r/Marxism • u/traanquil • 4d ago
Can someone explain the concept of Marxism not being moralistic
I'm a socialist and have been reading Marx for a while now. What I still have trouble understanding is the idea that Marxism isn't a moral philosophy, but is rather a science. At a very general level, I get it -- I understand how moralistic discourse can be paternalistic and individualistic, which undermines the whole project.
But, that being said, at a deeper level, isn't class struggle rooted in a moral imperative? I.e. we see that the current system serves the few at the expense of the many, and that this is morally intolerable. Even in Marx's capital, he seems to engage in moral condemnation in his various descriptions of the exploitative nature of capitalism.
Another way of framing my question is: isn't it the moral claim that is the impetus for proletarian class struggle? without the moral claim, is there an impetus for class struggle? is the answer to this question that the impetus is not the moral claim, but rather a more elementary struggle for power?
Any guidance would be appreciated!
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u/Dialectrician 4d ago
The idea is that while the capitalist system is morally reprehensible, this isn't enough to justify its overthrow. The truth is that no one cares about social domination and inequality as long as the trains run on time. Worse than that, the moral objections to capitalism typically are actually grounded in capitalist production itself. For example, it is "unfair" that workers don't get the full value of their labor... but the idea that producers are entitled to the product of their labor is itself a product of the laws of commodity exchange and production which lie at the heart of bourgeois society (even as, in their full developpment they become their opposite, the appropriation of another's labor without compensation which makes up capitalist production as such).
Rather, Marx aims to demonstrate that capitalism "doesn't work" in some qualified sense. Capitalist production necessarily creates conflict between bourgeois and proletarians (this is class struggle or the contradiction between labor and capital), accumulation of capital creates barriers to further capital accumulation (this is the law of the rate of profit to fall, a contradiciton of capital to itself) which causes crisis and periods of stagnation which hinder the developpment of the productive forces (contradiction between the mode of production and the productive forces). Those issues proceed from the structure of capitalist production and can't be avoided by any policy (ie social democracy doesn't work).
So these contradictions can only come to an end with the abolition of capitalism, which is also the abolition of property and classes in general.
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u/theholewizard 4d ago
It's always funny to me when people make the claim that there's no moral component in Marx or in a text like Capital. He spends a great deal of time demonstrating the ways capitalism immiserates the working class, and often illustrates the immiseration in gruesome detail (esp. Capiratal chapter 10). He's clearly portraying it as bad. What he doesn't do is try to come up with a general system for determining which types of suffering are better or worse than others, why we should care about someone else's suffering at all, or what systems of accounting we might use to do moral horse trading to optimize for maximum goodness. It's not that he or his writing are amoral, it's more that he does not view moral arguments as a tool for social change, and therefore devotes his project to an analysis of the material systems that produce the immiseration. His project is more like "why is all this bad stuff happening and what can we do to change it" than "why is this stuff bad and why should we care?"
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u/Legitimate_Action145 4d ago edited 4d ago
We have to be clear about what we mean by moral. Moral philosophy is just practical philosophy. Marxism is a theory that, looking at history, recognizes that it's a history of class struggle, of people pursuing their class interests. It's also a history of modes of production, which define the classes.
It is in "the interest" of capitalists to maintain capitalism but this is only a relative statement. Not all capitalists benefit equally and generally speaking, they are convinced that what they are doing is somehow of benefit to society, too, or it's the best thing that is possible for them to do in an imperfect world. However, the need to pursue their interests negatively affects freedom, and not only forces them to exploit, it also forces them into competition, gambling, and all other manner of things. As a class the capitalists are actually intrinsically divided and trying to crush each other, except when there's a threat to the class itself. And yet even petty bourgeois, even many workers think like aspiring capitalists, individualists, etc. The workers are forced to compete, too.
Capitalism forces the production of enshittified, seasonal, and planned-obsolete goods to avoid the consequeces of excessive productive capacity and underconsumption. During covid lockdowns food was rotting in fields and milk was poured down drained to avoid putting too much on the market. Capitalists have wealth but a significant portion have to live like ascetics anyway, or at best they consume more of the same arbitrarily inferior goods we are all stuck with because of "market forces."
