Resistance Marxist Library Their Morals & Ours The Marxist View of Morality Leon Trotsky, John Dewey, Georg Novack, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin 2 Their Morals & Ours Resistance Books 2000 ISBN 0909196 90 7 Published by Resistance Books, resistancebooks.com Contents Introduction by Dave Holmes..............................................................5 Their Morals and Ours by Leon Trotsky...........................................9 Moral effluvia..................................................................................................................... 9 Marxist amoralism and eternal truths........................................................................ 10 ‘The end justifies the means’......................................................................................... 12 Jesuitism and utiliarianism............................................................................................ 13 ‘Moral precepts obligatory upon all’........................................................................... 16 The crisis in democratic morality................................................................................. 18 ‘Common sense’.............................................................................................................. 17 Moralists and the GPU................................................................................................... 18 The disposition of political chessmen......................................................................... 20 Stalinism — a product of the old society.................................................................... 22 Morality and revolution................................................................................................. 24 Revolution and the institution of hostages................................................................ 26 ‘Morality of the Kaffirs’.................................................................................................. 28 The ‘amoralism’ of Lenin............................................................................................... 29 An instructive episode.................................................................................................... 32 Dialectic interdependence of ends and means.......................................................... 34 The Moralists and Sycophants Against Marxism by Leon Trotsky.................................................................................37 Peddlers of indulgences and their socialist allies, or the cuckoo in a strange nest.............................................................................. 37 ‘Hottentot morality’!....................................................................................................... 39 Once again on hostages.................................................................................................. 40 The dread of bourgeois public opinion....................................................................... 41 The moral code of civil war........................................................................................... 41 The masses have nothing at all to do with it!............................................................. 42 The struggle against Marxism....................................................................................... 43 Souvarine, the sycophant............................................................................................... 44 Revolutionists and the carriers of infection................................................................ 46 Means and Ends by John Dewey.....................................................48 4 Their Morals & Ours Liberal Morality: The controversy between John Dewey & Leon Trotsky by George Novack................................................57 Problems of ethics........................................................................................................... 53 The Marxist conception of morality............................................................................ 56 The ethical approach of pragmatism.......................................................................... 56 Means and ends in morality.......................................................................................... 58 The logical status of the class struggle......................................................................... 59 The nature of concepts and laws.................................................................................. 60 The mutual determinism of ends and means........................................................... 63 Are social laws relative or absolute?............................................................................ 65 The material determinism of class aims..................................................................... 65 The role of middle class liberalism.............................................................................. 69 Appendix 1: Engels on Morality by Frederick Engels......................69 Appendix 2: The Tasks of the Youth Leagues by V.I. Lenin........75 Glossary ............................................................................................89 Introduction By Dave Holmes What is morality? It is a code of conduct for individuals or social groups, whether freely and consciously chosen or imposed by the pressure of peer group or wider public opinion. It can thus be distinguished from a code of conduct determined by law and imposed by the state. Marxism teaches us that there is no such thing as an absolute morality, a morality that is independent of or stands above or is derived from outside of society — in our age, a society divided into sharply antagonistic social classes. As Frederick Engels puts it in the excerpt from Anti-Dühring appended here: … morality has always been class morality; it has either justified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or, ever since the oppressed class became powerful enough, it has represented its indignation against this domination and the future interests of the oppressed. Thus, in capitalist society, with its manifold and obscene contrasts between the enormous wealth of a handful of plutocrats and the insecurity and poverty of the great mass of the people, official morality justifies this reality. It preaches that wealth is a reward for hard work or great talent, that private property is sacrosanct and that stealing is immoral. Of course, there is also a lot of guff about care and compassion, helping the disadvantaged, the poor, the young, the sick, the aged and so on. But, as capitalist austerity bites ever deeper, it is clear that this is just humbug and that protecting and enhancing the wealth and power of the ruling rich is the supreme value in “free- market” societies. “Greed is good”, as the capitalist Gordon Gekko put it bluntly in the movie Wall Street. On the international stage, the imperialist West makes a big play about human rights. This is indeed a noble concept but in the mouths of Western leaders it is mostly yet more humbug, as any examination of the real conduct of the imperialist powers makes abundantly clear. Dave Holmes is a member of the Socialist Alliance. 6 Their Morals & Ours How, for instance, can the United States lecture anyone about human rights given its support for repressive regimes around the world and its increasingly racist and repressive “justice” system at home — where minors (let alone adults) can be subjected to the death penalty and where some two million of its citizens (mainly black) are currently incarcerated? For the US rulers, “human rights” is simply a tool of imperialist policy, a means to justify before public opinion the use of force against recalcitrants who aren’t toeing Washington’s line. The morality of the ruling class is clear. But what should be the morality of the working class, striving to overthrow capitalist oppression and create a new society? Exiled Russian revolutionist Leon Trotsky gives a clear answer: Civilisation can be saved only by the socialist revolution. To accomplish the overturn, the proletariat needs all its strength, all its resolution, all its audacity, passion and ruthlessness. Above all, it must be completely free from the fictions of religion, “democracy” and transcendental morality — the spiritual chains forged by the enemy to tame and enslave it. Only that which prepares the complete and final overthrow of imperialist bestiality is moral, and nothing else. The welfare of the revolution — that is the supreme law! Does this mean that Marxists are really “amoral”? Does it mean that anything goes? Do socialists believe that “the end justifies the means”? Are we no better than the capitalist class? Are we too prepared to sanction atrocities, repression and violence? This book provides clear answers to such questions. It is centred around two articles by Trotsky. The first, “Their Morals and Ours”, was written in February 1938 and first published in English in the Socialist Workers Party’s magazine New International in June of that year. The context was the 1930s, a decade when tremendous hopes were aroused only to be later dashed, often in the most bloody way, ushering in a period of “triumphant reaction”, as Trotsky put it. l At the beginning of 1933 Hitler fascism triumphed in Germany, its rise to power essentially uncontested by the potentially powerful workers’ movement, its will to fight paralysed by the twin shackles of pro-capitalist social democracy and the Stalinist