Alasdair MacIntyre: Social Practices,Marxism and Ethical Anti-Capitalism

The Post-Marxist MacIntyre

If few on the contemporary left would oppose Sayer's call for an ethical critique of capitalism, it is probably true that fewer would look to Marx to provide resources for such a critique. Indeed, the sense that Marxism is inadequate to the needs of modern politics appears to be confirmed by the trajectory taken by Analytical Marxism from orthodoxy towards an abstract utopianism (Cohen, 2000, pp. 101-3). Nonetheless, if it is widely agreed that Marx failed to outline an ethical critique of capitalism, ¹ it might seem at best counter-intuitive and at worst simply perverse to look to MacIntyre to fill this gap. Someone who is arguably the foremost living Thomist moral philosopher does not immediately spring to mind as a potential source of inspiration for the ethical renewal of the left generally and of Marxism more specifically. This, however, is exactly what Terry Eagleton has attempted in his recent borrowing from MacIntyre's mature work (Eagleton, 2003, pp. 155-7). And while this project might seem eccentric, it appears less so once we recognise that the common academic assumption that MacIntyre's mature critique of liberalism is conservative, communitarian and indeed nostalgic (Knowles, 2001, p. 235; Kymlicka, 2002, p. 209) cannot be supported by a close reading of his work (MacIntyre, 1998c, p. 245).

While the positive content of MacIntyre's mature thought has been the source of some contestation, it is uncontroversial that he is, and consistently has been for over half a century, a powerful critic of liberalism (MacIntyre, 1988, pp. 335-48). Thus in 1994 he wrote that ‘my critique of liberalism is one of the few things that has gone unchanged in my overall view throughout my whole life. Ever since I understood liberalism, I have wanted nothing to do with it – and that was when I was seventeen years old’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 43). Nonetheless, if he explained his youthful break with liberalism through his engagement with the Communist party in the East End of London in the 1940s (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 44), the fact that he has since aligned himself with Thomism would appear to imply that the young revolutionary who once described Marx as ‘the world-spirit in the British Museum reading room’ (MacIntyre, 1973) has come to challenge liberalism from a much more conservative standpoint in his maturity (compare Lutz, 2004; Sedgwick, 1982). If this is an understandable perspective, it is nonetheless one that elides over the depth of continuity in MacIntyre's project over the last half century. Indeed, by contrast with the conservative interpretation of MacIntyre's mature work, in an interview with Kinesis published in 1994 he claimed that there are ‘two points in which I remain very much at one with the Marxist tradition’: its critique of the state, and the desire of Marxists to ‘understand reasoning, especially practical reasoning, as giving expression to forms of social practice’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 35). More specifically, despite his now distant break with the Marxist left, his mature embrace of natural law theory acts, in part, to reinforce a long-held adherence to Marx's needs principle: ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ is a programmatic slogan he has embraced throughout his adult life (MacIntyre, 1995a, p. xxiii; 1999, p. 130, p. 111).

This suggests that Eagleton is right to recognise the revolutionary implications of some aspects of MacIntyre's mature thought, a supposition that is reinforced if we look at MacIntyre's claim, made in After Virtue and elsewhere, that Marxism is ‘still one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society’, and that if contemporary theorists ‘are now to learn how to criticise Marxism’, the main reason for this is not to ‘separate ourselves from its errors’, but rather to ‘once again become able to learn from it’ (MacIntyre, 1985a, p. 262; 1995a, p. xxx). Similarly, in the prologue to the third edition of After Virtue, he writes that ‘I was and remain deeply indebted to Marx's critique of the economic, social, and cultural order of capitalism and to the development of that critique by later Marxists' (MacIntyre, 2007a, p. xvi). Concretely, his critique of capitalism was evident in 1994 when he suggested that Michael Milken, the corrupt Wall Street banker who inspired the character played by Michael Douglas in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, was right against his ‘moralist’ critics when he claimed that he had only been ‘doing his job’, but that he was wrong to believe that this should have kept him out of jail: on the contrary ‘it probably means that many other financial managers should be [in prison] too’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 40). On a more practical note, his mature radicalism was apparent when in 2006 he signalled his support for those struggles

engaged in by members of some rank and file trade union movements, of some tenants' associations, of the disability movement, of a variety of farming, fishing, and trading cooperatives, and by some feminist groups, and […] by those who work within schools, hospitals, a variety of industrial and financial workplaces, laboratories, theatres, and universities in order to make of these, so far as possible, scenes of resistance to the dominant ideology and the dominant social order (MacIntyre, 2006a).

Whereas MacIntyre's mature disdain for Wall Street and his support for some rank-and-file trade unionists – including the resistance they ‘offer to attacks on their members’ wages and working conditions' (MacIntyre, 2007b) – displays an obvious affinity with his youthful Marxism, his contemporary distance from Marxism is perhaps best exemplified by his argument that the energy he once invested in overthrowing the capitalist system was ‘misdirected and wrongheaded’ not only because the ‘existing order is so good at destroying itself’ but also because ‘what we have to do is withdraw from it and not get involved in its disasters’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 42).

