Karl Marx’s critique of capitalism gets the attention — his vision of what a good society would actually look like is usually dismissed as naive or unrealistic. Jan Kandiyali, a political theorist at Durham University, thinks that dismissal rests on a misreading.
The standard view, from analytical Marxists Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen, treats Marx’s communism as an individualistic affair: everyone gets to develop their own powers freely, and other people are just a convenient means to get the goods and services you need. Kandiyali calls this the “parallelist interpretation” — like children playing side by side but not together. If God rained manna from heaven, nothing essential would be lost.
- Kandiyali draws on Marx’s 1844 “Comments on James Mill” to argue for a mutualist interpretation: self-realization in work means developing your powers by providing others with what they need to flourish. Working for others isn’t a chore you endure to get your own freedom — it is constitutive of that freedom.
- Under this reading, Marx’s communism doesn’t demand limitless abundance or the abolition of all specialization. It demands a radical reorganization of the division of labor, modest material sufficiency, and the recognition that meeting each other’s needs is at the center of a flourishing life.
- If God rained manna from heaven under the mutualist view, self-realization in work would be destroyed — because the activity of providing for others is what self-realization is.
The result is a vision of the good society grounded in solidarity, not parallel individualism. It doesn’t require infinite resources or a world without work — it requires a world where work is organized so that we realize ourselves in and through serving each other.
Kandiyali’s argument is a bracing corrective to the idea that Marxism lacks a positive account of the good life. It has one — it just looks more like mutual aid than autonomous self-indulgence.