{"id":3400,"date":"2020-12-28T01:32:34","date_gmt":"2020-12-28T01:32:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/?p=3400"},"modified":"2020-12-28T01:32:36","modified_gmt":"2020-12-28T01:32:36","slug":"the-ethical-work-of-karl-marx","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/the-ethical-work-of-karl-marx\/","title":{"rendered":"The ethical work of Karl Marx"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Written\u00a0by Maximilien Rubel in 1982 for the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s journal,\u00a0Socialist Standard, but not published<\/em>. [The ethical work of Karl Marx by Maximilien Rubel 1982 (marxists.org)<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

1.<\/strong> If ethics is taken to be, on the one hand, the negation of bourgeois ideology and morality and, on the other, as the intellectual and practical anticipation of the humanist values which are to govern relations among individuals in a world community freed from today\u2019s dominant alienating institutions (economic, political, ideological, etc.), then the work of Karl Marx may consequently be understood as an ethical act<\/em>. As such, this work is one of the most important contributions to a radical transformation of mankind\u2019s destiny: to humanity\u2019s passage from the pre-human to the human stage, from human prehistory to history made by man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. <\/strong>As an ethical act<\/em>, Marx\u2019s work is based on scientific proof of the opportunity offered to mankind to choose between collective suicide, made possible by technical achievements which escape man\u2019s rational control, and human self-realisation thanks to the reasonable use of the world\u2019s resources and the technical advances of modern science.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. <\/strong>As an ethical act<\/em>, Marx\u2019s teaching and practice was inspired by his view of the rapid cyclical development and expansion of the capitalist mode of production on a world scale, and thus of an increasing proletarianisation of the labouring masses, despite the immense progress in science and technics, and, finally, of mankind\u2019s opportunity for material and intellectual emancipation. It is through a growing consciousness of this opportunity that the proletariat of the industrially developed countries was to constitute itself into political parties and \u201cwin the battle of democracy,\u201d either legally, by universal suffrage, or by a revolutionary struggle, i.e. a general strike and the workers\u2019 takeover of the means of production in view of self-management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

4. <\/strong>As an ethical act<\/em>, Marx\u2019s theory was offered to the most numerous and poorest class not as a definitive revelation of proletarian slavery and human emancipation but as an instrument for revolutionary self-education in the tradition of the teaching and practice of those great social reformers whose disciple Marx acknowledged to be. Marx, an insatiable reader and scholar, himself provided a definition of his intellectual and literary vocation, while admitting the limits of his theoretical originality, in this following confession to his daughter Laura: \u201cYou’ll certainly fancy, my dear child, that I am very fond of books, because I trouble you with them at so unseasonable a time. But you would be quite mistaken. I am a machine condemned to devour them and then, throw them, in a changed form, on the dunghill of history\u201d (Laura had just married Paul Lafargue and the two were spending their honeymoon in Paris; letter dated 11 April 1868, shortly after the publication of the first volume of Capital<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

5.<\/strong> Marx, who was a disciple of Epicurus, Spinoza and Leibniz as well as of the French and English materialists, succeeded in constructing a world-view which he in no way considered as a new system of thought, nor as a new philosophy or a new science. He never asked that workers study Hegel\u2019s Logic <\/em>before attacking Capital<\/em>. Although his master-work remained unfinished, it is perfectly understandable as a set of scientific and critical theses whose aim is to disclose \u201cthe economic law of motion of modern society\u201d (Preface to Capital<\/em>), and as a series of ethical norms and postulates derived from empirical observation of the self-emancipatory efforts and struggles of the modern slaves, the victims not of capitalists but of capital. The object of scientific analysis is the \u201creign of necessity\u201d; the object of ethical vision is the \u201creign of liberty\u201d (Capital<\/em>. Book III, chapter 48 of the edition established by Engels).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

6.<\/strong> In adhering not to any socialist or communist ideology, but to the cause of the working class and of human emancipation, Marx immediately formulated his ethical creed by affirming a \u201ccategorical imperative\u201d that was fundamentally different from the one proposed by Kant : \u201cThe criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man<\/em>, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations<\/em> in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being …\u201d (Deutsch-Franz\u00f6sische Jahrb\u00fccher, 1844). After he had become a member of the Communist League and was entrusted with drawing up its charter and articles of association, Marx thought best to express the meaning of this imperative in the form of an appeal for union, similar to that which, before him, the leaders of the Chartist movement had addressed to the British workers. Marx added to it a world-wide dimension : \u201cWorkers of all land, unite!\u201d This appeal of 1848 was, nearly twenty years later, to constitute the implicit conclusion to Capital<\/em> as formulated in the three pages of the chapter entitled: \u201cThe Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation.\u201d This chapter ends with two passages taken from the Communist Manifesto <\/em>in which Marx draws a parallel between, on the one hand, the growth of poverty, oppression, slavery and degradation and, on the other, the revolt of the ever-growing working class, educated, united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. Here we find a typical example of the double-sided reasoning, the empirical judgment of the lucid observer paired with the ethical conception of the revolutionary behaviour and emancipatory will of slaves who consciously realise their enslavement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

