1MARX AS MORALIST AND ANTIMORALIST NOTES FOR PHILOSOPHY 166 SPRING, 2006 Dick Arneson 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"? 2. The Communist Manifesto, Part II. One good place to begin to explore these questions is section II of the "Communist Manifesto," where Marx invents a bourgeois moral critic of communism and works to rebut the objections against communism that he puts in the mouth of this imaginary moral critic. The critic objects (1) that communism would abolish the right of acquiring property in the fruits of one's own labor (p. 584), (2) that communism would take away the incentive of gaining privately from one's own hard work, and thus initiate a regime of universal laziness (p. 486), (3) that communism would abolish family life (p. 487) and turn all women into public property to be used sexually as men please (p. 488), (4) that communism would abolish "eternal truths" such as freedom and justice (p. 489), (5) that communism would undermine people's patriotic love of their own nation (p. 488), and so on. The reader might expect that Marx would answer the critic by explaining the communist morality on each point in dispute and then arguing for the superiority of communist morality over its capitalist rival. By and large Marx does not do this. Marx instead pursues two strategies of argument. One strategy is to turn the tables on the opponent by assuming for the sake of argument that the value the critic posits is really valuable. But since this value is not achieved to any significant extent under capitalism, the alleged fact that the value would not be achieved to any significant extent under communism provides no reason whatsoever2to prefer capitalism to communism on this moral ground. In this vein Marx argues for example that the inexorable trend of capitalist market relations is to destroy family life, so the alleged fact that communism would be inhospitable to family life is no black mark against communism. Notice that this style of argument consistently practiced does not force Marx to reveal his own values on the topics under discussion. Marx's arguments to the extent they are successful blunt the polemical force of his critic's claims without committing Marx one way or another on the moral issues. The second strategy of argument draws upon Marx's theory of history. Marx asserts that the critic is trying to apply to a new emerging form of society moral standards that make sense only in relation to the old society that is about to disappear. He writes: But don't wrangle with us so long as you apply, to our intended abolition of bourgeois property, the standard of your bourgeois notions of freedom, culture, law, &c. Your very ideas are but the outgrowth of the conditions of your bourgeois production and bourgeois property, just as your jurisprudence is but the will of your class made into a law for all, a will, whose essential character and direction are determined by the economical conditions of existence of your class (p. 487). On p. 489 Marx adds that the objections against communism advanced by the critic "are not deserving of serious examination." He continues, "Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that