Apologies -- omitted this from post
************** Haines, thank you for picking up my theme, which treats of the moral and, contentiously -- hence my subject line, "Theocracy?" -- a potentially religious aspect of the phenomena such as money (Mammon!) which arise in the area of the thread on The State and Capitalism.
People like Habermas dismiss Marx on specific grounds; they say Marx's materialism means the claim to have discovered the following: that the economic process is a "natural" process (in the sense of Hobbes and Bentham), which in the tradition of German idealism -- which still influences the likes of Habermas -- the Young Hegelians contemptuously called "stomach filling"; that it mechanically produces an epiphenomenon called politics; and that mechanically produced technological progress would bring about such a rise in productivity that scarcity would be abolished and no one would have to oppress anyone else to satisfy their desires. This interpretation of Marx seems to have dominated the field for most of the history of Marxism. If that were what Marx said, Marxism would deserve the strictures of Habermas et al, both in itself and for its consequences, such as utilitarian progressivism and stageism -- which greatly damaged the Irish struggle, for instance.
Habermas et al argue that Marx illegitimately jumps from the natural plane
of desire satisfaction to a transcendental plane, that of morality (in the
Kantian sense, which they recognize in Kurt Baier's "moral point of view").
>From another angle Alasdair MacIntyre speaks of the "enlightenment project",
the doomed attempt to reach morality on the basis of a theory of, as you
say, the possessive individualist Enlightenment atomic individual, "homo
oeconomicus" with the "natural propensity to truck, barter and *exchange*"
(the huckstering of the first thesis on Feuerbach). Eternal justice
(Proudhon) is equality of exchange ("a good deal"), and in general justice
is tit-for-tat.
Simone Weil -- counter to Plato (whom she is claiming to follow here) and under the influence of German idealism's degraded concept of nature -- calls that "natural justice", and the actions of the good Samaritan -- which I take it would be the normal reaction of (economically, physically and psychologically secure) people in communism -- "supernatural justice". I called the social structure universally enabling that reaction paradisiacal, but rhetorically; because the Aristotelian natural law tradition called the attitude of the good Samaritan *natural* justice. This concept is still found in the courts. According to it Hobbesianism and Benthamism are what Bentham himself called it -- expediency, not morality. The bourgeois contractual natural law theory, which includes Hobbes, Locke and Rawls, is incompatible with Marx's thought.
Marx had an Aristotelian concept of nature, but he was aware there was a problem even from that point of view. It is Doug's chicken /egg problem. A communist community would structurally embody the golden rule. But how could such a society be brought about by people structurally forced to behave in a Hobbesian and Benthamite way? How could such people "fit themselves to found society anew"? (German Ideology). His best shot at an answer is in the third thesis on Feuerbach: "The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of minds is found in revolutionising practice". Contrary to John Stuart Mill who said humanity would be brought about by the bourgeoisie giving incentives to naturally selfish people to behave "socially", Marx said that to bring about human behaviour the working-class must create a human environment. (Towards the end of his life he was looking at the potentialities of Russian and other agricultural communes).