Moralism and the Critique of Capitalism
What modes of critique are adequate to interpreting, understanding and acting upon Late Capitalism and its concomitant crises? Formulated another way, what form should a contemporary critique of Capitalism take? The French Marxist intellectual Louis Althusser took to these to be central issues in the mid-to-late 20th century, and I want to suggest that these issues remain with us today, and that Althusser’s own systematically anti-humanist Marxism offers us — at the very least — powerful tools for contemporary critiques of Capitalism, especially given the ways in which it has developed since his death. For Althsuser, ‘humanism’ is fundamentally ideological, in contrast to the scientific character of Marxism; what Marx provides us in his later works (arguably from Capital, Vol. 1 onwards) is a scientific explanation of the structure of capitalism, the processes which produce, undermine, and sustain it, and so on. The critique Marx’s later work offers is not merely that Capitalism, for example, denigrates the human spirit through repetitive, menial labour; but that it necessarily produces such excesses and goes on to provide an outline of the ways in which it also undermines itself (cyclical economic crises, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc.) and can be further undermined (worker agitation, etc.)
