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"Jeff Noonan traces the development of humanist values from the ancient philosophies of India, China, and Greece, to contemporary struggles against oppression. Embodied Humanism argues that humanism is a critical social philosophy in which need-satisfaction and life-enjoyment have always been paramount"--

Democracy and self-determination -- Liberalism and democracy -- The real contradiction between inequality and democracy -- Right-wing populism as a threat to democracy -- Radical democracy: agonistic theory and horizontalist practice -- Shared life-interests and democratic self-determination.

The most influential theories of oppression have argued that belief in the existence of a shared human essence or nature is ultimately responsible for the injustices suffered by women, First Nations peoples, blacks, gays and lesbians, and colonised people and have insisted that struggles against oppression must be mounted from the unique and different perspectives of different groups. Jeff Noonan argues instead that such difference must be seen to be anchored in a conception of human beings as self-creative. Unless freedom and self-determination are accepted as universal values, the moral force of arguments against exclusion and oppression is lost.

Current patterns of global economic activity are not only unsustainable, but unethical - this claim is central to Materialist Ethics and Life-Value. Grounding the definition of ethical value in the natural and social requirements of life-support and life-development shared by all human beings, Jeff Noonan provides a new way of understanding the universal conception of "the good life." Noonan argues that the true crisis affecting the world today is not sluggish rates of economic growth but the model of measuring economic and social health in terms of money-value. In response, he develops an alternative understanding of good societies where the breadth and depth of life-activity and enjoyment are dependent on dominant institutions. The more social institutions satisfy the necessary requirements of human life, the more they empower each person to develop and enjoy the capacities that make human life valuable and meaningful. A well-reasoned synthesis of traditional philosophical concerns and contemporary critiques of global capitalism, this book is a forward-looking treatise that defends political struggle and reconsiders what is most important for a happy life.

In Democratic Society and Human Needs Noonan examines the moral grounds for liberalism and democracy, arguing that contemporary democracy was created through needs-based struggles against classical liberal rights, which are essentially exclusionary. For him, a democratic society is one in which human beings collectively control necessary life-resources, using them to promote the essential human value of free capability realization. His critique of globalization and liberal-capitalism vindicates radical social and economic democratization and provides an essential step towards understanding the vast discrepancies between rich and poor within and between democratic countries.

Thomas Piketty is the most politically and economically important participant in the ongoing debate about the deleterious effects of income and wealth inequality. The article analyses his arguments carefully because they give Marxists an opportunity to intervene in a mainstream political-economic debate in which they are generally not taken seriously. As impressive as Piketty's argument is, and as willing as he is to embrace a socialist solution to capitalist crisis, a non-dogmatic Marxist examination of his texts reveals that his argument does not grasp at the most systematic level the connections between the driving forces of the capitalist economy and the undemocratic implications of widening inequality. This article will argue that although his critique acknowledges the structural inequality of power between workers and capitalists upon which capitalist society depends, his argument points towards an organic link between the exploitation of labour, the falling rate of profit, capitalist crisis, the shift of investment from the productive economy to the financial sector, and growing inequality that he does not explicitly formulate.

Mainstream economists have long argued that the labour theory of value cannot explain price-formation. In response, Marxists have argued that mainstream economics is fixated on abstract mathematical problems which mystify social reality and obscure the social relationships at the heart of the real economy. Marxist political economists have proposed formal solutions to the price-formation problem, but the deeper issue on which my article will focus is the way in which price signals cannot communicate the information that economic agents need to make decisions which are consistent with the life-support capacity of the natural world and the social interests of workers. While Marxists typically distinguish a socialist economy from a capitalist one on the basis of the former's commitment to production for the sake of need-satisfaction, needs are typically defined in terms of use-values. I will argue that this identification fails to distinguish between needs as universal life-requirements and needs as means to the completion of any project whatsoever. Unless needs are defined in terms of life-requirements, then even a socialist society can continue to undermine the natural conditions of life-support and exhaust human potential in meaningless cycles of consumption.

The paper argues that a Marxist transhumanism is politically and ethically incoherent. While it is true that transhumanists and Marxists and transhumanists believe that human beings are self-determining, self-transforming, transhumanists are committed to transcending the material conditions of organic life. Their ultimate aim is to encourage the emergence of a artificial superintelligence whose self-creative capacities are not limited by the needs of organic life forms. Socialism, by contrast, is a political and ethical movement committed to ending the suffering caused by capitalism, by changing social institutions and the values according to which resources are distributed and utilized. The success of the transhumanist project would render all social and political theories and institutions obsolete. The socialist use of technology would expand human life-capacities while preserving the ties of mutual need that link us together and make human life meaningful and worthwhile