i am so incredibly used to defending good things by explaining how they help people and make their lives better because, yeah obviously that’s why good things are good and people with empathy would want that. i get that modern Western bourgeois “morality” is fucked, but if you tell people that they just think you are amoral or don’t think morals are good or just don’t care about them.
i’m so used to describing things and “good” and “bad” and the fact that Marxist theory just doesn’t seem to bother with that throws me for a loop. and then comes the question of “well REALLY what IS morality” and whether its objective (which i dont think it possibly could be? i’m a hard atheist) and its just kind of a mess in my brain as i’m trying to parse it all out.
edit: i get that the immorality of exploitation is apparent in Marxist analysis and should be to anybody, i’m more talking about how the argument isn’t framed as a moral one, because then you can get really annoying people in there trying to facts-and-logic their way out of it, if that makes sense
I have a much harder position on it being amoral than some people in this thread, because I think Marxism is predicated on the idea that moral argument just isn’t a stable ground for a political project because morality is fundamentally arbitrary, and arbitrary in a way where people can just reject whatever you say is “self-evidently” good or bad because it’s all just a matter of preference that people try, on the basis of preferring it, to find ways of transforming into universal, “objective” values. Instead of that, it accepts that there is only preference but we can make actionable projects based on those preferences because, in aggregate, they are informed by commonalities in people’s material conditions (the main overarching similarity being class) giving them shared interests.
You can have moral motivations for supporting Marxism, and indeed most people do, but fundamentally using Marxist prescriptions as moral prescriptions undermines the point of it, though using simple facts of reality that Marxism observes to advance moral conclusions that align with Marxist conclusions, while I think tends to fundamentally be a weaker argument for reasons described above, is not contradictory.
But while I firmly oppose lying for socialism, I think choosing what to emphasize is fair, and beating someone over the head with there being no such thing as objective morality is usually not the productive way to carry on the conversation. You can just talk about human benefit and if they consider that in moral or amoral terms is really their own business unless you’re trying to recruit them as party cadre or whatever.
i’m definitely guilty of this, and i’m probably overthinking things. the human benefit as you say is enormous on its own.
To be clear, I didn’t mean it as a dig at people who do that (and I did it for a long time and still need to stop myself pretty often). I think trying to take what you think is “right” and getting other people on the same page is a reasonable impulse, society and human relationships work better when we reconcile our views, I just think the framework of moral values as things that in any way precede our existence and aren’t socially constructed is seriously mistaken, and we’re better off using frameworks of democracy and class interests to engage in that reconciliation. Nonetheless, it’s an exceedingly common mistake that is baked into a lot of our language, so it makes sense that we’d make that mistake as well and would need to engage in a lot of conscious effort to try to unlearn it.