i am so incredibly used to defending good things by explaining how they help people and make their lives better because, yeah obviously that’s why good things are good and people with empathy would want that. i get that modern Western bourgeois “morality” is fucked, but if you tell people that they just think you are amoral or don’t think morals are good or just don’t care about them.

i’m so used to describing things and “good” and “bad” and the fact that Marxist theory just doesn’t seem to bother with that throws me for a loop. and then comes the question of “well REALLY what IS morality” and whether its objective (which i dont think it possibly could be? i’m a hard atheist) and its just kind of a mess in my brain as i’m trying to parse it all out.

edit: i get that the immorality of exploitation is apparent in Marxist analysis and should be to anybody, i’m more talking about how the argument isn’t framed as a moral one, because then you can get really annoying people in there trying to facts-and-logic their way out of it, if that makes sense

  • wheresmysurplusvalue [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    9 days ago

    On the topic of Marx and ethics, check out Marx’s Ethical Vision (2024) by Vanessa Wills.

    Abstract

    “The communists do not preach morality at all”; this line from The Communist Manifesto might seem to settle the question of whether Marxism has anything to offer moral philosophy. And yet Marx issued both trenchant critiques of “bourgeois” morality and thundering condemnations of capitalism’s “vampire-like” destruction. He decried commodity-exchange for corroding human beings’ ability to value one another for who they are, not how much their lives could be traded away for. He expressed apparently ethical views about human nature, the conditions necessary for human flourishing, and the desirability of bringing such conditions about—views that are interwoven throughout his life’s work, from his youthful philosophical poetry to his unfinished masterpiece, Capital. Renewed attention to Marx’s distinctively “dialectical” and historical materialist approach to conflict and change makes sense of this apparent tension in his thought. Following Marx, Marx’s Ethical Vision centers labor—human beings satisfying their needs through conscious, purpose-driven, and transformative interaction with the material world—as the essential human activity. Working people’s struggles reveal capitalism’s worst ravages while pointing to a better future and embodying the only way there: rational transformation of their relationships to themselves, to one another, and to the natural world, so that the human condition emerges not as something they must bear but as something they joyfully create. Rather than “preach morality,” the key task for moral philosophy is to theorize in the light that workers’ struggles for freedom shine on capitalism—an existential threat to humanity and the defining ethical problem of our time.