This position suggests a weakness with Kelvin Knight's otherwise powerful claim that MacIntyre is best described as a ‘revolutionary Aristotelian’ (Knight, 2007, p. 224). For if Knight's framework allows him to draw threads of continuity across the last five decades of MacIntyre's career – showing that his critique of liberalism has consistently gone hand in hand with a radical and progressive critique of capitalism – it is idiosyncratic to say the least to label as a revolutionary someone who dismisses any attempt to overthrow the existing order. So while MacIntyre explicitly endorses Knight's characterisation of his politics, he also writes that ‘not only have I never offered remedies for the condition of liberal modernity, it has been part of my case that there are no remedies. The problem is not to reform the dominant order, but to find ways for local communities to survive by sustaining a life of the common good against the disintegrating forces of the nation-state and the market’ (MacIntyre, 1998c, p. 235; 1995b, p. 35).

Prior to his recent decision to allow the re-publication of a selection of his Marxist writings from the 1950s and 1960s, the degree of continuity across MacIntyre's oeuvre was perhaps best evidenced by the re-publication in 1995 of his Marxism and Christianity. The first edition of this book was published in 1953 as Marxism: An Interpretation, and marked one of MacIntyre's earliest attempts to square a humanist reading of Marx's ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (1844) with a radical interpretation of Christianity as a guide to committed Christian socialist politics. If the second, heavily revised edition of this text, and the first to bear the title Marxism and Christianity, was published in 1968 as the medium through which he made his most explicit early critique of Marxism, in the 1995 introduction he signalled the continuing appeal of Marxism, which he suggested was ‘the only secular postenlightenment doctrine’ whose metaphysical and moral scope compared to that of Christianity (MacIntyre, 1995a, p. vi).

Commenting in this 1995 introduction on the evils endemic to the modern world, MacIntyre suggests that while some of these arise from the character of those who commit them, others were generated by the ‘gross inequalities in the initial appropriation of capital’ which bequeathed a structural injustice in the labour market through the exploitative relations thus generated. However, the vices of capitalism go beyond this, for capitalism not only reproduces this exploitative system, it also ‘miseducates’ people to perceive themselves primarily as consumers for whom ‘success in life’ is increasingly judged through the medium of the ‘successful acquisition of consumer goods’. Consequently, whereas pleonexia, the drive to have more and more, was understood within the Aristotelian framework to be the very vice that was the counterpart of the virtue of justice, in bourgeois society it is perceived to be itself a virtue. This inversion of virtue and vice in turn ‘provides systematic incentives to develop a type of character that has a propensity to injustice’. Thus, the malicious character traits noted at the beginning of this paragraph are themselves reinforced by capitalist relations of production (MacIntyre, 1995a, pp. ix-xiv; 1985a, p. 137; 2006c, p. 39; 2007b).

In ‘Some Enlightenment Projects Reconsidered’, MacIntyre added to this argument the suggestion that the ‘free market economy’ should be numbered among those modern institutions that are corrosive of the virtues (MacIntyre, 2006e, p. 173). Here he claims that, like modern states, the free market acts to frustrate the formation of a community of autonomous individuals who might otherwise be able to deliberate collectively in the good life. Similarly, in ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’ he points out that the phrase free market is a misnomer because in the modern world markets tend to be ‘ruthlessly impose[d]’, and once imposed they ‘forcibly deprive many workers of productive work’ condemning them to ‘irredeemable economic deprivation’ (MacIntyre, 1998c, p. 249). Again, in ‘Toleration and the Goods of Conflict’, he claims that ‘the values of state and market are not only different from, but on many types of occasion incompatible with, the values of’ those kinds of local community within which virtues might flourish, because in the former, ‘decision-making is arrived at by a summing of preferences and by a series of trade-offs’ which depend upon ‘the political and economic bargaining power of the representatives of contending interests’. By contrast, it is a characteristic of those local communities to which he refers that within them a shared conception of the common good ‘provides a standard independent of preferences’ (MacIntyre, 2006g, p. 213). Concretely, MacIntyre claims that ‘for there to be an identifiable common good there must be identifiable structures of community, so that one can understand how the parts which different individuals contribute are contributing to a common goal’ (MacIntyre, 1994, p. 35). It is therefore only in small-scale communities that politics can escape from the compartmentalisation that is endemic in the modern world, and which is ‘inimical to the flourishing of local communities’ (MacIntyre, 1998c, p. 248).

