John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism

https://josephheath.substack.com/p/john-rawls-and-the-death-of-western

Anti-capitalist theory needs to move beyond Marxism. The theory of inalienable rights and the labor theory of property are significantly more powerful critiques of capitalism than Analytical Marxism, and don’t suffer from the problems that Marxist critiques do. The theory is also easy to understand. Marxism, unfortunately, has been more influential then classical laborists such as Proudhon

https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

@socialism

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
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    10 days ago

    Yes, anti-capitalist theory does need to move beyond Marxism, but it doesn’t need to move to (as Joseph Heath posits) Rawlsian liberal-egalitarianism.

    Perhaps this is the Mutualist in me chafing at Rawlsianism in general, but his emphasis on “Liberal vs Decent (vs Other) Peoples”, and his envisaged world order that can both “tolerate” other societies who disregard certain human rights, but also choose to intervene (as a structural component of the philosophy) into societies which they deem not “tolerable”, just feels like reinventing the “Rules-Based Liberal Order” of Western Liberal Militarism with a moral (self-)justification, rather than a monetary one. Same tune, new instrument. His focus on Hierarchy is anathema to his supposed desire to produce equity or equality; equality is the absence of hierarchy, which obviously can’t be enforced at a micro-level, but he’s gone the dead opposite direction, and somehow come to the conclusion that equality can be forcibly imposed (by someone with an unequal amount of power, of course).