There are actually perfectly rational reasons a person could not want to be a capitalist, but the people who do maintain a particular rationalization of what they're doing, prefer the relative security of their position, or what have you. No Marxist says it's "better" to be a capitalist, surely, but that in itself would be a type of moral judgment.
The proletariat is simply the class that drives history forward. The outcome of the class struggle is this tendency toward greater freedom. It is better for nearly everyone, in fact, if the means of production are unfettered from the relations of production. Capitalism also increasingly proletarianizes people.
Remember what we highlighted earlier. Moral philosophy is a practical philosophy. Thesis 11 states the point is to change the world. Not all practice aims at such a thing. Marxism is predicated on the idea that history has developed to this point anyway, it's a higher freedom for humans to enact this movement consciously. This means that it is a "practical philosophy" in itself, but not actually a philosophy, because it's not contemplative.
People having feelings or recognizing ends to struggle toward is not "idealism." Its not moral because it's not philosophy. It's a question of people recognizing that the best or perhaps only way to pursue their own interest is by taking account the interests of others. Human interests are not simply materialistic in the sense of meeting basic needs, the whole point is that we could be free from need but arbitrarily subject ourself to necessity and deprive ourselves of our needs at the same time. In other words the end is securing our needs in order to secure freedom. On the other hand recognizing the utility of cooperation is something even animals are capable of. In fact that is already how capitalism works, in concept, i.e. the pursuit of rational self interest alone is supposed to be enough to make society work (and capitalists do try to consider the benefit of providing different goods or jobs to a certain extent, if we are not blinded by moralism into thinking they are all just evil people), and production is increasingly social, it just in fact ends up badly for everyone because capitalism is an irrational, contradictory system.
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u/Winry06 Marxist-Leninist-Maoist 4d ago
Let me give you an example to help you understand this: Imagine your house is rented. It belongs to someone with more money than you, who offers you the house to live in exchange for mental rent. In Marxism, this is exploitation. You are being exploited, and the homeowner is the one exploiting you. However, at no point will he say: "the homeowner is evil, he's a horrible person". No, because Marxism doesn't make value judgments. So the critique is directed at the system: we live in a system where absolutely everything is a product to be sold and everyone needs to sell something. The poorest sell their labor, and the homeowner sells the opportunity to live in the house. Similarly, a business owner is not seen as evil by Marxism simply for being a bourgeois who exploits employees.Marxism holds that if the bourgeoisie ceases to exploit its employees, another bourgeoisie will do so when it discovers a way to profit more from it. And And so, the bourgeois who did not exploit becomes obsolete and outdated in the race of capitalism, and then loses his place in that hierarchy. He doesn't necessarily exploit people because he's evil, but rather to survive, because that's how capitalism works.
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u/Dense_Tutor_6650 4d ago
Go back and read Capital as you would a narrative text and tell me that at least when he's not elucidating abstract concepts he's not consistently totally outraged at the unimaginable degree of suffering the system causes. Hell, chapter 25 on the GENERAL LAW of capitalist accumulation is that as capital accumulates so does the production of IMMISERATION. He wouldn't be invested in the scientific approach if not for the moral imperative to overthrow the system. You need both.
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u/Square-Supermarket79 4d ago edited 4d ago
The claim of Marxism to have developed a scientific theory of socialism is based on Marx's idea that the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production make socialism not only desirable, but also consistent with the systemic tendencies of capitalism itself (namely development of productive forces, the increased interconnection of workers globally in the production process, the concentration of capital in the hands of a few big firms).
From this scientific perspective we get the classical Marxist claims that the proletariat is the class that will overthrow capitalism and that the goal of socialists is not to reverse or simply stop capitalism but to "seize the means of production" and wield them on a social basis. An extreme form of the "scientific" attitude produced Bernstein's revisionist view that capitalism would "turn into" socialism without revolutionary action.
