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Essay by Kelly Ross. Excerpt:
Karl Marx (1818-1883) did not have a theory of morality, he had a
theory of history. Thus, Marxism was not about right or wrong but about what will
happen in history. Marx was contemptuous of people who judged things in moral terms. When
diehards say that Marxism has actually never been "tried" (despite what Lenin,
Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho, and Daniel Ortega thought they were doing), they don't understand
that Marxism was not a rule for behavior or a program for action; it was supposed to be
the theory of a deterministic mechanism that will produce the future. This was not a
theory about "human nature" or "human psychology", but about how the mode
of economic production (how goods and services are produced) determines all the other
political, social, cultural, and moral structures of a society. The needs of the
"English petty bourgeois" are thus not "false needs", however
dismissive Marx sounds, but true needs in relation to a capitalistic mode of
production--needs which will change over time, in a historicist sense, as the mode of
production changes. As a "science" of history, Marxism would succeed or fail to
the extent that it could actually predict the evolution of production and its various
effects. |
