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Intro -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Contents -- 1 Introduction -- References -- Part I Human Development and Freedom -- 2 Human Development -- The Basic Structure of Marx's Critique of Capitalism -- Human Development as the Development of Powers -- Needs -- The Interaction Between Powers and Needs -- Human Development and Real Politics -- References -- 3 Freedom -- The Idea of a Human Nature -- Consciousness, Self-Direction, Freedom -- Freedom as Self-Direction -- The Value of Freedom -- References -- Part II Alienation and Democracy -- 4 The First Theory of Alienation -- References -- 5 Democracy -- References -- 6 From Realisation-Oriented to Agent-Centred Political Theory -- References -- Part III Alienation: The Unfreedom of Capitalism -- 7 Alienation and Unfreedom -- The Nature of Alienation -- Alienation from Product -- Alienation from the Labour Process -- Alienation from Species-Being -- Alienation from Others -- References -- 8 The Socialist Alternative -- Socialism as Emancipation -- Participatory Planning -- The Hierarchical Division of Labour -- Distributing According to Need -- Weber: Socialism Contra Bureaucratic Domination -- Participatory Planning and Hayek's Challenge -- References -- 9 Radical Theory and Revolutionary Practice -- Revolutionary Midwives and the Birth of the Future -- Alienation and the Revolutionary Contradictions of Capitalism -- The Revolutionary Theorist as Midwife -- References -- 10 Towards a New World -- References -- Appendix: A Brief Overview of the (Other) Principal Interpretations of Marx's Normative Commitments -- (A) The Amoralist Reading -- (B) The Moralist Reading -- (C) An Ethical Human Nature -- (D) Internal Critique Based on Ethical Principles -- Bibliography -- Index.

This book offers the first realist reconstruction of Marxs critique of capitalism. Reading Marx through a realist lens enables us to make sense of the connections between (1) Marxs positive concept of freedom, rooted in a theory of human development, (2) his understanding of alienation as diagnosing capitalist unfreedom, and (3) his conceptions of democracy and socialism, respectively, as the cures for this unfreedom. Along the way, it discusses and responds to some of Marxs most insightful critics, such as Max Weber and Friedrich Hayek. This clarifies Marxs ideas for a new generation of political thinkers; explains the challenge they pose to contemporary debates about freedom, democracy, and future economic institutions; and demonstrates that these ideas remain both defensible and compelling. Paul Raekstad is an Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam working on radical political theory, in particular Marxism, anarchism, prefigurative politics, and direct action. They co-authored Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today (2020).

AbstractThere is long-standing disagreement about how radical Adam Smith should be taken to be. Recently, Jonathan Israel's work on the enlightenment situates Smith as a moderate enlightenment thinker. This article challenges that assessment. Smith sees aristocrats as largely devoid of competence, wisdom, and virtue and thinks they do not wield significant political power in commercial societies. He is also highly critical of their economic power; and uses a neo-Roman concept of liberty to provide a powerful critique of slavery and feudalism. In so doing, he extends discussions of liberty and focuses them on economic relations in ways that prefigure labour republicanism. Finally, I show how these more radical commitments can be reconciled with his moderate proposals for political reform through his epistemology and realist anti-utopianism. These are aspects of Smith's thought that are essential for understanding it correctly and have much to teach us today.

In a recent article, Benjamin McKean defends utopian political theorising by means of an internal critique of realism, construed as essentially anti-utopian, in order to defend human rights against realist objections thereto. I challenge that argument in three steps, focusing on the realism of Raymond Geuss. First, I show that the realism of Raymond Geuss is not incompatible with utopianism, that Geuss never opposes realism to utopianism and that he frequently argues that political theory should be both more realistic and more utopian. Second, I show that McKean misconstrues Geuss' opposition to human rights as anti-utopian. Neither Geuss' opposition to ethics-first political theory nor his objections to human rights can accurately be explicated in terms of McKean's 'utopianism'. Finally, I show how this misconstruing of Geuss' realism renders McKean's critique of Geuss ineffective, as a result of which his defence of human rights against Geuss' realist objections fails. I conclude with some reflections on the importance of this for methodological debates in political theory, the value of realistically utopian theorising and the ideological power of contemporary ethics-first approaches to political theory.

Abstract:This article presents a novel reading of Marx's early, pre-1844, democratic theory, and its connection with his early views on alienation. It argues, contra established readings, that Marx had a properly developed theory of alienation prior to his famous

Alan Thomas' Republic of Equals: Predistribution and Property-Owning Democracy sets itself the ambitious task of synthesising neo-republican political theory and Rawlsian justice as fairness. It is an important and challenging work that will set the stage for a great deal of the discussion not only on justice and republicanism, but also on property-owning democracy, market socialism and broader discussions of alternative economic institutions to come. After reconstructing the argument of the book, this review article turns to some specific points it raises that warrant further discussion. More precisely, it examines Thomas' critique of market socialism, arguing that it fails to do what it sets out to do: show that market socialism is incompatible with justice as fairness. Having discussed and rejected his critique of the main other model that Thomas considers, I then turn to questions of the feasibility of POD as a feasible alternative to familiar forms of capitalism.

Marx's theory of alienation is of great importance to contemporary political developments, due both to the re-emergence of anti-capitalist struggle in Zapatismo, 21st Century Socialism, and the New Democracy Movement, and to the fact that the most important theorists of these movements single out Marx's theory of alienation as critical to their concerns. Despite this renewed practical and theoretical interest, however, these and other writers have been sparing in their accounts of the normative components which the theory of alienation incorporates. Along with many recent commentators, I argue that the normative components of the theory of alienation are to be found in a notion of human development, and that a conception of the particular importance of the human species-essence plays a critical role in this respect. However, I take a different, and somewhat more detailed, tack than these previous authors in presenting a more detailed conception of human development and flourishing on the basis of Marx's conceptions of powers and needs and comparing it to the most prominent non-Marxist theory of human development: the capabilities approach. I then show that this understanding of powers and needs, along with a notion of the particularly important human power of conscious self-directed activity, underpins the critique of capitalism Marx presents in his theory of alienation. This will allow us a better understanding of the normative components of Marx's theory of alienation and its potential relevance and plausibility to the theorists and movements it is influencing.