请将“Moreover, Marx’s “last two ends,” once they have been articulated, diverge in decisive ways from Cohen’s basics of socialism. Cohen invokes the socialist vision of “a better society, . . . lacking the manifest injustice and misery of capitalism; . . . rational in its workings because planned, rather than . . . anarchic and irrational”; a society based on community and equality, which would “turn the world into a home for humanity by overcoming the scarcity in the relationship between humanity and nature which induces social division.” The prominence of community or association is the only point where there seems to be a convergence between Marx and Cohen (even here, this appearance is misleading). They both, it is true, point out the anarchy of the present system’s reliance on markets, but, rather than opposing this anarchy to the rationality of a planned economy, as Cohen does, Marx opposes it to the control exercised by free and associated laborers. Marx says nothing about overcoming scarcity; nor does he say that scarcity is the origin of social division. He speaks only of eliminating slavery and exploitation, which stem from the current form of wealth, not from scarcity. Indeed, Marx says nothing about the natural world; he is focused squarely on social relations. Neither, unsurprisingly, does he say anything about eliminating injustice or bringing about material equality. Between Cohen’s socialism and Marx’s communism, there seems to be barely any shared commonplaces.

Neither is there any meaningfully common conceptual content. Looking at Marx’s hymn to the Commune on its own terms, its overwhelming theme is emancipation, the winning of freedom for and by the laboring class. Its secondary theme is the association of laborers for the sake of winning and enjoying this freedom. Freedom and association: these are the principles of Marx’s communism. Moreover, freedom and association have an intimate connection with Marx’s obstetric approach to politics. Because Cohen’s principles—equality and community—have no such connection to obstetric politics, he concludes that Marx’s midwifery must have originated outside of Marx’s commitment to socialism, and finds this source of alien contamination in Hegel. I want to show, instead, that Marx found in socialism and communism elements that were naturally harmonious with his Hegelian bent of mind and that seemed to cry out for an obstetric politics.


The Self-Emancipation of the Laboring Class

If socialism and communism name the emancipation and association of the laborers, and if emancipation and association are understood in a republican manner, then a commitment to socialism and communism practically entails a reticence to write recipes for the cook shops of the future. The precise institutional arrangements that will best suit any particular group of free and associated laborers will necessarily have to take into account the particularities of their situation, their common resources, their characters and histories and interrelations. The people best placed to know those particularities will be those free and associated laborers themselves. Anyone who presumes to say from afar how they ought to manage their common affairs might rightly expect to be told to mind their own business. The solutions to each association’s problems will have to emerge out of the context of the problems themselves, and the institutions of freely associated people are their own affair, provided that no one is dominated. This proviso has bite, however, and so, as we will see, there are significant institutional prescriptions that are compatible with Marx’s principled obstetrics, and that, contrary to Cohen’s implication, Marx is unafraid to make.

That Marx thought the emancipation of the laboring class to be the primary goal of the socialist movement is quite clear from the record. Marx takes this goal so much for granted that he never feels the need to argue for it, but simply uses it as a criterion for deciding whether a text or author ought to be regarded as socialist at all. Thus, for example, he largely dismisses Saint-Simon from the socialist canon with the observation that the Frenchman only “speaks directly for the laboring class and declares their emancipation to be the goal of his efforts” in his final work, Le nouveau chistianisme.19 His writings on behalf of the IWMA proclaim this aim repeatedly. It is, as the Rules of the Association declare, “the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means.” Those same rules declare that this aim “must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”20 My argument is that Marx’s obstetric conception of politics falls out naturally from this conviction that socialism or communism amounts to the self-emancipation of the laboring class.

To see why this is the case, let us return to Cohen’s objection to Marx’s incipient Leninism. The epitome of the Marxian claim is that, so far as the self-emancipation of the laboring class is concerned, “what is to be done, and done immediately at any given, particular moment in the future, depends, of course, wholly and entirely on the actual historical circumstances in which action is to be taken.” This sort of claim is said, by Marx’s critics, to combine an “extraordinary optimism” with a “circumscribed role . . . for political action.”21 I think three responses blunt the force of this critical assessment and open the way to an appreciation of Marx’s position.

