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Pragmatism Against the American Grain
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Alasdair MacIntyre is the rare ex-Marxist who did not morph into a neoconservative. He is hard to place on the commonplace Left-Right political axis because he has rejected the modern assumptions common to both its poles. Still, as a kind of anti-capitalist radical, he remains convinced that Marxism is a source of indispensable critical insights into the nature of capitalism and how it functions as the engine of both oppression and alienation. Marx-as-prognosticator, however, as opposed to Marx-as-critic, did not fare as well for MacIntyre — if Marx in fact had any ambitions to be prescient about the details of how revolutionary praxis will actually prevail.
Leon Trotsky is the hinge-figure in MacIntyre’s critique of Marxism as a political program. In opposition to Stalin, Trotsky held fast to Marx’s own historical analyses, from the rejection of the idea of “socialism in one country” to the conviction that successful communist revolution would happen if and only if certain material conditions, such as the final overproduction crisis of capitalism and the actual “withering away” of the socialist state, came to pass. MacIntyre concluded that Trotsky’s predictive failure also signals Marx’s failure as a reliable guide to political and economic revolutionary praxis:
Trotsky, in the very last years of his life, facing the question…
