revaluation of inherited tradition and a reinstatement of the authority of the bureaucratic state. Significantly, I think, there is a strong air of this in Stedman Jones’s presentation of Hegel’s role – in his account, Hegel drew from Hamann the idea that reason was ‘embodied in language and culture’, and after the disappointments of the post-revolutionary and Napoleonic eras identified ‘freedom’ with ‘a form of wisdom’, of feeling ‘at home’ in the world as it was.  There is no doubt that these are strong elements in Hegel’s thought but Stedman Jones presents what is arguably a rather one-sided or unbalanced picture of Hegel’s ambitious philosophical synthesis. We need to remind ourselves, once again, that for reason to be embodied in culture meant that a culture had to be one of reason, and that for man to find himself both free and ‘at home’ in his world he had to feel that he could justify it to himself as one that he had (or could have) chosen on rational grounds. This other side of Hegel’s thought has been given renewed attention by the recent work of American commentators who has stressed the extent to which a Kantian notion of free self-consciousness and rational autonomy remains at the heart of Hegel’s thinking. Indeed, Robert Pippin has presented Hegel as the ‘modernist’ philosopher par excellence, asserting that

if one treats the idea of modernity philosophically as well as historically, the question quickly becomes the basis for something like the moral authority of the allegiance demanded by modern institutions and practices: legal, scientific, aesthetic, as well as political and social practices. And the Idealists, Hegel especially, thought they had an answer for this question … the justificatory question came down to the nature and possibility and … the meaning of … an aspiration to freedom.

For Pippin the modernism of German Idealism centres on its radicalisation of Kant’s principle of the unconditioned self-consciousness that lies at the root of all knowledge and agency, which in Hegel’s hands becomes the all-determining and all-embracing principle of Reason or the Concept:

Reason itself, in all its manifestations, does not, in Kant, discover the human place within Nature or serve some natural end or passion; it ‘legislates to Nature’; it does not discover the good life, it prescribes the rules for human activity, be Nature as it may. Such a ‘spontaneous subjectivity’, completely determining for itself what to accept as evidence about the nature of things, and legislating to itself its proper course of action, is, if nothing else, the appropriate image of modernity’s understanding of itself as revolutionary and ‘self-grounding’ ... The general ‘German’ idea of self-determination or a self-grounding is, Hegel says, the principle of modernity…

Pippin’s reading of Hegel has proved to be controversial among Hegel scholars, but I would suggest that a plausible case for its capturing at least an important aspect of Hegel’s thought can be made on the grounds that it was precisely this aspect that seems to have inspired the ‘Young Hegelian’ movement within which Karl Marx first began to formulate his own social and political ideas. Thus I think it is clear that at the root of Bruno Bauer’s proclamations that self-consciousness (Selbstbewußtein) is ‘the all-powerful magician, who creates the world and all its differences’, and so ‘the sole force of the world and history’  is the original Kantian idea of self-consciousness as spontaneous, outside and unrestricted by the empirical world we experience, and in some sense the ground or organising principle of that world.  As Douglas Moggach has recently written of Bauer’s subversive reading of Hegel, ‘[i]n religion, self-consciousness is alienated, and appears to be passive, though it is never truly so. Rather, thought deceives itself about its own activities, attributing them to another, transcendent source, which it has unknowingly generated.’
 My claim, then, is that if we can identify ‘modernity’ with a realisation of human freedom, or radical self-determination, and philosophical ‘modernism’ with the exploration of its implications, then this idea can indeed be traced through the intellectual currents that fed into the French Revolution, and the further German attempts to theorise it, through Kantianism, Idealism, and Young Hegelianism.

Marx’s philosophical modernism

To complete the story, then, I think it can be shown that this idea is entrenched in Marx’s philosophical outlook at the outset of his intellectual career and can be seen reappearing in various guises throughout his life’s writings. To demonstrate this comprehensively would require at least an entire article, and perhaps a series. But I will here briefly indicate some of the staging posts at which I believe the idea surfaces in Marx’s texts, and some of the transmutations it undergoes.
 It is clear, firstly, that Marx’s earliest philosophical text, his doctoral dissertation on Epicurus, revolves around a notion of ‘self-consciousness’ which that is customarily related to Bauer but which, I would suggest, can helpfully be seen as relatively continuous with a philosophical discussion of the ‘unconditioned’ foundations of human knowledge and agency that reaches at least as far back as Kant.  Philosophy, Marx stridently affirms, stands in inherent opposition to ‘all heavenly and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity’.  These, I would suggest, are precisely the terms in which post-Kantian German philosophy characterised what we have described as the ‘modern’ understanding of ourselves as the responsible creators of our own world.
 Soon afterwards, this first principle of Marx’s early philosophy begins to reappear in a series of more concrete socio-political incarnations. In his radical journalism of 1842-3 he writes of the sphere of public deliberation constituted by a free press in terms that powerfully recall a post-Kantian notion of self-consciousness or self-determining reason as a force which dissolves all fixed distinctions and unifies totalities of experience.  In the 1843 critique of Hegel’s Philosopohy of Right this potential is redefined as the principle of democracy itself – ‘true democracy’, that is, the principle of self-determination that is at the root of all states and constitutions: 

