Alasdair MacIntyre's Flawed Critique of Capitalism

Robert T. Miller has a great article in the February 2011 First Things entitled "Waiting for St. Vladimir" in which he critiques Alasdair MacIntyre's critique of capitalism. (It is not available online except by subscription so I can't link to it.)

I have taught MacIntyre's great book After Virtue (hereafter AV) in my Christianity and Culture class for the last 7 or 8 years and I have greatly profited by reading and re-reading it. Like Miller, I revere MacIntyre as one of the greatest living philosophers and I think AV is one of the great books of the 20th century. It amazes me how lucid and engaging it is compared to some of MacIntyre's other books, which leave me cold and bored.

But AV is a story and a corker at that. It is the story of how we got to the point where, as a culture, we can no longer articulate coherent reasons for moral positions and are thus left drifting aimlessly along with no way to resolve moral disagreements other than by force. It seems clear that a culture in this predicament faces the alternatives of collapsing or embracing tyranny. And that is a lot of insight to get from one 300 page book.

I completely resonate with him when Miller calls MacIntyre one of his "intellectual heroes" and so Miller's criticism of MacIntyre is not based on any desire to undermine MacIntyre's ethics in general or to discredit him as a Christian philosopher. I believe MacIntyre is right about so many things that it pains me to find him wrong at one very important point. For the past several years now, in my final lecture on AV I have had to point out that MacIntyre seems to be somewhat naive about Marxism and Capitalism insofar as he seems to think that the Marxist critique of Capitalism is valid even though Marxism itself has been completely discredited. Miller explains the root of MacIntyre's critique of Capitalism and thus throw light on this puzzling position of MacIntyre's.

Miller describes a lecture given by MacIntyre at Cambridge in the summer of 2010 on the financial crisis of 2007-08 in which MacIntyre reiterated his anti-Capitalist views and expounded on them. Miller points to the classical Marxist theory of surplus value as the foundation of MacIntyre's argument. Miller writes:

"Following classical Marxist theory, MacIntyre defines surplus value as 'the difference between what the labor of productive workers earns in wages and what capitalists receive for the products of that labor' - that is, the difference between the value of the goods produced by a firm and the amount paid in the aggregate to its workers. Capitalists appropriate this difference and so exploit labor." (38)

MacIntyre argues that capitalists are caught in the dilemma of wanting to maximize profits by minimizing wages, on the one hand, and needing consumers with buying power to purchase the goods, on the other. Capitalism solves this dilemma by inventing credit, what he terms "the infliction of debt." (38) In creating the necessary financial products to facilitate debt, capitalists transferred a high amount of risk to unsuspecting individuals without explaining what was going on and thus caused a debt crisis.

Miller points out that if MacIntrye is right, the only solution is not regulation but revolution. The whole system is rotten morally and must be replaced. So we are not waiting for a new St. Benedict, but for a new St. Vladimir (as in Lenin). In the 1995 preface to his 1953 book Marxism and Christianity, "MacIntyre mentions 'relatively small-scale and local communities' such as certain ancient cities, medieval communes, and 'modern cooperative farming and fishing enterprises.'" He claims that in such communities the uses of power and wealth are subordinated to the goods internal to communal practices. While it is not clear in AV, Miller observes that "the local communities in which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained" that MacIntyre mentions in AV's conclusion turn out to be economic communities.

As Miller observes, the Marxist theory of surplus value is rejected by most economists today. Theologians and philosophers, apparently, have not all received the memo as yet, however.

Why is the theory wrong? It is because the value of goods is determined by all the inputs into the production process and not merely the labor of human beings alone. It depends on the cost of raw materials, plant and equipment, patents and technology and other inputs. Workers are entitled not to the entire value of the goods produced, but only to the portion of the value of the goods due to their efforts. Owners of capital deserve the portion of the value of the goods attributable to the capital.

Miller points out that MacIntyre's argument is implausible. For one thing, capitalists are not really able to set wages at any level they want because of stiff competition from other firms who compete for the services of workers. Wages set in a competitive environment are fair.

MacIntyre speaks as if all capitalists functioned as a collectivity, when in reality they are competing against each other. As Miller points out, capitalism has produced, through this kind of competition, a greater equality of wealth and income than any other system in history. Even workers are investors (capitalists) in contemporary societies. Most large companies are publicly traded and owned partially by workers. Workers invest their retirement savings in mutual funds, which invest in companies.

Credit products like mortgages exist because they meet a need, not because capitalists scheme to inflict debt on unsuspecting workers. A young couple thus can buy a house when their children are young, rather than waiting until the children are grown.

Miller is clear that capitalism is not perfect. But the costs of the capitalist system are less than those of the alternatives. All that need be claimed is that it is the least imperfect system in a fallen world; no Utopianism is required. Thus, as Miller says, an attack on capitalism is really an attack on poor people, who have been most helped by capitalism.

MacIntyre admits that capitalism has generated more material prosperity than any other system but is still unjust because of the surplus theory of value. But this theory is simply false.

Miller may well get to a deeper reason why MacIntyre thinks capitalism is evil when he notes that MacIntyre, following Aristotle, thinks that all communities have a purpose and that since capitalism is so good at generating wealth that must be its purpose. However, Miller argues that capitalism exists not to facilitate any particular purpose but rather to facilitate the attainment of the goals individuals set for themselves.

