2 - Karl Marx and the Capabilities Approach

Summary

This chapter examines certain connections between Karl Marx and the capabilities approach. It contains a brief discussion of Marx’s influence upon, and reception by, contemporary capability theorists. However, the chapter is primarily concerned with identifying, and reflecting on, certain formal and substantive affinities between Marx’s account of human flourishing and the capabilities approach. Those formal affinities include Marx’s ‘pluralistic’ account of value; his ‘normative individualism’; and his opposition to wholly ‘subjective’ accounts of advantage. Those substantive affinities include the overlap between certain modern accounts of ‘central capabilities’, and the extensive account of the necessary conditions of human flourishing that can be reconstructed from Marx’s writings. In addition to these questions of influence and affinity, the chapter considers whether his work might provide a critical perspective on some contemporary versions of the capabilities approach. Marx’s insistence on the value of fulfilling work and meaningful community, for instance, draws attention to particular capabilities that might be underestimated by others. More generally, Marx’s account of the threshold conditions of the good life suggests that, in pursuing the social and other changes that best promote human flourishing, we should not set our sights too low.