Communism

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COMMUNISM

The voluntary disbanding of the communist state of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the practical defeat of a certain theory of communism as the economic, social, and political antithesis and opponent of the liberal democratic capitalist state that first emerged in the developed Western societies. According to Francis Fukuyama (1992), citing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's theory of history, the "death of communism" marks the triumph of liberal democratic states as the paramount achievement of human history. Any further opposition to the extension of the liberal democratic model could only come in the form of regressive social movements seeking to avoid the trauma of inevitable change by clinging to ancient dogmas.

Still, as capitalism becomes the unrivaled global economic system, spilling over the bounds of the nation-state, the social and political achievements and perspectives of the liberal democracies are increasingly being jeopardized by the economic logic of capitalism itself. That the economic power of global corporations imposes demands that most nation-states ignore at their peril necessitates a reappraisal of a complacent triumphalism. In historical retrospect and freed from much of the ideological partisanship of the cold war period, it becomes clear that the challenge of communist claims of social egalitarianism and economic efficiency did much to stimulate progressive social and democratic changes in Western societies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Hobsbawn 1994). Rather than a choice between two distinct models, it appears that the thesis of capitalism and the antithesis of communism produced in the West an evolving mixture of elements from both ideal models (Lawler 2001).

Marx's Conception of the Stages of Communism

Indeed, the perspective of communism as an aspect or dimension of the internal evolution of Western society was the view recommended by the foremost exponent of communism, Karl Marx, who argues that the working people "have no ideals to realize, but to set free elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant" (1987, p. 355). In criticizing the conception of communism as an ideal to be realized in the future by contrast to the existing and undesirable state of affairs of the present, Marx distinguishes his "dialectical" understanding of communism from that of rival "nihilistic" theories of communism (Lawler 1994).

nihilistic and dialectical communisms.

The most prominent exponent of the nihilistic conception of communism, and Marx's opponent at the time of the Communist Manifesto (1848), was the Russian communist Nikolai Bakunin (1814–1876). In his "Appeal to the Slavs" written in 1848 while he was fleeing arrest in Germany, Bakunin writes:

Look! The Revolution is all around. It alone is powerful. The new spirit with its ability to dissolve has irrevocably penetrated humanity; it is burrowing into and overturning the deepest and darkest layers of European society. And the Revolution will not rest until it has completely destroyed the old dislocated world and created in its place a new and better world. Thus all the vigour and strength, all the certainty of triumph is in it and only in it. In it alone is life; outside it is death. (Pirumova, Itenberg, and Antonov 1990, pp. 85–86)

Marx and his partner, Friedrich Engels, rejected this utopian and nihilistic vision of creating an alternative society, however egalitarian and committed to social justice, out of the destruction of the old world. Evoking the realist historical perspective of Hegel that "[w]hat is rational is actual and what is actual is rational" (1991, p. 20), Marx argues that only by studying the real world and its actual movement is it possible to discern the internal forces and trends that bring about change, development, and transformation. Communism, he then argues, is a real movement that is actually taking place within the present capitalist society.

ten hours bill

For example, one of the major social events of the first half of the nineteenth century in England was the passage of a series of factory acts, including the Ten Hours Bill, which limited the workday for women and children to ten hours. Marx describes this modest achievement as of historic significance, "It was the first time that in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class" (1987, "Inaugural Address of the Working Men's International Association, September 28, 1864"). In Marx's conception the political economy of the middle class, or capitalism, is the pure, unfettered rule of private property and production for the market. Therefore, in limiting the operation of the free market for the sake of the well-being of working people, the factory acts evinced the partial triumph of communism over capitalism taking place within capitalism itself. Other such elements of communism that emerged in the industrial capitalism of the West during the nineteenth and especially the twentieth centuries included free public education, national health care plans (such as, in the United States, Medicare and Medicaid), and national pension or social security plans, as well as laws further limiting the time of the working day and establishing legal conditions for the self-organization of labor through trade unions.

