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
Marxism is certainly closely related to morality, especially revolutionary Marxism, as almost all revolutionary ideologies stem from the ontological pursuit of “unconditional human liberation”. However, here comes the “but”, it is precisely this pursuit that prevents Marxism from using “moral argumentation”. Marxists simply cannot be “good people in a secular sense” while promoting “the liberation of all mankind”. Marxism is breaking the ideology that has deeply ingrained itself into human conditioning in a society or even an era. For example, in the case of “piracy”, almost all Marxists would support “the use of piracy by the poor or geeks who want to break the copyright barriers of large companies”. But on the other hand, people deeply influenced by the ideology of “contract fetishism” would equate the use of piracy withremoved, robbery, and murder. In such a situation, how can you use moral argumentation? It is simply impossible for you to do so. The most powerful aspect of ideology is its ability to de-ideologize itself. It dresses itself up as a natural, spontaneous, and human moral principle