Democracy is the solution to the riddle of every constitution. In it we find the constitution founded on its actual ground: actual human beings and the actual people; not merely implicitly and in essence, but in existence and actuality. The constitution is thus posited as the people’s own work. The constitution is in appearance what it is in reality: the free product of human beings.  

Soon afterwards again this capacity for free, self-conscious self-organisation is ascribed to the revolutionary agency of the proletariat, as the class which dissolves all classes, the negation of the existing social order that is the harbinger of a new social unity. The proletariat is introduced by Marx, we might say, precisely by virtue of its location at the cutting edge of modernity: ‘that class which no longer realizes social freedom by assuming certain conditions external to man and yet created by human society, but rather by organizing all the conditions on the basis of social freedom’.  At this moment we can see Marx taking the crucial step of materially locating the moment of free self-determination that was central to the Idealist tradition within the sphere of everyday productive cooperation that has in modern times been classified under the heading of the ‘economic’.
 There is reason to suppose that at this point in the development of Marx’s thought, the post-Kantian affirmation of free self-determination converged with a growing awareness of the issues raised by the exponential growth of trade and industrial production in nineteenth century Europe. It is important to keep in mind that, as Stedman Jones notes, the potentialities of economic modernisation were most enthusiastically explored by those who Marx and Engels would later categorise as ‘utopian’ socialists.  The early nineteenth century writings of Fourier, Saint Simon and Robert Owen were full of fantastic speculations about the possibilities of technological advance and humanity’s control over nature that now seem an early form of science fiction – most famously, Fourier’s predictions that oceans would be turned to lemonade. But a more charitable view would credit them with a greater insight into the far-reaching implications of scientific advance and social transformation than many of their contemporaries. The optimism of such social reformers was the explicit target of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (initially provoked in 1798 by Condorcet and Godwin, and in later editions taking aim at Robert Owen), which warned that the threat of poverty would always be required to keep demographic trends in check. This was tackled head-on by Friedrich Engels in his seminal 1843 article for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’, which appears to have played a key role in stimulating Marx’s decision to investigate the subject. Engels describes Malthusian theory as a ‘hideous blasphemy against nature and mankind’ which is instantly disposed of once we recognise the obvious fact ‘that each adult can produce more than he himself needs’. For Engels the key factor to be raised against Malthusian naturalism was the unpredictability of science (Wissenschaft), ‘whose progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population’. 
 To those immersed in post-Kantian and Young Hegelian debates, I would suggest, contemporary changes in West European economies and societies would appear to be enacting in very concrete, ‘material’ ways the tight connections between freedom, communication, knowledge, and productivity that had been theorised so insistently by German philosophy over the previous half-century. This integration of philosophical analysis and historical observation close to the surface, I would suggest, in Marx’s 1844 writings on ‘species-being’.  This concept of course carries strong associations with biological naturalism and Aristotelian teleology, a question I will return to below, but at this point I want to emphasise the extent to which Marx also intends the concept to evoke a radically self-determining, infinitely expansive capacity for conscious self-development. Careful attention to Marx’s characterisation of humanity’s distinctive ‘species life’ makes it clear that he regards this activity as materially situated but also, crucially, conceptually mediated, and so inherently reflexive or ‘self-conscious’, and for that reason radically free or ‘spontaneous’:

The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity, it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges … he is a conscious being, i.e. his own life is an object for him, only because he is a species-being. Only because of that is his activity free activity [freie Tätigkeit]’.  