While MacIntyre is therefore no friend of the modern free market, neither does he follow traditional conservative critics of markets into a celebration of state power. Indeed, following Marx he points out that those who aim at conquering state power are themselves conquered by it, and through it ‘become in time the instruments of one of the several versions of modern capitalism’ (MacIntyre, 1995a, p. xv). With respect to communitarianism, for instance, he argues that, far from being an alternative to liberalism, this ideology has become part of the ‘ragbag of assorted values’ through which modern liberal states attempt to justify themselves (MacIntyre, 1998c, p. 245). So against conservatives and liberals alike MacIntyre argues that

what is most urgently needed is a politics of self-defence for all those local societies that aspire to achieve some relatively self-sufficient and independent form of participatory practice-based community and that therefore need to protect themselves from the corrosive effects of capitalism and the depredations of the state (MacIntyre, 1995a, p. xxvi; compare 1999, pp. 129-46).

This is not to suggest that MacIntyre is unaware of the faults of local participatory communities. Rather, against liberalism's ‘elitism’ and communitarianism's confusion of the politics of the state with politics practised in such communities, he espouses a politics which recognises that while life within such communities is ‘imperfect’, such communities can at their best engender forms of life which might act as the utopian standards by which one ought to live one's life (MacIntyre, 1995a, p. xxi; 1999, p.142, p.145; 2006d, p.63). Moreover, MacIntyre argues that the charge typically made by so-called pragmatic politicians against their radical opponents, to the effect that the political perspectives of the latter are utopian, is best understood as a damning critique not of radicalism but of the standpoint from which that charge is made (MacIntyre, 1990, pp. 234-5). Specifically, he believes that it is only in some local communities that ‘cooperation as a common good’ can emerge spontaneously as an alternative to the individualism that is both generated by capitalism and taken to be axiomatic by liberalism (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 114, p. 130).

In his mature work, therefore, MacIntyre proselytises an anti-statist and anti-capitalist politics that is best understood, as Knight argues, as a development of the ideas of Marx as well as those of Aristotle and Aquinas (Knight, 2007, p. 102), and which MacIntyre understands to be rooted in the forms of practice that are found in some local communities (MacIntyre, 2006f, p.193). And while his more recent writings make explicit a form of utopianism recognised by Fredric Jameson as a feature of After Virtue (Jameson, 1988, p. 184), it is nevertheless a concrete utopia rooted in real social practices. If the affinity between this position and Marxism is readily apparent, so too is the gap between the two: not only, as we have noted above, has MacIntyre retreated from his youthful hopes for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, but he also rejects Marx's claim that the proletariat could potentially act as the universal class in the modern world. Consequently, MacIntyre's defence of local communities is rooted, as we shall see below, in a more ‘pessimistic’, and he would argue more realistic, assessment of the socialist potential of the working class.

If this disagreement on the socialist potential of the proletariat marks the fundamental point of disagreement between the mature MacIntyre and Marx, the closest point of contact is arguably MacIntyre's reading of the third of Marx's theses on Feuerbach. Indeed, this thesis has been a constant reference point for MacIntyre from his earliest writings to the present day. In the third thesis Marx famously wrote:

The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice (Marx, 1975b, p. 422, emphasis in original).

Commenting on these lines in a programme originally broadcast by BBC Radio in 1960, MacIntyre wrote:

Marx attacks here one of the doctrines dominant in Europe since the eighteenth century. According to this doctrine, there are objective causal laws both of nature and of history, knowledge of which enables men to control their own destiny. So far as social life is concerned, the manipulation of society is possible to those who possess the secret of these laws. As Marx saw it, this doctrine implies the sharpest of divisions in society between those who know and those who do not, the manipulators and the manipulated. Classical Marxism stands in stark contrast to this: it wants to transform the vast mass of mankind from victims and puppets into agents who are masters of their own lives. But Stalinism treated Marxist theory as the discovery of the objective and unchangeable laws of history, and glorified the party bureaucrats as the men who possessed the knowledge which enabled and entitled them to manipulate the rest of mankind (MacIntyre, 2008b, p. 119).

What MacIntyre wrote of Stalinism in 1960, he later extended both to bureaucratic managers more generally (MacIntyre, 1985a, pp. 84-7, ch. 8) and to the classical Marxists who had preceded Stalin (MacIntyre, 1995a, pp. 99-101; 2006b, pp. 136-9). He also argued that Marx's economic predictions had been found wanting by the test of history, and that the working class had failed to become the self-conscious revolutionary agency envisaged by Marx (MacIntyre, 1995a, pp. 83-4, pp. 119-20). Marx in his maturity had lost sight of how politics and ideology could fundamentally affect economics because he had become hamstrung by his use of the base-superstructure metaphor, according to which, or so MacIntyre claimed in 1968, these two elements of the social totality ‘stand in external, contingent, causal relationship to each other’. Repeating this claim in 1995, he suggested that this reified way of conceptualising the relationship between politics, economics, ideology and so forth reflected the extent to which Marx's thought was ‘distorted in a characteristically bürgerlich manner’ (MacIntyre, 1995a, pp. 136-7, p. xviii; 1970, pp. 60-1). Marxism was, therefore, a product of its time, and this was its undoing. For while Marx attempted to theorise praxis, his deployment of the base-superstructure metaphor saw him revert back towards crude mechanical materialism. This partly explained why Marxism failed to become the theoretical expression of real workers in struggle, but became instead the pseudo-science of the self-appointed ‘leaders’ of the workers' movement whose claims to understand the iron laws of history were but masks for another incommensurable moral framework in a world where ethical positions generally have become more or less coherent expressions of personal preferences (MacIntyre, 1985a, p. 19, pp. 261-2). ² Against this trend, MacIntyre in his mature writings understands his own role, in part, as upholding the tradition of the younger Marx, particularly as expressed in the theses on Feuerbach, against the influence of the older materialist Marx.

