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Workers' Interests and the Proletarian Ethic; Conflicting Strains in Marxian Anti-moralism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Anthony Skillen
Anthony Skillen*
Affiliation:
University of Kent at Canterbury
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Extract

Marx wrote in The German Ideology that the communist movement ‘shatters the basis of all morality’ and that ‘the communists preach no morality at all’; in The Communist Manifesto that morality and religion are correctly seen by the class-conscious proletarian as ‘so many bourgeois prejudices behind which there lurk in ambush Just as many bourgeois interests.’ In an article ‘Marxism and Morality’ and in a book Ruling Illusions; Philosophy and the Social Order, I urged that Marx's well advertised but untheorised scorn for ‘morality’ not be interpreted in terms of rejection of the prevailing (bourgeois) content of moral norms, which would be consistent with espousing an alternative set of ‘precepts’ or ‘principles.’ Rather, Marx's position should be seen as a theoretical and practical opposition to the very form of ‘morality’ as he understood it: the form of universal, absolute laws binding on individuals as beings with a capacity to rise above and conquer their selfish, capricious ‘inclinations.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume , Volume 7: Marx and Morality , 1981 , pp. 155 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1981

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References

1 Marx, and Engels, The German Ideology (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1965) 267Google Scholar

2 Marx and Engels, op. cit., 460

3 Marx, and Engels, ‘The Communist Manifesto', in Selected Works (Moscow: 1962) 1, 44Google Scholar

4 Radical Philosophy 8 (197 4) 11 ff

5 Skillen, AnthonyRuling Illusions; Philosophy and the Social Order, (Brighton: Harvester 1978)Google Scholar

6 The inspiration of this account is the work of John Anderson's Sydney libertarian followers. Anderson's social thought and political life are excellently presented in Baker's, A.J.Anderson's Social Theory (Sydney: Angus and Robertson 1979).Google Scholar See also Kamenka's, EugeneThe Ethical Foundations of Marxism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1962).Google Scholar

7 Thompson, E.P.The Poverty of Theory (London: Merlin Press 1978).Google Scholar Thompson identifies my position with the related but clearly different one of Andrew Collier, even Learily describing us as a ‘learned Theban.’ Such is the force of the historian's habit of dealing with ‘individuals'!

8 In Marx, and Engels, Surveys from Exile, ed. Fernbach, D. (London: Pelican 1973) 239Google Scholar

9 C. Wright Mills wrote: ‘Marx's view of class consciousness … is as utilitarian and rationalist as anything out of Jeremy Bentham.’ (The Marxists (New York: Dell 1962) 115)

10 A powerful critique of Marx along these lines is in Marshall Sahlins’ Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press 1976) Chapter 3. Sennett, Richard and Cobb, JonathanThe Hidden lnjuries of Class (New York: Vintage 1973)Google Scholar and Moore, Barringtonlnjustice (Stanford: Stanford U.P. 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar are important empiri· cal sources of the ‘cultural’ dimension of class in capitalist society. Both show up the limitations of ‘interest group,’ analysis of political forces.

11 The quotation marks advertise scepticism about the adequacy of this realism. Marx seems constrained both to expose the utter desperation of the workers' situation under capitalism and to see this despair as the spark of revolutionary fervour; to emphasise the individual proletarian's destruction in order to support claims for the proletarians’ collective role as creators.

12 Marx, to Bolte, (1871) in Marx-Engels; Selected Correspondence (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1956) 329Google Scholar

13 Marx to Kugelmann (1869), op. cit., 277

14 Engels in 1849; from Marx; the Revolutions of 1848, ed. D. Fernbach (London: Pelican 1973) 221, 236

15 The moral versus material incentives’ debate in some state-socialist countries is conducted in quite traditional terms, in that little attention is paid to the ‘material· moral’ implications of different forms of control of work as distinct from techniques whereby social managers can extract more out of workers by mobilising honour and shame as against pecuniary wealth and poverty.

16 Koestler, Darkness at Noon (London: Penguin 1947) 129Google Scholar

17 ‘On the Ethics of Revolution,’ Radical Philosophy 6 (1973) 17-20

18 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 17-20

19 Marx, KarlEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: 1961) 124-5Google Scholar

20 Marx, KarlThe Poverty of Philosophy (London: Lawrence and Wishart 1957) 173Google Scholar

21 Anthony Skillen, Ruling Illusions, 168-9

22 Rousseau's contrast between amour de soi and amour propre remains a basis for exploration of the bourgeois ‘self.'

23 For an example of this Heglian leaping, see Marx’ account of proletarian revolution in The German Ideology, 83-4.

24 ‘Romanticism’ is characterised by imagining as realised what is correctly discerned as necessary.

25 Sorel, GeorgeReflections of Violence (New York: Collier 1961) 237Google Scholar

26 Luxemburg, RosaThe Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism (Ann Arbor: 1961) 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Brinton, MauriceThe Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1917-1921 (London: Solidarity 1970)Google Scholar

28 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, loc. cit.

29 Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 237-8

30 See Mouffe, C. ed., Gramsci and Marxist Theory (London: 1979).Google Scholar