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u/No-Sail-6510 4d ago
Because capitalists exploit workers not because they’re mean but because of their material conditions as an owner of capital. We see it all the time with small business owners. You start a restaurant because you like making food and as it gets bigger you hire people. If you paid them what they were worth you wouldn’t make any money so you have to exploit them to some degree. It doesn’t matter how nice you are, that’s your job the same way as a waiters job is to bring food to the table and cooks job is to cook.
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u/Drolmood 4d ago
While in the past you could argue that marxism had a moralistic aspect, for the present, its completly an existential one.
The incoming human extinction event, namely climate crisis, ist fueled by capitalism and can only be overcome by communism. This puts every revolutionary ambition on the clock, but also promotes marxism to a key-, if not the sole tool to the survival of our species.
I know this sounds melodramatic, but it is what it is.
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u/StarboundAllisten 4d ago
I can have taboo prejudices, but I'm not anti communist because logically I understand capitalism despite what it can bring has structural flaws that only communism can solve later. So because I'm a communist I'm not a perfect angel good person. But I'm smart enough to know structural issues. I'm not a communist because "love and light" I'm a communist because of logic and data and reason.
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u/SwissAsteroid 4d ago
Why is it not moral philosophy? Billionaires are not bad people. They become bad people because the most efficient way of producing isn't the one that helps other people. Moral people who pay their workers good are not able to make a million dollars, let alone a billion. On one hand, this changes People (the human mind is extremely fluid), on the other hand, it sorts the ones out that are not as influencable and have any other intrests besides capital efficency. It is not posible to just be moraly good, as the "natural flow of money" (how capitalist often call it) or capitalism only, ONLY cares about efficency, nothing else. Also, the rich being bad is not the cause of the problem, its a symptom. Thats why killing the rich wouldn't help at all.
Why is it a sience? Different to other ideas of new political systems, Marx does not just tell you what would be a good thing to do or how a system should work in an optimal world (which would be utopic, Marx criticised utopic systems a lot) but rather analyses exacly what happend in the past and can further explain a chain of reaction that even dips into the future. So communism is not like instructions to bake a cake, but more like a weather forecast. The only difference to a weather forecast is, that people and their actions are involved in a revolution, but that does not mean they just get summoned. Every human action has some kind of cause, and therefore a global revolution is predictable, as millions of people doing the same thing isn't about the individual, but only the (flawed) system they react to.
Edit: im sorry for mid english, my main language is german. I hope you didn't realise.
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u/ssssotss Marxist 4d ago
Hello. May I refer you to the opening paragraphs of Sudhipto Kaviraj's essay 'Marxism in translation'.
There he says that in matters of ideology and the arguments into being convinced of one, three propositions may arise. I am paraphrasing.
One, you may of course appeal to the moral imperative of the people and have them resonate with the justice in the cause.
Two, you may also appeal to an objective rationality and argue then about how progressive socialist economics is.
However, it is the case more often than not that it is the third proposition which makes the most powerful case of all: class positions determine politics through experiences of class realities. One doesn't need to be sold socialism. It is the shared experience of capitalist exploitation that fosters solidarity among the people.
PS. Kaviraj also makes a one to one connection of these three with the progression from Kantian enlightenment ideas to scientific realism (which is also appropriated by capitalists) to the scientific historicism of Marxism (class position as economic reality); but i read it a long time ago so don't remember the exact line of argument.
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u/Various-Employment31 4d ago
There are plenty of mental conceptions that could, in ideal, be more moral than capitalism. But Marxism is much more than that, because it is first and foremost a scientific critique of the capitalist economy, showing how it's internal contradictions will drive it towards a new mode of production, a change that will be driven and realized by the new proletarian class which will become the dominant class. Because this class is not a class which inherently exploits other classes, this is a qualitative break in the development of human society in which there is potential to develop a society without exploitation. All of this is not based on a moralistic understanding of what is right and wrong, but on the study of economy and political classes using dialectical materialism. It also happens that the future society will be more moral by many conceptions of morality, but that is not the primary point, marxism does not depend on whether or not communism is moral, only on the fact that it is the one progessive potential next mode of production.