From Marx's perspective the history of Western capitalism presents evidence for the growing emergence within the evolution of capitalism of embryonic elements of an alternative society whose basic characteristics are already discernable, not from the constructions of ideal theory, but from the requirements of actual historical development. A detailed study of Marx's thought on the nature of communism reveals six stages or phases of communist development, beginning with the factory acts and similar infusions of social consciousness into the operation of the capitalist market economy: two phases of communism within capitalism, two phases of the transition between capitalism and communism, and two phases of communism per se (Lawler 1998).

definition of communism

In the Communist Manifesto, when Marx projects the final outcome of this evolution, he formally defines communism as "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all" (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 506). The core idea of communism is the all-round freedom of the individual to develop latent abilities without the age-old restrictions that come from the necessities of mere physical survival. Such free development of each is the foundation of an integrally free society. When he further elaborates on this definition in his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), he writes of the highest stage of the evolutionary process, the second phase of communism per se :

In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (1989, p. 87)

The dramatic final maxim of communism, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," cited out of context as the sum and substance of Marx's conception, appears as an unrealizable, utopian ideal. However, this definition must be comprehended as the outcome of previous stages of historical development. Distribution according to need is only possible at a certain stage or phase of historical evolution when "all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly." And this abundance of social wealth presupposes both the alienation of labor and the alienation of this alienation—that is, the progressive emergence of creative human labor, labor that has become "not only a means of life but life's prime want" (1989, p. 87). These conditions of a fully developed communism emerge within the previous history of market-oriented society.

lower stage of communism or socialism

For Marx production for the market, although further limited by laws aimed at individual and social well-being, continues well past the communist revolution (initiating the transition between capitalism and communism) and into the lower phase of communism per se. In the lower phase of communism, often called socialism, distribution or the individual's income is geared to the quantity and quality of the work that the individual performs. This is the principle of "bourgeois right" that arises out of the requirements of market exchange in which qualitatively different products are equalized by their economic value. Because individuals differ in terms of their needs—for example, one person is single, the other has children to support—the principle of fairness, right, or law according to which each is paid according to work performed results in inequality in real conditions of life.

In this lower phase of communism, however, bourgeois "principle and practice are no longer at loggerheads" (1989, p. 86), as is the case in capitalism. In capitalism the principle of justice calling for "an honest day's pay for an honest day's work" is systematically violated by the fact that individuals do not receive according to their actual labor, but according to the value of their labor power or ability to work. While it is asserted that workers are generally paid according to the work they perform, their wages in fact tend to reflect merely the value of goods and services needed to reproduce them as workers. The difference between the wage thus determined and the value of the goods actually produced is surplus value, the basis of capitalist profit. Paying workers according to the work they actually perform, the principle of the first phase of communism, overcomes the contradiction in capitalism between abstract principle and real practice. But if bourgeois right is finally realized only in this lower phase of communism, both practical inequity and the alienation of labor nevertheless continue.

alienation of labor

The alienation of labor, first described by Marx in his early Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, consists in the individual's having to work to live, to subsist (1975). When people work only for the sake physical survival, they are subverting their essential human powers. Labor, for Marx, is the defining feature of human beings, distinguishing "the worst architect from the best of bees" (1996, p. 189)—the ability to creatively transform and channel the forces of nature to achieve distinctively human goals. The capacity for creative activity or labor arises out of the nature of the human being as a species being, that is, as a being who is directly concerned with the species as a whole. It is this connection of the individual with the human species, as epitomized in the use of language, that raises consciousness beyond the animal level of concern for (mostly) individual needs to the level of universality that constitutes reflective thought itself. Thus, while the animal is satisfied when its present hunger (and that of its immediate family) is appeased, the human individual is not content until the threat of hunger is banished in general, in terms of the future of the group and ultimately of the species as a whole.

Hence, when people survive only by selling their labor, working not to express their creative ability but to prolong their biological existence, they are alienating this distinctive feature of their humanity. Creative, essentially human, activity is barely possible where the necessities of survival force individuals to engage in repetitive physical work for up to sixteen hours per day. The distinctive human gift is squandered when children are forced into mindless labor from an early age. So when Marx examines the Ten Hours Bill, he recognizes the essential core of communist humanism: restricting the amount of time individuals are forced to work to survive and thereby freeing them, however minimally, to develop their own creative powers. Hence, one of the essential demands of the Communist Manifesto is free education for children and the elimination of child labor.

