Trotsky's Morals And Ours Political Morality And The Revolutionary Christian

Extract

This article is based on Trotsky’s article Their Morals and Ours (New International, February 1938) which I will refer to as TMO. Taken together with his second article The Moralists and Sycophants against Marxism (New International, 9 June 1939) which reiterates many of the same arguments TMO is important because it represents a clear and consistent account of the moral philosophy of Revolutionary Marxism. In passing I should point out that even talking about the moral philosophy of Marxism is a little contradictory since for Marxism political philosophy and moral philosophy are the same thing. In classical times no distinction was made between the political and the moral obligations of man. In the Greek city state a good member of the polis was quite simply a good man. Only with the rise of capitalism did it become necessary to posit the Kantian moral imperative as something external to the social and political life of man. In his essay on Kant Herbert Marcuse argues that Capitalist ideology was faced with two conflicting needs. On the one hand it was necessary to foster individualism as an essential component of the growth of capitalist economy but on the other hand it was necessary to subordinate the individual to the needs of the bourgeois state. If the individual were subordinated by crude repression this would expose the mythological character of capitalist freedom of the individual. By positing the moral a priori, a call to duty above class, Kant provided bourgeois ideology with the solution to this problem. Like Marx but unlike Marcuse TMO is polemical rather than speculative in tone, written in a specific historical situation to meet specific charges against Marxism.