First, Marx’s reticence to specify a postrevolutionary program is, in many cases, a matter of perfectly understandable political caution. When Marx claims, in Herr Vogt, that “it was not a matter,” in the run-up to 1848, “of putting some utopian system into effect, but of conscious participation in the historical process revolutionizing society before our very eyes,”22 he is in the midst of defending himself against the accusation of being a conspiracy monger and agent provocateur. The same context is relevant to his claim that the revolutionary “can only be said to conspire against the status quo in the sense that steam and electricity conspire against it.”23 As I argued in chapter 2, Marx had to de-politicize his call for proletarian revolution in order to publish his writings, and he and his companions were repeatedly dogged by police spies and informers. That he did not think it prudent to lay out a “ten-point plan” for what the socialists would do should they come to power, at a time when there was not even a socialist party in existence, much less one in need of rallying its forces behind a program, is understandable, given that such things could attract police attention in every Continental nation.

Second, the claim that what is to be done in a particular set of circumstances cannot be determined except by an examination of those circumstances themselves is not at all exceptional, historically speaking. Indeed, it was part of the common sense of political theorists prior to the rise of early modern doctrines of natural jurisprudence and social contract. Aristotle criticized his forerunners for failing “to put forward an arrangement of a sort that would be easy for people to be persuaded about and to introduce out of their existing circumstances.”24 In order to supply what others had not, he had to collect accounts of the constitutions of 158 political communities in and around Greece, each of which comprised not merely the arrangements regarding the major offices but also the history of the political life of the community.25 This use of history, location, and other circumstances as the starting point of situated political prescription dominated the subsequent history of theoretical treatments of political matters. This “situatedness” of theory was never taken to be a circumscription of political action, but precisely an allowance for it.

Third, and most centrally, the historical circumstances that most concerned Marx were the motives, capacities, and desires that might reasonably be ascribed to the mass of the laboring classes.26 When he forecasts that, at “the moment a truly proletarian revolution breaks out, the conditions for its immediate initial (if certainly not idyllic) modus operandi will also be there,”27 he is not subscribing to the magical thinking according to which the ascendant proletarians will find before them, not only all of the objective means they will need to construct socialism, but the instructions for how best to use them. He means, rather, that, if the proletarian party has managed to come into possession of the state power, then this will indicate that the workers have chosen to emancipate themselves. This makes a large difference.

Because Cohen—but not just Cohen—conceives the principles of socialism to be material and political equality and solidaristic or just community, he also conceives the material conditions of socialism to be certain objective factors. In particular, he thinks that realizing these principles requires an advanced technological basis that eliminates natural scarcity, at least so far as to allow everyone a reasonable modicum of real wealth. Without the technology to hold scarcity at bay with a minimum of physical labor, equality and community are both unlikely and unattractive (and unlikely in part because they are so unattractive). But the presence of such a technological basis, while necessary, is not sufficient for socialism. A set of subjective factors—widespread moral commitment to the principles of equality and community—are also necessary, and these are not provided either by the development of the technological base or by the causes of the development of the technological base. They require articulate arguments—a defense of justice and equality, education, and proselytization.

Marx’s midwifery seems wrongheaded from this perspective, since it seems to imply the absurd belief that the existence of the technological, objective conditions of socialism will, by itself, guarantee that the subjective conditions—broad and resilient moral commitment to equality and community—will also be present, at least among the proletariat. This is why Leopold accuses Marx of unreasonable optimism and of problematically circumscribing the role for political action. Marx seems unreasonably optimistic because he thinks that the capitalist development of the means of production, and the consequent struggles between the capitalist and laboring classes, will, of itself, make it the case that the broad swath of humanity is committed to socialist principles. He seems to have unreasonably restricted the arena for political action because he thereby denies the need to articulate and defend socialist principles, adherence to which is identical to a subjective commitment to the socialist project.”翻译为中文