Marx as Moralist and Antimoralist Notes for Philosophy 166 Spring, 2006

1. The Problem. Marx is undeniably a fierce critic of a capitalist organization of economic activity. By what standards does Marx assess capitalism and find it objectionable? In many passages it seems that Marx's critique is based upon notions of justice and fairness which in his opinion capitalism flagrantly fails to satisfy. In the "Communist Manifesto," contrasting the phenomenon of exploitation as it occurs under feudalism with the capitalist version of the phenomenon, Marx writes, "In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it [the bourgeoisie] has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation." Readers will naturally take Marx to be asserting that exploitation, whether hidden or open, is grievously morally objectionable. But then it must be noted that Marx sometimes explicitly disavows any criticism of capitalism on grounds of its immorality or injustice. In Critique of the Gotha Program Marx writes sneeringly, What is a "fair distribution"? Do not the bourgeois assert that the present-day distribution is "fair"? And is it not, in fact, the only "fair" distribution on the basis of the present-day mode of production? Are economic relations regulated by legal conceptions or do not, on the contrary, legal relations arise from economic ones? Have not also the socialist sectarians the most varied notions about "fair" distribution? (Marx-Engels Reader, p. 528) Here Marx seems to be saying that there is something suspicious or inherently confused in the very idea of a "fair distribution" as standardly employed in debate about the fundamental justice or injustice of economic systems. If this is so then the communist critic should not be claiming that under capitalism distribution is "unfair" but under communism distribution will be genuinely "fair". Marx accordingly vehemently objects to the proposal of the Gotha Program to include in the platform of a German working class political party the demand for a "fair distribution of the proceeds of labour." Later in the same essay Marx states that he is criticizing slogans of "equal right" and "fair distribution" "in order to show what a crime it is to attempt, on the one hand, to force on our Party again, as dogmas, ideas which in a certain period had some meaning but have now become obsolete verbal rubbish, while again perverting, on the other, the realistic outlook, which it cost so much effort to instill into the Party but which has now taken root in it, by means of ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French Socialists" (Marx-Engels Reader, p. 531). Together these passages pose a puzzle about how to understand what Marx is doing, or thinks he is doing, in undertaking to provide systematic social criticism of capitalist market economies. If moral criticism in terms of slogans of "equal right" and "fair distribution" is inappropriate, what then is the right sort of criticism? What exactly is supposed to be wrong with criticism couched in the language of morality and justice? How do we interpret Marx's objections against capitalist exploitation, since "exploitation" looks to be a morally charged term from the same family as "unfair" or "unjust" or "unequal"?