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u/owenallconmaid 4d ago
i agree completely it is the moral claim. you can do a whole load of cognitive work to show that x is rape. but if you never say rape is bad, then there is effectively no point to showing that it is rape at all, people will simply accept the new terminology and even normalize it.
thats the problem is 'No Kings' protest, saying 'no' without violent power is just foreplay for the rapists, and saying 'kings' just normalizes the existence of fascism.
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u/glafasiti 4d ago edited 4d ago
Proudhon begins by taking his ideal of Justice, of “justice éternelle,” from the juridical relations that correspond to the production of commodities: thereby, it may be noted, he proves, to the consolation of all good citizens, that the production of commodities is a form of production as everlasting as justice. Then he turns round and seeks to reform the actual production of commodities, and the actual legal system corresponding thereto, in accordance with this ideal. What opinion should we have of a chemist, who, instead of studying the actual laws of the molecular changes in the composition and decomposition of matter, and on that foundation solving definite problems, claimed to regulate the composition and decomposition of matter by means of the “eternal ideas,” of “naturalité” and “affinité”? (Marx, K. Capital: Critique of Political Economy, v. 1, ch. 2, footnote 2)
The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society. The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. (Marx, K. Theses on Feuerbach, III)
These two quotations combined provide a decent summary of Marx's basic problem with moral socialism. By enlightening us on what a fair society should look like, the socialist believes to be going beyond the morals of our current situation and to be prefiguring the morality of that future utopia. Anyone who remains unconvinced of the pretensions of social reform is, we are told, simply deluded by the prejudices of our time. What the socialist forgets is that, if the values and opinions of others reflect present standards, his own values and opinions do so as well. The very ideals of freedom and equality, upon which the socialist stakes his claim, find their reality in the exchange of commodities, which in turn is part and parcel of the very same system of capitalist production that he otherwise detests. Only amidst the voluntary transactions that make up civil society do we find these ideals manifest:
This sphere that we are deserting, within whose boundaries the sale and purchase of labour-power goes on, is in fact a very Eden of the innate rights of man. There alone rule Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham. Freedom, because both buyer and seller of a commodity, say of labour-power, are constrained only by their own free will. They contract as free agents, and the agreement they come to, is but the form in which they give legal expression to their common will. Equality, because each enters into relation with the other, as with a simple owner of commodities, and they exchange equivalent for equivalent. Property, because each disposes only of what is his own. And Bentham, because each looks only to himself. The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation with each other, is the selfishness, the gain and the private interests of each. Each looks to himself only, and no one troubles himself about the rest, and just because they do so, do they all, in accordance with the pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all-shrewd providence, work together to their mutual advantage, for the common weal and in the interest of all. (Marx, K. Capital: Critique of Political Economy, v. 1, ch. 6)
Of course, once the voluntary transaction of labor power for a wage transpires, the whole situation is transformed. Due to the difference between the value of labor power and the value of output, surplus value accrues to capital, by which labor enables capital to continuously employ it, and gratuitously no less, with no effort at all on capital's part. The labor contract that initially appears as reciprocity is, by the weight of its own presuppositions, inverted into exploitation.
[...] in so far as all this is true, it is evident that the laws of appropriation or of private property, laws that are based on the production and circulation of commodities, become by their own inner and inexorable dialectic changed into their very opposite. The exchange of equivalents, the original operation with which we started, has now become turned round in such a way that there is only an apparent exchange. This is owing to the fact, first, that the capital which is exchanged for labour-power is itself but a portion of the product of others’ labour appropriated without an equivalent; and, secondly, that this capital must not only be replaced by its producer, but replaced together with an added surplus. The relation of exchange subsisting between capitalist and labourer becomes a mere semblance appertaining to the process of circulation, a mere form, foreign to the real nature of the transaction, and only mystifying it. [...] At first the rights of property seemed to us to be based on a man’s own labour. [...] Now, however, property turns out to be the right, on the part of the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product, and to be the impossibility, on the part of the labourer, of appropriating his own product. The separation of property from labour has become the necessary consequence of a law that apparently originated in their identity. (Marx, K. Capital: Critique of Political Economy, v. 1, ch. 24, section 1)
A free and egalitarian society is shown to be just as much a society of coercion and inequality. On this foundation, the ideals of freedom and equality may justify the attack on the society which realized them, but, precisely by being realized by said society, these ideals are equally compelled to turn their sights against themselves. A consistent libertarian and egalitarian is logically forced to abandon freedom and equality. The moralist is forced to abandon his morals.
