Category error: The Good and freedom under capitalism: Reply to Tom Canel’s caveats on Marxism
Chris Cutrone
Platypus Review 185 | April 2026
For the little man . . . not only his own lack of freedom but that of others as well spells his doom. His interest lies in the Marxist clarification of the concept of freedom.
— Max Horkheimer, “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” in Dämmerung (1926–31)[1]
Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology, a physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families.
— Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street (1928)[2]
TOM CANEL’S ESSAY on my debate with Benjamin Studebaker, between pursuit of freedom and the Good, tries to address my writing as a logical problem.[3] But it begins with a misapprehension: not I but Studebaker introduced the category of the “body” into our dispute about Platonism and Marxism. Not my argument but his hinges on the natural body as a phenomenon. For me it is a historical form of appearance in society; for him it is an emanation of the Good — falling away from it.
This raises the issue of how a natural biological species, which seemingly hasn’t changed fundamentally physically in many thousands of years, could nonetheless have its social relations change, profoundly. What are social relations? They are not merely relations between persons, but also relations to and with Nature (physical and historical) and to and with oneself. They thus form a cosmos — a cosmology.
Kant introduced a critique of the hitherto mechanical view of the universe, on the basis of Rousseau’s observation that the interaction of things changes the things. He sought to go beyond Newtonian physics to a more organic perspective that could grasp qualitative transformations in a process of change. This dialectical view of subject and object, as well as of practice and theory, was motivated by recognition of radical historical change expressed by political, economic, technical and scientific, as well as philosophical revolutions in the modern, bourgeois epoch, overthrowing entirely a prior form of society. Kant’s revolutionary philosophy has been profoundly influential, affecting critical reflection and self-consciousness in diverse ways in all domains. Kant overcame the antinomies of idealism vs. realism (AKA materialism), empiricism vs. rationalism, etc., but this has not prevented the recrudescence of such Ancient philosophical concerns in the subsequent capitalist era. I regard the return to pre-Kantian philosophy to be a symptom of the abandonment of this revolutionary perspective.
Marxism historically critiqued such regression in philosophy as expressing the decadence of bourgeois society. Theodor Adorno, for example, addressed the wide disparity between so-called “Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy” as posing the question of philosophy itself; also noting that philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche seemed to be offering not alternative but anti-philosophies, as did Marxism; and the sciences had taken leave of philosophy altogether in the 20th century, by contrast with the bourgeois Enlightenment, and in ways not yet true in the 19th century, when science and philosophy could still yet cross-fertilize productively.
Tom Canel asks:
Would an established emancipatory communism leave any moral / historical tasks unfulfilled? If not, there might not be a need for any communist virtues. Arguably, once human species being is no longer alienated from itself, the world historical task that the conjuncture would task us with would be to continue to perfect our species being by constantly extending human potential.[4]
But this is the wrong question. No doubt there will be tasks and possibilities beyond that of overcoming capitalism, which is how Marxism originally defined socialism/communism. New problems will arise. Capitalism was regarded as the self-contradiction, crisis, and destruction of historically achieved virtues of bourgeois society, pointing paradoxically to their fulfillment and transcendence beyond capitalism. Leon Trotsky, whose work Canel invokes, warned about illusions of negating bourgeois society and its values, for instance in the realm of culture and art (see Literature and Revolution and other writings, in which he rejected the very possibility of “proletarian” culture and art); but Vladimir Lenin, following Marx and Engels, also warned against prematurely disregarding bourgeois forms of politics and economics, including those developed self-contradictorily under capitalism, the horizon of “bourgeois right” which any attempted rule by the working class — the dictatorship of the proletariat — would still need to observe and respect, in practice as well as theory, at least in the transition from capitalism to socialism that working-class political revolution could only initiate and not complete instantly.