7.<\/strong> Marx refused to \u201cprescribe recipes (in the style of Auguste Comte?) for the cook-shops of the future\u201d (Afterward to the second edition of Capital<\/em>, 1873), just as he never claimed to have invented any new morality intended for the slaves of capital. While we may justly affirm, in Engels\u2019s words, that Marx\u2019s \u201creal mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the state institutions which it brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the modern proletariat,\u201d it is wrong to claim that \u201che was the first to make [this proletariat] conscious of its own position and its needs, conscious of the conditions of its emancipation.\u201d Through this dubious eulogy delivered at Marx\u2019s graveside, Engels became the first bearer of Marxist ideology and thus of a new political superstition, whose principal representatives were to be Lenin and Kautsky. The British proletariat was the first to have gained consciousness of its enslavement and of the conditions for its emancipation. Marx had chosen to cooperate in the movement for the emancipation of the modern proletariat, not as a teacher, but as a disciple of the British proletariat, putting at its service not only the fruits of his studies, but also his energy as a militant. As an ethical act<\/em>, this choice reduced Marx\u2019s life to that of an intellectual pariah, with a career on the margin of official society, to that of a perpetual beggar, who depended above all on the hand-outs from his friend Engels. It was not as a teacher and founder but as a disciple and pariah that, in 1856, Marx addressed an audience of English workers, referring to the \u201csymptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire\u201d in order to remind them that \u201cthey will then, certainly, not be the last in aiding the social revolution produced by that industry, a revolution which means the emancipation of their own class all over the world which is as universal as capital-rule and wages-slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

8.<\/strong> Nearly 125 years after this appeal, in fact a veritable declaration of faith, the \u201csymptoms of decay\u201d have changed into the certainty of a world in decline without there appearing on the horizon the gravediggers of capital and the State. Can this phenomenon of decline, which seems to contradict the theses formulated by Marx in the conclusion of Capital <\/em>(\u201cThe Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation\u201d), be explained with the help of his materialist conception of history, in other words using the scientific method which Marx claimed to have adopted in the course of a radical critique of Hegel\u2019s Philosophy of Right? If this is the case, can we consider that \u201cthe economic law of motion of modern society\u201d which Marx claimed to have revealed the Preface to Capital<\/em>) to be precisely one of the \u201ctruths\u201d resulting from the application of the materialist method? If the answer to both these questions is yes, are we not then obliged to admit that Marx\u2019 s thought is opposed to any kind of ethics and that the famous \u201ccategorical imperative\u201d was only a sally, a parody of Kantian morality? Does the \u201ceconomic law\u201d not demonstrate the frightening thesis according to which \u201ceven when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural law of its movement … it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development\u201d (Preface, Capital<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

9. <\/strong>Here is a thesis which seems to justify certain critics of Marx who take him to task for his \u201chistoricism,\u201d for his mania for identifying social science (or the so-called human sciences) and natural science, for his ambition to observe and study human societies with the mind of a natural scientist (physicist, astronomer), for his quasi-Spinozian way of exculpating the individual and blaming the \u201csocial conditions\u201d of which the individual remains a product, \u201chowever much he may subjectively raise himself above them\u201d (Preface, Capital<\/em>). It follows that neither the capitalist nor the worker is individually responsible for their destiny, since they are only \u201cthe personifications of economic categories, embodiments of particular class-relations and class interests.\u201d So, in the end, what remains of the \u201ccategorical imperative\u201d to overthrow the social conditions which make the workers slaves and reduce them to beasts of burden?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

10.<\/strong> Marx envisages this overthrow as a long historical stage in a process of evolution which undoubtedly changes the conditions but which also changes men. Hence the \u201creformism\u201d in Marx\u2019s political theory<\/em>, a consequence of his determinism which rules out the possibility of a society \u201cskipping\u201d over the phases of its development or \u201cremoving\u201d their obstacles by legal enactments. This \u201creformism\u201d is clearly expressed in the Communist Manifesto <\/em>and in the canon of the IWMA; echoes of it can be found in Capital<\/em> and in other texts where Marx envisages trade union struggles, demands concerning the shortening of the working day and factory legislation to protect the workers\u2019 health and to promote the coercive education of \u201cfactory children,\u201d while imposing on the capitalist mode of production, \u201cby a coercive law in virtue of the State (durch Zwangsgesetz von Staats wegen<\/em>)\u201d (Capital, X<\/em>V, 9) \u201cthe simplest appliances for maintaining cleanliness and health.\u201d As a revolutionary thinker, Marx had to struggle throughout his whole career for \u201cbourgeois\u201d reforms since liberal democracy means the triumph of the freedom of conscience, association and organisation which alone can allow the proletariat to educate itself and to prepare itself for revolution and so for the abolition of capitalism. It is only then that they will be in a position to act in the spirit of the \u201ccategorical imperative,\u201d in other words of the ethic which following other reformers placed at the centre of his work. Until the \u201chistoric\u201d moment of the revolution, the slaves are only able to \u201cshort and lessen the birth-pangs\u201d .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written\u00a0by Maximilien Rubel in 1982 for the Socialist Party of Great Britain’s journal,\u00a0Socialist Standard, but not published. [The ethical work of Karl Marx by Maximilien Rubel 1982 (marxists.org)] 1. If ethics is taken to be, on the one hand, the negation of bourgeois ideology and morality and, on the other, as the intellectual and practical anticipation…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3402,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"magazine_newspaper_sidebar_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3400","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3400","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3400"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3400\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3403,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3400\/revisions\/3403"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3402"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3400"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3400"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.worldsocialism.org\/wsm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3400"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}