It is from this perspective that MacIntyre argues in ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road Not Taken’ (1998b, p.232) that the modern proletariat is unable to embody the type of social practice imaged by Marx, and illustrated by Edward Thompson in his The Making of the English Working Class (1980). Indeed, he claims that the process of proletarianisation, by contrast with Marx's expectations to the contrary, has made resistance a necessary part of the lives of the working class, while simultaneously robbing this resistance of its emancipatory content. Consequently, Marx's wager on the working class cannot today be justified, and, because Marxism cannot legitimately claim to be the theoretical expression of working-class practice, to the extent that Marxists articulate ethical critiques of capitalism they tend to revert to one form or another of modern bourgeois morality: either consequentialist or deontological.

Interestingly, Daniel Brudney has recently criticised the young Marx for a similar failure to justify the ethical significance of working-class practice (Brudney, 1998, pp. 192-226). Commenting on this critique, Knight argues that because MacIntyre in his mature work points us towards the existence of social practices within which virtues are embedded, his ‘account of self-activity within social practices is a solution to Marxism's “problem of justification” … for revolutionary practice’ (Knight, 2007, p. 189).

MacIntyre and the Working Class: Practice and Revolution

It was through the medium of the British New Left's debates on socialist humanism in the late 1950s that MacIntyre attempted to articulate a sophisticated Marxist justification for the ethical significance of working-class practice (Blackledge, 2005; 2006; 2007a; 2007b). In ‘Notes from the Moral Wilderness’ (MacIntyre, 1998a [1958-9]), he read into Marx a solution to what Alex Callinicos has recently called Marxism's ‘ethical deficit’ (Callinicos, 2006, p. 220). Drawing upon Marx's claim, as made in the ‘Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts’ (1844), that the separation of means from ends characteristic of production within bourgeois society can be overcome through the process of workers' struggles (Marx, 1975a, p.365), MacIntyre suggested that the proletariat, created objectively through the development of the forces of production, could begin in its struggles against capital to match the potential inherent in its objective structure and create the conditions for the solution of the contemporary problems of morality: it potentially begins to embody the practice which could overcome the ‘rift between our conception of morality and our conception of desire’ (MacIntyre, 1998a, p. 45). Indeed, by acting in this way workers come to realise that solidarity is not simply a useful means through which they struggle to meet their needs, but it is in fact what they naturally desire (MacIntyre, 1998a, p. 48).

However, if Marx's theory of revolution was predicated upon, first, a theory of human nature, second, a theory of capitalism's tendency towards economic crises and, third, an account of the unifying tendencies of working-class struggle, by the late 1960s MacIntyre had come to question all of these assumptions. He suggested that conscious capitalist intervention in the economy meant that Marx's theory of crisis had become an inadequate tool for the analysis of modern social formations, and that the struggles and therefore the consciousness of the working class would, by their sectional nature, remain trapped within the parameters of civil society. Finally, he rejected the concept of human nature as a ‘neutral standard’ by which social institutions might be measured (Blackledge, 2005, pp. 711-9; MacIntyre, 1966, p. 268). This cocktail underpinned his mature criticisms of Marxism: he concluded that without a social basis in proletarian socialist practice, Marxist parties became Weberian in both their pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary practice, and tended towards either Kantianism or consequentialism to the extent that they made moral pronouncements (MacIntyre, 1985a, pp. 261-2). In the short term at least MacIntyre's rejection of Marx's positive alternative to capitalism meant that he concluded A Short History of Ethics (1966) with a gesture towards Sartre as the modern theorist who most clearly confronted the problem of moral choice: ‘Each of us therefore has to choose with whom we wish to be morally bound and by what ends, rules, and virtues we wish to be guided’ (MacIntyre, 1966, p. 268; compare 1964, p. 528; 1967, p. 153). It was the ungrounded nature of this proposition which informed MacIntyre's search for a social basis for the virtuous resistance to capitalism that was free from what he understood to be Marx's untenable and teleological form of mechanical materialism.