This has been emphasised by Joseph Margolis, who emphasises that in contrast to Aristotle’s notion of a fixed, unchanging human nature or essence, Marx’s species-being is defined only as a capacity for self-transformation: ‘Marx’s notion that man’s “nature” is inherently and radically historical, historicized, subject to an inclusive transformation (in determinate respects) as a result of his “life activity”.’   Such a reading is expanded upon by Nick Dyer-Witheford, who seeks to rescue species-being from assumptions that it denotes ‘an essentialist concept of human nature unfolding in a teleological fore-ordained manner’. Instead, he suggests, species being involves

a combination of self-consciousness, material capacity, and collective organisation. In the process of humanisation, these elements feed into each other in a bootstrapped, self-reinforcing loop of social co-operation, technoscientific competences and conscious awareness … Read closely, the 1844 Manuscripts oscillate between two propositions. The first is that humans are, by nature, conscious and co-operative fabricators. The second is that humans consciously and co-operatively fabricate their own nature. The conjugation of these two affirmations generates a paradoxical formulation – that of a species-being whose nature is to change its nature, and whose only essence is the capacity for transformation. Since species-being incessantly modifies its own basis, its commonality can only be constantly recreated in the very acts of co-operation it appears to presuppose, founded in a shared foundationless condition … Species-being is thus not a given set of attributes but a socially constitutive power, a mobile and self-augmenting potentiality – a virtuality … It suggests a geographically expanding, deterritorialising scope of social activity, involving the ever-larger, more varied and cosmopolitan communities of co-operation that are both the prerequisite and the result of enhanced species-being. But it also refers to ever-greater mutability, flexibility, and collective options, widening amplitude of feasible actualisations for differing forms of production, play, and self-fulfilment – a growth of freedom.

Dyer-Witheford’s interpretation of the concept of species-being will seem to many a deliberately unorthodox and revisionist reading (as he freely admits, it is motivated by contemporary theoretical predilections). But if recent accounts of post-Kantian idealism that emphasise the centrality of radical self-determination to that philosophical tradition are right, then a reading of ‘species-being’ along these lines in fact seems much more historically plausible than those which present it as a relatively static, Aristotelian telos. Moreover, understanding Marx’s early writings on labour and political economy in this way helps us see much more clearly the connection between the ‘modernist’ philosophical outlook of his Young Hegelian years and the extraordinary analysis of capitalist development presented in the Manifesto.

The bourgeois epoch – modernity purloined

I hope that what I have said so far might suggest that the ‘modernist’ vision which Stedman Jones identifies in the Manifesto is not derived solely from Marx’s observation of the effects of market exchange and capitalist development, but is more fundamentally rooted in a conception of humanity’s unique ability to remake its world on the basis of its own, freely chosen goals and standards. This conception can be seen to have its origins in philosophical discussions prompted by the experience of broad historical change and cultural difference, and challenges to established political and religious orders that were seen to have reached a kind of climax in the earth-shaking events of the French Revolution. Marx’s extraordinarily vivid perception of the forces unleashed by the bourgeois political and economic revolutions can be seen to be grounded in his realisation that this was the contemporary form through which this fundamental capacity or potential was being manifested by the mid-nineteenth century.
 Marx thus saw capitalism as, in one sense, an unprecedented realisation of humanity’s powers of self-development, and yet at the same time, as a hijacking of this power – modernity misplaced, we might say. For Marx, it is clear, capitalism was unleashing and liberating humanity’s powers of self-development and world-making from the fetters of traditional norms and institutions. Yet at the same time it was turning this capacity into something beyond our capacity to fully control or comprehend. The paradoxical effect of this was to turn the market economy and capital accumulation into a new kind of constraint on human freedom, experienced as an external restriction and misunderstood as the product of natural laws or forces beyond our control. ‘Modernity’, in its capitalist form, had become the new ‘tradition’.
 To advance this interpretation in a fully demonstrated and convincing way would, again, take a great deal more exegesis and commentary than can be indulged in here, but it is not hard to see how such a gloss might be placed upon Marx’s most famous accounts of the worker’s experience under capitalism. We might easily argue, first of all, that when Marx writes of the ‘alienation’ of our ‘life activity’ under capital, what is being alienated is precisely that capacity for self-determination that we have been identifying with ‘modernity’.

Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, the human brain and the human heart detaches itself from the individual and reappears as the alien activity of a god or of a devil, so the activity of the worker is not his own spontaneous activity. It belongs to another, it is a loss of his self. 