That much of the political platform set forth in the Communist Manifesto has in fact been realized in the course of the later evolution of the Western capitalist societies is therefore evidence, from Marx's point of view, not of the triumph of capitalism, but of the incipient emergence, taking place already within capitalism itself, of what he projects as the outcome of this process, the free development of each of communist society. Only when the prime need of the majority of people is to engage in creative activity is the alienation of labor fully overcome. But the seeds of this development and its embryonic growth begin within capitalism. The historic advances of social democracies face new challenges in the early twenty-first century as an unrivaled capitalism emerges on a global scale beyond the controls of the nation-state. Capitalist economic logic implicitly pits workers of advanced countries against those of newly developing nations without centuries of struggle for the rights of the free development of each. Marx's ringing conclusion to the Communist Manifesto has therefore become even more relevant: Working people of all countries, unite! (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 519)

Communism in the History of Western Philosophy

asiatic communism

Viewed in this way, communism is not an alien social theory inserted abruptly at one juncture into Western philosophy by Marx, and then given a more hospitable reception in non-Western states such as Russia and China. The communism of the Soviet Union and China reflects an altogether different historical dynamic rising out of what Marx called, in his characterization of the socioeconomic structure of this part of the world, the "Asiatic mode of production" (1989, p. 263). In this mode of production the ruler, the tsar of Russia or the emperor of China, centralizes both political and economic power in his own hands. The dynamics of Western capitalism involves, on the contrary, the relative separation of political power from economic evolution—a separation that continues, for Marx, until, with the full development of communism, "the public power will lose its political [i.e., repressive] character" (Marx and Engels 1976, p. 505). From this point of view the "cult of personality" of Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) in Russia and Mao Zedong (1893–1976) in China, with state centralization and command of the economy, reflects a kind of Asiatic communism, or a communism developing within the Asiatic mode of production, rather than the communism that Marx discerned as emerging within the womb of Western capitalism. Marx's conception that communism and the market coexist and interpenetrate well after the communist revolution, allowing for a distinct phase of "market socialism," diverges sharply from this "Eastern" approach to communism (Lawler 1998).

possessive individualism

If in terms of content Marx's theory of communism is based on a study of Western society, in terms of philosophical form it is the outcome primarily of one of two major streams in early modern Western philosophy (Lawler 2006). One stream regards the individual as a self-interested being, urged on deterministically by desires arising out of nature, environment, and upbringing, and using reason as a means to achieve maximum individual satisfactions and advantages. The "possessive individualism" (Macpherson 1975) of the modern world sets it apart from the ancient Greco-Roman and medieval views of the individual as constituted by birth or nature for various relatively fixed social functions regarded as necessary for the good of the hierarchically ordered social whole. For the self-interested individual of modern times, the good of the social whole is a means to the individual's own well-being. The classical expression of this trend is the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes, for whom the equal restrictions imposed by the laws of the state (i.e., bourgeois right) establish the civil liberties of capitalist society, including "the liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one another; to choose their own abode, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute [instruct] their children as they themselves think fit; and the like" (1952, p. 113).

Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations propounds an economic justification of this perspective, in which the social good or wealth of nations is the largely unintended outcome of individualistic endeavors of production for the market. But in contrast to Hobbes's emphasis on the laws of the state, for Smith the economy is the base of the social order and the state and its laws of formally equal freedoms constitute a secondary framework. In his conception of the primacy of the economic base in relation to the political superstructure, Marx continues such economic materialism (Marx writes: "The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness" [1989, p. 263]). However, as seen earlier, the "political economy of the working class" or communism enters this picture when the free operation of buying and selling, and production for the market, are restricted by laws directly aimed at promoting the social good. A radically different understanding of the relation between the individual and the community is implied in the emergence of such communist laws.