Subsequently, however, MacIntyre has reconsidered his critique of Marxism in three important ways: first, he has suggested a rethink of his criticisms of Marx's critique of political economy (MacIntyre, 1995a, p. xx); second, he has re-embraced a model of human nature as a basis from which to mount an ethical critique of social institutions (MacIntyre, 1999); while, third, he has deepened his criticisms of Marx's conceptualisation of the proletariat. Because the first and second of these developments have reduced the gap between his mature thought and his more youthful Marxism, it is left increasingly to the third to bear the weight of his critique of classical Marxism.

In what we have already recognised as his most developed mature criticism of Marx, ‘The Theses on Feuerbach: A Road not Taken’, MacIntyre argues that Marx was too impatient when he left philosophy in 1845, and that had he developed the implicit Aristotelianism of his concept of working-class practice he might have recognised the limitations of this practice and, consequently, the utopian nature of his own political optimism. MacIntyre argues that it was to Marx's credit that he recognised that the standpoint of civil society could not be transcended by theory alone, but it was unfortunate that he had not given greater philosophical consideration to the nature of the practice through which it might be overcome (MacIntyre, 1998b, p.230). While it was not fatal for the Marxist project that Marx had not made explicit the Aristotelian assumptions which underpinned his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ – others have made explicit what he implied (compare Gould, 1978; Meikle, 1985) – it was disastrous for his project that he left unexamined the nature of proletarian activity itself.

According to MacIntyre, Marx recognised that something like Kant's antinomy between freedom and necessity was inevitable so long as society was conceived from the standpoint of civil society. However, whereas MacIntyre agrees with Marx that this antinomy could only be overcome through revolutionary praxis, he claims that Marx did not explore adequately this aspect of working-class activity (MacIntyre, 1998b, p. 231). Consequently, the central lacuna of Marxism, or so MacIntyre holds, is that in failing to elaborate on the ethical dimension of revolutionary practice, Marx failed to justify his claim that working-class struggle could underpin a virtuous, socialist alternative to capitalism. In his attempt to go beyond Marx, MacIntyre articulated an alternative account of social practices. He characterises as a practice any

coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended (MacIntyre, 1985a, p. 187).

Practices, thus understood, are orientated towards ‘intrinsic goods that can be attained only through the practice itself’(Porter, 2003, p. 40). While such practices are not in themselves virtuous activities, because they are not undertaken for purely instrumental reasons but evolve their own ‘goods and ends’ as ‘technical skills … are transformed and enriched by these extensions of human powers’, they can provide a point of ethical resistance to a system characterised by the domination of means-ends reasoning (MacIntyre, 1985a, p. 193). Thus deep-sea fishing, to take an example deployed by MacIntyre, is a practice because to become excellent at seamanship, for instance, involves developing goods that are both internal to fishing and which cannot be reduced to external good represented by the profit made when selling the catch. Moreover, this type of fishing necessarily involves a telos, whereby it is possible to judge a specific life within the fishing community ‘in terms of its success or failure, as a life well lived or a life perverted, frustrated or wasted’ (Porter, 2003, p. 41). Such an understanding of human telos will also necessarily evolve as a tradition through collective dialogue within the community, as fishermen and their families engage in an ongoing debate on the best way to live a full life in such a community. Cooperation in such a society will therefore spill over from specific crews to help generate a real living community.

Interestingly, in After Virtue (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988) and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (1990), MacIntyre opened himself up to the charge that he had failed to overcome the moral relativism inherent to A Short History of Ethics because of the stress he placed on the socially and historically constructed way that virtues thus understood existed in and through a tradition of communal debate. Dependent Rational Animals (1999), however, marked a break with this approach. Rather than appeal to some socially constructed tradition as a fundamental evaluative principle, for the first time since before he published A Short History of Ethics in 1966, MacIntyre appealed to a model of human nature and the possible flourishing thereof as an objective standard against which individual lives can be judged (MacIntyre, 1999, p. x). Interestingly, Eagleton appeals to this humanistic aspect of MacIntyre's mature thought in his attempt to outline a Marxist ethics. Unfortunately for Eagleton as a Marxist, while MacIntyre once believed that workers could begin to overcome the gap between our human nature and our social activity through their collective struggles against capital, since at least the mid-1960s he has rejected this argument. This presents MacIntyre with a problem, for it is not at all clear how his concepts of practice, telos and tradition, as outlined in After Virtue and subsequent works, can coherently be mapped on to the more naturalistic approach of Dependent Rational Animals. Indeed, as Gilbert Meilaender points out, the thesis of Dependent Rational Animals involves a move from ‘an attempt to talk about morality solely in terms of social practices and back towards metaphysical biology’ (Meilaender, 1999, p. 49). And while MacIntyre explicitly argues that he wrote Dependent Rational Animals from within the Thomist tradition, he says very little of the concept of tradition within this book. Moreover, it is not at all clear how the practices and virtues known in the local communities to which he refers might cohere with that tradition. MacIntyre has therefore articulated an ethical theory which involves at least a tension if not necessarily a contradiction between, on the one hand, an objective naturalist evaluative standard of human flourishing and, on the other hand, what Eagleton previously criticised as a much more relativist account of the traditions generated through the myriad debates on human telos associated with differing practices and the various communities which they underpin (Eagleton, 1993, p. 139). And while it is not difficult to imagine some communities by which a potential bridge might be erected between these two evaluative criteria, one need only glance across a world of inter-communal conflicts to recognise that it is not at all clear that all forms of community are so compatible.