My suggestion here is that we can trace a direct line of continuity between Marx’s references to the ‘spontaneous’ character of labour as human life activity and the ‘spontaneity’ of self-conscious experience and agency that is central to post-Kantian philosophy, and that what is ‘alienated’ under capitalism is not so much a natural human telos that capitalism prevents us growing into, as our very freedom from such predetermined roles or functionings that capital treats as a passive malleability to be manipulated for its external purposes. To draw again on Dyer-Witheford’s treatment, alienation ‘is not an issue of estrangement from a normative, natural condition, but, rather, of who or what controls and limits the process of ceaseless species self-development’.
 We can also see, returning to the text of the Manifesto, how strongly Marx’s account of the bourgeois epoch evokes the notion of free self-development that he has drawn from German philosophy. Marx stresses throughout the link between industrial and commercial development and the challenge to ‘traditional’ norms and institutions. The bourgeoisie has played a ‘revolutionary’ role, ‘put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations’ and ‘pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”’, dissolving all ‘fixed, fast-frozen relations’, creating new connections and making ‘national one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness … more and more impossible’, releasing the immense ‘productive forces’ that ‘slumbered in the lap of social labour’.  Marx’s fascination and excitement with this bourgeois revolution stems, I suggest, from his recognition of it as the contemporary historical incarnation of the negative, critical spirit that his onetime collaborator Bruno Bauer had identified at the heart of Hegel’s philosophy in his subversive pamphlet of 1841, with its mock-outraged insistence that ‘Hegel is not only set against the state, the Church and religion, but opposes everything firm and established, for – as he asserts – the philosophical principle has in recent times become general, all-encompassing and without limit’.
 Finally, and perhaps more unusually, I want to suggest that such a notion can be identified as the root of Marx’s mature account of capitalist exploitation and accumulation. It is well known that both Marx and Engels regarded the most important theoretical innovation of Marx’s later critique of political economy to be the assertion that what the worker sold to his employer was not ‘labour’ as such, but labour-power, that is, sheer capacity or potential, which could be deployed by the employer as they saw fit to advance their goal of capital accumulation. The possibility of exploitation was grounded upon the fact that labour-power was the one commodity which could produce a greater amount of use-value than was required to reproduce it – which is to say, what the capitalist buys, and takes possession of, is precisely that unique human capacity to go beyond what was required to maintain and repeat a constant way of life. There is thus a very precise sense in which the power of self-determination which we have taken to be central to the possibility of ‘modernity’ appears, under capitalism, as surplus labour and surplus value.  ‘Freedom’, for Marx, is manifested precisely in the fact that after the ‘necessary’ labour undertaken to satisfy existing needs, even the expanded needs of ‘civilised man’, there remains a choice about what is to be done with the rest of our time – this is the ‘true realm of freedom’ in which we pursue ‘the development of human powers as an end in itself’.  And while the modern philosophy had identified this potential as the starting point for the elaboration of common goals and a rational form of life that could be justified to all, under capitalism it is appropriated by the capitalist class and used to advance their goal of relentless accumulation – a goal that no one thinks rational, but which within the terms of the capitalist system is never called upon to justify itself to anyone.
 This lack of justification results in the experience of capitalism as a force of nature, beyond human control or rational accountability. It is in this sense no different from the various theologically or naturalistically sanctioned social orders which preceded it. From this point of view, there is nothing ‘modern’ about it. Marx’s famous account of commodity fetishism, and his general characterisations of capitalism as a self-mystifying social order, confirm the centrality of these concerns to his critique. ‘The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists … simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things’.  As Bob Cannon rightly emphasises, I think, ‘fetishism’ is precisely the mistaken view of human, social productions as externally given, natural phenomena, and thus involves a crucial element of ‘bad faith’, a failure to subject them to normative scrutiny or critique.

Marx’s critique of fetishism is grounded in the modern norm of autonomy. From this perspective, capitalism resembles a premodern form of sociality, governed by forces independent of its members’ will. In the case of religion, the independent force is ideological, although it is grounded in an authoritarian form of sociality. In the case of capitalism, it is systemic, insofar as sociality is governed by a set of autopoietic imperatives. To this extent, capitalism shares the same external, independent and oppressive characteristics as a premodern form of sociality.

A modern theory of communism?

For Cannon (drawing upon Postone) there is a basic problem in Marx’s decision to ground his critique of capitalism in a ‘transhistorical capacity of labour to objectify itself’, as a ‘hidden’ essence which needs to be uncovered, rending Marx’s critique of capitalism ‘epistemological’. Instead, Marx ought to have been explicitly normative, appealing to ‘the modern norm of self-constitution (and the struggles of agents to redeem it)’.  As it stands, ‘the critique of capitalism rests upon a transhistorical premise concerning the “ontological” properties of labour. And the movement to overcome capitalism is merely a means to realise this predetermined end’.
 I agree with Postone that it would have been problematic for Marx to ground his critique of capitalism in a transhistorical ‘essence’ or ‘ontology’ of labour or ‘production in general’, insofar as this is taken to constitute a quasi-Aristotelian human telos or model of fulfilment which capitalism obscures or obstructs. But, notwithstanding long traditions of Marx interpretation which might have encouraged this, I see no strong reason to read Marx’s account of labour and production in this way. Rather, if we look carefully at Marx’s account of this ‘transhistorical ontology’, it seems clear to me that Marx is positing an ontology of materially situated freedom, which is ‘transhistorical’ only insofar as it spans the various epochs during which we can describe human beings as language-users (that is, in the relevant philosophical vocabulary of the time, concept-users). In short, my contention is that, at the level of ‘ontology’ (if that is what we wish to call it), Marx’s argument neither advances nor requires any great departure from a basically Kantian ‘ontology’ of human beings as both materially situated (or ‘finite’) and radically free (by virtue of their being self-conscious conceptualisers and reasoners).
 To see this, it is first worth noticing that Kant himself had made clear that what the will does is ‘produce’ objects that correspond to representations that the willing subject has of those objects.  In the second Critique ‘will’ is defined as the faculty of ‘producing objects corresponding to representations’. In the third Critique the power of desire is similarly defined as ‘the power of being the cause, through one’s [re]presentations, of the actuality of the objects of these [re]presentations’. In the Metaphysics of Morals we are told that ‘[t]he faculty of desire is the faculty to be, by means of one’s representations, the cause of the objects of these representations’. For Kant, to recognise an agent as free is to ascribe a relation of causality between a ‘concept’ and an ‘object’. In the third Critique Kant also writes of ‘art in general’ in terms that will be strikingly familiar to some readers:

