Marx the Moralist?

Did Karl Marx hate morality? He called morality a bourgeois prejudice, a way to trick workers into being docile drones instead of rebelling against the system. And yet at other times Marx sounds like very much the moralist.

“The Communists do not preach morality at all.” Those are Marx’s own words, and they sure seem pretty clear: Marx hated morality. He called it a bourgeois prejudice, a way to trick workers into being docile drones instead of rebelling against the system. And yet at other times Marx sounds very much the moralist. He’s constantly railing against capitalist business owners, saying they exploit their workers, deprive people of dignity, and suck the life out of society. Marx thought we could do better than bourgeois morality: there’s a real morality out there, he implied, ready to replace the fake one.

So what should we make of Marx when he writes that “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis”? Is he not saying that rather than seeking a new ethical system, we should smash them all? Well yes, but not now—he’s saying we should smash them in the future, once we have a communist utopia. In that utopia, everyone’s needs will be met, so we won’t have to worry about conflicting needs.

Even if that’s true, there’s surely still a problem. Some moral codes are about more than conflicting needs: they are about being good people. Suppose, for example, you promise someone that you’ll keep their secret; in the amoral utopia, what’s to keep you from blabbing it around?

According to Marx, you’ll want to keep the secret. Once the utopia is here, you won’t have to be forced to do things by some external moral system, like some kind of angel on your shoulder whispering orders into your ear. Morality is a way of getting people to do things they don’t already want to do. In utopia, we won’t need that: everyone will automatically want to do what’s best for everyone else. Even now, in this imperfect world of ours, we often do things for our loved ones simply because we love them. And we also do things for people we’ve never met: everywhere you look, people are building schools, inventing cures for diseases, painting murals that brighten everyone’s day. Human nature is at least partly altruistic, and many people have a genuine desire to contribute something new to society.

OK, but who’s going to collect the garbage in utopia? (In Grafton, New Hampshire, a libertarian community reportedly collapsed when the local bears started attacking.) Warm fuzzy feelings may be enough for a happy week at Burning Man. But for a sustainable long-term project, you’re going to need everyone to take a turn doing the ongoing, unpleasant tasks. There’s an altruistic side to humanity, but we’re also a selfish species of individuals who look out for our own interests. Why should we think that’s going to change just because the workers have seized the means of production?

Marx might say this: look at how different we are now from how people were even a hundred years ago, let alone a thousand or ten thousand. In ancient Rome, pretty much everyone thought slavery was totally normal; nowadays, pretty much everyone would be appalled if they found out their neighbor had a slave. “We’ve come a long way, baby.” But an opponent might ask just how long a way we’ve actually come, given the existence of factory farming, ecological degradation, or people going bankrupt from doctor’s bills just to make the medical industry rich. Human greed has not gone away, and it isn’t about to. The selfish side is not going to change, even in a marxist utopia.

Maybe our guest will convince us that such change is possible: it’s Vanessa Wills, whose new book is Marx’s Ethical Vision.