Would “human species-being” ever achieve an unalienated state? Will disalienation ever be complete? We cannot know this for certain. All we can know, according to Marxism, is the possibility and necessity of overcoming the present form of alienation, namely capitalism, and accept and pursue that task of socialism. Marx’s observation about human species-being was that it seemed radically historically transformable in ways not seen in other natural species. Our capacity for self-alienation was responsible for this potential — for freedom. Marx followed Rousseau in acknowledging alienation as our inevitable condition. To overcome one form of alienation is to produce another.
Humanity has developed capacities that transcend our physical biological nature, producing technical possibilities incommensurate with our sense-data perceptions and physical experience. Technology offers possibilities beyond the human body. The problem is that capitalism, based on the bourgeois social relations of human labor, keeps technology shackled to measures of commensurability with biological human life. This problem yields opposed desires and fears: anarcho-primitivism vs. techno-utopianism. Socialism beyond capitalism will realize both and neither of these projections. Both human nature and technology will be free to realize potentials not tied down to the other. As Walter Benjamin recognized, the body is itself a technology; and technology is an extension and prosthesis of the body. To master them is to allow them to more freely relate to each other than is possible under capitalism. What we want is that “the tool not dominate the man,” not to choose either the tool or the man. We want a “relation between men” to no longer appear as a “relation between things” (Marx), but this doesn’t mean rejecting the things.
Marx recognized alienation in all domains of social relations: alienation between people; alienation from Nature; and alienation from ourselves. But he also recognized further alienation: the alienation of the social relations from themselves; the alienation of labor as a social relation from its product; and technology itself as an alienated social relation. Capital as alienated labor transcends and not only negates labor. Disalienation doesn’t mean trying to achieve an unalienated state: alienation is our species-being. What changes in the form of the self-alienation of humanity. Today it is capital — capitalism. Reappropriating it will mean overcoming one form of alienation, not alienation per se.
But our task is to overcome this form of alienation, since it is manifestly self-contradictory and self-destructive: capital contradicts not merely humanity but itself; capital destroys not only humanity but itself. If capital merely destroyed humanity, it would not distinguish itself from all forms of culture and society, which have all demanded human sacrifice: the sacrifice of the human body and its good. All culture and society has been “inhuman”; that has never been enough to demand its change: only internal contradiction drives change. Naïve humanism is an insufficient basis for transformation: capital must be realized in order to be abolished. Anti-capitalism is mere sentimentality to which everyone can agree.
From the standpoint of bourgeois society in the present, as well as from any historical standpoint, the potential for freedom expressed by capitalism must challenge fundamentally any notions we can have of morality and ethics. It is truly “beyond good and evil” (Nietzsche); and the freedom expressed by our reason, as developed by society, works for both good and ill, to our benefit and detriment (Rousseau): “man is born free but is everywhere in chains.” These are chains of our own making: so is any good that can be made on the basis of our natural potential — and of our historical enthrallment. More confusing still, the unfulfilled potential for freedom in capitalism is inseparable from its manifest harmful effects. Hence, Marxism regarded capitalism and its history as the basis for not merely unfreedom but freedom. To overcome our unfreedom we must master the freedom that it makes both necessary and possible.
The mastery of nature (so the imperialists teach) is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education, above all, the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery (if we are to use this term) of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is the mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man.[5]
However capitalism, especially at this late stage, might make us doubt the potential for such mastery, we should not pessimistically accept the apparent limitations of our bodies, as they appear under capitalism, as a conditional qualification for deference in our pursuit of socialism. To accept Nature in the forms of appearance — the Good — as presented under capitalism means accepting capitalism. | P
[1] Max Horkheimer, “The Little Man and the Philosophy of Freedom,” in Dawn & Decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969, trans. Michael Shaw (New York: The Seabury Press, 1978), 52.
[2] Walter Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” in One-Way Street, in Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, et al. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2004), 487.
[3] Tom Canel, “Species being, the good, and Leon Trotsky: A response to the Chris Cutrone / Benjamin Studebaker exchange regarding ideology critique,” Platypus Review 183 (February 2026), <https://platypus1917.org/2026/02/01/species-being-the-good-and-leon-trotsky/>.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Benjamin, “To the Planetarium,” 487.
