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
Exactly. One thing that can be easy to gloss over is that Marxism shows us the next stage of human social development. This stage will be far more productive then any other previous mode of production, just like capitalism was for all other previous modes of production.
The key here is in the socialization of labor. It is the key innovation of capitalism and what makes it so productive. The problem, like you pointed out, is that capitalism socialized the labor BUT retained the private ownership of the means of production. Instead of the laborer owning those tools like how it was generally under feudalism, the Capitalist owns those tools. They own the factory, the land, the machines, and raw materials required for production and as such can direct how they are used.
Under Communism, that role will be in the hands of the laborers again except owned and operated socially, which will eliminate the distinction between classes and thus abolish classes and class society.
Which is all well and good, except for that sticky issue of the global network of capital. Socialism therefore exists as the intermediary stage between Capitalism and Communism. Socialism, under the Leninist strategy, aims to destroy the capitalist state and replaced it with the workers state. The workers state aims to manage the contradictions of the national and global markets, while developing the productive capacity of the means of production. It’s ultimate goal is to aid in the global productive capacity until the contradictions of this new productive force shatters the global network of capital and replace it with a socialist network of assets and productive capacity that can be reorganized around the needs of all humans, reducing the socially necessary labor time to create all assets to its bare minimum, freeing workers from the extraction of surplus labor (capitalist exploitation) and only ever needing to work enough to reproduce our collective labor plower.
How that world is organized is not set in stone, and between then and now lay two paths of history, Socialism or Barbarism. It is not a prophecy, in the same way that the development of capitalism wasn’t a prophecy, but the result of hundreds of years of persistent development and achievement. Understanding the contradictions of capitalism and how it impacts workers from the local scale to the global scale informs how we might organize that world. The morality lies in the knowledge that the conditions of today will be looked on by history in the same way that we look back at the era of slavery and feudalism.
Fighting for a workers state is in service of building towards that future, affording us some opportunity to alleviate the horrors of the contradictions of capital even if we can’t yet eliminate them entirely.