Marx’s Ethical Vision

“The communists do not preach morality at all”; this line from The Communist Manifesto might seem to settle the question of whether Marxism has anything to offer moral philosophy. Yet, Marx issued both trenchant critiques of “bourgeois” morality and thundering condemnations of capitalism’s “vampire-like” destructiveness. He decried commodity-exchange for corroding our ability to value one another for who we are, not how much our lives could be traded away for. He expressed apparently ethical views about human nature, the conditions necessary for human flourishing, and the desirability of bringing such conditions about–views that are interwoven throughout his life’s work, from his youthful philosophical poetry to his unfinished masterpiece, Capital. Renewed attention to Marx’s distinctively “dialectical” and historical materialist approach to conflict and change makes sense of this apparent tension in his thought. Following Marx, Vanessa Christina Wills centers labor–human beings satisfying their needs through conscious, purpose-driven, and transformative interaction with the material world–as the essential human activity. Working people’s struggles reveal capitalism’s worst ravages while pointing to a better future and embodying the only way there: rational transformation of our relationships to ourselves, to one another, and to the natural world, so that the human condition emerges not as a burden we must bear but as life we joyfully create. The purposiveness of labor gives rise to a normativity already inherent in the present state of things, one that can guide us in knowing what sort of world we should build and that further prepares us to build it. Rather than “preach morality,” the key task for moral philosophy is to theorize in the light that working peoples’ struggles for survival shine on capitalism–an existential threat to humanity and the defining ethical problem of our time.