Marxism and Morality

A couple of days ago I finished Willis H. Truitt's book, "Marxist Ethics". While it was an interesting read, and while it sketched out a couple of important principles, I cannot say that it was very illuminating as a whole. Of course, marxist ethics are a subject matter for an entire library and not just a simple blog post. But there are a few important things that I believe can be taken up to start off the topic.

First of all, as Truitt so aptly puts it, both marxists and anti-marxists have boldly claimed that marxism is non-moral. A statement like that is completely meaningless unless we might understood what it would be like to be moral, and to then be non or un-moral. Trotsky writes in his famous, and still rather paradigmatic, text "Their Morality and Ours" that morality more than anything else has a class character, but also that:

When we say that the end justifies the means, then for us the conclusion follows that the great revolutionary end spurns those base means and ways which set one part of the working class against other parts, or attempt to make the masses happy without their participation; or lower the faith of the masses in themselves and their organization, replacing it by worship for the “leaders”. Primarily and irreconcilably, revolutionary morality rejects servility in relation to the bourgeoisie and haughtiness in relation to the toilers, that is, those characteristics in which petty bourgeois pedants and moralists are thoroughly steeped.

While this is a breathtaking statement that has many loose ends that demands further investigation, we will leave it more or less at that. The text is quite worthwhile in it's whole and has many good, and some bad, points. But it appears to us, then, that marxism must in some sense be non-cognitivist, that is to say, that at least part of morality must rely on some form of non-cognitive function, perhaps as part of certain passions, interests, feelings, virtues, natural attributes, etc.

Human interaction is formed around moral concepts, concepts that have changed to at least some extent during various epochs. Many forms of morality were entirely ideologically programmed for the upper class of that time. But just as there is one way of living in the manor, and one in the hut, so there has been the morality of the plebian, or the serf, or the proletarian as well as the morality of the patrician, lord and capitalist. I do not now mean to say that the former has always been 'better' than the other. Burgeoise development has given us the strongest and perhaps most succesful moral schools: kantianism and utilitarianism, that indeed say many true things. However, in not understanding the actual relation in the social world, being reified, they miss out many things. They are also, of course, ideological tools and have been used as such to a great extent.

So there is one important point, then, an adequate sociological and historical view of man. Humans understand themselves to a great extent by morality and ethics, and most political language is coached in those terms as well. The other thing we must avoid is to assume that because we do not believe in an abstract Rechts or whatever it might be, that we understand humans to be what the neoliberals imagine: atomized individuals only interested in themselves.

To continue, there is the other danger as well: that what we are doing is in some way trying to be extra nice to people, that that is what socialism is about. Revolutionary socialism is not about liking animals and children a little extra. It is about the overthrowing of one class at the hands of the other.

But as Trotsky reminds us, and as Zizek continues to put it, there is something that is more ethical in the conspiration to organize a class and usurp another than there is to offer a few pennies to a charity. Singer puts it the most aptly: it is a duty to murder a tyrant. To relinquish an opportunity like that is to be an accomplice to those he murders. Tactics, strategies and ethics are bound far more tightly together than anyone realized before.

There are other components, too, lessons learned from old Greece that must be remembered and understood in a more complete manner than what Aristotle, Plato and others were capable of. Ethics and politics are the same thing. Man is a political animal: his ethical stance is decided and understood, and compared in the political life, that is, the social life among other humans. It is as much political to not be in a party, as it is to be in one. It is as much political to protest a racist comment from a friend as it is to cast a vote. It is of an ethical nature to take one stance or the other. Man can only be understood in the relations of his kind. The concept of virtue, as in modern virtue ethics, that was once started in Greece by Aristotle contains a very important seed for a morality that avoids the tribal taboos of a desert tribe and instead situates man with his fellow man.

Here we find the idea of praxis, that is, of the melding and continuation of thought and action in one that dissolves so many irreparable, reified categories of burgeoise philosophy. Political praxis is ethical, and the other way around. Praxis is what we do, melded with the way we understand the world and situate ourselves in it.

Lastly, I would like to add the existential sentiment that might be traced in what I said about Aristotle. While Sartre writes about petit burgeoise alienation at worst, and 'merely' alienation at best, the existentialist school has important things for us to collect from it. Not the least, a kantian strain that can be traced in philosophers such as R. M. Hare from the analytical school to, indeed, Sartre himself. Humans, in their understandings of themselves and their kind, are involved with existentialist preoccupations. While I believe the "meaning of life" question to be unintelligible, I believe that the longing for freedom and development cannot simply be ignored unless one is to have a system of morality as colourless and dull as most substantial morality in the analytical school. That is, the subjective, internal view is important.

There are many, many more things to say than these. But this is a beginning sketch, an outline. Perhaps we can see some vague contours soon, rather than the hazy, murky outline of a far-off continent that we can just hint at at this moment.