But if the values that underlie socialist sentiment are themselves guilty of being bourgeois, how is communism possible? Does this mean that any and all attempts to overcome capital are doomed to reproduce the very thing that they try to destroy? Not at all. But the materialist thesis, which indicts all moral sentiment as bourgeois sentimentalism, defines the requirements of what communism must be like to be communism.
For [capital] to become an “intolerable” power, i.e. a power against which men make a revolution, it must necessarily have rendered the great mass of humanity “propertyless,” and produced, at the same time, the contradiction of an existing world of wealth and culture, both of which conditions presuppose a great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development. And, on the other hand, this development of productive forces (which itself implies the actual empirical existence of men in their world-historical, instead of local, being) is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced; and furthermore, because only with this universal development of productive forces is a universal intercourse between men established, which produces in all nations simultaneously the phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), makes each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally has put world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local event; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence intolerable powers: they would have remained home-bred conditions surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. [...] Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence. (Marx, K.; & Engels, F. The German Ideology, ch. 1, A, § 5)
Finally, on whether revolutionary motivation is dependent on moral reasoning, I will simply follow Foucault's lead in his debate with Chomsky and quote Spinoza:
Further, between appetite and desire there is no difference, except that the term desire is generally applied to men, in so far as they are conscious of their appetite, and may accordingly be thus defined: Desire is appetite with consciousness thereof. It is thus plain from what has been said, that in no case do we strive for, wish for, long for, or desire anything, because we deem it to be good, but on the other hand we deem a thing to be good, because we strive for it, wish for it, long for it, or desire it. (Spinoza, B. Ethics, P. 3, prop. 9, scholium)
[All quotations, except for the Spinoza one, are the HTML versions from marxists(dot)org, which is why there are no page counts. The Spinoza quote is from wikisource, so, likewise, no page number.]
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u/lowstone112 4d ago
It’s pseudoscience, he just masks his morality in scientific jargon of his time.
Science is very specifically the scientific method. If you don’t follow the steps it’s not science. Researchers for corporations that don’t publish their research are not scientists because communication is a step.
Marx never conducted any step beyond hypothesis.
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u/overtonesnob1 Maoist Third Worldist 3d ago
I’ve generally understood this by realizing exploitation is genuinely just not efficient economically. The fact that capitalism has done as much as it has to raise living standards, in spite of the inherent contradictions, is astounding, and honestly serves as a testament to how incredibly economically efficient even lower stage state capitalism is/can be, let alone actual Socialism
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u/CompetitivePut517 2d ago
Of course it's moral. It's ethics. That's what politics is made of.
The "science not morality" line gets repeated way past what Marx meant. Read Capital. Vampires, werewolf hunger, robbery. Nobody writes like that doing neutral description.
What he was attacking was Proudhon and the utopians, who thought you win by convincing the bourgeoisie that exploitation is wrong. That's the useless part. Moral argument as strategy. Not moral commitment as motive.
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u/Mordret10 6h ago
I think similar to you, another person told me, that there isn't anything moral about not wanting to be exploited and that made sense to me.
The gazelle doesn't want to get eaten by the lion, for the gazelle this isn't about moral, but survival. The proletariat similarly doesn't want to get exploited
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u/Parking-Leather-3429 4d ago
It is a moraly imperative to strive for revolution/communism because that principle is scientific.
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u/MichigandanielS 4d ago
It’s a mix of the two. Marx accurately describes Capitalism’s exploitation of the proletariat. The Bourgeoisie view this as morally right and justified. The proletariat view it as morally wrong. Marx clearly viewed this as wrong but also showed how the class distinctions force these relationships and views. How you view it depends on your class and whether you have been captured by the hegemonic institutions of Capitalism or not.
Additionally, Marx and Marxism view revolution as a fundamental belief. I view this as a moral position.