Episode 155: Marx’s Conception of Justice and the “Ought Implies Can Principle,” Part 1
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Co-hosts Andrew Kliman and Gabriel Donnelly begin a two-part discussion of Andrew’s book (in progress) focusing on the Critique of the Gotha Program. The discussion focuses on Marx’s conception of justice and the “Ought Implies Can” Principle. Andrew argues that Marx understood justice to be a matter of relations between people in a given society, which differs markedly from the modern conception of justice as a transhistorical ideal. The co-hosts discuss the basis on which he criticized different societies. Instead of declaring them “unjust” because they diverge from a transhistorical ideal, he focused on what they were actually able to do and achieve. This is a very different view than that held by activists and those on the left who push utopian viewpoints that are not actually achievable. Andrew’s book is trying to tease out Marx’s ‘realistic outlook’ (as he called it in the Critique of the Gotha Program), which has been forgotten and overlooked by the Left. The realism of Marx, in contrast to the utopian dreamers of his age and ours is something too often understated. We’re writing to advertise an MHI meeting on Sunday, April 12, 2026 from 1 to 3 pm Eastern Daylight Time (US/Canada). The meeting will discuss two new draft chapters of Andrew Kliman’s forthcoming book on Marx as a theorist of socialist society. The chapters focus on Marx’s key conclusion, in his Critique of the Gotha Program, that “right can never be higher than the economic structure of society.” One chapter explores what Marx meant and did not mean by that statement; the other discusses why he focused on realizing better historical possibilities rather than on realizing ideals of justice. Andrew will give an introduction, situating the two chapters in the context of the book as a whole. Other members of MHI will give short presentations on several themes in the chapters: how the “Ought Implies Can” principle informs Marx’s thought; the difference between conceptions in which justice is internal to a particular society and conceptions in which it is an external ideal; and Marx’s conception of freedom as “unfettered self-development of every individual.” Plus current-events segment: the co-hosts discuss the third No Kings protest in New York City. Radio Free Humanity is a podcast covering news, politics and philosophy from a Marxist-Humanist perspective. It is co-hosted by Gabriel Donnelly and Andrew Kliman. We intend to release new episodes every two weeks. Radio Free Humanity is sponsored by MHI, but the views expressed by the hosts and guests of Radio Free Humanity are their own. They do not necessarily reflect the views and positions of MHI. We welcome and encourage listeners’ comments, posted on this episode’s page. |
Very interesting stuff. Looking forward to the book.
I have a question, that perhaps could be of interest to others as well.
If we say that justice, conceptually and practically, is absolutely constrained by the mode of production, how come this isn’t the case when it comes to freedom? How come we can not say that human beings of the “primitive” society are treated unjustly, but we CAN say that they are not free? What is the fundamental difference here? If “right” (justice) can never stand higher than what is allowed by the economic development of society, how come the same view of historical/material constraint isn’t put forward by Marx when it comes to freedom, at least not in the same way?
With the reservation that I’ve just completely misunderstood this, it seems to me that Marx, for some reason, allow himself to “see” or “envision” how freedom develops transhistorically, at the same time that he avoids and denies the same transhistorical view when it comes to justice.
I have a notion that this is grounded in the fact that freedom, for Marx, is more fundamental, more absolute in some way, but my knowledge is too limited to figure out what the actual basis of this view is.
Hi Olof,
The most obvious difference is that whether someone is free, how free they are, and in what respects they are free are factual questions in a way that questions of justice are not. Slaveowners and enslaved people agree that the latter are unfree–because of the factual nature of the issue–even if they don’t agree whether that’s good or bad.
Thus, what is considered free and unfree does not vary across societies in the same way that what is considered just and unjust varies across societies. There are different conceptions of what social freedom should consist of–should people be free from coercion and constraint by others?, should they be free to self-develop?, etc.–but conceptions of what freedom is are pretty invariable.
There are two different meanings that a statement like “’right’ (justice) can never stand higher than what is allowed by the economic development of society” might have: (1) the extent to which “what is right” can be attained can’t be higher, or (2) “what is right” itself cannot be higher. (1) reflects the view of right or justice as an unchanging, transhistorical ideal. It never changes; what changes is only the degree to which it can be attained. (2) is what Marx meant; it reflects the opposite view that what is right (or just) itself changes in accordance with changes in the economic structure of society.
The main and most obvious reason that Marx subscribed to (2), not (1), is that he understood Recht (law, rights, justice) to be an essentially legal concept. That is hard to grasp nowadays, given the changes in the common meaning of justice, but that was more or less the standard view prior to the French Revolution. Once one grasps that this was Marx’s view, there’s not much left to explain. It’s obvious that systems and norms of legal justice change in accordance with changes in the economic structure of society, and that there cannot be a system or norms of legal justice that are valid across all societies.
In contrast, his view of freedom was basically analogous to (1): the extent to which the free and full development of every individual can be attained can’t be higher than the economic structure of society, but what “the free and full development of every individual” means doesn’t vary across societies in the same way. Of course, people in many societies might have trouble understanding or accepting concepts like “individual” when applied to persons, but we mean the same thing by “the free and full development of every individual” when we assess the extent to which it is achieved in “primitive” societies, in capitalism, in the higher phase of communism, etc.