Part of the appeal of Marxism to the young MacIntyre was its promise of a solution to this problem. According to Marx, it was through their struggles against capital that workers would tend to recognise their common interests as an international class. The solidarity thus socially constructed would underpin, as MacIntyre suggested in the 1950s, not merely a realisation of our essential nature as social beings but also a re-forging of that nature at a higher level (compare Marx, 1973, pp. 161-2; Sayers, 1998, ch. 9). Such a model could provide the basis from which MacIntyre might synthesise his practice-based account of the virtues and his metaphysical biology, but it could only do so at the expense of his concept of practice. Interestingly, in so far as MacIntyre has gestured towards concrete analyses of those local communities which have fostered the virtues (and to my knowledge he has done little more than gesture in this direction), there is less distance between his ideas and Marxism than I think even he would care to admit.

Against Marxism, MacIntyre interprets Marx's theories of exploitation and alienation as implying that the separation of means from ends characteristic of capitalist production leaves workers trapped in something akin to an iron cage of bourgeois rationality, preventing them from recognising the good life. So while MacIntyre accepts much of Marx's critique of capitalism, as we have seen he extends it to dismiss the socialist potential of the class Marx had hoped would be its grave digger. He suggests that even when workers combine in struggle to resist the dehumanising effects of capitalism on their lives, they tend to do so within parameters set by capitalism. So in struggling for a ‘fair day's wage’, for instance, workers accept the separation of means and ends characteristic of capitalism. Consequently, Marx's implicit ethics of liberation, even as it was extended by MacIntyre in 1958-9, whereby proletarian self-activity sits at the core of the ethical critique of capitalism, is negated by the nature of that activity. Thus very much along the lines suggested by Adorno and Horkheimer, both proletarian productive activity and the struggles of workers for better wages and conditions are conceived as being forever trapped within the parameters of civil society (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979, p. 37).

This sense of pessimism is reinforced by MacIntyre's periodisation of modernity. Both in After Virtue, and more fully in his reply to Marx Wartofsky's critique of that book, he notes the affinity between his periodisation of modernity and that outlined by Polanyi in The Great Transformation. Concretely, he argues that while the modern world has roots going back into the medieval period, the process of transformation ‘was not completed until the nineteenth century’ (MacIntyre, 1984, p. 253; 1985a, p. 239; compare McMylor, 1994, pp. 77-108; 2003). In fact, MacIntyre's utilisation of Polanyi illuminates his discussion of Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class noted above. For Polanyi dates the endpoint of the transition to modernity at 1834 – the moment at which Thompson's study terminates (Polanyi, 1957, p. 80, p. 102, p. 163), and assuming something like Polanyi's periodisation, it follows that Thompson's evidence of emancipatory working-class struggles has little bearing on the post-1834 period.

However, while the pessimistic implications of these arguments are all too apparent, in practice MacIntyre points to evidence which mediates against their blanket acceptance. For instance, in 2006 he wrote:

To Adorno my inclination is to respond by quoting Dr Johnson's friend, Oliver Edwards, who said that he too had tried to be a philosopher, but ‘cheerfulness was always breaking in’, perhaps a philistine, but also an appropriate response. What grounds then are there for cheerfulness in any social order such as our own about which some of Adorno's central claims still hold true? Those grounds derive surely from the continuing resistance to deprivations, frustrations, and evils that informs so many everyday lives in so many parts of the world, as well as much of the best thinking about those deprivations, frustrations, and evils, including Adorno's and Geuss's. To be good, to live rightly, and to think rightly, it may be said in reply to Adorno, is to be engaged in struggle and a perfected life is one perfected in key part in and through conflicts (MacIntyre, 2006a).