plato's hierarchical communism

The second line of thought is continuous with the traditional ancient and medieval view that sees the deliberate promotion of the social good as the highest aim of individual flourishing. In the classical formulation of Plato the public good demands communist or communal ownership of property on the part of the ruling guardians of society to prevent them from using their positions of power for private gain. Such public good also requires the perpetuation of what Plato calls a shameful lie, that is, that the souls of individuals are composed of finer or baser metals, from gold and silver for the rulers and their children to brass and iron for the farmers and artisans and their offspring. This is a lie for Plato, because the souls of human beings are not material, and their destinies, evolving over many lifetimes, are ultimately subject to their own choices (1952, book 10, pp. 437–441). Nevertheless, for the peace and order of society it is necessary that

none of [the rulers] should have any property of his own beyond what is absolutely necessary.… Gold and silver we will tell them that they have from God; the diviner metal is within them, and they have therefore no need of the dross which is current among men, and ought not to pollute the divine by any such earthly admixture. (1952, book 3, 341)

The modern proponents of the social good are not ashamed to propagate openly their Platonic spiritualism. However, like their counterparts in the stream of possessive individualism, they reject the fixed hierarchies of the past and adopt the standpoint of free and equal individuals. But such equality they ground on the freedom of consciousness or spirit.

descartes's egalitarian communism

Modern egalitarian communism replaces ancient hierarchical communism by stressing the primacy of the free, self-conscious individual, whose awareness that "I think" is, for René Descartes, the foundation of modern scientific method. The self-conscious individual in the modern idealist or spiritualist tradition achieves full self-development only by working directly for the good of others, the good of society as a whole, in such a way that each associates with the other cooperatively in rewarding activities of mutual and common endeavor. Thus, for Descartes the highest activity for the individual is the pursuit of scientific truth, and the motive of this activity is the practical application of scientific knowledge for the well-being of all. Descartes continues the medieval view of the primacy of the social whole, but abandons its aristocratic foundations in a hierarchy of social classes. Nothing is so equally distributed as reason or good sense (Descartes 1952, p. 69), and this common reason is the foundation of all science and the quest for those truths that will liberate humankind from the immense suffering that is due to ignorance and error. Each individual is capable of joining in the step-by-step ascent to truth that science elaborates as it progressively gains access to the laws of the natural and human orders. Thus, recognizing the limitations of his own individual accomplishments, Descartes begs

all well-inclined persons to proceed further by contributing, each one according to his own inclination and ability, to the experiments which must be made, and then to communicate to the public all the things which they might discover, in order that the last should commence where the preceding had left off; and thus, by joining together the lives and labours of many, we should collectively proceed much further than any one in particular could succeed in doing. (p. 69)

metaphysical basis of communism: materialism or spiritualism?

Descartes's metaphysical conception of the human individual as a spiritual being occupying a physical body contrasts with Hobbes's materialist view of the human being as primarily a physical being capable somehow of mental phantasmata. Both founders of modern philosophy appeal to the requirements of modern science. But whereas Hobbes regards the new physics of Galileo Galilei as demanding a starting point in the inertial straight-line motion of externally moved matter, Descartes sees the ultimate foundation of science in thinking itself, in the self-conscious "I" that is free to depart from the illusions of sensory perception so as to reconstruct a true picture of the world according to a step-by-step method of thought. While the possessive individualism of Adam Smith's justification of the free market correlates with this first metaphysical option, a fundamentally social orientation, anticipating Marx's theory of species being, follows from the second. It may seem paradoxical to locate Marx's philosophical ancestry in the spiritualism of Plato and Descartes rather than the materialism of Hobbes, but Marx's materialism is a dialectical materialism that is opposed to the mechanistic materialism of Hobbes that was also influential for Smith.

Descartes's metaphysical hierarchy of spirit or consciousness over matter and the body is expressed in practical, ethical, and social requirements. The pursuit of objects that diminish when they are shared with others should be subordinated to the pursuit of objects that are not so diminished. External material wealth diminishes when shared with others, and so one tends to separate oneself from others when one pursues them. However, because one recognizes the good in others, one should freely focus one's mind on the pursuit of those goods that do not diminish when shared, such as knowledge, health, and virtue. So, in a manner reminiscent of Plato's communism, Descartes establishes the community of shared goods as taking precedence over the pursuit of material wealth:

But I distinguish between those of our goods which can be lessened through others possessing the like, and those which cannot be so lessened. … But virtue, knowledge, health, and in general all other goods considered in themselves without regard to glory are not in any way lessened in us through being found in many others; and so we have no grounds for being distressed because they are shared by others. (1991, pp. 321–322)