By right we should not call anything art except a production through freedom, i.e., through a power of choice that bases its acts on reason. For though we like to call the product that bees make (the regularly constructed honeycombs) a work of art, we do so only by virtue of an analogy with art; for as soon as we recall that their labour is not based on any rational deliberation on their part, we say at once that the product is a product of their nature (namely, of instinct), and it is only to their creator that we ascribe it as art.

It is not at all clear to me how Marx’s much-maligned ‘transhistorical ontology’ of labour or ‘production in general’ involves any great departure from this Kantian anthropology of materially situated ‘self-legislation’:

Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature … We are not dealing here with those first instinctive forms of labour which remain on the animal level … We presuppose labour in a form in which it has an exclusively human characteristic … what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is that the architect builds the cell in his mind before he constructs it in wax. At the end of every labour process, a result emerges which has already been conceived by the worker at the beginning, hence already existed ideally. Man not only effects a change of form in the materials of nature; he also realizes his own purpose in those materials. And this is a purpose he is conscious of, it determines the mode of his activity with the rigidity of a law, and he must subordinate his will to it.

That is, when Marx writes about ‘labour’ or ‘production’, he means precisely that ‘modern’ notion of ‘self-constitution’ which Cannon wishes to counterpose to it, only deploying a vocabulary designed to remind us (what idealist philosophers and critics are prone to forget) that freedom must be actualised in a material world and is thus always situated within an inherited set of material circumstances. But its ends are in no sense ‘pre-determined’ in Marx’s account – as we saw with ‘species-being’, ‘labour’ or ‘production’, as Marx presents it, is notably minimal, formal and open-ended characterisation of the human situation.
 Marx’s implicit argument for communism is premised, I take it, on the insistence that, now more than ever, this process of self-determination or self-transformation through materially situated labour or production has become an irreducibly social affair. But it is precisely this social aspect that is obscured, mystified, and placed beyond our control by commodity exchange and capital accumulation. Communism thus appears in Marx’s writings as the reclamation or this capacity through its being brought to full collective self-consciousness.

The religious reflections of the real world can … vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between man and man, and man and nature, generally present themselves to him in a transparent and rational form. The veil is not removed from the countenance of social life-process, i.e. the process of material production, until it becomes production by freely associated men, and stands under their conscious and planned control.