MacIntyre has made some serious mistakes in political philosophy. But Miller demonstrates that MacIntyre's anti-Capitalist view are not derived from his Aristotelian philosophy. They are merely the barnacles of MacIntyre's rather old-fashioned Marxist ideology.

Alasdair MacIntyre: Retractationes

This morning I finished four weeks of teaching Alasdair MacIntrye's After Virtue to my Christianity and Culture class. It is a great book and it gets better every time through. Recently I traded in my old, battered 2nd edition for a shiny new 3rd edition with the Prologue written 26 years after the original book was published in 1981. I found a few notes of interest.

The most important point is clarified right after the bat. MacIntyre writes: "If there are good reasons to reject the central theses of After Virtue, by now I should certainly have leaned what they are. . . but I have as yet found no reason for abandoning the major contentions of After Virtue. (ix)

He says something of interest to me when he clarifies that it is only possible to understand the dominant culture of our day "from a standpoint external to that culture." (ix) Now this is a problem: how to find such a standpoint. There seem to be three possibilities only. One could examine our culture from the perspective of the future - say the 23rd century - but that would require a time machine, which we do not have. Or one could examine our culture from outside our culture - say from a position embedded in Chinese or Animist African or Saudi Arabian culture, but that is not really possible for one born and raised in late modern, Western, Anglo-American culture. Or one could find a place to stand in the past from which to look at our culture, which seems to be the most likely possibility.

n After Virtue, MacIntyre evaluates our culture from a the perspective of the premodern, Aristotelian tradition and surely this is the secret of the book's persuasive power. He does not criticize modernity from within modernity - which can only result in an extension of modernity - but from outside modernity. He acknowledges that the tradition he favors flourished in the European Middle Ages, but he brushes aside charges of "nostalgia and of idealizing the past." (xi) He says "there is, I think, not a trace of this in the text" and he is right.

MacIntyre clarifies one important point when he writes that when he wrote After Virtue he was "already an Aristotelian, but not yet a Thomist," which of course is plain from the text. But he says that he did become a Thomist through the process of writing this book and that can hardly come as a surprise to the attentive reader.

There has been much talk of claiming MacIntyre for the so-called "communitarian" school, but he says that he has never been a communitarian in the mold of Amitai Etzioni. Furthermore, he sensibly states what many communitarians never explicitly face up to when he asserts that not all forms of community are good. Some, he claims, are "nastily oppressive." (xiv) In addition, he goes so far as to state that such versions of communitarians "are compatible with and supportive of the values of the liberalism I reject." (xiv) For MacIntyre the good community is one in which the tradition of the virtues is developed on the basis of a shared conception of and devotion to the good.

He is so concerned to reject liberalism root and branch that he wants no part of conservatism either, which he seems to regard as a species of liberalism. Certainly, of the five main streams of conservative thought today: libertarianism, neoconservatism, anti-communism, social conservatism and traditional conservatism, the first two and often the third (and sometimes, but not always, the fourth) are really just classical 19th century liberalism, which has become conservative because of the Western drift toward socialism. But I would argue that MacIntyre's Thomism has much in common with the traditional conservatism of the "permanent things" as embodied in the thought of Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver and writers associated with Human Events or Touchstone. Certainly if he would not claim them, they would want to claim him as a friend and ally for they mostly love Aristotle and Thomas too, not to mention Augustine.

He also clarifies that he has rejected the Marxian program as hopelessly modern and the only aspect of it that he retains is "Marx's critique of the economic, social and cultural order of capitalism." It is important to say this because it is amazing how easily adopting a Marxian critique of capitalism slides (in the hands of lesser thinkers than MacIntyre) into a ideology of anti-capitalism that begins to sprout Marxist prescriptions alongside the critiques.

One delightful little tidbit is his confession that the opening chapter is an allusion to A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr., which has been my favorite novel (apologies to Dostoevesky) ever since I first read it as an undergraduate in a novels course. I have always thought it might be a conscious allusion and here is proof. I teach Canticle in the same Christianity and Culture class as After Virtue along with the Political Writings of St. Augustine and have the students write a paper on Canticle as an Augustinian novel. Reading those essays is the most pleasant aspect of my marking each year.

The final chapter, MacIntyre tells us, is an allusion to the poem by Constantine Kavafus "Waiting for the Barbarians." I reproduce that poem here for those to whom it is unfamiliar. It speaks to our situation so powerfully that it is hard to believe it was written in 1904.

"What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are to arrive today.

Why such inaction in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
What laws can the Senators pass any more?
When the barbarians come they will make the laws.

Why did our emperor wake up so early,
and sits at the greatest gate of the city,
on the throne, solemn, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
And the emperor waits to receive
their chief. Indeed he has prepared
to give him a scroll. Therein he inscribed
many titles and names of honor.

Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their red, embroidered togas;
why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets,
and rings with brilliant, glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying costly canes today,
wonderfully carved with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today,
and such things dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't the worthy orators come as always
to make their speeches, to have their say?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.

Why all of a sudden this unrest
and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution."

Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)

Alasdiar MacIntyre: "How I Survived 20th Century Academic Moral Philosophy"

On March 10, 2009 Alasdair MacIntyre was awarded an honoury degree by Trinity College, Dublin. Here is a lecture he gave at that time. It describes his pilgrimage as a philosopher and Christian. Take the time; it is well worth while. http://www.ucd.ie/news/2009/03FEB09/110309_macintyre.html