When one shares one's ideas with others, one loses nothing, but enriches both oneself and others. It is a win-win situation. When, however, one pursues limited material goods, then what one person gains the other loses. Therefore, scientific philosophy prescribes a social ethics in which the pursuit of goods of the first type has precedence over pursuit of goods of the second type. So Descartes prescribes the basic maxim of a reasonable and good society: from each according to ability, in cooperation with others, and for the good of all. Therefore, a good society is one in which the creative development of each individual is freely associated with that of other individuals, and working together they promote the full development of society as a whole. But that is just Marx's definition of communism in the Communist Manifesto.

leibniz's republic of spirits

Similarly, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's monadic human "spirits" achieve their highest development when they are aware of their harmony with one another and actively promote that harmony. So Leibniz writes that "[s]pirits are of all substances the most capable of perfection and their perfections are different in this that they interfere with one another the least, or rather they aid one another the most, for only the most virtuous can be the most perfect friends" (1951a, p. 342). The outcome of such universal social friendship Leibniz calls, variously, the moral world, the city of God, the republic of spirits (p. 343), and "the kingdom of final causes" (1951b, p. 132).

rousseau's social contract of the poor

Reflecting this latter term of Leibniz in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant calls the pursuit of the "kingdom of ends" the culminating formulation of the categorical imperative. It was not primarily to Leibniz that Kant turned for his moral theory, however, but to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Kant regarded as the Isaac Newton of moral science (Meld Shell 1996, 81–82). Rousseau heightens the critique of the philosophy of individual self-interest with his analysis of the Hobbsean social contract as a deceptive strategy on the part of the rich to mobilize the poor in defense of their property, for the meager concession of gaining formal political rights. He describes with sarcasm the real essence of this social contract of the rich, "You need me, for I am rich and you are poor. Let us come to an agreement between ourselves. I will permit you to have the honor of serving me, provided you give me what little you have for the trouble I will be taking to command you" (1976, p. 186). Rousseau would have appreciated the sardonic remark of the communist writer Anatole France that "[t]he law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread" (1894/1992, p. 550).

If the materialist philosophy of self-interest underlies this deception, Rousseau finds an alternative basis of community in the heart-felt promptings of the human soul, which the wise educator of Émile must nourish by turning the sympathies of youth toward the common human being, those poor and oppressed victims of the fraudulent social contract. Thus, the tutor of Émile counsels:

To excite and nourish this nascent sensitivity, to guide it or follow it in its natural inclination, what is there to do other than to offer the young man objects on which the expansive force of his heart can act—objects which swell the heart, which extend it to other beings, which make it find itself everywhere outside of itself—and carefully to keep away those which contract and concentrate the heart and tighten the spring of the human I ? (Rousseau 1979, pp. 222–223)

On such a basis an authentic social contract can be established in which what is emphasized is not the equality of formal legal and political rights (bourgeois right) but relative equality of the conditions of existence. Against the contracted "I" of the philosophy of self-interest, Rousseau emphasizes the expansive "I" that identifies with "the general will." What distinguishes the general will from the particular will is

not so much the number of votes as the common interest that unites [the citizens], for in this institution each person necessarily submits himself to the conditions he imposes on others. … And asking how far the respective rights of the sovereign and the citizens extend is asking how far the latter can commit themselves to one another, each to all and all to each. (1976, p. 34)

What is crucial is the prevention of the extremes of wealth and poverty, not a mathematical or formal equality, and the means for doing this involve manifold rectifications of the existent inequalities of conditions of life, involving the use of a progressive income tax and universal public education. A society based on the principle of "each to all and all to each" is just Marx's definition of communism in the Communist Manifesto.

kant's kingdom of ends

Kant takes up Rousseau's general will in his formulations of the categorical imperative, culminating in the conception of a "kingdom of ends," according to which one can "abstract from the personal differences between rational beings, and also from the content of their private ends—to conceive a whole of all ends in systematic conjunction" (1956, pp. 100–101). Making it clear that he does not primarily have in mind the establishment of formal legal and political rights, Kant stresses economic relations of production and exchange of goods as an integral part of such systematic conjunction of ends or goals united under the moral consciousness. The kingdom of ends formulation of the categorical imperative asserts a systematic hierarchy of ends as follows:

What is relative to universal human inclinations and needs has a market price ; what, even without presupposing a need, accords with a certain taste—that is, with satisfaction in the mere purposeless play of our mental powers—has a fancy price ; but that which constitutes the sole condition under which anything can be an end in itself has not merely a relative value—that is, a price—but has an intrinsic value—that is, dignity (p. 102).