To be ‘modern’ in this sense is to achieve our freedom in the same movement by which we become fully aware of it; Marx’s most important development of this idea is his insistence that, given our (historically developed) interdependence, this attainment of self-conscious agency must take place at a social or collective level. Seen from this angle, I would suggest, Marx’s prescription is not so different from Rousseau’s – finding ourselves enmeshed in complex and expanding networks of material and psychological interdependence with one another, the only way of fully recovering or realising the freedom that is our ‘ontological’ birthright is by exercising it collectively. Since the attainment of any individual goal or purpose is contingent upon the cooperative contribution of others, this dependence will be felt as an external constraint unless we consciously aim to integrate our ends within an overarching shared purpose which all can endorse as the necessary rational corollary of their own objectives.
 What I am seeking to advance here, then, is a corrective to readings of Marx that assume that communism is to be endorsed because it allows the fulfilment or realisation of our pre-given ‘social’ or ‘communal’ natures, rather as Aristotle’s polis figured as the cosmically ordained habitat for the flowering of our ‘political natures’. Of course it is very easy to read Marx in this way, and I do think that this represents an important aspect of his thought (a point I will come back to below). At the same time, however, I think it is salutary to notice how much of what Marx says is also consistent with a more ‘modern’ set of presuppositions which, I would argue, Marx shares even with ‘liberal’ or ‘contractualist’ approaches. The crucial premise here, I want to argue, is the presumption that social practices and institutions must be rationally justifiable to each and every individual participating in them on the grounds that they protect or advance that individual’s interests or ends. For Marx, I want to suggest, the presumption is that insofar as our interests and ends are interdependent – and we need not regard this fact as being of itself valuable, only as being a fact – then the most rational course for any one of us is deliberate and conscious social cooperation, not only at the level of setting the frameworks for our interactions (as liberalism would have it) but right down to the level of our most every day socio-economic interactions. This, I take it, is the thought behind Marx’s promise in the Manifesto that in place of bourgeois ‘society’ (Gesellschaft) we shall see ‘an association [Assoziation], in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all’. It is a picture to which Marx returns in the famous early sections of Capital, where he imagines ‘an association of free men [einen Verein freier Menschen], working with the means of production held in common, and expending their many different forms of labour-power in full self-awareness as one single social labour force’.  It is sometimes thought that Marx’s vision of communism implies that the individual is somehow ‘lost’ or ‘subsumed’ or ‘subordinated’ to the collective as if our rational agency and capacity to deliberate and choose were replaced by an instinctive or intuitive sense of immediate unity with the social body. I want to suggest that there is nothing in Marx’s writing to indicate such a view, and much to support a rather different idea that communist social unity is premised upon each and every individual freely and rationally choosing to participate in the collective because it can be seen to advance their interests most successfully.  The important point for our present purposes is that, in such a moment, the power of choice and rational agency is not surrendered or abolished, but pooled, and exercised collectively, on the basis of shared deliberation and agreement.
 None of the above considerations mean, of course, that such a collective agency is easily achieved. And Marx, indeed, saw its development and expansion to the point at which it pervaded all social relationships and interactions as an immense task of history, to be advanced through economic development and class struggle. Today the idea of its ‘completion’ perhaps seems as utopian as ever. My aim in this paper is not to defend the inevitability or even possibility of communism as Marx projected it, but only to reassert, against Stedman Jones, its cogency and conceivability as a ‘modern’ ideal in his terms. Indeed, for Pippin, such an aspiration is the very essence of modernity:

As understood by Kant, the early Fichte and Schelling, and Hegel and the left Hegelians, the modern enterprise is … tied to an essentially practical goal, what one might call a kind of ‘metaphysical politics’: working out, articulating, helping to defend and so to realize, the possibility of free self-determination, agency, spontaneity, activity, a self-directed ‘purposive life’, eventually (in Hegel) a necessarily collective agency.

According to Christine Korsgaard, we can already find the resources for thinking the possibility of such a collective agency in Kant:

When we interact with each other what we do is deliberate together, to arrive at a shared decision. Since the conclusion of a practical syllogism is an action, the result is an action that we perform together, governed by a law we freely choose together. The free choice of this law is an act that constitutes our unified will and makes shared action possible. That, in Kant’s view, is what interaction is. … the conditions for successful interaction are the joint conditions of respect for the other’s humanity, and the treatment of her reasons as considerations with public normative standing: when we interact, we legislate together, and act together, for the good of the whole we in this way create.

My argument, then, is simply this: if we regard self-determination and free agency as a fundamental human capacity, there is no reason why it can only be exercised individualistically, and indeed many reasons for thinking that it is best realised collectively, and that it can be done so without it thereby ceasing to be wholly free or self-determining. Everywhere we look in today’s world we can see examples of such agency being exercised, from the level of every day cooperation in social, domestic or work settings, to larger scale enterprises from scientific inquiry to public political debate.  We might conclude that Marx’s hope that such relationships could be developed and expanded to the point where they became the predominant mode of interaction in our society was optimistic or unrealistic. But I see no reason for thinking that such moments of collective agency should be seen as any less ‘modern’ (that is, freely self-determining) than the individual exercise of choice. When we find ourselves in unforced agreement with others we have not thereby abandoned our own powers of rational deliberation; when we choose to act in concern with them we have not surrendered our freedom to choose.

