Marx's Ethical Vision

"There is a deep and abiding ethical impulse under the political commitments that Marxism is associated with: socialism, communism and the fight against capitalism . When you ask people who are swimming in one of those seas what they're up to and why, they give what sounds to me-as an analytically trained moral philosopher-like moral explanations: they think there's something wrong with capitalism, something inappropriate about the way the system treats people. Yet, Marxists have often shied away from explicitly ethical thinking about capitalism."

"There is a sense that there's some kind of bourgeois affectation going on whenever explicitly moral thought enters into discussion. Your book is written in part as an answer to that perspective. So, what was it in your view that Marxists and non-Marxists felt they were achieving or avoiding by objecting to morality-laden interpretations of Marxism and what would we achieve by leaving that interpretation behind?"

"Among the many reasons to reject this crude view that you offer later in the book is a peculiar thing that Marx says in the 1844 Manuscripts. Namely, there's this high-level stuff about sense organs -their potentials and their actuality - that we might have thought we were going to leave behind in a view about economies and corn and linen and exchange rates, right? So, what's all this talk of sense organs and potentialities?"

Marxism carries a persistent ethical impulse motivating commitments to socialism and opposition to capitalism. Many adherents explain their politics in moral terms, though Marxists sometimes resist explicit moral language as a bourgeois affectation. The 1844 Manuscripts introduce metaphysical reflections on sense organs, their potentials, and their actuality, which seems surprising in economic analysis. Marx treats human senses as historically conditioned rather than purely biological. That historicity links sensory capacities to social and economic life, explaining why a thinker focused on commodities would engage metaphysical questions about perception and human potentialities.

Read at The Philosopher