It was in the context of this argument that MacIntyre commented, as I noted above, that some struggles mounted by ‘rank-and-file trade union movements’ are practices that deserve our support. Indeed, MacIntyre's recognition of the radical significance of struggles such as these is that feature of his thought that has long since differentiated his variant of post-Marxist thought from that of the Frankfurt School. Thus as long ago as 1970 he suggested that if the major thesis of Marcuse's One Dimensional Man (1964) was true, ‘then we should have to ask how the book came to be written and we would certainly have to enquire whether it would find any readers’ (MacIntyre, 1970, p. 62). On a similar note, in Dependent Rational Animals (1999) he gave an example of one of those local communities within which the virtues had been reproduced in opposition to the modern state. He argues that ‘Welsh Mining communities’ should be numbered among those local communities where practices survived, in resistance to the market, which sustained, among other ‘virtues’, those of ‘trade union struggle’ (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 143; compare 2006e, p. 180). Commenting on this point, Knight responds that ‘alienation is real, but seldom as total as postulated by Marcuse. Insofar as individuals are not alienated … they have resources to resist their further alienation’ (Knight, 2007, p. 150).

In an attempt to avoid performing a contradiction whereby working-class activity is both posited as being trapped within an alienated means-ends relationship while simultaneously being a site of virtue-fostering practice, MacIntyre, as I have suggested, distinguishes between labour qua labour on the one hand and concrete acts of labour which can be characterised as practices and which in turn can sustain some conception of the good life on the other. Thus the labour struggles that Knight claims involve ‘self-activity within social practices’ and that consequently provide ‘a solution to Marxism's “problem of justification” … for revolutionary practice’ do not include those bread-and-butter utilitarian struggles for higher wages – though such struggles may in themselves be justifiable – for these internalise the capitalist spirit of pleonexia. Rather, it is the struggles of practitioners against the malignant influence of managerialisation that underpin virtuous activity in the modern world.

The potential appeal of this conception of politics to contemporary radicals seems, to me at least, obvious: support can be extended to nurses, doctors, teachers, engineers and so on, in so far as they struggle to maintain their excellent practices against neoliberal managerialism; while more simple demands of workers for higher wages might be criticised for the same reasons that many would oppose pay increases for chief executive officers (CEOs) – they reflect a pressure to be greedy. Nevertheless, while the attractiveness of this suggestion is understandable, it appears to sit rather awkwardly with MacIntyre's claim that Welsh mining communities should be numbered among those local communities that have sustained virtuous practices in the face of pressure from both the state and capital. For whatever else might be said of coal mining, it is difficult to imagine that this dehumanising job can be conceived as a MacIntyrean practice as presented in After Virtue. In this book MacIntyre claims that while architecture, for example, is a practice, bricklaying is not, because the former is an example of the type of activity with goods internal to it while the latter is not (MacIntyre, 1985a, p. 187). In the absence of a more developed discussion of this concept it is difficult to imagine coal mining, which could almost be posited as an archetypical form of those activities whereby the separation of means – digging coal – from ends – a weekly wage – acts to undermine the realisation of some human telos. However, it is also palpably the case that vibrant communities emerged in the Welsh valleys and elsewhere in mining areas, and MacIntyre is certainly right to argue that moral and political philosophers should attend to historical and sociological studies of such communities (MacIntyre, 1999, pp. 142-3).

Unfortunately, MacIntyre's own comments on Welsh mining communities in Dependent Rational Animals are tentative to say the least. In just a few lines he writes that these communities were informed by ‘the ethics of work at the coal face, by a passion for the goods of choral singing and of rugby football and by the virtues of trade union struggle against first coal-owners and then the state’ (MacIntyre, 1999, p. 143). While MacIntyre does no more than hint towards an analysis of the relative importance of these forces in the creation of those communities, in their classic study of the South Wales Miners' Federation (SWMF), The Fed (1980), Hywel Francis and David Smith have pointed to the intimate links between trade union struggles and the sustenance of these local communities. Moreover, while Jonathan Rose is undoubtedly right to allude to the peculiar tradition of the South Wales coalfields (Rose, 2001, p. 238), Chris Williams points out that many of those aspects of respectable working-class life identified by MacIntyre could be found in other areas of Britain (Williams, 1998, p. 5), and Francis and Smith argue that it was ‘primarily’ through the trade union that such ‘communities’ were constructed from what would otherwise have been mere ‘aggregations of work-people’. Indeed they argue that ‘the totality of commitment to the miners’ cause was a form of class consciousness which translated itself into a community consciousness' (Francis and Smith, 1980, p. 55). Moreover, their book perhaps includes lessons for radicals active in the modern global economy, for they show how socialist activists in the SWMF overcame divisions within a workforce that sprang not only from across the British Isles, but from many parts of Europe as well: Portuguese, Germans, French, Belgians and Spaniards were brought together in the union alongside English and Welsh speakers with a multiplicity of local dialects and accents (Francis and Smith, 1980, p. 34, p. 11). The role of socialist activists was central to the process whereby communities were formed out of these disparate materials. They acted, one might argue, as Gramscian organic intellectuals (Gramsci, 1971, p. 6), drawing together a community of workers through the ideology of ‘proletarian internationalism’ in opposition to the attempts of the mine owners and the state to divide and rule them (Francis and Smith, 1980, p. 31, p. 351, ch. 10). Moreover this ideology was framed, on the one hand, by the local class struggle and, on the other hand, by the activists' relationship to an international grouping of militants in the Second and Third Internationals. And while there was no automatic relationship between the trade union struggles in the pits and the formation of the broader mining communities, then neither was there, as MacIntyre's mature critique of Marx seems to suggest, an unbridgeable gulf between these two processes. In seeming contrast to his model of practices, in struggling against the process of their dehumanisation, Welsh miners did create communities which MacIntyre claims fostered the virtues.

