Utopias: Future, Present and Concrete in Alasdair MacIntyre and C. L. R. James

ABSTRACT

Alasdair MacIntyre’s Ethics in the Conflict of Modernity caps a long engagement with Marx and Marxism through a discussion of the life and work of C. L. R. James. MacIntyre’s critique of James is interesting both because James influenced MacIntyre’s early Marxism and because MacIntyre’s mature critique of Marxism can be understood against the background of his failure to realise a broadly Jamesian political project in the 1960s. Moreover, MacIntyre’s mature concept of a “utopianism of the present” can, in part, be understood as an attempt to overcome the abstract utopian limitations of the politics he embraced in his youth. I argue that MacIntyre was right to reject the interpretation of Marxism he held in the mid-1960s, but that his general criticism of Marxism is less successful because Marxism, at its strongest, can be understood as a form of a utopianism of the present. The underlying flaw with the version of Marxism that MacIntyre embraced in the 1960s is not to be found in its abstractly utopian character but rather in its one-sided conception of the relationship between working-class self-activity and socialist consciousness. This is a problem, though inverted, that continues to haunt MacIntyre’s interpretation of Marxism.

KEYWORDS:

• Alasdair MacIntyre
• C. L. R. James
• utopia
• alienation
• Marx

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Kristyn Gorton, Christian Høgsbjerg, Kelvin Knight and Jeffery Nicholas for their comments on this paper in draft.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Paul Blackledge teaches in the School of Social Sciences, London South Bank University in London, UK, and researches into Marxism and ethical theory. He is the author of Frederick Engels (SUNY Press, 2019), Marxism and Ethics (SUNY Press, 2012), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (Manchester University Press, 2006) and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (Merlin Press, 2004). He is also co-editor of Virtue and Politics: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Revolutionary Aristotelianism (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), Alasdair MacIntyre’s Engagement with Marxism: Selected Writings 1953–1974 (Brill, 2008), Revolutionary Aristotelianism: Ethics, Resistance and Utopia (Lucius and Lucius, 2008), and Historical Materialism and Social Evolution (Palgrave, 2002).