Universal respect for the dignity of the human being establishes a community based on common humanity that economic goals must not violate and to which they should be subordinated. Kant repudiates Adam Smith's idea that if everyone pursues their individual interests, the good of all, defined in terms of quantity of goods, will take care of itself. Smith is also far from Descartes's cooperative search for truth, Leibniz's republic of spirits who "aid one another the most," or Rousseau's heart-based community whose maxim is "each to all and all to each," when he writes of the principle of the modern economy:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens (1952, p. 7).

In another formulation of the moral society, Kant, referring with Leibniz to the Gospels, calls the goal toward which all morality ultimately points "the highest good (the Kingdom of God)" (1993, p. 135). Leibniz and Kant interpret the Gospels as promoting a this-worldly kingdom based on spiritual truth, as Jesus said, "The Kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:21). The highest good is a unity of virtue and happiness in which happiness is "in exact proportion to morality" (Kant 1993, p. 117). That is, it is a society in which people who perform their moral duties are happy—meaning, that they have their legitimate needs and wants satisfied. Marx merely reformulates this principle for the highest stage of communism: from each according to ability; to each according to need. That is, with the realization of a society whose governing principle is the highest good, people will perform their duties as creative individuals, working in accord with the good of all, and their needs and wants will be satisfied, from the goods and services provided by society, independently of any strict measurement of their contributions. People who contribute less, materially speaking, but still perform their duty according to their ability, are able to satisfy their particular needs just as freely as those who contribute more. They do not, however, work for the sake of satisfying their needs—which for Kant constitutes heteronomy and for Marx is the general characteristic of the alienation of labor.

ideal of the highest good: a fantasy or an emerging reality?

The problem with this ultimate goal of morality, Kant says, is that it seems unrealizable in the real world that one observes around oneself, that is, the world that is governed by the laws enunciated by Adam Smith and that Marx calls the "political economy of the middle class." In this empirical reality the satisfaction of needs is not based on the performance of moral duty, but on market-based laws of supply and demand that can bring misery and death to whole portions of the population as a result of changes in fashion and fad. Writing about the same time as Adam Smith, and well before the Ten Hours Bill of the next century, Kant sees no clear expressions of a countervailing "communist" tendency in the real world capable of counteracting the actual operation of the economy based on self-interest. But unless the moral principle is capable of being realized, he says, it must be "fantastic, directed to empty imaginary ends, and consequently inherently false" (Kant 1993, p. 120). The whole of Kant's moral theory as he understands it thus hangs on the empirical possibility of its being realizable. The apparent contradiction between moral ideal and empirical reality constitutes what Kant calls "the antinomy of practical reason" (pp. 199–126).

Marx again reformulates Kant when he rejects the pursuit of communism as an abstract ideal raised against the real world, as well as Hegel, who opposes the "empty ideal" of a better society and insists that "[w]hat is rational is actual and what is actual is rational" (Hegel 1991, p. 20). Kant's own solution to the problem hinges primarily on the recognition that history does in fact move in the direction of a society based on the moral ideal (Van der Linden 1988). But to justify this conception he must establish the validity of a teleological view of history. His third Critique of Judgment, as well as many of his historical essays, argues for this perspective. In this way Kant paves the way for the historical approach of Hegel, who sees all of human history as the expression of the dynamic of "spirit," which he defines as "'I' that is 'We,' and 'We' that is 'I'" (Hegel 1977, p. 110). Therefore, what is both actual and rational in the course of history, according to Hegel, is what Marx later calls communism (MacGregor 1984).

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Encyclopedia of Philosophy