In which case it is nothing but the logical result of the development of the 'modern' Communist movement.
Trotsky, in 'Their Morals and Ours' writes:
"This vacuity in the norms obligatory upon all arises from the fact that in all decisive questions people feel their class membership considerably more profoundly and more directly than their membership in "society". The norms of "obligatory" morality are in reality charged with class, that is, antagonistic content. The moral norm becomes the more categoric the less it is "obligatory" upon all. The solidarity of workers, especially of strikers or barricade fighters, is incomparably more "categoric" than human solidarity in general."
What is apparent in surveying the history of the Communist movement - both its Stalinist wing, and, sadly, the Trotskyists - is that it has been ill suited to a mass which is often much less "categoric" than was wished for. From the extermination of the Old Bolsheviks by Stalin, through the abuse of power in Healy's SLL and WRP, with many other examples besides, the centralism which made modern Communist ethics possible has often been directed precisely against the working class - the subject in theory in the 'center' of the ethics in question.
Probably Marx's most famous statement on solidarity, on centralism in fact, is the one in the 1844 Manuscripts:
"When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time, they acquire a new need -- the need for society -- and what appears as a means had become an end. This practical development can be most strikingly observed in the gatherings of French socialist workers. Smoking, eating, and drinking, etc., are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures."
The dissolution of the 'modern' is not some trick of the post-modernists.
How could the 'modern' collective, the working class party, which proclaim the catagorical solidarity which Marx spoke so positively about - how could that survive after the betrayal of the 1968 French revolt by the PCF? After Callaghan's betrayal of the last hopes of Labour in 1976? Before the bit of Marx that I just quoted, he says: "The abstract hostility between sense and intellect is inevitable so long as the human sense [Sinn] for nature, the human significance [Sinn] of nature, and, hence, the natural sense of man, has not yet been produced by man's own labor." When the 'working class parties' showed that in practice the solidarity they offered led no further than the factory floor, how could anyone believe in the 'solidarity' that they offered?
The masses remained outside (as they increasingly remain outside the factory anyway) and ceased to be catagorical (anyway, there were always limits to solidarity - sexism, racism, nationalism, craftism - which put limits on the catagorality of working class ethics).
Kantian 'ethics from above' is going to be with us again until we supercede, in practice, the dissolution of working class consciousness. And to supercede working class consciousness means not just doing the same thing in different spaces (organising a union among the temp workers) but also a recognition of the way 'modern' solidarity's demise was speeded along by the use of the catagorical against itself.
Peter -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.