Modernity and nature revisited

Thus far I have attempted to argue that, on Stedman Jones’s implicit definition of the ‘modern’, it is possible to construct a critique of capitalism, and argument for communism, that remains consistent with this ideal. Such an account would affirm that, despite the role of capitalism in unleashing productive powers and breaking down traditional restraints, it results in a form of development and social change that is beyond our powers to understand or control, and thus ultimately denies or frustrates our capacities for self-determination. It would go on to argue that communism, envisaged as the project of bringing our productive activities under collective control, with the aim of consciously and deliberately regulating and developing them so as best to advance in an integrated way our various interests and ends, can be viewed in this regard as a quintessentially modernist project, whatever our views as to its prospects of success.
 I have, moreover, offered some evidence to suggest that this ‘modernist’ account of capitalism and communism finds considerable support in Marx’s own texts, and that there are reasons to think that he aimed to remain faithful to an ideal of free self-determination that he embraced at the outset of his philosophical career. But it must be admitted that in doing so I have arguably presented or emphasised only one side of Marx, the side that seems most consistent with a broadly ‘Kantian’ version of modernity as the experience of radically free self-determination and correlate requirement for some way of constructing and legitimating justifiable norms of (individual or collective) self-rule. And of course we know that Marx was extremely reluctant to cast his social critique in explicitly ‘normative’ terms, renouncing all talk of ‘justice’ or ‘democracy’, fairness or equality. And those hints at a ‘modernist’ reading that we have found throughout Marx’s texts undeniably sit alongside another discourse, that of Marx the ‘natural scientist’, who appeals to human ‘nature’, the ‘natural history’ of man, and the ‘natural’ laws and processes of our ‘metabolic’ interactions with our environment. It is this strain in Marx’s thought that Stedman Jones and others have pointed to as marking a kind of regression or retreat from a fully ‘modernist’ vision which would have no truck with such appeals to the natural order of things, as if ‘nature’ somehow presented us with a set of given goals and purposes.
 In order to understand this ‘other side’ of Marx – in order to understand, ultimately, that there need not be inconsistency here but only two ‘sides’ to the same coin – we need, I suggest, to complexify our notion of ‘modernity’, and recognise that it, too, has two different sides. Thus far we have emphasised the sense in which modernity effects a break with ‘nature’ – by rejecting traditional forms of justification that took ‘nature’ to be authoritative over us, and insisting instead on our capacity to choose a form of life that might be different from anything that had gone before it. But we need to remind ourselves that this powerful assertion of radical freedom and responsibility has gone hand in hand, historically, with the experience of rapid advances in our understanding and knowledge of ‘nature’, its mysteries and its laws. This, of course, is to reinstate the importance of the seventeenth century scientific revolution at the centre of the ‘modern’ experience. Now, it is certainly the case that the advancement of science often seemed itself to reinforce and exacerbate the sharp bifurcation of humanity from nature, by undermining Aristotelian and theological conceptualisations of nature and thus robbing us of what had seemed a significant resource for the justification of human practices and institutions. And sometimes this produced radically different or dualistic world views. Thus the Rousseauian affirmation of human freedom cited earlier is very clearly advanced against the frameworks of mechanical materialism which, in Rousseau’s view, left no place for the experience of choice and conscience. And, as is well known, Kant’s transcendental idealism can easily be seen as a sophisticated development and elaboration of this basic interest of Rousseau’s in the radical disjuncture between mechanical nature and human freedom and morality.
 But throughout the ‘modern’ era there have also been determined and ambitious attempts to reunite the natural and the human in a way that did justice to contemporary experiences of both. For much of the period relevant to our discussion this ambition was ineradicably associated with the name of Spinoza, whose influence, it is increasingly recognised today, haunts modern European philosophy to an extent that is not always immediately apparent at the surface of texts and discussions.  In Germany this influence burst into the open in the late eighteenth century when the posthumously reported confession of Lessing to a forbidden Spinozism unleashed a storm of controversy over the hidden spread of pantheism and atheism among the intelligentsia. Even Kant, it was suggested, seemed to be gesturing towards a monist unification of sensibility and reason, nature and freedom, and, by implication, humanity and divinity, at the horizon of his philosophical system.  Such hints were seized upon and explored to their limits in the early Idealist writings of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. In different ways, they all sought to bring together Rousseauian and Kantian insights into the radicality of freedom and rational self-determination with a basically Spinozist commitment to the ultimate unity of rational humanity and material nature. For all of them, as for Spinoza, it was the rational intelligibility of nature that seemed to hold out the prospect of a link – if freedom was necessarily structured by reason, and nature proved amenable to rational reconstruction, then perhaps there was a sense in which freedom could be understood as the expression or realisation of nature without thereby losing its status as rationally self-authorising. The ambition of Hegel and Schelling is captured in these terms by Fredrick Beiser:

The great strength of Fichte’s idealism was its concept of radical freedom, the right and power of the self to create itself and its entire world. Fichte’s concept of the self-positing ego – that the self is only what it makes of itself – was irresistably attractive to the generation of the 1790s, who wanted to break down all the limits of the traditional order and create a new heaven and earth. The great virtue of Spinoza’s naturalism is that it saw the divine in nature and not as a supernatural heaven existing beyond it … Given the strengths of both positions, it was the ideal of the entire romantic generation to synthesize Fichte’s freedom and Spinoza’s naturalism.

