439 - The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought

The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought
By Cornel West
New York, Monthly Review Press, 1991. xxxiv + 183 pp. $18.00

Why should Cornel West, at age thirty-nine the country's leading Christian African American philosopher, publish at this point in history a book about Marxist philosophy? The answer for him is clear. Marxism as an ethical method is far from dead. In fact, he says, despite its blindnesses and inadequacies toward racism, sexism, and ecology and purged of its pretensions to be a system of rational necessity and universal obligation, it is "an indispensable tradition for freedom fighters who focus on the fundamental issues of jobs, food, shelter, literacy, health, and childcare for all."

West calls this method "radical historicism." His concern in this closely-reasoned book is to show how Marx himself developed it and how it was distorted by three of Marx's most famous interpreters: Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, and Georg Lukacs. He sets out to clarify the non-Leninist stream of the Marxist tradition and recover its vitality. More is at stake here, however, than disputes among Marxists. Is there, as Kant believed, a universal rational principle of obligation which guides all ethics? Are there philosophically discerned truths about nature and humanity that transcend and judge historical struggles and events? If not, are we lost in relativism, in positivism, and finally in nihilism? West's answer, which he finds also in Marx, to all these questions, is a resounding No! Radical historicists are immersed, with critical faculties, in the life, the ethics, the suffering, and the hopes of particular peoples in particular places. Their task is focused upon the theoretic -"to discover ways in which to develop a larger consensus and community, such as through example and exposure, through pressure and persuasion, without the idea of a last philosophic court of appeal." Ethical standards are real, but they both change and are changed by the struggle to realize concrete human goals against dehumanizing powers.

This approach does indeed capture a central feature of Marx that perpetually challenges all systems, even those built in his name. It also raises some basic questions. Cornel West says, in an autobiographical introduction to the book, that he is not a Marxist because he is a Christian. Both, he finds, are radically historical, but Christian faith probes more deeply the meaning of death, suffering, love, and friendship. One wishes he would develop this interaction and contrast more fully. How does the existential God-human relation in Christ and the church affect the theoretic task of the radical historicist? How do divine judgment and grace interact with the human struggle as Marx defines it? Christian hope with the radical historicist's goals in history? There is an ocean of work in this area which West has not explored. He would be a more convincing philosopher, perhaps a more truly radical one, if he were also something of a theologian.

Charles C. West
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, NJ