by Andreas Peglau
If we are born as good beings, there is only one thing we need to do: ensure that these predisposition is allowed to flourish. Then we will inevitably build a community that is in accordance with these predisposition—and thus a good one as well. Who or what could possibly stand in our way?
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Despite all its shortcomings, there is no more comprehensive and thoroughly developed conception of society than the one traceable to Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. It provides detailed proof that exploitative systems such as the capitalist one are profoundly unjust, inhumane, and necessarily undemocratic. Since the socialist world system led by the Soviet Union was laid to rest around 1990, “left-wing,” non-capitalist social models have nevertheless been largely dismissed as obsolete. In doing so, something was wrongly discarded that should, however, have been holistically completed—and fundamentally revised.
Marx and Engels had only rather general, half-baked ideas about how to achieve and shape a better society. Believing in a supposed primacy of the economy, they fought against any perspective that deviated from it. As their doctrine became increasingly “economistic,” what is most essential to human beings—the psyche—disappeared from it.
In the article People as Puppets? How Marx and Engels Suppressed the Real Psyche in Their Teaching,[1] I elaborated on this point in detail in 2024. In the present text, I take up the thread once again: How do we arrive at a humane social order? Weiterlesen