The success of such speculative enterprises remains highly contested today, and of course Marx himself was one of their earliest critics. In 1844, inspired by Feuerbach, he set himself against both ‘abstract materialism’ and ‘abstract spiritualism’ and wrote that ‘consistent naturalism or humanism is distinct from both idealism and materialism, and constitutes at the same time the unifying truth of both.’ Articulating his break with Feuerbach not long afterwards, he identified ‘practice’ or ‘sensible human activity’ as the unifying term that could synthesise the achievements of Kantian and Spinozist traditions. One must assume that he hoped that the way to enact this synthesis was through the production of a materialist conception of history at the service of the working class movement, but the vacillations of his own vocabulary as well as the confusions and contestations that always marked the political traditions that bore his name suggest that the transcendence of Kantian dualism was always more easily promised than achieved.
 But I want to suggest that there is at the root of such projects a contention that remains plausible and which is arguably just as important an element in the ‘modernist’ philosophical project as the emphasis on freedom and normativity we have so far emphasised. This is the thought that, while scientific advances may have destroyed traditional moralised understandings of nature, and left us ‘free to choose’ our forms of life in ways that were not previously apparent, we remain materially embodied and situated beings whose choices must be somehow informed by the improved and improving understandings of ‘nature’ with which modern science has furnished us. This, I take it, is the force behind Hegel’s critique of the ‘empty formalism’ of Kantian ethics – the rules of reason alone tell us nothing in abstraction from the natural and social world we use them to understand. And a similar thought seems to me to lie behind Marx’s analysis of the limitations of constitutional and liberal politics, conducted in isolation from and opposition to the concrete experiences and activities of society, and, ultimately, the excesses of capital accumulation, pursued without regard to the sustainability of the natural and social processes upon which it depends. Marx’s critique of bourgeois society is in this sense a critique of modernity, insofar as modernity is taken to mean nothing other than radical freedom and abstract normativity. But I think a plausible argument can be made that such is a limited and one-sided understanding of modernity itself, that one can assert that modernism also entails the requirement to know and understand ‘nature’ (in its disenchanted form), and that, far from compromising an insistence on the possibility and necessity of self-determination, it is its necessary corollary. One only needs to turn to Kant for endorsement of the idea that as moderns we are bound (by the interests of reason, indeed) to understand ourselves both as natural beings and as rational beings, and that the two projects complement one another, even if there may remain an ineradicable tension between the conceptual frames they entail. Whether Marx thought, with Hegel and the other post-Kantians, that a philosophical or theoretical language could be found which satisfactorily unified these ‘two aspects’ of our reality, I do not know; certainly I would be the first to admit that he did not convincingly produce one. My objective here is to establish the more modest contention that there may be good historical and philosophical reasons why in his texts an apparently ‘naturalist’ vocabulary sits side-by-side with that of free rational self-determination, and that certainly the retention of the former should not disqualify him from the mantle of ‘modernist’ if we are to sustain a plausibly complex and rounded conception of what ‘modernity’ demands of us.

Conclusion

The proper relationship between the normative and the natural has yet to be definitively settled, and remains at the heart of theoretical and philosophical debates. In Fredric Jameson’s account, it was Adorno who ‘dialectically reproblematized’ Marx’s notion of History ‘in terms of the “identity” and “non-identity” between human and natural histories’, involving ‘a perpetual process in which neither term ever comes to rest, any more than any ultimate synthesis emerges’. 
 The relationship between ‘transcendentalism’ and ‘naturalism’ remains a live issue within contemporary post-analytic philosophy, lastingly shaped by figures such as Sellars and Quine, and lately revived by a return to Germanic sources.  A strikingly similar ‘polarity’ has also been identified by Alex Callinicos in the latest ‘continental’ debates between (neo-Kantian?) philosophies of ‘the event’ such as Badiou’s and the ‘vitalist ontology’ of avowed Spinozist Toni Negri. For Callinicos, neither seem tenable: ‘Badiou’s ontology reduces transcendence to a miracle and licenses a version of the decisionism pervasive in contemporary left-liberal intellectual culture, while Negri’s vitalism relies on philosophically indefensible assumptions and leads to a politics of passive waiting’.
 All this suggests that ‘modernism’ may be better defined not as a one-sided assertion of ‘freedom’ against ‘nature’, but as an ongoing attempt at their rearticulation. Marx’s memorable aphorisms and innovative vocabularies can help us approach the issue, even if they cannot be taken as the final words on the matter. But his fundamental argument that this philosophical problem is historically produced and needs to be worked out not just theoretically, but practically and socially, poses a challenge which ‘we moderns’ will not be able to escape.