This suggests that while simple ‘economistic’ trade union struggles might well, as MacIntyre recognised in the 1960s, reflect the sectionalism of the working class, in different circumstances they might also impel forms of solidarity upon workers that could underpin a conception of human telos that problematises MacIntyre's concept of practice (compare Kelly, 1988). For if virtue-sustaining communities can in some instances be underpinned by this type of trade union militancy, there are important implications regarding fundamental weaknesses with MacInyre's claim that ‘[W]hile proletarianisation makes it necessary for workers to resist, it also tends to deprive workers of those forms of practice through which they can discover conceptions of a good and of virtues adequate to the moral needs of resistance’ (MacIntyre, 1998b, p. 232).

Conclusion

MacIntyre's mature work is not only deeply influenced by Marx, but he is also a critic of liberalism, and his concept of practice is intended to go beyond the limitations of Marx's account of proletarian struggle to explain ethical resistance to capitalism. Indeed he has recently gestured against those who would label him a conservative by favourably quoting Lenin's urge, alongside similar lines from Aquinas and St Paul, that we not ‘bow down before the tyranny of the established fact’ of the neoliberal consensus (MacIntyre, 2007b). This revolutionary perspective is reinforced by MacIntyre's suggestion that social and political theorists study various communities of resistance to capitalism through which practices that are able to underpin the good life might emerge and flourish. Nevertheless, MacIntyre's concept of practice is not without problems. As we have seen, the Welsh mining communities noted by him as foci of the virtuous resistance to capitalist markets and states were arguably underpinned by forms of trade unionism that could not reasonably be classified as MacIntyrean practices. Indeed, by his account of proletarianisation they should have been forever trapped in an alienated means-ends activity characteristic of capitalism. If, when MacIntyre has recourse to move from theory to evidence, the examples he cites prove problematic for his model, this does not of course entail that he was right to claim, as he did in 1961, that

[t]he self-activity of the working-class is revolutionary for it marks a total break with both the economic and the political systems of capitalism which rely upon the passive acceptance of their alienated role by the workers. And socialism is self-activity as a total form of life (MacIntyre, 2008c, p. 191).

However, if MacIntyre was right in the late 1960s to recognise problems with this argument, we should also note that the example of the Welsh mining communities suggests that there was perhaps a kernel of truth to this earlier argument. Moreover, the fact that these communities grew and flourished long after Polanyi's watershed of 1834 implies that, whatever has happened since, this point need not mark an absolute break in the history of the workers' movement.

This conclusion suggests a possible space for further reconciliation with Marx. For the great strength of his conceptualisation of the proletariat, by contrast with MacIntyre's views on the subject, is surely that by positing a contradictory essence to the working class, he explained both the fragmentation and alienation of working-class life, and the collective struggles through which workers are able to begin to re-appropriate their nature as social beings, as well as, most importantly, the link between the two. This contradictory essence of capitalism was recognised by Marx in 1844, and provided the basis for his politics thereafter (Arthur, 1986; Fisk, 1980, p. 124; Marx, 1975a). Through his embrace and deepening of this argument in the 1950s, MacIntyre not only contributed to the renewal of Marxism associated with the New Left but he also suggested a mechanism by which the tension between a naturalistic ethics of human needs and one of social practices might be overcome.

However, since the 1960s MacIntyre seems to have swung from a toosimplistically optimistic conception of the working-class struggle to a toosimplistically pessimistic interpretation of the same. Consequently, while his mature concept of practice provides a powerful basis from which to ground his continued opposition to capitalism, despite his intention of going beyond the pessimism associated with the Frankfurt School MacIntyre does not provide an adequate account of some of those examples of virtuous communities of resistance to capitalism to which he refers in his work. Moreover, in so far as he has come to supplement his practice-based model of ethics with a naturalistic account of the same it is not at all clear how this approach matches the coherence of his youthful Marxism.

If the pattern of class struggle in the 1960s taught MacIntyre that every strike need not transcend the system of alienation, the example of Welsh mining communities ought to remind him that neither is every economistic struggle forever trapped in that system. That similar movements have repeatedly emerged over the past century, and that they have, in some instances, grown out of 'virtuous' practice-based demands while, in others, they have emerged out of the less obviously virtuous bread-and-butter issues, suggests that while MacIntyre asked important questions of Marx he has not himself provided a comprehensive response to these questions.